Sinopsis
The teaching of music appreciation has always depended on technology, and Listen has always moved forward with new technological developments. When Listen fi rst appeared in 1972, it came packaged with a 5-inch LP record on wafer-thin plastic. One by one, further editions introduced an awkward stack of 11-inch vinyl LPs; our now-familiar 3- and 6-CD sets; cassettes, now thankfully retired; a CD-ROM offering interactive resources; a companion Web site, which has burgeoned over the last few editions; and a DVD of opera excerpts, packaged with the book.
In this edition, for the fi rst time, nearly all of the recordings to accompany Listen are streamed on the companion Web site at bedfordstmartins.com/listen. Access to the streamed recordings is also available for students using the print book, offering a lower-cost alternative to the CDs. If you are reading this page from our e-book version, Listen e-Book with Streaming Music, you will fi nd links there to the streamed recordings and also to the Interactive Listening Charts, which work with them. With these new options, instructors who have used Listen in the past will now fi nd it more fl exible than ever. These instructors will notice many changes in Listen, Seventh Edition. We think of these as improvements, of course — improvements in line with the many comments and reactions we have solicited from users and non-users alike. Much has happened since Listen, Sixth Edition, fi rst came out. The intervening years have seen the rise of YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, texting, media players of ever-increasing ingenuity, and the streaming of music for educational purposes. All these advances in communication and information retrieval have accompanied (perhaps helped to produce) a national mood ever less patient with the somewhat leisurely presentation that characterized earlier editions of Listen. We have done a good deal of rewriting to change the tone, though hardly the substance, throughout. From beginning to end, you will fi nd this a leaner, more straightforward Listen.
The Fundamentals unit in particular has been reorganized to develop basic musical concepts in what seems to us now a more logical, orderly sequence. It begins with rhythm and meter and continues with pitch, dynamics, and tone color, pausing here to consider the musical instruments students will be listening to. Next comes melody, and only then are the more challenging issues of harmony, tonality, and modality raised. The introduction to music notation, not necessary for this unit or the course as a whole, has been moved to an appendix at the back of the book. This presentation, we feel, allows instructors to pick and choose issues they want to highlight more easily without losing the logic of the presentation
Content
- Fundamentals
- Early Music: An Overview
- The Eighteenth Century
- The Nineteenth Century
- The Twentieth Century and Beyond
