Discovering Music

You know that feeling when you take a risk and order something for your homeschool that you aren't too sure of--something you've never even heard of except by the recommendation of one friend?  I love it when that feeling is replaced by thankfulness, appreciation, and joy.

We recently finished a music appreciation course,  Discovering Music:  300 Years of Interaction in Western Music, Arts, History and Culture by Carol Reynolds, Ph.D., and I am simply amazed at all that Briana and Destry have learned.  The aspect of Discovering Music that most appealed to me was the idea of "connecting music history to political and cultural history (thus making) all of history more memorable and more interesting."  We had previously taken a historical journey through the 1600s to the early 1900s and I sprinkled a little music (a la Charlotte Mason) throughout the years, but my own musical knowledge is so limited that I felt insecure about how little they had learned.  When I considered Destry's particular interest in music, I decided this might be the perfect review of history and exposure to music.

We spent nearly three semesters in this curriculum because of the move last year, but I'm glad we took our time to be able to fully complete it.  The timing has worked out quite nicely, actually, as we have simultaneously experienced many life opportunities including live performances of Broadway musicals Les Miserables, The War Horse, Beauty and the Beast and the upcoming Million Dollar Quartet.  We have had several opportunities to hear the Des Moines symphony perform pieces the children have studied and we have attended performances of a brass quintet, chamber music, and a world-renown pianist playing Rachmaninoff.  We were blessed to attend a symphony performance of music from Westside Story and tomorrow evening we get to enjoy a collaboration of the Des Moines and Chicago symphonies celebrating Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4.  These experiences have been enriched by our actually knowing a little something about the composers and/or time period.

I think my favorite unit was opera because I knew nothing about opera and held the standard prejudice against it.  Imagine my chagrin as I learned the modern musical (which I simply LOVE) is a descendent of classical opera.  As we studied this genre and learned the storylines of several famous operas, we found we quite enjoyed watching operas (on dvd, one of these days we'll have to make it to a live opera).

A good excuse to insert this picture of my beautiful 17-year-old. . .

Briana most enjoyed learning about early American music such as jazz and ragtime.  Overall, she says the program introduced her to so many people and concepts fundamental to an understanding of music history that she had never before been exposed to.  She thinks all that she has learned will consistently come up in her everyday life.  For example, as she was doing some recent research online for an essay not related to music, a commercial on a page was playing Flight of the Valkyries by Wagner, a piece she was introduced to in Discovering Music.  She thought it was so fun to be able to recognize this classic.

and this picture of my handsome 15-year-old

Destry really enjoyed this program because it assigned lots of music to listen to so that when he hears a composer's name, he automatically thinks of a famous work, such as Prokofiev and Classical Symphony.  His favorite unit examined early 20th century composers.  They were free of rules and boundaries and very expressive allowing one to feel the emotion of the composer.  He also really liked the unit about Russian composers because the Russian style and personality has a rustic characteristic which he relates to.