Music Education Monday: Yale University's open online course "Listening to Music"

This week for Music Education Monday, let's class up this joint a little bit with a free online course from one of the world's great universities.

"Listening to Music" is described by Yale professor Craig Wright as "the most basic course that the department of music has to offer," but for those who don't have a degree in music or haven't done much formal study at all, the series of video lectures contains plenty of potentially useful information.

Recorded in the autumn of 2008, the course aims to familiarize students with "the basic elements of Western classical music, such as rhythm, melody, and form," through which they will learn "strategies that can be used to understand many different kinds of music in a more thorough and precise way."

There are a total of 23 lectures, most ranging in length from 45 to 50 minutes, and Professor Wright uses examples from jazz, blues, techno and musical theater as well as from many classical works to demonstrate his points. There also are course materials available at the Yale Online website.

After the jump, you can see a complete list of the individual lectures, along with an embedded video window containing a playlist showing all of them in order...

The individual lectures from Yale's online "Listening to Music" course contained in the video playlist are:
1) Introduction
2) Introduction to Instruments and Musical Genres
3) Rhythm: Fundamentals
4) Rhythm: Jazz, Pop and Classical
5) Melody: Notes, Scales, Nuts and Bolts
6) Melody: Mozart and Wagner
7) Harmony: Chords and How to Build Them
8) Bass Patterns: Blues and Rock
9) Sonata-Allegro Form: Mozart and Beethoven
10) Sonata-Allegro and Theme and Variations
11) Form: Rondo, Sonata-Allegro and Theme and Variations (cont.)
12) Guest Conductor: Saybrook Orchestra
13) Fugue: Bach, Bizet and Bernstein
14) Ostinato Form in the Music of Purcell, Pachelbel, Elton John and Vitamin C
15) Gregorian Chant and Music in the Sistine Chapel
16) Baroque Music: The Vocal Music of Johann Sebastian Bach
17) Mozart and His Operas
18) Piano Music of Mozart and Beethoven
19) Romantic Opera: Verdi's La Traviata, Bocelli, Pavarotti and Domingo
20) The Colossal Symphony: Beethoven, Berlioz, Mahler and Shostakovich
21) Musical Impressionism and Exoticism: Debussy, Ravel and Monet
22) Modernism and Mahler
23) Review of Musical Styles