Music and Song
Who is it for?

• Teachers, trainee teachers, and teacher trainers.

Key features

• Shows how any piece of music - from folk and classical to jazz, rock, and pop - can be exploited in an immense variety of ways in the language classroom.
• Shows how teachers can 'tune in' to students and use their musical interests to enhance their learning.

Elements Of Jazz: from Cakewalks to fusion

TTC

(8 lectures, 45 minutes/lecture)
Taught by Bill Messenger
The Peabody Institute of Music
M.A., Johns Hopkins University

The uniquely American music and art form, jazz, is one of America's great contributions to world culture.
Now you can learn the basics of jazz and its history in a course as free-flowing and original as jazz itself.
Taught by Professor Bill Messenger of the Peabody Institute, the lectures in this course are a must for music lovers. They will have you reaching deep into your own music collection and going straight out to a music store to add to it. Professor Messenger has spent his life in music as student, teacher, and professional musician. He has studied and lectured at the famed Peabody Institute and written an acclaimed book on music activities aimed at older adults.
And as a pianist, he has: Played in ragtime ensembles, swing bands, Dixieland bands, and modern jazz groups Been a successful studio musician in the early days of rock 'n' roll
Accompanied performers as renowned as Lou Rawls and Mama Cass Elliot Opened for Bill Haley and the Comets.  So it is no wonder that the course he has created is so thorough and enjoyable.

Johannes Brahms

The Teaching Company
In both his life and his music, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was a man of contrasts.
He composed serious Teutonic music and joyful dance music.
He was miserly with himself and exceedingly generous with family and associates.
He was kind to working people and known for his biting, malicious wit in artistic and aristocratic circles.
No one's idea of an easy man to know, Brahms destroyed a good deal of his own work and almost all of his lifetime's correspondence, in later years even collecting his letters from friends so that he could consign them to the flames.
This course links the complexities of Brahms the man with the electrifying music of Brahms the composer through biographical information and musical commentary.
Brahms had vowed early in life to be lonely but free. He never married, owned a home, held a job for more than a few years, or took on a commissioned piece.
In art, he showed a similar independence of spirit. He believed in traditional musical genres and forms as challenges, not as hindrances to expressive freedom but as healthy sources of stimulation for his awesome artistic powers.
Unlike, for example, Beethoven, Brahms did not reinvent his art repeatedly in response to personal emotional crises, but rather found his essential compositional voice while in his mid-20s, and developed it in more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary fashion.