the "lives of composers" method

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in fourth grade, i had a teacher--otherwise very cool--who would have our class sit silently for an entire period listening and taking notes to cassette tapes where an english narrator would tell us about the lives of the great composers. we'd learn about mozart's family, mahler's illnesses, brahms's romances, etc. all about the various counts and kings who were their patrons, the scandals that greeted their new compositions....

none of this taught us a thing about the actual music. it certainly didn't teach us to appreciate it in any real sense. it was basically like a bad rock star bio, only NPR-sedate and of course about "good" music.

was this a common method of "music appreciation" once upon a time? or was it just awesome laziness on the part of my teacher? did anyone else have to suffer through this?

i ask b/c i left the classical station on all day for the cat (see "pets and music" thread) and when i arrived home, there was a similar program about brahms (with long untranslated passages in french wtf?!). and i don't think i've heard such a thing since the fourth grade.

((to the station's credit, the narration alternates with longish excerpts from berlioz's works. the tapes i listen to as a student never had more than a few bars of music, or rather, the music was usually playing in the background of the lachrymose narration, thus reinforcing the dumb notion that classical music is best as background music for elevators and dentists' offices.))

― |a|m|t|r|s|t| (amateurist), Tuesday, 10 August 2004 22:54 (twenty-one years ago)

not brahms, berlioz. the program on now is about berlioz.

― |a|m|t|r|s|t| (amateurist), Tuesday, 10 August 2004 22:56 (twenty-one years ago)

yeah, it's very tedious to hear about their lives unless/until you're into the music. get people excited about that first and then it'll interest them to know the circumstances of the composition of the symphonie fantastique. having said that brahms had a pretty dull life; berlioz didn't in comparism

― de, Tuesday, 10 August 2004 23:04 (twenty-one years ago)

whatever berlioz they're playing right now is amazing, i have to say that.

― |a|m|t|r|s|t| (amateurist), Tuesday, 10 August 2004 23:06 (twenty-one years ago)

dude's music is amazing. except for the operas maybe.

i've got a 3 part 'lives of the composers' in the blue penguins from the '40s, edited by a.l.bacharach, similar to the harold c.schoenberg doorstop. i guess they must have taught music this way, to some extent, up to the 70s, over here at least.
it's pretty fascinating to see what views they held on things at that time eg mahler's music was pretty worthless aside from a few things, schubert was too windy in his late works.

― de, Tuesday, 10 August 2004 23:19 (twenty-one years ago)

I don't know much about classical music, but it always annoys me when people do the same thing with art. The teachers I had that would rather talk about an artist's life and make no mention of how they painted anything were the same ones that I never saw actually paint anything. The artist biog programmes on TV strike me as programmes about art for people who don't actually like art (judging by the people I know who watch them), although I don't know whether they don't like it because it would be too much work to understand and learning facts about an artist's life is easier, or if it's because programmes about artistic technique are pretty rare in comparison and they don't realise that there is more to it than the context of the painting in the artist's life. Patronising as that sounds.

― lupine lupin (lupinelupin), Tuesday, 10 August 2004 23:30 (twenty-one years ago)

Actually, there's the more obvious reason of them actually being interested in artists' and musicians' lives, but why an artist's life would be more educational (in artistic terms) to learn about than, say, Napolean or Henry VIII (or Henries I through VII for that matter) is beyond me. There are always interesting people with interesting lives to read about, but a music class should probably be teaching music.

― lupine lupin (lupinelupin), Tuesday, 10 August 2004 23:39 (twenty-one years ago)

i suppose on the radio, this is as harmless and potentially as pleasant as vh1 behind the music. but it's certainly no way of teaching music, which was i think its intended purpose in my fourth grade class.

worse than simply recounting the stories of these composers' lives, the cassettes (if i can remember correctly, it's been nearly 19 years after all) had this sort of cod-romantic outlook wherein every piece of music was inspired directly from some event in it composer's life: a trauma, or a love, or whatever. the more obscure and more interesting and semiautonomous imperatives of art were hardly thrashed out.

p.s. the berlioz piece that impressed me was the requiem, which i'm surprised i didn't recognize.

― |a|m|t|r|s|t| (amateurist), Tuesday, 10 August 2004 23:51 (twenty-one years ago)

I remember being taught about Beethoven's deafness. And that it was the reason the Ninth sounds the way it sounds.

― Monetizing Eyeballs (diamond), Tuesday, 10 August 2004 23:56 (twenty-one years ago)

x-post there is a whole industry of that crap, cake tin portrayals of composers and classical music in general. over here we've got a station called "classic fm" which is the direst example of this kind of shit. it's the direct competitor to radio 3, which is i'd guess the best [classical] music station in the world..but it gets many more listeners

― de, Wednesday, 11 August 2004 00:10 (twenty-one years ago)

We did something like this in my elementary music class, in between playing the recorder and watching TV. In fourth-grade, the teacher made us watch Amadeus

― miloauckerman (miloauckerman), Wednesday, 11 August 2004 00:20 (twenty-one years ago)

we had to sit and listen and imagine and then describe what we imagined.

the teacher had slash marks on her wrists and an empty bottle on the back seat of her car.

― gaz (gaz), Wednesday, 11 August 2004 00:32 (twenty-one years ago)

All I remember of music class was our unit on punk in 6th grade. We got to form our own punk bands.

― tokyo rosemary (rosemary), Wednesday, 11 August 2004 01:48 (twenty-one years ago)

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