Fnord.

You may or may not agree with the following:

The Allegretto from Beethoven’s 7th is the greatest piece of music in the Western canon. Schubert said so; Wagner agreed; and though I’ve long considered The Right Brothers’ “Bush was Right” a strong contender for the title, in the end where Wagner goes I go.

Personally, I’m not sure. It’s a personal favorite, but anyway. The point of my post is that this page has done something that I’ve not seen before: They used YouTube to propose an hypothesis, defend it with musicology and portions of the clip, and generally used the Internet to do interactive musical education.

That’s damned cool.

In this, Bernard Chazelle talks, very knowledgeably, about the structure and progression of the Alegretto and why its so affecting. (Seriously, the peak of the movement would move a stone to tears.) The clip is the Berlin Philharmonic, Karajan conducting, and Bernard’s explanations are readable and fascinating.

Probably other people have been doing this, and I just missed it, but it struck me that the YouTube + music + HTML combination was wonderful. If you’ve taken a music appreciation class, you know how much easier it is when the professor is pausing the music and explaining. I’ve tried, but the same thing from a bound book just doesn’t work. If you can imagine the music from reading the score, then you’re probably not the person a music appreciation text aims for… Ironic, that.

Anyway, read the page, watch the clip and if you’re like me, go and play your CD of it on your stereo, loud.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Audio, sound and music, Essays - other people, Reviews and recommendations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.