Sir James Galway hosts this comprehensive video survey of Western music.
From pre-Gregorian to post-Modern, this 16-part series covers the major periods, styles, forms, composers, and works in the entire span of Western music with superb performances and authoritative narration. Ever unhurried, viewers are permitted to relish entire compositions and generous excerpts from representative period music performed by world-acclaimed artists, orchestras, conductors, operas, and ballet companies around the world.
16-part DVD series, 60 minutes each.
Purchase includes public performance rights.
Click HERE for a preview clip.
VIBRATIONS AND PAGAN RITES Chronologically backward from Ligeti to Gregorian chant, Galway demonstrates how ageless and universal music-making is. The depth of our understanding of music history determines our appreciation for the art. Excerpts from many works heard here are presented more fully in subsequent volumes.
THE FIRST SECULAR MUSIC We journey from the early music of the Eastern churches to the Christian liturgy to the birth of secular song, hearing excerpts from Gregorian, Hebrew and Greek chants through Landini, Dunstable and Dufay.
THE RENAISSANCE Follow the patronage of the Dukes of Burgundy and the Kings of France and the continued influence of the church as music, like philosophy, moved away from elaborate formality to purer forms. Hear Binchois, Ockeghem, Josquin des Pres, Palestrina, Orlando, Gabrieli, Taverner and much more.
THE GOLDEN AGE This program covers the wealth of music during the age of Elizabeth I in England, the emergence of opera in Italy and France, and madrigals. Music of Byrd, Purcell, Monteverdi, Lully, Morley, and more.
LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION Covers the impact of the Reformation on the history of music, the work of J.S.Bach, church organs, chorale singing. Hear choral, organ, string, flute, chamber ensemble and much more.
THE ADVENT OF FASHION Music written for public performance in concert halls and theaters required composers to keep abreast of popular styles, Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks, Zadok the Priest and Messiah plus Rameau, Telemann, Scarlatti, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, more.
THE SEASONS AND THE SYMPHONY Vivaldi's musical celebration of the seasons, Gluck's transformation of an opera into a dramatic as well as musical experience, new ideas in symphonic composition, and Haydn are covered here.
VIENNA Mozart and Schubert and the musical scene in Vienna are here explored, with parts of the Mozart Requiem, his piano concertos, symphonies, operas, Schubert's songs, chamber and piano music.
THE REVOLUTIONARY Beethoven, who changed the course of Western music, is the one subject.
THE ROMANTICS These composers strove for self-expression and reacted against the orderliness in 18th-century classicism and 19th-century industrialization. Chopin, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schumann, Bruckner.
NATIONALISM AND REVOLUTION Beginning with the French Revolution, composers began to identify with causes and expressed them in music. Berlioz's and Verdi's Requiems Wagner, Liszt, and more.
LAND OF OUR FATHERS Smetana, Dvarak, Janacek, Grieg, de Fallas, Vaughan Williams, Kodaly, Sibelius all used folk songs in their music to express the culture and landscape of their individual countries.
THE MIGHTY FISTFUL We travel from folk traditions to the founding of the Russian style by Glinka. Then followed Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Scriabin and Tchaikovsky.
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY Hear the transition from Romanticisn to Modernisn, from self-expression to Realism, and the attempts to escape to bygone eras. Puccini, Debussy, Mahler, Schoenberg, Wagner, Berg, Richard Strauss.
WAR AND PEACE Composers sought to express the jarring and discordant sense of civilization gone awry, but during the same time, jazz burst upon the international scene. Shostakovich, Britten's War Requiem, Gershwin, Elgar, Joplin, Hindemith, Milhaud, Weill, Bartok, others.
TODAY AND TOMORROW Presents a broad cross-section of modern music and musical trends. Lennon/McCartney, Varese, Stravinsky, Copland, Tippett, Messiaen, Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti, Henze, Cage.
