Postlude
Coda
In classical music, the coda the little bit that composers add when they feel they need a little something to give a piece a convincing ending. In popular music this is called an “outro”, to balance out the “intro” that starts a song off. The purpose of this section is to wrap up the book as a whole.
We hope you have enjoyed your journey and that your understanding and appreciation of music will grow over time as a result of the investigation you’ve made of the variety of styles that were presented.
We recommend that you go back and listen at least one more time to all the playlists for the class in order to help solidify your memory and consolidate your understanding. As you go you might to save your favorites to a new “greatest hits” playlist of your creation.
Review Questions
In classical music, the coda the little bit that composers add when they feel they need a little something to give a piece a convincing ending. In popular music this is called an “outro”, to balance out the “intro” that starts a song off. The purpose of this section is to wrap up the book as a whole.
We hope you have enjoyed your journey and that your understanding and appreciation of music will grow over time as a result of the investigation you’ve made of the variety of styles that were presented.
We recommend that you go back and listen at least one more time to all the playlists for the class in order to help solidify your memory and consolidate your understanding. As you go you might to save your favorites to a new “greatest hits” playlist of your creation.
Review Questions
- How much effort do you feel you put in? How much do you think that you learned?
- What instruments can you recognize by sight and sound?
- What are some differences between the music composed by Josquin des Prez, Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, Igor Stravinsky, Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Tom Jobim, Ravi Shankar, John Cage, Public Enemy, and Max Martin?
- What is different about American jazz and popular music compared with Western European art music? What do they have in common?
- How did African music impact music in North and South America, and eventually the whole world?
- What world music cultures did you find most interesting?
- Look at the list of pieces of music that was sent into outer space with the Voyager spacecraft into intersteller space. Do you have a better idea for what it includes as a result of reading this book and listening to the examples? Do you think they made a good selection of music to put on the gold record? Is there anything you would have left off? What would you have included in its place?
- If we were going to leave out three things that were in the book, which do you think were the least important? What three do you think we should be sure to keep?
- Was there anything that came up that you were curious about, that you might look into in the future?
- As a result of studying this material, what types of music are you more interested in listening to in the future?
We’ve reviewed what was covered in the last 15 chapters. We hope you enjoyed reading them as much as we enjoyed writing them.
Some suggestions for the future:
Some suggestions for the future:
- Go listen to live music. It’s worth the effort to turn an object at rest into an object in motion.
- Listen to the world around you as much as you can, as much of the time as possible.
- Learn to play an instrument. The ukulele is relatively inexpensive and easy to learn. If you learn a few basic chords you’ll be able to strum to thousands of different songs.
- Sing and dance more.
- Talk to other people, including your parents and grandparents, about the music they like. It’s a great way to find common ground, and to learn about music you may not have heard of.
- Listen to listener-supported and college radio stations. They play music you don’t hear on commercial radio stations.
- Explore music from the style periods that you found most enjoyable in this book. There are many composers we didn’t get to, and many pieces that have stood the test of time and emerged as classics.
- Find time to listen to music and not just using it to create background stimulation. Use it as an opportunity to build up your resistance to the temptation to multitask, which just wastes time and energy switching from one thing to another. Like they say, “A thing worth doing is worth doing well.” We think listening to music is worth doing, and that you can’t do it well if you’re not paying attention to it. Music can make the world go ‘round, but you have to do your part if you want to reap the maximum reward.