Search results for: 'katy hamilton music appreciation'

A music appreciation course focusing on the aspects of music left to its performers, particularly in the Western Classical Tradition.

Do you want to know more about classical music history? Explore selected topics and key works in Baroque, Classical and early Romantic music on this highly informative 10-week course. Ideal for people with no specialist knowledge. Break week: 17 Feb 2025.

Do you want to know more about Western classical music? Explore selected topics and key works in Romantic and modern music on this informative 10-week course. Ideal for people with no specialist knowledge. NB: Break week 31 Oct 2024.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Exploring further beneath the surface of a musical work can help us decipher programme notes, understand the work’s context and a composer’s intentions, and greatly enhance our enjoyment of a performance.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Exploring beneath the surface of a musical work can help us decipher programme notes, understand the work’s context and a composer’s intentions, and greatly enhance our enjoyment of a performance.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

What is opera? And how do you approach watching and listening to it? Explore the ostentatious, sometimes overwhelming, world of opera through study of two major works and styles.

Arnold Schoenberg was born in 1874, and his career spanned the period from high Romanticism through Modernism to the post-1945 avante garde. Come and learn how this fascinating and eclectic composer was part of, and a huge influence on, Western classical music during his lifetime and beyond, and learn to appreciate his music for its own sake.

A foundation course for students new to music making. You will discover a range of musical instruments and study the basic building blocks of music.

For experienced classical guitar players, you will work on scales and arpeggios at grades 7 & 8, and learn to play fingerstyle versions of Baroque, Latin/Spanish and contemporary music.

An ensemble for musicians interested in learning the skills of playing consort music in different instrumental combinations (broken consort). It will be a journey exploring the variety of sound combinations in 17th century repertoire. Break week: 29 May 2024.

“The more beautiful everything is, the more it will hurt without you”—Gene Kelly as An American in Paris (1951) singing to Leslie Caron. Happy endings are hard won in fifties’ musicals and The End is where they were heading. MGM was the studio of musicals in the 1950s. During this decade other studios presented only occasional musicals. The musical was big business for Hollywood in the 1950s and so was the western, so bringing them together made sense. Annie Get Your Gun had been a big success for MGM so Warner Bros. decided to get a piece of the action with Calamity Jane (1953 David Butler with Doris Day). Judy Garland was sacked by MGM in 1951, then followed Joan Crawford to Warner Brothers where she staged a big comeback in, fittingly, A Star is Born (1954 George Cukor). Oklahoma (1955 Fred Zinnemann) and Carousel (1956 Henry King) from 20th Century Fox introduced Shirley Jones. And don’t forget Leonard Bernstein’s score for On the Waterfront (1954) that anticipated West Side Story (1961). (See related courses on Fifties Melodrama and Film Noir and 50 Films From the ‘50s: Hollywood’s Last Stand).

Ideal if you know the basics of music production but want your music to sound more polished and professional. Tips and tricks for mixing, using compressors, limiters, EQ, reverb and other devices.

From the sound you phone makes to wake you up in the morning to pop, club music and concert music – electronic music is everywhere an available to everyone. This course tells the story of electronic music from computers as big as rooms in the WDR studios in Cologne to GarageBand on your iphone and the music that was made along the way.