How Music Works with Howard Goodall - 03 - Harmony

How Music Works with Howard Goodall youtube search

Thanks!!

This guy is a pretty easy watch but informative. You have to be careful or you will learn something and not mean too!

I watched the video about how The Beatles "saved" twentieth century classical music. While I'm a big Beatles fan I'm not convinced they, alone, saved music. However his examples illustrated several musical terms such as mode and progression.

He's good on cadences suspensions and secondary dominants but for me it's aimed very much at tweaking the interest of the non-musician. Don't get me wrong he provides a great service in this respect; it's good to get this kind of historical overview and to see how much the present is still in debt to the past but as a tutorial it's necessarily limited and skims over too much too quickly.
The best use of this documentary of course is to take each technical innovation in turn and go elsewhere for further explanation and examples for study.

As a UK resident he's well known to me as a writer of theme tunes for TV and has an engaging presence on screen. I take issue with his dismissal of modernism but accept this is largely a dispute with the extreme end of serialism in classical music. I think he's okay with it in the jazz world so he gets a thumbs up from me.

Thanks for posting.

Alan

for those interested her's a link to the beatles clip and ther others in the series
Howard Goodall's 20th Century Greats

There's a book of the series as well. I'd recommend that. I got it through Kindle.

I discovered Howard Goodall on this forum thread and it's much appreciated. My wife (non-musician but musical by nature) and I watched one series and it was useful to a.) learn new things and b.) provide some good points of discussion to further her knowledge.

Alan S. - whenever someone critiques a good video, I know they are probably aware of some they consider better. What videos - free or otherwise - explain important concepts like these (and related) in a more complete, informative way - and are geared toward musicians ?