Studying for the Classical/Romantic test

1) You can now access the powerpoints that come with the test. Login to WebCT, click on the Classical or Romantic organizer pages. (Thanks to the person who let me know there was a problem!)

2) Check out the study sheets here on the blog - links are on the right sidebar.

3) Listening - you should have been listening to the CDs and getting them in your head well before now. Well, better to start late than not at all - trust me on this. Listening will come from the Classical and Romantic eras.

Standard answer to "How many questions are there on the test?" still applies.

(Between 1 and 10,000).

Note about Beethoven

Something for today's class: from the Wall Street Journal, Fri 3/8/08 Edition, Page W14:

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Recapturing the Excitement of Beethoven
Mikhail Pletnev Makes the Symphonies Sound New Again
By GREG SANDOW

When Beethoven's symphonies were first performed, there was sometimes wild enthusiasm. "The listeners could scarcely restrain themselves," said an early Beethoven biographer, talking about the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, where the audience burst into applause right in the middle of the music.

And later, when the symphonies began to be played regularly, everybody knew that something special was happening. People in the audience would cry out with "wonderment and joy," as one observer wrote. When "a violin passage [in the Fifth Symphony] ripped down from the highest notes of the orchestra to the lowest . . . the orchestra entered into a community with the public, they exchanged glances."

This of course doesn't happen in our time, when surely there's a Beethoven symphony played somewhere at every hour of every day. And not just because the etiquette of the classical concert hall forbids those wild reactions. We know these pieces now, and they're not likely to surprise us. We're used to them.

And yet . . . isn't something missing? Isn't shock and surprise -- and wild excitement -- built into Beethoven's DNA? In the Fifth Symphony, there's something just about unprecedented, at least for any listener in Beethoven's time. The third movement, dark, uneasy (and full of goblins, as E.M. Forster memorably wrote), can't bring itself to end. It collapses into tense and almost formless expectation, out of which the last movement explodes like a long-awaited burst of light. Nobody had connected movements of a symphony before, and certainly never with such drama. Audiences in the 19th century understood how new this was and would lose control, erupting with spontaneous applause.

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