#241 overall
The Unanswered Question (Leonard Bernstein)
YouTube
2 recommenders · 2 threads · recommended in 2 years, 2020–2023 · score 1.8
A 1973 series of six lectures by Leonard Bernstein (the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard) on music's relationship to language, linguistics, and philosophy, using Chomsky-style ideas to examine how music communicates meaning. It is available as a playlist of recorded lectures on YouTube.
Commenters recommend it as an entertaining, deep route into the philosophy of music and the basic vocabulary of music theory, such as intervals, scales, and chords.
Humanities & Social Sciencebeginnerfreevideo lectures#music theory#philosophy of music#bernstein#norton lectures#linguistics
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20062026
While I agree with your goal of finding analogies when teaching new concepts, I think your first paragraph is a pretty unsympathetic take on music theory. (I don't know anything about photography.)
Music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. Is it any surprise that something we had to invent a whole new symbolic notation for is difficult to connect to concepts we can describe in natural language?
If you want to go really deep into the philosophy of music, to understand it from "first principles" so to speak, I highly recommend Leonard Bernstein's lecture series "The Unanswered Question" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unanswered_Question_(lectu... (available on YouTube).
To paraphrase Bernstein's comment from his book "The Joy of Music": we need to stop comparing Beethoven to grassy fields and mountain streams. A "major seventh" or a "plagal cadance" are themselves the description of those qualities. By all means use music as metaphor, but when you're trying to describe it you're going to be using terms specific to its domain.
"Intervals", "Scales", and "Chords" are good terms to search for. They are elementary concepts present in a lot of music. Ten Steps use six notes of the C Major Scale, all of which belong to either the I or IV chord. The I and IV chords use, by definition, an interval of 1-4-7.
For an entertaining overview, check out Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton lectures, "The Unanswered Question"[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFjonLo8gYHIXC35K4Ujr...