JHU OSHER ON ZOOM: MONDAYS, FEBRUARY 22 TO MARCH 29, 2027

VIDEO PREVIEW      ARTIST BIOS      SYLLABUS      CLASSES:  [1]  [2]  [3]  [4]  [5]  [6]

Two things have combined to shape this course. In my many showings of opera, Broadway, and ballet, I have become increasingly aware of how much our understanding is affected by the choices of the video director, such as when to zoom in for a close-up. And in my more recent dive into pop music, I often find that my immediate fascination with the video sparks a developing interest in the song itself. Hence this exploration of how the camera can present music, an essentially non-visual medium, in an increasingly visual world. Running from Disney's Fantasia to the self-directed videos of Taylor Swift, this profusely-illustrated six-week course will touch on a wide variety of music over an 80-year span.

Scroll down for a list of class topics and dates. As currently planned, the various works illustrated will all be included in the relevant class, plus others, but all this may change. As each session is prepared, the RESOURCES tab under its image will turn GOLD, directing you to a specific page for that class, with a printable handout and often other information as well. rb.

	February 22
RESOURCES

1. Transcription

Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) stands as the iconic attempt to transcribe classical music into visual terms; ranging from Bach to Stravinsky, it spans the gamut from near-abstraction to cartoon narrative. Three decades later, the graphic notations of Stephen Malinowski, representing interweaving musical lines on a moving graph, offered a more objective form of analysis, especially helpful in contrapuntal music. And for most of the century, choreographers like Balanchine and Ashton have created abstract ballets reflecting the formal design of the music; the camera in these cases merely clarifies and records. Not so when the original music is intended to represent a place, mood, or narrative, and the film-maker responds with evocative photography that brings the underlying ideas to the surface.

	March 1
RESOURCES

2. Biopic

Hollywood has long loved composer biographies that portray the artist as being as romantic and passionate in his love life as in his music; a few of these may even include substantial performance sequences. We shall play a piano duel between Liszt and Chopin in the film Desire for Love (2002). But the 2003 BBC film Eroica is a special case, in that it reconstructs a private play-through of Beethoven's entire 3rd Symphony in the house of his patron, Prince Lobkowitz, combining it with an imaginative story about Beethoven, his assistant, and members of the Prince's household; it is thus as much a biography of the work as of the composer. We shall also see scenes from Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) about the genesis of the iconic song, composed and performed by Freddie Mercury with the band Queen. Probably there will be a few other clips, classical or popular, along the way.

	March 8
RESOURCES

3. Instrument

Unlike, say, opera and ballet, the camera filming an instrumental concert will not be content with a seat in the auditorium. Instead, it typically ranges widely, showing the conductors as the players see them, picking out orchestral sections or soloists, focusing on a pianist's face or fingers. Often this is done for visual variety alone, but there are a few cases where sensitive camerawork actually illuminates the music being played, cuing you to entrances you might otherwise have missed. Another approach is to film recording sessions or rehearsals, in which the camera can move more freely and performers are less shy about showing their personal involvement in the music-making task.

	March 14
RESOURCES

4. Voice

Classical song recitals are generally about the delicate interplay of music and words, without extraneous gesture; videos may zoom in on the singer's face, and nowadays often add the texts, but it is rare to see them do much else. Popular groups are different, in that the staging, lighting, and special effects are often part of the physical performance, and the camerawork can be similarly creative; this thus overlaps the music-video category discussed in Class 6. Opera is a different matter again; it used to be filmed in the studio or in natural settings, giving the director a high degree of control in design and presentation. Nowadays, though, almost all opera videos are made during live performances in a theater. As there is usually more happening onstage than can be taken in at a single glance, the video director plays a major role in telling us where to look. And camera angles have got more creative too; the Met-Live-in-HD approach switches between views from different positions in the audience, but some other directors intersperse views from the wings, the flies, or backstage; is this helpful or a distraction?

	March 22
RESOURCES

5. Film

In some ways, this class is the opposite of everything else in this course: adding music to video as opposed to adding video to music. But this older marriage of the two media offers insights into modern music videos that approach the combination the other way round. Some uses of music in film illustrated here include creating a foreboding mood (e.g. Miles Davis for Elevator to the Scaffold, 1958), screwing up tension (Bernard Herrmann for Psycho, 1960), penning a phrase that would persist as a musical meme (Vangelis for Chariots of Fire, 1981), and establishing the epic scale (John Williams for the Star Wars franchise from 1977 on).

	March 29
RESOURCES

6. Pop

The 24-hour music-video channel MTV was launched in 1981. It was a spur to the creation of many more examples, to the point where issue of an accompanying video was considered a normal part of promoting a song or album. But MTV would not have been possible without a considerable number of already-existing videos for it to show; the prehistory goes back at least to the 1960s and the Beatles. Music-video approaches include the use of abstract imagery, creative ways of filming an actual performance of the song, the addition of narratives that may or may not parallel its words, and elaborate productions such as the 2025 film Taylor Swift directed for her "Fate of Ophelia," whose web of cultural reference is provocatively tangential to the song itself. This was the subject that got me started on this course to begin with, but I realize now that it is a huge field that will require (and get) a lot of research before I can come up with a final proposal. rb.

 
Site hosted by DreamHost