VANTAGE POINT: TUESDAY MORNINGS, OCTOBER 28 TO DECEMBER 9, 2025

VIDEO PREVIEW      ARTIST BIOS      SYLLABUS (flat)     SYLLABUS (foldable)
CLASSES:    [1]    [2]    [3]    [4]    [5]    [6]

 
Musical Escapes

Music has the power to take us out of ourselves, to offer a temporary escape to somewhere else. Escape to a distant place or time… to radiance, order, and calm… to fantasy or laughter… or simply to concentrate on something that, for the moment, is all-absorbing. While classically-based, the course will span the gamut—symphony, song, opera, ballet, or musical—with a few surprises thown in from left field. These will be arranged by theme rather than period or genre. Each class will feature one or more longer excerpts or even complete works, together with video clips of all kinds to provide context and get us thinking.

For the course is more than a series of excursions on a musical tour bus or time machine. We will look further into the cliché of being transported by music. Can music convey spiritual radiance without referencing a specific religion? Can it recreate a time other than the one in which it was composed? Can it take us to different places without some clue in the title? Can it make us laugh through sound alone? And since all music plays out in the imagination, can composers use it to explore their fantasies rather than our own? These are important aesthetic questions—the answer is not always yes—but we won't approach them in the abstract; just be prepared to listen, be open to your feelings, and discuss.

I chose the images below for harmony rather than diversity. They only represent a part of what I will play in the actual classes, which I expect to be as varied and entertaining as I can make them. One by one, I will add RESOURCES for each session, at which point the current grey links will be activated and turn gold. rb.

	October 28
Still from a video of "I want to live where you live" by David Lang	RESOURCES

1. Music and Mood

The first hour of this class, An Experiment in Listening, will take a short four-movement work as basis for discussion of how its different moods can get our feet tapping, remind us of a simpler life, confront us with the power of nature, or convey a sense of spiritual aspiration. Music can also have negative effects, of course, like inducing anxiety or fear, but in this first class we will concentrate on a single positive: the power of music to circumvent our conscious minds and bring us a sense of order, radiance, or joy. For example, music has long held a place in religious worship, yet spirituality in music can take many different forms, and may not even be attached to religious doctrine. Thus our second hour, The Music of Exaltation, will be devoted to ecstatic experiences of all kinds, secular or sacred, and in many different contexts: the Bach family fireside, a baroque chapel, the Bucks County barn pictured above, or a shtetl in the Ukraine.

	November 4
James Agee and Ashton's Enigma Variations	RESOURCES

2. Music and Time

All music reflects the time in which it was written, so playing or listening to it can be a form of time-travel. But music written to evoke a yet earlier time is a special case. The photographs above represent two of the works featured in the second hour: above, the writer James Agee, whose poetic memoir Knoxville, Summer of 1915 was set to music by Samuel Barber; and below, Elgar's Enigma Variations, written orginally as a portrait of the friends who used to visit his Worcestershire home, but turned into a ballet by Sir Frederick Ashton in 1968 to make a veritable time-capsule of British social life in the late Victorian era. The first hour will look at how later composers from Donizetti to Lin-Manuel Miranda have looked back at British monarchs, and consider the special case of musical performers whose intense concentration makes time virtually cease to exist.

	November 11
Turner's Fingal's Cave and a cottage in Somerset	RESOURCES

3. Places in Music

Musical landscape painting became a stock-in-trade of Romantic composers. Many depicted the lands in which they lived: think of Smetana in Bohemia or Sibelius in Finland. Others sent musical dispatches home from other countries: Mendelssohn from Scotland, Dvorak from America, Gershwin from Paris. To get the authentic color, many composers called upon folk song and dance; this was how Copland made the mental journey from Brooklyn to the old Wild West, for Billy the Kid. Folk song also played a large part in the English musical revival of the early Twentieth Century, with composers such as Vaughan-Williams, Holst, and Butterworth. And by collecting little-known songs that would be lost when the last generation that knew them passed away, works like Holst's Somerset Rhapsody were also a memorial to a life that was quickly slipping into the past.

	November 18
Two uplifting ballets L'allegro (Mark Morris) and La fille mal gardée (Frederick Ashton)	RESOURCES

4. Music and Merriment

Listen to any comic-opera overture by Rossini, and you know fun will follow. Buy a ticket for any Broadway show before about 1970, and be prepared to laugh. But music can raise the spirits without telling a joke, and much of this class will be about how it does so, in popular songs, ballets, musicals, symphonies, and concertos. There will indeed be a few frankly comic pieces in the second hour of the class but—unlike most musical humor that requires some prior knowledge of style and context—I have chosen things that can be enjoyed by everyone.

	December 2
Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges and Lloyd Webber's Cats	RESOURCES

5. Music and Make-Believe

Music springs from the imagination of the composer and plays out in the imagination of the listener, so it should be an ideal medium for fantasy. Or a fantastic medium for the ideal. From the 18th century on, composers used music to portray idealized visions of the countryside: Vivaldi's Seasons and Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony are two examples. Hector Berlioz, one of the first composers to use his own psyche as musical fodder, poured his desires, frustrations, and nightmares into his Fantastic Symphony. Early 20th-century composers Ravel and Janacek brought singing animals onstage in their operas L'enfant et les sortilèges and The Cunning Little Vixen; Ravel also includes singing objects such as the teapot and teacup shown above. And the ne plus ultra of singing animals on the musical stage is surely Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber's setting of TS Eliot's comic poems for children.

	December 9
The Wizard of Oz and a Chinese landscape	RESOURCES

6. Over the Rainbow

Music has the uncanny power of expressing a yearning for something unknown or even unknowable. The iconic example from the popular media is the song "Somewhere over the rainbow" sung by Judy Garland at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. Or Audrey Hepburn with "Moon River" in Breakfast at Tiffany's. At the other end of the scale is Mahler's valedictory Song of the Earth, whose six movements, all based on motifs from traditional Chinese painting, sing of imagined worlds, both here on earth and beyond the mountains of death.

 
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