Writing Great Songs

Great documentaries and lectures

Leonard Bernstein – The Unanswered Question:

The Unanswered Question is the title of a lecture series given by Leonard Bernstein in the fall of 1973. This series of six lectures was a component of Bernstein’s duties as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry for the 1972-73 academic year at Harvard University, and is therefore often referred to as the Norton Lectures. The lectures were both recorded on video and printed as a book, titled The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard.

1. Musical Phonolgy http://youtu.be/MB7ZOdp__gQ
2. Musical Syntax http://youtu.be/r_fxB6yrDVo
3. Musical Semantics http://youtu.be/8IxJbc_aMTg
4. The Delights & Dangers of Ambiguity http://youtu.be/hwXO3I8ASSg
5. The XXth Century Crisis http://youtu.be/kPGstQUbpHQ
6. The Poetry of Earth http://youtu.be/OWeQXTnv_xU

Howard Goodall’s Twentieth Century Greats

Howard Goodall’s Twentieth Century Greats This series aims to show people what the constituent parts of music do: melody, harmony, rhythm – and how the pieces fit together. It’s for anyone who’s ever tried to learn their favourite song at the piano, or who’s tried to pick up the guitar or the trombone, for every kid who’s starting out with music, or the merely curious to know why one piece of music might resemble another.

1. Lennon & McCartney – When people look back in 200 years’ time at Western culture, whose music will have survived from the 20th century? Who will be our equivalent of Bach and Beethoven, Verdi and Wagner? There are big classical names from the last 100 years, including Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Stockhausen, but, believes composer Howard Goodall, in dismantling the traditional keys and harmony, the building blocks of Western music, classical music lost touch with its audiences. ‘The big story of 20th century music,’ he says, ‘is the way that classical and popular music collided with each other to create a new musical mainstream. In the 1960s, with classical music at its lowest ebb, the most important composers in the world were without doubt The Beatles.’
2. Bernard Hermann – Film is the 20th century’s own art form and many of the most emotive musical moments in cinema history came from the pen of Bernard Herrmann. According to Howard Goodall, Herrmann put film music on the map, and his compositions will be remembered by generations of filmgoers, long after other composers have been forgotten. Born in 1911, his life spanned the period when film was breaking new ground and gaining huge audiences.Though Herrmann is not as well-known as other avant-garde composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, his electrifyingly mood-changing music is recognised by millions of filmgoers. Who can forget the terrifying orchestral shrieks that accompany the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho? Or the eerie sounds that form the backdrop to the arrival of an alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still?
3. Leonard Bernstein   – One man above all embodies the 20th century struggle for supremacy between classical and popular music. Leonard Bernstein composer, conductor, TV personality, concert pianist, educator and visionary walked the tightrope between the two musical traditions long before the term ‘crossover’ was coined. Howard Goodall describes him as the ‘musical gatekeeper of America’s 20th century’, saying: ‘The music he composed over a 40-year career integrates classical with jazz and rock, sacred music from the Christian and Jewish traditions and European and South American rhythms.’
4. Cole Porter – Which 20th century composers will still be delighting audiences in 300 years’ time, as Handel, Mozart and Beethoven do today? Though the earlier composers, like Stravinsky and Shostakovich, were pushing the boundaries of classical music, their compositions were still recognisably related to the work of their predecessors. And, more importantly, music lovers wanted to listen to their work. But as composer Howard Goodall points out, classical music soon ‘began a perilous journey into an arid form of modernism that the mainstream audience couldn’t, or didn’t want to, follow’.By the 1920s, popular music entered the process, and songs that were catchy and entertaining, though often banal in their simplicity, began to rival classical compositions in their complexity and sophistication. This transformation says Howard Goodall, was kick-started by Cole Porter, a musician who was part of a generation of gifted composers that created and developed the musical one of the seminal American art forms of the 20th century.

Howard Goodall’s How Music Works

In this 2006 four-part series composer Howard Goodall strips music down to its essential parts to find out how music works.

1. Melody http://youtu.be/xw9eef99aSI
2. Rhythm http://youtu.be/ZZJPnAer7EM
3. Harmony  http://youtu.be/KwRHu8T1lCs
4. Bass http://youtu.be/fIWEGYDG-Ig