To the Instructor

When Joseph and Vivian Kerman launched the first edition of Listen back in 1972, they no doubt hoped — but could not have expected — that it would still be reaching students over forty years later. The staying power of the book is a tribute to many things and many people, but above all it commemorates their initial vision and their continued efforts across several decades in revising and improving it. Joe himself came to regard Listen as far and away the most important contribution of his career, a judgment that sets a high bar, given Opera as Drama, The Beethoven Quartets, Contemplating Music, and the rest. But who would gainsay that judgment, in the light of the hundreds of thousands of undergraduates whose lives have been touched and even transformed in courses employing Listen?

The Kermans’ vision was at first almost unique: to focus the attention of non-major undergraduates on close, analytic listening to great music at the same time as they came to understand its place in a historical chronology of styles and in a broader story of Western culture. Listen fulfills this vision in a fashion still unsurpassed, and we continue to revise and improve the book in ways that respond to the changing landscape of teaching introductory courses to the Western musical tradition.

New to This Edition

The changes in Listen, Eighth Edition, answer to the desires, viewpoints, and indeed criticisms we have solicited from users and non-users alike. Particularly important have been users’ views on the teaching effectiveness of individual works. Of course we have retained the basic elements that have always distinguished Listen: the stimulating prose, the high-quality recordings, the unmatched Listening Charts, the clear laying-out of musical basics in Unit I, and the broad context outlined in Prelude chapters for each new historical phase. To these we have added new features, new repertory, and a clean, updated new design.

New Features

Each historical unit begins with an arresting two-page spread designed to orient the student quickly and effectively. On the left is a very short description of the materials introduced in the unit, on the right a time line of the works students will encounter, tabulating composers’ names, titles of works, and chronological order of composition. In between is an artwork characteristic of the period at hand, with a caption explaining what makes it so.

Each chapter ends with a new bullet list of Goals for Review: checklists of the listening skills and key concepts students should particularly attend to as they study.

New Repertory

As in every new edition, we have sought to improve the coverage of the musical repertories at the heart of our enterprise. We have added a movement from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, always a favorite with students and teachers alike. The coverage of the Classical symphony now exemplifies variations, rondo, and minuet forms with movements from three of Haydn’s London symphonies. A Beethoven piano sonata movement shows features of his late style.

For the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the rethinking has been extensive. For the early part of the period, the coverage of modernism is more inclusive and varied, with the addition of new works by Ruth Crawford and William Grant Still. For the most recent years, Listen adds new selections by Tania León, George Crumb, and John Adams.

All told, the new works are as follows:

New Design

The publishers of Listen, no less than the authors, have always worked hard to make this textbook attractive to look at; we all take pride in the book’s design and appearance. But the real point of a good design is to make it both easy and inviting to find your way around in a book. Of necessity there is a lot of diverse material here, lots of bits and pieces — the main text, boxes and charts of different kinds, music, marginalia. The new design introduced in this edition enhances the flow of the text and emphasizes important information to make student reading a more effective learning experience. In general, the design gives a clean, updated “look.”

Students these days, perhaps more than ever before, are used to getting information quickly and clearly. Listen, Eighth Edition makes this possible without sacrificing the nuance of subject matter and presentation for which the book has always been praised.

New Formats

Listen has always moved forward with new technological developments that are essential to the teaching of music appreciation. For this edition, we offer the full and brief sets of the Listen recordings in a convenient downloadable format; the full set is also available on six high-quality CDs. Streaming recordings and an interactive e-book are available in LaunchPad, a new, fully customizable course space. See Resources for Listen, Eighth Edition, below.

Distinctive Features of Listen

In the midst of many changes, what have not changed are our basic coverage and organization, which have proved solid over many editions. For new users, we draw attention to the following strong features that we believe set Listen apart.

Fundamentals

The Fundamentals unit develops basic musical concepts in a logical, orderly sequence. It begins with rhythm and meter and continues with pitch, dynamics, and tone color, pausing to consider the musical instruments students will be listening to. Next comes melody, and only then are the more challenging issues of harmony, tonality, and modality raised. The introduction to music notation, not necessary for this unit or the book as a whole, is found in an appendix. This presentation, we feel, allows instructors to pick and choose issues they want to highlight more easily without losing the logic of the presentation.

Eight Listening Exercises that work with music on the Unit I CD (bound into the back of the print book and included in LaunchPad as Music for Listening Exercises) illustrate rhythm, melody, texture, modality, and so on, and culminate in the encyclopedic Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra by Benjamin Britten. We show students how to listen to this work as an informal summary of fundamentals at the end of the unit.

Flexible Coverage

The main emphasis of Listen is on the common-practice repertory, with a careful selection of more modern material and a generous unit on pre-eighteenth-century music. After Unit I, the historical scheme goes from “early music” — in effect, everything before Bach and Handel, when the standard repertory begins — to the three great periods of Western classical music: the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the twentieth century to the present. Units III, IV, and V, each containing several chapters, cover these periods. Unit II, “Early Music: An Overview,” is independent of the rest of the text; nothing later in the book depends on having studied it, so if your course plan begins with Bach and Handel in Unit III, students will not need to skip back for explanations of continuo texture, recitative, fugue, and so on.

Cultural Background

The Baroque and Classical eras and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are introduced by what we call “Prelude” chapters. Each summarizes features of the culture of the time, emphasizing those that stand in close relation to music. The Prelude chapters also contain concise accounts of the musical styles of the eras, so that these chapters furnish background of two kinds — cultural and stylistic — for listening to specific pieces of music in the chapters that follow.

Biography boxes segregate material on the lives of the major composers from discussions of their music — again, making the book easier to read and easier to work from. The boxes include portraits, concise lists of works that can serve for study or reference, and, under the heading “Encore,” suggestions for further listening. Time lines in Appendix A locate composers at a glance in relation to other important historical figures and events.

Non-Western Music

The seven Global Perspectives segments of Listen are positioned so as to elaborate on the European and American topics discussed around them. The Global Perspectives segment on sacred chant, for example, comes at the end of the Middle Ages chapter, where Gregorian chant has been discussed; African ostinato forms are exemplified after the early Baroque chapter; and a brief look at complex instrumental forms in Japanese and Indonesian traditions follows the eighteenth-century unit, with its examination of sonata form and other formal types in the Classical symphony.

We believe these materials broaden the coverage of Listen in a meaningful way, but we certainly do not offer them as a token survey of world musics. If they are a token of anything, it is the authors’ belief that music making worldwide shows certain common tendencies in which the European classical tradition has shared.

Listening Charts

One of the strongest features of Listen, instructors have always told us, is the format for Listening Charts. The charts for instrumental works all fit onto one page, visible at a glance, with concise descriptions and identifications. Off at the side, brief music tags can easily be consulted by those who read music — and just as easily ignored by those who don’t. Interactive versions of the Listening Charts can be found in LaunchPad for Listen at macmillanhighered.com/listen8e. Guides for songs, operas, and other vocal works offer texts in original languages and parallel translations; they are set in “Listen” boxes throughout the book.

In the end, this text owes its success less to “features” than to two basic attributes, which the authors have been grateful to hear about many times from many instructors over the history of the book. Listen is distinctive in its writing style and, related to that, in the sense it conveys of personal involvement with the music that is treated. The tone is lively and alert, authoritative but not stiff and not without humor. We sound (because we are) engaged with music and we work to engage the student.

The excitement and joy that the experience of music can provide — this, more than historical or analytical data about music — is what most instructors want to pass on to their students. Our efforts are rewarded when students tell us years later that music they studied has become a part of their lives. This is what teaching is about (which is why technology will never replace live instructors), and this is what we have always tried to do in Listen.

Acknowledgments

We express our gratitude to the many practiced “music appreesh” instructors who have reviewed this book and its supplements and given us the benefit of their advice for this revision. Their criticisms and suggestions have significantly improved the text, as have the market surveys in which an even larger number of instructors generously participated. In addition to users of previous editions who over the years have given us suggestions, we wish to thank Lois Ash, Delaware State University; Jeanne Belfy, Boise State University; Roxanne Classen, MacEwan University; Cathryn Clayton, University of Utah; Bruce Cook, Diablo Valley College; Lara Saville Dahl, Georgia State University; Chris Davis, North Greenville University; Melissa Derechailo, Wayne State College; Leanne Dodge, Columbia University; Jennifer Duerden, Brigham Young University–Hawaii; Tracey Ford, Joliet Junior College; Janine Gaboury, Michigan State University; Gary Gackstatter, St. Louis Community College–Meramec; Scott Gleason, Fordham University; John Glennon, Ivy Tech Community College; David Gramit, University of Alberta; Rolf Groesbeck, University of Arkansas at Little Rock; Ross Hagen, Utah Valley University; Barry Hause, East Central Community College; Sharon A. Hickox, University of Nevada, Reno; Todd Jones, University of Kentucky; Karl Kolbeck, Wayne State College; Julianne Lindberg, University of Nevada, Reno; Robin Liston, Baker University; John McClusky, University of Kentucky; Ginny Nixon, Concordia University; Matthew Parker, Trident Technical College; Todd Quinlan, Blinn College; Katie Roberts, Brigham Young University; Catherine Roche-Wallace, University of Louisiana, Lafayette; Ruth Spencer, City College of New York; George Sprengelmeyer, Quinnipiac University; Yiorgos Vassilandonakis, College of Charleston; and Steven Voigt, James Madison University.

The production of a major textbook is a complex, year-long process drawing on professionals from many areas. The main contributors to Listen are listed on the back of the title page, and we are truly grateful to all of them. Our first, special thanks go to the team that has worked in the trenches with the authors to turn this book and its ancillaries into realities and make them better in countless ways. Senior Editor Caroline Thompson, Senior Production Editor Deborah Baker, Art Director Anna Palchik, Designer Marsha Cohen, Editorial Assistant Brenna Cleeland, and picture and permissions consultants Martha Friedman, Kalina Ingham, Susan Doheny, and Margaret Gorenstein — the project would have been unmanageable without the expertise and hard work of all of them. Carrie Thompson’s efforts in particular often assumed larger-than-life, even operatic proportions. Tom Laskey of Sony Music, responsible for recordings acquisitions and production, kept his head through the conniptions of the recording industry (even while authors around him did not). The cover was designed by Billy Boardman. Karen Henry, Editorial Director for English and Music, is a longtime supporter of and coworker on Listen; Edwin Hill, Vice President, Editorial, is a new and welcome supporter of the project.

We are delighted that Professor Mark Harbold has again undertaken the Instructor’s Resource Manual for the present edition, and we are grateful and fortunate indeed that Davitt Moroney agreed to perform a work specially for the CD set: He recorded the Frescobaldi Canzona, Balletto, and Corrente on the seventeenth-century Spanish organ by Greg Harrold at the University of California, Berkeley, in meantone tuning.

The high quality of Listen is a tribute to the expertise, dedication, tenacity, and artistry of all of these people. We are indebted to them all.

G. T.

(for J. K. also)

Branford, CT, July 2014

Resources for Listen, Eighth Edition

Bedford/St. Martin’s offers resources and format choices that help you and your students get the most out of your book and course. To learn more about or to order any of the following products, contact your Macmillan sales representative, e-mail sales support (sales_support@bfwpub.com), or visit the Web site at macmillanhighered.com/listen/catalog.

LaunchPad for Listen, Eighth Edition: Where Students Learn

LaunchPad provides engaging content and new ways to enhance your course. Get an interactive e-book combined with unique, book-specific materials in a fully customizable course space; then assign and mix our resources with yours.

Select Value Packages

Add value to your text by packaging one of the following resources with Listen, Eighth Edition. To learn more about package options for any of the following products, contact your Macmillan sales representative or visit macmillanhighered.com/listen/catalog.

The 6-CD set for Listen includes all of the recordings discussed in the text in a high-quality format that students can keep. To order the 6-CD set packaged with the paperback text, use ISBN 978-1-319-02397-3.

Access cards for music downloads make the Listen recordings available in a less expensive digital format that’s easy for students to load onto their iPods and other devices. Choose the full set of downloads, which includes all of the music from the 6-CD set, or the brief set of downloads, a selection of core listening that replaces the former 3-CD set.

Save Money with the Loose-Leaf Edition of Listen

The loose-leaf edition does not have a traditional binding; its pages are loose and three-hole punched to provide flexibility and a low price to students. To order the loose-leaf edition on its own, use ISBN 1-4576-9698-3 or 978-1-4576-9698-5. To package the loose-leaf edition with CDs or downloads, visit macmillanhighered.com/listen/catalog or contact your Macmillan sales representative.

Instructor Resources

macmillanhighered.com/listen/catalog

You have a lot to do in your course. Bedford/St. Martin’s wants to make it easy for you to find the support you need — and to get it quickly. All of the following resources are available for download from the Bedford/St. Martin’s online catalog at the URL above.

The Instructor’s Resource Manual, prepared by Mark Harbold of Elmhurst College, is the most comprehensive teaching guide to accompany any music appreciation textbook. In addition to chapter overviews and suggested teaching objectives, the instructor’s manual includes detailed suggestions for lectures, demonstrations, class discussions, and further listening. The manual is provided as a PDF file.

Additional Listening Charts and Additional Texts and Translations make it easy to add works not discussed in this edition of Listen to your course.

The Index of Terms and Musical Examples suggests examples from the Listen recordings to illustrate key terms and concepts from the book.

PowerPoint Presentations outline the main points of each chapter and contain selected visuals from the book. You can download, edit, and customize the slides to create your own presentations.

The Test Bank contains more than 1,800 multiple choice and essay questions designed to assess students’ comprehension and listening skills. The Test Bank is available for download in Microsoft Word format or in a computerized test bank format that offers additional editing and customization features. Answer keys are included.

DVDs of complete performances of works discussed in this edition are available to qualified adopters. For information, contact your Macmillan sales representative.