How to Listen to and Understand Great Music by Robert Greenberg
(Great Courses audio lecture series)
This book has been recommended for many years as part of a Fine Arts credit for high school in Mater Amabilis (since the beta high school plans!).
It's a survey course in 48 lectures of all Western music with most of the focus on traditional classical music. I have generally scheduled twelve lectures each year. I recommended alternating them with weeks of listening to any of the pieces mentioned in the lectures. (We have Spotify, but you can use the library or whatever music streaming service you prefer. We even owned some of the pieces on CD.) Some of my kids listened to the whole pieces, but mostly they didn't feel it necessary. My three younger ones are all still taking piano lessons and play in a band (currently in twelfth, tenth, and eighth grades), so they are exposed to quite a bit of music in those ways as well.
Professor Greenberg is funny and only sometimes irreverent. The lectures are written for college students or adults, so there are sometimes references to more mature themes, but nothing I thought too scandalous for my high school students.
We have also really enjoyed his lectures Music as a Mirror of History.
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