The Story of Classical Music is a multisensory, classical music course that also covers art, architecture, and history. The course includes a beautiful, hardcover teacher’s handbook, links to online listening activities (playlists provided), a few brief video lectures about music terms by course author Sadie Hoyt, video art tutorials for some lessons by Elisabeth Waldstein, My Listening Journal activity books (for two levels: ages three to seven or ages eight and up), and a printable set of 95 flashcards.
The course can be used for preschool through high school. There is an activity book for children in kindergarten through third grade, but the course content is best for middle school through high school. (High school students can earn one credit for the course.) Younger children can listen and participate with workbook activities and projects as much as they are able, and they can absorb the beauty of the music even if some content is over their heads.
The teacher’s handbook has six parts, with four chapters per part. One or two composers are highlighted in each chapter. So, while the course traces key developments in classical music, it is not a comprehensive history.
The six parts and the featured composers for each chapter are:
I. Cathedrals of Polyphony – Medieval and Renaissance Sacred Music: Hildegard of Bingen, Leonin and Perotin, Guillaume du Fay, and Giovanni da Palestrina and Thomas Tallis
II. Musical Tapestries – Renaissance & Early Baroque Music of English Monarchs: William Byrd, John Dowland, Orlando Gibbons, and William Lawes
III. The Birth of Opera – Baroque Opera of Italy, France, & England: Claudio Monteverdi, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Henry Purcell, and George Frideric Handel
IV. Baroque Splendor I – Italian & French Baroque Music: Arcangelo Corelli, Francois Couperin, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, and Antonio Vivaldi
V. Baroque Splendor II – Late Baroque Music of England, France, & Germany: George Frideric Handel (featured in two chapters), Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Georg Philipp Telemann
VI. The Genius of Bach – Polyphonic Masterpieces of Johann Sebastian Bach: Johann Sebastian Bach (featured in all four chapters)
You might have noticed the names of several unfamiliar composers rather than those commonly taught. I think this makes the course more interesting to students who have already had some introduction to major classical composers.
While Hoyt provides narrow historical contexts for the lessons, prior knowledge of world history for the larger context will be helpful to students. Every chapter begins with at least two or three pages that relate pertinent historical events relevant to the featured composer and his work, often including developments in architecture, art, costumes, religion, and philosophy. One art tutorial project is included for each of the six parts, and these appear in the first part of one of the four lessons.
The second component of each lesson talks about the featured composer. Students learn some biographical information and important aspects of the composer’s work. This is sometimes where students encounter musical terms and learn about instruments and styles of music. There are occasional video tutorials. For example, In the second lesson, we learn about chants used as sacred music and the concept of the melisma. Hoyt has a brief video where she sings a melisma.
The third lesson component is an encounter with a piece of classical music. You can access Hoyt’s playlists for the course through a dedicated page on her website. Playlists are available for Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube. The teacher’s handbook has listening instructions that tell students particular features to listen for that illustrate lesson concepts. Sometimes students will simply listen to complete musical performances. (Parents might choose excerpts for students with short attention spans.)
My Listening Journal for the Story of Classical Music
As I mentioned above, there are two very different My Listening Journal books, one for ages three to seven, and one for those eight and above. Both are printed in black and white. Assignments to be completed in the journals are in boxes in the teacher handbook headed “Students’ Activities During Reading,” which implies that the parent might be reading text from the teacher’s handbook aloud while children work in the journal. The journal for younger children has a coloring page and a fairly simple activity page for each lesson. Children might color while listening to either instruction or music, but parents will probably need to interact with them for the activity page. It seems to me that young children will not grasp most of the lesson material but will benefit most from listening to the music. So, bringing them in at those points in each lesson might be the best way to include them.
The activities in the journal for older students vary somewhat from week to week but generally begin with a drawing activity and have two or more listening activity worksheets. The drawing assignments can be completed while listening to the parent or teacher reading information, but the other activities cannot. These usually ask students to tell what they thought or felt as they listened, perhaps completing a graphic organizer as part of their response. Some lessons have terms for which students write out definitions. Every lesson concludes with a quiz. An answer key for the older level My Listening Journal is available free on the digital resources page for this book.
Icons throughout the teacher’s handbook alert students to key terms to learn, instructional videos, art tutorials, listening activities, and pages to complete in Listening Journals.
Parental Concerns
The Story of Classical Music is not a religious course, but there is necessarily a discussion of Catholic and Protestant religions since many major developments took place within religious music. In addition, the development of music was impacted by the Protestant Reformation in significant ways that Hoyt discusses in Chapter 21 in regard to Bach. The development of music and sponsorship of composers by churches was a significant factor, and I appreciate the way Hoyt juxtaposes those developments against the development of music and entertainment by wealthy European rulers and their courts.
The decadence of the imperial courts influenced musical content in different directions. Some parents will want to be forewarned that pagan gods and goddesses are discussed or shown in a few lessons such as Chapter 8’s discussion of masques hosted by King Charles I and Queen Henrietta of England and Chapter 10’s discussion of the opera Psyché by Lully.
Summary
The Story of Classical Music’s multi-media lessons provide a well-rounded course on the fine arts. It is ambitious in aiming for such a broad audience, but I think it works best for teaching students in junior and senior high and letting younger students absorb as much as they are able from the lessons
