All You Have To Do Is Listen—Missing Examples

I talked about Rob Kapilow's excellent book All You Have To Do Is Listen in Music from the Inside Out. Reading it is a marvelous way for classical music novices like me to learn how to understand the music the way its composers intended us to.

Kapilow teaches by example. Each point he makes in the text of the book is reinforced by short snatches of music illustrating the idea. These examples are shown in the book in musical notation, which of course most of us can't read. So the examples are brought to life online, here.

Go to that link, and you'll find a list of the book's 14 chapters on the left side of the window. Click any of the chapters and a list of the musical examples contained in that chapter appears, while the first example in the list automatically starts playing as a movie in the center of the window.

In each movie, the musical score scrolls steadily leftward past a vertical line that indicates exactly which notes are being played at that moment in time. It's a cool idea, letting total dummies like me follow what's happening both sound-wise and score-wise at one and the same time.

Kapilow also puts extra text notations in the score to alert us to which of the points he makes in the book are being illustrated now, at this point in the music as it is being played. You can pause the movie at will to consider Kapilow's key points more fully, at your leisure.

There's a slight problem, though. Two of the examples — numbers 13 and 14, from Chapter 2 — are missing.

You can download all the examples, including the missing ones, by going here and clicking on "Download All Examples." That's a good thing to do, as a matter of fact, since you can then import the examples as movies into iTunes. Once you've done that, you can sync them to your iPhone or iPod Touch. (I found that a few of them wouldn't sync unless I selected them and used the "Create iPod or iPhone version" item in iTunes' Advanced menu.)

But if you aren't eager to go to that much trouble, here are the two missing examples. (Note that you can put the mouse pointer over the QuickTime player for each and use the mouse scroll wheel and the space bar to control what portion plays when.)

Example 13 is from the "Spring" Concerto, from Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Its purpose is to show how an initially plain, simple harmony sets us up for a high-impact "event," as Kapilow uses the word, when suddenly three previously unheard chords are introduced very, very quickly by Vivaldi in the third measure.





Example 14 is from Bach's The Art of the Fugue. Its purpose is to show that an initially unimpressive opening doesn't necessarily have to lead to a quick, major event that "justifies" it. Instead, Bach states an unadorned opening idea that stays, for the time being, plain.





Bach does this on purpose, since his intent is to use the layered form of the fugue to open up his plain musical "kernel idea" very, very gradually, over the course of his entire composition, until it impresses us as, in a modern analogy, a beautifully popped piece of popcorn.