Study begins, and why

Today is the day I planned to begin part one of my course. In the couple of days since receiving my course materials, I have spent some time reading through the supplementary documents included with the course. Who knew that before I had even looked at my first exercise or project that I would be learning about the nature of a Listening Log, and how to utilize the Harvard Referencing System amongst other things? My initial approach at trying to cram all this information in one go has been superseded by what I think will be a more suitable idea; of referring to those documents as and when needed.

I think it's important to explain why I wanted to take this course, and the immense value that I think it will bring to me.

As a classical pianist and teacher, I have listened to classical music with interest for quite some time. The piano however can be an instrument of solitude. A huge amount of music for keyboard instruments is/was written for the solo instrument. This then leads me to listening to a lot of music from the solo repertoire. This is not to say that I have not been exposed to music of the other instruments; many of my favourite composers of solo keyboard works are/were also prolific composers of other orchestral and vocal works.

With that being said, for my goal of attaining a holistic knowledge of western classical music, I recognise that there is an enormous amount to be learnt, and this course presents a comprehensive and focused method of doing this.

You will notice above that I refer to "classical music", the conventional term for the more accurate "western art music". It's important to note that this course deals with "music" not just "western art music", and as such deals with a wide variety of different genres. The main interest for me however lies in the less familiar sub-genres of classical music, such as medieval and renaissance music, and contemporary classical music. This is where I intend to aim my focus during this course as much as possible.