Music History and Appreciation

University of Louisville

The University of Louisville School of Music presents many free concerts throughout the year. The concerts range from large ensembles like the symphony orchestra, to small ensembles like the viola studio, to individuals performing recitals.

Iroquois Amphitheater 

The Iroquois Amphitheater presents several concerts throughout the year. Some require an admission fee or a ticket.

Waterfront Wednesdays

WFPK Waterfront Wednesdays presents free concerts on the Big Four Lawn at Waterfront Park on the last Wednesday of each month from April to September.

Other local ensembles that often present free concerts include: 

• Bellarmine University music ensembles
• Bellarmine University (most recent concerts)
• Louisville Winds
• Louisville Youth Orchestra
• Louisville Youth Choir
• U of L Community Band
• Louisville Orchestra

Read your instructions carefully and make sure you understand what your professor is expecting of this review. Keep these instructions in mind when attending the concert.

Find a concert early enough before the deadline so that you have time afterwards to write the review. Many local music groups will put on free concerts. 

Be prepared to take notes once you are at the concert.

Find and keep any program notes that were available at the performance. If there were program notes, they will contain all the information about the pieces that were played, including titles, composers, and sometimes dates (either birth and death dates or dates of composition or both). These notes will also sometimes include biographical or historical information about these pieces and composers. This is a good starting point to understand the context of the music that was played.

Take notes of the performance while you are listening so you can accurately describe the music when writing.

A concert review should include a description of the music that you hear using appropriate musical terms. The music can be analyzed along different aspects:

• Melody - the main musical theme of a song or piece of music
• Rhythm - the arrangement of musical notes according to duration; the music's pattern in time
• Dynamics - how loud or soft as well as any changes in volume such as crescendoes and descrendoes and sudden loudness or softness
• Timbre - the specific tone color of each instrument that makes you able to figure out what instrument it is, or the unique quality of a singer's voice
• Texture - how many different musical lines are playing at the same time; how many different instruments or singers are performing at once during different parts of the music

See if you can hear which instruments have the melody at which times. Think about the following:

• Is the melody fast or slow, soft or loud, smooth or sharp? 
• Do they stay loud or soft throughout?
• Do they have a wide dynamic range, from very soft to very loud?
• Is the rhythm something you can dance or move to?
• How do different musical lines from different instruments interact with each other or with the singer(s)? 

Keeping these different characteristics in mind while listening to the music will help you describe the music in your review. 

Pay attention to the skill of the musicians. Some things to ask yourself include:

• Did the music do a good job of getting very soft or very loud without you realizing it was changing, which would have distracted you from the music?
• Was somebody out of tune or playing at a moment they weren't supposed to be playing?
• Did a soloist impress you enough to write about?

Pay attention to the visuals of the concert. Things to keep in mind include:

• What was the lighting like?
• What were the musicians wearing?
• Did it distract from the music or did it help you get excited for the music?
• How were the musicians sitting or standing?
• Were they moving along to the music so that you could see them enjoying themselves or feeling the emotions?
• If there was a conductor, was she energetic and theatrical?
• Did she mark time clearly or have some other noticeable pattern?

Make a note of the size of the audience and whether they seemed to respond well or poorly to the performance. This can have an affect on how the musicians felt, which can affect how they perform. It can also affect how the performance felt to you.

For your introduction paragraph, include the following information:

• Full name of the musical group or individual musician
• Location, date, and time of the concert
• Any information about the concert theme, such as if it was a tribute to a composer or to another musician
• A full list of the exact title of each piece and its composer
  • If there were too many to list easily, list only the featured piece or pieces of music
  • List the names and composers of the other pieces as you talk about them in the following paragraphs

The  main part of the concert review will be describing the music itself. Do not quote the program notes; use your own descriptions.

You can include brief biographical and historical information about each piece when you discuss the music.

Writing about each piece of music in the order that it was performed is a good idea. It means you can talk about whether the order of the music made sense or how the order in which the songs were played made you feel. If there are a lot of songs, you can put two or three songs in the same paragraph based on the order they were played or you can group songs that are similar together in the same paragraph.

While describing the music itself, you can include quality descriptions and write about whether a section was played particularly well or badly. Was one piece of music played really well or badly and if so why? Another option is to describe the way the music sounds in the main section of your review and then in a paragraph before the conclusion describe how you felt about the quality of the performance.

You can also talk about any visual aspects of the concert, perhaps in your introduction to set up the atmosphere and the way it felt or in your conclusion to bring the musical discussion back to something more physical.

Always be specific to the concert that you saw, even if you have heard the music before.

In your conclusion, you can talk about whether the concert was worth listening to and what emotions it created in you as a careful listener. How did the audience respond? If you are familiar with the music, how was it different from other performances or other recordings you have heard? Summarize the overall effect of the concert.

In the main part of the essay, titles of long form pieces of music like operas and symphonies should generally be italicized (for example, Mozart's The Magic Flute).

Songs and short forms of music should be in quotation marks (for example, Bach's "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring"). If the title is generic, it should be capitalized only (for example, Schubert's Piano Sonata in B-flat Major).  Movement titles are capitalized (for example, Andante from Mozart's Symphony in G Minor).

If a piece of music has a specific title that has been given to it by the composer, that title should be italicized (for example, Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 (Eroica) or R. Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra).

When referring specifically to names of movements or songs of a larger piece, the individual movement title is placed in quotation marks (Schubert's "Der Lindenbaum" from Winterreisse).