Episode 5 of Man and His Music, “Instrumental Forms,” covers material for which creative pedagogy is hard to come by.  When you’re considering the structure of your basic piece of string quartet music, it is what it is what it is.  Still, Dad brings some lightheartedness and fun to what would be, in the hands of most professors, a rather dull exercise.  In this episode, for example, we get

• Dad playing the recorder on two different versions of “Take Me out to the Ballgame,” one in duple (2/4) meter and one in triple (3/4) meter to illustrate Renaissance dance structures
• brief piano excerpts of “Sweet Sue,” “Tenderly,” and “How You Gonna Keep ‘Em down on the Farm” to illustrate disparate individual elements of a collective suite
• a lighthearted admission that there are too many different uses in classical music for the word sonata (“The trouble is the word sonata is used a half a dozen times in different ways, and you simply have to learn to thread your way through the labyrinth; there’s just no other way.  Extrasensory Perception is what you need”)
• a bit of vocalese added to the primary themes of the first and fourth movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor: “Mozart’s in the closet (let him out, let him out, let him out)” and “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s Mozart!” respectively.

Along the way, of course, there is a lot of meat, and Dad, having entertained his students as best he possibly could given the material with which he was working, expected all those athletes, accountants, and engineers–who had been hoping for the easy A his classes were rumored to proffer–to muster up the self-discipline to sit respectfully through a legit musical offering when the time came (in this case, the entire fourth movement of a Haydn string quartet, nicely rendered by some conservatory students here).

Thanks for reading.  I hope you enjoy Man and His Music, episode 5, “Instrumental Forms.”