During the era of the silent film, movies were never really silent. Hidden in plain sight behind the films that made figures like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton into cultural icons, were the musical giants whose compositions defined the very films that captivated a generation of movie-goers. "HOLLYWOOD'S MUSICAL MOODS" is an intimate conversation with some then-living legends from a bygone golden age of Hollywood, a freeze-frame of an era where music exemplified the magic of the movies as much as any leading lad or lady. At a time when new technologies were shaping a rapidly-changing film industry as a whole, musical inventions such as the mighty Wurlitzer organ and the ethereal Theremin made the job of these geniuses a true exploration in creating emotion. Directed with an unobtrusive eye, this hour-long feature lets these masters of mood and music, as well as some of their iconic works, speak for themselves. Sincere interviews are intercut with nostalgic clips and classic scenes to showcase the sheer power with which these scores could command the films for which they were written.

HAM captures Sam Harris's critically acclaimed, multiple-award winning live stage show in which Harris plays himself at various ages as well as ten other characters. After being discovered on Star Search, fame ensued for Harris: Broadway, TV, platinum records, Carnegie Hall. But through the highs and lows of a life in show business, Sam must confront the merciless question: what is enough?

In Professor Anthony Seeger's America's Musical Heritage, learn how to listen to the music of America with new ears. Produced in collaboration with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, proprietor of the vast treasury of American vernacular music, these 12 episodes explore more than 200 years of music from trailblazers like Scott Joplin, the Memphis Jug Band, Woody Guthrie, and many others.

In America's musical cities, musical stories come together to create a soundtrack that showcases the nation's diversity and its collision of cultures, culminating in a unique blend of sound, music and innovation unlike anywhere else in the world.

Harmony, where two or more notes sound together, lies at the heart of tonal music. In this lesson, study the structure of chords, combinations of three or more notes heard at the same time, focusing on triads, a group of fundamental three-note chords. Learn about major and minor triads, and the lesser-used diminished and augmented triads, and observe harmony in action in a Bach chorale.

Seventh chords are another essential component of Western tonal music. Observe how seventh chords (four-note chords) are built on triads (three-note chords), by adding another interval of a third. Learn how seventh chords "resolve" or propel the music forward. Study the five types of seventh chords, how they are used in different musical genres, and hear seventh chords in context.

This episode discusses the phrase structure of tonal music. Discover how music unfolds in phrases, segments of musical material that end with a sense of rest or pause, often using a harmonic event called a cadence, which concludes the phrase. Hear how musical phrases operate, and how they are organized into larger units called periods and sentences, which create a musical narrative.

Sampling the music of Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht and others, Nadler delves into the creative lives of prominent gay and Jewish outsiders, and their escape from antisemitism in Nazi Germany to Hollywood and Broadway. In the process Nadler discovers his own family.

Building on your study of harmony, observe how harmonic motion works, where one chord or tonality leads to another, forming a progression that we hear as a coherent harmonic sequence or event. Study the example of the tonic harmony, the "home" tonality of a piece, as it leads to the predominant harmony, the dominant harmony, and resolves back to the tonic, completing the progression.

In listening to music, we sometimes hear the meter differently than the way it's written on the page. Learn how the concept of hypermeter helps explain this, by showing that when measures of music are grouped into phrases, we often hear a pulse for each measure in the phrase, rather than the pulses within the measure. Explore examples of hypermeter, and how we perceive music as listeners.