prof: all right. let's proceed with ourdiscussion of musical style. and this is going to be mostlya comparison of musical style in different style periods. and we've put the titles ofthose style periods up on the board there. once again, this is a typicallywestern exercise that we are dealing with here. we love to organize material sothat we can simplify it and we
can deal with it--whether it's attributing to an individual,things that a large number of people do,whether it's grouping random units of pulses into meter,or whether it's taking a highly complex group of phenomena andputting them particular style periods,we like to do that because it allows us to deal with thematerial in some kind of organized fashion. so we've got our variousperiods up here.
as mentioned though,we won't going into the post-modernist in anysignificant way here. now what you'll be asked to dois identify the period in which a particular piece is written,and if it turns out that on our final test,we happen to play for you a piece that's on the list ofpieces that we give you, then you're responsible foridentifying the name of the composer and the name of thepiece. if the piece we play is not onyour list, then all you would be
asked to do is identify thestyle period. however, you're asked to dosomething even more important than that and that's to tell uswhy it's in this particular style period. it does no good--i don'tthink--just to say "romantic"and then going to walk away from it. what i would ask you to do isgive us three or four specific points that you hear in themusic that corroborate your
decision with regard to thestyle period. now, you may wish to take alook at your textbook there, around page sixty-seven,sixty-eight, sixty-nine, where there's anintroduction to musical style and a checklist,as i call it--checklist of musical style by period. and that'll kind of get youthinking in these sorts of ways. the baroque music,for example, tends to have rather long,asymmetrical themes but very
driving sorts of rhythm. so you could learn thatchecklist for each of these periods,but the important thing is that when we play the music you havegot to hear in that music that particular phenomenon orcharacteristic that you list on your group of three or fourfactors that lead you to your conclusion. for example,you may recognize the piece of be--as being of the romanticperiod and say that it has lots
of low brass in it. it may not have any low brassin the music we're playing at all, so that wouldn't be doingvery much for us there. so we want to hear the musicand we want to take things out of the music that we're actuallyhearing. so maybe we'll start with apiece here. now what we've got is a seriesof six, seven--depends on how many youwant this morning-- particular pieces chosen toexemplify these various style
periods. now, what are you going to belistening for here? i was thinking about that thismorning. what's the most important thingwhen trying to identify style? what will allow you to get tothe answer quickest? what do you think it is? what are you going to belistening for? let's go back to the radio inthe car business--or you
suddenly turn on some sort ofstreaming fm, middle of the piece. what is it that's going to giveyou the most information? roger. student: instrumentation. prof: instruments,right, absolutely. okay. it's the instruments,because if you hear lots of percussion and xylophones andthings such as that banging away
in a dissonant fashion,those instruments just weren't there in time of mozart,for example, so you know it's got to beprobably late nineteenth-century and on. so instrumentation is thesingle most important factor, but some instruments are commonto many different periods. the piano operated roughly fromwhen to when? if you hear a piano,what does that tell you about the time period of the musicthat you're--classical music
that you're listening to? it's got to be roughly afterwhat? after--or after who? when did the piano reallybecome the principal keyboard instrument in western culture? roughly 1770 or so, 1760,1770. as i've said,mozart was the first to really use the piano exclusively,so if you hear a piano, it can't be renaissance ormedieval;
it can't be baroque. it could be classical,romantic, impressionist, or modern, and then on thebasis of other things you would come to a conclusion about thestyle period. what might something else be? roger, with the help ofcaroline there, was able to tell us thatinstrumentation was very important here. after instrumentation,what is it that we might be
listening for? marcus. student:> prof: okay. yeah, the volume,the size of it. that in some way--yeah. so, specifically speaking,it's not just the instruments. it could be volume as well andthe later--what's the pinnacle in terms of volume?
what would you say? is it all just a straight-lineascent to present day in terms of volume? when's the biggest orchestraaround? we talked about that. student: it was romantic. prof: okay. romantic. can you refine it any furtherthan that? student: late romantic.
prof: late romantic,mahler, strauss, that kind of thing. mahler wrote a "symphonyof a thousand," he called it. he had almost a thousandperformers in it. so it's late nineteenth,early twentieth century, and then it sort of,in an odd way, declines thereafter. so volume is important.
just to move things along here,i think the harmony is important too,and you can pick out, sometimes, chords,not necessarily the specific chords,but does it kind of sound plain vanilla harmony or does it sounda little bit surprising, or--not shocking,but bracing, unexpected? well, the more unexpected itbecomes probably the later you are, the more into the romanticperiod you are.
and most importantly i think,maybe even more important than that, is the element ofconsonance versus dissonance. when do we begin to get a heavycomponent of dissonance in high art music in the west? classical period? romantic period? impressionist period? a little bit. yeah, i see kristin.
well, maybe. okay? yeah. so a little bit in theimpressionist period and then heavy in the modernist period,and then it actually backs down in the post-modern period,but we're not going there. prof: good point. it can be present in medievalmusic, so in an odd way, yeah. the notion of consonantharmonies really didn't get formed until the fifteenthcentury so if you're listening
to things before the fifteenthcentury, sometimes you can find ratherbracing and biting dissonance in medieval music,and then it sort of smoothed itself out for five hundredyears. so i think we have our firstselection queued now so let's just listen to this,and these are going to be rather long as they will be inthe test. > so we've heard that much.
right off the bat,some things should be ruled out. so what do we want to rule outhere? douglas in the back. pick--and i'm going to coldcall people today. yes, doug. what would we rule out there? student: classical. prof: okay. classical.
mozart, haydn, even beethoven. we would rule out classical,and in ruling out classical, that sort of wipes out what? basically everything elsebefore. so it can't be anythingafter--excuse me--before--well, it can't be anything reallybefore 1800, so we'll start with romantic. so, still in the game here:romantic, impressionist and modernist.
any thoughts about that:romantic, impressionist, modern? caroline. i don't--just tell me--don'ttell me the--what you think the answer is. just tell me what you heardthere. prof: louder, please. so may--possibly somestrange-sounding scales and some bells you said?
what were--did you hear--whatelse did you--a big orchestra, a little orchestra? prof: i beg your pardon. huge orchestra? huge orchestra and huge sound. okay? so where does that put us inthe spectrum here, 1800-2000? well, we talked about that.
probably around 1900 or so,with an orchestra that big, and you heard voices in it,which is interesting to comment on also. so then you might ask yourself,"well, is this beethoven?" well, it's too big forbeethoven. it's too--there's too much ofit. it's too rich for beethoven. is it wagner?
it's probably even too rich forwagner; it's just bigger. so we're pushing on here after1850. let's listen to a bit moreand--because the excerpts that we will have on next wednesdaywill be longer. let's listen to a bit more andsee if we can gather some information here. what are we hearing there? a very important piece ofinformation there.
what was that? what instrument was playing? oboe was playing. daniel. they had the melody,and what about that melody? how did it go? what's that? yes, kristin's got it outthere. nice and loud, please. student: ostinato.
prof: it's an ostinato. so what does that tell us ifwe're trying-- which one of the three of thesestyle periods does that knock out of the box:romantic, impressionist or modern? we talked about that in alecture on impressionism, but by the same token,your listening exercise forty-two on stravinskyforegrounded precisely this phenomenon of ostinato.
so there we have romantic beingtaken out of the mix here and this idea of stasis is not partof the aesthetic of romanticism. romantic flows,it grows, it expands, it contracts,but it doesn't constantly reiterate one phenomenon. so we--we're down toimpressionist or modern here. let's go on and listen to justa little bit more. so what did we hear there? anything more that we could addto our list of identifiers?
oscar. prof: good. parallel motion,>. those woodwinds were all goingup and down in the same direction, parallel motion. excellent. there's one other thing here. at the very end we heard whatplayed by a harp? prof: a glissando,that kind of wash.
so based on that,obviously we are dealing with a piece of impressionist music. this is ravel's daphnis andchloe, ballet music for one of those diaghilev ballets thatwe were talking about in section last time. so what would we say here? well, we would say large,colorful orchestra. actually, there was also theuse of the human voice here which we heard in debussy aswell.
we would say also that it'sessentially a consonant and not a dissonant--essentially aconsonant environment. we would say that we haveparallel motion, as oscar pointed out. we would say that we have,possibly-- if you wanted to throw thisin--scales that are not traditional--although that's a little bit hard to hear--but certainly we had the glissando.
so if you're looking for foursound bites here or four bullet points to put on your paper:large, colorful orchestra,consonant backdrop, parallelism,and--what did we say? the glissando at the very end. and you're finished,you're out, you get a hundred percent. so that's piece number one andthat's sort of the thought process that i hope you woulduse while working through this
particular exercise. let's go on to piece number twowhich i think--<
comes from. i'm going to move--skip arounda little bit. let me go to emily,please, behind. student: medieval andrenaissance. prof: medieval andrenaissance. we had chant there and on thesame cd we have an example of--this is actually sort ofright between the two. it's written by thomas tallisin england, but england was sort of slow to catch up to therenaissance, so it's late
medieval, early renaissance. what specifically did we hearhere that leads you to that conclusion? jennifer? jessica. sorry. what? student: angela. prof: angela. sorry. student: we heardmultiple
we heard multiple unaccompaniedvoices. what kind of texture was beingemployed there? student: mostlypolyphonic. prof: mostly polyphonic,and we said within the textures we had imitative andnon-imitative polyphonic textures. was this imitative ornon-imitative? prof: everybody agreewith that? anyone disagree with it?
some people are shaking theirhead. it was non-imitative--orno--excuse me--it was imitative. if i had time to play it again,you could hear one voice would come in, > and then somebody else wouldcome in, > and then the third voice andthe fourth voice, but you're right to saymultiple voices unaccompanied. so you sort of get two pointsfor that, and what do we call that unaccompanied style?
prof: yeah. so--but we don't get a separatepoint for a cappella. unaccompanied a cappellastyle would be one marker there. the idea of imitative voiceswould be another. you might even pick up on thetext, i suppose--that it's in what language? latin, yeah. what else there? that it's not particularlyrhythmic.
no strong rhythms or meters. it flows gently like gregorianchant, and, as mentioned,we have this texture that's not only polyphonic but highlyimitative, and those are all hallmarks oflate medieval, renaissance music. that particular piece waswritten by an english composer, thomas tallis,but more interesting, in a way, it's a setting of theold "lamentations of
jeremiah"out of the old testament that laments the fall of jerusalem. so it's a particularly dark,heartfelt text and exquisitely set there in that renaissancevocal style. let's go on to another one now. sometimes you can figure thisout in about three seconds. it doesn't take much more thanthat. so with just that,and we'll be playing a lot more than three seconds--many minutesand, depending upon the
particular piece,probably more than once. so what did you hear there? and we may go back and hearjust that much. what did you hear there? let's talk about what you heardand then we'll conclude about the period in question. so someone get us started. nicole. student: a lot ofpercussion.
prof: a lot ofpercussion. very--definitely,particularly the tympani. marcos. prof: a lot ofdissonance. that was very prominent. it started out okay. it could have been a kind ofjohn williams "star wars" type sound up untilthe-- about the third iteration ofone particular figure,
but the level at--the pitchesat which it was brought in produced a very dissonant momentthere. so initially you say, "oh,maybe john williams and romanticism knockoff kind ofthing," but when that dissonant enters,then that takes you in to a slightly different realm. daniel. student: there's a lotof blaring brass, and it's kind of in apercussive way.
a lot of brass,and even if they were not percussion instruments,those instruments were being used in a kind of percussive,in-your-face way. yeah. so those are three good things. roger, you got another one? student: there were lotsof ostinatos. student: lots of--prof: yes, there were lots of ostinatosright at the beginning.
i almost forgot about that,and may have only been just two notes going back and forth. so already we've got our four,and maybe that's all we need. let's listen to just the--it'snot a long excerpt. let's listen to the beginningof this again. could be romanticism> with that entry right there,very dissonant <
dissonance, more dissonance,> brasses as percussioninstruments, < component in our thinking. so all of this leads us to theconclusion that this is a piece of twentieth-century music bythe woman composer ellen zwilich,and you have ellen zwilich of course as the basis of yourlistening exercise forty-five that you've done. this is simply another piececalled "celebration." it's a pretty--so far a prettyintense celebration by ellen zwilich written in 1984,so it's a fairly recent piece of music in the moderniststyle-- not post-modernist,but modernist. well, i'm going to--i thinkvariety is always useful in life. i'm going to--and i asked lyndayesterday, "lynda,you prepare a piece and-- but don't tell me what it is'cause i want to go through the same thought processes thatother people have." so lynda has prepared a piece,and i don't know whether she's going to use the piano orwhether she's going to use the audio player. lynda: what are youhearing? who has any thoughts on this? student: regular meter. lynda: regular meter. all right, that's a very good,important point for this particular meter. what else? what kinds of instruments? student: a lot ofstrings in the foreground. lynda: uh huh,strings in the foreground, so this means we have,probably, an orchestra of--what--well,okay. before we get there--okay. strings in the foreground inthis particular ensemble. can anybody tell us what thesolo instrument was? student: bassoon. lynda: right, bassoon! prof:> what a coincidence. lynda: so we've gotregular meter, strings in the foreground,a solo instrument. what might you say about therelationship between the solo instrument and the biggerensembles? i think it may be prettyobvious but-- student: i guess> lynda: that's true. there seems to be at about asimilar level. it doesn't seem like theensemble is very big and you have them playing one after theother, which is a characteristic ofsomething that we learned about. rhythmically,this goes with meter, is it regular,irregular? pretty regular. you could tap your foot to it. you could hear a melody. i'll just play a couple moreseconds. so the solo instrument isplaying something kind of simple or something kind of virtuosic,impressive? it's pretty impressive. you should hear lots of littletrills and weeping all over the place? it's showing off and this is afeature of something we learned about. so who would like to guess whatperiod we're in-- student: romantic> lynda: close,yeah. yeah, i guess i can see why youmight--why might you say romantic? lynda: which makes merealize that it can't always fall inside of the orchestra. sometimes it's better to listenfor some of the more abstract features, such as what theorchestra is doing. the harmonies,how about the harmonic language? is it pretty surprising or alittle more expected? maybe it's just--maybe it'ssomething that's going to help you zero in a little bit more. yeah, pretty expected,not very surprising harmonies does anybody else have another--student: lynda: little bows tiedup at the end of a phrase. what does that suggest to you? student: a cadence. lynda: a cadence. very good,> which is very strong in whatperiod? lynda: classical. yeah. these things do happen in otherperiods, but this is sort of a quintessential classical,very particular genre. does anybody know what genrewe're in? student: concerto. lynda: concerto. exactly, so this would bemozart's "bassoon concerto." who knew that mozart wrote abassoon concerto? it's one of the bassoonist'sbiggest pieces in the repertoire. he felt the bassoon was sort ofamusing instrument; that's why he wrote a lot ofleaps in it. he felt it sounded like a clown. anyway, so that's a concertoexample for you which is not piano or violin. student: what is themain difference between romantic and classical? lynda: that is a greatquestion. i wonder if i ought to defer toprofessor wright. prof: well,let's work through this together. one we have been all over thismorning, and that is the size of theorchestra, and we talked when we had thelecture on nineteenth-century orchestral music,how all of these instruments come in. so in romantic music theorchestra has many more and many varied instruments in it rangingfrom top piccolo down to middle english horn down to bottomcontrabass, bassoon, tuba and things likethat. so it's the orchestra,particularly low brasses and that kind of sound,that typifies the sound generally for orchestral musicin the nineteenth century. then, whereas daniel wastalking about bow tie, they're tied together,you don't--what he was intimating there perhaps wasthat we have this kind of paired phrasing or neat little units ofphrasing that can be tied that's a component of classicalmusic. as you go into the romanticperiod, the themes, the melodies,become much more expansive, and someone i think saidearlier on here it has-- maybe the first point wasthere's pretty regular meter in this particular piece ofclassical music by mozart, the "mozart bassoonconcerto," k. 191. is that right? and so the regularity of thethemes and the balance and symmetry is part and parcel ofthe classical period. you move into the romantic. you have expansive themes,but by way of contradistinction there,then the rhythm becomes not necessarily more flaccid,but more loose, and we talked about thisphenomenon of rubato, for example. so flexible rhythms,flexible tempos, less clear meters in theromantic period. and, not to overdo it,but maybe this idea of just "beautiful melody,"and it is of course in the nineteenth century that we getthe whole idea of the bel canto sound. anybody readrothstein's--no--anthony tommasini's article that ipointed you to about bel canto? he said, "actually,the beginning of that starts back with the composers of pianomusic of that same period and then the opera composers beginto go into it." so who wrote this? a lovely melody,huh? isn't that beautiful? well, the whole idea ofbeautiful melody--yeah, mozart wrote a lot of beautifulmelodies too. so did bach. but somehow,"beautiful melody," this warm, rich melody,is very important in romantic music. so this is a good example of> kind of rich harmonies,a broader palette and--than the classical period. i could play one other piecehere just to differentiate romantic piano music from thissound. so that's a piece by mozart. you could say that the melodyis just as beautiful. that's a gorgeous melody too. that's lovely. you could use that as filmmusic just as well as you could the other piece. so the first piece that iplayed < classic--quintessential momentof chopin that's become a classic. indeed it became a kind of--judy garland used to sing this, "i'm forever chasingrainbows." it got turned into a pop songin the twentieth century because it's such a drop-dead beautifulmelody, but the difference here isthe--in the pianos the terms of expansion. here is the chopin sound>. here is the--and the chords,sometime they go < well, i know what that is. that has to be what? emily. student: alberti. prof: that's an albertibass and alberti bass is used only in what period of musichistory? classical. okay? so you hear that and it's gotto be in a forty-year period, roughly 1770 to 1810 or so,and then they stopped using it. how do you know that this isspecifically mozart? this is above and beyond thepale. the--if put down beethoven forthis, it'd be great. if you put down haydn for thisit would be great; schubert for this would begreat; mozart for this it would begreat. how we do know it's mozart? there's one little moment here> that when he takes that lineand nobody else would have >. he loves to do that. what did he do there? he inserted what? what kind of scale is that? emily says chromatic. so he inserted just a littlebit of chromaticism there and that's a fingerprint of mozartso that-- we're parsing this out a littlebit more fine than we need do, but that's the--kind of thenext step on this. where are we? let's do one more piece. anybody want to ask a questionwhile we're queuing this up? student: just the ideaof the use of ostinato music in modern music. prof: beethoven wouldn'treally use so much of an ostinato as he would just sitthere-- i see your point though--on onechord and kind of hammer you over the head with that,but i--that's an--it's a good point. it's more sophisticated in away that we need get into in here, but i wouldn't saybeethoven uses ostinato so much as iteration. and admittedly it's a fine linebetween ostinato and iteration but kind of sitting on somethingand just kind of repeating that--maybe that chord--over and over and over again in a way thatmozart or schubert, being fundamentallyconstructors of melody, wouldn't necessarily do. yeah, that's true. you could look upon the--that> as an ostinato,but people don't normally do that, but that's just fine anddandy. it may be something particularto beethoven rather than the era generally, but yes,you're right about that, so good for you. oscar: one, craig:nothing at this point. any other question? all right. let's go on. we'll hear one last piece andthen i'll let you go although it's a fairly long one. any other questions aswe--angela, go ahead. prof: well,you could use him as a swing player. in other words,if you hear a piece that you think is beethoven and you putthat down as classical that's fine. if you put that down asromantic, that's fine too. now there should be one thingthere that's a dead giveaway in terms of period,and what would that be? zach. student: the harpsichord. prof: the harpsichord,okay, because we've said before that really the harpsichorddoesn't get much in the way of legs in the history of musicuntil the baroque period and then it disappears as it'sreplaced by the piano, for the most part,in the classical period. so the baroque period isall--it can be readily identified here simply by thepresence of the harpsichord. but what else did we hear inthese admittedly very short excerpts? well, let's go back to thebeginning, then, and listen to the rhythm. could you dance or march tothis? it sounds like almost a pompousentry of some kind. you can see the king coming into court or something so, highly regular rhythm here,and this rhythm and this particular sound goes on andgoes unchanged for about a minute and thirty-five secondsor so, and that's another aspect ofthis--not only regular rhythm but a regular ethos in the musicof the baroque period. now let's listen to this lastcomponent here and then we'll stop with this. so what are we hearing here andwhy is this further evidence of music coming from the baroqueperiod? mary pat. student: it's a fugue. prof: it's a fugue,okay, and we studied the fugue and we said the fugue came intobeing in the baroque period, principally under the aegis ofj.s. bach. so there we've got our fourbullet points or four pieces of supporting evidence for theconclusion that we came to rather early on,as zach pointed out, by the presence of theharpsichord there. any final questions before westop? if not, i have a request. you may have heard thatunfortunately our good friend, richard lalli,has had a serious medical issue that he is dealing with. and he was--he is always such awonderful guy and this was going to be the highlight of hiscareer. he was going to take over themastership of jonathan edwards college and unfortunately thishappened. so i'd be very grateful toyou--and we've got a couple of get well cards out there andrichard is always very much interested in our yale students,and it would be great if on the way out,you would be good enough to sign your name there on thosecards and we'll be sure that they get over to richard. thanks very much and i'll seeyou next wednesday, six days from now.
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