Wednesday's Quartet

I missed class on Wednesday. Can anyone tell me about the quartet? What was it like?

schumann's dichterliebe

What I like most about this song cycle, is the way the lieds ends.

#16 'Old Angry Songs' betrays deep sadness and resignation in its lingering end, after all the sarcasm and fury of the verses. The three attempts to reach a (major) cadence starting in the fourth minute are really very sad and sweet.

I also really like #13, "Nightly I see you in my dreaming", it tapers off rather suddenly and into spotty moments of silence and little minor triads. I thought there was a problem with the recording at first, haha, but in any case, if he was trying to convey that bitter post-dream feeling, but also the self-reassurance that the dream is over, I think he did it really effectively.

Maybe this song-cycle is the inverse of Monteverdi - rather than trite word-painting, Schumann's Dichterliebe expresses in music what is sufficiently alluded to in the text, but still left unsaid.

Midterm Review

I don't know if any of you are having trouble with the vocabulary, but I thought I should share the following links that have been very helpful to me:

https://www1.columbia.edu/sec/itc/music/sonic/index.html

http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/

Also, is anyone interested in forming a study group?

~ Maria Class ~

Early Opera

Early opera presents another attempt to convey emotions through music. Do you find that you "feel" Orfeo more than the other pieces we have studied? If so, how, and why might that be the case?

Reaction Paper

Use this post for questions/comments in relation to the Ockeghem / Gombert reaction paper.

The Madrigal

In the pieces for today - the madrigals of Monteverdi. We are seeing in action the newfound appreciation for both proper setting of the text and the idea of music setting out to elicit emotional response.
A question that I'd like to look at in class is the following:
Why should music have expression as one of its goals?

Late Renaissance

In these pieces I want you to listen for the way the text is set. As you can see from the documents of the Council of Trent, the Catholic church, owing to the newfound interest in humanism, grew particularly interested in the clear presentation of the text. Think about the way the music fits the text and vice versa, especially in regard to the Palestrina work - the piece which by legend, though not by history, is given credit for "saving" music.