Final Exam

Please ask any questions you have about things we studied in the second half of the semester.

Slightly off-topic

During the semester we have at times talked about the money woes of many composers. The link below shows us the earnings of a successful composer, the Finnish Jean Sibelius. Sibelius's estate still pays out to Finnish composers. On the chart - earnings are in green, debts in red.
http://www.sibelius.fi/english/erikoisaiheet/raha/raha_01.htm

Exploring the site also demonstrates Sibelius's taste in cigars and spirits.

rhapsody in blue

I'd never listened to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in its entirety before tonight, and I just felt compelled to say how cool it was. I especially liked the virtuosic piano solo that starts at about 15:14, which is a serious contender against that crazy bit in Bach's Brandenburg no. 5 mvt. 1. (:

Plus, if anyone's ever watched Jeux d'Enfants, there's a little double three-note ascending figure in Rhapsody that really reminded me of the main theme of the movie. try 11:30 or 12:26 to hear what i'm talking about...

Oliver Sacks Talk

At the Music Hum lecture today, Oliver Sacks mentioned that Brahms' music was religious in nature but that Brahms himself was an atheist. Upon a few Google searches, I've learned that Brahms' religious beliefs are more ambiguous and unclear. Assuming that he was an atheist, or that he was nonobservant, this relates to a question that we discussed earlier this semester: if music does not arouse the feelings in the listener that were originally intended, has the composer failed? alternatively, is it possible for music to arouse feelings that the composer him/herself did not feel when creating/conducting the music? What do you all think?

Check out this essay on Google Books written by our friend Schoenberg for more on Brahms and his interactions with other composers of his time.

Rite of Spring

YouTube provides us with video of a reconstruction of the Rite of Spring ballet. It was broadcast on PBS many years ago and has never been released commercially.
Enjoy it:
Part 1

Part 2


Part 3

Wagner’s Problematization of Traditional Harmony

Wagner disregards the harmony of the Baroque and Classical periods epitomized by Bach and Haydn, each of whom helped to establish the reigning traditional form of harmony. Thus, his unique style of composing create a confusion of sorts within the classical genre.

His concept of the all-encompassing Gesamtkunstwerk and the notion of endless melody rather than periodic cadences complicate the idea of music as performance and minimizes the achievements of his predecessors. Tristan und Isolde successfully represents the human striving to surpass the material world (day), and to reach the enlightened and eternal world of the spirit (night).

Wagner's use of various leitmotifs, particularly the friction created by the “Tristan Chord,” demonstrates the flexibility of musical modes of expression.

Wagner's Ring

I want to alert you all to a radio program from WNYC and the inimitable Radiolab about Wagner's Ring - it's not the best, but it does give you an overview about the operas, leitmotives and Wagner's conception of theater.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/01/01

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.

The Early Renaissance Mass

Both the Ockeghem and the Dufay pieces make use of "L'Homme Arme" a popular fifteenth century tune as their cantus firmus. L'Homme Arme is not a chant. It may be a secular tune. Is this problematic?

Clearing up Confusion about Proportions

I know that some people may be having problems getting their heads around all this proportion talk and so I hope this may clear it up somewhat.
In this talk about proportions we are really talking about three similar ideas - as they say, "same, same, but different."

On the first level when we speak of these ratios we are simply referring to length of strings and the pitch that those strings would sound if they were plucked.
So if I have a string that is 6 inches long and I pluck it, it will sound a specific pitch. If I have a string 3 inches long and pluck it, it will sound the same pitch as the other string, but an octave higher - (the difference between mens and women's voices generally). Thus we could say that the ratio of the two strings - their string lengths was 2:1 and that same ratio (2:1) could represent the sound of the two strings plucked simultaneously - the interval of an octave. If one wanted they could do an experiment with rubber bands or strings. Since for the medieval musician, music was thought of as the art of measurement it would be logical for them to conceive of pitch relationships like this. When we discussed the acceptable simultaneities of pitches, we were defining those simultaneities - octaves, fifths and fourths in terms of their ratios and suggesting that these simultaneities were deemed acceptable because they could be expressed in simple superparticular - (x+1:x) - ratios.

This is one sense of the ratios.

Another sense is the physical sense - if I pluck that same 6 inch string the whole thing will vibrate. However, at the same time that whole string will vibrate each half of it vibrates, each third of it vibrates, each fourth of it vibrates and so on ad infinitum. Thus, we could concieve of the relationships of the parts of the string vibrating in ratios. Each half to the whole (1:2); each third to the whole (1:3) etc.

Finally, in the sense of the isorhythmic motet we have proportions of lengths of musical sections - self-contained, internally coherent hunks of music. Here we're talking about durations: we could be referring to beats, seconds or whatever. So the first section of music might be 60 seconds long and the next 30. Thus we could say that the sections of music were in a proportion of 2:1. There is a rhythmic component of this, known as mensuration, that complicates the matter.

You're welcome to post follow-up questions to this thread, and we can discuss it more in class on Monday.

The Motet

The two pieces for Monday are examples of the isorhythmic motet, a specialized type of music that was saved for special occassions. In the isorhythmic motet, there is often a proportional relationship in the length/speed/duration of the individual sections of the work to each other. That is, Section A may be twice as long as Section B (2:1) or one and a half times as long as Section B (3:2) etc. The article by Charles Warren tries to read something into the proportions of the DuFay motet. This was a very controversial argument when it was put forth and was rebutted in two other articles: one by Craig Wright, an expert on Early Music at Yale, and more recently by Marvin Trachtenberg, an architecture professor at NYU, among others. So:
1) What about Warren's article?
2) Consider the motet in light of Notker's insertion of words into a chant.

Medieval Polyphony: Organum

In organum and this early polyphony composers added additional melodies to existing lines of chant - chant sung unbelievably slowly at times. I'd like to ask you to think about two aspects of this process.
1) How should we understand this act of adding an additional line of music to a sacred chant? Just why were these people writing, or improvising, these additional lines?
2) Where is the role of emotion in this music?
Next time, we'll continue discussing the the role of music in the medieval church, some technical aspects of coordination, as well as these and other questions.

Chant

We're looking at Gregorian Chant for Monday's class.
Please use this blog to post any questions or comments you may have about assignments.

I'll begin with what may seem like a stupid question:

Is this music?
What makes something music or not music?