 All right, let's proceed with our discussion of musical style. And this is going to be mostly a comparison of musical style in different style periods, and we put the titles of those style periods up on the board there. Once again, this is a typically Western exercise that we are dealing with here. We love to organize material so that we can simplify it and we can deal with it, whether it's attributing to a single individual, what 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 phenomenon and putting them in particular style periods. We like to do that because it allows us to deal with the material in some kind of organized fashion. So we've got our various periods up here, as mentioned though we won't be going into the postmodernist in any significant way here. Now what you'll be asked to do is 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 of pieces that we give you, then you're responsible for identifying the name of the composer and the name of the piece. If the piece we play is not on your list then all you would be asked to do is identify the style period. However, you're asked to do something even more important than that and that's to tell us why it's in this particular style period. It does no good, I don't think just to say romantic and then we're going to walk away from it. What I would ask you to do is give us three or four specific points that you hear in the music that corroborates your decision with regard to the style period. Now you may wish to take a look at your textbook there around page 67, 68, 69 where there's an introduction to musical style and a checklist, as I call it, checklist of musical style by period. And that'll kind of get you thinking 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 that checklist for each of these periods. But the important thing is that when we play the music you have got to hear in that music that particular phenomenon or characteristic that you list on your group of three or four factors that lead you to your conclusion. For example, you may recognize the piece as being of the romantic period and say that it has lots of low brass in it. It may not have any low brass in the music we're playing at all. So that wouldn't be doing very much for us there. So we want to hear the music and we want to take things out of the music that we're actually hearing. So maybe we'll start with a piece here. Now what we've got is a series of six, seven, depends on how many you want this morning. A particular piece is chosen to exemplify these various style periods. So I think let's go right to my track. Let's see. Let's go to CD2 there. And I want track ten, if I may please Linda. And then Linda later on is going to talk about some of this too. She's got a surprise piece for us. So let's start with track ten. And let's go to at four minutes and thirty seconds there of track ten. Now what are you going to be listening for here? I was thinking about that this morning. What's the most important thing when trying to identify style? What will allow you to get to the answer quickest? What do you think it is? What are you going to be listening for? Let's go back to the radio in the car business, or you suddenly turn on some sort of streaming FM, middle of a piece. What is it that's going to give you the most information? Roger? Instruments. Right, absolutely. Okay, it's the instruments because if you hear lots of percussion and xylophones and things such as that banging away in a distant fashion, those instruments just weren't there in the time of Mozart, for example. So you know it's got to be probably late nineteenth century and on. So instruments is the single most important factor. But some instruments are common to many different periods. The piano operated roughly from when to when. If you hear a piano, what does that tell you about the time period of the music, that you're classical music that you're listening to? It's got to be roughly after what? After or after who? When did the piano really become the principal keyboard instrument in Western culture? Roughly 1770 or so. It was 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 or medieval. It can't be Baroque. It could be classical, romantic, impressionist, modern. And then on the basis of other things you would come to a conclusion about the style period. What might something else be? Roger with the help of Caroline there was able to tell us that instrumentation was very important here. After instrumentation what is it that we might be listening to for? Marcus? Okay. Yeah, the volume, the size of it. That in some way, so specifically speaking it's not just the instrumentation, it could be volume as well. And the later, what's the pinnacle in terms of volume? What would you say? Is it all just a straight line, a scent to present day in terms of volume? When's the biggest orchestra around? We talked about that. Marcus? Okay. Romantic. Can you refine it any further than that? Late romantic, Mahler, Strauss, that kind of thing. Mahler wrote a symphony of a thousand he called it. He had a thousand performers in it. So it's late 19th, early 20th century. And then it sort of in an odd way kind of 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 sound a little bit surprising or not shocking, but bracing unexpected? Well, the more unexpected it becomes, probably the later you are, the more into the romantic period you are. And most importantly, I think maybe even more important than that, is the element of consonance versus dissonance. When do we begin to get a heavy component of dissonance in high art music in the West? Classical period? Romantic period? Impressionist period? A little bit. Yeah, I see Kristen. Maybe. Okay. Yeah. So a little bit in the Impressionist period and then a little bit in the Modernist period. And then it kind of actually backs down in the Postmodern period, but we're not going yet. Roger? Good point. Good point. It can be present in medieval music. So in an odd way, the notion of consonant harmonies really didn't get formed until the fifteenth century. So if you're listening to things before the fifteenth century, sometimes you can find rather bracing and biting dissonance in medieval music. And then it sort of smoothed itself out for 500 years. Okay. So I think we have our first selection queued now. So let's just listen to this. And these are going to be rather long as they will be in the test. So we've heard that much. Right off the bat, some things should be ruled out. So what do we want to rule out here? Douglas in the back. We're cold-call people today. Yes, Doug? What would we rule out there? Okay. Classical. Mozart, Haydn, even Beethoven. We would rule out classical. And we're ruling out classical. That sort of wipes out what? Basically everything else before. So it can't be anything after, excuse me, before, well, it can't be anything really before 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, just tell me what you think the answer is. Just tell me what you heard there. Louder, please. Okay. So maybe possibly some strange sounding scales and some bells you said. What did you hear? What else did you hear? A big orchestra, a little orchestra? A big, pardon? Huge orchestra? Huge orchestra and huge sound, okay? So where does that put us in the spectrum here, 1800 to 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? No, it's too big for Beethoven. It's too much of it. It's too rich for Beethoven. Is it Wagner? It's probably even too rich for Wagner. It's just bigger. So we're pushing on here after 1850. Let's listen to a bit more, and because the excerpts that we will have on next Wednesday will be longer, let's listen to a bit more and see if we can gather some more information here. Let's stop right there. What are we hearing there? A very important piece of information there. What was that? What instrument was playing? Oboe was playing Daniel. Okay, they had the melody. And what about that melody? And then they had to go... What's that? Yes. Kristen's got it out there nice and loud, please. It's an ostinato. So what does that tell us if we're trying? Which one of the three of these style periods does that knock out of the box? Romantic, impressionist, or modern? We talked about that in a lecture on impressionism, but by the same token you were listening Exercise 42 on Stravinsky foregrounded precisely this phenomenon of ostinato. So there we have romantic being taken out of the mix here. This idea of stasis is not part of the aesthetic of romanticism. It flows, it grows, it expands, it contracts, but it doesn't constantly reiterate one phenomenon. So we're down to impressionist or modern here. Let's go on and listen to just a little bit more. We're going to stop it there. So what did we hear there? Anything more that we could add to our list of identifiers? Oscar? Good. Parallel motion. Yeah, dee-dee-dee-dee. Those woodwinds were all going up and down in the same direction. Parallel motion. Excellent. There's one other thing here. At the very end we heard what played by a harp? Caroline? A glissando. That kind of walk. So based on that obviously we are dealing with a piece of impressionist music. This is Ravel's Daphnis and Chloé, ballet music for one of those diagola ballets that we were talking about in section last time. So what would we say here? Well, we would say large colorful orchestra. Actually there was also the use of the human voice here, which we heard in Debussy as well. We would say also that it's essentially a consonant and not a dissonant, essentially a consonant environment. We would say that we have parallel motion, as Oscar pointed out. We would say that we have, possibly if you wanted to throw this in, 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 four sound 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. Okay. So that's piece number one, and that's sort of the thought process that I hope you would use while working through this particular exercise. Let's go on to piece number two, which I think, yeah, let's do my track, just track one. Let's see what we got there. No, let's go to, on that particular, well let's play track one and see what happens. Okay. Play track, I believe it's track five. I wrote it, I wrote it, I don't have the right sheet. Fui. Excuse me, yeah, it's on my list here. Yeah, track five, track five. What about this one? Oh, did we switch on to the next CD? Okay, we're going to go to the next CD now for another piece. Sorry, my fault. Let's go to track one. No, let's play track five. What was that? Play what you just played, track five. Okay, let's stop there. What's a good example of what? Chant. Just Gregorian chant. La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la. Chant and keep it there. Let's go on to track one. That's the setting of, well, you tell me what period it comes from. Let's skip around a little bit. Let me go to Emily, please, behind medieval and Renaissance. We had chant there and on the same CD we have an example of this. This is actually sort of right between the two. It's written by Thomas Tallis in England, but England was sort of slow to catch up to the Renaissance, so it's late medieval early Renaissance. What specifically did we hear here that leads you to that conclusion? Jennifer? Jesse? No. Sorry. What? Angela. Sorry. Okay. We heard multiple unaccompanied voices. What kind of texture was being employed there? Mostly polyphonic. And we said when we were dealing with textures we had imitative and non-imitative polyphonic textures. Was this imitative or non-imitative? Everybody agree with that? Anyone disagree with it? Some people are shaking their head. It was non-imitative. No, excuse me. It was imitative. If I had time to play it again you could hear one voice would come in. Incipit lamentatio. And then somebody else would come in. Incipit lamentatio. And then the third voice and the fourth voice. But you're right to say multiple voices unaccompanied. So you sort of get two points for that. And what do we call that unaccompanied style? Yeah. So but you don't get a separate point for acapella. Unaccompanied acapella style would be one marker there. The idea of imitative voices would be another. You might even pick up on the text, I suppose, that it's in what language? Latin, yeah. What else there? That it's not particularly rhythmic. No strong rhythms or meters. It sort of flows gently like Gregorian chant. And as mentioned we have this texture that's not only polyphonic but highly imitative. And those are all hallmarks of late medieval Renaissance music. That particular piece was written by an English composer, Thomas Tallis, but more interesting in a way. It's a setting of the old 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 Renaissance vocal style. Let's go on to another one now, the next CD. It's probably CD3. And for this we do have track five, I believe, times. You can figure this out in about three seconds. It doesn't take much more than that. So with just that, and we'll be playing a lot more than three seconds, many minutes depending upon the particular piece, probably more than once. So what did you hear there? And we may go back and hear just that much. What did you hear there? Let's talk about what you heard and then we'll conclude about the period in question. So someone get us started. Nicole. A lot of percussion, okay? Very definitely particularly the tip in Marcos. A lot of dissonance. That was very prominent. It started out okay. It could have been a kind of John Williams Star Wars type sound up until about the third iteration of one particular figure. But the level of the pitches at which it was brought in produced a very dissonant moment there. So initially it's maybe John Williams romanticism knockoff kind of thing. But when that dissonant enters, then that takes you into a slightly different realm. Daniel. Okay. 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? A big, pardon? Yes, there were lots of ostinato right at the beginning. I almost forgot about that. I 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 beginning. It's not a long excerpt. Let's listen to the beginning of this again. When that entry right there, very dissonant. And the ostinato, of course. Percussion, dissonance, more dissonance. Brasses as percussion instruments. More percussion, pounding, dissonance. A lot of modern music has a kind of intensity to it. You know, stop, I give up, okay? I surrender. It's got that element to it. So that could be even a fifth component in our thinking. So all of this leads us to the conclusion that this is a piece of twentieth century music by the woman composer, Ellen's Vilek. And you have Ellen's Vilek, of course, as the basis of your listening exercise 45 that you've done. This is simply another piece called Celebration. It's a pretty, so far, pretty intense celebration by Ellen's Vilek written in 1984. So it's a fairly recent piece of music in the modernist style, not post-modernist, but modernist. Okay. Well, I'm going to, I think, a variety is always useful in life. I'm going to, and I asked Linda yesterday, Linda, you prepare a piece. But don't tell me what it is, because I want to go through the same thought processes that other people have. So Linda has prepared a piece, and I don't know whether she's going to use the piano or whether she's going to use the audio player. Audio player? You want me to play it for you? You're okay? Okay. So this means we have probably an orchestra before we get there. Okay, strings in the foreground of this particular ensemble. Could anybody tell what the solo instrument was? All right, see you soon. So we've had regular meters, strings in the foreground, a solo instrument. What might you say about the relationship between the solo instrument and the bigger ensemble? I guess that may be pretty obvious, but that's true. They seem to be at about a similar level. It doesn't seem like the ensemble is very big. And we have them playing one after the other, which is a characteristic of something that we learned about. Rhythmically, this goes with meter. Was it regular, irregular? Pretty regular. You could tap your foot to it. You could hear a melody. I'll just play a couple more. A little bit of virtuosic and impressive. It should be impressive. You hear lots of little trills. It's leaping all over the place. It's showing off. And this is a feature of something we learned about. So who would like to guess what period we're in? Michael. I mean, I guess I can see why you might... Why would you say a romantic? It makes you realize... Which makes you realize that you can't always tell by the size of the orchestra. Sometimes it's better to listen for some of the more abstract features such as what the orchestra is doing. The harmonies. How about the harmonic language? Was it pretty surprising or a little more expected? I mean, this may be something that's going to help you zero in a little bit more. Yeah, pretty expected. Not very surprising harmony. Does anybody else have another? Or do you want to correct yourself? A little bow. Tie it on a sequential phrase. What does that suggest to you? Very good. Which is very strong in what period? Classical. Yeah, I mean, these things do happen in other periods. But this is sort of a quintessential, classical, very particular genre. Does anybody know what genre we're in? Concerto. Concerto, exactly. So this was the Mozart bassoon concerto. Who knew that Mozart wrote a bassoon concerto? It's one of the bassoon's biggest pieces in the repertoire. And he thought the bassoon was a sort of amusing instrument, so that's why there are lots of leaps. And it sounds a bit like a clown anyway. So that's a concerto example for you, which is not a piano. Yeah, that is a great question. I wonder if I ought to defer to Professor Wright. Well, let's work through this together. One, we've been all over this morning. That is the size of the orchestra. We had the lecture on nineteenth-century orchestral music, how all of these instruments come in. So the orchestra has many more and many more varied instruments in it, ranging from top piccolo down to middle, English horn down to bottom, contra-based bassoon tuba and things like that. So it was the orchestra particularly, low brasses and that kind of sound that typifies the sound generally for orchestral music in the nineteenth century. Then, whereas Daniel was talking about bowtide, or tied together, what he was animating there perhaps was that we have this kind of paired phrasing, or neat little units of phrasing that can be tied together. That's a component of classical music. As you go into the romantic period, the themes, the melodies, become much more expansive. And someone I think said earlier on here, has pretty, maybe the first point, was this pretty regular meter in this particular piece of classical music by Mozart. The Mozart bassoon concerto, K-193. So the regularity of the themes and the balance and symmetry is part and parcel of the classical period. You move into the romantic, you have expansive themes, but by way of contradistinction there, then the rhythm becomes not necessarily more flexed, but more loose. And we talked about this phenomenon of rubato, for example. So flexible rhythms, flexible tempos, less clear meters in the romantic period. And not to overdo it, but it may be this idea of just beautiful melody. And it is, of course, in this nineteenth century that we get the whole idea of the Belcanto sound. If anybody read Rothstein's, no, Andrew Thomas Cini's article that I pointed you to about Belcanto, he said actually the beginning of that starts back with the composers of piano music, of that same period, and then the opera composers begin to go into it. So who wrote this? Beautiful? Well, the whole idea of beautiful melody. Yeah, Mozart wrote a lot of beautiful melodies too, so did Bach. But somehow beautiful melody, just warm, rich melody, is very important in romantic music. So this is a good example of kind of rich harmonies, a broader palette, and then the classical period. I could play one other piece here just to differentiate romantic piano music from this sound. So that's a piece by Mozart. You could say that the melody is just as beautiful. That's a gorgeous melody too. That's lovely. You could use that as film music just as well as you could the other piece. So the first piece that I played is by any takers on that, piano music of the nineteenth century. Anybody, if you peek through the textbook, that is? Good. Yeah, Chopin and Frederick Chopin. So that's a classic, quintessential moment of Chopin, quintessential moment of Chopin that's become a classic. Indeed, it became a kind of – Judy Garland used to sing this. I'm forever chasing rainbows. It got turned into a pop song in the twentieth century because it's such a drop dead beautiful melody. But the difference here is in the pianos the terms of expansion. Here's the Chopin sound. Here's the – and the chords sometime ago. Interesting harmonic shifts, but the Mozart by comparison is very plain harmonically and very limited in terms of the range and limited somewhat in terms of the texture. What kind of bass is this? You're talking about how we identify style. All you really have to do is listen to about one second of this. I know what that is. That has to be what? Emily? That's an Alberti bass. An Alberti bass is used only in what period of music history? Classical. Okay? So you hear that? It's got to be in a forty-year period roughly 1770 to 1810 or so, and then they stopped using it. How do we know that this is specifically Mozart? This is above and beyond the pale. If you put down Beethoven for this it would be great. If you put down Haydn for this it would be great. Schubert for this would be great. Mozart for this it would be great. How do we know it's Mozart? There's one little moment here that when he takes that line and nobody else would have wanted it. He loves to do that. What did he do there? He inserted what? What kind of scale is that? Yeah. Emily says chromatic. So he inserted just a little bit of chromaticism there, and that's a finger print of Mozart. So we're parsing this out a little bit more fine than we need due, but that's the kind of the next step on this. Okay. Where are we? Let's do one more piece. Let's do one more piece. Let's put this one in and go to track 18, I believe. Anybody want to ask a question while we're queuing this up, Oscar? Beethoven wouldn't really use so much of an ostinato as he would just sit there. I see your point on one chord and kind of hammer you over the head with that. But that's an idios, it's a good point. It's more sophisticated in a way that we need to get into in here. But I wouldn't say Beethoven uses ostinato so much as iteration, and admittedly it's a fine line between ostinato and iteration, but kind of sitting on something and just kind of repeating maybe that chord over and over and over again in a way that Mozart or Schubert being fundamentally constructors of melody wouldn't necessarily do Okay. That's true. That's true. You could look upon that famous de-de-de-deem, pa-pa-pa-pa, as an ostinato. People don't normally do that, but that's just fine and dandy. It may be something particular to Beethoven rather than the era generally, but yes, you're right about that. So good for you. Oscar I, Craig nothing at this point. Any other question? All right. Let's go on. We'll hear one last piece and I'll let you go, although it's a fairly long one. Eighteen, sorry. Yeah. Long way to go. Is that playing? It's odd. There's nothing about the CD. I just played that in my office a few minutes ago. Yeah. Let me check the track number here. Yep, eighteen. Sorry for the delay. Any other questions as we vamp? Maybe I'll just dance up here. Angela, go ahead. Well, you could use him as a swing player. In other words, if you hear a piece that you think is Beethoven, you put that down as classical, that's fine. You put that down as romantic, that's fine too. So we're sort of set? All right. Let's just go ahead and listen to this then we can go. Let's stop it here. Time is short. Go up to about 135 on that CD. Something else is going to happen. Let's just stop here. Now, there should be one thing there that's a dead giveaway in terms of period. And what would that be, Zach? The harpsichord, okay? Because we've said before that really the harpsichord doesn't get much in the way of legs in the history of music until the baroque period. And then it disappears as it's replaced by the piano, for the most part, in the classical period. The baroque period can be readily identified here simply by the presence of the harpsichord. But what else did we hear in these admittedly very short excerpts? Well, let's go back to the beginning then and listen to the rhythm. Could you dance or march to this? Almost a pompous entry 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 and goes unchanged for about a minute and thirty-five seconds or so, and that's another aspect of this. Not only regular rhythm but a regular ethos in the music of the baroque period. Now let's listen to this last component here and then we'll stop with this. Let's go back to 135 one more time, please. So what are we hearing here and why is this further important of music coming from the baroque period? Mary Pat? It's a fugue, okay? And we studied the fugue and we said the fugue came into being in the baroque period principally under the aegis of J.S. Bach. So there we've got our four bullet points or four pieces of supporting evidence for the conclusion that we came to rather early on, as Zach pointed out, by the presence of the harpsichord there. Any final questions before we stop? If not, I have a request. You may have heard that unfortunately our good friend, Richard Lawley, has had a serious medical issue that he is dealing with, and he's always such a wonderful guy and this was going to be the highlight of his career. He's going to take over the Master's of Jonathan Edwards College and unfortunately this happened. So I'd be very grateful to you. We've got a couple of Get Well cards out there and Richard is always very much interested in our Yale students and it'd be great if on the way out you would be good enough to sign your name there on those cards and we'll be sure that they get over to Richard. Okay, thanks very much and I'll see you next Wednesday, six days from now.