Opera (music/drama) oratorio (not music or drama) cantata (religious text, no story or drama) passion (Christ's story; has orch, solo, chorus SATB) Aria (solo or duet, sung) Harpsichord, reed continuo (backup to solo)
Instrumental forms toccata (improvise) fugue (strict chord progression) 2 - 5 voices, subject: theme melody. Prelude (instrumental solo) fantasy (improvise solo instrument) Concerto (orchestra Sonata) instrumental only, no vocal; mostly chamber music. Music depicts a story. Church music ends on major keys to depict uplift, like a text painting.
SUITES sets of 4 or more movements: allemande (slow) courante (fast) saraband (slow) gigue (fast) basically dance. Saraband, seductive, only allowed in church if played faster.
MUSIC more subtle emotional level, less dynamic difference. Strong sense of pulse, little deviation. Treadmill, no sense of start or end. Orchestra size up to 15 or 20, mostly strings and keyboard.
BACH 1685 - 1750 (BMV#, no opus #s) known mostly as organist. Improvisation, not just chord progression. Music busy, active, heavy textured. Bach succeeded only posthumously as a composer. Musically literate, could improvise. Bach wrote
- Mostly toccatas, fugues, cantatas, masses, passions and teaching pieces.
- 6 each of Partidas, English and French suites.
- 48 preludes and fugues - 12 each major and minor = 24 = 2 books of each = 48 = for teaching
Bach, 19, transcribed his Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, from another key. His first piece was a toccata of mostly rising and descending higher notes an octave apart. Shorter than the Fugue, it was mostly improvised, its sections faster and more technical sounding. His second piece, a fugue, deeper, had chord progression among the larger pipes underlying the Toccata. Slower, with subject melody imitated in other hands (or feet, as with pedals) it has many sounds for each entrance of the subject. It has more bass pipes, some of them 32 feet high in larger modern pipe organs.
HANDEL 1685 - 1759 opera, oratorio; Messiah; keyboard, concerto, text painting
ORFEO integrated music with drama; wrote madrigals (church opera) - polyphonic
VIVALDI 1678 - 1741 first 3-movement concerto; lighter than Bach
MONTIVERDI 1567 - 1643 first successful opera
CLASSICAL ERA
Major genres: sonata, opera, concerto, symphony, string quartet. Classical traits first appeared around 1700. Symphonies had 4 movements. New forms; old forms used new ways. Allegro, Andante, Moderato, Presto. 99.9% start, end fast; all movements relate. Idea is proportion, symmetry. Beginning is also at end. Sonata allegro most important form; found in 1st movement orchestra, chamber, piano solo, brass. Early symphony has harpsichord. Starting at Beethoven's era: suite = (n) movements. Opus = published work. Pieces published together get a number except symphony get own opus number of that opus e g opus 46 # 2.
BEETHOVEN 1770 - 1827 introduced motifs and more woodwinds, brass, percussion. Beethoven, the first freelanceer, published 9 symphonies and 1 opera. In other genre Beethoven developed piano playing.
Beethoven's Symphony #5 in C minor, Op 67, its first movement allegro con brio, dominated by strings. A brief oboe solo is heard in the middle of a series of quiets before storms. The motif comes first from lighter strings and repeats with heavier strings. The orchestra plays variations of the melody at normal volume with the motif loudly repeated at intervals throughout. String sections echo each other in the motif. Strings play another melody on top after brass enters, then repeats the motif. Beethoven uses this movement to forcefully introduce the motif, downplayed throughout the rest of the symphony. On inspection this motif, a third (2 whole steps apart) plays any key.
HAYDN 1732 - 1809 wrote mostly symphonies and string quartets
MOZART 1756 - 1791 mastering all major genre, was heavily into opera
SCHUBERT 1797 - 1828
ROMANTIC 1850 - 1900
Showmanship, specializing. Symphonic poem, 1 movement, programatic (a story) BEETHOVEN VI (Fantasia) the first notable case. Leitmotif (leading motif) in opera linked story to music. Important motifs: person, place, thing, mood - noun or adjective. Concerto solo vs orchestra. Section vs show-off vehicle. Inventive resolution, distantly related keys. Complex harmonic vocabulary, not classical neat, tidy harmony. Add more chromatic (1/2 step), increase harmonic vocabulary, end on distantly related key, drawn out resolve, break down harmonic sense of stability.
NATIONALISM
Incorporates native folk music and national identity. Composers running out of harmonic vocabulary looked to one's culture for something different. Smallest musical unit the MOTIF, remends you of something: a mood, etc.
Lieder - Schubert, Beethoven, San Saens. Performers: Nikolai Paganini (violin) Liszt.
PIANO Genre: etude, study technical problems (Chopin, Liszt) character pieces inspired by things besides music. Quasi-programatic (no specific item of inspiration, no text) mazurka, nocturne, impromptu. Movements 5 - 10 minutes, absolute = craftsmanship, no program. TRADITIONAL Symphonies in 4 movements.
Hector BERLIOZ 1803 - 1869 Symphonie Fantastique 1830 technically not a symphonic poem because it had more than 1 movement. His orcestras had over 100 pieces and were first to need a conductor. Wrote color and variety, used orchestration an art form in itself. First "real" romantic composer to abandon classical tradition, inspired by Beethoven VI. Wrote the first pastoral: the first programatic work, each movement has a title and an image.
Robert SCHUMANN 1810 - 1856 specialized in short character pieces (not like Chopin's) Wrote variations of themes by peers. Wrote lieders (song cycles) A piano journalist, one of the first critics, in 1834 founded the New Journal for Music. Clara Schumann and Liszt performed the first off-book recital.
Johannes BRAHMS 1833 - 1897 early works (teens) are piano - character pieces, multi-movement sonatas. Most conservative, replicating Beethoven; later wrote chamber music.
Franz LISZT 1811 - 1886 progressive, bombastic; wrote his earlier work to show off. Movements 30 minutes long. Wrote for piano, later for other instruments. Transcriptions of opera to piano were lost.
MUSSGORSKY Pictures From an Exchibition; wouldn't study past work, it interfered with his own.
DVORZAK New World Symphony based on a visit to the United States
TCHAIKOVSKY symphony, ballet. Swan Lake, Nutcracker Suite, 1812)
WAGNER designed his own opera house, Bayreuth, 1876
Frederick CHOPIN 1810 - 1849 lyrical; piano only
GLINKA father of Russian music
Richard STRAUSS 1864 - 1949
KORSAKOV Scheherezade
GRIEG Peer Gynt
SIBELIUS Finlandia
IMPRESSIONISM 1890 +
Pentatonic scale (5 note e g black keys; Javanese gamelan) Chromatic scale (next note) Whole tone scale (all whole steps, 6 notes per octave) Church modes (medieval, before baroque; move to Roman numerals, home base elsewhere) Quasi-programatic scale - after 1890, specific, same as impressionistic painting (color, image) - improvising. Rhythm (hazy, blurred image you can't tap your foot to)
RAVEL 1875 - 1937 piano, orchestra Stole Debussy's ideas, was programatic. Gaspard de la Nuit was taken from Debussy's Ondine - first movement - Girl with the Flaxen Hair (the water nymph)
DEBUSSY 1862 - 1918 Prelude to Afternoon of a Faun 1894 the first orchestra piece
WAGNER diatonic scale
20th CENTURY
12-tone music, serial. Heirarchy up to just before it. What key you're in is important. What next after Wagner, Debussy? Cerebral, mathematical heirarchy broken down. Choose randomly 12 pitches, use pitch once, tone row.
Arnold SCHOENBERG 1874 - 1951 (5 pieces for piano op 23, 1924 first 12 tone seen) Suite for piano op 24, 1924 first strict 12-tone seen. Students included Anton Weburn, Alban Berg
Edgar VARESE French; Poeme Electronique, the first electronic piece, composed painstakingly with taped sound effects, spliced