Using a simple and enjoyable teaching style, this course introduces the novice listener to the wonders of classical music, from Bach fugues to Mozart symphonies to Puccini operas.
6.3 - Musical Style
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From the course by Yale University
Introduction to Classical Music
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From the lesson
The Sound of Music
Have you ever wondered what it is that makes music sound sometimes rich and luxurious and sometimes strange and mysterious? Well, you’re in luck because this module, we’ll explore what the nature of simultaneous sounds and textures. We’ll start off with a look at chords, specifically how the three types of triads– tonic, dominant, subdominant– build a foundation upon which a melody can be constructed. Once we understand the rules of musical syntax, we’ll be ready to learn about musical progressions including the three types of cadences.We’ll also look at major and minor triads and how they work. Then, we’ll learn how to hear the bass and focus on the harmony of a song. Finally, I’ll talk you through the four families of musical instruments–brasses, percussions, strings, and woodwinds---and the various musical textures, forms, and styles that they can create. How exciting!
Meet the Instructors
Craig WrightHenry L & Lucy G Moses Professor of Music
Department of Music
When you walk around downtown Chicago, you see many architectural styles.
Here 1960s office buildings rest behind the spectacular Prtizker Music Pavillion
designed in a far more modern style by architect Frank Gehry.
Similarly, when you walk into an art museum and enter a gallery,
you often have to make an educated guess as to what you're seeing,
you're not close enough to actually be able to read the picture labels.
Is it medieval, or is it modern?
Actually it's something of a fun game to play, name that picture or more correctly,
identify that style.
What's the style, what's the style period of the painting?
Here we've got Medieval of course to the left, modern to the right.
Well, we do the same thing in music.
We walk into Starbucks and hear music played, or riding in a car and
turning on the radio, or sitting in an airplane and click on that audio button.
But what are we then hearing?
Is it Bach or Mozart?
Beyonce or Bono?
Unless we happen to know the particular piece, we have to guess,
we have to make an educated guess based on style.
Cultural historians use the term style
to refer to common attributes among works of art.
This allows us to match it or not match it with other works.
And that's what we're doing when we look at an unknown painting or
listen to an unknown piece of music, we're trying to match it up with what we know.
Oddly enough, Internet sites such as Pandora and the newer iTunes Radio
make use of an awareness of musical style as well,
to give you more of the style that you like.
You choose a piece of listen to, and while you're listening, the computer is mining
data about the piece, and then is matching that data to other pieces with similar
style features, and that's how the site suggests new songs for you.
But what is style in music?
Style in music is the distinctive sound,
the sound that is the totality of all of the elements of music that we have been
discussing of rhythm, melody, harmony, and particularly tone color and texture.
The surface details of the music.
Music historians generally divide the history of Western music
into eight styles, or eight style periods.
We like this idea, historical periods, it helps us group things,
helps us to see commonalities, helps us to understand.
Here are the eight style periods as you can see on the screen,
here are the eight style periods as generally agreed upon for
the history of Western classical music set out in sequence.
And as you can see Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic,
Impressionist, Modern, Postmodern, and then there toward the end they begin to
overlap because a composer doesn't wake up on the 1st of January, slap his forehead,
and say, by golly it's 1900, I've got to start writing in a modernist mode.
These styles do in fact overlap.
If you're following along our course with the text book and the website,
you'll have access to a link that takes you through the various periods,
and the history of music by an interactive timeline, and it allows you
to play representative samples as you progress along that timeline.
So let's see how this game is played.
And initially the way I set it up for the moment,
it progresses along through the history of music with various graphic representations
and seminal moments in the music history of that particular period.
Now into the Baroque, the Classical, and you can see there are various
audio buttons there, that if you wished you could hit one of those and
you would get a representative piece from that period.
And I think one is just about to come up,
believe it's John Adams, Short Ride in a Fast Machine.
[MUSIC]
But you can click on any of these and
representative music of that period will play out.
In addition to that, we have something called the checklist of musical styles.
And as you dig more deeply into that, as we will with
the next slide here, you can see that here you are given
the history of music broken down period by period.
And then also you are given the music of that period,
broken into its component elements, melody,
harmony, rhythm, color, and texture.
And you can click on any of these and you will have a representative sample of
the melody, the harmony, the rhythm, the texture of that period.
Here of course we have Mozart's famous music,
as a representative of classical melody.
Let's go on to melody of the romantic period now.
[MUSIC]
Here we have the music of Richard Wagner on his opera, Tristan,
with Isolde singing, working her way up to a melodic climax here.
[MUSIC]
Well, I have to leave Isolde hanging there for
the moment as we move on to the Modern period, Modern melody.
[MUSIC]
And it's very different in terms of melody, it's highly disjunct, dissonant,
and so on.
So you can work through each of these and become familiar
with the different elements of musical style for all of the historical periods.
And then finally you can actually quiz yourself here,
there is a section called Musical Style Quiz.
So let's see what's involved there.
So here you can start out, the periods are named for you, paired off.
And then we go in and you can click on any particular button.
[MUSIC]
Up will come a piece, and you can click off,
respond to questions regarding to tone, color, beat, meter, texture,
period in question, the type or genre of the piece, composer's name,
and you say you're finished, you're ready to be graded,
and there's your score, good for you, you got them all right.
So for each of the periods in the history of music,
we have style quizzes as well, so go in and explore.
Explore the richness of the website that comes along with this particular textbook.
But let's pretend for a moment we don't know, we don't know what period we're in.
Let's have a mystery piece here and see how we do in terms of style.
So I just pulled one out here,
you listen a bit, see when you think this piece was written.
What period in history of music was it written?
[MUSIC]
Okay, let's phase that out here.
So here we heard a lovely solo for the English horn, a low oboe.
Now the English horn wasn't added to the orchestra until the 19th century,
around 1830.
So this piece can't have been written before the 19th century.
But at the same time, it's very consonant, and
it has a lovely scale based melody to it.
Later 20th century music often has much more dissonance and
the melody is often much more disjunct.
So a quick and correct response would be to this that this piece could not have
been written before the 19th century, and unlikely to have been written after
the 19th century, so this is a piece from the 19th century,
from the romantic period in the history of music.
It's the famous Goin' Home melody from Antonin Dvorak's The New World Symphony.
And a sidebar, an excursus on my part.
People often misuse the word song when talking about pieces of orchestral music.
They refer to Dvorak's New World Song or the Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
as Beethoven's Fifth Song or to Mozart's Piano Concerto as Mozart's Song.
Songs have lyrics, a text that tells you what the music's about and
suggests how you should feel about that music, but
most classical pieces are entirely instrumental.
So if it's a classical piece and it's instrumental, it's not a song,
it's a piece, it's a composition, a chef d'oeuvre if you were.
A masterpiece, or more specifically, a symphony or concerto, whatever.
But in the vernacular, it ain't a song.
The difference between classical and popular styles in music was brought home
to me by something that happened recently at my university, Yale University.
A group of musicians, essentially trained in classical style,
did a remake, did a cover of a pop song.
The song was Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe, and was very popular a while back.
You can think whatever you want to of this song, the classical cover
was done by a traditional chorus in a Western style symphony orchestra.
And you can think whatever you want to of that version.
So let's begin here with the song.
Let's listen to Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe.
[MUSIC]
Yeah, that's probably enough, it gives you certainly an idea and
likely know the song already.
Okay, so now let's listen to some of the classical cover.
[MUSIC]
Very different.
[MUSIC]
Somebody's added slow descending scale.
[MUSIC]
Tempo is very different.
[MUSIC]
Okay, well that's probably enough of that, but it certainly gives you an idea.
Listening to these two versions cause me to ask myself,
what's good about classical style?
What do classical instrumentalists and choruses do well?
What makes classical music work?
And what do pop instrumentalists and pop singers do well?
What makes pop music work?
The song Call Me Maybe has gotten over half a billion hits on YouTube.
The classical Yale instrumental version has received two and
a half million, which is still pretty good.
See which you like better as you listen to each, and you can find them
online easily enough, as you listen to each think about what you are hearing.
Again, what does classical music do well?
And what does it not do well?
In so doing, you'll come to think a lot more critically about musical style.
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