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.
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Introduction to Classical Music
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From the lesson
Music to the Present
When you think of Impressionism, you probably think of paintings, likely the beautiful canvases of Claude Monet. But the emotionally evocative, non-realistic style of Impressionism pervaded all aspects of art. For music, another Claude, this time Debussy, typified the Impressionist movement. After learning about the sometimes outrageous lives of some of history’s famous composers, it may shock you to hear that Debussy led a rather banal existence, with no depression, psychosis or family tragedy to speak of. But from an ordinary life can come extraordinary music! We’ll look at three pieces, one each from his early, middle, and late career, to see how Debussy's style shifted away from more goal-oriented Romanticism to the “live in the moment” style that came to define Impressionism. After a brief guitar lesson taught with the help of the talented Solomon Silber, we’ll continue on to the Modernist period. As is well known to all by now, musical style is constantly changing. Sometimes the change is subtle, like the shift from Classical to Romantic music. At other times, however, change crashes like a Tsunami against previous traditions. This is what we experience as we engage the bracing sounds of Modernism. Beginning in the early 20th century, composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg abandoned traditional melody and scale. Simply put, audiences were, at times, less than receptive to this change. We’ll listen to samples of the music that provoked audience hostility, and discuss what seems to make this music so inaccessible, at times downright unpleasant, for most listeners.We will close this week, and our course, with Postmodernism and Minimalism. We’ll see how composers like Aaron Copland brought orchestral music back to the people by paring it down to its most basic terms. We’ll then hear how artists such as Philip Glass and John Adams, took this idea and ran with it, composing captivating trance-like movements around the simplest of ideas.
Meet the Instructors
Craig WrightHenry L & Lucy G Moses Professor of Music
Department of Music
[MUSIC]
Hi, welcome to Office Hours.
You might recognize the, that part of the theme that I just played
which is from the second movement, the opening of the second movement
of Dvorak's very well-known New World Symphony.
It's his Symphony Number Nine.
It was composed in 1893 while he was
serving as a director of a conservatory here in the US.
This is a very, very well-known and, and beloved piece.
And I actually wanted to talk with all of you actually about the first movement,
not the second movement today, which is still lovely.
But we're going to talk about the first movement because I thought it might be fun
to go through a, a piece, a movement of a piece that is very well-known and
hopefully recognizable for many of you out there.
And, and talk through it both from a musical, descriptive level,
but also to travel through it and look at sonata form which is one of the major
forms that we deal with in western art music in, in classical music.
And I think that in using this piece as an example, we can kind of see how some of
the familiar scenes that you might know just from being an active listener,
can map on to the sonata form structure that Dvorak has employed here.
And, and countless of composers in the Western art music tradition,
have employed for over two centuries at this point.
So let's start out by just talking a little bit
about the framework of this symphony.
I'm going to go to the white board over here.
And what we're going to do is just very quickly map out
the kind of general sonata form structure that you've learned it, which would be,
here we have the exposition, and I'm just going to abbreviate that.
And then we know that there is a middle section that is the development,
and then at the end we have a third part which is the recapitulation.
We'll call it here, the recap.
Broadly speaking, those are the three main sections of a sonata form movement.
The exposition, of course, is in charge of laying out all of the major
musical ideas of the form.
So what we're going to do is we're going to refer to these
areas as kind of zones or groups.
So we'll have a first theme, zone or group.
Another way to think of it is as a primary, primary theme, group.
Then usually there's some sort of transition.
Just transition.
Then we get to the second theme.
Or we can call it our, our secondary theme group, or zone.
Of course, that'll go for a little bit, and then we'll come to our
third thematic area or group, and
sometimes it's thought of as being like the closing melodic area.
So once again now we have kind of the layout of our exposition.
This is going to give us the, the primary not necessarily primary,
but the important musical ideas for this sonata form, and
then for the rest of the movement we're going to see how these things play out.
There are many different things that are implicated in a sonata form that we
are going to probably skip over for now, because they
not only go into greater music theoretical terms, but also they don't
always necessarily play out exactly the same way from one sonata form to the next.
We have to think of this as kind of an ongoing tradition and an ongoing,
maybe dialogue between a composer and the music, a composer and
other composers who are using sonata form.
And of course the kind of the history of sonata form as it
as it spreads across different countries and different composers and styles.
So not every composer is going to do the same thing.
However, I'll just quickly kind of highlight that often times when we move
from our first theme group to the second theme group, there's usually a modulation
and that often happens over the course of the transition.
And then usually the second and
third theme groups are going to be in the same key.
But once again that's not a hard and fast rule.
So in traditional sonata forms, you're actually going to have a repeat.
This is our, this is the music sign for repeat.
If you ever look at a music score and you see this right here like that,
that usually means to repeat back either to the beginning or
repeat back to the first opening repeat sign.
So if you see one of these somewhere before it,
this repeat sign's going to tell you to go there.
If you don't see that, it's going to tell you go to the beginning.
Now we get to our development.
A development usually entails taking some of this material that
we've heard in the exposition and actually developing it.
Kind of playing with it, giving some new twists or
spins to it, kind of a metamorphosis.
You might hear lots of modulations or traveling to different key areas,
even though we don't necessarily stay in those key areas for very long.
And then this is kind of the section that has the most
free-flowing creativity, well I shouldn't say creativity.
It has the most kind of variability in the sonata form,
so for now I'm just going to do, I'm going to represent that like this.
I'm just going to say, it's a lot of this and then eventually there's going to be
a moment where you can kind of tell that the tension is building and
then all of a sudden we now get the onset of the recapitulation,
which essentially is a conceptual restatement of the exposition.
So you know, we can think of this kind of loose turn or A, B, A, right.
A, B, A.
In the recap then we're going to get the first theme group,
second theme group, third theme group again.
We can call it again PSC.
And oftentimes there are going to be some slight, modifications.
It's not necessarily always going to be an exact restatement of the exposition.
For instance, if you recall, I just said that oftentimes in sonata forms,
you will have a modulation between the first and the second theme groups.
In the recap, usually, that mod, that modulation is going to be modified so
that you stay in the same key.
That's kind of a typical move, but again, once again,
it's not always the hard and fast rule.
So in this case, let's just leave this as our broad layout.
Now, in the Dvorak symphony, the New World Symphony, in the first movement,
we have an extra little component, which I think we've also encountered in our
course before, which is that before the exposition even begins,.
And I'm going to now erase a little bit of this to create some room.
Before the exposition begins,
we actually have a slow introduction.
And so this is also some material.
Slow introduction, then there's going to be a transition out of that,
into the onset of the exposition.
Now, in the Dvorak, you're going to hear a repeat.
That repeat, is actually not going to take us all the way back to
the beginning of the slow introduction.
It's in fact going to take us back to the beginning of the exposition proper.
So, you can think then, of this as having a slow introduction,
and then, repeat signs there, so that you going to hear the entire exposition,
then it's going to repeat back to the exposition again.
On the second pass through, you're going to hear the same thing.
When we get here there's going to be a slight modification so
[LAUGH] that we don't repeat over and over again.
A slight modification that's going to then lead us in to the development, and
then we're going to go all the way through to, to the recap, to the end of the piece.
So that's our crash course again in sonata form.
And now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you through some of
the themes that we're going to hear in this movement.
And then we're going to actually walk through
a listening of the entire movement.
It takes about 11 minutes or so and
I'll try my best to not talk too much over the audio.
But I think I will talk over the audio so that I can guide you as we're going and
we can, we can talk about what we're hearing in real time.
So, at the very beginning, our first theme.
And I'm not going to play all of these themes in their entirety.
One of the interesting things about music, and music as it takes
place in larger forms like this, is that there is some flexibility
with how we define various concepts.
When we say a theme, we usually do mean though kind of a,
a relatively self-encloser at least.
And a noticeable or parsable melody that you can kind of say has a beginning and
possibly an end.
In, in, in this case the theme is somewhat longer and made up of smaller gestures.
So I'll play you kind of the main idea here which just goes
[MUSIC]
And then keeps going.
So this theme has like a very noticeable idea, which is.
[MUSIC]
And then keeps going.
Now it's that, will take place.
And then we're going to hear more music, which obviously ensues.
And, and there's not necessarily a clear distinction between like,
Oh, the theme has stopped right here and this is clearly non-thematic material.
However, there are, there will be points in the music where you can tell that it's,
that the music is not necessarily supposed to be acting, you know, like a theme,
but rather it's supposed to be transitional material or
kind of developmental material.
As we go through the piece, I'll kind of explain this further, and
I hope that we'll be able to here that more clearly.
So that's our first theme.
Then, the next theme is going to take us to.
It's going to take us to the second theme group.
And that one goes.
[MUSIC]
Like that.
That's our second theme group.
And, once again, you're going to hear that develop and it's going to keep going.
And then we're going to experience transition to our third theme group,
which sounds much more relaxed then the first two themes.
This one goes like this.
[MUSIC]
And then keeps going.
Now one thing you might notice about that theme, maybe not right away, but
the very first rhythmic idea in this theme right here, which is
[MUSIC]
like that.
Actually it has the exact same rhythm as our first theme which was
[MUSIC]
So now let me pull the melody out of it, let's pull the notes out of it and
just think of it as pure rhythm.
So the very first theme goes
[MUSIC]
like that.
[MUSIC]
And then our third theme goes.
[MUSIC]
So you can see how these two ideas are somewhat related, even at a kind of
rhythmic level, even though they have very different characters.
The very first theme, as you're going to hear has a, a more emphatic quality to it.
While, while this theme, the third theme, sounds more pastoral.
But yet they share the same opening rhythmic idea.
So there's a, a link there that is not necessarily immediately audible, or
maybe it was.
Maybe it was to you when, when you just heard them now.
Either way, whether you recognized it off the bat or not, it's there and that,
that kind of adds some additional kind of quality of rela,
an additional relationship to the different themes.
So, that's part of the way that sonata-formed themes work is that each
theme often has a different sort of character to it.
And that's also how we can keep track of them throughout the piece,
is that they can be they can have a kind of a certain identity of their own.
All right, so now that we've heard those three themes, let's just start here at
the beginning of this movement, and travel through and, and see how we fair.
So, I'm going to go to the very beginning.
And here we go.
Here are, we are at our slow introduction.
We're using a recording by the New York Philharmonic conducted by
Leonard Bernstein.
The reason why I chose this is ultimately because I like the recording [LAUGH] and
I think Leonard Bernstein is a, is a very nice interpreter of this music.
But also for, equally important is that it is one of the recording, or
one of the few recordings out there that I've found that actually does play
the expositional repeat.
And I think that's really important for us to be able to hear.
Sometimes conductors will make the decision and
there are many reasons for it.
It could be recording you know, depending on when it was recorded it could've been
the limit in, in the time that they wanted to give to the overall recording, and
sometimes to save the time, they will skip the repeat.
It could've just have been an artistic decision.
But in this case,
what we are getting is the full version of the movement that includes the repeat.
So here we go, from the, from the top.
[MUSIC]
As you can see, it's a very somber mood.
Low register, very quiet.
[MUSIC]
Mounting
tension right
here.
Right here, rumbling of what will become
our first theme, here it is again.
Violent outburst.
And building.
And right here is the start of our exposition.
[INAUDIBLE] So
you can here how
this theme has been
generating momentum,
now we're moving onward.
You hear the theme again.
Now I'm traveling.
Your
sequence
here.
All right.
Now.
We've reached our second theme.
And you hear the oboe.
Transfers
to the
strings.
So as you can see, we're traveling again now.
It's kind of in transition here.
Some turbulent music and then it seems to relax again.
More relax.
Now you can kind of feel the slower role.
Here's our third theme.
The flute.
Once again, transferred to that strings.
Momentum's
building.
Final presentation, of this third theme.
Where are we going back?
Back to the beginning, or to the beginning of our exposition.
So here we are, we've now experienced the expositional repeat,
we're back in our first theme area.
So on the second pass visualized and
also hear your way through the form.
First theme again.
Now, traveling.
Here's our
sequence.
Okay, here we are, traveling again.
We have a change, slow change in mood.
Feel kind of
a deflation
a little bit.
Now second theme. Transfers to the, the middle strings.
Another outburst.
And they're building again and getting a head of steam.
It kind of breaks through and
now again kind of turbulent.
Relax.
And again, building
again, relax.
Here we go again.
Third theme, you can hear
how pastoral it feels.
Another iteration
of the third
theme.
Now we're going to travel through.
You can hear now, we're traveling.
And here's our onset of the development.
That sounds a little bit like the third theme.
But now, the development is happening here as we see that kind of breaking it down.
Ba ba ba ba, all right,
so you can hear,
there's a little snippet
of our first theme.
Some snippets of
the first theme.
Here you go, another hark back to our first theme.
You can hear now, we've moved again.
Da, da, da, da, da, same thing.
So now we're using a rhythmic
jester from earlier.
Now the oboe has it.
Puh, puh, puh, puh, puh, puh, puh.
See, you can here how Dvorak is playing with some of snippets of ideas from
the exposition, piecing them together.
And now we're back at the recap.
And this should sound familiar because this is pretty much what we get at
the very beginning of the exposition.
Here, you might notice there's a modification happening.
It's not exactly like it was in the exposition.
We're on our way to the second theme group.
And here.
[MUSIC]
It's still in the flutes though.
[MUSIC]
Then it gets past.
This time stays in the woodwind family.
[MUSIC]
Here now again, tension.
And a little relaxation.
The same thing again.
The swirling.
And relax again.
More relaxed.
Lowering down.
And here we are at our third theme.
[MUSIC]
All right, now we reach the end.
Or, the point where we would be at the end in our exposition.
[MUSIC].
Now we're recycling some key material.
[MUSIC].
All this is new, of course.
[MUSIC].
Coming off of again, our first new material.
[MUSIC]
Feel the energy.
Momentum.
Feel the boom, boom, boom.
[MUSIC]
Feel the rhythm. [MUSIC]
First theme again.
[MUSIC]
So I'm going to go back to the whiteboard here, to illustrate one thing.
Which is that in the recap, when we got to our third theme area,
we heard the full iteration.
[MUSIC]
And then played all the way through and then we got to that big conjubilant point.
And of course at that point in the exposition,
we got to that jubilant point and then we repeat it.
And then, the second time we went onto the development.
This time we get to that jubilant moment and
then Dvorak basically ex, extends the activity.
He first of all, modulates.
He moves us up a little bit.
You could, you could, you could probably hear that, we might play it again.
But you hear it happens, it's jubilant.
And then, it actually gets raised again.
And then, we get a little kind of a tag at the end where there's all this
energy build up.
And as you can see, the whole orchestra is kind of running, running, and
the rhythm is getting more and more intense.
And what we have and, and
I think that this concept has also been presented before.
But, what we get basically here at the end.
Right after our third theme zone has happened
is what we like to think of as a coda.
Coda I believe comes from Italian word for tail, I believe.
And it really does kind of, add just a, extra space on to our movement.
Or it could happen in a,
in a single contained piece that doesn't have various movements, at the end.
But anyway, we get a coda that basically kind of gives us a final hoorah.
In this case, the final hoorah is made up of snippets of our first theme.
Right and so you could hear at the end there
[MUSIC].
Right? And so and then it builds and
it builds and then at the very end it ends with a bang.
So in this case, our sonata form then had kind of two additions
to our kind of classic exposition, development, and recapitulation.
We had a slow introduction which was never repeated.
And then we have a coda which also only sounds once.
And so, that's basically in a, in a nutshell,
a very nice encapsulation of sonata form operating in some of the traditional ways.
And then, in some of the kind of added bonus ways and
this is by no means unique to Dvorak.
Haydn, for
instance often had slow introductions to movements that he wrote in sonata form.
Mozart, Beethoven.
So, this is by no means, something that is a late 19th century development.
This is, this is something that composers even in the 18th,
late 18th and early 19th century.
Are already playing with these kinds of features.
In the way that they explore sonata form.
But I think that this is a really it's a really neat movement.
Because we can hear a lot of cool themes that have very distinctive characters.
And we can see how they play up.
So as you can see I've made these little spirals here in the development.
But really in the spirals we could have written,
we could have kind of notated things.
Like he's playing with a third them, playing some of the bits of our first
them, and, of course, there are also new material.
I don't know.
I'll just write the word new thrown into the jumble there.
And so, that's kind of the, that's the point of a development section.
The idea is that it's a, a meditation, in sense, in a sense,
or, or a kind of rumination on the material that was given in our exposition.
And of course, out of this Pssst.
The recap comes.
And so, that is basically how our sonata form is working.
What I'm going to do then is, let's just play the very end of the recap and
the coda one more time.
So that you, you can kind of get a sense, once again,
of how that transition works out of the recap into the coda.
And maybe we'll call it a class at that point.
So here let me put the bottom here.
Maybe this is a good point.
[MUSIC]
So here we are.
We're kind of at the tail end of our second theme group.
So you can hear, here we are, relaxing, relaxing,
[MUSIC]
Sigh, and here's the third.
[MUSIC]
Here we are.
Music in this jubilant moment here.
[MUSIC]
>> [INAUDIBLE] We're rising.
[MUSIC]
Here we are now, getting into coda.
We're in coda world now.
Here in coda world we're playing with aspects of our first theme.
All right. [INAUDIBLE] this.
[MUSIC]
Momentum is building.
Here we go.
[MUSIC]
And one more time, yep.
[MUSIC]
It's a very emphatic end to that movement.
And, of course, what follows this movement probably after a few seconds of break for
a, both conductor and orchestra, and audience,
to kind of breath and, and have a moment after that big adrenalin rush.
Was, of course, the second movement, which starts out with some big,
kind of broad chords in, in the brass.
And, of course, the same melody that you heard me playing when we started out here.
So I'm going to now, I'm going to play, again,
that melody from the second movement, the very famous melody.
I think it also has the nickname.
Going home.
This is what you would hear if you were at a concert then you were at a symphony.
You would hear that movement,
then you would hear the opening of the second movement, and then this melody,
which is actually not played by the violin but by the English horn.
And so I will play this melody and, bid you adieu for now, but thanks so
much for joining us for office hours.
I hope that was a, a helpful walk through sonata form.
And I hope that if you liked that piece, or that movement, i hope that you will go
check out the rest of the symphony and, many more symphonies by Dvorjak and,
of course, plenty of other symphonies by many other composers,
both of whom we've spoken about in this class and
others that we haven't had the opportunity to, to discuss.
But here we are the, opening melody of the second
movement of Dvojak's new world symphony.
[MUSIC]
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