MusicTheoryWithAndre

There’s one pedal that we haven’t discussed on the organ because it isn’t one of the “note” pedals—in fact, it’s the only one that doesn’t have a pitch. Instead, the missing pedal is the swell pedal. Look at the body of the organ (the assembly of where all the pipes are, as opposed to the “console”, where the organist sits and plays the instrument—these may or may not be physically close to each other), and you’ll probably see what kind of look like plantation shutters. (If you know where my parish is, then this feature of the organ is very clearly visible on ours. Your local organ might not be so obvious.) These shutters, called “swell shutters/shades,” show or hide the pipes of the organ. Organs have instantaneous dynamic control—the amount of pressure you put on a key dictates how much air flows through the pipes, just like a piano allows you to adjust dynamics on the fly by changing the amount of pressure with which the hammer hits the string(s) given the pressure on the key. Thes...

One cannot possibly understand the organ looking only at the keyboard(s). If that’s all you see or understand, you’re looking at a funny-sounding piano— and you’d get very, very far playing it like one. But an organ is much, much more than that. And a significant part of what’s missing is hidden far below, where most people never bother to look. There, a secret is hidden: a whole other keyboard to be played with the feet of the organist, which is responsible for so many key concepts in harmonic analysis. Here, we have the first phrase of Bach’s BWV 556— his little Prelude in F, written for organ. Notice the 3 staves bracketed together rather than the typical 2 you’d see for a piano, harpsichord, or almost any other keyboard. The treble staff, as usual, is played by the right hand, and the bass staff in the bracket is played by the left; but there remains a third (bass) staff still unaccounted for. This, indeed, is the pedal staff. At least in the case of the F major prelude, it’s far ...

  We saw yesterday that organs are so difficult to play because of the complexity involved in playing in two dimensions— not just on one keyboard, left to right, but on a stack of keyboards, left to right and up and down. Now, let’s talk about one of the primary reasons one would do that, and explain the origin of a popular expression. Organs are, fundamentally, instruments of polyphony. You play them with both hands and both feet, so they’re begging to have multiple lines moving at the same time. That is very often the case, and composers have known and taken advantage of this for centuries.   Each organ is built by a particular firm for the space in which it’s going to be played, by the particular kinds of people who are going to play it, for the particular things it’s going to be asked to do. Each organ, therefore, is completely unique; my parish’s is completely different from my cathedral’s is completely different from the one at the Episcopalian cathedral a few miles away...

Other than the human voice, no instrument has ever been more important in the music of the Church than the organ. The Church has been incredibly important in the development of the musical tradition we have today, so it stands to reason that the most important instrument in the most important force behind the musical tradition we carry forward each day deserves plenty of attention. That’s my goal over this next series of 4 articles, each one covering a different aspect of the organ. First, I want to discuss why it’s so difficult to play the organ, and why a very good pianist will almost certainly not cross over right away into a very good organist (thought that transition can and certainly does happen— after lots of practice). The piano has 1 keyboard— almost always 88 keys, although there are some models (the Bosendorfer Imperial, for example) that go slightly beyond that. You play with both hands, but at least all you have to do is navigate the placement of 2 hands on a one-dimension...

Baroque music is known for its incredibly technical and ornamented style. The most common and fundamental of those ornaments is our focus today: the trill. Most simply, a trill is a very fast, repeated alternation of two notes. In the vast majority of cases, those notes are adjacent, but that is not a requirement. Given how fast and common they are, regardless of what you play—whether it’s a string, wind, or keyboard instrument, or your voice—they have a reputation for being quite tiring to play. The period matters when considering a trill. Classical and later composers treat trills, in a sense, in the opposite manner than Baroque composers do. Let me show you two examples: First, the Baroque way of thinking. This is a PAC:   and especially in the Baroque era, when the plucked harpsichord dominated over the hammered piano, it was hard to sustain sounds for long since the sound of the plucking decays quickly. The trill was developed in response, out of a need both to ornam...

Now is a great time to discuss a particular accompanimental texture emblematic of the Baroque and Classical era: the Alberti bass. There is, perhaps, no more famous Alberti bass in the popular conscience than the one in the first four bars of the Sonata Facile—a sonata explicitly written to be easy for students, which is undoubtedly one of the first things a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed kid taking their first piano lessons will learn. If you don’t recognize it by that name, or by K545, its catalog number, try looking at the score and singing the treble line; once you hear it, I’m sure you’ll recognize it. (I, for one, heard this sonata for the first time that I can remember, at my maternal grandparents’ house when I was quite young, while watching the movie “Frankie and Hazel”, in a scene during which Frankie is dancing ballet, and her teacher accompanies her on the piano with this sonata.) Let’s look at what happens in these four bars. First, in the right hand, bar 1 is all about ...

  Cantatas, oratorios (effectively, enormous cantatas), and opera have three basic types of movements, categorized by who is singing, about what. The most straightforward out of the material we’ve looked at so far is the “Chor/Chorus” movement—the chorus sings all together in four-part harmony. A fabulous example of this type of writing is the sixth (and far more famous tenth) movement of BWV 147, the cantata movement made wildly popular by pianist Myra Hess’s transcription as “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Notice how the voices move together (there’s a term for this, and we’ll cover it very soon), and it’s relatively easy for anyone to sing (in this particular case, though not always), so it’s theoretically possible for the congregation to join in if they have the lyrics and/or the melody. These “chorus” movements are generally prayers—movement 6 begins (translated into English) “What joy for me that I have Jesus, oh how firmly I hold on to him,” and movement 10 (the more famous on...

We still have, play, and deeply treasure, Italian violins from 350-400 years ago. But a few articles ago, I mentioned that a G 6 —a G 4 is on the second line of the treble clef; a G 5 is on the space above the fifth line, and a G 6 is an octave above that— was the highest note Bach ever wrote for the violin, and possibly, for any instrument.                Violins of his time—when Guarnerii and Stradivarii were basically new—had significantly shorter fingerboards than modern ones do. Pushing down the string to the fingerboard in a particular place, and then dragging a bow across the string or plucking it is how a violin makes its sound. It is theoretically possible, but much more difficult (and may cause hand pain, damage, or in some cases even be outright impossible) to play notes with actual pressure beyond where the fingerboard ends.              ...

  Especially concerning Baroque music, there’s a trend to be “historically informed”—that is, to play the music with the tempo, tunings, and instruments that would have existed at the time, rather than with their modern equivalents: catgut (actually sheep intestine—nothing to do with cats) strings rather than steel, bows that curve outward rather than inward, tuned a half step flat, without vibrato, faster, and with smaller ensembles. But there’s another key difference, and the best way to show it is with a video recording. First, here’s the (historically-informed) Netherlands Bach Society: Bach - Jauchzet, frohlocket! from Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 - Sato | Netherlands Bach Society Compare that with the (modern) WDR Sinfonieorchester: Bach - Jauchzet, frohlocket (Christmas Oratorio) | WDR Rundfunkchor | WDR Sinfonieorchester - YouTube Specifically, look at these 2 frames: NBS: WDR: The clearest difference between these two images is the subject of this article: th...

The overtone series is a key musico-mathematical concept. The way I’ll explain it will largely be in terms of string lengths because I’ve been around string instruments for 20 years, but the math translates exactly to columns of air and their lengths, for wind players. Imagine you have a string that vibrates at 196 Hz—the G below middle C, the lowest violin string. If you barely touch your finger to the string at exactly the point that cuts its length in half, and then you play that note, you’ll get a note that sounds exactly 394 Hz—exactly double, or exactly an octave higher. This is the “first harmonic” of that string. (The “zeroeth” harmonic is the fundamental frequency of the string when played completely open, in other words, the original 196.) Following a series of completely-reduced (i.e., 1/2, not 2/4 or 3/6) ratios, it is possible to build the next several harmonics—the second, third, fourth, etc. ·        The fundamental ·   ...

The Mass is the central act of worship of the Catholic Church. As we’ve seen in our historical overview, even at that level of detail, it’s clear how influential the Church was in setting up the musical traditions we have: chant, polyphony, cantatas, and so on—and, of course, many hugely influential composers have been priests (most famously Vivaldi). It's no wonder, then, that so many composers, even those who haven’t been Catholic, have written “settings of the Mass.” Having written one myself, and working on 2 more at the moment, let me briefly explain what that means. There are certain parts of the Mass where there is no flexibility—no room for options, and nothing based on a calendar(* with some very minor, specific exceptions). Every Mass, for example, has some sort of penitential rite, wherein the congregation ask God for forgiveness and mercy, right at the beginning of the liturgy, “so that we might worthily celebrate the sacred mysteries.” After that, every Mass not...

  The 6/4 is much more restricted than the 6, or the completely free root position chord because it creates an instability. Several articles ago, I mentioned that the perfect fourth can be a dissonance in certain situations against the bass, in that it wants to resolve by falling a half step into a major third, despite the fact that, classically, perfect fourths are consonant since they’re perfect. The 6/4 therefore, as Dr. Perry Holbrook (my high school orchestra director and theory teacher) put it, requires a special license before you can use it, and that license will be granted on a case-by-case basis in only one of 3 situations. 1.        A passing 6/4 is allowed as long as no other rules are broken by including it, and as long as there is movement into and out of it by chords that aren’t 6/4, and the movement out of it resolves anything that needs to be resolved correctly 2.        A pedal 6/4 is allowed as lon...

  This is the opening phrase of the “Laudamus te” (“We praise you”) from the Gloria of the B minor Mass. It’s the third movement of the Gloria, written for solo violin “obligato” (which means you absolutely must use a solo violin and not replace it, e.g., if your violinist is sick, or you can’t hire one, or their violin is at the luthier, or some other bad thing happened) with a similarly-ranged instrument, a soprano, and continuo:     I found a MuseScore file online, and I’ve kept just the melody and the continuo parts because I want to show you something: Can you see how many times the “6” figured bass indication appears? In the Baroque era, there were many uses of the 6 chord—not to be confused with vi, or with a chord with an added sixth (the former being the relative minor, and the latter being a triad which has added a sixth above its root, in effect turning itself into an inverted seventh chord), and looking at so many “6”s in a row made me think it would be the...

  There are two distinct approaches to the number of notes per syllable when setting text to music. We can see both in a hymn particularly common at Christmastime (during which this article was written). First, we have the easier “syllabic” way of writing. Here, each syllable maps onto notes one-to-one, or very nearly so. Notice there are no slurs. In vocal writing, slurs mean that, essentially, you should breathe and open your mouth only once, for the whole duration of the slur. Without them, you can simply breathe wherever feels natural—and you aren’t kept from singing something if you don’t have the lung capacity of a professional. However, this same hymn also includes one of the most famous examples of the other kind of writing—melisma. Melisma happens when the mapping of notes to syllables is many-to-one. In fact, the number of notes in one syllable is so large that, at least in the Catholic millennial/Gen Z corner of the internet, there’s a meme that circulates around Chr...

A number of dance styles, mostly from France, but one from Spain, were very popular in the Baroque era, but almost all fell out of use as soon as it ended. These styles were often grouped together into collections. Johann Sebastian Bach was a particularly prolific writer of these collections, including: 1.        BWV 806 through 811 for solo harpsichord or solo clavichord 2.        BWV 812 through 816 for solo harpsichord or solo clavichord 3.        BWV 825 through 830 for solo harpsichord or solo clavichord 4.        BWV 1001 through 1006 for solo violin 5.        BWV 1007 through 1012 for solo cello The last two collections—the six sonatas and partitas for my own violin, and the six cello suites—are such monumental works that each of BWV 1001 through 1012 will get its own article, if not multiple articles for each, in the ...

  There are certain places in the Mass where the rubrics (red text that says basically “be in place X doing thing Y in posture Z with person A helping you out in manner B”, from which we get the term for “grading standards provided to a student along with an assignment) say, especially in the case of a particularly solemn liturgy, “and then the Priest, or the Deacon, or if none are present, the Cantor, intones the [something]”. This could be, for example, the priest singing alone “Gloria in excelsis Deo” which, in a sense, gives the choir permission to start singing the Gloria, and so on. Once I’ve laid a complete enough theoretical foundation, these articles will switch to discussions, or listening guides, more than instructional material teaching basic theory. And when that day comes, there’ll be more material written here about the Mass in B minor than you could ever imagine. But for now, I want to use the first movement of the Credo (the Nicene Creed, in English, “I believe in...