MusicTheoryWithAndre

 Today, we celebrate the 341st birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the greatest musical minds ever known to history. (You may have seen birthday celebrations 10 days ago on the 21st but those are due to the “Old Style” date—the date on the Julian Calendar—and not the current “New Style” Gregorian date. Other figures of the time also may have birth and/or death dates recorded in both “Old” and “New” styles, depending on when their countries switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian.) Bach was born to a family with a long history of deep involvement in music, going back to his great-great-grandfather, a baker who had been born in what is now Slovakia. That baker, a Protestant, fleeing Catholic persecution, moved into what is now the modern state of Thuringia in Germany, where, about 300 years after the birth of the Protestant baker, arguably the greatest musician ever would be born into what was by then already an established musical family. Bach received his early mus...

 The Sarabande is another form traditionally included in suites, but this time, it comes not from France as most others have, but from Moorish Spain (possibly from the Spanish colonial presence in the Americas, that went back to Europe by the Columbian Exchange, even). As I mentioned in a previous post, I, in a very real way, owe a lot to Mendelssohn for his revival of Bach. That, too, precipitated a rise in interest in even earlier music, including what was certainly the first dance I ever heard after I was born—this is the second track on one of the classical CDs the maternity ward gave my parents (as was typical in US hospitals around the time I was born), and I still listen to the collection to this day, 25 years later.  The actual act of dancing the Sarabande (“Carabanda” or “Zarabanda” in older Spanish—“Sarabande” is what you get when you put that name through French) was supposedly so full of immodest, overt sexual innuendo that the authorities of the Inquisition banned...

 Another of the dances that frequently appears in suites (more so in the cello suites than in the sonatas and partitas) is the “courante” (also known by its Italian name, the “corrente”). In either case, the name of this dance is the language’s word for “running.” (The Italian style is more common in Bach’s work.) The French style, though fast, isn’t as fast or relentless as the Italian style. The Italian style, meanwhile, is usually a fast flurry of notes in 3 (3/4 or 3/8) that is so fast it often makes the most sense to feel it in 1 rather than 3.  Here are a few examples: 1. From the G major suite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZB5okGllIU&list=RDjZB5okGllIU&start_radio=1 2. From the C major suite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM9_Xfi8Jjo&list=RDZM9_Xfi8Jjo&start_radio=1 3. From the E-flat major suite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdNzOkSsGf4&list=RDHdNzOkSsGf4&start_radio=1   4. From the D major suite: https://www.youtube.com/w...

Today’s form the loure, is quite rare—I only know of one, so I apologize in advance for the lack of variety in the sample recordings—but is deeply connected to yesterday’s gigue. In fact, it’s a subtype of gigue: every loure is a gigue, but not every gigue is a loure. (For this reason, you might also hear people refer to the “gigue lent”—the “slow gigue”. These forms are equivalent.)  The main difference between the gigue and the loure is the tempo of the loure, which is much slower than its parent form is by default. As a consequence of this, while most gigues are written in 6/8 felt in 2, most loures are written in 6/4 and can be slow enough to be felt in 6. (At a certain point, something in 6 gets so slow that you can’t feel it in 2 anymore, and you have to go through the individual sub-beats.) Here is Itzhak Perlman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTU5aUlCGl4&list=RDTTU5aUlCGl4&start_radio=1   Here is Augustin Hadelich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44MgDcg7GNY...

 Today, let’s cover a dance form that has two names—one if it’s Irish and another if it’s French. Today’s subject is, of course, the “gigue/jig.” Whatever you call it, a gigue is a fast dance in compound time (i.e., the top number of its time signature has at least one 3 among its factors, so 3, 6, 9, or 12—but overwhelmingly 6) with a very particular characteristic of the dotted quarter beat unit: 2:1, or “quarter, eighth.” Here is a variety of gigues for your listening pleasure—in some of these, the 2:1 rhythm is obviously everywhere, and in others, it can sometimes be harder to find, so use this as a an exercise to find it in all of them: 1. First, one by Francisco Maria Veracini (found in the Suzuki repertoire): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlA9m29Uszs&list=RDnlA9m29Uszs&start_radio=1 2. Next, one by Handel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J9PTqyrNKY&list=RD6J9PTqyrNKY&start_radio=1 3. Every single Cello Suite ends with a gigue, so here’s the one from ...

A musette is a type that often occurs inside a Gavotte, but isn’t really it’s own properly distinct form. The key that makes a musette a musette (“musette” after all is French for “bagpipe”—this, truly, I have always know  since I started working on a musette for the first time [the only time, actually], just a few months after learning my first Gavotte.) is that it always has a drone/pedal line in the accompaniment, just like real bagpipes do.  In fact, many years ago, I remember working on this Musette with Laura in a group setting, through which we’d all take turns either playing the melody or playing the pedal point while she played the prescribed teacher (on the violin)/pianist accompaniment.  Look at the score here, beginning at 14:30:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOhVgN_0a8o&list=RDGOhVgN_0a8o&start_radio=1 Notice the G pedal all the way through the section labeled “Gavotte II” (this is what makes Gavotte II the musette).  Here’s the Suzuki re...

 Next, let’s look at a “gavotte,” another type of dance. Full disclosure, I was 9 when I learned Gossec’s Gavotte (which will be one of our samples), and it took until when this article was written, now that I’m 25, to find out that “gaivotte” and words from Romance languages like “gaivota/gaviota” meaning “seagull” in Portuguese and Spanish are false cognates, and that the following 2 things are true: (1) the name of the dance comes from the name of the Provencal groups of France (where it originated) for themselves and (2) “seagull” in French is “mouette,” so the name of the bird and dance have absolutely nothing to do with one another.  There are a few key characteristics of the gavotte: It’s written in 2 or 4 but felt in 2. If there’s a pickup of some sort, it’s half a bar. It’s a dance—and this character can never be forgotten. It moves well but never rushes.   Let’s now look at a few Gavottes: First, a few recordings of the aforementioned Gavotte by FJ Gossec, ...

 As promised, this next dance form is one in which, unlike most other dances, the stress in the bar is not on the first beat (by default the strongest), but, out of 3, on the second. There is one example of this form that is so well known that, when you mention the form, almost anyone immediately associates it with this particular example. I am, of course, referring to the Chaconne (also called a “Ciaconna”—the only difference is French vs. Italian nomenclature), the “type specimen,” if you will, of course being the one in Bach’s D minor violin partita.  The stress on the second beat is not the only defining characteristic. Another, just as important, is that a chaconne is made up of many harmonic cells strung together, where each cell is a chord progression of constant length. Chaconnes, therefore, are defined just as much, if not more, by their basslines as they are by their melodies.  Bach’s Chaconne BWV 1004, has 64 of these cells, 4 bars each, for 256 total bars. Our...

Now that we’re pivoting our discussion of form into dances, I needed to look no further than my own Suzuki roots when deciding how to go about this. Paying homage to the early days, we’ll start with the minuet, a French courtly dance. I don’t know why, but these dances were extraordinarily popular in the Baroque periods, then slightly less so in the Classical, and they completely fell off the map in the Romantic.  These dances were usually at quite moderate tempi, and the strongest beat was always the first. (Believe it or not, there were several forms for which this was not the case—we’ll cover one such case next.) Structurally, they were almost always in rounded binary with repeats. (That last fact, the presence of the repeats, I contend, is the single most contributing factor to my stage fright which arose from a studio recital mishap in 2009 and persists to this day.)  Let’s now go on a tour of some significant minuets in my life: 1. From the G minor French Suite (which ...

Just yesterday (relative to when this was written), I had the immense pleasure and honor of hearing—live for the first time—the Mass in B minor. (Of course, I mean Bach’s Mass in B minor BWV 232, but to say “the Mass in B minor” without further qualification is to always  mean Bach’s, just as to say “the Ninth” without further qualification is to always mean Beethoven’s.) And as I sat in the front row watching, listening, and thinking, and the idea for this article came to mind. Basically, why did Bach break up 5 movements into almost 30 in the B minor Mass to create something of a grandeur and scale never seen until then?  The answer lies in the old story of the “doctrine of affections”—basically, the idea that artistic works should convey only one emotion, or they’ll get too chaotic because only one emotion can ever really come through.  This is especially evident in the Credo: “Credo in unum Deum” and “Patrem omnipotentem” have, among their “affects”, the fact that the...

 Let’s continue our discussion of form with a very popular nursery rhyme: Frere Jacques. Frere Jacques is (well, can be, and very often is) an example of what’s called a “round.” Rounds are the simplest form of imitation. They are a special case of another imitative form called a “canon,” which we’ll discuss later.  Listen first to a purely monophonic Frere Jacques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC6rvbxdywg&list=RDBC6rvbxdywg&start_radio=1 The idea is very clearly in 4:  1 2 3 1 | 1 2 3 1 | 3 4 5 ~ | 3 4 5 | etc.  (Here, I’m borrowing a notation from Laura from before I could read music; ~ turns the preceding number into a half note: quarter quarter quarter quarter | quarter quarter quarter quarter | quarter quarter half | quarter quarter half | etc.) So, what happens if you, very simply, start another 1 2 3 1… halfway through that four bar phrase I just put above, like  1 2 3 1 | 1 2 3 1 | 3 4 5 ~ | 3 4 5 ~ | etc           ...

 Two articles ago, we looked at functional harmony; the idea that certain chords that aren’t necessarily the tonic or dominant can “act” as if they were, and that certain chords are “pre-dominant,” that is, they exist to come before—to “prepare” the dominant. Last time, we looked at tonicization specifically looking at a harmonization of Jakob Hintze’s “Salzburg” hymn tune (used in English-language hymnody most often with “At the Lamb’s High Feast We Sing”) by Bach, in his chorale BWV 262 “Alle Menschen müssen sterben.” Today, we’re going to look at something very closely related to both of those concepts, so be sure to read the articles mentioned above—in order—before continuing on with this one. We’re going to look at secondary harmony.  Go back to the Hintze score, and you’ll see, in clear-as-day D major, that, briefly, there is an E major chord. That, of course, doesn’t happen diatonically in D, since the ii chord is minor. E-G-B, of course, is different from E-G#-B. But b...

  Suppose you didn’t have the context of the rest of this hymn tune, and I gave you only the first two bars of the second line and asked you to identify which key it’s in. You would be totally correct if you analyzed the first 2 chords as I chords which move to a IV, which moves to a I while an F# from the IV hangs around a little later than it should, before actually moving back to IV, then to V, then to I, in the first two bars of that line. If that were your analysis—and it would be absolutely correct—then you’d essentially be arguing that the phrase is in A. After all, that’s the key in which I is A, IV is D, and V is E.  Allow me to put out what perhaps seems like a radical idea: even if I then show you the whole context, the analysis above remains absolutely correct. Each 2 bars is effectively one musical gesture here, and in the first 2 sets (that get repeated), everything is firmly grounded in D; this is, of course, nothing to write home about, since everthing else abo...

When this blog began, we introduced a quite rigid harmonic scheme rather soon. I was tonic, ii was supertonic, iii was submediant, and so on. V goes to I or vi. iii goes to vi goes to ii goes to V.

Now, I’m here to tell you that, in some cases, these rules may be bent slightly. Chords, of course, have a name, a number, and a quality, but, lying underneath that, they all have a function as well. 

 • I of course has “tonic function,” since it’s the tonic chord—but so does vi, since it’s the tonic of the relative minor • V of course has “dominant function,” since it’s the dominant chord, but so does viiº, since it’s exactly equivalent to the top 3 notes of a V7 • ii and IV have “pre-dominant function.”  • iii appears very rarely, and, depending on the circumstances, can have arguably either tonic or dominant function, exercising both of those much more weakly than the chords listed in the dedicated bullet points for those functions  What matters in functional harmony is...

One of the most important forms we have yet to discuss is also, at least in terms of its description, one of the most basic: theme and variations. That is, follow a 3 step process: 1. Play a thing 2. Change it somehow 3. Keep doing step 2 as long as you feel like it Theme and Variations can vary wildly in complexity. At one end of the spectrum we have the first work in the first of 10 Suzuki volumes: five (when I was growing up—but now six) purely rhythmic variations plus plain old nursery rhyme, sing-it-to-your-babies Twinkle Twinkle.  • Variation A gets students started thinking about detache versus staccato • Variation B introduces rests • Variation C works on bow distribution from tip to frog and vice versa • Variation D (since apparently relabeled “E”) works on right-hand flexibility  • Variation E (apparently actually “D” thanks to the relabeling) introduces triplets and/or counting in 6/8  • The theme is just straight, quarter-quarter-quarter-quar...

Cumulative music is a form that I rarely hear discussions about—except in one instance: “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. The premise of the song is that one’s true love gives them, from Christmas until the Epiphany: 1.        A partridge and a pear tree 2.        Yesterday’s gifts (another partridge) plus 2 turtle doves 3.        Yesterday's gifts (another partridge and 2 more doves) plus 3 French hens 4.        Yesterday’s gifts plus four (calling/colly—there is debate about this word) birds 5.        Yesterday’s gifts plus five golden rings 6.        Yesterday’s gifts plus six geese actively laying eggs 7.        Yesterday’s gifts plus seven swans actively swimming 8.        Yesterday’s gifts plus eight maids actively milking cows ...

The next form I want to talk about is the overture. This isn’t a “form” per se, but it’s an important-enough fixture in a whole host of different musical applications that it merits a discussion now. I want to start out with this recording of the Impresario Overture (the overture to “the Impresario”—a Mozart opera about opera; the singers, stage crew, opera house management, composer, public, and so on, and the vanity of the performers); I played the overture in high school, so I chose it (rather than the overture to something far more famous—Don Giovanni, the Magic Flute, etc.) both for that reason and to give it its due time in the spotlight alongside the heavyweights. MOZART : Impresario Overture K.486 (SLOVAK SINFORNIETTA ORCHESTRA) - YouTube Concerts in Mozart’s day were far more raucous affairs than they are today (a close comparison might be, for example, a modern Taylor Swift concert—full of in-venue eating and drinking, laughing, talking, and many other things that are tak...

Militaries have been around for quite some time, and with them, especially in the last few centuries, a distinctly military musical tradition has arisen. By far the most important form to have come out of that tradition is the march, written in   since we have two feet, and marching is a walking process that involves both of them in alternating sequence. Other than the near universality of the use of    for the reason stated above (  is used, but very rarely, and other time signatures are nearly unheard of), there are very few restrictions on what a march can be. It’s best that I show you a few examples of marches; as you listen, pay close attention to how duple they feel, and imagine yourself literally marching—or, better yet, get up and actually walk around, matching your pacing to the tempo. ·        Mozart Piano Sonata No 11 A major K 331 Barenboim - YouTube —this was written by Mozart to mimic the musical tradition of the Janiss...

If you look at scores of Baroque works in minor, you may notice something curious: they are sometimes notated as if they were in the dominant key of where they are actually written. (I first noticed this—and wanted to figure out the reason—years ago, when, as soon as I graduated from high school, I got a book with the scores for BWV 1001-1006 and BWV 1014-1019, and I started deeply studying some of these works I had never heard before (BWV 1014-1019, at the time) or (I’m now embarrassed to say) hadn’t given nearly as much listening attention as I should have (BWV 1001-1006). My first exposure to BWV 1001 was many years earlier at a studio recital; I think it was the first one that I remember during which Laura played something herself (she would go on to play with her son(s), brother, and the parents of fellow students, nearly every other recital thereafter), when she played the Adagio for us. Laura, I don’t know if you know this blog exists, but if you do and you’re seeing this, I’m m...

   The recording above is of a special (Baroque) type of concerto, and, in fact, was the first one I ever listened to as I was brought home as a newborn. The Adagio that begins around 5:38 in this recording has been with me literally 99.98% of of my life at this point, so it’s safe to say I know it quite well! What makes this (and so many other concerti by Arcangelo Corelli— the teacher of Antonio Vivaldi, by the way) a “concerto grosso” is the way in which it is written, made clearest by the visualization of the score. There are, in effect, two orchestras, not one. There is a small one “di concertino”, who are the group at the top of the score. Accompanying them— often passing the melody back and forth—is the larger group “di ripieno” (the “full” group) which most of the time also includes everyone in the smaller group. Listen to (and watch) this performance carefully several times, both with and without the score as a visual aid. The Christmas Concerto is particularly contr...