Prof: Okay.
Good morning,
ladies and gentlemen. My name is Craig Wright and
this is "Listening to Music," the most basic
course that the Department of Music has to offer.
Its aim is to teach you how to
listen to music. "Wait a minute,"
you say. "That's preposterous.
I listen to music all the time.
I've got, what,
my iPod, I'm downloading mp3 files, continually swapping
files. I've got my car..."
(What do we call those things
in the automobile where you-- Is it a DAT tape that you can
take your iPod and plug it in to the--
your--the stereo system in your car?)
"I've got that.
I listen to music in my dorm
room off my computer, in the bookstore,
wherever. I bet I listen to a lot more
music than you do, you old goat."
And you're right.
You probably do.
But what kind of music are you
listening to? Well, probably pop music and
that's fine; that's okay,
fair enough, pop music.
But are you getting the most
out of this particular experience?
Are you getting the most out of
your listening experience? I contend that perhaps you are
not, that you are not maximizing the time, using that time most
profitably. How do I know this?
What makes me think that you
are not getting as much as you possibly can out of your music?
Well, experience,
to some degree, but also an experiment that I
did just last weekend. I have four children.
The last of the four has now
turned seventeen so I said last weekend--
he's always with the iPod on--"Chris,
what are you listening to?" "Go away.
You're bothering me." Okay.
"You're ruining my life
again." So >
"Well now,
come on. Let me listen to this.
Let me listen to it.
What are you listening to?"
So I listened to it and I said,
"All right. Here, you listen to this and
tell me what you're hearing."
And what did--what was he
tracking? He was tracking the text;
he was tracking the beat of the piece.
I asked him,
"Well, what's the mode of the piece?
What's the meter of the piece?
What's the bass doing?
Can you follow the bass line
there? Can you identify any chords in
this particular piece?" Nothing. Zero.
And this from a reasonably
sophisticated kid who's had twelve years of serious cello
lessons, and that brings up,
I suppose, a point: that although I don't know much
about your music I think I can teach you a great deal about
your music by using the paradigms of classical music.
So I'm going to tell you a lot
about classical music in here: Mozart, Bach,
Beethoven. It will be the locus of our
course. How many of you already listen
to classical music? Raise your hand.
Okay. Great.
A lot of you and that's
wonderful. I'd be interested to know,
gentleman down here, how do you do this?
Is it streaming off of your
computer? Are you downloading mp3 files
and saving them? How--Tell me. How do you do it?
Student: I just go to
YouTube. Prof: You go to YouTube.
All right.
Very interesting.
I should have known that but I
didn't. You go to YouTube and you
listen there. Anybody else do it a different
way? Yes?
Student: On the radio.
Prof: On the radio. Okay.
That's interesting.
We'll come back to that point.
Anything else, anybody?
Yes?
Student: My parents' CDs
or records. Prof: Okay.
Your parents' CDs or records.
That's wonderful.
They have sort of the old
technology here but some of those old recordings might be
very, very good. Now here is a question for you.
Why would we want to listen to
classical music? Why do--why--who just answered
a question for me, those folks who raised your
hand? What--gentleman here again.
I'll--you're my sacrificial
lamb this morning. Why do you like to listen and
why would you want to listen to classical music?
Student: It relaxes me.
Prof: Okay.
Very interesting.
National Public Radio asked
exactly this question in a survey a year or so ago and they
got the following principal responses back.
Why do people listen to
classical music? One, it helps them relax and
relieve stress, so this is perhaps the
principal reason. Two, it helps us center the
mind, allowing the listener to concentrate.
Three, classical music provides
a vision of a better world, a refuge of beauty,
of majesty, perhaps of even-- of love--and sometimes,
at least for me personally, it suggests that there might be
something out there, God or whatever,
bigger than ourselves, and it asks us to think
sometimes, think about things. That's what I think these great
fine arts do, great literature,
poetry, painting, music.
They show what human beings can
be, the capacity of the human spirit.
They suggest to us as indicated
maybe there is something, a larger spirit out there than
ourselves, and they get us to think.
They get me to think frequently
about what I'm doing on this earth.
What are you doing on this
earth? >
Don't answer that.
What am I doing on this earth
with regard to this particular course?
What am I trying to accomplish
in here? Well, maybe two things.
One, change your personality.
I want to make you a richer
person, a broader person,
by instilling you with an unending deep and abiding
understanding of classical music,
so that's part of this, and not just here for Yale but
for your life after Yale. I would hope that how you lead
your life ten years from now, twenty years from now,
thirty years from now, would have been significantly
influenced by this particular experience in this course.
And secondly,
if I'm successful in my teaching I will accomplish this
second aim here. I will impart to you a love of
classical music. You, through,
later on after Yale, your attendance at concerts,
buying of one fashion or another,
downloading mp3 files, iTunes or whatever it happens
to be, maybe being members of your
local symphony board, opera company,
something like that, maybe giving music lessons to
your children, you will become the purveyors
of classical music thereafter. You, the intelligentsia of the
next generation, will be those that preserve
this great treasure of Western culture and it is a great
treasure of Western culture. Okay.
How are we going to do all of
this? How are we going to accomplish
these two things on our list of agenda here?
What are the mechanics of the
course? Did you all get a syllabus?
Everybody's got a syllabus?
The first three or four weeks
or so we'll be following the elements of music:
rhythm, melody and harmony--and then a test.
Next we will deal with what's
the--arguably--the single most important thing when we listen
to any piece of music and that is its musical form.
Here is a question for you.
I was thinking about this the
other day as I was preparing the lecture for today.
What's the most common type of
musical form in pop music? When you listen to pop music do
you ever think about the form of the music?
Can anybody name a form of pop
music, any one form? Well, maybe verse and chorus?
Think about that.
That shows up in a lot of stuff
and we'll come back to that. We'll talk about verse and
chorus when we get to the issue of form.
And then toward the end of the
course we will turn to the question of musical style.
How does a piece of pop music
differ from a piece of classical music?
We sort of all know this
intuitively but can we articulate why?
This particular difference
about musical style was driven home to me the other day.
It was last Friday.
I was walking across the
campus--maybe you saw this too, corner of Elm and College.
There was a large flatbed truck
out there and there were these people on this truck getting
you-- trying to sell you audio
equipment, and they had a big banner up
there. It said "Pump Up Your
Room." Okay?
So then to encourage you to
"pump up your room" they had music playing and this
is the kind of music that they had on that flatbed truck.
>
Okay.
I'm feeling very pumped up at
that particular point >
and my cell phone rings.
Okay. My--This is true.
My cell phone rings and because
one has the capacity nowadays to select your own ring
tone--right? I have mine selected not to
that sound but to Mozart, so I hear this sound on my
telephone.
And it will give us a sense of
the difference in style between pop music and classical music.
How does this,
what we're about to hear, differ?
Can you give me,
say, three or four reasons why what we're about to hear differs
from what we just heard? >
Mozart.
>
Can anyone tell me?
What's the difference between
these two? What's the--what did the pop
piece have? That's Rave 'Til Dawn.
That's my--I own that album,
I'll have you know, Rave 'Til Dawn.
Gentleman back here.
Student: In classical
music there's much more attention to detail.
Prof: Yes,
that's probably true as a general observation,
whether it comes through clearly on these two--
this comparison--I'm not quite so sure,
but there--I wouldn't say there's a great deal of detail
in the first one. There's a lot of repetition.
That's where I--once that gets
going, it goes for a long period of time.
Anything else?
Yes?
Student: A melody?
Prof: Oh,
melody. Which one had the melody?
Student: The classical
music. Prof: Yeah.
>
The first I couldn't pick out
any melody at all. It was all what?
Rhythm and beat.
Okay?
So repetitious,
rhythm, beats, strong pulsation to it.
What was making that sound?
What were the instruments
playing in the-- Student: Violins.
Prof: Okay,
in the Mozart there were violins, so acoustical
instruments as opposed to synthetic sound with regard to
the pop music. So what we will be doing is
differentiating pop from classical and also
differentiating within styles of classical music.
You're driving down the road,
you ... who is the FM listener?
Over there ...
You turn on your radio,
your car radio, to your FM classical music
station and what number approximately would you go to?
Student: In New Haven?
Prof: Yeah,
okay, or anywhere, your hometown,
but just-- Student: All right. 98.7.
Prof: Okay. 98.
That's pretty high.
What town is that?
Do you know?
Student: Chicago.
Prof: Oh, that's Chicago.
Well, they're Elevated people
in Chicago I'm sure. >
Normally, where you go is all
the way down in the low numbers. Particularly,
here in Connecticut it's 89.5,90.1,90.5.
My favorite is 91.5 (WMRN).
Generally speaking,
when you want to find classical music you go to the left of your
FM dial and fish around down there in your National Public
Radio. Okay?
So that's how we do it,
but you got your car radio going.
The music comes on.
Is it baroque or romantic?
Is it medieval or modern?
Is it Bach or is it Beethoven?
Well, those sorts of answers,
those sorts of issues, are the sorts of things that
we'll get to when we come to the question of musical style toward
the end of the course. Okay.
Materials.
Textbook.
Here is the textbook.
It is my own textbook,
Listening to Music, now in the fifth edition.
I'm very proud of it.
Actually, it's used all across
the United States and used across the world,
about to come out in a Chinese edition for heaven's sakes.
What was it?
It was simply my lecture notes
from this particular course that I've been teaching here for a
long time. I had these lecture notes;
I had all of these listening exercises;
I basically just put it in a textbook.
So this is all material for
Yale students, Yale--material designed here at
Yale for Yale students. At the back of the book--I
think I took mine out but at the back of the book you will see
wrapped with it an intro CD, introductory CD.
You might be interested to know
that a lot of the material there actually recorded by Yale
undergraduates. We paid them for it.
We paid people across the
street at the School of Music but this again is kind of native
local Yale produce here. So we have to--We get the
textbook and then with the textbook we recommend getting
access to this six-CD set. This material will be necessary
to do the listening exercises for the course,
which is sort of the backbone of the course.
There are a couple of copies of
this on reserve in the music library and you can go over
there inside of Sterling Memorial Library and do the
listening there if you want, but one way or another you've
got to get a hold of this. If you decide to buy it,
it has one particular virtue and that is you end up with an
excellent library of classical music that will last you for a
lifetime. Years after the fact,
I get e-mail from--e-mails from students.
Nowadays they usually begin,
"Hey, Professor" or "Yo,
Professor," something like this.
"I lost CD four to my
six-CD set. Can you get me a
replacement?" Yes, I can, and I do send them
a replacement, not too hard to do,
send them a replacement. So if you get the CD set,
not only do you get a wonderful beginning library of classical
music but in effect you get a lifetime service contract with
it. >
Okay.
Requirements.
You can see this on the sheets
too. You've got a couple of tests
here. We have to write a short music
paper. We're all going to go to a
concert. I think this year we're going
to go hear the Saybrook Youth Orchestra.
And I put on the sheet this
year--I think I'm going to try to count five percent for class
participation. We will be taking attendance in
the lecture. Yeah, I know. It's babyish.
I'm sorry, but I take this very
seriously. I really do.
It's my lifeblood and I want
you to take this seriously too. I want you to come to class.
I want you to come to lectures,
so we have the two lectures each week that you'll come to.
Sections are also mandatory.
We have three wonderful
specially selected TAs in here. I'll introduce you to them next
time. So come to two lectures,
one section, and do the work regularly.
Now, sections.
They start on Thursday and go
through a Monday cycle. They do not start tonight.
They start next Thursday in the
cycle. You can go online and sign up
there but you're still shopping so we're not starting sections
tonight. You may not--may or may not be
taking this course. Do the assignments,
these listening exercises, on time.
Music is an aurally perceived
phenomenon. You can't cram information
about music, the sound of music,
into your head the night before a test the way you might be able
to in an English course or a history course.
The way we hear music,
the way our mind processes music,
is very, very different from this other kind of information,
very different from history or economics.
To make this point,
let me see if we can get my helper here,
technical person, to bring up a slide for me,
and my question to you is--as this slide comes up--
is the following: where in the brain is music
processed primarily? Where do we process--Anybody
know the answer to that? Anybody who take psychology
courses, neurobiological courses?
Yes, young lady out here.
Do you have a sense of that?
Student: I think it's
the left side-- Prof: The left side of
the brain. That sounds like,
well, maybe the old creativity theory.
Could we--And that's possible.
In a way it's correct.
Anything more specific?
All right. Here's our brain.
We took this off of the
internet. All right?
That's why it's all in French,
because it's not copyrighted, and we have to be careful with
that in here with these camera rolling--cameras rolling.
So we have the tronc
cérébral down there.
It just means the brainstem and
the cerebellum and then the temporal lobe,
the frontal lobe, the parietal and the occipital
lobes. Now where is music and language
processed? Anybody?
And there is--Is somebody
raising their hand? Student: Well,
the temporal lobe is where your hearing occurs.
Prof: Yes,
the temporal lobe is where your hearing goes on.
It doesn't matter whether
you're hearing language or whether you're hearing music.
This sort of processing happens
in the primary auditory cortex, both left and right,
of the temporal lobe. Let's say I had to remember to
play something at the keyboard. Well, there I might be
factoring in the frontal lobe because much of the short-term
memory in particular is in the frontal lobe.
Let's say I went to play a
piece <<music playing>>
Now I didn't think about that.
Actually, a minute ago I didn't
even know what I was going to play but I remember that.
Am I thinking back there,
"Well, it starts in C and that's got an E up there and
it's got a G"? No.
It's like athletes.
It's muscle memory.
You do that eight billion times
in your life and you can hit a good top spin backhand.
It's muscle memory and that
happens in the--that's mostly in the parietal lobe.
Here I've got to scroll up here
if I'm looking and then I've got the visual cortex engaged.
So doing music,
if I'm sight reading, playing, it's a very complex
thing, but most of the--most of this
music and language processing happens in these--
the--as I mentioned--the left and right auditory cortex.
Therefore--Where am I going
with all this? Therefore, the pedagogical
techniques that we use in teaching "Listening to
Music" are virtually identical to those that we use
in teaching language. There is a great deal of
similarity here because it's just processing sound.
This was a point--I was
listening to some National Public Radio thing the other
day-- and listening to something that
had a psychologist talking about the correlation between sound
and music, and he said it was something
about-- he said music is sometimes very
strange, sometimes very strange,
sometimes very strange, >
, and that sort of brought home
to me the text is irrelevant, the idea that music really is
sound and that language is just sound.
There's a very thin line
between the two and we therefore use the same pedagogical methods
in the sense that we've got to do the following.
If you ever read the course
descriptions of French 115 or Chinese language,
basic intro to Chinese, they say--I think I wrote it
down here, this process of gradual
assimilation. Yes.
Daily participation in language
labs required. So daily is the key thing here.
You've got to do this gradual
assimilation. So learning to listen to music
is just like listening to language.
We've got to do a little bit
every day. You've got to turn in these
listening exercises in a regular fashion and come to class.
This is a beginning course.
I assume that you know nothing,
starting from ground zero here and build it up.
All right.
I've talked--I've droned on
here. Let me ask you if you have
questions about the course in general and do you have
questions of me at this point?
Yes, the gentleman in the back.
Student: What are the
formats of the tests? Prof: The formats of the
tests will be very clearly laid out for you.
There'll be a little bit of
written work. There'll be a fair amount of
listening. You will be given a list of
pieces that you'll have to prepare for a little bit and
then we will play out of those particular pieces,
but most importantly, I will give you a prep sheet.
Each test comes in advance with
a prep sheet telling you how to get ready for that particular
test. Good question though.
Thank you.
Anything else?
Okay.
If not, let's go on to the
following. We're going to have a
diagnostic quiz and you are taking a quiz the first day.
Now that's on the back of your
handout there. This is not really a quiz
'cause we're not going to collect it.
You can throw it away going out.
It's in here to--intended to do
two things: One, to show you something about the
method that we will be using in here and two,
to show you something of the level of this course--
the level of the course. The questions that I'm asking
on this quiz-- the questions asked on the
quiz--are the types of things we would expect you to know at the
end of the course-- not now, but at the end of the
course. Some of these are difficult.
So if you find yourself getting
most of these answers correct, then don't take this course.
You'd be wasting your time,
wasting your money here, so don't do this if you find at
the end of this you've got sixteen,
seventeen, eighteen of these correct.
All right.
Let's start with a little bit
of classical music here and this engages questions one and two.
Who is the composer of the
piece that you're about to hear and what is its title or what's
it called? >
Okay.
So let's--I'm going to ask them
to queue the next piece here while we talk about that just
for a moment. The composer--Anybody know the
composer of this? Raise your hand.
Okay.
Some people do.
Some people don't.
Gentleman over here,
in the dark shirt. Student: Beethoven?
Prof: Okay.
That is Beethoven,
Ludwig van Beethoven, and do you know the name of the
piece? Student: Fifth Symphony?
Prof: Okay.
Symphony no.
5.
Now if you're sitting next to
this gentleman--Oh, god, this guy knows so much.
I'm going to go down the tube
in this course. No.
Don't be intimidated by this.
As I say, we're going to build
everybody up here together. So that was Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony, the beginning of it, a famous passage in the history
of classical music. Let's listen to another
composition here. Who is the composer of this and
what--in what composition is this piece used?
>
So who is the composer of that?
Does anybody know the answer?
Fewer people do.
Young lady out here in the
green, did you have your hand up?
Student: Beethoven.
Prof: Again Beethoven.
What's--what's the--in what
composition does Beethoven use this particular piece?
Does anybody know?
Gentleman here?
Student: Ninth Symphony.
Prof: Okay.
In the Ninth Symphony again and
you're saying, "Oh, I'm getting really
worried now." Don't be worried here.
Okay. So Ninth Symphony.
Now I believe that music works
a magical potion, a magical spell on us.
Music gets us to do particular
kinds of things, gets us to feel particular
kinds of ways, and I think these two pieces by
the same composer get-- cause--us to feel very,
very different, cause a different mood,
a different psychological state,
to come over us. One of them goes this way:
> Okay? And the other.
>
I want to do a little
experiment, have never done this before but I'd like to do the
following and that is to ask you to think about what mood each
piece causes you to fall into, and I've put some adjectives up
on the board up there and I've grouped them by Rs and Ls
because I'm going to ask you to raise your right hand if you
respond one way to a piece and your left hand if you respond
the other. So under the R group there
we've got positive, happy, secure.
Under the L group we've got
negative, anxious, unsettled.
So I've chosen pieces maybe
with slightly different feels here.
Let's see what we do with this.
Now piece number one:
> How do you feel about that?
Now here's piece two:
> All right.
So here's one if--I'm going to
play it again. >
If you raise your right hand or
left hand as your response to that.
Okay.
Here's piece one:
> Right hand or left hand.
All right.
So those of you that are
raising your hand, and some aren't raising their
hands but that's okay, those of you almost unanimously
say that the Beethoven Fifth Symphony sounds somewhat ominous
to us, somewhat fateful to us,
and the Beethoven Ninth Symphony conversely has a
different sort of feel to it. Indeed, does anybody know the
title of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony?
It was the setting of a poem by
Friedrich Schiller called-- Student: Ode to
Joy? Prof: Ode to Joy.
So how does Beethoven go
about making the Ode to Joy joyful?
What does he do here?
This is what we're going to be
doing in our course. We're going to be zeroing in on
this music. Can anybody tell me why to a
person in this room we all responded positively to the
Ninth Symphony and somewhat more anxiously to the Fifth Symphony?
You have to tell me one thing.
Student: Major and minor?
Prof: Okay.
Major and minor.
Now once again you--you're out
here in front. You've been listening to your
parents' records and CDs and so maybe--
I'm delighted that you know this, but maybe this is too far
below your dignity here so-- but good for you.
All right.
So: <<music
playing>> we've got this idea of major
chords and minor chords so let me ask you this.
Which--I think this is a quiz
question here, probably number five.
Which is this?
A major chord or a minor chord
> as opposed to?
>
The first one is a minor chord.
The second one is a major chord.
We can call them triads and
we'll be talking about what that is before--so that's one reason:
major versus minor. Here's a question for you.
What about this?
>
Let me take the rhythm out of
it. >
That's a bit skippy, isn't it?
Doesn't that move around a lot?
Whereas the--if I take the
rhythm out of the Ninth Symphony >
really Beethoven there is just
going up and down a scale so it's very conjunct.
We have the difference between
conjunct music with the >
and disjunct music
> and that perhaps adds to the
unsettled quality of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony.
Here's something else and I
guess it's a quiz question I think I'm asking you there,
and it has to do about a home pitch.
Music gravitates around a home
pitch and in the Beethoven Fifth Symphony <<music
playing>> we still haven't gotten the
home pitch. We go that far and we still
haven't heard the home pitch. Can anybody sing the home pitch?
>
>
But he hasn't given it to us
and maybe that's why this sounds so disjunct and so unsettled,
apart from the skippy nature of the melody,
is that we are not given at the outset the home pitch whereas
with the Ninth Symphony, >
second phrase,
that's the home pitch there and we all feel sort of secure in
that home pitch. There's another reason I think
these two sound differently and that is the following.
What's the direction generally
of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? >
Student: Down.
Prof: Down.
It's generally going down.
So the direction that music
goes can also affect how we feel about it, our mood about it,
so I think the next question--I play another piece for you.
I want to play this one with
the piano a little bit and I ask you the name of the composer of
this piece-- it's a bit less well known but
maybe not-- what it's called and when in
the history of music it was written.
>
Anybody know that piece and the
name of the composer? Yeah?
Student:
* Prof: Okay.
Debussy, a French composer
writing at the end of the nineteenth century in the
Impressionist style, and the piece is called
Moonlight-- Clair de Lune--but again
you may- you'll come out of this course--
four months from now you'll know all of this stuff.
Now you're not supposed to know
any of this. What I'm interested in is your
emotional response to this. How do you feel about this
music? What kind of mood does it put
you in? >
Now how do you feel about that?
Anybody want to tell me about
that? Student: --serene..
Prof: I beg your
pardon. Oops, I heard--Nice and loud
please. Student: Serene?
Prof: Serene.
Yeah, serene.
Why does it feel serene?
Boy, I wish I could play my
Rave 'Til Dawn CD now. Right?
<<simulates playing
music>> Okay. There's no beat to it.
All right.
It's very languid in terms of
the pulse here. It's very understated in terms
of a beat. You'd be hard pressed to
identify what the meter of that is so that's one reason,
and of course what--where am I going with the next important
point about what's happening in this music?
It makes us feel serene,
relaxed, because it's all going down <<music
playing>> and only when we get here
> do our spirits soar upward at
that particular point. So again, direction in music
also is important with how we respond to it.
So what are we going over here?
Major versus minor?
Disjunct versus conjunct?
What else?
Strongly felt tonal key,
which is called-- I don't know if I mentioned
this or not-- the tonic key,
the tonic pitch, the tonic pitch there,
and this idea of the direction of the music.
All of these we'll have to be
thinking about as we listen to music in this course.
Okay. Now let's see.
I think I want to do the
following. Yeah.
Here's a question for you.
Here's a question,
a completely different subject here.
What are the two dimensions of
music? Think about dimensions of
painting or architecture perhaps but what are the two dimensions
of music? Have you thought about that?
Can anybody give me one?
Well, pitch--Oh, yeah.
I'm sorry. Okay.
Pitch.
And what would the other one be?
Time.
Okay, pitch and time and pitch
and duration, excellent, so those are the two
dimensions of music and well, indeed we could even call them
the axes of music because we tend to think of pitch on a
vertical axis. We talk in terms of high pitch
and low pitch although we'll fine tune that next time,
and then we have this idea of duration or time,
which we tend to write out in symbols that move from your left
to right. So what I'd like to do now is
focus on a piece that emphasizes--foregrounds--just
the first axis, pitch.
Here is a question for you.
How many of you have heard
Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra?
Okay.
How many--and be courageous
here--how many have not heard Richard Strauss's Also Sprach
Zarathustra? Raise your hand nice and big.
Okay, the overwhelming majority
of people say they have not. Wrong.
You all have heard this many
times. It's used continuously as a
movie score, television, radio commercials.
It's all over the place,
and as soon as I start to play it,
at least once we get in to it, you'll say,
"Oh, yeah, I've heard that."
So this is a piece by Strauss
where he's trying to resurrect the content,
or mirror the content, of a philosophical novel by
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
and it's about the unleashing of human capacity as it comes
forth from the primordial earth here.
And in Strauss in attempting to
do this will use the orchestra to depict here in this
particular case perhaps the rise of human power,
maybe as metaphorically represented by the sun,
so here is Strauss depicting the rise of the sun.
And the first question I think
that you have on the quiz here is the following:
what keyboard instrument is playing here?
It's a keyboard instrument.
So let's listen to just a
little bit of this please right now.
>
What that is,
is an organ pipe of the type of organ that we have over in
Woolsey Hall, thirty-two feet tall,
this gigantic sound of >
down there so that's what he's
trying to set up. Okay?
Then a brass instrument enters
and what is the name of this brass instrument?
>
And a percussion instrument.
>
So the brass instrument is
the--is a--trumpet. Okay?
That's what that is.
It's coming up there.
Let's talk about what we've
done on the board here. We can see we have these low
pitches, > What did I just sing?
>
Almost the same sounding pitch.
Right?
Well, we'll talk about this.
This is called an octave.
>
It has to do with frequency
ratios that we'll go in to a little bit next time.
So he's coming up initially
just through octaves. >
Then the next pitch on the
trumpet > is actually an interval of a
fifth. >
That's a fourth
> but it happens to produce an
octave > against that.
Then the first time
> so he came up a major third
there and then quickly backed off with just a half step below
it, which completely gave it a different feel.
So a bright,
shiny major and then dark minor.
>
Then a percussion instrument
came in. Anybody know what that was?
Okay.
Tell me what it was.
Nice and loud.
Yell it out there.
Student: Timpani?
Prof: Timpani or as it's
sometimes called a kettle drum, and it was playing two
different pitches, actually sort of playing this
pitch and this pitch, the octave and then the fifth.
The fifth degree of the scale
after the tonic is the next most important and it's called the
dominant note. Okay?
So that's what that is in that
particular question. So the timpani comes in and it
goes crazy > and comes back to the tonic at
which point the trumpet takes over again.
So let's listen to just a
little bit more and I think--Well, let's listen.
I forget where we left off.
>
Now at this point what happens
is the trumpet >
all the way up there.
It's going to jump way, way up.
So let's listen to that.
>
What's happening and interests
me acoustically, and again we'll come back to
it, is that we're getting up toward here,
and notice how these pitches in terms of the ratio frequencies
are getting very close together. So we're going to go
> You sing the next note.
>
There it is up there.
Okay? Good.
You got it. Come on. Louder.
>
Coraggio!
Okay. So there we are there.
My question on the quiz is
what's this one called? >
Okay.
So this is a leading tone going
in to that particular note. So let's listen to here again
just the very end of this with the spectacular sound of the
orchestra, <<music playing>>
and there at the end you could
hear the organ a little bit better.
So that's how using some of
these basic ratios gives us this primordial type of music and
it's quite spectacular. It's quite spectacular because
here in the 1890s we have the apex of the Western classical
orchestra, this big, beautiful, powerful instrument.
Okay.
We've talked a little bit about
pitch here. Let's go on to talk about the
other axis of music and that is rhythm or duration.
Now in music as you probably
know--we've already talked a little bit about this--we have
the importance of the beat. The beat's very important in
music and generally speaking, in music, we divide the beat.
We organize it into groups.
The beat's kind of like the
heartbeat. It's kind of like the basic
pulse of > but, given our psychological
makeup, we tend to divide these up into
units: so generally two and generally three,
and if we have groups of two we call that duple meter;
groups of three we call that of course triple meter.
How do we indicate these?
Well, by some kind of
conducting pattern. We'll come back to this.
You'll all be conducting in
here. So duple is just one,
two, one two, one two, one,
> , one strong beat,
one weak beat, strong,
weak, strong, weak, in that fashion,
and conversely of course triple is strong,
weak, weak, strong, weak, weak, with two weak beats
between each strong beat. So here's a question for you.
Who wrote the musical,
and it's on your quiz there, Chicago?
Anybody know the answer to that?
How--Okay.
How many don't know--a rousing
show of hands here--don't know who wrote Chicago?
This is amazing to me.
This guy is the stealth bomber
of music. How nobody could know the name
of this person that has given us so much great music,
Cabaret, Chicago,
songs that you go on singing, have in your ear all the time,
John Kander, lives down in New York City,
writes a lot of this stuff. So we're going to listen to a
track out of John Kander's Chicago here,
and the question that's at--in play at the moment is what's the
meter of this cut from Chicago?
>
Okay.
Here's something that may
interest you. We'll be playing a lot of pop
music in here but they will generally be short clips of pop
music. Why is that the case?
For copyright reasons,
that's right. So we've heard a passage here.
What was the meter of that
section? Gentleman down here,
you seem to be moving with the music, which is very good.
What did you think?
Duple or triple?
Student: Duple.
Prof: Okay,
duple. Now I would come--That's
correct. I would come right back to you
with yeah, you intuited that but can you explain to me what you
were hearing? What did you hear that allowed
your brain to instantly go to that decision,
make that correct decision? Any ideas?
Anybody.
Student: Cut time--
Prof: Okay, cut time. Student: Accent on one..
Prof: What?
Accent on one,
but what part of the music were you listening to?
Student:
> Prof: Yeah.
Yeah, that's it.
Somebody's up there going
> and it's actually the bass so
we'll be wanting to zero in on the bass in a big way in music
> because that's oftentimes
giving us much more information than the melody.
>
So there we had an example of
duple. Let's see.
Have we got another excerpt
here? Let's listen to a little bit of
that. >
So what about that one?
Student: Triple.
Prof: Yeah.
You know the setup here.
We did duple and now we've got
to do triple. Okay.
So that's strong,
weak, weak, in that fashion. All right?
Now let's listen to a little
bit more of this, and something interesting
happens to the beat. It slows down.
What do we call the passage of
music in which the beat slows down?
What's being applied?
What's being affected here?
What's being used here?
>
Okay, a very simple word there:
Ritard. Okay? So the music is retarded.
We have the pulse being slowed
down and almost like a law of physics or something,
now comes a reaction--now John Kander makes the music
accelerate so let's watch a wonderful example of accelerando
here. >
Let me hear it.
Okay.
So at that point the music
begins to speed up with the accelerando.
Now <<music
playing>> getting close
> drive to the end.
Do you ever notice this in
musical compositions? Keep an eye out for this,
particularly in pop music. They've got an idea but they've
got to fill up a track. They really need a good three
minutes and thirty seconds here. They'll have something going
and then almost unbeknownst to you they will take that and lift
it up in terms of the pitch content.
What is that called when you
change the fundamental pitch in a piece, going to a different
pitch level? Anybody know about that?
Called modulation and this is
sort of where we'll be really, really four months from now,
modulation. It's very subtle.
A lot of what we were doing
today is very straightforward, the idea of duple versus triple
meter, but most modulations we don't usually hear.
So let's listen to--We've got
two more cuts to do and then I'll let you go.
Let's listen to John Kander sit
on one pitch level and then suddenly raise the whole thing
up. Raising up music builds
excitement. >
Now he builds--I think this is
the last question. What do we call this last chord?
What <<music
playing>> chord?
It's the--Anybody remember the
second most important pitch? The dominant.
So let's watch John Kander sit
on the dominant chord now >
and now you sing the tonic.
>
>
And okay, hit the tonic.
>
>
Okay.
So these are the kinds of
things we will be doing. If you decide to take this
course, get a hold of the materials for next Tuesday,
do listening exercises one and nine through eleven.
I'll see you then.
Oh man, this really cool.