Was this composer BETTER than BACH?!

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] i actually i wrote that myself because i thought is that a mistake it doesn't have a feeling like it adds up to anything like in bach [Music] so not too long ago i was practicing on a public piano as us pianist ended up having to do from time to time and i was playing some scar lottie and this lady comes up to me and she says you know i just love bach so i just nodded and i said yes thank you or not thank you my first reaction was isn't it so obvious that these two composers are so different so for a bit more context johann sebastianbach is one of the most famous composers from the baroque period arguably of all time and domenico scarlotti is another famous composer from the same exact time period when i think of box music it has a reverent quality where each line carries a lot of weight and significance the music moves in a way that is never static and constantly searching for a new direction scarletti's music on the other hand has a very different set of virtues many of them immediately distinguishable in my opinion [Music] he has a lot of hand crossing he has repeated figures and in general his demeanor is a lot lighter and playful buoyant [Music] but as distinguishable as they are from each other there are definitely overlaps [Music] so it's not that out of line to confuse the two after all they're both from the baroque period in fact born on exactly the same year and although they were from different geographical locations they both have a long history of musical tradition that have overlaps built into their sound okay now i'm going to play some short extras for you try to guess if they're written by bach or scarlotti [Music] do so of course all of these excerpts were really short if they were longer some of these answers would be much more obvious now what's for sure is that bach and scarlotti use similar building blocks in their music and because of this i think a fun way to just dive into this comparison might be to take some music by skrilati and modify it to make it sound more like bach and vice versa takes music by bach and modify it to sound more like scarletti then we can examine what we come up with and take some notes but before we do that i'm going to pay a visit to david louie my former teacher and mentor who is an expert on baroque music who you might recognize from a previous video that we did on box music so he's been building up a very impressive archive of scarletti sonatas on his youtube channel and so he is the right person to ask about all this with scarlotti the part of the fun is the the exoticism of the music the fact that it is broke music he came from a very classical baroque training and then he he incorporated folk elements spanish basque elements the colors of of the instruments guitar castanets it's all in there [Music] i've always considered bach to be a sculptor if you had to compare scarlotti would be a collage artist what a sculptor is is somebody that carefully selects their material and the quality of the material and they have to recognize what that material is destined to become and then they become a shaper of the material whereas a collage artist like scarlotti takes different elements that may seem haphazard to some people that really don't have any business belonging together but it's their vision of bringing them together that creates a unified piece of art okay so now let's start building up a list comparing the two composers first some similarities they both use smaller bits of themes and phrases to build up their pieces their music often calls for a moderate and consistent sense of rhythm and pacing ornamentation is frequent rules of counterpoint are considered and both included a variety of techniques and contrasting elements in their writing now on to some differences bock road keyboard works in many different styles and forms everything from sweets partitas preludes fugues inventions variations just to name a few to our knowledge so far scarlotti only published short keyboard sonatas in binary form minus a few rare exceptions first sonatas were published in 1739 and he was born in 1685 so he would have been approximately 55 years old wow late bloomer late bloomer from then on he went on after those 30 sonatas he went on to write about 550 of these pieces [Music] in in bach's case he takes a harmonic idea and uses it to create a extended piece and we're talking about a piece that lasts upwards of an hour and he didn't just do that with the goldberg variations he did that with with the art of feud he did that with a musical offering it was sort of something that he became very interested in especially at the end of his life bach tends to change the material with constant motion whereas scarlotti writes a lot of repeating phrases that are quite static [Music] bach is very strict about managing points of tension and release so his dissonances are always resolved scarlotti on the other hand sometimes just colors his chords with dissonant notes that are not resolved [Music] six notes so d a b flat so you have to play the two bottom ones with your thumb like that oh so his keyboard technique was already modern yeah that's right while box keyboard writing is definitely very complex and demanding scarlotti sonatas contain more things that advance keyboard technique as a whole with everything from hand crossing leaping and other elaborate types of passagework [Music] scarlotti exploits the extremes of range on the instrument whereas bach will tend to keep things sort of in a more contained register he'll use different registers but but he'll sort of move gradually towards them bach tends to have polyphonic texture with separate lines and scarlotti often adds in purely accompanimental chords that are homophonic buck rarely breaks away from the strict rules of counterpoint [Music] where scarlotti will sometimes have parallel fifths octaves and nonsensical voice leading [Music] and now with these new insights in mind i came back to the piano to get started on my experiment to see what it takes to turn bach into scarletti and vice versa let me tell you though those scarletty leaves are no joke and now here's what i came up with i'm gonna first play a bit of the original and then go through the changes that i've made this has a very angular theme that actually already sounds like something bach could have written [Applause] now here's the new bakkified arrangement i'm pretending that this opening is a theme to a bach invention [Music] now we're going to move on to an original piece by js bach his prelude in d minor from his wall temper clavier book 2. this already has many qualities that overlap with scarletty's writing [Music] and now with my adjustments to make it sound more like screlotti [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so while i was working on this i posted a clip of the scarletti made to sound more like bach on my instagram so i do see a lot of guesses that say bach which is a great sign but i will say that bach is just more famous his name is sometimes used synonymously to baroque sounding music so there are more factors to this here but still some of these answers are really funny pierre boulez last movement of italian concerto played backwards coffin dance jc ba good guess something that i realized is that both bach and scarlotti are very daring and adventurous but in very different ways you have to look at different aspects of their music to find this with scarletti it tends to show more in an extroverted way whereas with bach it's more contained within strict boundaries it's also made me wonder more about the context surrounding some of these compositions and really wonder about scarletti's life let me know what two composers you get mixed up from time to time if you're interested in other videos that i've done breaking down the stylistic elements of composers check out this playlist or this video here

Channel: Nahre Sol

Views: 181,360

Keywords: piano, music composition, harmony, music theory, nahre sol, classical music, improvisation, pianist, film scoring, jazz, modern music, scarlatti, bach, js bach, music analysis, harpsichord, baroque, music history, sonata, scarlatti sonata, ear training, music quiz, glenn gould, comparison composer

Id: ZMr_e1NTPUY

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 10 2022