The Clarinet Quintet was one of Brahms’ last works. It is incredibly rich and brooding. The first movement reminds me somewhat of his Eb Viola sonata, in that it is heavily nostalgic and longing. Here is Wikipedia’s description of the work:
Adagio in B major, in 3:4 time modulating into B minor and then B-flat minor and back to B major
Andantino in D major, in common time evolving into Presto non assai, ma con sentimento in B minor in 2:4 time
Con moto in B minor, in 2:4 with a key transition to B major returning to B minor into a meter of 3:8 and then transforming into 6:8 time
First Movement
Like the quintet by Mozart, the strings play the theme at the beginning. This movement sets a dark and somber mood for the rest of the composition. One phrase, towards the middle played by the clarinet, sounds closely related to one in the first movement of Carl Maria von Weber’s Clarinet Concerto No. 1 in F minor. This was possibly inserted because when Brahms listened to Richard Mühlfeld at his recital, he was playing this concerto.
Second Movement
The melody is a reflective love song first introduced by the clarinet. Later, the mood changes back to the gloomy atmosphere of the first movement. The clarinet performs technical runs playing from all ranges. It returns back to the beginning theme and then subsides.
Third Movement
The shortest of all four, the movement begins sweetly being one of the composition’s few uplifting passages. In measure twenty-three, the clarinet and violin play as if they were talking in a conversation. It modulates back from its heart-warming D major into the darken B minor. This section is highly influenced by the first part and even ends the same except being in a 2/4 meter.
Fourth Movement
This movement is titled “With Motion” and contains theme and variations with the same form as Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet and Brahms’s’ Clarinet Sonata No. 2. Tempo varies according to the musician. Another sweet melody which resembles the second movement is in this part and is in the same B major key. Later, it brings back the theme from the Allegro and ends with a loud chord which eventually fades away.
Was every late work by Brahms about his love for Clara? (I kid!)
Below are the first two movements of this beautiful work. Wikipedia has some very high quality recordings (better than I posted here), so check those out if you are interested in listening to all the movements.
As always big thanks to everyone contributing at IMSLP for the parts and score.
Yesterday I spoke about how Schoenberg’s pieces and philosophical writings have started us on a journey to have our ears judge works by their thematic content rather than whether all the dissonances are handled like Bach would have wanted them too. Today, I wanted to post some music (better than JT) where the heavy use of what would be considered dissonance in functionally tonal works is used casually. The point of this is to demonstrate that our ears consider these effects to be fairly stable.
Listen to Brad Mehldau’s Martha My Dear (an awesome cover of The Beatles song). At about 20 seconds in, he starts using intervals that would, in functional tonality, need to collapse, but he instead jumps the interval around maintaining the right hand’s job as the melody. He is essentially using “dissonant” intervals as a doubling of the melodic voice. In the baroque, all the way through the late romantic, any doubling was usually done at the octave, thirds or sixth. In Meldhau’s improvisation, at that point, the doubling is at the 7th. Our ears do not think twice about this.
Skip in this Radiohead video to 1:30. The very beginning has a series of attacks by the Guitarist which stack and stack, eventually creating a cluster. This cluster is used as a sonic padding through the entire song. Until the piano finally comes in about 45 seconds later any sense of tonality is indiscernible. Even though the guitar’s use in this piece is different than the Mehldau (as a harmonic function rather than melodic) it still doesn’t cause our ears to vomit at the ugliness of clashing pitches. In both cases their use is actually aesthetically pleasing. In the Mehldau work it ads a new interesting flavor to the vanilla melody that The Beatles wrote and in Radiohead’s case, the effect is quite beautiful.
Culturally, we have come an incredibly long way from the squelching pressure of music’s performance permission based on whether the work is functionally tonal or not. There are many remnants of of this pressure, largely due to expectations by some audiences on what classical music should sound like. But the ubiquity of dissonant intervals and gestures being used as consonant objects in all forms of music will further erode these expectations.
One of Schoenberg’s goals in emancipating dissonance was to free us from the expectation that music should be functionally tonal. Though he was unable to do this himself (as we are still on this path he started us on), what he did end up doing was move our cultural ears forward so that certain clusters and intervals that were traditionally thought of as needing to resolve in a certain manner could now be used in a consonant fashion. So, thank you Mr. Schoenberg for providing the cultural basis for acceptance of my compositions and their repeating minor or major seconds. Thank you for forcing society’s ears on a path where Jazz musicians can use 7ths, 11ths and any number of crazy extensions as if they were the normal pitches in a major chord. I may not enjoy some of you music, but God Bless You Mr. Schoenberg.
JT's music was influenced by a cultural progression started in large part by Arnold Schoenberg
Two years ago when Justin Timberlake released his latest album FutureSex/LoveSounds, I absolutely hated it, mostly because of how much I don’t like teen pop albums but also because the big single off of it, SexyBack, sounded like the sound track to the apocalypse. The dirty synth, heavy pulse and distortion on Timberlake’s song sound more scary than something erotic. It reminded me of the first track of Busta Rhymes’ Intro to E.L.E.. That being said, if you listen to how distorted the synth is (even if there is a clear fundamental pitch which goes up and down a minor second) you’ll find that each attack is essentially clusters of notes and that the melody sung by Mr. Timberlake is modal rather than in a functional key. The use of modal keys and what are essentially pitch clusters all has to do with the dissolution of functional tonal harmony over 100 years ago.
Listen closely to pop music, jazz, contemporary classical music and you’ll hear what baroque and renaissance counterpoint label as dissonance being used in an entirely consonant fashion. This is in no small part due to the forcible progression of our musical ears by the Second Viennese School. Their founder, Arnold Schoenberg, wrote extensively about the emancipation of dissonance and how, society could come to accept the sounds of any cluster of pitches as they are and judge a work on its thematic content, rather than in the context of what a “dissonance’s” resolution could be.
This process began quite a bit earlier than when Schoenberg and his disciples Berg and Webern arrived on the scene. Franz Liszt wrote atonal works and Richard Wagner’s extended tonality could be considered atonal for certain stretches as any sense of functional key is indiscernible. The hitch to calling these works atonal is that they still created harmonic direction which resolved into another dissonant chord, essentially series of drawn out “pre-dominants” (like the Liszt Bagatelle sans Tonality). The theoretical establishment considers this “direction creation” to still be tonal music by definition, even if it isn’t functional tonality.
Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until Webern or the composers he influenced in the post-war period that tonality was truly escaped. Schoenberg’s and Berg’s melodies and musical gestures were largely tonal ones and in analysis of their works, dominant and tonic key areas can be discerned. This is not necessarily due to their failure as composers, but rather the difficulty in escaping the cultural influence tonality has on us all (there is research showing a possible element of psycho-acoustic preference for pitch centers, but it is hardly conclusive). Our ear’s desire (whether it is a cultural artifact or genetically programmed) to create a hierarchical tonality where there is a supreme pitch center cannot be understated and extreme lengths must be undertaken to disassemble this tendency.
Thankfully Schoenberg got us on this path over a hundred years ago, one that we are certainly still traveling on.
(Thanks to Noam Faingold for some very nuanced observations).
The quality of this sheet music is a little low, but I thought it might be interesting to put up this Sonata – Duo by Boccherini because his music is ridiculous and something good for a viola cello duo at a gig.
Composers work very hard on their craft, especially when it comes to motivic development. The development of these motives often comes in altering melodic fragments and placing them in counterpoint or a recombination of the parts to create a new sonic object. Why does this work for our ears though? How does greater organization in a piece and auditory pattern recognition bloom out of altered motives? One part of the answer to these questions is that our ears are far better at recognizing general contour of melodies than the actual intervals. This allows us to extend our aural comparisons to great lengths.
An interesting article by Trehub, Bull and Thorpe discusses how infants are able to recognize different melodies, but without sufficient experience in our world cannot differentiate between melodies that have been transposed or melodies in which the pitch contour is the same, but the pitches have been altered. This belies a basic tendency for humans to recognize contour of melody rather than specific pitch intervals. This confirmed by WJ Dowling’s research on contour, who says in discussion of melody recognition memory tests:
The results of a number of experiments show the listeners usually find it easy to respond positively to all comparison melodies which share contour, and respond negatively to melodies with different contours.
Think about Beethoven’s 5th symphony in the first movement. The most famous motive ever written begins as a major third from G to Eb, three eighth notes and then a half note, then again with the same rhythm but this time a minor third (Eb-C. Finally after the bold opening statement, the violins sneak in with the same motif, but instead of a descent of thirds, it is seconds. All the while, the audience recognizes each of these ideas as similar. I will concede that much of this motivic recognition is due to the rhythmic aspect, but I will give you a better example here.
Most violinists or violists who’ve decided to perform as a career have played exercises from these books. They are not quite etudes in the sense that Kreutzer or Rode are, but still much more music-like than Dounis exercises or scales.
I find they are incredibly useful, especially the first book in teaching the hand proper motion between different placements of the fingers. What I mean by this, is that when a player begins ascending in pitch, placing more fingers upon the string, the hand changes its “center” from an open to closed position. With this change, there is a slight motion up the fingerboard with the entire hand, a slight shift with the first finger’s contact with the string moving from the pad to the tip. This way the fourth finger is above the string, ready to fall in its correct position.
These simple physical changes are demonstrated easily in a lesson with Op. 1’s first exercise. A simple up and down scalar pattern can go a great distance when the hand position and facility needs to be taught.
We experience sound in a three deminsional space. This should come as no surprise to those who pay attention to the sounds that enter our ears. This is in stark contrast with the capabilities of our eyes. When we are born, our visual-perceptions are terribly limited. Much of our ability to see in 3D-ness is learned through experience, like working with gradients, or visual flow (a exception to this is binocular reconciliation, which most are born with). Our ears, on the other hand, are remarkable for their innate ability to organize the locations of sound sources.
On Tuesday, in the New York Times , Natalie Angier wrote a cool article called When an Ear Witness Decides the Case. There are a ton of different topics covered, but here is what one of the professors interviewed had to say:
Unlike the eyes, of course, the ears are not limited to sensory stimulants in front of the face. “Because auditory signals go around objects,” said Dr. Shamma, “they’re extremely important for communicating in a cluttered environment.”
What does this have to do with music though? The article mentions music, but not on a level that is useful for someone looking to create it (the part about the differences between enjoyment of music in monkeys and humans was really cool though). Many composers have tried to use the balconies, backs and walkways of a concert hall to create the effect of the audience being in the action of the piece. Take Puccini’s La Boheme, where an army marching through the back of the hall is a way to stage the end of act two. This can be a great effect, but what about a work that strays more on the “absolute” music side (as opposed to referential or performance based)?
I know that composers like John Corigliano (Circus Maximus), and Cage scored for moments of auditory spaciality, but I can’t seem to think of a work that really uses this effect in a striking way. Maybe Cage is more “naturalistic” as his works are about loving sounds as they are, where Mr. Corigliano’s Circus Maximus is a staged effect. But if all these works are in a concert setting, they inherently are not in the “cluttered” world our ears normally reside, the work’s 3D-ness limited by the quadrilateral that most concert halls are. As weird as it would be, and how far it would go over most audiences heads, music in a cluttered space would be an interesting concept to explore. It could possibly be combined with a visual art piece and the goal would be to exploit the perceptual differences of the senses.
Also in the news: Oldest instrument, Music is definitely part of our nature and integral in the evolution of humans.
A vulture-bone flute discovered in a European cave is likely the world’s oldest recognizable musical instrument and pushes back humanity’s musical roots, a new study says. Found with fragments of mammoth-ivory flutes, the 40,000-year-old artifact also adds to evidence that music may have given the first European modern humans a strategic advantage over Neanderthals, researchers say.
The big collection is here for all the pianists out there. I know that many of my friends tear there hair out over these pieces. I posted videos of Glenn Gould playing some of these works along with the scores. Listen to him singing if you’ve never heard him play. Thank goodness it doesn’t bleed that far into the real recordings I have of him.
Here are some good resources for those looking to analyze the WTC (courtesy of the aggregation by the first link below):
–Glory to God Alone: The Life of J. S. Bach courtesy of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America). This introduction to the life and work of J. S. Bach includes commentary by Christoph Wolff and Robin Leaver.
-Thomas Rossin, video on the discovery and significance of Bach’s Bible
