Chapter 9: MUSIC

 Unit 3: Music & Dance

Humanities through the arts 

Subodh Bhattarai 2022

3.1 Music

• Music is one of the most powerful of the arts partly because sounds—more than any other sensory stimulus—create in us involuntary reactions, pleasant or unpleasant. 
• Live concerts, whether of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Centre, or Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on tour, usually produce delight in their audiences. Yet, in all cases, people rarely analyse the music. It may seem difficult to connect analysis with the experience of listening to music, but everyone benefits from an understanding of some of the fundamentals of music. 

3.1 Music (Hearing & Listening)

• Music can be experienced in two basic ways: “hearing” or “listening.” 
• Hearers do not attempt to perceive accurately either the structure or the details of the form. 
• Most hearers prefer richly melodic music, but when one asks hearers if the melody was repeated exactly or varied, or whether the melody was moved from one instrumental family to another, they cannot say. They are concentrating on the associations evoked by the music rather than on the details and structure of the music.

3.1 Music (Hearing & Listening)

• Powerful repetitive rhythms and blasting sound trigger intuitive/illogical responses so strong that dancing or motion—often wild—becomes imperative/crucial. 
• Another kind of hearer is “suffused” or “spread over” by music, bathing in sensuous sounds, as many people will do with their earphones tuned to soft rock, new age, or easy-listening sounds. In this nonanalytic but attractive state of mind, the music spreads through the body rhythmically, and soothingly. It feels great, and that is enough. 

3.1 Music (Hearing & Listening)

• The listeners, conversely, concentrate their attention on the form, details as well as structure. 
• A listener, unlike a hearer, would be aware of the details and structure of works. They could answer questions about the structure. 
• Listeners focus on the form that informs, that creates content. Listeners do not just listen: They listen for something—the content. 

The Elements of Music

• Let us begin with some definitions and then analyse the basic musical elements of tone, consonance, dissonance, rhythm, tempo, melody, counterpoint, harmony, dynamics, and contrast. A common language about music is prerequisite (necessary/needed/essential) to any intelligible analysis.

The Elements of Music: TONE

• Music tone can refer to a single frequency played by a musical instrument. For example, when you depress the A key on a piano keyboard, it sounds the musical tone A. Press the adjacent key right above it, and you sound the musical tone A sharp.
• A sound with one definite frequency or a sound dominated by one definite frequency is a tone. Most music is composed of a succession of tones. We hear musical patterns because of our ability to hear and remember tones as they are played in succession. Every musical instrument will produce overtones, called harmonic partials, that, while sometimes faint, help us identify one instrument from another. 
• Each of the overtones will grow fainter than the primary tone, and the exact loudness and quality of the overtones will define for our ears whether we hear a saxophone or a trumpet or a piano. All the blending of instruments will contribute to the colour (metaphorically) of the sounds we hear. 
• Thus, the tonal colour of a jazz group will differ from a heavy metal band, which will differ from a traditional rock-and-roll group, which in turn will differ greatly from a major orchestra. Each group may play the same sequence of tones, but we will hear the tones differently because of the arrangement of the instruments and their tonal qualities. 

The Elements of Music: Consonance

• When two or more tones are sounded simultaneously and the result is easeful and pleasing to the ear, the resultant sound is said to be consonant. 
• The sounds of the music of a different culture may seem dissonant/lacking harmony at first but consonant after some familiarity develops. Also, there is the influence of context: A combination of notes or chords may seem dissonant in isolation or within one set of surrounding notes while consonant within another set. 
• In the C major scale, the strongest consonances will be the eighth (C + C’) and the fifth (C + G), with the third (C + E), the fourth (C + F), and the sixth (C + A) being only slightly less consonant.

The Elements of Music: Dissonance

• Just as some tones sounding together tend to be stable and pleasant, other tones sounding together tend to be unstable and unpleasant. This unpleasantness is a result of wave interference and a phenomenon called “beating,” which accounts for the instability we perceive in dissonance 
• The second (C + D) and the seventh (B + C) are both strongly dissonant. Dissonance is important in building musical tension since the desire to resolve dissonance with consonance is strong in almost everyone. 

The Elements of Music: Rhythm

• Rhythm refers to the temporal relationships of sounds. Our perception of rhythm is controlled by the accent or stress on given notes and their duration. In the waltz, the accent is heavy on the first note (of three) in each musical measure. In most jazz music, the stress falls on the second and fourth notes (of four) in each measure. Marching music, which usually has six notes in each measure, emphasizes the first and fourth notes. 

The Elements of Music: Tempo

• Tempo is the speed at which a composition is played. We perceive tempo in terms of beats, just as we perceive the tempo of our heartbeat as seventy-two pulses per minute, approximately. 
• Many tempos have descriptive names indicating the general time value. Presto means “very fast”; allegro means “fast”; andante means “at a walking pace”; moderato means at a “moderate pace”; lento and largo mean “slow.” 
• Tension, anticipation, and one’s sense of musical security is strongly affected by tempo. 

The Elements of Music: Melody

Melodic Material: Melody, Theme, and Motive 

• Melody is usually defined as a group of notes played one after another, having a perceivable shape or having a perceivable beginning, middle, and end. Usually, a melody is easily recognizable when replayed. 
• We not only recognize melodies easily but also can say a great deal about them. Some melodies are brief, others extensive; some slow, others fast; some playful, others somber. 

The Elements of Music: Melody

Melodic Material: Melody, Theme, and Motive 

• A melodic line is a vague melody, without a clear beginning, middle, and end. 
• A theme is a melody that undergoes significant modifications in later passages. Thus, in the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, the melodic material is more accurately described as themes than melodies. 
• A motive is the briefest intelligible and self-contained fragment or unit of a theme.

The Elements of Music: Counterpoint

• In the Middle Ages, the monks composing and performing church music began to realize that powerful musical effects could be obtained by staggering the melodic lines. This is called counterpoint—playing one or more themes or melodies or motives against each other, as in folk songs such as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Counterpoint implies an independence of simultaneous melodic lines, each of which can, at times, be most clearly audible. Their opposition creates tension by virtue of their competition for our attention. 

The Elements of Music: Harmony

• Harmony is the sounding of tones simultaneously. It is the vertical dimension, as with a chord (See Figure), as opposed to the horizontal dimension, of a melody. The harmony that most of us hear is basically chordal. A chord is a group of notes sounded together that has a specific relationship to a given key: The chord C-E-G, for example, is a major triad in the key of C major. At the end of a composition in the key of C, the major triad will emphasize the sense of finality—more than any other technique we know. 

• Chords are particularly useful for establishing cadences: progressions to resting points that release tensions. Cadences move from relatively unstable chords to stable ones. 
• Harmony is based on apparently universal psychological responses. All humans seem to perceive the stability of consonance and the instability of dissonance. The effects may be different due to cultural conditioning, but they are predictable within a limited range. 
• In the 1940s one anthropologist, when told about a Samoan ritual in which he was assured he could hear original Samoan music—as it had existed from early times—hauled his tape recorder to the site of the ceremonies, waited until dawn, and when he heard the first stirrings turned on his machine and captured the entire group of Samoans singing “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.” The anthropologist was disappointed, but his experience underscores the universality of music. 

The Elements of Music: Dynamics

• One of the most easily perceived elements of music is dynamics: loudness and softness. Composers explore dynamics—as they explore keys, tone colours, melodies, rhythms, and harmonies—to achieve variety, to establish a pattern against which they can play, to build tension and release it, and to provide the surprise that can delight an audience. 
• Two terms, piano (“soft”) and forte (“loud”), with variations such as pianissimo (“very soft”) and fortissimo (“very loud”), are used by composers to identify the desired dynamics at a given moment in the composition. A gradual build-up in loudness is called a crescendo, whereas a gradual reduction is called a decrescendo. 

The Elements of Music: Contrast

• One thing that helps us value dynamics in a given composition is the composer’s use of contrast. But contrast is of value in other ways. When more than one instrument is involved, the composer can contrast timbres. 
• The brasses, for example, may be used to offer tonal contrast to a passage that may have been played by the strings. The percussion section, in turn, can contrast with both those sections, with high-pitched bells and low-pitched kettledrums covering a wide range of pitch and timbre. The woodwinds create very distinctive tone colours, and the composer writing for a large orchestra can use all of the families of instruments in ways designed to exploit the differences in the sounds of these instruments even when playing the same notes. 
• Composers may approach rhythm and tempo with the same attention to contrast. Most symphonies begin with a fast movement (usually labelled allegro) in the major key, followed by a slow movement (usually labelled andante) in a related or contrasting key, then a third movement with bright speed (usually labelled presto), and a final movement that resolves to some extent all that has gone before—again at a fast tempo (molto allegro), although sometimes with some contrasting slow sections within it, as in Beethoven’s Eroica. 

The Subject Matter of Music

• In music, as in other arts, content is achieved by the form’s transformation of subject matter. Our approach is to identify two kinds of subject matter: feelings (emotions, passions, and moods) and sound. 
• Music cannot easily imitate nature unless it does so the way bird songs and clocks sometimes appear in Hayden’s symphonies or as Beethoven does in his Pastoral Symphony when he suggests a thunderstorm through his music. Other musicians sometimes use sirens or other recognizable sounds as part of their composition. 
• Program music attempts to provide a musical “interpretation” of a literary text. For many listeners, the swelling of the music implies the swelling of the sea, just as the music’s peacefulness suggests the pacific nature of the ocean.  
• Our view is that while a listener who knows the program of La Mer may experience thoughts about the sea, listeners who do not know the program will still respond powerfully to the music on another level. It is not the sea, after all, that is represented in the music, but the feelings Debussy evoked by his experience of the sea as mediated by his composition. 
• Thus, the swelling moments of the composition, along with the more lyrical and quiet moments, are perceived by the listener in terms of sound, but a sound that evokes an emotional response that pleases both those who know the program and those who do not. 
• This then means there is no strict relationship between the structures of our feelings and the structures of music, but there is clearly a general and worthwhile relationship that pleases us. 

The Subject Matter of Music: Feelings

• Feelings are composed of sensations, emotions, passions, and moods. Any stimulus from any art produces a sensation. 
• Emotions are strong sensations/excitement felt as related to a specific stimulus (a thing or event that evokes a specific functional reaction in an organ). Passions are emotions elevated to great intensity. Moods sometimes arise from no apparent stimulus, as when we feel melancholy for no apparent reason. In our experience, all these feelings mix together and can be evoked by music. No art reaches into our life of feeling more deeply than music. 
• In some important ways, music is congruent/harmonious with our feelings and is thus capable of clarifying and revealing them to us. Nervous-sounding music can make us feel nervous, while calm, languorous music can relax us. A slow passage in a minor key, such as a funeral march, will produce a response quite different from that of a spritely dance. 
• Things get most interesting when the music begins to clarify and produce emotional states that are not nameable. 
• We name only a small number of the emotions we feel: joy, sorrow, guilt, horror, alarm, fear, calm, and many more. But those that can be named are only a scant/hardly few of those we feel. Music has an uncanny/mysterious ability to give us insight into the vast world of emotions we cannot name. 
• The philosopher Susanne Langer has said that music has the capacity to educate our emotional life. She can say this because she believes, as we do, that music has feeling as part of its subject matter. 

Two Theories: Formalism & Expressionism

• Music may not only evoke feelings in the listener but also reveal the structures of those feelings. 
• The Formalists of music, such as Eduard Hanslick and Edmund Gurney, deny any connection between music with non-musical situations. For them, the apprehension of the tonal structures of music is made possible by a unique musical faculty that produces a unique and wondrous effect, and they refuse to call that effect anything that suggests an alliance with everyday feelings. They consider the grasp of the form of music so intrinsically valuable that any attempt to relate music to anything else is spurious. 
• As Igor Stravinsky, one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century, insisted, “Music is by its very nature essentially powerless to express anything at all.’’¹ In other words, the Formalists deny that music has a subject matter, and, in turn, this means that music has no content, that the form of music has no revelatory meaning. 
• The Formalist theory of Hanslick and Gurney² or our own theory—is the Expressionist theory: Music evokes feelings. Composers express or communicate their feelings through their music to their audiences. We should experience, more or less, the same feelings as the composer. 

Sound

• Apart from feelings, sound might also be thought of as one of the subject matters of music, because in some music it may be that the form gives us insight into sounds. This is somewhat similar to the claim that colours may be the subject matter of some abstract paintings.
• For example, the tone C in musical composition has its analogue (parallel/similarity) in natural sounds, as in a bird song, somewhat the way the red in an abstract painting has its analogue in natural colours. 
• Tonal relationships in most music are very different in their context from the tones of the non-musical world. Conversely, music that does not emphasize tonal relationships—such as many of the works of John Cage—can perhaps give us insight into sounds that are noises rather than tones. 
• Since we are surrounded by noises of all kinds—humming machines, talking people, screeching cars, and banging garbage cans, to name a few—we usually turn them off in our conscious minds so as not to be distracted from more important matters. 
• This is such an effective turnoff that we may be surprised and sometimes delighted when a composer introduces such noises into a musical composition. Then, for once, we listen to rather than away from them, and then we may discover these noises to be intrinsically interesting, at least briefly. 

Musical Structures

• The most familiar musical structures are based on repetition—especially the repetition of melody, harmony, rhythm, and dynamics. Even the refusal to repeat any of these may be effective mainly because the listener usually anticipates repetition. Repetition in music is particularly important because the ear cannot retain sound patterns for very long, and thus it needs repetition to help it hear the musical relationships. 

Theme & Variations:

• A theme with variations on that theme constitutes a favourite structure for composers. We are usually presented with a clear statement of the theme that is to be varied. The theme is sometimes repeated so that we have a full understanding, and then modifications of the theme follow.

Rondo:

• The music of the Classical period, circa/approximately/roughly 1730–1820, is known for its use of structure, form, and themes to create a sense of drama, contrast, and story. One of the most popular forms of the era is known as the rondo form. A rondo in music consists of a recurring section of music called a refrain.
• The structure of the rondo is sometimes in the pattern A-B-A-C-A—either B or D—and so on, ending with the refrain A. The rondo may be slow, as in Mozart’s Hafner Serenade, or it may be played with blazing speed, as in Weber’s Rondo Brillante. 

Fugue |fyoog|:

• A fugue uses a type of musical technique called counterpoint. Counterpoint is a type of polyphonic texture used in music and can be classified into many different types.  
• In the Baroque Period (1600-1750)the master of the fugue was the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).
• In the fugue, there is one main melody that is used over and over. 

Sonata Form:

• Sonata form (also sonata-allegro form or first movement form) is a musical structure generally consisting of three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation. It has been used widely since the middle of the 18th century (the early Classical period).

Symphony:

• The symphony marks one of the highest developments in the history of Western instrumental music. The symphony is so flexible a structure that it has flourished in every musical era since the Baroque period in the early eighteenth century. The word “symphony” implies a “sounding together.” 
• In the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, the symphony was particularly noted for its development of harmonic structures. Harmony is the sounding together of tones that have an established relationship to one another. 
• Triadic harmony (the sounding of three tones of a specific chord, such as the basic chord of the key C major, C-E-G, or the basic chord of the key F major, F-A-C) is common to most symphonies, especially before the twentieth century. 
• The symphony usually depends on thematic development. All the structures that we have discussed—theme and variations, rondo, fugue, and sonata form—develop melodic material, and some or all of them are often included in the symphony. 
• As the symphony evolved into its conventional structure in the time of Haydn and Mozart, the four movements were ordered as follows: first movement, sonata form; second movement, A-B-A or rondo; third movement, minuet; fourth movement, sonata form or rondo. 

Blues & Jazz: Popular American Music

• So far, our emphasis is on classical music, other kinds of music in addition to opera, symphonies, and chamber music affect modern listeners. The blues, which developed in the African American communities in the southern United States, has given rise to a wide number of styles—among them jazz, which has become an international phenomenon, with players all over the world. 
• The term “blues” was used early to describe a form of music developed in the black communities in the South, and it seems to describe a range of feelings, although the blues was never a music implying depression or despair. Rather, it implied a soulful feeling as expressed in the blue notes of the scale and in the lyrics of the songs. 
• The music that later developed from the blues is characterized by the enthusiasm of its audiences and the intense emotional involvement that it demands, especially in the great auditoriums and outdoor venues that mark the most memorable concerts seen by thousands of fans.
• Jazz was developed in the early years of the twentieth century. It began in New Orleans with the almost mythic figures of Buddy Bolden, the great trumpet player in Lincoln Park in the first years of 1900, and Jelly Roll Morton, who claimed to have single-handedly invented jazz. 
• The large, primarily white society bands, such as Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, introduced jazz to large radio audiences by employing great jazz stars such as Bix Beiderbecke, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Hoagy Carmichael, and Jack Teagarden. Fortunately, all these orchestras were recorded widely in the 1920s, and their music can be heard online at any of a number of sources. 
• The hot jazz of the time is marked by an extensive use of the blues scale, a powerful rhythm usually drums, piano, and guitar or bass. The horns, trumpet, clarinet, and trombone played most of the melodic material, supplying complex harmonic support while individuals were soloing. 

Rock & Roll & Rap

• Rock and roll has its roots in R&B—rhythm and blues—popular in the 1940s in the United States primarily among black radio audiences. However, the wide acceptance of rock and roll began only after white groups and singers began to adopt the black style. 
• Rock music and jazz are essentially countercultural art forms with codes for sexual behaviour, and they usually went unobserved by general audiences. Rock groups were aided by the invention of the electric guitar in 1931. 
• Les Paul popularized the Gibson solid-body electric guitar, and by the 1960s almost all rock-and-roll music was amplified, which made possible the great concerts of Led Zeppelin, the Who, Cream, Steve Miller Band, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, and the Rolling Stones, all of whom began to tour internationally. 
• The Beatles, a small group, were especially political during the 1960s and 1970s when they condemned the Vietnam War and popularized Indian mysticism. Some of these groups still appear, and all can be heard on the Internet and seen on YouTube and other sharing sites.
• Hip-hop and rap music have their roots in gospel, shout, and blues, just as do jazz and rock and roll. The use of amplified instruments, simple chord patterns—often the use of no more than three chords—and a heavy backbeat (great stress on beats two and four) throughout a composition mark most of the rock and later music. The lyrics are often personal, political, and usually countercultural—aimed at a youthful audience that sees itself as naturally rebellious. 
• Rap stars like Tupac Shakur recorded hundreds of tracks about life on the streets and the violence in the neighbourhood. Tupac was killed in Las Vegas after an incident with gangs. 
• Rap figures like Eminem, Jay Z, Sean Combs, Drake, and Future tend to develop narratives beyond the neighbourhood. 
• The music is still subversive and often a form of protest. Rap has been called misogynistic (hating women in particular) and sometimes racist, but it is an evolving form. The driving rhythm of rap remains, but as in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Hamilton, the resources of rap may be much less limited than its critics have thought.
• Today, popular music includes most styles derived from blues, and most of it is strictly commercial, designed to make money. But some of it derives from a serious artistic purpose that has little to do with making money. Serious lovers of popular music usually look for evidence of sincerity in the music they prefer. It is not always easy to detect. But all that aside, the elements of popular music are those of all music: tone, rhythm, tempo, consonance, dissonance, melody, counterpoint, harmony, dynamics, and contrast. 

END OF THE PART