Category: lectureNotes_musth4

The Final Exam is comprehensive. You should review posts from the semester. Twilight of the Tonal System (chromatic and doubly chromatic mediants, etc., concepts from Chapter 1)

Late posting. Concrete Music (Musique Concrete) Concrete Music uses prerecorded sounds (often natural sounds) as the source of all of its sounds for a composition. The French were the first to develop this technique, and it draws upon their focus on color (think Debussy, Ravel, etc.), but their development is only a historical origin point.…

Minimalism began as a general reaction to post-WWII modernism, atonality, and integral serialism. As such, there are certain traits that one find in minimalist pieces, but the technique is not uniform (just as there are many ways of composing 12-tone music, or classical period tonal music, for example). Characteristics of minimalism: restricted pitch and rhythmic…

Classical serialism typically refers to the 12-tone composition technique developed by Schoenberg and his followers. The basic premise of the 12-tone system is the row, which is an ordered arrangement, or set, of pitch classes. Each pitch class occurs once, and only once. The row has four basic forms: Prime (P): the original ordered set (row). The transposition…

A set class contains all the pitch-class sets (in normal order) that are related by transposition, and all the transpositions of the inversion of the set. For example, start with the randomly chosen set, [9,1,2]. The first twelve sets show all the transpositions of [9,1,2]. [9,1,2] [10,2,3] [11,3,4] [0,4,5] [1,5,6] [2,6,7] [3,7,8] [4,8,9] [5,9,10] [6,10,11] [7,11,0] [8,0,1]…

Transposition Transposition of pitch-class sets is by ordered pitch-class interval. Before going any further, consider the implications of that first statement. Transposition is by pitch class, which means that a transposition could contain octave displacements and still be a transposition. Transposition is by ordered pitch-class interval, which means that we always count the transposition distance in a positive…

We will continue to talk about this on Friday, but what follows are the rules for arranging pitch classes into a set in normal form. The first thing to do with a collection of pitches, a pitch-class set, is to arrange the pitch classes into a form that can be used to compare one set…

As promised, but a little late, here’s a compilation of links to review for the Midterm Exam. Text: Chapters 1 – 6 Links: Twilight of the Tonal System Integer Notation Scale Formations Chords and Verticalities Melody and Voice Leading Harmonic Progression and Tonality Rhythm and Meter: Bartok, Additive Meter and Syncopation Rhythm and Meter in…

Movement VI, Dance of the Furies, deals with additional rhythm and meter topics: added values, nonretrogradable rhythms, and augmentation/diminution of rhythmic patterns. Added Values Added rhythmic values occur in otherwise simple rhythmic and metric patterns by adding a short additional note, dot, or rest. Example 6-11 in the textbook has the opening portion of the…

We’re using Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) 1940 – 41, by Olivier Messiaen (1908 – 1992), as the basis for several concepts introduced in chapter 6 (Rhythm and Meter). This post will focus on the first movement, “Liturgie de Cristal,” as an example of isorhythm. You may have studied isorhythm…