Category: lectureNotes_musth4

Speaking historically, there are two main approaches to composing electronically. One approach is to manipulate recorded sounds – natural sounds, or simply any sound recorded on tape. This approach is called Concrete Music (musique concrete) because the composer is manipulating actual sound, rather than notation (an abstraction, or representation of sound). The other approach involves…

Some Definitions Timbre refers to tone color. Tone color can be a property of an individual instrument, or of an entire ensemble. Texture is another one of our fuzzy terms. (“I know it when I see it.”) It generally refers to the relationship between individual parts at a given moment in a composition. The line…

Since very few of you know who Frank Zappa is, I’m including a few YouTube videos that highlight different facets of his very extended personality. Zappa performing Inca Roads, something of an experimental jazz-rock fusion. Zappa is playing the guitar solo, and periodically conducting. (Besides the standard long black hair and mustache, Zappa is the…

Chapter 9 of the Kostka text covers “external” influences on 20th-century music. He divides external influences into three main sources: The Past (Neoclassicism, Neoromanticism, Quotation) The Present (Folk/Jazz/Pop) The Unfamiliar (Music from other cultures) Setting aside the idea of “the unfamiliar,” which is fairly loaded from a cultural studies perspective, I would prefer to talk…

Some worthwhile things to remember from the discussion on Webern’s Op. 21 Symphonie, and some clues to helping you figure out Babbitt’s Semi-Simple Variations (useful for doing the homework). Webern serves as a model for many post-WWII composers, because his use of 12-tone serial composition points the way to using serialism as an organizing feature…

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…

To follow up on pitch-class sets, previously talked about in Part 1: First, a clarification that may help you to better understand inversions of pitch-class sets in general. The easiest way to visualize the inversion of a pitch-class set is to start with the top pitch-class member (right-most) of the pitch-class set, and working your…

I started posting this as a comment to Basic Concepts for Atonal Theory, but decided it needed its own life. Important additional comments/clarifications regarding interval terminology: Unordered and ordered pitch intervals are the same except that ordered pitch intervals include  a + or – sign. Pitch-class intervals can never be larger than 11, since a…