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Understanding baroque
Baroque period music summary
Baroque period music summary
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Harmonization and Form In John Cage’s Living Room Music John Cage has always been known as a controversial and new age composer. Some say that his pieces lack the very structure that makeup classic forms. I argue that John Cage’s work Living Room Music, despite instrumentation with no set pitch, has conclusive harmonies and is in the style of a Baroque suite. This is a strange concept for some because pitch has become such a focal point around harmonic analysis when in reality it can be determined simply by ensemble texture and dominate features. The word harmony in this analysis refers to the relation of different sound sets instead of pitch. The setup for this is featured in Example 1. Example 1: John Cage Living Room Music, Directions * As you can see in Example 1, the conclusive and inconclusive idea is enforced by having the right hand accented and the left hand unaccented. This establishes that one beat is going to be more forceful and dominate than another. Another concept that enforces the idea of harmony is the eight different sounds produced. Each player (four players total) has to create two sounds. This doesn’t necessarily mean two instruments but different “pitches” must be established in some form of high to low forming a scale of sorts. The concept of sound in this work is very general because the sound can be from anything. Instrumentation can range from couches to beer bottles. The intention of the piece is that it can be performed anywhere by anyone, a concept that is not original of a Baroque suite. Previously, suites were only performed in formal settings for people of aristocratic stature. A good quote to summarize the ideology behind the settings comes from Stephen Kenyon, in his article “The Baroque Suite”. “It was a highly organized and stylized music--despite its roots in the common soil– and was not the sort of music ordinary
1. Wide-ranging, dynamically expressive tonal melodies are played in equal temperament and generated from logical tonal harmonic progressions. 2. A simple, isometric, and restricted rhythmic range is used. 3. The texture is homophonic, that is, a principal melody line with accompaniment. 4. Clear periodic formal structure is favored. 5. The instrumentarium is restricted and standardized.
Daum, Gary. "Chapter 12 The Baroque Era (1600-1750)." Georgetown Prep. 1994. Georgetown University. 12 July 2005 .
...died hands buffet and slap His head and a scorner spits in His Face. The slapping hands are frozen in mid-air and thus trigger associations with regard to noise. This association with noise is also shown in the scorner’s spit and how it suddenly stops before it reaches Christ’s halo: In order to perceive a sound in its reality, we require the space of silence, not of carnival. Glasmeier believes that this is precisely what John Cage does in 4’33’’. There is a suggestion of noise in Cage’s work just like in Angelico’s. The performer of 4’33’’ approaches the instrument three times, giving the instrument the possibility of noise without the reality of that noise: the viewer becomes the performer, imagining how that noise may be articulated. This is just like how a blank sheet of music still embodies music without ever being played; it triggers associations with sound.
Buelow, George J., “Music and Society in the Late Baroque Era.” Music and Society in the Late Baroque Era. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1994. p. 1-38
The phrase begins with a 1 beat anacrusis, often used in jazz to give rhythmic momentum to the swung melodic lines. The melody consists of 3 phrases where the second phrase is a repetition of the first phrase at a minor third lower. The melody consists of a triplet followed by 5 quavers where the triplet ascends chromatically. This chromatic technique is used in jazz to add unique colour to the piece whilst also allowing for creative embellishments. The piano plays the harmony using extended chords, with the first chord being an Ebdim7 and the second chord a Cdim7.
Firstly, syncopation is the accenting of “offbeats” within a measure. All around the world, musicians are able to captivate their audiences through the occasional emphasis of unstressed beats excluding the first beat in each measure. These affected area may include the notes between pulses, and the middle beats in a measure, for example, the second and fourth beat in 4/4 time. Many varieties of placements of both strong beats and accents are taken in the performances of musicians to increase rhythmic interest.
Composer Philip De Vitry wrote Ars nova treaties in 1320. He used verbalization new techniques in legion of his composition. Therefore, term was used to happen upon harmony specifically from those are in 14th century. Ars Nova was included integrating more complex rhythm and polyphony of secular music. Therefore, composer should not be worry about building
During the 1950s music academies all over America were prominently concerned with a form of composition known as serialism. Serialism in it’s most basic and initial form can be characterized by twelve-tone rows, but is a much broader term that covers “series” that can be devised for other musical aspects such as dynamics and rhythmic duration. The alternative to this cerebral music was indeterminate music, which was being pioneered by John Cage during the 50s. Minimalist music throughout the late 50s and 60s developed largely as a reaction against the complexities of both serialism and indeterminate music.
The melody is consistent with the song. The string instruments are prominent whereas the timpani and oboe just go along with the melody. Esta es una pieza sencilla binaria; claramente no hay devolución del material melódico apertura en la segunda parte del movimiento.
Baroque music is characterized by its development of tonality, elaborate use of ornamentation, application of figured bass, and the expression of single affections. A considerable philosophical current that shaped baroque music is the interest in Renaissance ideas that spawn from ancient Greece and Rome. Ancient Greeks and Romans considered music to be an instrument of communication that could easily stimulate any emotion in its listeners. Therefore, musicians became progressively knowledgeable of the power one’s composition could have on its audiences’ emotions. Because of this, one of the primary goals of baroque art and music was to provoke emotion in the listener, which is closely connected to the “doctrine of affections”. This doctrine, derived from ancient theories of rhetoric and oratory, was the theory that a single piece of art or a single movement of music should express one single emotion. Intrinsically, instead of music reflecting the emotions, composers aspired to cause emotions in the listener. Ma...
‘Do not forget that the melody is the Idea, the outline; as much as it is the form and the subject matter of a work. The harmony is an illumination, an exhibition of the object, its reflection…’(3)
Arnold, Denis, ed. The New Oxford Companion to Music. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983.
Introduction The world is changing and so is the style of music. Often people who do not have any musical background might think that classical music is boring and only for more mature audiences. In fact, the sales of traditional Western classical music albums are decreasing and many symphony orchestras and operas are struggling to find endowments and audiences. It is considered that classical music today occupies a position similar to that of religion, as a form of art rather than entertainment or just a background noise (Johnson, 2002). Unlike popular music, classical music may be more sophisticated and complex in its form.
John Cage (1912-1992) presents an attractive challenge to a music GSI teaching a class of non-majors. As much an idea man as a pen-on-paper composer, Cage proposed through his writings and artistic approach that all sound, whether deliberate or accidental, whether inside or outside of the concert hall, is in fact a macro-series of musical events. In effect, according to this way of thinking, all ambient sound is music. Considering the way most of us have been brought up to think about music, this is a significant imaginative leap as well as an important door to open for those who might not come across the idea elsewhere.
It is a style of Western art music. The word "baroque" comes from the Portuguese word barroco, which means misshapen pearl. During the Baroque era, professional musicians were expected to be skillful improvisers of both solo melodic lines and accompaniment parts. Baroque music expanded the size, range, and complexity of instrumental performance, and also established the mixed vocal/instrumental