The complete idiot's guide to classical music (9 page)

During the classical era, rhythms became more subtle and nuanced, compared with the more insistent patterns of the Baroque. In the Romantic period, the poetic spirit reigned supreme, and rhythmic freedom was encouraged. The 20th century, with its energy, vigor, and technological advancements, led to a lot of rhythmic experimentation; Bartok, Stravinsky, and many other composers have used “polyrhythms,” where several independent patterns compete for the listener’s attention at the same time.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
The American composer Henry Cowell, working together with the Soviet engineer Leon Theremin, invented a contraption called the Rhythmicon, which made possible the simultaneous production of 16 different rhythms on as many different pitch levels. Cowell also wrote a piece called “Rhythmicana,” but it was so complicated that nobody could play it. The first performance, taking advantage of advanced electronic techniques, came at Stanford University in 1971, six years after his death.

Syncopation is when the beat doesn’t happen where you expect it, or more formally, the displacement of an accent to a beat that is usually unaccented. You can either get annoyed and sulk or enjoy the surprise. For most of us, this offbeat accent is a delightful ear-opener; it lies at the heart of jazz, blues, and ragtime, and adds a delectable spice to classical compositions as well. The word “syncopation” comes from the Greek word meaning “cutting short,” so let’s syncopate this discussion and proceed to . . .

The rhythmic impulse that keeps a march marching or a waltz waltzing has its counterpart in vocal pieces, where sometimes the lyrics seem to drive the music ahead (think of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song), while in other instances the melody leads the way, flowing up the lazy river while the words more or less float along with it. The rapidity or slowness with which the music progresses, the number of times rhythmic patterns are repeated, or the way they are altered each time all contribute to the musical current.

This is the part where the “beat beat beat of the tom-tom” goes into “Night and day, you are the one . . .”—where the rhythmic spurt of the verse gives way to a shapely tune, where the beauty of line replaces the urgency of the beat.

A melody or tune is a succession of musical notes that creates a recognizable musical entity. It can be as simple as “Happy Birthday to You” or as elaborate as an extended theme in a Mahler symphony. The popular broadcaster and musicologist Karl Haas says that “Melody has the musical flow of poetry. It subscribes to the same urges of symmetry and rhythmical division, and is governed by the same impulses of emotional stress and release.”

A melody is usually constructed from smaller units, called motifs or phrases. These can be as short as the two-note cuckoo call, which has been often incorporated into major classical works, including Mahler’s First Symphony. They can be constructed from two or three consecutive notes of a scale (try “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on your old kazoo: the opening notes are E-D-C-D-E-E-E) or they can span a whole octave (the opening of “The Star-Spangled Banner”).

 
Music Word
The focal point of a melody, the center around which the tune flows, and usually the note on which it ends, is called the
tonic.
It’s also the first degree, or keynote, of the scale in which it’s written: A in the key of A Major or A minor, B in B Major or B minor, etc. The tune may wander far from that tonic note, but eventually it returns there, giving us a satisfying feeling of resolution, a comfortable “welcome home” after a long journey.

A melody can be easy to follow if it stands alone or predominates over a harmonic accompaniment, but play two or three melodies together and you hear the resulting mix rather than each tune separately. Take a simple round, like “Frere Jacques.” The first phrase is sung alone, and we have no trouble picking out the tune: “Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques.” When singer #2 comes in with “Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques,” we can still hear the tune because it’s the same melody, only sung three notes higher. When Singer #3 chimes in with a different tune on “Sonnez les matines,” though, and #4 adds yet another little melody with his “Ding Dong Ding,” those four simple phrases add up to a fairly involved musical message.

A fugue is an organization for several parts (often called “voices” whether they’re sung or played), with each voice entering successively in imitation of each other. The opening motif is called the subject, the imitations the answer, and sections between complete entries of all voices are called episodes. A wit once described a fugue as “a piece where the instruments come in one after the other, and the audience goes out one after the other.”

We often use words like “melodic” or “tuneful” to mean that a piece of music is pleasing to the ear, and historically, a lot of music was devised expressly for that purpose. A court composer to Elizabeth Tudor was not likely to take a chance to write something that might displease the Queen, and even the great Haydn dutifully churned out pleasant pieces for everything from royal suppers to princely marionette shows.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Haydn didn’t have the happiest of married lives. His wife hated music and used to line her pastry dishes with his manuscript pages. He got even with a song, though:

“If in the whole wide world

One very worst wife there is,

How sad it is that each of us

Knows well that she is his.”

Great works of art, of course, can be disturbing as well as harmonious. They can serve as political protest, portray events of high tragedy, and in our own time, echo what W. H. Auden (and Leonard Bernstein in his symphony) called “The Age of Anxiety.” All of which means that “pleasing to the senses” must be redefined to include a work of imagination, originality, and communicative power. We no longer need always to be soothed or placated; music has too much else to give us.

Harmony is the simultaneous sounding of two or more notes; it is the underpinning of a melody that gives it depth and perspective. Harmony may be synonymous with consonance in the dictionary, but that is not necessarily the case in music: Notes sounded together can be dulcet or dissonant. What harmony meant in the Middle Ages is that Brother Timothy and Brother John were no longer singing the same notes at the same time. Today, as the ever-wise Cole Porter pointed out, “Anything Goes.”

Take a note, any note. Now take another one. The distance between them is called an interval, and intervals become harmony when you sound the two notes together. They also become a chord, although some purists insist that you have to have at least three notes sounding together to qualify as a chord. That’s their problem.

Harmony enriches a melody, accentuates rhythmic patterns, and moves the entire listening experience to a new realm. In its most common form, the melody predominates, with chords embellishing, supporting, and flavoring it. When all parts of the chord move along together, usually with the melody on top, as in a hymn at church, we have what musicologists call homophony. When the harmonies are produced by the interplay of different melodies, we have polyphony. In the Renaissance era and on into the baroque, polyphony was king; a decided shift toward melody came in the classical period, and reached its height with the romantics. Which is not to say that Bach didn’t write some gorgeous melodies (listen to “Sheep May Safely Graze” or “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”) or that we don’t have them in the 20th century (think of Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”).

We have pictures of ancient Egyptians and Greeks playing all sorts of instruments, so maybe the art of harmony is a lot older than we know, but until the 9th century, the church in Europe frowned on harmony as the work of the devil. It was only in the 9th century that some rebellious monks decided to add a second voice to the chants, and eventually a third and a fourth. Around the year 1000, the heyday of Romanesque art and architecture, composers experimented with music for two voices that went their separate ways—a landmark step in the evolution of classical music since it became a determining factor in distinguishing Western music from its Asian and Middle Eastern counterparts.

As the Renaissance began to spread through the European continent, freeing art from religious domination and reawakening scientific interest, composers of both religious and secular music began expanding the harmonic construction of their pieces, blending as many as six different vocal lines. By the time the Elizabethan madrigals came into favor, composers were exploring such highly secular topics as love, sex, and politics.

It may seem obvious to say that a chord produces a richer sound than a single note, but adding supporting notes to a melody, or setting one tune against another, enriches the texture of a musical work. Harmony adds depth to music just as perspective adds depth to a painting, and indeed, for the past millennium, composers and artists have both been constantly experimenting with ways to enhance the three-dimensionality of their work.

 
Important Things to Know
Harmony is essential to the character of an instrumental piece. In vocal music, the lyrics in and of themselves can convey the emotional intent of the composer. In the absence of words, the music itself must establish the emotional mood. Consonant harmonies produce a lyrical, soothing, or romantic effect. Dissonant harmonies create tension, evoking agitation or uncertainty. Of course, consonance and dissonance are much in the ear of the listener: One man’s music is another’s mayhem.