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I understand that composer's attitude.

 

I've actually worked a bit with electronic music, and also from a recording perspective, it's interesting to note that a lot of contemporary folks are increasingly using recordings as "notation." This has been done for a long time in popular western music when people do covers, but it's crept into western classical music in recent decades as well. Especially composers who do work that crosses multiple genres (especially when that involves using studio tools and in electronic music) the recording is often a better indication of what exactly is happening in the piece. An early example of this is Steve Reich's "Different Trains" piece which uses electroacoustic effects and interview clips as part of the piece. The score consists of a mixture of notated string parts, written instructions and stage directions, and recording clips to demonstrate how and when the recorded pieces are to be played.

Like any written system for communication, it does certain things well and others poorly. But it's also a flexible system - it's not as if the notation is permanently set in stone. There are many composers, especially in music after about 1900 who started experimenting with notation and ways to show new and increasingly complex techniques. "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" is a famous example of this, the notation having more akin with John Cage scores or artistic drawings than traditional classical music notation. I still occasionally come across something in more modern scores that I've never seen before, though it's often accompanied by a key or legend of some kind.

A great recent example of this is Caroline Shaw's "Partita for 8 Voices" which she wrote for her group Roomful of Teeth. It won a pulitzer, and I have a score, but unfortunately am not allowed to post it for copyright reasons, etc. But it contains lots of interesting instructions on how to accomplish and use the various singing techniques from around the world that the piece calls for. Worth a listen too for those interested.

Here's a picture of the score from threnody, it's a bit low-res but you can see that it's filled with instructions and experimental notational techniques.

 

Bringing in Indian music again for contrast, the tradition is aural: passed from the memory of the teacher to the memory of the student and so on generation by generation. Even when I sat in mridangam (South-Indian Classical drum, equivalent to tabla of North, but different) class, although our teacher went to great lengths to make notation (in the spoken-percussion language of India) as simple for us as possible, and we would write it down, he often used to say, "It should be in your head, not in your notebook."

In concert, he would never dream of working from a notation. The playing is improvised, informed by knowledge of the composition. And exception to this might be a set dance piece --- but he would just write down numbers, to remind himself of the structure, not the precise strokes.

I never tried to learn singing, or an instrument, so I don't understand raga. I believe that, although students may have their aide-memoirs (is that the word?) that there is no standardised notation: the notes in a raga, or of a song in that raga, are memorised. The only concession is that the words might be written down. I have never managed to get an understanding of this, because the words are not that many, but the melody, although also a limited number of lines, might be a complex set of variations.

I was mind-blown when I first saw someone writing a score for several instruments. I asked, incredulously, if he could really follow all the parts at once, and he told me, "Not only that, but I can hear the result in my head." Well... sure, how else could he compose?

Then many years later, I learnt my one-fact-about-Mozart: that he could listen to any multipart piece of music just once, and remember each and every part. And that, on being introduced to a composer one day, he said, "Oh yes: I heard your piece a few months ago." And sat down at the piano and played it.

Well... I strayed a bit from notation into general layman musical waffle: sorry about that

 

Deleted posts restored. Thanks @ultrabike .

More questions are welcome. If I don't get any soon it's likely I'll just start waffling on about anything.

 

I have a Query

Yesterday Lenovo launched a new phone in India and they said it has Dolby Atmos speakers and also support Dolby Atmos through headphone..
Can someone help me to figure out how this Dolby Atmos feature will work inside a Headphone and if possible through mobile inbuilt speakers ?

 

@music4mhell

Not sure if you are being funny or serious.

I wish I could help you, but this is a thread about music history and theory. Try asking here instead:

http://www.superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?threads/the-all-purpose-advice-thread.19/page-154

 

Thanks for the heads up.. i thought some1 can help me out understanding this tech part
by the way i was serious .. Anyways, may be someday i will find my answer

 

Five years ago or so when I first ventured into Beethoven's symphonies, I used to listen without understanding form in any way. I used to memorise the music as if I memorise roads without looking at directions or a map. I lacked a birds' eye view during the listening sessions. Then through various music forums (GMG / Talk classical) and online resources I started to learn about musical structure and it blew me away. A further step I took was to get to the bottom of the thematic structure, motif, counterpoint and harmony. Beethoven, Mozart and good old JS Bach were integral to this learning process.

Two years ago, I listened intently to the Kreutzer violin sonata and understood its underlying structure, its recurring motif, the way Beethoven changes its shape, breaks it, builds on it, does unbelievable things to such a simple motif. It was stupefying. I had to relisten to all his symphonies, piano sonatas and string quartets to get the buzz, that birds' eye view, again. Even a basic understanding of music structure, themes, motifs and harmony can provide such joy in "getting" the pattern within the music. It feels like looking at the whole forest rather than just the trees. Such knowledge provides a map that makes it easier to delve deeper into the mastery of such great composers.

I was tempted to try and delineate the structure of the Eroica 1st movement or Mozart's Clarinet quintet sonata form. However, with my limitations, I think it would be more beneficial if I link to some great articles posted online. Few years ago I found a great introduction in the form of an idiot guide to sonata form by an awesome blogger aptly named Dumbo and his Thursday Classical music blog. An article gave a brief introduction to harmony and the physics of music.

Another post describing sonata form is such a great read that I will transcribe most of it here...

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Sonata Allegro form

"If you are new to all of this, and I actually hope you are, you're going to become literate in an art form that was closed to you, and you will have a blast exploring and enjoying and understanding the huge library of western civilization's music that you may have heard before only in the background without really "getting it." Maybe you think music is music and you either instinctively enjoy it the first time you hear it or it's not your thang.

Thanks to John at Americablog for the video above of his Yorkie, Sasha, watching TV.

I could ask you if you feel like a dog watching TV, but hey, if you did, how would you know? The whole metaphor depends on you not understanding how much you are missing. To Sasha, it's a bunch of different images streaming, one after the other, some of them repeating randomly.

I can think of lots of other metaphors. Imagine staring out the window of a train going some place, you know not where. You see trees flashing by, then a water tower, then more trees, then a cross roads with a clanging bell, then a brief view of Mount St. Helens erupting behind a supermarket shopping lot, then another cross roads with lots of cars piled up, more trees, another water tower, another crossroads, people screaming with a pyroclastic flow bearing down on them, then some cherry trees in bloom, then oak trees on fire. So did you enjoy all those trees?

Trees! Now there is another good metaphor. "He can't see the forest for the trees!" Especially if you don't know there is a forest. Or what shape it is, or where the rivers are, where the grizzlies, the first aid station, the looming forest fire, etc.

I had a good friend once that I played a symphony for. She told me afterward that she enjoyed it, although she didn't really understand it all; that it was like being washed over by a beautiful mix of sounds and images. I feel that way too, sometimes, when I listen to a piece of music I've never heard before or never really got into enough to grasp it. That's normal. Our goal is to learn to not listen to music as a series of disjointed albeit enjoyable sounds and images but to hear the coherent whole of it, the story and drama that carries it forward from beginning to end, that gives it a point. If you're being washed over by the pretty sounds, you haven't heard the music yet. Unexpected pleasures may await you.

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SONATA-ALLEGRO FORM
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So I want to start by talking about probably the single most important lesson in understanding and appreciating classical music from about 1750 up to today: Sonata-allegro form, also called just Sonata form. I'm going to post an example of this soon enough. Symphonies and piano sonatas and concertos and quartets and quintets and divertimenti are all examples of what are called sonatas. They all follow a fairly typical format with three or four separate movements. And the very first movement is almost always in a form called Sonata-allegro form.

Excuse me for having to introduce musical jargon, but, if it's necessary, well, you know... If you had grown up in Vienna, Austria in the nineteenth century, hearing Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on every street corner, you would have absorbed the whole lesson from an early age and not need the jargon; Sonata-allegro itself would be part of your inherent cultural baggage, whether you knew the term or not.

So here is a bird's eye view of Sonata-allegro form, the form that the first movement of almost everything takes:

1. Introduction
   
   
2. Exposition
   2a. First theme
   2b. Second contrasting theme in a different key.
   2c. Codetta
   
   
3. Repeat the whole friggin' Exposition. (2a, 2b, and 2c).
   
   
4. Development section
   
   
5. Recapitulation
   5a. First theme again, just the same as 2a.
   5b. Second theme from 2b, changed, back in the home key.
   
   
6. Coda

​

If you are like me, the first time you see this, you may feel a little surprised. They are all like this??? That's a very complicated structure. And a bit strict-looking as well, not allowing for much creativity. Well, part of the fun of music is seeing how the composer tweaks the rules in this or that piece to give you a surprise. So if you aren't familiar with the usual format, you may not understand the most dramatic moment of the work. It might just wash over you. Like a beautiful pyroclastic flow.

A real Music Appreciation class would now have the obligatory Beethoven's Fifth symphony, first movement, as its lesson model. I decided not to exploit that poor ol' war horse. We're going to do another fun piece of music that you may not have already heard beaten to death in so many movies and commercials and disco tunes:




Overture to the Magic Flute,
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

"Oh, Dear Dumbo, What the flying donut is an overture, and what is a Magic Flute?" you ask.

The Magic Flute is a two hour opera by Mozart that we aren't going to listen to, some reasons being that I don't have space or time to analyze it or explain it, and I'm not enough of an opera buff to do it real justice. An overture, in this case, is the opening movement that is played before the curtain opens as people are getting settled down and hitting their kids and telling them to shut up and doffing their top hats. Mozart's overtures are always in Sonata-allegro form, just like the first movement of all his symphonies. And this is a particularly magnificent example of the form, composed when Mozart was in his prime, in 1791, the same year as his death, in fact, at the ripe old age of thirty-five.

Thirty-five years. That's how long geniuses lived in eighteenth century Vienna, Austria. Go rent the Academy Award winning flick, Amadeus. We will have a lot more to say about Mozart, and other composers too, in future diaries, but since we are just getting our itsy-bitsy toesies wet, we'll try to stick with the lesson plan today.

Let's listen to the Magic Flute Overture, all seven minutes of it, and dissect it, naming the parts. We won't need to do this with every piece of music we listen to on here, but when this is all new, it can be eye opening. (direct link, here.)

1. Introduction. From 0:00 to 1:28.

The overture begins in E-flat major, unless my guitar here is out of tune. What is E-flat major? That doesn't matter, right now. The introduction itself is slow and stately, stated by the brass and the drums. It helps us get ready and set for the fast and complicated allegro (Italian for fast) exposition part to come.

Without wanting to belabor Beethoven's poor lil' fifth, let me point out a difference you might notice right away. Beethoven's fifth starts out with an eight note introduction: Da-Da-Da-DAAAH! Da-da-da-DAAAAAAH! Mozart's introduction to the Magic Flute Overture, on the other hand, is a whole minute and half long, almost a separate piece of music in itself, unconnected to the rest of the music. In some symphonic pieces, the introduction really IS like a long separate movement of its own.

1. Exposition begins! (1:27)

2a. First theme. (1:27 to 2:26)

After a short, expectant lull, the meat of the movement begins, allegro (fast), with a softly spoken main theme that begins dede dede dede diddle-diddle. This rest of the movement builds itself upon and around this. The first statement of the theme at 1:28 is in the violins. Mozart restates the theme again starting at 1:43, and notice how it is being complicated. The theme is turning into a fugato, an interweaving of the same melody with different parts of itself. And at 1:59 we finally hear the main theme restated again, this time with the full orchestra at full volume.

(2:26 to 2:35)

At 2:26, the music begins to change key, heading towards B-flat. What is B-flat? In true Music-for-Dummies style, let me say it doesn't matter right now, except that you know it sounds a little different from the E-flat we started with. The second theme is coming up and it will be in B-flat.

And, by the way, if you are aware of this, in the future, when you hear a music piece without the blow-by-blow commentary, you might be better equipped now to notice that the changeover is coming to a second, distinct theme.

2b. Second theme (2:35 to 3:10)

The second theme comes in, now in B-flat major, led by the woodwinds. Don't worry about dede dede dede diddlediddle though. Pay attention and you can hear that it's still there, in the background, keeping the second theme company. This isn't true of every Sonata-allegro movement, but in Sonata-allegro you will often hear little pieces of the first and second themes ripping each other off. It's one of those wonderful Where is Waldo things about classical music. You can listen to a piece over and over again on your car radio for years and suddenly notice, "Hey, I think I heard that before... Oh wait, now I get it! Aha! Mozart you bastard!"

Notice also that the second theme is a little more mellow and lyrical (song-like) than the first. This is VERY, VERY typical in Sonata-allegro movements. As you will notice in diaries to come, second theme sections tend to be this way, in part, to create a feeling of contrast. The most heart-rending melodies of a Sonata-allegro movement are often found in the second theme. This one, however, is just lilting, different in texture, smooth where the first was choppy, pudding where the other was tortilla chips.

2c. Codetta (3:05 to 3:25)

And now we work towards the end of the exposition. A codetta is a little coda, and coda is the word for tail, or end. The codetta concludes the exposition, just as the coda, at the very end, will end the movement. If it sounds like he's wrapping things up here, he is in a way; he is wrapping up the exposition. It is now a complete part of its own.

Where before we might have let this wash over us, just a few noisy chords played by the brass and drums, not sure if we should get up and leave or just let it wash us some more until everybody else gets up, we know better now, don't we? There is more to come.

1. Repeat of the exposition.

What? There is no repeat? Nope. Sorry. I couldn't find a youtube with the repeat included, which is a shame, because a short but incredible Mozart piece like this really deserves it. Take my word for it, please, that there is USUALLY a repeat of the whole exposition here.

It became very common during the 20th century for recording labels to remove the repeats from pieces by Beethoven and Mozart as a way to save space on LPs and keep everything under 25 minutes. To a certain extent, this has also become modern fashion, with repeats left out frequently even in live performances. However, it's an awful shame to do this to Mozart. Mozart, unlike other, more analytical composers like Beethoven, put his best work into the exposition and often had short development sections.

(3:30 to 4:05)

The exposition is over, but there is a curious lull. Three chords are played by the brass, in B-flat, the key at the end of the exposition, expectantly, as if announcing something. This is Mozart's choice to segue us into the coming development section, which will not be short.

1. Development section (4:05 to 5:01)

The development begins with our old friend back, dede dede dede diddle diddle. But there is a feeling of suspense in the air, created by a modulation to a new key. One of the great distinctions between classical music and modern pop music is the way classical music uses modulations to create drama, tension, a sense of forward movement, and structure. I quit trying to count how many modulations there are in this development. We could analyze it bar by bar to see the devices that he used here, but that's not for today's lesson. We are about forests, not trees, today. Just revel in it.

And appreciate how, towards the end of the development, he creates a sense of coming home after a long journey as he finally heads back to the home key and the restatement of the hero of our movement, Sir Dede Dede Dede Diddle Diddle, arriving home in E-flat on his magnificent steed.

1. Recapitulation begins! (5:01)

5a. First theme again. (5:01 to 6:01)

And our lovely main theme is back, although it seems a little bit changed from how it began. Sometimes that is the case in Sonata-allegros. In many works, maybe even most, especially very early ones, the first theme returns unchanged from its adventures in the development section. But in the Magic Flute Overture, it returns a little bit jumbled up at first, with the strings trying to state it, and then giving it up to the woodwinds, and from them to the brass, all rather tentatively, before it is taken up loudly and grandly by the full orchestra at 5:17.

And please note, for future reference, we are back in the home key of the work, E-flat. No, it doesn't matter right now. It will in later lessons. But I hope you are getting the idea -- that the whole work is a movement from a home key, to a different key, and then to a whole bunch of different keys, before returning back in resolution to a home key. And if you say, "Aw hell, I can't tell one key from another, this is esoteric bullshit," hey, I know where you're coming from because it does sound that way at first; maybe even at second and third. So we'll skip that debate for now.

5b. Second theme again. (6:01 to 6:31)

The lilting second theme repeats, but it, too has changed a little along the way. Where before it was in the foreign key of B-flat, this time it's in the home key of E-flat, and the bridge connecting the two themes has changed.

1. Coda (6:31 to 7:00)

And now the end is upon us. The codetta from the exposition is now the coda. Some codas are very different or expanded versions of the codetta, but not in this case. This coda is very similar to the codetta, although the last kettle drum bangs have a more final sound to them, and that's probably a matter of the conductor's taste rather than the composer's.

And because we all understand Sonata-allegro form, we know before the final beat that the movement is over, that we can stretch our legs. What a difference it makes! Imagine poor Sasha, wondering whether the tiger is going to come back and get her after the commercial. Knowing the size and shape of the movement as a whole changes us in our listening. We know that it has a beginning, a middle and an end, and what those sound like.

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I should exercise some personal discipline and end here, but nooo... If you are interested in what happens next in the Magic Flute, you can check out the opening which follows the overture in this youtube of the Magic Flute filmed by Ingmar Bergman. Yes, that is a singing man running from somebody in what looks like a Barney costume but is probably supposed to be a dragon.

And if you want to hear one of the most famous arias from the Magic Flute, you can listen to the Aria of the Queen of the Night here. Quite trippy, not the least so because it's supposed to be dramatic and scary and yet it makes you (well, me) feel tickled.

It occurs to me that of the many adjectives that you can use to describe Mozart's music, (elegant, perfection, rational) that there is a word I would use today that would have made me laugh twenty years ago if I had heard somebody say it. Mozart is SEXY. I know, it has a kind of childlike purity in the way it embraces and finds joy in the simplicity of major key chords. But Mozart makes it sensuous in a way that other composers do not. His music lingers and toys with the details of tonal beauty. It can slip by you at times, but he revels in the accidental notes, notes just a half-note too high or too low, that slip down to the correct note immediately afterward in a teasing manner. Other composers used chromaticism to explore the boundaries of tonality, but Mozart used it to heighten it. If the music of Wagner is all boots and blood and incest, Mozart's music is sex in a pile of loose feathers.

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True, electronic folk are often able to experiment more because sounds/samples/etc are much more easily introduced/manipulated. It's literally at their fingertips. There is a whole useless argument if that is "creating" music or not...That being said, people who have had training or learned music theory tend be more delineating in what they are going for, even if just the reason is not be too similar or replicate stuff they heard before, based on the sheer volume of stuff they have been exposed to.

When I took some classes on Western classical and jazz (more of orientation and exposure), our teacher told us that, once people learn notation, it changes the way they listen to pieces in the future...a catch 22, as he said he no longer "enjoyed" the music in the same way.

A good analogy I heard was from a painter who did mostly abstract/collage/Pollock type stuff. At the gallery opening, he overhead someone saying "I could do that, what's so special about this?" or some such. He told me that most of the folks in art school respect the abstract artists more if they have been classically trained, and still CHOOSE to paint in the abstract vein, versus people who entropically put stuff together. It's subjective.

 

Here is a good video explaining sonata form for those interested in getting into classical music...

 

Who better?

 

These past 3 months my 6 year old kid and I have been playing a Yamaha U1 piano with such vigour that I barely have time for just listening. It is a great experience as a beginner even when playing 'Three blind mice'! The process is so enjoyable.

Slowly but surely my goal of playing Bach or Beethoven feels reachable even at the age of 40.

Thanks for your 'Do it' advice.