Related but a bit tangent
http://www.the-wagnerian.com/2012/08/the-psychopathology-of-...
Wagnerism
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: Wagnerism
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
For those like me who don't know much about the technical aspects of music discussed in this comment (motif, texture, modulation, etc.), I recommend checking out Craig Wright's lecture series on "Listening to Music" offered by Yale Open Courses: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhYB41gNRjT1L2CyJRwtS...
motive: a short series of notes from which a larger theme is created. E.g., first four notes of the 1st movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. To hear how a motive gets turned into a theme, listen to the next ten seconds of the 1st movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. texture: whether the music sounds relatively busy or bare at a given moment, using more granular terms for "busy" and "bare" as you learn more about mu…
I loved your GP comment, but I don't understand your final paragraph here at all.
Sure, writing modulation from one key to another is more work than using a pitch-shifting operation in a DAW. But compared to the work of actually writing a piece of music, it seems like a relatively minor amount of work.
Your GP comment was so insightful, however, that I suspect that your meaning is being missed here. Could you clarify?
Re: Wagnerism
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's definitely an influence of composers like Brahms living in the shadow of Beethoven. Brahms does have some more continuous pieces, though. For example, the Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JwKDzPlYQs
I always thought the reason Brahms stands out among his contemporaries is that he's the first post-Beethoven symphonist who actually came close to Beethoven's level. But I've never been a big fan of the early Romantic era compositions.
One overlooked reason his music stands out is because Beethoven's technique is tractable and is still taught as a kind of "divide-and-conquer" technique to composition students. Students can write a coherent piece in essentially any style by building up phrases and sections from small groups of notes that are easy to control. So they enumerate through a few techniques of lining up these little units and listen to the result. Then they go back to listen to Beethoven and Brahms and immediately gain a deeper appreciation of just how completely those composers mastered these techniques to create dramatic musical structures. Rinse and repeat through the generations. This is one of the reasons why Brahms is considered a "composer's composer."
Now, what process is used to teach a composition student to write music that, say, use techniques responsible for what happens in the first minute of the first movement of Schubert's B Minor Symphony, D. 759? It's one of the great beginnings to a symphony, but it isn't really written leveraging the techniques I described above. And while you can analyze it to figure out why it specifically comes off the way it does, there's no easy "divide-and-conquer" technique to abstract out and apply to other settings/styles.
That means there are fewer composers writing toy versions of moments like that to build up a deeper understanding of these other techniques. And there are many other musical techniques like this which do not lend themselves to pedagogy. Mozart is full of stuff like this, where the technique is essentially, "First, learn all the music. Next..." :)
Re: Wagnerism
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
motive: a short series of notes from which a larger theme is created. E.g., first four notes of the 1st movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. To hear how a motive gets turned into a theme, listen to the next ten seconds of the 1st movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. texture: whether the music sounds relatively busy or bare at a given moment, using more granular terms for "busy" and "bare" as you learn more about mu…
I loved your GP comment, but I don't understand your final paragraph here at all. Sure, writing modulation from one key to another is more work than using a pitch-shifting operation in a DAW. But compared to the work of actually writing a piece of music, it seems like a relatively minor amount of work. Your GP comment was so insightful, however, that I suspect that your meaning is being missed here. Could you clarify…
Yeah, I was just riffing in that paragraph.
To riff further-- writing a modulation is a subset of writing a piece. If we were to quantize modulation "styles" to match, say, a set of DAW operations in a dropdown list, we've made the work of writing a piece easier.
We extend that ease for each aspect of music-writing that gets a similar dropdown menu in the UI. That ease accelerates the production of music.
I find it fitting on HN to insist the common practice period was comparatively unproductive and inefficient. :)
Re: Wagnerism
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I loved your GP comment, but I don't understand your final paragraph here at all. Sure, writing modulation from one key to another is more work than using a pitch-shifting operation in a DAW. But compared to the work of actually writing a piece of music, it seems like a relatively minor amount of work. Your GP comment was so insightful, however, that I suspect that your meaning is being missed here. Could you clarify…
Yeah, I was just riffing in that paragraph. To riff further-- writing a modulation is a subset of writing a piece. If we were to quantize modulation "styles" to match, say, a set of DAW operations in a dropdown list, we've made the work of writing a piece easier. We extend that ease for each aspect of music-writing that gets a similar dropdown menu in the UI. That ease accelerates the production of music. I find it f…
OK, I still don't understand. Are you suggesting that modulating between keys was sufficiently difficult for (say) Brahms, Beethoven or Wagner that they would try to avoid it?
That seems quite contrary to my understanding.
Re: Wagnerism
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I was just riffing in that paragraph. To riff further-- writing a modulation is a subset of writing a piece. If we were to quantize modulation "styles" to match, say, a set of DAW operations in a dropdown list, we've made the work of writing a piece easier. We extend that ease for each aspect of music-writing that gets a similar dropdown menu in the UI. That ease accelerates the production of music. I find it f…
OK, I still don't understand. Are you suggesting that modulating between keys was sufficiently difficult for (say) Brahms, Beethoven or Wagner that they would try to avoid it? That seems quite contrary to my understanding.
It's not difficult, exactly, but there are only so many ways to do it well.
You can, of course, just start writing different notes, which sounds jarring. There is a whole theory of "voice leading"[1] which provides a toolbox of nice-sounding ways to get from key to key, with various emotional and textural elements attached to each.
(Some if it, I note, is called "Neo-Riemannian theory"[1], which does in fact relate to geometry but is wholly unrelated to Bernhard Riemann.)
You don't actually need any of that theory. You can just compose by ear. And some of that theory has been known since the Middle Ages. But the "classical" era composers worked very hard on pushing the state of that art -- some of which can now be autosuggested by composing software. Which is especially nice when you're doing it for an entire 100+ piece orchestra.