06:
Professor Berlioz checks his email to find a note from Rufus:
Yo Prof! I’m in Denmark and haven’t been thinking solo violin lately, I mean it’s summer. Baroque music is for wintertime. I fooled around with one in the studio the other day. I thought you might be interested in what I came up with.
MP3: Play audio file (scratchy.mp3)
Rufus
Professor Berlioz was NOT amused and sent Rufus a howler:
RUFUS WAINWRIGHT! HOW DARE YOU SEND ME SUCH AN INSIPID PIECE OF WORK. I EXPECT MORE FROM SOMEONE OF YOUR TALENT. I expect a work for solo violin from you, due one week from today. Score it using Sibelius notation software, and the piece should be a prelude, say around 2 minutes long. Study the Bach scores that I mentioned last time. I will send you an addendum to this email with some new things to incorporate in your string writing.
Don’t make the mistake Lenny did: keep your composition alive, make performing your 2nd priority.
Yrs,
Bz.
Berlioz slapped the SEND button shaking his head in frustration. He sat back, opened up a new word document, and began to give Rufus his next lesson with help from a scanner and the internet.
•
WRITING FOR STRINGS (2)
With regards to bowing, the string player will either play one bow per string, giving it a well articulated sound, or play 2 or more notes under one bow, making the sound more smooth, more lyrical, and the notes seem more connected. Sometimes melodies want to be slurred in little groups of 2’s and 3’s, and sometimes a composer will put a whole string of notes under one bow. (I’m assuming you know that “bow” means to draw the bow across a string from the bottom part (the “frog”) to the top (the “tip”), and back again.
Here is an example of detached playing, or one note per bow. There is an interesting sparkle to this passage that may not be obvious. Remember that a downbow feels a bit more like a downbeat, and an upbow feels a bit like an unaccented beat. Playing up-and-down is a binary articulative process: up down up down — a duple feel. The example below is in 6, so that the strong beats, beats 1 and 4, have a downbow on 1 and an upbow on 4 that accentuated the two-groups-of-three in the 6 beats. Notice compositionally, the wild shape of the note directions: Not boring scales and arpeggios, real music with melodic fantasy.
Let’s look at some different kinds of bowing techniques. The first 4 bars of the next example illustrate a technique where one note is held, like a drone, while the other has a melody. The melody has to be relatively simple and able to be played well while sustaining the other note.
Then, afer those four bars of 2-part music, the texture becomes solo for the next four bars. And then the 2-part texture returns for four more bars, and this alteration between numbers of “voices” changes phrase by phrase, almost like a call-and-response. Look at ms.5 and 6: the 8ths are slurred in groups of two (Bz sings: “dyah da, dyah da, dyah da” and so on). Then in m.7, there are no slurs. This means every note gets a separate bow, which gives each of those notes textural importance: they stand out in the phrase because they are played differently than the rest of the passage.
The above example alternates between 1 and 2 voices. Look at this example: it’s a fugue for a violin, and damn hard to play. You see the subject come in in m.1, it then repeats in the lower voice in m.2 while a simple accompanimental countersubject comes in over it. Look at the chords happening simultaneously beneath the third appearance of the subject in m.3. Very difficult to play. Easy for a keyboard, hard for a stringed instrument.
Here is an example of a chaconne, a famous one in d minor. A chaconne is a chord progression that repeats over and over, which is quite common in popular music. Notice how the contrapuntal business of each line is clear, attention is paid to detail, and it is clear what is foreground and what is not.
Now here is a fun texture: good for fast passages, climactic music, and country fiddling. If you look at all four measures, the 16th notes on the off-beats are all E’s. Not only that, but they are all E’s on the open E string. What is happening in the 16th notes on the downbeat is the melody being played on the next lower string, the A string, but it’s being played in the same register as the open E, so you get this back-and-forth between a fingered string and an open string.
You’ll also notice funny little italic recommendations. This is the birth of DYNAMICS. (They eventually became single letters rather than words.)
Alright m’boy, I’m sleepy, but study these examples; they are all in your book. Buy a CD. Listen to this stuff all the time. Get it in your head. Learn how string music “goes.” Abandon string washes. Give string players something challenging to do. Goose eggs, er whole note, ain’t it.
Berlioz
30:
Prof. Berlioz: For the next few sessions I will be introducing you to writing for the solo stringed instruments, and I don’t mean the guitar, bass and banjo, I mean the violin, viola, cello, and double bass. The first three instruments are tuned in 5ths; the cello is an octave below the viola; the viola is a perfect fifth below the violin. The bass, like the guitar, is tuned in 4ths where notes sound an octave lower than they appear.
Likening strings to a choir, the violin is part alto, part soprano, and then its upper register is unique and very high;
the viola is like a dusky tenor- alto that can also play fairly high;
and the cello can be a bass, a tenor, an alto and an really intense soprano in its highest range;
The bass is usually just the bass that can be bowed or plucked.
[These musical examples are from musicarrangers.com. Visit this site for succinct and simple explanations.]
Although there are concertos and sonatas composed for them I”m not going to tell you it’s my favorite music. Basses often sound “funny” when they play melodies.
At the beginning of a concert, you will hear the string section tune up. You will hear LOTS of 5ths. The oboe, which has the richest overtones and carries nicely, tunes the orchestra giving them the pitch “A.” The concert master, the alpha string player, tunes first, then stands up and tunes the section. You’ll hear all the orchestra play their OPEN strings. Open strings are more resonant. And because they are not played with the fingers, you can’t get a vibrato sound from open strings. But what you can do, and mountain music does this often, is to play a melody on one string while the other string is played like a drone. [Berlioz demonstrates this.]
There are many excellent books on orchestration, instrumentation, and music notation. I’d suggest a visit to Patelson’s Music Store and buy some. There are also some excellent resources online; Pete Thomas has a good site as does musicarrangers.com, and many others.
This week, let’s just concentrate about the instrument and how it’s played. The left hand presses down strings to produce notes. There are no frets on violins as there are on guitars; the player must know EXACTLY where to place their finger to obtain the correct intonation. String players practice scales and arpeggios as they are the bread and butter of the melodic material in classical music.
The bow has two main jobs: to play downwards, or a downbow, and to play upwards, or an upbow. The part next to your hand is called the frog, and the other end is the tip. The natural state of a downbow is a strong beginning, and as the string is sustained and the bow moves to the tip, the pressure is less: a down bow is like an exhalation, meaning a strong start, with a tapering at the end. The upbow is like an inhalation, starts softly and builds. Realize that string players learn to overcome this natural tendency in bowing and cover it up, but behind most up and downbows is an emulation of the breathing process. Add to that, a gentle shake in the tone, vibrato, and a sound that emulates the human voice.
Usually string instruments play one note at a time, but they are capable of playing more. When two notes sound simulaneously, this is called a double stop, with three notes, a triple stop, and all four notes, a quadruple stop. Also, unlike the ukelele, the banjo, the guitar, andthe mandolin, the bowed stringed instruments have curved bridges. Realize that their bows are straight lines, and they are supposed to play all four strings! As they play single notes far more frequently than multiples, an arched bridge makes playing single notes easier, and thereby, quadruple stops are more difficult. You have to “throw” the bow across the strings with force in order to get all four strings to sound like a simultaneity, or a chord. [He demonstrates.] A few other things you need to know: only write for adjacent strings, meaning strings IV and II can’t play together because III is in between! In music notation for bowed instruments, the phrase mark indicates the length that the bow will be held. Roughly speaking, the more notes you cram under one bow (the drawing of the bow across a string in ONE direction), the softer it will be; when you draw a full bow across the string per note, the overall sound will be louder. This is the importance of knowing how bowing works, how it feels, and how it emulates breathing and singing.
I’d like you to purchase the Dover Edition of Johann Sebastian Bach’s WORKS FOR VIOLIN. Henryk Szeryng has a good recording of it. (There must be a more up to date recording than this!?) Study carefully how every move is made. Listen to the music and follow along with the score. If you see something you don’t understand, hit the pause button, and look it up.
22:
Berlioz in 1867.
[Doorbell rings. Prof Berlioz hollers down. Rufus waits patiently. Sound of keys against the door. Swearing in French, wrong keys. Silence. Sound of footsteps up from downstairs. More key sounds. Door opens. Rufus appears with a big smile and a flashdrive in his hand. Berlioz slaps him on the back and they move to the studio. Rufus plugs his flashdrive into the professor's new MacBook Pro. Rufus opens two examples and begins to speak. Berlioz is amused, sits down and cleans his glasses squinting up at Rufus. Open on the screen are two scores from his work "BLOOM" both which show use of the circle of fifths.]
Rufus: Professor, I’ve done as you asked and have two examples of a cappella use of the circle of fifths. I’ve sung them in time and in tune per your request. This first one is just the chorus, well, actually it’s all me, singing in four parts using a three legged sequence to go through the circle of fifths and get home again:
MP3: Play audio file (asst2.mp3)
Berlioz: Excellent, excellent (tapping the tips of his fingers together).
Rufus: And here is the same passage with two antiphonal lines that go along with it:
MP3: Play audio file (asst3.mp3)
Berlioz: Bravo my beamish boy! Bravo! Excellent performance, in tune, marvelous examples of exactly what I asked you for. Now go and use that in something that’s not a rock song.
(TO BE CONTINUED: the next assignment: Writing for strings I)
[Note to readers: these are excerpts from "Hope is a thing with feathers" used in his BLOOM dance/chorus collaboration..]
20:
Dear Prof Berlioz,
Thank you for the roses and the thoughtful if not naughty card. I have not completed your assignment because of the concerts last week, and well, y’know, I’ve just been caught up in it all. So, may we meet once before I go to Europe? I promise I’ll have a great piece of work for you.
Your humble student,
Rufus
08:
[An ongoing public lesson in composition.]
Rufus arrives with some old onion skin filled with clefs of all kinds. Professor Berlioz scans the page and sees improvement in his autography and says so. He critiques the shapes of the flags in 16th and 32nd notes. “Here you try it.” Rufus grabs the pencil and starts making a 16th note. The pencil point breaks. “Shit!” Berlioz grabs the pencil and pushes it into the electric sharpener. “Here, good as new.” He taps the point, “It’s a good idea to gently break the very tip of the pencil so that doesn’t happen. Doodle for a few seconds to get the graphite looking solid.” Rufus does so. Now, I want you to relax as you write with a pencil. Just as when you work at your computer, it’s important to have good posture, and a relaxed hand as you write. Take a look at Bach’s handwriting. Granted, he used a crow quill pen, but you get the impression he wrote this calmly and quickly.
Berlioz: Rufus, if you were a typical incoming Freshman, I would take you on a much slower, gradated path, but you know much already, and for that reason, I will jump around to find holes in your knowledge and try to fill them. I will try to help put names on things you very likely know already. Today I’d like to review basic triads, their qualities, and what happens to them when you make them into 4-note chords, or in this case, seventh chords.
When I use the term “diatonic” I am referring to the notes of a major scale, or the white notes if you will. If I create a triad and clone it as I rise up the scale, I get the following chords:
You’ll see that there are three kinds of triads: a major triad (I, IV, V), a minor triad (ii, iii, vi), and a diminished triad (vii). Many teachers use upper case letters to refer to major chords and lower case letters to refer to minor and diminished chords.
To the right of this are the diatonic seventh chords. There are four kinds of seventh chords in a major scale. The chords are built upon one of the three basic triads, but in this case, a seventh is added above the bottom note which is either a minor 7th or a major 7th (played on the piano). So a MM7 seventh chord is based on a MAJOR chord with a major 7th on top; the Mm7, usually referred to as a dominant 7th and only exists on V, is made up of a major triad with a minor 7th on top. These are the two major sounding seventh chords. The MM7 doesn’t really need to go anywhere since jazz. In Classical music the 7th is considered a dissonance and would need to be resolved. The Mm7 is the core of so-called functional harmony. A dominant 7th chord has a powerful tendency to resolve to the tonic, or primary key. The last diatonic seventh chord is kind of an odd ball: it’s the dm7 or a seventh chord based upon a diminished triad, with a minor 7th on top. It’s known as a “half-diminished” seventh which is indicated by the little degree symbol with a slash through it.
Music made up of triads that just go up and down the diatonic scale is usually dull and predictable. Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” is one of the most beautiful exceptions (see my analysis on this blog). The power of the V – I chord progression is one that is found on other scale degrees as well. We can cycle through every triad by romping through what is known as the circle of fifths. If you ride it downwards, you usually run out of the range of the instrument you’re writing for. So, you adjust it: rather than descending by 5ths forever (listen to the first part of the example below), you jump down a 5th, then go up a 4th instead of down a 5th (it’s the same note, just an octave higher). So the bass line that goes down a 5th, up a 4th, down a 5th, up a 4th, et cetera, is demonstrated below, and is an example of a chord progression that rides along the circle of 5ths.
Now let’s listen to these two examples. The first takes you through the circle of 5ths using ONLY triads. It also has the bass line that descends by 5ths. You see that the last two notes are not heard and “fall off” the piano.” The second example does the same thing, but adds a seventh to each chord. You hear it is a much more emotional rendering of circle of fifths chord progressions. Also note that in the bass, it has been adjusted to fit on the piano, and sounds much more satisfying.
MP3: Play audio file (circleof5ths.mp3)
Berlioz: Your assignment for next week..
Rufus: Ah c’mon Prof, I’ve got my big Judy Garland concert coming up next week, I can’t…
Berlioz: Ah yes, alright I’ll give you next Tuesday and Wednesday off, but back to work on Thursday. I’d like to you compose a work for chorus, yes, you may record all the parts. In it I want you to obsessively explore the circle of 5ths. Mind you there are many, many other ways of tapping into that circle, I’d like you to discover as many as you can. I’d like you to clean up the performance of your recording and I want everything in tune. You may not use any instruments whatsoever. It will be due in one week. Good luck.
20:
[Rufus hands in a CD of "Lux aeterna" a part of his larger work "Bloom."]
Berlioz: What is this?
Rufus: My “Lux aeterna”
Bz: Is this a notation file?
RW: No, it’s a sound file of my performance.
Bz: Where is the score?
RW: There is no score. I recorded it all in real time.
Bz: My dear Rufus, I must encourage you to practice your notational skills.
RW: I don’t need them.
Bz: I beg to differ. Notating music takes your music out of time, and allows the composer to carefully consider every tiny detail and nuance on paper, or on computer, before anyone ever tries to perform it. This is especially true with counterpoint.
RW: So you don’t wanna hear my piece?
Bz: I’d be happy to hear it.
[Rufus plugs the disc into his laptop. They listen. Berlioz smiles, applauds. Rufus combs his hair back with his right hand and reaches for a cigarette.]
Bz: Excellent m’boy. No smoking in lessons. Kill yourself on your own time, not mine. The piece has many characteristics of a good contapuntal work. The music is really overloaded with more parts than are really necessary, that is unless you were after a Thomas Tallis type mega-contrapuntal piece.
RW: Yeah, I kinda was.
Bz: You’re not ready for it. Take one step at a time. Be patient. I’d like to start you at the very beginning or contrapuntal study: modal counterpoint. In this study, we’ll do note against note exercises, half against whole exercises, quarters against whole, then a study in syncopated voices and suspensions, and then I’ll let flap your wings and try your hand at free counterpoint. The difference is that I will give you rules as to what you may and what you may not do.
RW: Sheesh, just what I need; more rules. Do I hafta?
Bz: Yes you have to. Trust the process. I’m not insisting that you follow these rule for your whole life, nor for your own music, just for this series of lessons. Think of these exercises as contrapuntal training wheels.
RW: Yeah, there’s an attractive image.
Bz: But first I want you to practice your music notation. While you’re talking on the phone, I want you to doodle drawing clefs: treble, bass and alto. Practing making notes. Notes are ovals, not circles or little specks of fly poop. They are ovals. Draw an oval and fill it in for the black note. Now notice the difference between the two hollow notes: the half note and the whole note. See how the half note slants to the right, and the whole note slants to the left. Practice drawing these differences. You may wonder why music notation looks the way it does. Composers used crow quills, or pens made from crow’s feathers. Used like this [draws] you can make a thin line, and like this [demonstrates] a fat line. Do this and the lines can go from thin to fat. For next time, I’d like you to fill this page with music notation, not music, just notation practice. Find a treble clef you like and imitate it. Try it yourself first, then I’ll show you my technique later.
RW: Cool, ok thanks dude.
Bz: I am not “dude” you may call me Professor Berlioz, or Professor, but not dude.
RW: Ok Prof, er, Professor.
Bz: Later dude.
15:
[Rufus dutifully hands in the three chant assignments. Professor Berlioz offers his critique]
The melodic shape and sense of flow in your assignments are excellent. Clearly, your work was the work of a latter day monk, and not one from the 12th century. Let me illustrate a few things that your counterpart from that era would not have done, that you did.
Notice here, here, and [turns page] here, you have triadic arpeggiation. Remember there was no concept of a triad at that time. Any time a melody leaps this is a dramatic gesture, and rather rare. Remember that after a leap, the melody often recovers in the opposite direction. Not unlike “two steps forward, one step back.” Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can’t do this in YOUR music, but if you wish to emulate chant, avoid triadic arpeggiation.
Another problematic section is [looks through the papers], uh, here. Listen. [Prof Berlioz sings the passage stomping his foot every four beats.] This passage is far too metric for the style. There wasn’t any concept of 4/4 or 3/4 in this music, nor a concept of a downbeat, a pickup, syncopation, or other modern rhythmic notions. The music’s job is to sell the text.
And finally, in this section [points to a section of music] you’ve got a motive going, alright, it’s just a little motive, but remember that motivic writing was extremely rare. Wait till we get to the Baroque period, you can sequence yourself into a frenzy.
Now, I’d like to take you out of the 12th century. Take your favorite part of these three chants and make a song, a 21st century song that is you, but is based upon what you’ve just composed here. It is due in one week. Record it all yourself using ProTools, or Logic, or Performer. You will perform and sing all the parts.
Assignment for today’s work: A-
Prof. Berlioz
[Illustration courtesy of Raymond Holbert]
05:
This is the first in a long series of lessons in composition. My ideal student is Rufus Wainwright however it could be anyone with musical talent in composition who wishes to virtually study at the college level.
First lesson: check out of the libary or purchase the Liber Usualis. In it you will find a gold mine of chant. No, it is not necessary that you convert to Catholicism to appreciate the music.
Pay attention to the complete absence of meter.
Note how the shapes of the melodies rise and fall.
Observe when music is repeated and when it is not.
Notice the absence of any motivic elements.
How would you describe the “mode” of the chant you are singing?
Could you describe the phrase structure?
Buy a CD of Gregorian Chant. Listen to it many times. Follow along with some of the chants with the score in the Liber.
Assignment: compose three chants using a text you found in the Liber. Use the treble clef for the first, the alto clef for the second, and the bass clef for the third. Sing them for your friends. Sing them for a devout Catholic and listen to their comments carefully.
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