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- Music appreciation
- Theme and motif in music
Materials and preparation
- You will need an audiotape or CD player and a recording of a piece of music that is strongly based on a short, easily-heard motif. Some suggestions follow, or you can use your own favorites.
- If you have the class time, you may want to do two recordings, starting with a piece with more obvious motifs and ending with a piece in which the use of motifs is a little more subtle. Or if the class needs persuading that classical music is approachable, you may want to start with a non-classical piece and move on to a classical piece.
- Definitions and explanations of the concepts to be presented in this activity can be found at
Melody .
Some easy-to-find music based on motives
- The first movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 has the most famous motive in
Western classical music.
- In "The Ride of the Valkyrie", from Wagner's opera
Die Walkuere (
The Valkyrie ), there are two closely-related motives to listen for; the melody is built on one, and the accompaniment is built on the other. Most of Wagner's opera music is based on motifs, but there can be so many different motifs being used in one section of the music that they can be difficult to spot unless you are familiar with the opera. If you can't find "The Ride of the Valkyrie", try listening to the overture to
The Flying Dutchman (
Die Fliegende Hollander ).
- All of the movements of Holst's
The Planets are highly motivic, but each movement develops several different motives, and some are easier to spot than others. The rhythmic motive in "Mars" is by far the most obvious, but the four-note motive that opens "Uranus" is also very easy to hear. If you use this piece, you may want the further challenge of seeing how many different motives you can hear in a movement, as well as how each of them change. Are the melodic lines based on motives?
- The five-note "alien message" motif in John Williams' score for "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" may already be familiar to some students. Many other movie and television scores also include short motifs (see
below ).
- Not all motivic music is classical in style; from early ragtime tunes like Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag", through big band tunes like "String of Pearls" and "In the Mood", to the cool jazz of Miles Davis'
Kind of Blue , to the latest improvised solo, jazz is full of motifs.
- Listen for the two-note "look down" motive from the work song at the beginning of
Les Miserables to return throughout the musical. There are other motives in this musical, too, and in many other musicals (
Phantom of the Opera , for example).
- Many other classical works are also full of motivic development, particularly works written in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Try listening to both the "Waltz of the Snowflakes" and "Coffee (Arabian Dance)" from Tchaikovsky's
The Nutcracker , or to Strauss' tone poems ("Till Eulenspiegels Lustige Streiche", for example) or to the orchestral works of Stravinsky (for example, the first movement of the "Symphony in E Flat") or Dvorak (for example, the first and second movements of his "Symphony No. 9: From the New World"). If a piece has many motifs, you may not be able to keep track of all of them until you have heard the piece several times and are more familiar with it. Start by picking out one motif that you can hear and listening for it, or by simply counting motifs.
Source:
OpenStax, Music appreciation. OpenStax CNX. Mar 24, 2014 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11640/1.1
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