0.2 Chapter 1: elements of music  (Page 6/6)

Although tone color has a scientific explanation, its function in music is aesthetic. Music is an art of sound, and the quality of that sound has much to do with our response to it. Indeed, the concept of tonal beauty varies considerably in different periods, styles, and cultures. On the other hand, within a particular context, ideals of beauty may be quite firmly established and performers often pay extraordinary prices for instruments that can produce that ideal sound. But no instrument automatically produces a beautiful tone, so the finest violin will produce a rasping, scraping sound in the hands of a beginner. Even at the most advanced stages of accomplishment, achieving what is considered to be a beautiful tone is a criterion of a good performance.

The attitude toward tone color has played an interesting role in the history of Western art music. Prior to the 18th century, composers were often quite vague, even indifferent, with respect to how their musical ideas would be realized. It was customary to play music on whatever instruments were at hand and to perform some or all parts of vocal compositions on instruments. During the 18th century, as composers became more sensitive to the idiomatic quality of instruments, they began to conceive musical ideas in terms of particular tone colors. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the fascination with expanding and experimenting with the palette of tone colors has elevated the art of orchestration to a level equal to other aspects of the compositional process.

Form

1. sectional, falling into units of contrasting or repeating content,

2. continuous, usually involving the development and transformation of one or more germinal ideas,

3. a combination of sectional and continuous.

In addition, four general concepts help in the appreciation of many forms: repetition, contrast, return, and variation. The concept of “return” is especially important, for when listeners hear something familiar (that is, something they heard earlier in a work or performance) the sense of “going home” can be very powerful, whether it takes place in a 45-minute symphony or a four-minute pop song. One traditional method of representing these concepts is to use letters of the alphabet to identify individual phrases or sections, AA indicating repetition, AB contrast, ABCD a continuous structure, ABA return, and ABACA a design involving contrast, repetition and return. Capital and lower case letters may be used to distinguish between different levels of formal organization, while symbols for prime (A’, B’ etc) signify restatement of material with some changes. When a section is repeated more than once with different changes, additional prime symbols may be used (ABA’CA’’, for example, where the second and third A’s are both versions of the original “A,” but different from each other).

To illustrate, the chorus of Jingle bells would be represented as abab’ ( a for the repeated music of the first and third lines, b and b’ for the contrasting music of the second and fourth phrases with their different endings -half and full cadences, respectively). The entire song is in ABA form (A for Jingle bells….open sleigh), B for the second section of the song (Dashing through the snow…) and A for the return of the chorus.

In variation form, a melody or chord progression is presented successively in different versions; the form could be diagrammed as A A’ A’’ A’’’ and so forth. Changes may be made in key, instrumentation, rhythm, or any number of ways, but the original tune is always recognizable. Aaron Copland’s variations on the Shaker tune Simple Gifts in his Appalachian Spring is a famous example of variation on a tune, while Pachelbel’s Canon in D might be considered a series of variations on a chord progression. Some have compared a jazz performance to a kind of variation form, where musicians play a pre-existing tune and then provide a series of improvised “variations” on that tune.