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Okay, okay, okay! I get it! Now, explain to me the music theory of the D major section of the Bach Chaconne! Say the first few notes of that section after th

by graycat 12y ago

Okay, okay, okay! I get it! Now, explain to me the music theory of the D major section of the Bach Chaconne! Say the first few notes of that section after the opening open D string and the D an octave higher on the A string; or if want to avoid the open string, play the D of the open D string on the G string and the other D on the D string. Then what is the role of the notes repeated three times, and those triplets repeated several times? These triplets are insistent? Heifetz played them this way, but not all violinists do! Then what is the connection from the last few bars of the D major section and the first few bars of the following D minor section? Or the last of the D major is the climax of the piece, and the start of the D minor is a catharsis? For more, at the beginning of the second to last bar of the D major section, there is a chord the first G above middle C, the next G up, and the B above that. The notes are quarter notes except the upper G is an eighth note and changes to the D just below, also an eighth note. Well, what is the role of the change from that G to that D? Some violinists emphasize that change from the G to the D a fourth below, that is, make the D easy to hear and the fall something dramatic, say, as some kind of resignation. What's going on here? What likely did Bach have in mind? Rostropovich, with his recording with von Karajan of the Dvorak concerto, made something really special at the beginning of the second movement: He has some depiction of remembered pathos. So, how'd he (Dvorak and/or Rostropovich) do that? From Rostropovich I hear emphasis with vibrato, volume, and tone color and careful timing, phrasing. It's passionate music. What's going on? It sounds a little like some abstraction of some speech with pathos. Maybe easier is the Prelude of the first Bach piece for solo cello and, there, the rising chromatic passage to what is apparently the climax of that piece. So, what else is going on there just besides that rising chromatic passage? Then there is the cello solo early in the first act of Die Walkure, maybe representing the girl? How to write a cello solo that sounds like a compassionate girl? For some more, there is the duet, "Presentation of the Rose" in Der Rosenkavalier with Barbara Bonney and Anne Sophie von Otter as at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuS337uc-4Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuS337uc-4Y Some parts of the duet with the two voices are just marvelous, and I'm not understanding how Strauss did that. What's going on? How'd he do it? For more, there's too much going on in Ein Heldenleben, but I'd be happy knowing a little about what Strauss did there, even how the girl, that is, the violin solo, worked, or even just how Stauss made the girl so comforting in the last section. Are such issues what you have in mind as music theory? How'd I get into such questions? One night on a radio I heard Beethoven's 7th symphony, and it seemed easy to like, e.g., the dance. Occasionally Dad gave me some money, and I bought some recordings, Vivaldi through Rachmaninoff. Then I was a grad student in math at Indiana University in a dorm next to the music building, and a Stern protege put his old Italian violin under my left chin, gave me a lesson, and I took a violin course, starting with how to tune the thing. I learned the music theory of perfect fifths, that is, three times the frequency of the lower open string is the same frequency as two times the frequency of the upper open string, and the beats between those two can be used to tune to perfect fifths. Not long after making it in some form through much of the Chaconne I got too busy to continue on. So, I like the music but don't fully understand just why. Music theory has an explanation?

quadrangle 12y ago
Your questions are great! They totally fit the scope of actual music theory. The first thing to understand is that written music notation is not music. Partially, this is like the way that written English is not spoken English. All the notation we've inherited from Bach specifies certain things and leaves other elements unspecified, in much the same manner as this text really fails to carry the tone and delivery you would hear from me in real life. I can read some English text in different ways and bring out an amazing range of meaning and interpretation in how I express it. Likewise with music. We can speculate about what Bach had in mind, but we can only use various bits of evidence, writing, known practices, etc. to guess about anything not present in the notation. There are tons of parallels between music and speech, and I recommend the book Music, Language, and the Brain by Ani Patel for more in-depth about this. The stuff in the book I mentioned originally (Music and Memory) gets into a lot of the issues too. Our processing of all these interacting parts has to do with the various psychoacoustic factors that make things merge together or heard distinctly in our perception. Auditory stream segregation describes the factors in how we follow a line of music and why we relate one note to another instead of in a different way. And some things are really distinct, so everyone hears them the same way. Many others are ambiguous so you and I can hear the exact same sounds and actually parse the music quite differently in our heads. I actually could sit down with you and make sense of all the subjective experiences given understandings from psychology and explain much of what is going on in each of your examples. It's a bit hard to express in text though, easier in person with the ability to gesture and intone and sing while discussing and experiencing the different examples.
- graycat 12y ago
  Thanks, I'm learning! Finally it dawned on me, the G to D change was while in D major and, thus, back to the tonic! So, there, in the next to last bar, right before the top of the climax of the section, Bach touched on the tonic again! So, artistically this tied the motion and emotion of the other notes back to the tonic and not left partly lost out in the ozone -- or some such. This afternoon, I listened to the Heifetz and Piatigorsky performance of the Andante of the Brahms Double Concerto: Finally it dawned on me: Brahms had an abstraction of some kind of speech, say, of just the sound of the speech, the sounds that conveyed the emotion without knowing the literal words. So, it sounded like speech, maybe like speech in a foreign language where didn't understand the literal meaning of the words but, still, got much of the emotional expression. It appears that you have a book that expands on such a thing. Edit: Okay, at http://www.nsi.edu/~ani/MLB_review_Psychomusicology_Sept_2010.pdf http://www.nsi.edu/~ani/MLB_review_Psychomusicology_Sept_201... I found a book review of Aniruddh D. Patel. Music, Language, and the Brain. He's deep into some apparently fairly speculative research and makes me like more my little idea that some of music is like listening to some passionate talking in a foreign language were know none of the words but, still, get the emotional content -- that is, the music and the emotional content of the speech can be similar. So, back to the opening cello solo of the Brahms Double, we can imagine some passionate speaking where a person says something, just a few words, then says it again a little differently, then again with a little different emphasis, then again using maybe different word order. Well, maybe that's much of what Piatigorsky playing what Brahms wrote is doing. Or, back to the beginning of the D major section of the Bach Chaconne, we have phrases F# G E, F# G A D, E F# G F# E E A F# [this example would be still more clear with the actual music with the note timings -- maybe the harmony would also help!] Here I am inserting commas to separate what I am regarding as the separate phrases repeating the same basic emotional content. So, an idea is that that music is like a speaker saying much the same thought three times, each time with mostly the same words and in a similar but different way, that is, with variations. Why three times with variations? The speaker is passionate and, maybe even, pleading, and trying to get their meaning across if not the first way then maybe in one of the two other ways. Besides, the third way is more complete than the other two and, even, with the rise to the A, has a point of high emphasis and emotion. Maybe. See something similar at the beginning of Silent Night where there are four variations of basically the same emotional expression. I suspect that Bach and Mozart could "search their feelings" (Star Wars), think of some corresponding speech, hear the corresponding music, and just write it down. The book review suggested that different languages have different patterns in the speaking and, thus, for each such language, music written in that language will use similar patterns. So from that might argue that the Bach Chaconne was not written by a native speaker of French or Greek. Or Massenet just does not sound like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Wagner, or R. Strauss! Maybe Massenet sounds more like Debussy or Ravel!

by graycat 12y ago

quadrangle 12y ago

Your questions are great! They totally fit the scope of actual music theory. The first thing to understand is that written music notation is not music. Partially, this is like the way that written English is not spoken English. All the notation we've inherited from Bach specifies certain things and leaves other elements unspecified, in much the same manner as this text really fails to carry the tone and delivery you would hear from me in real life. I can read some English text in different ways and bring out an amazing range of meaning and interpretation in how I express it. Likewise with music. We can speculate about what Bach had in mind, but we can only use various bits of evidence, writing, known practices, etc. to guess about anything not present in the notation. There are tons of parallels between music and speech, and I recommend the book Music, Language, and the Brain by Ani Patel for more in-depth about this. The stuff in the book I mentioned originally (Music and Memory) gets into a lot of the issues too. Our processing of all these interacting parts has to do with the various psychoacoustic factors that make things merge together or heard distinctly in our perception. Auditory stream segregation describes the factors in how we follow a line of music and why we relate one note to another instead of in a different way. And some things are really distinct, so everyone hears them the same way. Many others are ambiguous so you and I can hear the exact same sounds and actually parse the music quite differently in our heads. I actually could sit down with you and make sense of all the subjective experiences given understandings from psychology and explain much of what is going on in each of your examples. It's a bit hard to express in text though, easier in person with the ability to gesture and intone and sing while discussing and experiencing the different examples.

graycat 12y ago
Thanks, I'm learning! Finally it dawned on me, the G to D change was while in D major and, thus, back to the tonic! So, there, in the next to last bar, right before the top of the climax of the section, Bach touched on the tonic again! So, artistically this tied the motion and emotion of the other notes back to the tonic and not left partly lost out in the ozone -- or some such. This afternoon, I listened to the Heifetz and Piatigorsky performance of the Andante of the Brahms Double Concerto: Finally it dawned on me: Brahms had an abstraction of some kind of speech, say, of just the sound of the speech, the sounds that conveyed the emotion without knowing the literal words. So, it sounded like speech, maybe like speech in a foreign language where didn't understand the literal meaning of the words but, still, got much of the emotional expression. It appears that you have a book that expands on such a thing. Edit: Okay, at http://www.nsi.edu/~ani/MLB_review_Psychomusicology_Sept_2010.pdf http://www.nsi.edu/~ani/MLB_review_Psychomusicology_Sept_201... I found a book review of Aniruddh D. Patel. Music, Language, and the Brain. He's deep into some apparently fairly speculative research and makes me like more my little idea that some of music is like listening to some passionate talking in a foreign language were know none of the words but, still, get the emotional content -- that is, the music and the emotional content of the speech can be similar. So, back to the opening cello solo of the Brahms Double, we can imagine some passionate speaking where a person says something, just a few words, then says it again a little differently, then again with a little different emphasis, then again using maybe different word order. Well, maybe that's much of what Piatigorsky playing what Brahms wrote is doing. Or, back to the beginning of the D major section of the Bach Chaconne, we have phrases F# G E, F# G A D, E F# G F# E E A F# [this example would be still more clear with the actual music with the note timings -- maybe the harmony would also help!] Here I am inserting commas to separate what I am regarding as the separate phrases repeating the same basic emotional content. So, an idea is that that music is like a speaker saying much the same thought three times, each time with mostly the same words and in a similar but different way, that is, with variations. Why three times with variations? The speaker is passionate and, maybe even, pleading, and trying to get their meaning across if not the first way then maybe in one of the two other ways. Besides, the third way is more complete than the other two and, even, with the rise to the A, has a point of high emphasis and emotion. Maybe. See something similar at the beginning of Silent Night where there are four variations of basically the same emotional expression. I suspect that Bach and Mozart could "search their feelings" (Star Wars), think of some corresponding speech, hear the corresponding music, and just write it down. The book review suggested that different languages have different patterns in the speaking and, thus, for each such language, music written in that language will use similar patterns. So from that might argue that the Bach Chaconne was not written by a native speaker of French or Greek. Or Massenet just does not sound like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Wagner, or R. Strauss! Maybe Massenet sounds more like Debussy or Ravel!