Classe 1:

Moment a cavall del renaixement al barroc: Polèmica Artusi-Monteverdi:

A grans trets, el Renaixement té les següents característiques:

- Triomf de la polifonia fins arribar a la perfecció: rigorositat contrapuntística

- Música es basa en els modes eclesiàstics medievals però s’usen amb més
llibertat
- La melodia no existeix per si solia: cada línia melòdica es codependent

D’altra banda el barroc:

- Comença a aparèixer la melodia acompanyada: major claredat i el compositor
concentra l’expressió musical en una única veu.
- Harmonia: es pensa més verticalment i hi ha modulacions amb un discurs
harmònic amb tensions
- Predomini de l’harmonia sobre el contrapunt: aparició del baix continu
- La música instrumental s’independitza de la vocal

El compositor comença a pensar la paraula com una prioritat: la música esta al servei
de la paraula i cal arribar al màxim de la seva expressió.

Video Monteverdi: How to express and convey the intensity in the whole range of
human emotion.

Classe 2: Craig Wright

Renaissance:
Middle Ages, Renaissance. What do these terms mean and where do we get them?
Middle Ages, well if they were in the middle of something what was on either side?
Indeed two periods, that are perhaps more stable and perhaps more classical in modes
of thinking. The Middle Ages then, were between Classical Antiquity of Ancient Greece
and Rome and the rebirth of classical ideas and classical ideals in what we call the
renaissance. Where do we get this term, renaissance, rebirth? Well that was first
coined not until the 19th century around 1860 by a German historian Jacob
Burckhardt. And it was intended to signal a renewed interest in classical antiquity,
particularly of Ancient Rome. Well, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so
let's have a look at one, indeed more than one. Here we see the Roman forum, as it
presently looks with the remains of temples with columns and capitals, both
Corinthian and Ionic. Now the famous Pantheon in the center of Rome, again with
columns, capitols, a triangular penta metume, and a rotunda. Now we see architecture
from 1500 years later, from the Renaissance, from Palladio's Villa Rotonda near
Vincenza, Italy, but yet again, the columns with Ionic capitals, a triangular
pedimentum, and a rotunda. And now another view, straight on. The Middle Ages
were not so kind to Rome. There was crime, organized and disorganized, and decay.
The city of Rome went, you'll never believe this, but it's true, went from a population
of more than a million at the time of Caesar Augustus, to somewhere around 25,000 in
the 14th century. Wolves ran through the sections of the city, looking for corpses. And
the pope, during most of the late middle ages, didn't even reside in Rome for nearly a
century, he lived in what was to become France in what is today Avignon, France. By
the mid-fifteenth century, however, Rome was on the mend, a period of economic
ascend, ensued. The Pope had returned, and the citizens were starting to rebuild. And
they, and their fellow citizens in city-states such as Florence and Sienna, rebuilt and
refashioned society and in so doing, they asked, How should city government work?
What should a building look like? What should a sculpture look like? Where should it
go? How should politicians behave? How should a politician's speech be organized and
so on? For answers they turned to models in classical antiquity and made it reborn.
How did this renaissance apply to music? Well less well, because almost everything
musical from classical antiquity, the music itself and the musical instruments have
been lost or destroyed. There was as far as they knew, no surviving music. But they did
have a lot of books on music theory and many literary references that talked about
how music was constructed and how it worked in society. One important point that
Renaissance musicians took away from these reports about ancient music in classical
times was that it was powerful. Music could move the listener, could have a powerful
emotional effect on the hearer. So musicians of the renaissance devoted a lot of time
to creating a kind of music that would move the listener and they did so, as we will
see, by tying music to the text. By having the music underscore, reinforce, amplify, the
meaning of the text in ways that it hadn't during the Middle Ages.

Madrigal:

We said that in the Renaissance, written composed music became available in written
form, to a broader segment of society. This was part of the humanizing of the
Renaissance, and it was driven in large measure by technology. Technology changed
what art was and how people experienced the world, just as technology determines
what art is today, and how we experience the world, how we hear music. The
technological revolution of the Renaissance was, of course, the printing press, invented
in Germany on the banks of the Rhine River about 1450 or so. And from there it spread
to Italy, first to Venice and then Rome and then to France in Lyon and Paris. These
became the music publishing centers of Western Europe. On the screen you see the
finished product. This is just one part, here again, a tenor part book for a mass. A
singer would buy the book for just his part book, or possibly for secular music, her part
book, the soprano voice, the alto voice, the tenor voice, whatever. Why would you
need the other parts? You just needed your own music, except if you got lost, you
needed to peg off of or reference off of the other parts. Here on the screen now we
see an image of a printing press in action, we see men working with movable type.
Pressmen creating multiple sheets that had to be cut and these sheets had to be
bound. And the proofreader had to vet all of this, had to vet guarantee the finished
product. This is from a French image from Paris. And we know that there was an
important music printing working in Paris at this time in the 1530s, one Pierre
Attaingnant. Let's look at the title page from one of his prints. Here you can see one
that reads, 30 Musical [FOREIGN] In Four Voices, etc., etc. New pieces printed by Pierre
Attaingnant, A-T-T-A-I-N-G-N-A-N-T, living at, [FOREIGN] and so on near the church of
such and such. And here are the 30 or so pieces in this collection and it is simply a part
broke, the Superius part broke. But he tells us who he is and where he's living. And
based on this and the location of that church, we can actually see where he was
working here on the left bank, within a block or so of the Sorbonne. And interestingly
enough, there's still a bookstore, [FOREIGN], on that very spot. Now let's see some of
these part books as they were actually viewed. Here we see a trio, the young lady
playing on a flute from a soprano part book, while another singer sings, presumably
from another part book in the back and a lute fills out the harmony. Of course, this was
communal music. It was fun, but everybody was to be a participant. It wasn't any such
thing as an audience as we think of it, a large gathering of people who just listened.
Now let's see a slide from Paris, actually downtown Paris. If you look in the background
here, you can see the spires of Notre Dame. We saw that from the other side in our
session 7. Again, here is the park book with someone singing out of it, conducting and
a flute is playing the soprano part. Generally speaking, much of this secular music was
sung just one to a part. Sometimes with instruments but often times, a capella. So here
we have a group all singing out of a part book, three ladies and a gentleman. He seems
to be conducting given the hand position that he's gesturing with. Let's listen to this.
It's a chanson by Attaingnant Tant que vivrai performed here by Voices and Lute.
[MUSIC] Now Pierre Atoniogne was an enterprising fellow, and arranged for these
songs in every sort of different way. He wanted to make, to be bumped as much
money as he could on this enterprise. So he raised them for voices, for voices and
instruments, for lute, for lute and voice, recorders, keyboard, alone, and so on. Here's
a harpsichord, from slightly later after 1600. It's in the Yale Collection. Let's listen to
the same chanson, Tant que vivrai, but now arranged for harpsichord alone. [MUSIC]
And this brings us to the most popular kind of vocal music of the Renaissance, the
madrigal. The madrigal is a genre, again a type of music, involving several solo voices,
usually four or five, that sets to music a poem. Most often a poem about love or of love
frustrated. Usually only one singer sings each part. And most often the madrigal was
performed acapella, no accompanying instruments. More than 2,000 separate books
of madrigals published during the Renaissance, first in Italy and then in the low
countries, and in Germany and in England. Usually there were 20 madrigals or so in
each volume. So you can see that they're somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 of
these madrigals created. I suppose singing the madrigal was something of a rage,
perhaps the way doo-wop was, or maybe folk singing in the 1960s. Let's review all this
by means of this slide. Madrigal, what is it? Well, it's a genre of vocal music sung, not
in Latin, but in the vernacular language. It could be English, it could be Italian. Where
was it generated? Well, first in Italy, around 1530, and then it spread to the rest of
Europe. How many? Well, as we said, thousands. Maybe as many as 40,000. By the
time it reached England, we were in the Elizabethan Age, the age of Queen Elizabeth I.
There were a number of important musicians working at her court, associated with her
and with London generally. Thomas Morley, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, John
Wilbey, Thomas Weelkes and collectively they formed what's call the English Madrigal
School. So we're gonna take a listen to now, just one Madrigal out of an important
collection called the Triumphes of Oriana 1601, a collection of, again, roughly 20 or so
of these Madrigals. This collection is interesting because each one of them, in order to
be included in this collection, you had to end your Madrigal with the salutation, long
live fair Oriana. Oriana was the favored nickname of Queen Elizabeth. So each of these
madrigals ends this way. We're going to turn our attention now to the madrigal As
Vesta was from Latmos Hill Descending, by Thomas Weelkes. Again, you can see on the
screen here six vocal parts to six part madrigal. Each of the parts would be sung only by
one voice. And only four of the voices, the top four voices start out. But let's move on
now to three images. One of the composer Wilkes who wrote this madrigal in 1601.
Second, in the middle of course, Queen Elizabeth the first, the dedicatee of this
madrigal. And third, my friend and former colleague here at Yale before, his regretted
retirement, Simon Carrington who is the founder and conductor for years and years of
the King Singers. So we're gonna turn now to a recording of the king singers. And in it
we're going to hear the following. We're going to listen to this madrigal As Vesta was
from hill descending. It's full of what we call word painting or madrigalisms. Moments
when the music underscores the text in a direct Onomatopoeic way, music in the
service of text. So, I'll talk a bit as we proceed. Let's see this music now sung by the
King's Singers. [MUSIC] Descending now. [MUSIC] That music of course is graded down,
so everybody's coming down. Latvis hill, what do they see? They see the Queen
ascending, so the music has to go up here. [MUSIC] Attended on by all. Well we'll have
a lot of voices here cuz everybody's in. [MUSIC] All six voices singing in [INAUDIBLE]
[MUSIC] So Diana's darlings, those attending the goddess Diana, they came running
down a-mains. So, it's going to go fast and downward. [MUSIC] Two by two? Yes, two
voice. Three by three? Yes, three voices. [MUSIC] You guessed it. [MUSIC] All alone.
[MUSIC] And mingling with the Shepard's, well, we're gonna mingle here
poly-phonically with lots of imitation, busy music. [MUSIC] Then sang, well everybody
together now, announcement. [MUSIC] All the nymphs of Diana sang. Long live Oriana.
[MUSIC] And they sing this for a very long time in imitation with the bass singing in
very long notes. [MUSIC] Sometimes the memetic nature of the music, the memetic
nature of the music, underscoring each word or phrase with an appropriate music
gesture gets down right silly. But this development is hugely important in the history of
music. It developed a vocabulary of musical expression. We can talk about the
different periods in the history of music, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and so on.
But the two most important changes in the history of Western music arguably, were
the switch from oral to written music, which occurred during the Middle Ages, and the
switch from abstract music, chant, mass, motet, to memetic music here again in the
Renaissance. Music became a memetic language that we all speak, or at least can all
understand. Happy music, well what are we gonna do with that? We're happy, we're
gonna put it in major and probably in an upper register. She falls down, struck down
with grief. Well that's going to be slow in tempo. It's gonna be minor in key and the
music undoubtedly will go downward. These are sorts of gestures that make up this
language. In the next period in the history of music, the Baroque period, this language
of music which originated in vocal music, will become so commonly understood that it
can be sounded by instruments alone, and we all will understand it.

Baroque:
Now we come to the Baroque Period in music. Though in truth, these period, these
time designators are somewhat arbitrary. No composer ever slaps his forehead. It's the
year 1600. Time for the Baroque style. Or, it's 1750, time for the classical era. Styles
change gradually, and we, historians, and people generally, set convenient dates, so
that we can understand things. We divide time into hours and minutes and seconds
just to make sense of it all. Now with the Baroque period, we are lucky. Because
there's a rather clear cut off provided by an event or development that happened
around 1600. It comes conveniently in the form of the creation of a new musical genre
in the West. Opera, again, Italy around 1600. Opera became so important that we can
use disappearances to mark the beginning of the Baroque era. Similarly, we have a
convenient end marker for the conclusion of this style of music, 1750. In fact, JS Bach
did us a great favor by dying in 1750. [LAUGH] Of course, I'm kidding, it'd be wonderful
if I had even more great music by Bach, but the fact that he died in 1750, and musical
style changed thereafter, became very different, is a convenient end marker for us. So
for the Baroque we have these two convenient goal posts, 1600, 1750. It's a long span,
and one that incorporates many stylistic changes. Indeed in the arts and music, the
Baroque era is something of a disjunctive and highly variegated period of artistic time.
Where do we get the term Baroque? Well, it come from the Portuguese word, barroco,
pearl of irregular shape. At first, the term Baroque had something of a pejorative
sense, meaning irregular, untamed, perhaps even bizarre in style. Well if not, bizarre,
at least flamboyant. And it's also generally dramatic and grandiose in scale. To get a
sense of this, let's look at some slides. Here we are again at St. Peters in Rome,
constructed from roughly 1550 to 1650. Late renaissance, into the early baroque. It's
big. The largest church in the world. And we can get a sense of this by turning the
other way. The Piasa can accommodate several football or soccer fields. Now going
inside, on the left side of the nave of the church, the longest nave in the world in
Christen. On the right, the canopy over the high alter. It's huge, nine stories tall or
about 90 feet tall. Designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1626. Now the flamboyant
baroque, well it's evident here in these monstrances showing the radiation of the
transubstantiation of the Holy Spirit, which is a typical image found in Roman Baroque
churches. Here we have two. Both designed again by Bernini. One for Saint Peters, on
the left, and the other for the Church of Our Lady of Victory, also in Rome. Also in the
same church, Our Lady of Victory, the famous Saint Teresa in agony, which twists with
Baroque energy. And now, speaking of Bernini, let's do a comparison, it's instructed I
think to put the two together. David by the young Michelangelo, and David by Bernini,
a century later on the right. What's your reaction to them? Think about it for a minute.
How do they exemplify the Renaissance as opposed to Baroque statuary? Well on the
left long straight lines, balance and proportion, versus on the right, right angles and
twists. From the left placid smile. On the right, a tense grimace. Renaissance, Classical
serenity versus Baroque energy. Let's go back to that Roman church of Our Lady of
Victory and let's look at the ceiling there with the organ to the left. Well, why is this
not Classical in any way? Well, because the ceiling is overrun with activity, with
ornamentation. There's scarcely a square inch here that is not used in some active
way. It's all energy. Now we turn to a comparison again. St. Peters on the left, St.
Florian in Austria. Again, here it's not only ornament, but power. We see both energy
and power. These structures are large, but they are also highly ornate. There's a string
vertical structure, the pillars go up and support. But on top it's all decoration and
ornamentation. And that often happens in Baroque music. Where we get a simple
vertical support, but also a highly ornate canopy up above, or in musical case, a highly
ornate melody. Now let's review just a bit here, what we're seeing on the screen at the
moment is a slide of a representation of most Renaissance religious music and most
song repertoire of the Renaissance. How it looked, in terms of texture. As you can see,
it's highly imitated. Highly contrapuntal. Highly horizontal. With independent lines.
Now let's compare here. Here's what early baroque texture is more likely to look like.
More homophonic, more block-like, more vertical. As the image says, not all voices in
homophonic texture are created equally, top and bottom are more important. The
bass in baroque music is strong, and usually steady, as we'll see later on when we get
to our segment four with the baroque basso continuo.

Classe 3:

“Creieu-me, el compositor modern construeix sobre els fonaments de la veritat”

Buscar Artusi a la Wikipedia. I Artusi-Monteverdi

Classe 4:

El madrigal és una cançó polifònica secular que esdevé popular a Europa al

Renaixement i primer Barroc. Els madrigals tradicionals s’interpreten a capella i a dues
o fins a vuit veus. La majoria consten de diferents melodies acompanyant seccions de
text. Cap el segle XVII s’inclou acompanyament instrumental

No confondre amb el madrigal italià del Trecento: litúrgic.

Recorregut històric: Arrels en cançons polifòniques del segle XIV, que abandonen
l’homofonia com el motet o la cançó francesa. Es desenvolupa a Itàlia tot i que els
primers compositors provenen de l’escola franco-flamenca: escriue sobre poesia
italiana. Ex. Jacques Arcadelt. Durant gairebé tot el segle XVI es compon a capella. Els
madrigalistes del segle XVII al entendre les possibilitats de la forma afegeixen
acompanyament instrumental (sense especificar instruments).

Trets diferencials:

- Lletra secular: no utilitzen text litúrgic: poesia com Petrarca

- Polifonia creixent: evolucionen de la frottola italiana i arriben a estil
contrapuntístic de fins a 8 veus
- Word-painting: antecedent de la música programàtica
- Composició no estròfica, sense seccions repetides.
- Del madrigal a l’òpera: Orfeo

Classe 5: pdfs
Classe 6: Barroc
L’ofrena musical:

1747- Frederick el Gran li demana a Bach que improvisi una fuga a tres parts: origen
del Ricercare. Amb l’Art de la fuga es porta el contrapunt a la seva màxima expressió.

So, there's the great man. The only authentic likeness of J.S. Bach. He's holding a
canon, a round, because canons are difficult to create. This shows not only that Bach
was a musician, but a learned musician. Bach, the learned musician, that's the title of a
book by my colleague at Harvard, the great Bach scholar Kristof Wolf. Our sessions on
Bach and Handel, of course, will take us to the music of the late Baroque in it's mature
style. These are long, complex pieces, done with great ingenuity and great integrity.
Bach and Handel were both Germans and they were both born in the same year, 1685.
And they were born even near one another, in Germany as we'll see. But let's start
with the Bachs. The many faces of the Bachs. Indeed, they were a dynasty of
musicians. From the 16th through the 19th Century. Ten generations of Bachs, here we
see. The most famous J.S. Bach, top of, upper left hand corner there, Johann Sebastian
Bach. And then his son, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, and then another son of J.S. Bach,
Johann Christian Bach, and then another one, Wilhelm Friedman Bach, and then over
to the far right, I have no idea but we can be sure, it's a Bach. If we look down at the
bottom there, bottom left, we see a portrait of Bach's father, Ambrosius Bach. Bach's
father was a town musician, who often played in the town wind band, he played an
instrument called the shawm, that we've talked about before, and here's what a town
band looked like, as we can tell by glancing at this early 17th century Dutch painting
there on the lower right hand side of this slide. This first map shows where Bach was
born in 1685. And rather soon, both his parents died. Actually they were both dead by
the time he was 11. And so he became a ward of his older brother. And then, he went
off, J.S Bach went off to prep school in effect. Where he was a boy soprano in the choir
school at Lüneburg, way up in northern Germany. Singing paid his way through school.
Thereafter, when his voice broke, at the age of 18. He took a job at the church of
Arnstadt, a town then of about 3000 as an organist. Here we see the pipes of the
original organ of Bach's day, the framework and the pipes. And here we see the
console, in a sense the central processing unitwith keyboards of Bach's original organ.
This is his original instrument, two manuals, two keyboards for hands, and a keyboard
for the pedal, pedal keyboard. And we see the stops, those round knobs around the
circumference of the in, instrument. They allow the organist to sound various groups
of pipe. Sound one group which might have the sound of a trumpet or sound another
group whichmight have the sound of an oboe or even a shawm. And if you pull them
out all together you get a very big sound. Pulling out all of the stops. So again, this
processing core went inside the original framework, the original casement of Bach's
organ, and here we see it. When he was a young man at Arnstadt, Bach asked for a
leave of absence. He wanted to visit the city of Lubeck. So off he goes, he walks the
225 miles one way, didn't have any money, couldn't fly, walked 225 miles up there to
hear and meet Dieterich Buxtehude in Lubeck. And here's the church in which
Buxtehude worked, Bach went up spent a couple of weeks there and then returned.
Oddly enough Handel, Handel made the same sort of trip. Handel was in Hamburg and
he went to Lu, Lubeck about this same time. So Bach walks to Lubeck and then walks
back. And as you can see from this map here. He returns somewhat late, tardy or late
into Orange dot and then moved on. And eventually is settled in Weimar, a slightly
larger town in the court's center. The center of the Duchy of Weimar. So here Bach in
Weimar was an organist in the duke's orchestra and a string player, violinist into
Duke's orchestra as well. And some of Bach's most famous early organ works were
composed here. The somewhat frightening sounds of the Toccata and Fugue in D
minor. Now, a toccata is a type of keyboard music. Literally, it means something
touched. So, when one touches an instrument. But as a musical Toccata is usually a
free flowing unpredictable composition of some what improvisatory style. So here's
the music of the Toccata in D minor. [MUSIC] You can see the organist is ornamenting
auction original scores no doubt. [MUSIC] And his big diminish chord. [MUSIC]
Ornamental resolution to a major chord. Well, this is a quick look at the life and music
of young Bach. The beginning of the music of his mature period, for mature Bach, we'll
move on to the city of Kothen.

Classe 8:

Retrat de Bach
Classe 9:

Patrons rítmics de l’ofrena

Classe 10:
Classe 11:

In the year 1717, Bach was on the move yet again. At stake here was the position of
Kapellmeister, director of music. A prestigious job in 18th century German society. His
position was open at Cöthen, so Bach went over to Cöthen to apply for the position of
Kapellmeister of the prince of Cöthen. And Bach was awarded the position. He got the
job. End of story. But not exactly. It turns out that in the 18th century, if an employee
was taken into the service of a member of the nobility or a high ranking clergyman he
belonged to that lord. He just couldn't quit. And the same thing was true later for
Haydn and for Mozart. In the 18th century, there's no such thing as we Americans
would call free agency, or he's a free agent. You were, in the 18th century, an
employee for life, unless your employer agreed to release you. And Bach hadn't played
by the rules of the game. And when he returned from Cöthen to Weimar to pick up his
possessions and his family of five, the Duke of Weimar had Bach thrown in jail. Bach in
jail? [LAUGH] Yes, in the county jail, for a month, from early November to early
December, 1770. At which point, Bach was finally released, both from jail and his
position in Weimar, and off he went to Cöthen. So here's Weimar and here we are
moving up to the northeast where we see Cöthen. And here's the way Cöthen looked
in the mid 17th century. Now Bach didn't live in the court buildings that we see in the
center here. But he lived to the west of town a couple blocks from the court chapel or
court complex to the west. And here's the moat around the court castle. And here's
the bridge going across it. Right, let me see if I can show it on the screen here. There
we go, right there. There's the bridge leading across the moat in Bach's day, that's he
we got to work every day. And here's how that same bridge over the moat looks today,
several hundred years later, how it looked after the communist regime relinquished
East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And, as we can see by this next slide,
immediately thereafter, Cöthen was in somewhat of a state of disrepair. But the first
thing the West Germans started to fix up was this part of the castle, the court castle.
The rather well known Hall of Mirrors. It has been restored. It has been restored
because it was the most Important room in the castle. This was the center of
entertainment and music for the court and it's still used for concerts that way today.
So let's take a moment now to review where we stand with regard to JS Bach. He's in
central Germany. He's married, 35 years old, four children. He's now a Kapellmeister,
chief musician at court. He's composing mainly instrumental music, solo sonatas and
suites for violin and for cello, that sort of thing. Composing many pieces in the genre of
concerto grosso. We'll be hearing the Brandenberg Concertos, at least bits of them, in
a moment and he's composing preludes and fugues, in a collection called the Well
Tempered Clavier. Now, we'll come back to the Well Tempered Clavier in just a minute.
But before the Well Tempered Clavier reached fruition, it knew an earlier life in
something called The Keyboard Book of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, which you see on
this screen here. It's an interesting story about this particular book. First of all, it's at
Yale University as you can see. But Wilheim Friedemann Bach was the first son of JS
Bach, and since most Bachs were musicians, it was thought that Bach, too, should train
his children to be musicians. Train the next generation. And to teach young Wilhelm
Friedemann. And as was the tradition with all conscientious music teachers at that
time, Bach created a music book for his child to learn from. Father Mozart did the
same thing for his daughter Nannerl and son Wolfgang. In those days you just couldn't
go to the neighborhood music store and buy music. It didn't exist. If you wanted
teaching material you had to create it yourself. You had to do so by copying it by hand.
That's what was thought to be good and useful for your pupil. So here we have JS Bach
beginning such a book, showing the boys the names of the notes and how to read the
various clefs and how to play the scales and so on. As mentioned, this entire, very
valuable manuscript, perhaps the most valuable of all Bach manuscripts, is in the
library at Yale University. And the next slide, well, it shows us the symbols and the
signs of the ornaments, and he introduces his son, the fledgling keyboard player, to
these signs and symbols, which are very important In the Baroque Era. And then he
begins to write his succession of easy to play preludes and fugues. The most famous of
these being the Prelude in C Major, and indeed, we've actually heard that before. And
if we turn to the end of this same prelude, we can see that interestingly enough, the
way it appears in its original version was not exactly as Bach heard it in his ear in the
final version. So you know this, this, prelude, we've all heard it. [MUSIC] And then just
the last four bars here, in its original version. [MUSIC] Originally Bach ended it right
there. In the last version that we know it by today there's a long extra sus on the
diminished chord, I believe, that brings him back to a different ending of this prelude.
So what's a prelude? Well, a prelude, of course, is a warm up piece, gets the fingers
limbered up and relaxed and ready to play the more substantive piece, the fugue. So
let's go on now to learn about the fugue. And we'll do so by means of a class video. So
we want to know about how fugues operate, so let's take a look at the specifics here.
The term fugue actually comes from an old Latin word fuga, which means flight or to
fly. So in a fugue, what you get is one voice going ahead, leading ahead and another
voice following it. Now I just used the term voice there. Fugues can be written for
actual voices, sounding voices. Or they can be written for instruments such as the
violin or the cello. Individual lines. It can even be written for instruments that can play
several lines or several parts at once. The piano can do that, the organ can do that,
even the guitar. And occasionally the violin will be asked to do that. Fugues have been
written for as few as two voices. Yes, you could have a two voice fugue. Up to as many
as 32 voices. And they can be, as mentioned, written for, and they are best, perhaps,
performed on, these keyboard instruments that have the capacity to play many lines,
many parts, many voices at once. The greatest collection of fugues, as you may have
bumped into or heard about or at least heard the term, is this collection of preludes
and fugues by J S Back called the Well Tempered Clavier. First of all what's a prelude?
It's just a warm up piece. [MUSIC] You sort of get relaxed. You get a, your fingers get
the feel of the keyboard, or of the lute or whatever it might happen to be. A prelude, a
preplay, a warm up. And then we go on to the meat of the issue, which is the fugue.
Now why is this called the well tempered clavier? Anybody know? Anybody have, it's
an odd term. Clavier just means keyboard. The well tuned keyboard. Thoughts there?
Well, what was going on in Bach's day is that they didn't have a keyboard that [MUSIC]
they didn't have a tuning system in which all of the pitches were exactly a half step
apart. Some were slightly closer together, and then others farther apart. And the key
of C [SOUND] actually had a slightly different sound than the key of D [SOUND]. And
it's only the 18th and 19th century that we gradually shifted from an unequal keyboard
to an equally tuned keyboard. So Bach is kind of part of this transition to the equal
tuned keyboard. He was getting close to the equal temperament of the modern
keyboard. And that's why he called it the well tuned keyboard. And by tuning it this
way it allows you to modulate to all keys. And that's what he did in this collection. He
wrote two books, one in 17, about 1722 when he was in Curtin and another in about
1742 when he was in Leipzig. And in each of these books we have a total of 24
preludes and fugues. One a prelude and fugue in C major [SOUND]. One prelude and
fugue in C minor [SOUND]. One prelude and fugue in C sharp major [SOUND]. And one
prelude and fugue in C sharp minor [SOUND]. And so on it goes, all the way up the
keyboard in that fashion. Two books of those. And this is kind of standard fodder for
those that want to become professional musicians. Okay. So that's what that is about.
The well tempered clavier. We've been referencing Bach here, and nobody of course
wrote better fugues then J S Bach. Some continued, some continued to write fugues.
Mozart wrote some fugues. Haydn wrote some fugues. Beethoven wrote some fugues,
and so on. And even into the 20th century we have a few composers. Paul Hindemith
used to teach at Yale. Dimitri Shostakovich. They wrote fugues. But, generally
speaking, the fugue has its heyday in the Baroque period, roughly 1600 to 1750. The
heyday of Bach and Handel. How do fugues work? Well, they start out, as mentioned,
with one voice leading forward. And then another voice imitates that voice, exactly.
Now, if that following voice, here's a question, if that following voice imitated the
leader exactly from beginning to end what would we have? A round. Okay. Good.
That's what we would have. A round. Or we could call, use the fancier music word, a
cannon. Cannon, round, the same thing. One voice imitating the other exactly from
beginning to end. But in a fugue, what happens is, after the main idea, which we'll be
calling the subject, the main idea is stated, then the parts go their independent ways
generating counterpoint, but they're not exact. They're not precise duplication of the
rhythms and the pitches of the leaders. So what we can do would be to visualize this in
a sort of crude way up here. You have a leader and then a follower. And the follower
duplicates the main idea, which we're gonna call the subject for a period of time. But
then it kind of breaks off. So, voices will come in and duplicate a certain amount of
material and then break off and go their own way. So that's a good way of thinking of
the beginning of a fugue which we will call the exposition. I'll come back to that point
in a moment. Notice here I put a little, silly little tree up here. We could say that we
have the genus polyphony here. And we've got monophonic texture, homophonic
texture, and polyphonic texture. So, within polyphonic texture we have non-imitative
texture, and then a stream of imitative polyphony, and then two forms of imitative
polyphony, rather strict, exactly strict, imitative polyphony, the canon, and less strict
imitative polyphony, the fugue. Okay? Questions about that so far? All right. Let's go
back to the beginning of the fugue. We have this opening melody, the distinctive part
of it which we're gonna call the subject. That's what we call the melody in a fugue, the
subject. And the way this works is, in a fugue, each of the voices in turn will come in
with that subject. One will start out, and another will come in, then another will come
in. After all of the voices are in, we're at the end of what we call the exposition of the
fugue. We hear in the fugue we have just one theme. But everybody's gonna get a
chance to present it. And after everyone has a chance to present it, every voice has a
chance to present it, then we're finished with the exposition. All the voices have
exposed the theme in their range. After that, we go on to what's called the episode of
a fugue. What happens in an episode? Well, usually it modulates key. And the vehicle
through which composers frequently modulate is melodic sequence, either up or
down. You can kind of move around by using sequence. You can get to different places
by using sequence. So it tends to be contrapuntal because it's using little motives from
the theme. It modulates, moves around a lot, goes to different keys, sounds a bit
unsettled. We start out here with the exposition in which all voices present the
subject. Then you have this kind of free period in which the motive out of the subjects
is played with, developed, moved around different pitches. Then the subject will come
back in a new key because we've modulated it in the episode. Subject in just one voice,
new key. Then another episode in which there's modulation, more counterpoint, more
movement. Another statement of the subject in a new key. Another episode. Another
statement of the subject, and on it goes until we run out of energy usually about after
about four or five minutes or so, at which point, the composer will bring the subject
back, maybe in the bass or in the soprano, in a very prominent range in the tonic key.
And we have the sense, this is a very solid moment. Yes, this fugue is ending. And
maybe they'll throw upon, throw one or two chords on at the end. But that's it. That
takes care of the fugue, generally. But let's review now, by way of a definition, and by
necessity it has to be a long one. So what's a fugue? Well, a fugue is a composition
with two, to as many as 32 lines or parts, whether they be voices or instruments. But
usually they're instrumental voices. A Fugue begins with a succession of statements of
the subject in all voices. That's called as we've seem the exposition continues with
alternations of subject and free sections. These episodes using material derived from
the subject. The episodes modulate through different keys. And ultimately, the subject
returns in the tonic key with a strong affirmation of that tonic key. Now, let's dig in to a
few now, specifically the few from Bach's Well Tempered Clavier in C minor. So you see
the fugue, the music for the fugue on the screen up there. We're going to start upper
left hand side of the page there, and this particular fugue is written for three voices.
And we'll call them alto, soprano and bass. Starts with the alto voice. Here's the
subject. >> [MUSIC] Okay, that takes us page one, third system, middle of the page
there. So, we've got all three of our statements of the subject, that's the end of the
exposition. Now, we have an episode. I'm going to play just the bottom part here so we
can see. The melodic sequence. But episodes modulate. [MUSIC] And then so on it
goes. So, we have a pitch starting here. [MUSIC] Each one of those successively lower
degree, the scale, the effect of that is to take us from here, minor key up to hear at this
point, this is the fourth system, the subject comes back, but this time in a major key.
[MUSIC] And then another modulation which takes us over to page two. Now, I want
to point out something of interest here at page two top system. Has to do with the
episode. Page two, top system, last two bars. We have an episode and we're working
with a motive here and the motive sounds this way. Part A of the motive. [MUSIC] And
part b up above against it. [MUSIC] Okay, a and b. Now, watch what he does in the
continuation of this episode in the first bar of the second system, second system, first
bar. B is now down below. [MUSIC] And A is now up above. [MUSIC] So, he's switched
the two, we have what's called invertible counterpoint. We've inverted these motives.
Okay systems three and four we go through. [MUSIC] Another episode, long melodic
sequence takes us down to bottom system where the bass comes back in the key.
[MUSIC] And then we're going to head toward the end, final drive to the cadence here.
[MUSIC] Final statement. [MUSIC] Of the subject. And that's how it sounds. On a
harpsichord. This is a synthesizer sounding like a harpsichord. [MUSIC] But notice the
bass has completely died out. Bach probably had the sound of the organ in his ear
here, because we want that tonic note and some performers actually play it this way.
[MUSIC] So, we get that tonic base strongly in our ear. Now, if Bach had performed this
on the organ, and through the marvels of the modern synthesizer, I may be able to do
this, play this on something that may be the sound of a rock organ. Yes. [MUSIC] Hear
the bass sounding. It continues to sound on an organ and it works on an organ. It
doesn't work so well on a harpsichord. Well that holding line there is called a pedal
point, and obviously the term comes from the Baroque organ process of having a
pedal, usually in the base, hold out as upper material slides above it. [MUSIC] More
effective that way. Okay, well let's review using some of the terms that we've
discussed in association with the Fugue. Subject, obviously you know that's the main
theme episode, excuse me, exposition. Well that's the section in which the subject is
presented in succession in all of the voices at the beginning of a few episode. Episode
is a pre modulatory section in which motives out of the subject are derived and then
exploited therein modulation obviously that's a change of key. That's what episodes
are good at, getting you from one key to the next. Melodic sequence, we talked about,
presentation of the mode of different pitch levels, it allows the performer to modulate.
And pedal point, which we were just introduced to, a sustained note oftentimes in
some sort of tonic fashion and gives a strong sense of the tonality that particular point
along sustained pitch. Okay, these are terms for today. And a final point. Fugues have
always seemed to me to be somewhat mathematical. We saw that episode in which
the music, well, it was first in the bottom, and then the top. And then the box switched
them around. They put the top music on the bottom, and the bottom music on the top.
Well in a sense, you can do the same sort of thing in mathematics. These particular
parts of this equation here can be re-shuffled in any number of different ways, and the
answer will always be the same. The effect will always be the same. It's like playing in
odd sort of ways, manipulating I suppose, Lego's in one fashion or another. And the
same thing happens with the constructiveness or mathematical design as I'll call it here
in a creation by Josef Albers entitled Fugue. Josef Albers used to be the dean of the
school of art and architecture at Yale and he's got the construction called a Fugue and
then he's got these motives in the Fugue. Well, we can take these motives and as I've
done here, I've just arbitrarily duplicated the image and made it go backwards, just
turned it around so that we have it going forwards and backwards at the same time.
Does it look any different really, to you? Does the bottom one have a different sort of
sense of it for you? And you could do the same thing as we'll see from the next slide
here. We could flip it upside down and make it go backwards. So, we've got to make it
going backwards and then upside down. You could hang this thing on your wall any
one of three or four ways and I don't think it would matter a lot. So, again, the parts in
something as intellectual constructivist as a fugue can be arranged in many different
sorts of ways. And how we feel about the composition, whether visual or musical really
doesn't change very much.

Classe 12: