About this course
This is the final semester of a three semester course on Western Music Theory and Composition. The official title of the course is "Compositional Techniques, late-Romantic and 20th Century." In this course we will be learning to both analyze and compose in styles related to European-based music for which there is no clear "system" and no single approach regarding compositional method. The best that could be said of this style is a famous quote from Max Reger, who stated a fundamental principle of chromatic composition as follows :
"Any chord can follow any other chord."
Given this non-principle principle, how does one then learn to compose using techniques of late 19th Century chromaticism and the various techniques of the great composers of the 20th Century? That this can be done is evidenced by the success, for example, of contemporary film score composers, who for the last 70 years have been incorporating the languages of the great composers of the past into evocotive film music. This is true of the classic film composers like Bernard Hermann (the many Hitchcock classics), but continues up to the present day. A great deal of the film score for The Lord of the Rings by Howard Shore, for example, sounds like music from someone who knew his Sibelius symphonies very very well.
We will basically engage in the activity of "learning by imitation." By attempting to write in various styles and musical grammars, you will come both to understand and appreciate the great masters of the past, and you will also begin to build your own musical vocabulary of compositional techniques, discovering those you are most drawn to as you move into your own creative future.
Required Background
This course assumes a knowledge of the following harmonic concepts:
- A basic understand of musical ratios as found in Pythagorean and Just intonations.
- The basic rules of two-part counterpoint (i.e. the handling of consonance and dissonance and the correct motion of voices.)
- A knowledge of the sound of the old modes (Dorian, Phrygian, Aeolian, Lydian, Mixolydian) and how they compare to the two fundamental scales of the major-minor system.
- An ability to write out these modes in any key and to play them at the piano starting on any white key.
- An ability to successfully analyze the harmony of a Bach chorale, using standard Roman numeral notation, and accounting for all so-called non-harmonic or embellishing tones.
- An ability to voice the implied harmony of a figured bass into the tenor, alto and soprano voices.
- An ability to recognize the functional harmony of Classical era works
(Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven), including:
- The diatonic chords in major and in minor and their inversions.
- The special case of the diminished seventh chord
- The function of secondary dominant harmonies, including the use of the V7 and the vii7 versions.
- The basic use of chromatic harmony:
- The Neopolitan sixth chord
- The so-called Augmented sixth chords (French, Italian and German)
- An understand of the concept of Harmonic Polarity and how it applies to the analysis and composition of tonal and late-tonal works.
The remaining sections of chapter one serve as review of the above material.
Organization of this course
The course will focus on the following fundamental principles and how they were expressed through various composer's works:
- The use of folk song and popular idioms, which are fundamentally modal
in character, and how these folk song and modes were used in the context
of formal composition. Specific works that we will investigate will include:
- Chopin Mazurkas
- Grieg and Brahms settings of Norwegian and Germanic folk material
Dvorak's attempt to incorporate American folk song in the 9th Symphony - Liszt and Bartok's use of Hungarian and Gypsy music
- Stravinsky's incorporation of folk idioms in the Rite of Spring
- George Gershwin and African-American music
- Aaron Copland and the popular style
- The link between the advanced chromaticism of Wagner in "Tristan
and Isolde" and the music of Debussy. At the same time, we will
also look at Debussy in connection with esoteric philosophy and non-western
musics. For this we will analyze in detail:
- The Prelude and Transfiguration music from Tristan and Isolde
- The orchestral music from Afternoon of a Faun and the Nocturnes
- Variation technique. This includes the more formal style that we call
"Theme and Variation", where a basic harmonic scheme of an
opening theme is given a variety of compositional treatments. This also
includes the more advanced forms of "continual variation" that
we find in the tonal works of many 20th century composers. Under this
rubric will also appear our work on 12-tone composition and row manipulation.
Works we will specifically investigate:
- Brahms/Haydn variations
- Grieg Ballade
- Berg Piano Sonata
- Bartok Second String Quartet
- Webern Symphonie and Piano Variations
- Minimalism, Rock and electronic music
- We'll end the semester looking at the links between these idioms.
Fundamental Principles for our study
This study will involve some fundamental principles that must stated and understood from the outset. These principles are:
- Harmonic Dualism
- The belief in the fundamental, co-equal and dualistic balance between major and minor triads.
- Tonality and Modality in 19th and 20th Century Classical music.
- The understanding that classical music has never existed in a vacuum, and that the great composers, while writing for an upper class audience, were themselves open to and influenced by the music of the street.
- Issues of musical aesthetics and the history of speculative, esoteric
philosophies
- A recognition that, behind the scenes, many (certainly not all) of the composers that we will look at had firm beliefs regarding the spiritual, aesthetic or moral quality of their music.
The next pages will investigate these three principles in turn. They are linked above and form the remaining sections of this introduction.
Chapter 1 Section 1: Musical Ratios