Category: Uncategorized

  • Timbre

    What is the timbre of this soloist’s voice? What is the texture of the piece? Two voices, two different timbres. The tenor voice is that of Paul Robeson’s pianist, Lawrence Brown. What is the timbre here? What about here? How would you compare and contrast the timbres of these three ensembles?

  • 4’33”

    In John Cage’s 1952 piece 4’33”, the performer is instructed NOT to play his/her instrument for the duration of the piece. Here are some images from the score. The musical term “tacet” is an instruction to the performer to keep his/her instrument silent. Cage specified that 4’33” could be played by any instrument or combination of…

  • Pulse

    Can you feel a pulse or beat in this music? Or this? On the other hand, as this Malinke elder notes, EVERYTHING comes from rhythm.

  • Tonality

    Let’s start at the very beginning. This song is in the natural minor. Harmonic minor sounds vaguely Middle Eastern: composers use it to create an “exotic” or mysterious atmosphere. Quarter-tone notation: Some pieces for microtonally-tuned piano: Turkish guitar music that uses microtones: The music of the Second Viennese School in the early twentieth century used…

  • What Do All Great Conductors Have in Common?

    Conductor jokes.

  • Shifting Meters

    Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), 1913, by Igor Stravinsky. The orchestral score is transcribed for two pianos here. Note the changing meter: What instruments do you recognize, even if you can’t see them? The ballet, performed with the original choreography by Vaslav Nijinksy: Another score by a modernist Eastern European composer, based on…

  • Elements of Music: Pitch, Melody, Key, and Rhythm

    4’33” by John Cage. Symphony no. 5 in C minor, op. 67, by Ludwig van Beethoven. What instruments are playing? How long are the held notes? Can you hear variations between loud and soft? Overtones: Is this music? Is this? Is this? Is this?

  • More Unusual Scores

    Near Eastern notation used from c. 1200 to 1800, and still used in the Armenian Orthodox Church today. Brian Eno’s score for Music for Airports: Which sounds like this: “Miniwanka” by R. Murray Schafer: Voice Piece for Soprano by Yoko Ono: Which sounds like this: One composer saw this: and heard this: What does this sound…

  • What is a Score?

    A score is a representation of sounds using visual symbols. Learning to read and write music is no different from learning to read and write a foreign language. Music notation is a sonic blueprint, like this blueprint that tells a shipbuilder how to build a ship: Or you can think of it as a sonic…

  • Black Men Play (with) the Classics

    More cross-cultural encounters: The great jazz pianist Jason Moran (above right) plays one of the late piano works of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), the Intermezzo op. 118 no. 2, with his trio, the Bandwagon.  Listen to what happens. The piece as Brahms wrote it: