Lesson with Voce (Modern Analysis, History, Counterpoint and Harmony)

OK, so I told you to check out this:

http://www.youngcomposers.com/forum/lesson-jordan-general-theory-harmony-composition-14891.html

And you also should check out:

http://www.youngcomposers.com/forum/lesson-simenn-counterpoint-analysis-14630.html

In essence, since I'm addressing similar topics already with other people, make use of that and let's focus on working on more in-depth systematic analysis of harmony and the German polyphony schools.

You'll probably have a lot of questions and stuff, so post them before I get into long-winded explanations so I know what we'll be working with exactly.

I'm looking at the first lesson thread, with the Schumann piece, and I understood everything up to the part where you explained how the 2nd chord of the 3rd measure was based off of A major. I understand that the 7th (G), 9th (B), and the 3rd and 5th are there. But I don't see the relation to A major, because the A isn't there. You said that the function of the dominant can exist without the root tone being there, but that's the part I don't get.

Ohh. Well.

See, the entire cadence is a cadence that ends in a 6-4 suspension in D major, yeah?

It's very customary to have the double dominant before the dominant in these types of contexts. So, with that in mind, the chord that precedes the D major chord should be an A major chord.

But it's also quite typical to have dominant chords where the root note is missing. The reason this distinction is made is because the function remains the same.

The sound A C# E G functions the same in a cadence as dominant from D major as just C# E G, for example. In this particular case, this is what you have. It's a A major chord with 7th, but no root tone. Plus the 7th, you have the 9th, which is also typical.

So you end up with a sound which still fills the role of dominant to D major, hence double dominant (and A major, rather than something else.)

I hope that's clear. :>

The recitative in the B section-

This is a little harder to analyze, because 1. there are no chords, only implied ones until about halfway throuugh it and 2. there are more accidentals there than in the rest of the piece. the little "sighing" (that's how I think of it) two-triplet motif seems to hint at A minor, which if you're in E minor is...IV (?). Then it's more clearly in E minor because of the D sharp afterwards.

Then, after the 16th note thing you have chords. The A sharp hints at B major (?), as does the C sharp to B afterwards.

I really don't know what to make of that chord after the two Bs. (Csharp-E-B-E.) To me it just looks like I with a C sharp attached, which when you factor in the A sharp after still hints at B major.

Alright.

So, the B part, eh? This is something that I wanted to get to from the start, hence I picked this piece.

First off, let's not confuse "could be harmonized with" with "implied harmony." A melody that arpeggios a chord implies a harmony, but something like this recitative here doesn't do such a thing.

You could argue, sure, the start is A minor, then it goes to D sharp if we take the double sharp in consideration. But you can clearly see how this is at best poor proof of what it's actually doing harmonically because, simply put, there's no harmony to speak of.

A monody or homophone technique was used during the romantic period (and previously too, but not to such an effect) as a means to blur harmony and functions. Schumann has other examples in his lieder where he does the very same thing. He reduces the entire piece in moments to a single melody line, and it becomes impossible to anchor it to a specific harmonic function, be it dominant, tonic, or any other chord.

Here it's the very same thing. The recitative has of course here can be taken as to literally be the poet speaking. How Schumann handles precisely this element, the lack of harmonic clarity, is indicative of what he was trying to get across. Though, it's the realm of speculation to be any more specific than that.

Towards the end of the recitative part you get indications of cadences in both B and A. But, really, you can also take this to be more a matter of counterpoint. It's easy to see how the small motive that first appears in the recitative starting with A, with the triplet figure, is repeated throughout the recitative. In the second repetition, you get a diminished 5th (A# + E) and the same figure, it later repeats exactly the same but tack on a B, which is there also as imitation.

So, it may be best to look at this from a more interval-oriented POV rather than strict chord phrases. There simply isn't enough there to give you a clear idea of where it's going. Of course, except for the last 8th triplet sequence which spell out an A major diminished+7th+9th chord without the A (C# E G Bb) and you basically get a D7+8 to the next chord, which is D major dominant, like at the start. It's really the only preparation for the repetition of the A part.

The reprise goes without change until the very end, where you get the same "minor chord, cadence" scheme from the start, only transposed to fit the original harmony order. That is, there's no backwards modulation, it simply jumps to the G major cadence.

One important thing to notice is where the final chord rests in range. It's a pretty low register, which is also something you'd mark as being romantic. The lower registers often don't lend themselves to harmonic clarity (hence why you never see Mozart or Haydn do the same thing, almost all of their cadences are in the medium to high ranges, or at least evenly distributed. That I know of, there's only ONE example of Mozart ending in a low range like this.)

Try playing cadences in the lower range of a piano to see how chords sound entirely different and certainly it becomes harder to tell minute changes, or even sometimes entirely different chords "blur" together. Same idea here, though the main reason why he chose to do this most likely wasn't some theoretical "I'll obscure harmony HA HA HA!" but probably because he thought it was stylistically sound, so let's not forget the difference between composer intention and actual analysis thx.

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CORRECTION:

The measure 7, 19 and 21 chords before the dominant chord ARE subdominant, but a specific sort. It's a subdominant +6 -5, which means you get, indeed, a D minor chord, but without A, + B. Confused yet? This is a typical variation of the sixte ajout

The measure 7, 19 and 21 chords before the dominant chord ARE subdominant, but a specific sort. It's a subdominant +6 -5, which means you get, indeed, a D minor chord, but without A, + B. Confused yet? This is a typical variation of the sixte ajout

So, we're going to be looking about Liszt's rather bizarre Nuages Gris piece.

Score: http://imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/a/a3/IMSLP00617-Liszt_-_Nuages_Gris.pdf and http://imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/5/57/IMSLP05855-Liszt_Nuages_gris.pdf which looks cleaner and has measure numbers.

Some dude playing it: YouTube - Alvaro Ordo

So, I'll explain in some measure of detail the famous "tristan chord" out of Wagner's Tristan & Isolde. First thing to actually mention is that though this chord shows up only in this piece, what I'm going to be talking about applies to a whole lot of music other than his.

And while it's true that the chord "has shown up before," the historical significance of Wagner's usage is worth our attention for two reasons: A, it symbolizes what the tendency in the late 19th century romantic music was. B, it presents an example of just how simple things can be made completely unclear through different means.

Anyways, head over to wikipedia and grab the vorspiel extract and the chord score: Tristan-Akkord ? Wikipedia Yes out of the German Wikipedia, lol.

There are a lot of possible analysis for this chord and what it means, but I personally like one in specific, which is what I'll be explaining. This analysis is grounded on Diether de la Motte's Harmonielehre analysis, which isn't to say it's absolute though it is one of the more accepted analysis of the chord and the harmonic implications.

According to this model, this chord's functions can be determined if we simply treat the G# as suspension, the F as an altered 5th (which is pretty typical in the literature). So you get a B major chord with 7th (B D# F(altered) A), the next chord is also rather simple to clear, it's simply a dominant (E major) chord with 7th, (E G# B D.) Again, A# is a suspension to B.

The chords can, therefore, be easily analyzed as DD7->D7 in A minor. But haha if it were that easy nobody would have cared much, right?

Indeed, the whole problem starts when what actually sounds there isn't what we're identifying in the possible chord anatomy. It doesn't do much for me to tell you that's a double dominant if it sounds like a sixte ajout

I almost had a question about the analysis, but it makes sense now lolz.

I do have a question about the actual treatment of different keys, though. When you get into chromatic stuff like some of Wagner, Strauss, etc., (and early Schoenberg beyond that,) how do you find a key in the first place?

It may not be atonal, but the tonailty isn't staring you in the face like you get with baroque and classical pieces, so it's harder to find.

Well there's a given harmony, like, well, Tristan is in A minor cuz Wagner said so. Within this context we can establish how he handles it. By other pieces it's a matter of following the cadences see where they go, where they don't go, etc.

Maybe next time we can look at Chopin's 2nd prelude in A minor or maybe something by someone a little more modern. Post questions, as usual.

I would have said "VERKLARTE NACHT" or "OMG DEBUSSY STUFF" but since you keep bringing up the Chopin piece, I might as well get that out of the way.

Um. We can look at something by Debussy too. But the chopin thing is important, so. I can do it in whatever order you want. :x

let's do the Chopin.

You asked me to do a NON-HARMONIC analysis, grr. This is only part of it, and the last section is a little sketchy lolz.

For outsiders looking at this, I'll be looking at Bach's trio sonata in C Minor, from the Musical Offering.

First, in order to even begin to understand the whole set of pieces in the Musical Offering, the trio included, we have to know some of the history behind it. In 1738, C.P.E. Bach met Frederick II of Prussia. He was employed by Frederick II, who was to become king in 1740. That year, Bach began to play in the court orchestra, still in the service of the king. Years later, Johann Sebastian Bach and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, his eldest son, traveled to Potsdam at the invititation of Frederick II, who had learned about the elder Bach through C.P.E. There, Bach was challenged by the king to improvise a three-voice fugue on a given subject. Afterwards, he was asked to create a six-voice fugue. Bach returned to Leipzig and wrote the theme of the Musical Offering.

Now, to the piece. In a typical trio sonata, you have 2 melody instruments and basso continuo. The two melody instruments are almost always violins, and the basso continuo is generally played by a cello and keyboard. Now, look at the instrumentation of Bach's trio sonata, which you can find here. Musical Offering, BWV 1079 (Bach, Johann Sebastian) - IMSLP

There's the typical continuo, and one of the usual two violins is there. But look at the next instrument, the flute. Bach did this kind of thing often, modernizing traditional forms and instrumentations to suit his taste. But why did he do it here?

To answer this, we have to go back into some of the history behind the piece. When Bach met Frederick II, he had been invited because the king wanted to show him a fortepiano, then a new invention. But that wasn't the only instrument the king was interested in. He also played the flute, and Bach kept this in mind while writing his trio.

In the other pieces of the Musical Offering, instrumentation is not specified. Here, in the trio however, Bach calls for "flauto traverso" (transverse flute,) and "violino" (violin,) as the two melody instruments. The flute is included because of Frederick II.

Now look at the theme, stated in the first bars of the piece by the violin and then stated again by the flute, a fourth up. Look at the main theme of the Musical Offering, clearly shown in the first piece of the set. The trio theme contains the first 5 pitches of the original. They both end in a cadence on C and change key chromatically from there. The trio theme seems almost an abridged version of the first one.

you gave me the damn piece and ran away. a minor. Chopin.

you sure this isn't in E? o.O

It doesn't look like A minor AT ALL until bar 13. wtf?

I'll get to the Bach later, first I want to get this out of the way since this is absolutely important.

Before we start tearing Chopin's little prelude there apart, you need to know the context in which we're viewing this. By this point in the narrative it should become clear that these cycles of short pieces by mid/late romantic composers seem rather simple but in reality they're not.

We already saw the harmonic complexity and what was going on with Der Dichter Spricht by Schumann, or Liszt' Nuages Gris. This piece by Chopin is no exception. It's a very short piece, but it tells us a lot about what was going on and what was going to happen later in music history.

If you really want to understand the innovations and changes going on during the romantic period, it's imperative that you look at these pieces. Much like the Lieder were by Schubert, these short pieces served as "templates" in terms of form (they are all very simple forms) from which to work entirely different ways of connecting chords, voice movement, chord construction, etc etc.

So with that out of the way, let's look at this thing. ( http://imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/8/83/IMSLP00485-Chopin_-_Preludes__Op_28.pdf score, recording: YouTube - Chopin Prelude op.28 - no.2 in A Minor (Rubinstein) )

First thing that jumps to mind is the absurd levels of dissonance that go on in this piece. First, let's clear that up. It may seem at first that the piece is not in A minor, since it starts in E minor (the minor dominant key.) But remember, we already saw this by Wagner, the tendency in the late romantic period was to have the key the piece stood in as the "goal", so to speak.

In this sense, this piece is a good example, the key of A minor doesn't really show up until the very end and a little before that.

But what happens in the harmony here? It may be very hard to really hear the harmony since you get that constantly changing bass figure with the passing notes which fill the piece with dissonances. Yet, the harmony is pretty clear if we define what notes are actual chord notes and which are passing notes.

In the beginning it's pretty clear that it's in E minor, the A# is passing note, so you get E G B. Then in measure 4 comes the relative major (G major) chord, but! We have to look at it functionally to see what happens from measure 4 till 6. If we look at measure 5 carefully, we can make out a D major chord in the last half of the measure, with G# as passing note (chromatic) to A.

So, with that in mind, in measure 6 we get a G major chord again, so the D major section is to be understood as dominant to G major here, and the G major chord that comes before (measure 4) is simply a D64->53 suspension. That's really it. Remember, in a D64-53 suspension the first chord is the same as the tonic in terms of notes (D G B -> D F# A.)

But you don't really hear that, do you? Of course not, specially not with all the chromatic movement and the dissonances in between. What lies at the core here is a very simple harmony, obscured by the actual figures used to present it.

What comes later is also rather simple. G major continues until measure 8 (E and Eb are passing notes the entire time.) In measure 8, the harmony changes to B minor (B D F#, E# is passing note.) This continues till measure 11 where a double dominant (in A minor) with 9 and 7 -root shows up. The chord is D# F# A C, and you can already see it in measure 10 actually, the D natural is passing note, as is the E and C#.

This continues (in measure 11-12 you get C## being a passing note) and it continues really until measure 15, where we first see an A minor harmony at all. To get there, it resolves the B and G# chromatically in measure 12, again, this is all built on suspensions and passing notes.

The A minor part here is not to be understood as tonic yet. If we look carefully at what happens after, this is another D64-53 suspension, which resolves in measure 21 in beat 3. The final cadence is simple enough, D(E major)->DD(B major)->D->D7->T in A minor.

So, the overall harmony is pretty simple, it starts in E minor, goes to G major (with a D64-53 cadence), from G major it goes to B minor which then becomes dominant to E major with 64 suspensions, which leads into the end cadence.

That's really all there is to the harmony of the piece, it's pretty standard all things considered. But that's to be expected, because the tendency was even till early Schoenberg that the more complex your harmony was, the less passing notes and crap you'd add to it and also in reverse, the easier your harmony the more crap you'd add to make it very difficult to recognize.

Since here we have such a mess of passing notes and chromatic movement, we can expect the actual underlying harmony to be rather simple and indeed that is the case.

About the form of the piece. It's understood with these little pieces that the form is almost unimportant, and generally you get very simple ABA forms, or slight variations to that. Here it's not even an ABA form, it's so compressed you only get "A" out of it, and it ends. There's literally nothing else except that little melody on the right hand and judging from the harmony there isn't much room for anything else since the entire piece is basically a simple cadence in A minor when looked at as a whole as far as the harmony is concerned.

This shows three things of vital importance:

1: The form was not of much interest to Chopin here and he opted to keep it extremely short, so short that he really didn't have much time to add contrasts, etc anything else.

2: The obscuring of the harmony also has to do with the perception of the form. He probably kept the form as it is because if he had gone for something more elaborate it would've been futile from a perspective of what was actually heard (we can't really identify the simple cadences by ear at all as it is, imagine adding more complex harmony!) though this is more speculative than fact, there's enough evidence to lead to this conclusion, I'd say.

3: The treatment of the harmony and the appearance of the function Tonic as the last possible chord in the piece is telltale for what would later be very typical by Wagner, Zemlinsky, Mahler, etc. You would treat the key the piece was written in as the goal, which meant the entire piece was a process or "road" to that harmonic destination. It's easy to see that being the case here.

This piece also contains an example in measure 17 of what we later see by many other composers (Grieg has a rather fantastic example of this in his lyric piece No.4 out of the Op.68 called "Evening in the Mountains.") which is that you simply take out everything and leave only a melody. At that point all that we can guess about the harmony must come from the implications in the melody which leads to a lot of ambiguity when this is manipulated and used in such way that you can't simply tell anymore what the corresponding harmony is supposed to be.

Anyways, this is it for this particular piece. I'll get to the Bach later after I have a sandwich. :>

k, in the meantime. I found a really, really interesting piece by Liszt that I hadn't heard before, and I'd like to try and do an analysis of the very short 1st movement on my own.

Trauervorspiel und Trauermarsch, S. 206. One of his sparse, late pieces, which you can find there. Trauervorspiel und Trauermarsch, S.206 (Liszt, Franz - IMSLP)

The first thing I noticed about the first movement, the Trauervorspiel, was that it begins so low in the register of the piano, and slurred. You mentioned earlier that this was common in the late Romantic period, writing in the low, gravelly register of the piano to blur what would be an otherwise clear sound. I find that it works especially well in this piece, because of the funereal character of the whole work. It evokes images of death and just all-around creepiness, so +1 scary point for Liszt.

The piece opens with that low motif as just that- a motif. There's only octave doubling for the first 2 and a half bars, no harmony to speak of. Even so, the tonality becomes clear soon, because the motif suggests C# minor strongly.

Another thing to notice about these first 2 and a half bars is the makeup of the motif itself. It appears to be just a regular descending figure at first, broken into groups of 4 notes. But look at the intervals. The first group of four notes goes down a whole tone from the initial C#, then down 2 semitones. The second group of four goes up a whole tone from C#, then up two semitones- the exact opposite. That alone shows Liszt, even in these late works, which sometimes seem jumbled and odd, did in fact put a great deal of thought and care into his work.

Then look at the 2nd half of measure 3, where the first chord comes in. Setting aside the actual name of the chord in relation to the key for a moment, look at how dissonant the chord is. From the bottom, the intervals in between the notes are a tritone and a major third. In addition to the tritone interval from B to F, there's an extra dissonance added by the interval of an augmented seventh from B to A. Liszt doesn't dull this dissonance like he did in Nuages Gris by rolling the chord, the notes are played simultaneously here. The same kind of biting dissonance continues throught the movement, with all kinds of intervals.

From m. 3 all the way until m. 11, Liszt builds on the chords presented from m. 3 to 5, producing a more stable and obvious tonality. But what happens during these measures?

I DON'T KNOW! XD

Help me with figuring out what to call chords in relation to other stuff XD

Just quickly looking at it, I'd say the entire first mov there's chord sequence is based on a augmented-like chord (F A C# D) and in between there's a chromatic chord.

Then it just goes into octaves. Not much to say about it, really. There's a constant pedal in F (save for the chromatic later) and it's kind of hard to tell what for a harmony there is if any.

This really comes of no surprise considering what people were doing in 1880 and onwards.

I'm tired, so I'll look at this again tomorrow. :>

Wow tomorrow is looooong. Anyways, you said you wanted to try out some exercises or something to that effect, we can do that too. I'm sorta in the middle of some stuff so I've been away, but if you got ideas post'em and we can discuss'em in more detail.

Here's a good idea for something you can do. Write a short piece (or sketch) in form of a baroque passacaglia, but you can use whatever kind of counterpoint/techniques you want, so long as you can explain their relation to the old baroque form. Feel free to mix things up too.

Without saying much, think of the baroque model as a way to keep structural integrity. It doesn't have to be slow in tempo, though generally passacaglias are slow but since this is free-ish, I don't particularly mind.

If you aren't sure/don't know what a passacaglia is, it's basically a form where you have a bass which always repeats itself, or an element of the sort which always through the entire piece plays the same sequence of notes/melody. On top of it, you'd have different counterpoint development each time the repeating element repeats.

Summed up, you have one static element, one dynamic element and they play off one another for the effect.

So, unless you have any objections, off you go.

hur's yo score.

counterpointexercise2.pdf

So, explain what you did, what you tried to accomplish and what you used and how. :>

A little auto-analysis is in order, or this won't have any purpose.

So, explain what you did

Wrote an attempt at a style copy.

what you tried to accomplish

I tried to write an accurate style copy using counterpoint in the manner of Bach, using the Aria from the Goldberg Variations as an example.

and what you used and how.

I tried to avoid unisons except for in the very first and very last bars of the piece, and used a modulating section to vary the mood slightly.

How's that for a 3 sentence analysis? XD

If this is a style copy, how it is a passacaglia in the baroque sense?

It isn't. This is a different thing lol.