Lecture 2. Introduction to Instruments and Musical Genres
Yale (YouTube) · lecture · en · indexed 2026-02-08
youtubetranscript
okay good morning over the weekend you were assigned material from chapter one of the text and it dealt really with three famous beginnings of pieces of classical music somebody tell me at the outset what were those three famous pieces young lady down here okay bov's Fifth Symphony what was the second one yeah a a piano Concerto Number One of chovsky and the third one yeah this piece by rard Strauss with this funny sounding German name we'll just call it Zara thra this Prophet Zara Thruster so those were the three pieces and the issues there had to do with musical genre that we're going to talk a little bit more about in a moment and the instruments the instruments and you went ahead and worked with listening exercises through 11 to engage the musical instruments um a bit in those particular exercises and we have performers here today that are going to as you can see demonstrate some of these instruments uh instruments for us let's uh make one point very clear at the outset often times I get student papers that refer to Beethoven's Fifth song or chovy's first piano song is that right no that's not that's not good at all uh are these songs what what do you have to have to make something a song lyrics you got to have a text so we don't have in 80% of classical music we don't have lyrics we don't have a text well yes with Opera of course but the other 80% is purely instrumental music it works its magic again uh through purely instrumental means so we can't really call those songs and this puzzled me but one day I was sitting there at iTunes and I wanted to buy an interior movement of a Mozart serenade uh so I was all set to purchase this and it said buy song boom that told me the answer that's where this terminology comes into play because on iTunes we buy songs it could be purely instrumental but it's called buy a song but we don't want to use that sort of parament we want to be more a bit more sophisticated than that if you will and use other terms so we'll talk generally about Beethoven's composition or Beethoven's piece or Beethoven's work or his master workor or Chef du however fancy you want to get with it we could also go on and be a little little more precise and say it belongs to a particular genre we could use the name of a genre I'll be talking a lot about genre in this course genre is simply a fancy word for type or kind so what genre of piece is this by Beethoven well it's a symphony Symphonies have four movements have four movements what's a movement well a movement is simply an independent piece that works often times if there multiple movements in the symphony or concerto works with other movements they are independent yet they are complimentary think of for example a sculpture garden you might have four independent sculptures in there but they relate one to another they make some sort of special sense one to another so Symphonies have these four movements and they usually operate in the following way a fast opening movement a slower more lical second movement then a third movement that's derived from the dance and then a Fourth Movement Fourth Movement that's sort of again uptempo fast emphatic conclusion uh let's see how these play out let's see how these play out by means of a quick review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony so all we're going to do here Linda is going to go from the beginning of the track for the first movement to the second movement and so on and uh well let's just start here let's just by way of of refreshing our memory the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony [Music] okay let's pause it there and as we said last time it operates in that fashion and that beginning gives us a good opportunity to make a distinction between two types of Melody between this idea of a motive and a theme both are sort of sub sets of Melody if you uh if you will uh as I say in the textbook there the beginning of the Beethoven fifth is something like a musical punch in the nose right sort of grabbing you here hitting you in the face whatever musically it's not a very long idea how many notes is in this opening Gambit here how many pitches four short short short long okay so that's a classic example of a motive a motive is just a little cell a germ out of which the composer will build other musical material now let's contrast that with what happens in the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony where we have a lyrical long flowing theme okay [Music] okay we'll stop there all right so that went on if we heard the whole thing it actually goes on for 32 notes as opposed to just four so motive versus longer theme themes tend maybe a little bit more lyrical now let's go on to the third movement we said the third movement was dance derived but in this case with Beethoven it's a very strange dance if it is dance derive it's just a little bit uh different than most of these third movements but let's listen to it anyway because I'd like you to when the brasses come in think about what you're hearing and think about that Visa the first movement so let's hear the third movement now [Music] okay so what happened there when the brasses came in how did that relate to the first movement yes for no something as simple as that same rhythmic idea so that's the use of a motive there and that's how these movements are tied together a little bit let's go on to the finale now and as we listen to the finale let's think about what we heard at the very beginning and talked about the last time about the mood that the beginning of the Fifth Symphony created for we had these adjectives up here negative anxious unsettled well how do we feel now about the finale and why [Music] well to just you just turn the volume down a little bit as we go down uh so why do we feel different ly about that I think we do what do we feel there well sort of upbeat positive what's turned all of this around what's specifically well with the first movement we said he's generally going in that kind of idea but now it's and we'll explore this when we get to Harmony this idea of major and minor so we're going but now so that's a change from the dark minor to The Brighter major we were going down in the the first movement now we're going it's going up and instead of having just the violins playing we have the trumpets the heroic trumpets so it sounds very triumphant very triumphant so in this 40 minute interval we've gone sort of through an emotional musical Journey here from despair despondency uncertainty to whatever to personal Triumph and in a way that mirrors some of the things that were going on in Beethoven's life okay okay let's go on to talk about the second piece we're finished with this idea of the genre of the four movement Symphony let's go on to talk about the piano concerto concertos are generally in three movements so the concerto is another genre it's a genre in which a soloist will confront the orchestra and there'll be a kind of give and take a spirited give and take uh between the two so now we are going to listen to the beginning of the first movement of Jovi's piano conero you've worked with this already so you're a little bit familiar with it and at the outset here I have two questions for you is the beginning here played uh played by the brasses or the strings in other words what or the woodwinds what family of instruments is playing here and is chovsky using a motive or is he using a theme at the very beginning of this concerto up a little bit Linda just up a little bit no [Music] turn so let's let's let's do that again please let's do that again so we can hear the hear the [Music] beginning so what about that theme or motive at the beginning motive all right so here it was I think how many notes in our motive same as in the Beethoven well why isn't it the same well we got a Skippy Beethoven but here with chovsky is coming down just straight down down uh consecutive intervals there for the most part and both of them are however minor with the chovsky the all the the intervals are the the durations of the same but with the with the Beethoven de short short short long so chovsky is a little bit more neutral in terms of the Rhythm okay so then we go on and the piano enters uh what is the piano doing so let's hear the piano come in just a bit just play a bit more please okay let's stop here here so what's the piano up to well the piano is just playing chords playing them uh in octave successions and we'll talk about that a little bit more too so what do we have here in this next section do we have a theme or do we have a motive and which do this are the violins playing are they uh do they have the theme or the motive or does the piano have the theme or the motive let's listen okay so let's let's stop it there uh so was what the what were the violins playing theme or motive theme what was the piano doing yeah just the same Cor [Music] in that fashion I'm singing The Melody they're playing a cordal accompaniment against it all right uh let's listen to the next iteration of this theme we've identified this as a theme who's got the theme now is it exactly the same and what are the strings up to in terms of string technique here [Music] let's stop it there we'll just pause it there so uh who had the theme piano now uh but was it exactly the same not really it's kind of noodling around with it varying it a little bit what were the strings doing they were playing the accompaniment and what string technique were they using I think we mentioned that in the first chapter of the book there yeah you've got it nice and Loud please picato good okay picato we could write that did we write that as a term yeah okay we've got it up there picato that's a help um so in that particular case we've switched the rolls around let's um let's let's go ahead to 210 we're going to move this along just a little bit here uh as we come back into this I think we've got a situation where the the piano keeps playing the fourn note motive and keeps building it up for tension and there's a Cascade and then the theme comes back let's see what happens here just the motive 1 2 3 4 3 4 1 2 then they [Music] piano is [Music] playing [Music] ornamented pH that down all right so that's an introduction to a three movement piano coner happens to be the first of these three movements and pretty Spectacular music I hope you like that music it's one of the one of the great Melodies of all time it's a it's a wonderful example of a of a theme having talked just a little bit about genres we could conclude by saying there are other kinds of genres in music of course we're we've been introduced to this idea of the tone poem The Strauss Zara Thruster is a tone poem that's a kind of one movement work in which the composer tries to tell a story or play out in a historic event or in the case of the Strauss I guess to give us the beginning of the contents of a philosophical novel through music so tone poems are one movement and we have got other kinds of gen of Music we've got Opera we've got canatas sonatas ballets things such as this and we'll get to each of those in turn so that's the end of the discussion of genre let's go on now to talk about instruments and how instruments produce sound AER come on up this is is my friend longtime colleague music librarian extraordinaire and professional French horn player Ava heer who will demonstrate here come on over here right in the center Jean Kimble is in the basement somewhere recording all of this oh yes it's very exciting here what a time to be alive um so Ava is going to just demonstrate the physical process of playing the French horn um the horn obviously is a brass instrument and what makes the sound is a vibrating column of air in this case the basic column of air is 12 1/2 ft long and there's something called partials or the harmonic series that happens in in anything on a string instrument or whatever but on the horn it's very distinct and that's what makes the different notes Let Me demonstrate to you the harmonic series [Music] [Applause] now I didn't use no hands that was just the notes that are naturally on the 12 and 1/2t length of of vibrating air that's those that's the harmonic series that's on that and what the valves do is they shorten and lengthen that vibrating column of air very much like a cello string on the fingerboard you know the chst is always shortening and lengthening the uh the strings I'm doing the same thing I'm just doing it with a series of switches instead of a fingerboard which we obviously don't have um okay that's fine that's great that's that's the principle and when she says she's overblowing what that means is we'll keep emphasizing this point today that uh and these partials that when a sound is made you have not just one sound but that tube is dividing is into sections and all kinds of little sections of that one tube are sounding not just the big sound but the partials or the overtones the the intervals in the harmonic Series so uh it's a whole series when we listen to a single tone it's a whole series and what Ava was doing there is playing out the notes in that series successively we'll keep banging on that now if you would Ava play just the beginning of the zarathustra where the trumpet part can you do that oh man what is it um well whatever key you're in what what key are you in uh what key would you like me to be in well could you could we do c sure [Music] one more time okay that's that's that's another note thank you very much thank you very much okay now Ava has another gig out in Guilford this morning so she's going to to run off and I'm going to show you maybe if we can get our slides up this overtone series stuff okay okay it's a mathematical thing too it's it's all math I hope I've got it on the slides gentlemen can you I'm going to hit what I was told to do function f8 is that right ha all right something came up and then disappeared all right so may I have a technical person please bring press it one more time press it one more time uh eight okay so we don't have we don't all right so let's I tell you what we're going to just leave this up and I will bag the other slide I have slides with all this information on it but we can't seem to bring these up uh what we've got here is the following this idea of partials that Ava was talking about with raos 2: 1 3:2 4: 3 5 to four 6 to five and so on and the point here is that the way we differentiate between instruments can anybody tell me this why I you tell me this it's always better when students answer why does a trumpet if I ask a trumpet to play this p p pitch a trumpet played it then I ask an OBO to play it The Sound would be very different why is that the case gentleman here different overtones different overtones well actually they all have the same Overton in a way the same frequencies would sound but you've got it uh 99% of it it's which partials are particularly prominent have extra Punch or extra volume to it is that the the the OBO may have the seventh partial very strong and the third partial very strong whereas the trumpet I'm just making all of this up of course the trumpet may have the second partial and the fourth partial and the sixth partial so it's which of these partials are sounding within each each of these instruments and the physical properties of each of these instruments are different it's the particular blend here's a really dumb analogy any Scotch drinkers in here no of course not you're way too young to do that but think about a blended Scotch you know you got a little of this little of this little of this and it makes up whatever it is that you end up with a particular recipe for that liquid well we have a particular recipe for instrumental tambra or instrumental color and it's the intensity of the overtones with or partials within each particular instrument that creates that okay now we're going to go on and talk about a woodwind instrument here so Linda come on up Linda is is a bassist uh she's also uh this is Linda Paul who will be our one of our principal teas here she is a PhD candidate in the department of music just passed her qualifying exam with flying colors so here she is to demonstrate the bassoon for us lowest member of the woodwin family all right so you probably read in the book that the bassoon is a double read instrument and so just to show you what that looks like you've probably seen it but if you haven't two pieces of wood vibrate together when I blow through them always uh check it out before I play any notes and as you will probably suspect by the length of the bassoon it can play very low notes [Music] and if I put a little rag in the top I can get it even a little bit lower than that I didn't bring one uh but actually amazingly it's a very versatile instrument it can also play very high notes as you can see there are a lot of keys on it there are nine keys for my left thumb alone so I'm kind of switching between these on the back here and many others and because of that I can go very high and I'll just demonstrate that [Music] so that's just to give you a sense of the range because of this sort of particular character of the bassoon sound it's often used to play sort of funny little low note characters in the orchestra for example if you're familiar with Peter and the Wolf the different instruments play different characters the bassoon is the [Music] [Music] grandfather cool okay great thanks so much that that's really fun uh now Jacob um Adams is going is a professional U violist here in New Haven what's the name of your quartet Jacob I'm a member of the v string the vinka string quartet so keep an eye out for them they're based here in New Haven so come on out Jacob and um uh let he is a violist not a violinist but the the principle here is pretty much the same so tell us about the construction of the instrument okay so obviously we've now seen a little bit of the Brass family and the woodwind family and the other uh principal uh section of the orchestra would obviously be the String family um the viola is very similar to the violin so anything I say about the viola applies to the violin as well and of course you all probably familiar with violins and the size uh the violas are a little bit bigger this particular one is about 16 in long um of of I'll put the bill down so I can show it better uh violins are maybe go up about 12 in they have a slightly smaller body to them um but violins and violas have the same general construction um we we uh all the sounds are produced by the strings uh on the instrument and how the bow is pulled across the instrument the bow is made out of typically horse hair from the Tails of horses um the strings are now metallic but um 16th 17th 18th century they would have been made out of cat gut um that was much more common and still some people so I'm sorry we I got lots of things going on here this morning so just play um a scale uh quickly and then V picado and tremolo for us so again this is on a viola so it has a deeper darker tamber than a violin but here's a [Music] scale wow you did something there at the end do you have too much coffee this morning you started shaking so tell us about what you were doing there at the end so there are all sorts of different little technique things you can do to create different colors and sounds on uh on all string instruments so this applies to any of them uh one of them is is the technique you saw me do with my left hand where I wiggled it a little bit it's called thebr you hear it in human voices as well and you can do it on other instruments but on the string instrument it's it's the difference I'll play A Melody without vibr and with vibr so you can see the [Music] [Music] difference so that's with AB not that interesting in my opinion with the [Music] BR and you can vary the width and the speed and the length there's a lot of variety of which okay then just quickly play a Pato for us [Music] sure okay and then finally trem amoo yes adds a little excitement or a little filler to the music sometimes all right great thank you Jacob very much so I don't know if I can whether technically this will work or not I've tried all morning to get this to work I have it up on my screen uh but I don't see it up on the screen there can I have a tech assistant to to all right we'll go back here to try this hit it again nothing happened well that's why I asked somebody to stand up here yeah uh it doesn't do me much good to have somebody in the back going like this okay what I would like what I wanted to show you was a clip uh that actually what my daughter brought to my attention um just this past weekend she was watching television America Has Talent anybody watched this America Has Talent and she said Dad you've got to watch this this is the most amazing thing they've got these two guys on here called Nothing But strings so I did I and I went to she she sent me the link to L YouTube here now let's see if we can get this to go I don't know say absolutely yes to the seminal to do something I love with the person that person [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] ah so obviously the violin is not just this dodgy old thing from the Renaissance it has some legs today uh used in folk music used in sometimes you see it in in Nashville playing with country music that kind of thing uh is this a travesty to use a violin with with hip-hop here I guess this is hip-hop of course not this is wonderful this is the best thing that has happened to the violin in the last 100 years there will be millions of kids out there now gee I'd like to learn to play the violin too so this is wonderful this sort of cross uh semination of genres here bringing this particular in instrument the traditional classical violin into the popular realm all right so let's put that aside we've talked a little bit about sound production here I've got two pieces I'm going to work with here uh for the end of our session we have 15 minute left and here are these two pieces the first you can see on the board up there is by another Russian composer modet mazori it's called polish oxcart from his work pictures at an exhibition what happened was he had a friend the friend died the friend was an artist the friend left these pictures as an homage to the painter mzori sat down and tried to come up with create a musical response to each of these paintings that were on display now this is a piece that's always interested me because the painting is very pedestrian it's of an old polish Ox card sitting on some godforsaken Road in Royal Russia somewhere so how do you make that work as music how do you turn that visual image into music how do you turn that into um a sort of live Sonic esape and I should say at the outset I'm going to Prejudice you're listening here just a little bit I hear this as me being in the center and this Ox cart starting could it start either side doesn't matter everybody moves left to right so I'm going to hear this moving left to right it comes in front of me almost R rolls over top of me runs me down and then disappears to my right so as we listen to this you think about what are the techniques by which mazori creates this musical action scene you should be able to come up with two pretty good ideas here two pretty good answers all right here we go nice and [Music] loud now the instrument is play that is playing is a low tuba tuba low brass instrument doesn't sound much like a tuba cuz it's actually playing in the higher register of the instrument but it is a [Music] tuba okay now the strings turn it up just a little bit strings come in with a coun idea complimentary idea [Music] [Music] okay give me one pretty straightforward way this happened what did he do there yes it's a young lady out here please Crescendo okay Crescendo from beginning to end yeah so like a giant wedge so that's why you the the cart seems to be in front of you and so we're talking about musical volume here started very quietly it built up to this huge Center in which we had the base drum pounding away there and the snare drum coming in to give the effect that the entire Earth is rattling at that particular particular point and then as it passed by you the Thunder passed by you and off you went into the distance quietly into the distance and it was we'll come back to that but uh uh how did that happen we'll listen to the end of that in just one one moment it's kind of a a a disintegration of the sound at the end disintegration of the sound at the end so let's pick so that's one big one big way this happened one that's probably the big ticket item here there's another way a more subtle way any thoughts about that yes instrumentation yes the instrumentation can you elaborate on that yeah great right so there's a kind of wedge shape with regard to the instruments too he starts with the lowest instruments the lowest instruments uh and then uh goes to the high instruments and then back to low instruments at the end let's just review well no we won't review this let's not review that okay we don't have time to review that but let's go on to say the following that what M muori knew there was a very B basic principle of Acoustics and what is that principle yeah I beg your pardon well to some extent I'm going to give an example example of that of the train kind of going by you and the sound heading off in the other other direction to yes to some extent it is that yes um uh but what I was thinking about here is this idea that the lowest sounds create or the longest sound waves and they last the longest the lowest sounds create the largest sound waves and they last the longest the lowest sounds last the longest why might this be the case here uh uh not having too much confidence in our slides this morning I went ahead and put this one up on the board here here is one pitch here is a pitch and of a string an octave higher so you can see it this way as you probably know if you take a long string and pluck it it's going to take that long string a long time to pass that sort of cycle if you will just one pass through that cycle the string half a length will pass through that cycle two times so that you can kind of graph these up here as one long low sound or one faster vibrating sound an octave higher so again low sounds or low frequencies travel farther now you've experienced this in your own life you're standing in a street corner here in New Haven in the distance what do you hear an automobile approaching with a souped up audio system in it and what sound do you hear at the very [Music] first that kind of thing then maybe and then maybe some kind of Melody will come in and then it will all come together right in front of you and it'll kind of disappear in the distance you're at a football game you've probably experienced this too the band is marching on the field suddenly they do the Doppler effect where it they turn their backs to you in in a way and they're playing away from you and you hear very little sound What instrumental sound do you hear Boom Boom Boom the bass drum and the tuba or and the marching band it would be a Susa phone they would call it the bass drum and tuba so mazori knew this kind of thing and because he was a professional musician and was playing off of it to create this rather usual and remarkable uh musical soundscape here okay I have five minutes left I'd like to do one last piece it's another piece by rard Strauss it kind of brings us to the end of rard Strauss our discussion of rard Strauss we'll say goodbye to him here in our course it's called death and Transfiguration death and Transfiguration and I hear this as a compion piece a kind of pendant to the Zara thra one sort of opens up the beginning of Life here and the other closes it down uh through a referencing of death there's a interesting anecdote about Strauss and that is that on his deathbed he said to his daughter Alice he said Alice It's the funniest thing dying is exactly as I composed it in death and Transfiguration what an odd thing to say but in any event here's how this works we've been talking about this overtone series with Zara Thruster Ava played this overtone series he's basically working up to the upper partials now he's going to work down the partials he's going to close it back down here with death and he's going to close it back down using a process that we frequently encounter in music and that is this idea of dissonance resolving to consonants here's a dissonance here's a consonant there are precise technical reasons why these are the way they are but let me try to to cut to the chase here with dissonant intervals they tend to be frequencies that are sounding right next to each other very close by frequencies they sound dissonant if you allow a little bit of spacing a little more space between your frequencies they're a little bit farther apart then you can move from closeness to spacing and you get the consonant generally speaking dissonant intervals have ratios such as 9 to8 for the whole step or 17 to 16 for the half step they're irrational numbers and these irrational numbers like to move to rational numbers they like to move to consonances they like to move to intervals that are based on things such as 2: one and 3 to2 or maybe four to three so that's the the the principle of this idea of dissonance resolving to consonants so we're going to listen now to the end of strauss's death and Transfiguration the the death here and again we've got the idea of the octave then the fifth then the fourth we're working up farther and farther in these partials and we've got some of these notes right next to each other and they want to move to the stable note so we're going to be hearing a lot of a note right above the tonic wanting to pull down to that tonic note we're going to hear a lot of a note right above the dominant wanting to pull down to the uh dominant so let's listen to this we have about three minutes I think um we'll hear it and I'll comment a bit as we go okay first question what string technique is being used here tremolo tremolo just sawing away there [Music] [Applause] [Music] now just working with the four note motive [Music] here whoa strange little dissonant chord there resolving the consonants [Music] all [Music] [Music] and here it's [Music] all just tonic just the basic portal note upon which all these other tones are [Music] built okay so that's rard strauss's approach to death not particularly relevant to you young people but for older gentlemen such as Professor Kagan and myself we're getting close to that right Don so uh thank you all for staying with us this morning hope you enjoyed that music we'll see you in section starting this Thursday if you have any questions come up and see me or send me an email