Lecture 6. Melody: Mozart and Wagner
Yale (YouTube) · lecture · en · indexed 2026-02-08
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all right ladies and Gentlemen let's get started we are going to continue our discussion of Melody and last Thursday we were talking about melody in terms of scales major scales minor scales chromatic scales then we went on to talk a little bit about what it is in a Melody that makes us feel the way we do about that particular Melody the major and minor quality of them and the fact that that quality shows up rather early on in the uh scale the third step of the scale then we talked about conjunct Melodies and disjunct Melodies and we ended up talking about Beethoven's o to Joy which he Incorporated in the last movement of his last symphony symphony number nine and we said that that had a particular quality of phrase construction an aedan consequent phrase [Music] structure opening it up and closing it back down and I was thinking over the weekend of all the all the pieces that operate that way um and a Sean consequent then it goes on with an extension the way be toen went on with an extension an aen consequent uh I was thinking of of a piece of [Music] mozar yeah is that really Mozart well let's listen here just to a little bit of what that really is okay Linda go ahead play it [Music] sorry [Music] that's enough of that a dumb pet trick right okay dumb pet trick all I did was take the theme of The Macarena and strip away all the rhythmic stuff underneath and put an 18th century alberty Basse with it that Mozart would have used and so on but the point Point here is that even the Macarena is using this antecedent and consequent phrase structure something as basic as that so it's sort of endemic to how Melodies are constructed uh now I was thinking and I always like to try to come up with uh new however albeit lame brain ideas for teaching this class supposing I got a student up here I mean Melody what makes a Melody beautiful what makes a great Melody anybody know well if you do let me know cuz I don't know nobody really knows it it's sort of like the definition pornography you kind of know it when you see it or you know it when you hear it um so in in pursuit of this I was trying to think well maybe I'll have a student come up and try to craft a Melody right here uh uh on the spot and I suppose we could play with that but then I said that's probably not a good idea because a uh no student would really want to do this and B it would probably take too long to work through all the aspects of it so what I did and this is about 4:00 yesterday afternoon I thought all right Craig you think up a Melody so I started thinking up a Melody and I can hope I hope I can remember how it [Music] went something like that so what would you give me as a grade for that Melody come on now uh Daniel what do I get for that Melody B minus C+ B well we this is great in days of great inflation so I've been inflated up to a b but it was kind of c c minus um wasn't particularly inspired but in in crafting that it made me think of why do I do this at this particular point and not that well there's certain param certain confines that we're operating with we've got to be in a scale certain kinds of phrases something ending like that in a piece that's going to end here tells me that's got to be in the middle that can't come at the end so there's a syntax here also we've talked about that before that musical phrases have to come in a particular order for them to make sense so um instead of working with my lame brain Melody let's work with a great one we're going to work with a Melody by Joo Pini here and you can see his name on the board up there and get a sense of the melody in question it's an ARA and we'll talk about what an Arya is later but it's an Arya from his Opera Johnny ski now now that's not a well-known opera by Pini can anybody tell me the name of a better known Opera by Pini Tusa y Madame Butterfly haven't hit the the most obvious one yet laboom for example all rent was based on Lao uh so he's written a lot of well-known operas this happens to be a lesser known Opera but it has one sort of Drop Dead Beautiful melody in the thing om B Babino where a young lady is trying to in con some money out of her father um and it's an odd thing this thing so beautiful talking about trying to separate her father from money is an odd thought and it occurs rather early on in the Opera too and dramatically it's not of any particular significance it's just happens to be an absolutely gorgeous Melody that you've all heard many many times one day I was and you you'll recognize this as I started to play one day I was playing this at home my then 13-year-old son came in and said I know that that's beautiful I said Ah that's my boy he's going to be a music lover yeah that's the background music for Grand Theft Auto what's what's Grand Theft Auto Chris um well I found out um but it shows you that this this particular Arya has legs it's kind of kind of everywhere so let's listen to a little bit of pini's om bamb B [Music] okay let's pause it right there let's pause it what's kind of neat about that right at the outside there what's that why again do our spirit soar at that particular Point we've got a large leap there it's a leap of [Music] a of an octave we wouldn't expect you to recognize that but it's interesting to to fold that in because we were talking about octaves last time so we have this opening phrase and it's about to be coupled we're going to continue now with the next phrase phrase that will complete the antecedent phrase so we'll listen we'll just continue please Linda is there so we're sitting here can you sing the tonic that's where we want to go yeah that's where we want to go so we're in a step right above the tonic so that's the end of the Anan phrase the opening up phrase but we're not on the tonic okay so now we're going to continue and you can imagine we're going to hear some of that same music but ultimately it's going to come back to the tonic having gone away with from it okay little more please starting again here's our [Music] octave okay let's stop it right there now something interesting happened there ah there's our tonic we should be back to our tonic but that's not exactly what [Music] happened we went to the tonic Melody note but underneath he harmonized it with an unexpected Harmony we expected to hear we got so we were deceived there a little bit and musicians call this a deceptive Cadence a deceptive Cadence when the whole thing has been set up to come back to the tonic with the tonic chord underneath we get something other than the tonic chord so in music we have two kinds of really broad categories of cadence we have this kind of thing called or where we come back to the expected tonic we call those authentic cadences we also have another class of as mentioned de deceptive cadences where we do things such as we're expecting to go but we go or we go even more bizarre something like that you keep the same tonic note in the melody but you change the harmony underneath so that's what Pini has done here instead of going there he goes there here is a silly analogy one time I was flying into the City of Minneapolis plane could fasten your seat belts everybody trays up etc etc etc we're coming that right in there you can see the the tarmac there and suddenly the plan Zoom doesn't land does a barrel roll almost off to the right circles all the way around announces there was some piece of equipment on the um uh landing strip and he was doing a flyover in music you have to do the same kind of thing if a composer has set this up so that you're expecting to go and you don't you go here that we can't end that way we just can't end that way we need our daily supply of tonic so what we got to do is a musical fly over he's going to fly all around this thing again and then come back in and this time land on the tonic so let's listen to the [Music] flyover [Applause] [Music] these are tonic but it's so lovely he can't stop so he's going to give you a little reminiscence of the beginning there's our [Music] octave [Music] [Music] so just a little reminiscent of the beginning but again coming back in this time of course ending on a tonic so that's the structure of an Arya by Pini and it is highly structured it is highly structured now I want to talk about another ARA that's structured in a different way and that's by rard Vagner but before we do that we need to talk about one other process in music and that has to do with something called melodic sequence and oddly students over the years have had difficulty understanding and hearing melodic sequence but it's a pretty simple idea melodic sequence is simply the repetition of a musical motive at a successively higher or lower degree of the scale so I I could take a take a motive anybody want to sing a motive for me here Daniel you want to sing a motive give me four notes yes [Music] okay so we've set up a descending melodic sequence now supposing we did [Music] this and so on that's obviously an ascending melodic sequence so that's what's involved here and generally speaking going down introduces relaxation going up perhaps tension um all right so that's a little bit of a setup with regard to that so now we're going to work through this we'll call it an ARA for the moment of Vagner in which rather than structured units he's going to continually evolve new music but using a motive that he presses up continually through melodic sequence so it's a slightly different process of melodic structure here rard Vagner not um a very nice man not a very nice man did needless to say um but he was a spectacular composer and wrote many great things and one of them arguably the best that he wrote is his Opera Tristan Tristan in it olda uh written in 1865 as you can see on the board here and we should know about it because we here at Yale own the piano on which Vagner wrote Tristan or was at least involved in part of Tristan next time you are walking past du over there you know the health center at 17 Hillhouse Avenue there's a building there rather for boting looking Building inside is a wonderful collection of keyboard instruments so go in there sometime and look at the beckstein piano this German piano beckstein that Vagner worked used when when working on on Tristan so we have the um uh Opera and we're going to start here with a little bit of the of the plot it's a story of this English Knight Tristan and this Irish princess isolda and it's Tristan's job to go over to Ireland and sort of pick her up and deliver her back to corn wall where she's supposed to marry King mark But on onot uh they inadvertently consume a love potion so she is passionately in love with him and he with her so we're going to listen to a little bit of the Ure here now Vagner actually called it a Prelude that doesn't matter opening opening music here to um to Tristan and I have two uh questions for you as we listen here what instruments are playing and and what musical process is Vagner using at that at this point okay [Music] Linda [Music] [Applause] okay we're going to stop it there now so what instruments we're playing there in that little dialogue a dialogue between families of instruments strings and Woodwinds okay alternating back and forth the strings were at the lower point then the woodwinds would answer then [Music] strings okay and then the third time and so on so what melodic process were they using there Rising melodic sequence Rising melodic sequence all right and then it sort of chugged along until we got to what's this we talked about about this before in regard to rard [Music] Strauss that sound it's a dissonant sound resolving the consonant so he uses these sequence to work up to a climax hits a dissonance resolves it into consonant let's listen to a little bit further along here in the prel Linda if you could move it up to 710 now churning his way up here through sequence each level gets higher and higher in the [Music] violins and let's stop it there and you heard the trumpets come in there with that chromatic figure almost kind of like a snake Rising through it so it's not only the rising melodic sequences This is highly chromatic music and that that also produces tension how do you make love in music well we've got Rising Dynamic volume here we've got Rising SE quence it works up to a climax where there is dissonance and then release so if I'm using rather suggestive language here it's done intentionally uh this is this ain't Mary Poppins or the sound of music or Snow White and Seven Dwarfs this is the passionate story of Tristan and a Zelda lust desire carnal knowledge that that sort of thing and how how does vogner give you this sense how does he communicate this well this idea of continually Rising sequence that then then hits this climax with the dissonant almost painful dissonance and then the resolution uh music duplicating in an odd way life's processes the climax of the Opera the real climax however really doesn't come until about 3 hours into it at the end uh now we have Tristan dying of a mortal wound uh isolda is cradling him in her arms and she sings an Arya uh we'll call it an Arya Vagner gave it a different name it's called The lius Tote she's singing about her vision of their life in the Hereafter in the world Beyond in the celestial realm uh and so it's called a love death a lius tote here um and it's typical I suppose of the of conventions of the Romantic Period right this is the 19th century this is romance Tristan and it's ZTA so we're going to pick this up about halfway through the uh uh lius tote of of isolda uh and once again we will hear these little Snippets these motives okay I don't have absolute pitch when you're really annoyed with things in life you can sometimes at least make some fun enjoy it somehow by trying to figure out what key it's in okay so that was that was a pipe in F we were listening to rather unres pipe in F okay so let's go back to the midpoint of of the lius tote here and we're going to hear these little Snippets this is not aned consequent this is a motive being pushed higher and higher each time to a climax here we [Music] go [Music] is is [Music] is [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] see [Music] okay we're going to pause it there just for a second it's glorious it's glorious sound and Isn't it nice to have our audio system working properly again this is really the first day that it's worked properly uh so it's it it sounds wonderful it's glorious it's a glorious climax that Vagner has been working for for 3 hours here and we've got them we've arrived but now he's going to turn everything around the entire sentiment is going to change and I think we should be able to to enumerate here maybe as many as four different ways in which Vagner does turn our emotions 180 degrees at this point so we're going to go back and we're going to listen to the climax again and then we're going to listen to How the music changes and I want you to as you sit there to think about what's he doing here what what you're the composer what would how do you make something go from uh sort of cradle in your arms to vision of of the world Beyond so think about Dynamics think about Tempo think about these sequences consonants and dissonance etc etc etc okay here we [Music] go [Music] [Music] [Applause] s [Music] [Applause] [Music] most [Music] well I hope you like that really gorgeous stuff uh so get me started here get me started what did you hear there how did he sort of slow down this entire train yeah oh the whole thing got softer okay the whole thing got softer so we're going to take the the basics first and that would be sort of number one on my list the whole thing got softer what else happened not only soft although the voice ended up rather High one of the last sounds we heard also ended lower and we talked about high and low in tension that's before softer maybe lower generally in terms of the Tes tesur or the range what else yeah um Chris yeah um the tempo got slower oh yeah there were some points that the tempo got slower and we'll talk about that in just a minute if we hit on anything else here um anything else Elizabeth a fewer instruments uh well they weren't playing as loud they weren't quite as obvious I'm not sure that they were fewer instruments my guess is if I were to look at that score it would be huge and everybody would still be playing it's just it sound did fewer because they were playing more quietly what about [Music] um Roger sorry yeah he used he used the distance for example we had that that snake idea it's like snake in the Garden of Eden it was Rising around there but then he took it up two more degrees and folded it in into a consonant so it was all very consonant at the end what about the sequence it was was Rising rising Rising but here at the end it started [Music] doing it's just just repeating the same pitches over and over and over again so he took that out of the equation too he sort of backed out this idea of the sequence it's static at this point we have stases we have arrival stability What were what was the one thing we haven't mentioned in terms of the tonality [Music] here there at the end what is that last sound very strongly the the tonic yeah that's the way it ended there was one other thing that was kind of cool here um trying to think of the exact we had that kind of sound supposing I [Music] went does this have any resonance to you where are you if you hear this sound M yeah maybe in a Yale commencement where we sing hymns or in a church or something like that but we would call that an aen an amen Cadence what does that bring to the it it sort of brings a Divine benediction here now the 19th century like this more painful minor but if you if you have a sense here at the end that there living a blessed existence in heaven it may because Vagner has folded in sort of subliminally here below the surface this um uh Cadence we have deceptive cadences and we have another kind of cadence here called an amen Cadence um that uh brings an additional resonant an additional symbolism to the conclusion so it's a wonderful piece of music um and uh maybe we I think we have time let's listen to just the last few seconds of that because it sort of Recaps some of the points we've been making back it up even a couple seconds before that yeah that's good here's the snake going away here's the [Music] consonants [Music] okay good so that's a the leis tote of rard Vagner questions about that thoughts about that comments about that all right if not let's go on to talk about Mozart a little bit more about mozar we're going to hear another ARA uh by Mozart and this one does something a little bit different than well it's a kind of combination of what we've just studied here we've got a highly structured Arya by Mozart yet at the same time we're going to see an example of rising melodic sequence in it and we have a guest artist today Lauren libel so Lauren come on up some of you know Lauren she's in Davenport College and I've known her for years now because she is a music Major and I've seen her sing and lots of different Productions of the school of music's um Orphus in the Underworld a year or so ago um so Laura and I know that you've sung with the Los Angeles Opera and I remember that you sang with David Stern in Brussels was it Brussels or Paris or both both both yeah it's probably at the chatet in Paris yeah yeah the chatet theater that the big Metro changeing yeah um so she's a very experienced singer and a very very good singer so but tell us uh U Lauren what do you want to do with this here you are you could do you could become an opera singer you could uh go to law school and work for scad Arps in New York or Los Angeles or whatever you want to do what are you going to do with all this um I would like to pursue a career in Opera law school is not the road for me although I do like to argue um sorry parents so you're going to have a go so this year then if you're a senior are you going to take a year off or you going to apply directly to a graduate schools in voice and where are you going to apply if you're going to do that actually um I'm going to go back to work with David Stern um in Paris for a year in a young artist program cool that they have there so you're in that already or yeah he um very kindly has asked me for David Stern was a Yale undergraduate he is the Son and he was the nicest boy too the son of who of whom Stern does that ring a bell Isaac Stern the the world F the great greatest violinist of the 20th century so David was an was an undergraduate here graduate probably 15 or so years ago went onto a career in music as a conductor mostly in Europe mostly in Europe I think he told me that he was the TA for this class he he would come in from time to time and and we would do things in here uh as an undergraduate he was not a he well then he was conductor of the yso for a couple of years too yeah um so he would come in from time to time we would do different things so um LS as mentioned a very experienced singer and we're going to do a little ARA here out of Mo Arts figuro is opera The Marriage of figuro 1786 called VOA so Lauren can you tell us something about this this um Arya who's singing it um this Arya is sung by Kino who's a young boy actually though I'm clearly not a boy I'm wearing pants for the purpose um it's called a trouser roll for that reason um sung by a woman in this Opera um he is why do they do that what is is weird oper people like transvestites or something like this what what's there are other roles like there just kind of a convention in in Opera kind of a convention yeah he's a young boy um so maybe they thought the higher voice yeah that's right he's an adolescent 14 and what's he experiencing here first love basically or first lust um he's not sure he's not sure so uh he's singing to the CEST uh with whom he is in love and With a Little Help from um Susan Susanna yeah yeah so he's not he thinks he's in love with the Cs but maybe it's Zenna or maybe it's barbarina or maybe it's that broomstick over there it's really hard to hard to know exactly what he's in love with at age at age 14 um and that's the confusion here so there's a certain palpitation from time to time in the singing it's it's intentional here in a certain sense of being flustered almost you're agitated fluster you're uncertain what all these things are um we're going to have Lauren sing all of this for us um but in order to have this be something other than just a performance I'd like to work through different pedagogical issues here so let's talk about that just for um a second now at the outset of this and you guys have your sheets out there there's a sheet on the music stand back there uh you've got a sheet so take a look at that and uh will'll see what do you see uh Marcus right down here in the front row what do you see on your sheet by way of Music um it's broken up into two different parts okay I guess three so and they're labeled anes and consequent so Mozart starts out here with the anti and consequent phase structure that was the Anan Here Comes [Music] consequent so an aeden consequent then interestingly enough when the voice comes in what does he do Lauren what what does he do there you have to sing you just don't duplicate what I do he actually expands the phrase structure I guess by adding more material in the middle two so had an A and B but his mind is such I mean I'd never be able to figure that out he he he thought well hey I can open this whole thing up and put in some additional lovely music and then close it back down with my consequent phrase structure uh so we have that let's let's listen to how that plays out so we'll just start with with where you come in Laur with voy [Music] okay [Music] okay and then we go on with a series of phrases and as you listen to this you might count the number of bars and phrases here but generally speaking they're all four bars in link Mozart is one of the guys that sort of puts this whole idea of structure with Melody on the map structure symmetry are very important in his compositions and as we proceed here the text gets more and more interesting we start talking about where uh feelings at line five there sentao I feel how would you well I guess we have a trans I feel aeto in Italian is like something emotion yeah uh and and then sometimes he's really happy and then sometimes he's sort of despairing and what's kind of cool is when we get over to the despairing idea here on the piano we're here and we go to and then he's going to free be burning like a flame and then freezing to death so we get this weird harmonies out out here as he's freezing and th so let's hear just a little bit maybe with from there at Santo Dano [Music] okay [Music] okay now we're going to go on to a little bit later lovely lovely lovely um we're going to go on to a little bit later if you can follow on your text and so on what does Mozart do here in terms of structure it's a sequence um I think he repeats the same series of notes um progressively higher sort of to illustrate kabino Rising uh angst SL emotion good so um so you pick it up you be flat there and I'll try to catch up yeah uhhuh [Music] for so notice there uh how as we come to the end of that we work up there we have the it rises up through the um melodic sequence Rising melodic sequence we get Lauren hits that high note up there and then comes off of it that's the climax the peak of the whole ARA and then the base what's the base doing it's sort of sneaking back down to the tonic okay so and when we get back to the tonic then comes in we're going to pick it up from there and um Lauren if you could when we get we're going to sing through that when we get over there to just hold on core and we'll ask them a question what happened here what do we have here okay when we see if you can hold on that core so from from the voy [Music] yeah [Music] [Music] nice nice That's so what did Mozart do there what was that had a decep of cadence good marus scores big today so we're sitting here on on [Music] this we want it to go but instead it goes that's the core and then we have our fly [Music] over [Music] and that's the way in so you come back to the tonic okay we've arrived we've landed all right I think we have time to do the whole thing now from beginning to end and we'll get our pages in order and so Lauren liau singing VP from Mozart's marriage of figuro [Music] speee [Music] for [Music] fore [Music] spee [Music] speee moment [Music] fore [Music] foree [Music] for [Music] see lovely lovely lovely aren't we fortunate to have such talented students here at y okay well thank you all very much we'll play a little more Pini on your way out and I hope you enjoy his day as beautiful as all this music has been