Lecture Three

The Rise of German Nationalism in Music   This lecture describes the rise of a distinctly German music during the Baroque. The Protestant Reformation is examined not just as a religious upheaval but also as a product of sixteenth-century German nationalism. The ultimate victory of Protestantism saw a new emphasis placed on the German language in worship, an emphasis that led to a new sort of music that followed the idiosyncratic cadences of the German (as opposed to Latin/Italian) language. This lecture also explores the Lutheran view of music and musical composition as a spiritual act, a view that would profoundly alter the history and nature of German music. 

Outline We begin by comparing the expressive nature of two early-nineteenth-century works.

Featured Music:  What is the expressive purpose of each selection? 

A.  Rossini, The Barber of Seville, “Una voce poco fa” (1816)

1.   This is an operatic aria whose purpose is character introduction and development.

2.   It is engaging and entertaining.  Her entrance aria

3.   Its expressive message is obvious.

B.  Beethoven, Symphony no. 5, first movement (1808)

1.   This is symphonic instrumental music.

2.   It is powerful and terrifying.

3.   Its meaning is metaphorical and abstract.

C.  Rossini s aria reflects the Italian view of music as entertainment, while Beethoven’s symphonic music reflects the German view of music as metaphor and as heightened expression.  Berlioz wrote about Rossini:  Music for the Italians is a sensual pleasure and nothing more.  They want something like macaroni that can be assimilated immediately.  Without them having to think about it or even having to pay attention to it.  They like Glitzy and entertaining music! E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote about Beethoven:  What speaks more to his are and genius than  immeasurably and profound symphony in C minor?  How this symphony carries the listener to ever with it with its ever mounting climax into the spirit kingdom of the infinite.  It seems like the breast burdened with the premonition of tragedy of threatening annihilation,  in gasping tones war struggling with all its strength for air but soon a friendly forms draws near and lightens the night. This goes on for 5 pages.  Serious profound stuff, high fallutin!   

This music is very representative of the nationalities of the composers! 

II.  Nationalism in music refers to more than just “folkish”-sounding music.

A.  Nationalism in music is ordinarily defined as the use of folk or ethnic music in a concert work.

B.  More importantly, “nationalism” in art and music has as much to do with the language, “national character,” and collective mindset of the composer’s national group as it does with “folk music.”  We are what we eat!  What we started with is usually the way we draw on this experience for the rest of our lives. This is stereotyping and generalization! 

III. The sort of melodies a composer writes is based to a large degree, on the language being set to music and the language the composer grew up speaking.

A.  The Latin language, for instance, has smooth, long vowels and few sharp consonants or explosive articulations. It is naturally given to sustained syllables, i.e., melismas.

Featured Music:  Music created for prayer and contemplation

Leonin, “Alleluia Pascha Nostrum” (ca. 1200) THE NATURE OF THE LANGUAGE YOU ARE SETTING DETERMINES THE STYLE OF MUSIC SET.!  Lots of Vowels!!!  Problems with translation…  Look at the difference between allelujah and a word like BLOTCH!  You can continue allelujah…

B.  The insistence of the early Church that only vocal music (rather than instrumental music) is appropriate for worship ensured the development of vocal music above all other kinds, especially in those areas closest to Italy. 

Iv.  Secular and vernacular music emerged during the High Middle Ages and developed rapidly during the increasingly expression-conscious Renaissance.

A.  Greek-style humanistic expression was placed on an equal footing with religious expression.

B.  By 1500, Italy had emerged as the musical capital of Europe. Because of MONEY!

C.  As the closest language to Latin, the Italian language most easily adapted the melismatic and elongated character of Latin music.

V.  Italian Baroque style was firmly in place by 1650.

A.  It was an outgrowth of Latin vocalism and the Church’s insistence on vocal music.

B.  It was an essentially homophonic tradition.

C.  It cultivated at the highest level the art of song—clear and direct melodic expression.

D.  It preferred structural simplicity over directness. Over polyphony!!

Ie concertos solos, operatic idea of voice outgrowth of Opera.

E.  Italian instrumental music grew out of this vocal tradition.

VI. The Protestant Reformation brought additional changes to Western music.

A.  The Reformation was an anti-Roman revolution centered in northern Europe. 

B.  Martin Luther initiated the Reformation in 1517.

C.  A new religious dogma and liturgy emerged based on Luther’ s reforms.

D.  The characteristic religious music of Lutheranism was German-language religious songs—especially chorales and hymns.  SOLO FEDE!

E.   Luther attributed to music the semi-magical power to convey ideas, steer the will, and fortify faith. According to Luther, music was not the work of man but a glorious gift of God.  Revolution of doctrine and music!

F.   Because of the nature of German language, hymn melodies (in German) sound very different from Latin ones. The German language has many sharp consonants and explosive articulations; it is not given to sustained syllables.  They felt that The church was out of step with society.  The rise of MONARCHIES  The rise of non Latin languages.  The church was uneasy with reforms. 

Vernacular Language! Much doctrine was changed:  Solo scriptura, etc.   

Music became the most important school subject, after theology, music the highest importance and honor of school subjects! Music was a spiritual POWER.  This act of composition was spiritually.  It also wanted instrumental music.  The act of composing itself was important not just performing.  Catholic music was word based.  The Lutheran idea was that instrumental music raised the consciousness.  A loss of ego and transcending your own body.  Instrumental music brings you to a place where you can be influenced by devine things. 

Latin is so different in that German  How do you think they are profoundly different.  You can sustain vowels in Italian not in German 

English: what a lovely evening 

Latin O vespara Linda 

Italian Che bella sera 

German  Welt ein scherner abend  

Featured Music:  Glory be to you

German:  Gloria sei dir gesungen
Mit Menschen- und englischen Zungen, Gloria sei dir gesungen
Mit Menschen- und englischen Zungen,
Mit Harfen und mit Zimbeln schon.
Von zwölf Perlen sind die Pforten,
An deiner Stadt sind wir Konsorten
Der Engel hoch um deinen Thron.
Kein Aug hat je gespürt,
Kein Ohr hat je gehört
Solche Freude.
Des sind wir froh,
Io, io!
Ewig in dulci jubilo. 

Gloria is sung to you
With people and English tongues,
With harps and with Cymbals already.
Are from twelve beads the gates,
At your city we are together
The angel high around your throne.
No August felt ever,
No ear heard ever
Such joy.
We are glad,
IO, IO!
Eternally in dulci jubilo. 

Gutteral CONSONANTS.  What kind of music! This is language not used before the reformation.

 Featured Music:

J.S.            Bach, Cantata no. 140, “Wachet Auf,” Part VII, verse 3 (1731)

1.   The music is syllabic rather than melismatic.

2.   Rhythms are sharp.

3.   Punctuation is clear.  No smooth flow as Italian

4.   Each note is significant.

5.   More melodic information is provided in less time, as compared with Catholic plainchant.

An Italian would have take not 1 ½ minutes but 6-10 minutes with melismas everywhere. 

Therefore in the Baroque we will need to speak of TWO separate traditions.  Lutheran Europe Intellectual instrumental music.  Serious and spiritual work in instrumental music.   

G.  Lutheran Church chorales and the German-language melodies that characterized them became the backbone of north German music from c.1650 onward.

1.   Bach saw no essential difference between secular and sacred music. In his view, all music was meant to render honor to God.

2.   Bach was a product of his time and place. His native German language and Lutheran faith shaped his world-view and his view of music as much as his musical genius did. 

Bach gave all of his music to the glory of God all music was a spiritual complete Christ is present in all things both sacred and secular.  Why is Bach’s music so moving. And it is so intellectual.  It is beyond our understanding.  His intellectualism and faith were LINKED completely.  All music is Holy and the composition of music was holy and spiritual!

Part Two Fugue

This second half of the lecture examines fugue, arguably the single most representative musical form/procedure of the Baroque era. Fugue is defined as a typically monothematic, polyphonic work in which a theme—or properly, a subject—is examined, broken down, reassembled, etc. in as many different ways as possible. Drawing on fugues by Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederick Handel, this lecture introduces and examines the three essential parts of a fugue: the exposition, subject restatements, and episodes. This lecture also seeks to define and discuss the various tuning systems used up to and during the Baroque era: Pythagorean tuning, mean tone tuning, and well-tempered tuning. 

Outline

Fugue is arguably the most significant and representative compositional process to emerge from the Baroque era.  Remember monophony, homophonic, and polophonic. Remember two types of polyphony.  Canon or non-imitative.  A Fugue is imitative

A.  Fugue is a systematic exploitation of nonstrict imitative polyphonic techniques.

B.  Properly speaking, fugue is a flexible procedure rather than a rigid form. The only consistent feature of fugues is the way they begin—with an exposition. 

We can vary a theme we examine it in a Fugue. 

II.   The following are aesthetic and constructive aspects of a fugue.

A.  A fugue is typically a monothematic work.

B.  The fugue “theme” is properly called the subject. It is a very special sort of melody, constructed in order to be dissected, manipulated, and reintegrated.

It needs to be inverted, done backwards, chop it up in to pieces and then be put back together again. It has to work also as a canon, and it still has to sound like music!  Very difficult and if you are not a genius sounds like an exercise.  Very intellectual but Artistic!!!  

The entire point of a fugue is to see how many different ways a subject can be overlapped on itself and other melodies generated from it broken down in to smaller motivic units compressed expander inverted etc…  melodic exhuberance with procedural control and logically investigating a subject like science, etc.     The problem is how do you write the subject?  When I took counterpoint I spent most of the semester just learning how to do the subject. 

 Bach is the master of the Fugue because he combined Italian type melodies. With the intellectual development. 

C.  North German composers have produced some of the most expressively and polyphonically intense and technically accomplished fugues. 

D.  A fugue consists of three essential parts.

1.   In the exposition, the subject is introduced successively in each of several voices. Until all the voices are in.  Once “in,” a voice continues with a complementary melody called a counter-subject. All are then equal each entering voice is either highest or the lowest  voice after the first voice.

There are statements and then restatements with episodes. 

2.   The episodes are modulating transitions that separate restatements of the subject.

3.   Following an episode, the fugue subject will be restated in a new key in one or another voice

III. Before we examine Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” we must discuss Baroque-era tuning systems.

A.  The Baroque genius for systemization and codification focused on tuning systems.

B.  The Greek music theorist Pythagoras investigated the relationships between intervals.

1.   An interval is the registral distance between two sounds. What causes some intervals to blend and others not to blend?

2.   Pythagoras identified the following “perfect” (“primary”) intervals:

a.   Octave (2: 1 ratio of vibrating bodies).

b.   Perfect fifth (3:2 ratio of vibrating bodies).

C.  Perfect fourth (4:3 ratio of vibrating bodies).

3.   The Pythagorean Scale is a seven-note scale, derived from moving five successive perfect fifths upwards from a starting pitch and one perfect fifth lower from that starting pitch.

C.  “Just intonation” is the tuning system for the Pythagorean scale.

D.  Growing expressive demands ultimately demanded greater pitch resources than those offered by the seven pitches of the Pythagorean pitches/just intonation system. 

E.   More pitches were added by expanding the “circle of fifths” outwards from those successive fifths that created the Pythagorean scale.

1.   Problem ! If one continues to move a perfect fifth upwards or downwards from a given starting pitch, an infinite number of new pitches will result, the starting pitch never being reproduced at a higher (or lower) octave.

2.   Solution: if the fifths are slightly shortened (tempered), the “circle of fifths” will indeed return to the starting pitch after moving up (or down) through twelve different pitches.

a.   The mean tone tuning system (ca. 1500) shortened some fifths more than others, resulting in a tuning system that sounded very different from key to key.

b.   The equal temperament system, in theory, shortened all fifths by the same amount, resulting in a completely symmetrical, twelve-pitch scale.

C.  Well temperament refers to any one of the close approximations of equal temperament, of which Bach’s preferred tuning was one. 

All fugues start monophonic and you hear the subject by itself.  .1. A round repeats a fugue goes to new material.  It is not exact. .Here is the theme in the alto “voice”  2.  if it was a round it would sound like this but that is not what a fugue does:  3. here is what it does sound like:  Are they the same pitches? 4. this is what they would sound like together if it was a round theme but it is not:  

Iv.  Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” consisted of two books, each comprising 24 preludes and fugues: 12 preludes and fugues in all 12 major keys, and another 12 in all 12 minor keys.

Featured Music:  listen how he created a theme he can do many things with! The rhythm is so important and a regularity of harmony. 3 voices in this fugue.  Alto , soprano, then Bass.  Listen for telescopic effect of each voice coming in together. After all are in the exposition is over./ then  the exposition. 5 restatements of the fugue subject. It should be smooth so we cannot hear the transitions. 

Bach, C Minor Fugue, Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I (c. 1720).

A.  The fugue subject is motoric, memorable, and a bit mechanical.

B.  It is restated five times and in several keys. Eb, G and C minor

C.  The restatements are separated by four episodes. 

V.  Featured Music: chicken coop fugue  easy to hear the subject.

Handel, Concerto Grosso op. 6, no. 7, Fugue (1742). Same year as Messiah

A.  The subject is endowed with drive and energy, wit and humor.

B.  Episodes are based on “echo” motives drawn from the counter-subject.