INSTRUCTIONS FOR MARCH 2 

For March 2 - instead of holding class in Room 211 we will go online by using ClassesV2 server.

Discussion – ask questions, post answers, snarky thread optional

Resources – recorded music, background information, hand-outs, worksheets

Email – direct questions to RG

Goals for the class:

1)      Explore the musical cell used by Ernest Bloch in Avodeth Hakodesh 1^st movement, finding the cell exposed in root position, expanded/paraphrased, inverted, interrupted             

– use your score received last week and marked as homework project

– read background paper “Individual Harmonic Systems”

2)      Introduce the 20^th century use of synthetic scales and harmonic systems, such as microtonal, modes, octatonic, #4b7, pentatonic, etc.   

– listen to music examples Quarter tone pieces for two pianos - allegro by Charles Ives and Yankee Doodle Fantasy by Harry Partch

– view Modes Example Pg1 and Modes Example Pg2 files

3)      Practice finding synthetic modes and scales

– complete Modes worksheet

– complete Modes homework pg1 and Modes homework pg2

4)      What key is the Bloch homework piece in?

 

Stepwise Instructions:

1)      Please read the background paper “Individual Harmonic Systems”

2)      Please post at least one but no more than two positions of the motivic ‘cell’ as found in your homework project.  Please post in the Discussion area within the Bloch Cell thread.  Please state the a) instrument or voice  b) beginning measure#  c) ending measure #

3)      We need everyone post at least once in the Bloch Cell, and some people will post twice.

4)      Please read all of the posts in the Bloch Cell thread as I will ask questions and try to generate some further discovery of Bloch’s technique – this discussion will start as soon as people post and end sometime Monday night

5)      Please listen to the microtonal music examples by Ives and Partch

6)      Please read the information presented in Modes Examples Pg1 and Modes Examples Pg2.  You may post questions and discussion in Discussion area Modes thread.  Please read all of the discussion which will hopefully ramble on through Monday

7)      Test your comprehension of modes by completing the Modes Worksheet

8)      Please email to me your answers to Modes Homework pg1 and Modes Homework pg2 to richard.gard@yale.edu

 

Midterm exams – Wednesday and Friday

Wednesday we will have an exam with three sections:

a)      General short-answer questions on the music we studied so far in spring semester.  What key, phrase or melodic structure, instrumentation, interesting harmonies, etc.

b)      Specific short-answer questions on the Bloch Avodeth Hakodesh score regarding any terms printed. What does poco slent mean, what is corni in fa, what is caloroso, where are the brass score lines located in this full score, what does Vcl. (div) mean, etc.  Please research and learn every term you find in the Bloch score

c)       A few spelling questions.  Write Ger+6 in C# minor, write N6 in A major, write CD in F major, write V^4-3 in Db major, etc.

 

Friday we will sing the individual tests on the Beethoven sonata pages 1 and 2.  To earn an ‘A’ you need to sing musically as well as accurate pitches.  Sign up times are listed in the Sign-up area of the Classes server.

 

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Individual Harmonic Systems

Harmonic tonality, which broke down about 1910, had dominated the scene for three centuries.  In contrast, none of the systems projected in the early 20th century, apart from the 12-note technique as such, extend beyond specific validity for any individual composer.

 

Ernest Bloch (1880 –1959)

 

Ernest Bloch went to the United States in 1916 as conductor for a tour by Maud Allan’s dance company. He accepted a position at the newly formed David Mannes College of Music in New York, teaching theory and composition 1917–1920.  In 1918 Bloch signed with G. Schirmer, who published his ‘Jewish’ compositions with the trademark logo – a six-pointed Star of David with the initials E.B. in the center. Bloch was director of the Cleveland Institute of Music (1920–25), where he conducted, taught composition, established classes for the general public, and proposed the abandonment of examinations and textbooks in favor of direct musical experience, with study rooted in the scores of the great masters. He was also director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (1925–30).

 

During the 1930s Bloch lived mainly in Switzerland, composing such works as Voice in the Wilderness, the Piano Sonata, Evocations for orchestra, the Violin Concerto and Sacred Service, with which he began his second European period.  Bloch returned to the USA and, in 1940, assumed a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught summer courses until 1952.

 

Macbeth, Bloch’s only published opera, established him as a dramatic composer, with characteristics of later works: frequent changes of meter, tempo and tonality; melodic use of the perfect fourth and augmented second at crucial moments; modal flavoring or progressions, dark instrumentation, repeated-note patterns, ostinatos and pedal points, and cyclic forms.

 

Authentic Hebrew material is rarely quoted or used by Bloch; exceptions are heard in Israel and in Schelomo.  But allusions to Hebrew liturgy and life abound: repeated-note patterns and the augmented and perfect fourth intervals evoke the call of the shofar; the unfettered rhythmic flow suggests chant; and the frequent accents on the final or penultimate beat of a bar have analogies in Hebrew.

 

Avodath hakodesh (1930-3) is based on texts drawn from the Reform Jewish prayer book. The motivation that produced the self-styled ‘Jewish Works’ of Ernest Bloch was essentially spiritual, cultural and historical rather than religious, national or political. His grandfather had been a celebrated lay-cantor; his father had at one time intended to become a rabbi. Some of the traditional synagogue chants his father sang are found as elements integral to the melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and textural character of the music, not as quotations or arrangements. Some motifs are borrowed directly from biblical cantillation modes, synagogue prayer modes and fixed chants. Others, without quoting directly, reflect the typical traits of Jewish sacred music, for example: accentuation of short motifs into extended phrases;  use of Near Eastern scales; quasi-improvisational recitatives’ frequent meter and tempo changes, irregular phrases, abrupt gestures.

 

 

 

Modern Modal Harmony

One alternative to chromatic harmony as an extension of tonality is modal harmony. It arose as part of a general interest in the past, in folk music and in oriental music and introduced ‘foreign’ elements into tonal harmony. It was not so much a system of harmony in itself as a way of deviating from the normal functions of tonal harmony to achieve particular effects. It is unlike the modality of the 16th century in that it is the relationships between chords, rather than melodic considerations, that determines the key centers. In the 19th century the modes came to be thought of as variants of major and minor, and this is implied by phrases such as ‘Mixolydian 7th’ and ‘Dorian 6th’. The Mixolydian 7^th (i.e. chords of D minor and F major in the key of G major) is not ‘modal in character’ in the medieval and Renaissance modal system (where the 3rd and 4th were just as much determinants of the modal center as was the 7th).  It is significant only against the backdrop of major and minor.  Modal harmony, for all its apparent connection to the past, is a 19th-century innovation.

 

Skryabin based his later works on a central sound that determined both vertical and horizontal structures – the ‘mystic chord’, interpreted first as a piling-up of 4ths (C–F#–Bb–E–A–D), second as a chord of the 9th with lowered 5th (C–E–Gb–Bb–D) with unresolved suspension of the 6th (A), and third as a section of the natural harmonic series (upper partials 8–11 and 13–14 imprecisely pitched). The first interpretation is prompted by Skryabin’s way of using the chord in his late works, the second has regard for the chord’s historical provenance, and the third adopts the premise on which scientific rationalizations of harmonic phenomena were based during the 18th and 19th centuries.

 

Stravinsky frequently used the technique of overlaying. By this means (a manifestation of his wider use of the Octatonic collection) he created bitonal effects and ambiguity between major and minor, gaining the possibility of further transformations by interchanging major and minor 3rds.

 

Bartók, continuing from Liszt, developed a harmonic system based primarily on the principle of symmetrical octave division (C–F#–C', C–e–G#–C', C–Eb–F#–a–C').  The tonal organization that Hindemith developed was a projection of his own stylistic peculiarities fitted into an overtone/ harmonics scheme. In principle it sought to measure dissonance level in complex chords and make possible the controlled gradation of dissonance in chord progressions.

 

In 1976 Arvo Pärt (b.1935) began to compose using a tonal technique of his own called ‘tintinnabuli.’  The tintinnabuli technique starts with a two-part homophonic texture: a melodic voice moves mostly by step around a central pitch (often but not always the tonic), and the tintinnabuli voice sounds the notes of the tonic triad. The two voices are related by a predetermined system for each particular work. The entire structure of a tintinnabuli work is also predetermined either by some numerical pattern, or by the text, or both at once. 

[quarter notes are melody] -- image missing

 

The melodic part is reduced to ascending or descending modes, to or from a central pitch. The tintinnabuli voice is added to this melody pitch note by note; either a pitch in the triad that is nearest to the melodic part, or the pitch that is next nearest. The tintinnabuli pitches may be applied above or below the pitches of the melodic voice, or alternate between these.

[Overall design of St. John Passion (1982)] -- image missing

 

- compiled and paraphrased from Grove’s Dictionary.

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MODES EXAMPLE PAGES 1 & 2

 

 

 

MODES WORKSHEET - CREATE THE MODE INDICATED

 

 

 

 

MODES HOMEWORK PAGES 1 & 2 -- EMAIL YOUR ANSWERS TO ME AT RICHARD.GARD@YALE.EDU