Using a simple and enjoyable teaching style, this course introduces the novice listener to the wonders of classical music, from Bach fugues to Mozart symphonies to Puccini operas.
Office Hours I
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Del curso dictado por Yale University
Introduction to Classical Music
1271 calificaciones
De la lección
The Sound of Music
Have you ever wondered what it is that makes music sound sometimes rich and luxurious and sometimes strange and mysterious? Well, you’re in luck because this module, we’ll explore what the nature of simultaneous sounds and textures. We’ll start off with a look at chords, specifically how the three types of triads– tonic, dominant, subdominant– build a foundation upon which a melody can be constructed. Once we understand the rules of musical syntax, we’ll be ready to learn about musical progressions including the three types of cadences.We’ll also look at major and minor triads and how they work. Then, we’ll learn how to hear the bass and focus on the harmony of a song. Finally, I’ll talk you through the four families of musical instruments–brasses, percussions, strings, and woodwinds---and the various musical textures, forms, and styles that they can create. How exciting!
Conoce a los instructores
Craig WrightHenry L & Lucy G Moses Professor of Music
Department of Music
[MUSIC]
[APPLAUSE] Hello, everyone and welcome to Office Hours.
I'm Melissa Thomas.
You may have seen me throughout the Coursera discussion threads
providing support on the Yale side, and
today, I'm here with Professor Craig Wright and his TA, James Park.
And today, they're going to answer some of the questions that you posted in
the forums.
So let's get started.
[MUSIC]
Hello, guys.
>> Hey! >> Thank you for sitting down with us.
Hi, Melissa.
>> Hello. >> Good morning, Melissa.
Thank you for joining us.
>> Thank you.
So let's just get started with the questions that some of
our students wrote in.
Let's start with Hock Core.
So Hock Core said, I would like to take up music.
What do you think would be a good instrument to start with?
For example, I understand that a violin is not an easy instrument to play on,
because it does not have bridges, what are your thoughts?
>> Well, I think the violin is definitely a wonderful instrument.
I obviously will have a deep affection for it.
>> Mm-hm. >> But, at the same time,
I can see how it might be a tricky instrument to start off with.
There are a lot of nuances to, to the instrument, even from the get-go.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So with that said,
I can imagine that the piano would be a really great instrument to begin with.
the, it's obviously a very different and complex instrument in and of itself.
But, at the same time learning the mechanics, I think, just getting off
the ground floor may be one of the easier tasks for for a beginner.
So the piano is probably a very good instrument to, to begin with.
Another instrument that a lot of people begin with casually is the guitar.
It's a very easy to to pick up from scratch.
And, obviously there is a very kind of broad repertoire not just within
a classical guitar realm which is
a realm that actually is full of very intricate and complex, difficult pieces.
But of course there's also the popular repertoire.
So.
>> Very cool. Thank you.
And Craig what do you think?
>> I think the one instrument I would not start with
is the violin [LAUGH] and the cello.
These are really hard.
These string instruments are so hard.
How do I know?
From painful experience.
Two of my four children, one studied violin for
12 years, one studied cello for 12 years.
The parent really has to stand with them and help them and
encourage them, go to the lessons, practice with them.
So unless you have genie looking over your shoulder, or a parent close
at hand I recommend, as James ultimately did, either the guitar or the piano.
Now, pianos are large, and they can be very expensive.
But nowadays, we have the beauty of
[MUSIC]
this synthesizer.
A sort of, electronic piano, if you want to.
They're much less expensive, they fit in a smaller space.
So my recommendation would be, you start out with something that gives you
satisfaction immediately because you play a certain number of notes [SOUND] and
you get a, a perfect sound without having to worry about intonation or
hand positioning or all, this kind of thing.
And not that expensive, and you can encompass it
more readily in whatever physical space that you, you have at hand.
>> Very nice.
Well, there you have it, Hawk.
You don't have to start with a recorder like I did.
>> [LAUGH] >> You have fun instruments to
choose from.
All right.
So moving right along, we have a question from Thomas, or Tomas Mejernick.
And he asks, Professor Wright, what is your favorite song and why?
And James, you can feel free to share too.
>> Well Melissa and Thomas, Tomas, whoo.
This is one of those really difficult questions.
I feel like any time I give an answer, I immediately regret it and-
>> [LAUGH]. >> Feel very guilty for
all the other pieces or songs out there that I love.
So what I think I'll do is I'll probably tell you one or
two pieces that I've been listening to recently that I've really enjoyed.
U, either getting to know or returning to.
And the first is the piano quintet by Shostakovich,
the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
It's a, it's a powerful work for string quartet which would be two violins,
a viola and a cello as well as the piano.
And it's, it's a, it's a really really amazing piece.
It's a very emotional, it's very powerful it has moments both of great drama and,
as well as kind of a playfulness, but
there's also kind of a, a deep angst in the piece.
It just really traverses a lot of the,
kind of, great emotions that can be captured in music.
>> Yeah.
>> So that, yeah,
that's, that's kind of one that I've been listening to a lot recently.
>> Thanks for sharing.
>> James said and, and Tomas or
Thomas said a song but James answered with a piece of instrumental music.
Which brings up the question, What is a song?
Well if we,
we generally around the world use term song to indicate any piece of music.
I suppose strictly speaking we should just stick with song as a term for
pieces that have lyrics.
So if we're talking about my favorite songs our learners
maybe horrified to know that I think, well this is a beautiful song.
We're going to play a really gorgeous song for you today by Schubert.
But if you were to ask me what are your favorite songs,
I would say Adele's Rolling in the Deep, would be one of them.
Hotel California, by the Eagles would be another and maybe my all time favorite,
again you'll be shocked, and I'll probably be, be fired by saying-
>> [LAUGH].
>> saying this, is the City of New Orleans by Arlo Guthrie.
Which brings up, and we use a little bit of that earlier in our course.
And it brings up a very interesting issue because, as a youth,
I would be schlepped back and forth between the east coast and
the midwest of the United States, crossing that area.
Going out to the farm fields of Iowa, where my mother had come from, and
my grandparents had farms out there.
So it's, acco, but what this, the point that I'm going to here is the following.
That, when we listen to any piece of music, whether its James' Shostakovich or
my City of New Orleans, the thing that really drives that I think often times is
not just the sound, its the memories that you have associated with it.
We tend to think of music being compartmentalized over here,
we have sound here, we have memory here, we have emotion over here.
That's not the way it works in the brain.
What happens is that it's this mosaic and
you have these associations you acquire instantaneously.
So we really can't separate out the musical experience from
the personal experience, they are there together.
So I say, what is your, what's the most moving song for you?
What's the most music, moving piece?
Well, that's why I think I like these, these particular sounds.
It's because all of the memories that flood in at the same time.
>> Very nice. Thank you.
All right.
Let's see what we have next.
We have Nicole Butt.
She says I am still confused about the intervals, interval ratios.
I understand that if you double a string length, you will get a pitch that is an,
is one octave higher than the original pitch.
I.e.
C to the next C on the piano.
I do not understand what a fifth is, or
how that interval relates to the keys of a piano.
>> So before James takes it, this one.
Because he's got the fiddle there and he should answer.
If if was it Nicole?
>> Nicole, yes.
>> Right, if Nicole is confused, so are we.
>> [LAUGH] >> In, in some ways.
It's tricky, it's difficult to explain.
A lot of things in music,
>> [COUGH] >> are kind of counterintuitive and
difficult to explain but we'll do, do our best.
And I think James is going to maybe he's-
>> All right. >> I see his fiddle there.
So he may be able to help us.
>> Well Nicole so actually if you have a string length,
let's say let's just go with this open string here, A.
[SOUND] Then I'll go, I'll move my hand up here and
play another A that'll be an octave higher.
[SOUND] You see that by putting my finger down here I've actually
made the length of this string now half of what it use to be.
because it use to just resonate without anything touching the string, so
it was just the full length.
And now.
[MUSIC]
So by putting my finger here, I've stopped this half of a string from vibrating.
So now it's just vibrating from here to the end.
So actually the string length is now half and the octave, well,
we went from an A to an octave higher A.
So the string length being halved, made the sound go higher by an octave.
But in a more general sense,
intervals are the difference between one pitch and another pitch.
So if we say, for instance in our musical alphabet is A, B,
C, D, E, F, G, if we say the interval of a fifth.
What we may, what we mean, broadly speaking,
is the interval between one note and five pitch excuse me, five pitches away.
So A, so a fifth away would be one A B C D E.
So A to E is a fifth.
So a second would be A to B.
And a third A to C and so on.
>> Yeah.
That's good.
Maybe if we could even James' excellent explanation.
But you do see that it is complicated by looking at the keyboard.
We may have a, a camera on the keyboard here.
So if we have, we,
we can have intervals that play sequentially, one after the other.
[MUSIC]
So here's a big interval, this is the octave.
Now I'm playing on a synthesizer but
you have to understand that what we have here is a just a,
a technological replication of string lengths, just as with James's violin.
So here's [SOUND] one string and
here's the string [SOUND] twice as long down here.
So we can see it.
This is a fairly large [SOUND] leap.
It's a fairly large interval, it's an octave,
it spans eight letter names as James said.
Nicole referenced the fifth.
Well let's just go up five.
So I'm going to take, we could start on A, it's the simplest way of doing it,
and I'll use C-sharp to stay in the major scale.
A1 [SOUND], here's A, B [SOUND], C [SOUND], D [SOUND], E [SOUND].
[MUSIC] One, two,
three, four, five spend five letter names.
We have a fifth in that fashion.
They sounds sort of open maybe a little bit bland if we wanted to
spand a shorted intervalt.
[SOUND] We could play them sequencialy we can play them together than we get one,
two, three.
The third sounds lovely.
If we want to, reverse that a little bit.
[MUSIC] One, two, three, four, five, six.
We get a sixth.
[MUSIC] That also sounds lovely.
Interval of the second.
[MUSIC] Just one, two.
Well it sounds like a great idea.
[MUSIC] But when you put
them together they're sort of dissonant.
That's the close together second, and
because they tend to be close together they are dissonant.
>> Mm-hm.
Thank you.
I hope that clears everything up for you, Nicole.
All right and we have another question.
A more, another clarifying question.
I would appreciate some clarification on how to recognize modulation.
How do we know when the music has switched to a different key?
Says Cory Stress, Stresinger.
And he also says, this is a great course.
>> [LAUGH] it, it's funny we get, why don't you give us an easy question?
[CROSSTALK]. >> [LAUGH].
>> And this one is an easy one to answer, but it's hard to hear.
It's really hard to hear.
And when I go to concerts,
I can genuinely speaking sometimes here the modulation is happening.
And I'm not absolutely sure that this should be the, the most important thing in
one's listening experience, it's sort of in the background.
It's maybe a graduate level question or graduate level experience.
This whole business of modulation.
I think one can enjoy music and experience it with,
to its fullest without necessarily knowing that it was a modulation.
But let's stick with the question here, and a modulation is just a change of key.
I think even Schoenberg said it's sort of like a change of musical scenery.
Well, we're going to change the scenery.
Now, I, I may have done this, and
we may have done this very briefly, but let's review modulation.
We can a modulation means you're somewhere.
You're established in the territory, a tonal territory.
So we're going to establish the tonal territory.
I like to work with C because it has no sharps and flats.
[MUSIC]
So there we are, firmly here in C, but supposing we wanted to move somewhere,
well then what you do is you take a note that's not part of the scale and
you inflect it.
[MUSIC]
Okay, so we were here.
[MUSIC] And then suddenly,
we're going to add this note.
And then that takes us over to here.
And then a composer would be quick to
[MUSIC]
to establish that as a new, tonality.
So now we've traveled to a new land, a new tonal land.
But after awhile we play there and maybe that gets boring.
[MUSIC]
And maybe we need another change of scenery so here we sit.
[MUSIC]
We've established another territory over there.
They happen quickly in, in music.
There is a moment of inflection which, oh that was nice.
I'm not sure that knowing, oh gee, that was a modulation, helps us all that much.
But technically, that's what's going on through the modulation.
>> Okay.
Do you have anything to add, James?
>> I think that that's that's, that's a very good introduction to how to kind of,
basically hear modulations.
One thing that comes to mind is that.
In a lot of pop songs.
>> Mm-hm. >> Sometimes towards the end
you might actually hear that there's rise in,
in the, in the pitch and in, in pretty much in the entire song.
Sometimes by a half step, sometimes by a whole step.
The distinction between those two is not what's necessarily important, for
this, moment.
But, when you hear the pitch kind of rising and
you hear all the music around it kind of,
almost, feeling like it went up, we often call that a pump up modulation.
And it, it feels like the music is getting more intense and it feels like the energy
has has risen simply by all of the music and the melody, the vocal melody all
moving up by that same interval, either a half step or a whole step.
So that's actually another really easy kind of moment to hear as a modulation and
it often happens towards the end of pop songs.
When, if it does happen at all.
>> Oh, good to know. I know I'll,
I'll be on the lookout for those.
>> Yeah, usually that, that's usually where they're running out of gas.
[LAUGH] In other words they've got this great idea, you've milked it for
three minutes, we have no more ideas.
What are we going to do?
My gosh, we gotta fill this track up.
Oh, let's pump it up.
>> Yes. >> And, and, and
energize it just, I never heard that before.
Pump up modulation.
>> Yeah. >> That's cool.
>> I never heard it either.
Good to know.
All right, and our last question was posted by an anonymous user.
It says, thank you for a great course.
I have a question about overtones, specifically in barbershop singing.
Which overtone am I hearing when I hear that ring or
extra voice in an a capella barbershop, and why?
Is it always the tonic, or is it sometimes the fifth?
>> I think, if I could take this one,
I don't know I, and I have never, eh, sung barbershop.
Eh, I don't, actually I have, but
it was so long ago that I forgot now that I ever did.
[LAUGH] I suspect what you're hearing
[MUSIC]
let's say we have a, we have an end of the song that goes here.
[MUSIC] I
suspect what you're hearing is this kind of sound.
[MUSIC]
Very faintly up above there.
It's probably the fifth degree.
I hear this a lot, actually, in orchestral scores and
James is an orchestral player with the EF Symphony Orchestra.
And oftentimes, it's the brasses that are sitting there,
you'll have a horn I'm just sort of sitting up where the basic tone,
bam, is up here, and James is probably down here.
Maybe a trumpet or a french horn is
[MUSIC].
sort of faintly.
And that's what I hear as a ring.
And James thought about that?
>> No I think that In barber shop singing I don't have a ton of experience with it.
But I think it's very possible that what you're hearing is either the overtone of
the, of the fifth, like, Craig said.
And maybe depending on what part of the harmony you you are singing,
you may also be hearing pentatonic.
Sometimes you may be just hearing the note that you're singing kind of resonating,
not only throughout your body, but, you know, kind of out and into, out in
the air just because you're producing this, so much of the sound yourself.
>> Mm-hm.
That what you're hearing may just be some sort of, kind of,
amplification of your own pitch, but, unfortunately, I don't really have much
more expertise in, in barbershops, and, to really say more beyond that.
>> Fair enough.
All right. Well, do you guys want to play a little
tune to close this office hour session or add anything else?
>> Well there is one thing that we want to talk about.
>> Yeah. Sure.
>> That we think might be helpful.
>> Mm-hm.
>> For our students with respect to meter.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So one of the tricky things about meter is that
the meter is not always present in the most visceral sense in music.
The Satie the Gymnopédies by Erik Satie.
>> Mm. >> That was used in one of the videos.
>> Mm-hm. >> Is actually a great example of a,
of a piece that has meter for sure.
But its not always ever present kind of on the palpable horizon.
>> Mm-hm >> And we'll get to that in a moment.
But the, the important thing to remember about meter is that it
organizes musical time.
In regular time we organize music, I'm sorry.
We organize time with seconds and minutes in hours and, and so forth.
But in musical time, we usually organize things in terms of beat patterns.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So, you're not necessarily going to hear the beat always when you listen to
a piece of music but
there will be underlying beat structure to help organize the time.
So for instance, in duple meter, we'll have one, two, one, two, one, two.
Even if the music isn't doing that.
>> Mm-hm.
>> For instance, let's think of goodness, let's think of a tune.
How about let's do Happy Birthday.
You ready?
So [MUSIC]
So this is three.
[MUSIC]
So Happy Birthday is actually an interesting decision on my part to use.
Because it actually starts with a pick up, which basically means it's kind of
an additional amount of music that precedes our downbeat.
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you.
So, do you see how every time I move my arm like this, this is a beat.
This is how we conduct triple meters, so one, two three.
One, two, three.
So happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday to you.
So even when we're saying you, you is being held.
>> Right. >> When you just say you,
we don't go you, you.
>> Right. >> Happy birthday-
>> [LAUGH] >> To you, you.
>> [LAUGH] >> But even though we're holding-
>> Right. >> You.
Through two beats its there.
>> Mm-hm. >> It's always there that's why
we have this kind of triple meter.
>> Mm-hm. >> The beats are always there in
the background.
So maybe the way that we should quickly demonstrate this
is by playing maybe an except of two triple meter pieces.
>> Okay.
>> That way we can get a feel for how how the beats are operating in the background.
So this is one that we were playing as folks were coming in,
because it does have a very clear pattern, where we know
where the beat is by this sort of accompaniment underneath.
One, two, three, one, two, three.
And I love this piece because you get this strong downbeat there.
That really sets up the meter as James was saying.
And then we subdivide it with other beats and then we have hits.
I like to think of them as hits.
So hit, hit, hit, hit.
Hit, hit, hit, hit.
Hit, hit, hit, hit.
With a big hit coming on the down beat and all the little ones after.
>> And all those little hits, hits or articulations, that's rhythm.
Those are the surface rhythms.
So the meter is the underlying kind of organizing beat pattern and
that will, that's stable.
Its like seconds.
And then well there's not necessarily a good analogue in the kind of minutes and
seconds metaphor here for the rhythm.
But the rhythm obviously is,
it is the kind of surface articulations that make the music itself.
>> Okay, so, a quick take on this.
Here's our downbeat.
[MUSIC]
Two, three, two, three.
Two, three.
[MUSIC].
>> Very beautiful.
[LAUGH].
>> So that's I think a very straightforward example of triple meter.
And you can kind of here that because especially in
the left handed piano a very regular you know movement.
You know, of.
[MUSIC]
So next I think Craig will play the Gymnopedie again which is by
Erik Satie and this one is a little bit more tricky because
especially in the beginning you're only going to hear two hits.
It's just going to be
[MUSIC]
So when you have only two hits it might feel like there are only two beats
happening, but actually underlying those two hits are three steady beats.
So what I'll do is I'll conduct as we're hearing this so
that you can hear all of those beats in conjunction with just the two hits.
So, maybe.
[LAUGH] That's it.
[MUSIC]
Yeah.
>> Great.
Well, no one asked what my favorite song was, but
that happens to be one of my favorites.
>> Oh, it's a lovely piece.
>> Yes. Nobody's ever heard much of Eric Satie.
I guess he's a sort of one-hit wonder in a sense.
Occasionally that happens where it's like the inventor of velcro-
>> [LAUGH] >> or something,
well I have one great idea, and everybody loves this piece by Eric Satie but
you ask, who wrote it, who's Eric Satie.
>> Right, right.
Yeah, it is a beautiful song for sure.
>> Yeah.
>> All right.
Well anything else?
>> No, I think that'll do it for, for today.
We've got two more-
>> Yes. >> Weeks of classes and
then we'll come back for another exciting office hour and
we'll get to play our office hour with jingle again-
>> Yes!
>> [LAUGH]. >> That's our favorite
[MUSIC]
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC]
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