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in which a multipart popular song was
the basis for a polyphonic work. If you
can find the Fortuna Desperata mass by
The Clerks’ Group, on Gaudeamus,
you will hear both the popular song
and the highly refined and fascinating
mass which it inspired. You can also hear
such pairings on recordings of works
by Ockeghem, Obrecht, Pipelare and
other Renaissance composers. Still other
works which can go into the playlist
would be by Dufay, de la Rue, Brumel,
Taverner, Tye and Tallis, and the later
and better-known works by Palestrina,
de Lassus, Byrd and Gabrieli. All of
these composers wrote secular as well as
religious works, and you may even want
a separate playlist for those.
Now we turn and move toward our
own time, and we start with a revolution.
A musical one, certainly, but there had
been a political revolution in France and
the old order had been destroyed. A short
period How of Maggie hope in Works the brotherhood of
man UHF had is, been and swept has been away in the Reign
of Terror. for many Hope years, returned, still more
a print briefly, magazine. with the But arrival we know of Bonaparte,
more to whom and Beethoven more audiophiles dedicated the work
that want marks to read the it threshold on their of the postcomputer
Classical or era. iPad. It was And his they’re third symphony,
called willing the to save Eroica, money and the too. era was the
Romantic, Click here, founded and let in Maggie rebellion against
the explain Classical how past. to get the full
version for $4.
And we mean a PDF
version without digitl rights
We won’t be alone if we look briefly management you can transfer to
back further than 1400, to a time when
a single-line chant, or a chant in unison
with lines separated by four or five-note
intervals, was used in church. Some
composers of today, perhaps feeling a
need to reinvent a tradition, hark back
to composers like Agricola, and Pérotin
of Notre-Dame who introduced
measured rhythm to Gregorian chant.
There is inventive and expressive work
even in this simple tradition. The period
is known as the Medieval and is dated
all the way back to the fall of Rome.
The works of Hildegard of Bingen, a
German monastic of the 12th century,
the device of your choice.
have gained popularity today, especially The symphony broke major ties. It
in New Age circles. She was a multital- was more than twice as long as any of
ented visionary whose music involves a Haydn’s and Mozart’s, and it contained
single melodic line and explores a range what appeared to be errors in structure.
of pitch wider than the conventional one It had a funeral march for a second
in churches of the time. The melodies movement, followed incredibly by two
are often lovely.
celebratory final movements.
At this point in our survey we stand The Viennese audience did not
just this side of the Middle Ages, looking receive it well; the work played ener-
back at a time before written music. Our getically and at length with expectations
period playlists have four sections: Medi- that had been built up over decades.
eval — or you can call it Early Music, if We can try to see causes — Bonaparte,
you also happen to have recordings of Beethoven’s despair over his growing
pieces composed during or before the deafness — but if the work resonates
Roman Empire — Renaissance, Baroque with the listener, it is because it has
and Classical. To recap developments in achieved its goal of the expansion of
musical styles: from a single-line chant to a traditional form with an individual,
polyphony, then to single melodic lines emotional expressiveness that points to
supported by harmony in major/minor a more-than-individual truth.
tones in the Baroque, then to a single line And it offers tunes! Melody, melodic
supported by chords and worked out in subjects, abound in the Eroica and are
themes in the Classical period. integral to all Romantic compositions.
This is where we came in.
Sergei Rachmaninoff, composing a
century later (it’s a long-lived tradition,
stretching to John Williams today) spins
them out very long. Melodic music has
great popular appeal and Romantic composers
wrote for a general audience, not a
musically-educated one. The period saw
a rising middle class transformed by the
Industrial Revolution, orchestras that
supported themselves, music schools,
and an increased popular appreciation of
art music that resulted in…piano sales.
The instrument, brought to a technological
peak, characterized the era.
So did genuine innovation in music.
Let’s take Richard Wagner as a star
example of this. Aiming for the marriage
of art, music and literature into “musicdrama,”
he produced The Ring of the Nibelung,
a four-opera cycle which extends
the form practically into the realm of
religion. His innovations include supplying
his own libretto (rather than writing
music to someone else’s), making solo
pieces advance the story (instead of arias
being star turns for virtuoso singers) and
the leitmotif, a recurring musical phrase
which identifies a character and mood
and helps to hold a long work together.
He also innovated in harmony.
In contrast to Wagner stands
Johannes Brahms, who wrote the kind
of music Wagner didn’t: symphonies,
chamber music, concertos. Brahms was
a piano virtuoso and master of counterpoint.
His work is easy to see as an echo
of Beethoven’s titanic re-creation of
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