Does the sun come up every morning? Here's the theme.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
Hello there, I'm Peter Schickele, and this is Schickele Mix, a program dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal, or as Duke Ellington put it, if it sounds good, it is good. There are a lot of things to be thankful for. The sun comes up every morning, the movies haven't completely died as an art form, and our bills are paid by the American Public Radio Program Fund, whose contributors include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and also by this radio station, in whose state-of-the-art yet charming studio I sit ensconced for the next hour. When you study classical music, you hear a lot about various forms, sonata form, song form, rondo form, variation form, and some people think of these as... as precast forms into which composers simply pour notes. More astute observers recognize that not only are these formal procedures constantly evolving, but that even during a given period and I'm talking about a week or two in the case of prolific creators, a good composer will treat the same form quite differently in two successive pieces. What it comes down to, of course, is that the definition is backwards. Most of what is often presented as rules in musical pedagogy is actually description.
Descriptions of music made after the music was written, and then organized and tidied up and presented as the way you're supposed to write music. By the time the rulemongers get around to codifying their observations into prescriptions, the great composers are doing something else. But that doesn't mean that there aren't certain tendencies that are interesting to look at and follow.
Today's show is called Growing Up Binary, and we're going to follow the binary form from a teeny little dance to a great big symphony. First a few definitions. We go into some of these terms more thoroughly on other editions of this program, but I'll try to lay them out quick and easy here. The two most important chords during the 18th century were the tonic and dominant. The tonic is the home base chord, the chord on which virtually
The dominant is the chord whose generating note, or root, is five notes up from the root of the tonic. Fortunately, this studio has a keyboard in it, and it's an authentic keyboard, too, not some modern copy. It's an actual early 1990s Casio Tone Bank. Okay, now here we are. We're talking about the tonic chord. Let's call that the tonic chord, okay? So then the dominant chord, one, two, three, four, five, is this.
So you get a dominant seventh.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
Now the terms tonic and dominant are used not only for the chords, but also for the keys based on those chords. In other words, here's, let's see.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
Now here's the same thing in the key of the dominant. We go up from the tonic.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
The process of working your way from one key to another is called modulation. Okay, now a cadence is the melodic and harmonic closing of a phrase or section. For instance, let's see.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
Here's the cadence.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
Finally, by using double bar lines and two pairs of dots placed within the staff, composers can indicate that they want an entire section, sometimes a very long section, to be repeated verbatim. Or should that be notebatum? Now, performers may decide on their own to embellish the music somewhat, but in terms of what's on the page, the section is notated once and played twice.
Alright, we're gonna start with some dance music. One of the characteristics of dance music I expect the world over is repetition. Lots of repetition. I used to play string bass occasionally in a square dance band, you know what I mean?
[sung: Schickele vocally accompanies himself on the keyboard]
Every single section is repeated. Why is there so much repetition? Well, the audience isn't sitting there concentrating on the music's development. They're dancing and flirting, and there's talking on the sidelines, so things have to be very obvious. And it's good for the composers. Dances can go on for a long time, and with repeat signs, the piece is going to be at least twice as long as what they write down. And also, as far as I'm concerned, dancing is trancing, and repetition always helps when it comes to trances.
Most dances, at least in Europe, end up making their way into the concert hall. The music retains certain dance qualities, but it becomes more stylized, perhaps more complicated, less concerned with making the beat obvious, and more concerned with development of material than with presenting one tune after another.
Here's the first minuet from Bach's first keyboard partita. It's in binary form, which means it has two halves, both of them repeated. In this particular piece, the opening measures of the theme happen twice even within the first section. But you always know a section's coming to an end when you hear this cadence phrase. And here's the same phrase in the dominant.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
Okay, Trevor Pinnock, let's hear it.
[music excerpt: J. S. Bach, Partita No. 1 in B-Flat (BWV 825), Menuet; Trevor Pinnock]
Now what we had there was a rather uniform texture. The right hand is almost always moving in eighth notes. And the left in quarters.
There's no change in dynamics, that is loudness, but in addition to the fact that both halves The halves end with the same phrase. The halves are defined by key. The first half starts in the tonic and ends in the dominant, and the second half starts in the dominant and ends in the tonic. This is very basic stuff for the period we're talking about. Now let's hear a minuet from a Haydn symphony, No. 59, performed by the Philharmonia Hungarica under Dorati.
The whole movement actually consists of a minuet, trio, minuet, which really means minuet, second minuet, first minuet again. But we're only going to deal with the first minuet. The basic setup is identical. Tonic dominant, dominant tonic. Both halves end with the same cadential material.
Material. But instead of having a uniform texture, the first half here is made up of contrasting material, some of it loud, some soft, some short notes, some flowing.
[music excerpt: Haydn, Symphony No. 59 in A, Menuet; Philharmonia Hungarica/Dorati]
Here's the cadential material, and we repeat.
This time we go on, and
[No speech for 69 s.]
Cadential material, and going out.
The idea of defining sections through the use of different thematic material and textures, in addition to keys, became quite important, to put it quite mildly. Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord sonata in E, K380, which we will hear played by Rafael Puyana, has a much larger scope than the two minuets we've heard.
Puyana doesn't take the repeat in either half of the sonata, but if he did, it would last more than three times as long as the Haydn minuet, so there's a lot more room for new material. The first half has two very clear subdivisions, one in the tonic, featuring legato or smooth melodies, and the other, a rather martial fanfare, in the key of the dominant.
The second section is also subdivided. It begins with a development of the fanfare material beginning in the dominant but going through various keys and ends with a recapitulation of the entire second section of the first half, this time transposed to the tonic. Got that? There will be a test on this next week. Your little blue books will be arriving in the mail. The important thing is that sections are now being defined partly through the use of contrasting
[music: Scarlatti, Sonata in E (K. 380); Rafael Puyana]
The weird thing about that gorgeous piece is that once you get into the second half, you never hear the opening material again, this thing here.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
Once you've heard the first half twice, you never hear that again, and that's unusual. In the 18th and 19th century, most composers have this theory of conservation of material, if not energy. And you never hear anything just once, but Scarlatti often did that. He said, hey, beautiful, but I got a lot of other beautiful stuff up my sleeve. So what happens in that little sonata is that the second half begins with really a development section, development of the, let's call it second theme from the first part.
You never hear that opening thing again. What's more common during this period, which is around the middle of the 18th century, is to have that development section at the beginning of the second half treat material Material from the very opening, as in Mozart's first symphony, which the wretched little brat composed at the age of eight.
[music: Mozart, Symphony No. 1, 1st mvt.; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Marriner]
Okay, now we're starting to modulate to the dominant.
And here's the second theme group.
[No speech for 23 s.]
We got a bunch of cadential material here, then we're going to go back to the beginning and repeat the first half.
[No speech for 82 s.]
That cadential material again. And we'll go on to the second half which will begin with the opening theme but in a couple of different keys.
[No speech for 46 s.]
Now we're working our way back to the tonic.
[No speech for 35 s.]
That cadential material again after which we will repeat the second half in
[No speech for 110 s.]
Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Mozart's first symphony, the first movement. Eight years old. You know what gets me is it's so Mozart-y. That sounds like it could come out of The Abduction from the Seraglio or something like that. You think Wolfgang's father helped him with that symphony? I'd like to think not.
But what do I know? I'm Peter Schickele. The program is Schickele Mix on APR.
Now let's step back a bit, not in terms of time but in terms of scope. A Mozart Minuet just one minute and twenty seconds long. Long. It's from the E-Flat Serenade for Wind Octet played by the Holliger Wind Ensemble. There's a very significant difference here. The latter part of the second half, instead of recapitulating just the latter part of the first half, now recapitulates the entire first half.
He fooled us there. That's a favorite trick of Mozart's. If we use letters to describe this form, we have A for the first half. We're describing it now in the simplest way. We have A for the first half, which is repeated, and the second half, also repeated, is B for either new material or developmental material, and A for the recapitulation of the first half.
Playing the repeats, what we've got is A-A, B-A, B-A. And that is the basic ground plan of the so-called Sonata or Sonata Allegro form that remained an important influence on European composers for over a century. Before we get back to Mozart, by the way, here's another example of the A-A, B-A, B-A form.
[music: Lennon/McCARTNEY, (BMI) “I’ll Cry Instead” (Something New); The Beatles]
Lennon singing I'll Cry Instead with The Beatles Now, if you listen to the words, you'll notice that the song as written was really A-A-B-A. I was fooling around a little bit there. The song was A-A-B-A, but that wasn't long enough for a satisfying single, so they repeated the B in last A, resulting in a form that is identical to that of the Mozart Menuet. This is extremely common in pop music, to sort of fill out the song by going back and repeating those last two sections and getting this age-old form.
Form. Actually, the way it happened historically was the other way around. People started leaving out the second repeat of something like the Mozart Symphony, which left you with the form A-A-B-A, and that became the standard form for popular song, in this country anyway, in this century. Thirty-two bar long songs, eight bars repeated, and then a middle part, the B part was eight bars, go back to the A for eight bars.
In pop music that B section is called a bridge. And there's a good story about the jazz musician who could never remember the bridge of a song. He was a fabulous musician but he just could not remember how the bridges of songs went. And first when he played gigs he'd sort of signal to one of the other players as jazz players do sometimes, you know, why don't you take over here. But after a while everybody began to catch on that this guy didn't know the bridges, that he'd never played the bridges.
And they stopped hiring him and it got worse and worse and worse until finally he moved to London. He figured nobody knows me there I'll be able to start over again and the same thing happened people loved his playing but as it became more and more obvious that he didn't know the bridge to a single song he started not getting rehired finally one day he'd been reduced to moving into a sixth floor walk-up flat it had been raining he was lying around very depressed Rest, and the clouds parted, the sun came out, and there was a beautiful rainbow. He went over to the window, put the window up, picked up his horn, and started playing.
[sung: Schickele vocalizes "Over the Rainbow"]
And neighbors started opening up their windows and listening, because he just played so beautifully.
And when he got done with that A part of the tune, he went back and repeated it. Well, that's fine. That's what the tune does. But when he got through A the second time, he could not remember how the bridge went. So he went back and played the A part a third time, all the time trying to remember how the bridge went. Couldn't remember it. Went back and played the A a fourth time. By this time, the neighbors are getting a little bit annoyed. They say, hey, come on, play the whole thing.
Except, they said it with English accents. Finally, they started really getting hostile, and he realized that this was going to be his life. He stopped playing, he unhooked the neck strap, threw the horn out of the window, and jumped after it. And as he lay on the sidewalk dying, he heard the ambulance coming, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh.
Well, let's go back to Mozart, now an old man of 14. And here the first movement of his Symphony No. 12. It's only seven years since his first symphony, but now he has a floor plan that will, with myriad variations in detail, serve him for the rest of his life.
[music: Mozart, Symphony No. 12 in G (K 75b), 1st Mvt.; The Academy of Ancient Music/Schroder/Hogwood]
And here he's actually using some of the material of the opening in the second theme group, then we'll go back and repeat the first half. And
[No speech for 107 s.]
the recap beginning with the very opening.
[No speech for 22 s.]
This part is changed so that we stay in the tonic key.
[No speech for 151 s.]
Mozart, Symphony No. 12 in G Major, K75B, The Academy of Ancient Music. Jaap Schröder was the concertmaster. Christopher Hogwood on the continuo. Peter Schickele on the microphone. The program is Schickele Mix on APR.
I was mentioning about A-A-B-A being the standard old-fashioned pop song form, but unless it's really a slow ballad, how it has to be filled out to make a respectable record side. Here's another A-A-B-A song and another solution to the what-to-do-after-the-song-is-ended problem.
[music: Boulanger/Kennedy, "My Prayer"; The Ink Spots]
All right, the Ink Spots with My Prayer. A-A-B-A, spoken A-B-A. Well, we heard the opening movement of Mozart's first symphony. Let's go out with the opening movement of his last. Written 24 years later, later, and nicknamed, not by him, the Jupiter. A lot of notes had gone before and after the bridge, and symphonies had gotten a lot longer. The conductor of this performance chose to omit the repeat of the second half, this is often done with longer pieces, and I, in the interests of being finished here before they shut down my mic, have omitted the repeat of the first half. Compared to the twelfth symphony, there's less literal repetition within each half, and more development throughout, throughout but still we're in familiar surroundings.
[music: Mozart, Symphony No. 41 in C (K. 551), "Jupiter," 1st mvt.; Staatskapelle Dresden, Blomstedt]
No, it's the first theme again with a new counter melody added.
[No speech for 33 s.]
We're really in the dominant with the second theme group coming up here.
[No speech for 31 s.]
Baseline based on the opening theme there.
[No speech for 45 s.]
Let's call this the closing theme, still part of the second theme group.
[No speech for 32 s.]
Development is starting out with the closing theme, then
one little bit of that theme and putting it through some acrobatics.
[No speech for 39 s.]
Is this the recapitulation? It's the opening theme with the counter subject, but it's soft.
[No speech for 37 s.]
Recapitulation changing
[No speech for 36 s.]
section so that we end up in the tonic but also add a little bit more development second
[No speech for 41 s.]
theme group now in the tonic.
[No speech for 108 s.]
Herbert Blomstedt conducting the Staatskapelle Dresden Orchestra in the first movement of Mozart's last symphony, the Jupiter. A cursory tour of a grand structure. When both repeats are taken, the opening movement alone of this work is one and a half times as long as Mozart's entire first symphony, all three movements of it. By the end of the 19th century, composers were writing symphonies that last well over an hour. But remember, it all started here.
[music: J. S. Bach, Partita No. 1 in B-flat (BWV 825), Menuet (reprise); Trevor Pinnock]
It reminds me of one of my favorite pieces of trivia. Did you know that the wingspan of a 747, the distance from the tip of one wing to the tip of the other, is longer than the Wright brothers' first flight? Now you do.
[music: J. S. Bach, Partita No. 1 in B-flat (BWV 825), Menuet (reprise); Trevor Pinnock]
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
That's Schickele Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by the American Public Radio Program Fund, whose contributors include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and also by this radio station and its members. We'll tell you in a moment how you can get an official playlist of all the music on today's program with record numbers and everything. Just refer to the program number. This is program number 41.
And this is Peter Schickele saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi. You're looking good. See you next week.