Yalecourses-Lecture 10. Sonata‑Allegro and Theme and Variations

All right, let us begin. Let us, we'll turn down the music of Charles Onysh, we'll come back to the music of Charles Onysh, but let us begin with our discussion of musical form, continuing our discussion of musical form. Last time we talked really about three forms. We talked about verse and chorus in popular music and we had a wonderful presentation by Frederick Evans and I hope you came away with the following, that in dealing with verse and chorus basically you have the same material, you have the same musical material coming back again and again and again. With the chorus we actually have the same text coming back again and again and again, but with the verses, although the music is the same, the text keeps changing each time. We get new strophes or new verses of text. So keep that in mind, verse, chorus, verse, chorus. Sometimes this can start with the chorus, sometimes there's a harmonic change in here that we would call the bridge, but essentially it's the repetition of the same material over and over again in terms of the music, but in terms of the text you get new text each time for the verses. We also talked about the simplest of all these musical forms, ternary form, right? And that was simply this idea of statement, contrast, statement, A, B, A. Very straightforward. Not too much we need do with that. Today we're going to go on and talk about theme and variations. And with regard to all three of these, I should say that all three of these forms are very old. I could go back into the Middle Ages and get a responsory of the Middle Ages that is in A, B, A form. I could go back into the Middle Ages and bring up an early fifteenth-century English carol that's in verse and chorus form. I could go back into the Middle Ages and find you instrumental pieces that are in theme and variation form. So these three are very old. Now the fourth one that we talked about, sonata-allegro form, is adventitious. It's something constructed in the eighteenth century, adventitious to the eighteenth century. So it's something put together in some measure by Joseph Haydn and then passed on to his good friend Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. So sonata-allegro form, this big complex musical form, is a little bit different than the other. It's a lot younger, it's a lot newer, beginning with the period of classical music, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. All right. With that by way of an introduction, let's go back to sonata-allegro form. We said that was the largest, the most complex of these musical forms. Why are we dealing with this? Well, next, a week from Saturday, we will go to this concert and we will sit there and we will listen to pieces on this concert. The opening piece will be in sonata-allegro form. It will be by Mozart. Then we will have a piece by Johannes Brahms in theme and variation form. Then we will have a symphony by Beethoven in five movements. It's an exception and we'll explain why when we get to it, in five movements, but within those movements we have a couple of instances of sonata-allegro form, a couple of instances of theme and variation form, and one instance of ternary form. So all of these forms will be necessary. We will have to understand how these forms work in order for us to really engage that particular concert. For example, you'll be asked to write a review of that concert, and I was thinking this morning, well, a kind of mediocre review would say, well, in the middle of the first movement of the Beethoven piece, and once again we wouldn't call it a song, in the middle of the Beethoven symphony, things seem to be disorganized. What I'd like to hear there is, well, in the development section, in the development section of the first movement of the Beethoven symphony, it seemed disorganized because the counterpoint was not clear, because the imitative entries of the parts was not clearly articulated. And that would be a much more specific sort of response to the music, a much more educated, if you will, response to the music. So that's where we're going with all this, to kind of sort of get you to think about precisely where you are and precisely what should be happening, and then is it really happening the way it should be. Now, as said, sonata-allegro form is the most difficult of these and it takes a little extra time to get familiar with it. We're going to be reviewing this in section, starting this evening, and don't forget we have this model of what sonata-allegro form is. I didn't want to put that up on the board again. I did that last time, but you've got it on page one-ninety-three of your textbook, if you want that complex diagram, one-ninety-three of your textbook, so get familiar with that. And do, once again, bring your books to section this time because we'll need them in section this time. So we've got this complex form, and I've figured out over the years the way to sort of wrap your arms around this or get into this, understand this. And it involves the fact that music in the Classical period is what we would call rhetorical music. It's doing something at every moment. It is doing, as I see it, one of four theme things. It's presenting a theme, so we'll have a what we call a thematic function. It's moving from point A to point B. Remember with the Beethoven, that's the opening theme, and then the second theme is. Well, those are both themes. That's stating something that we can sing, that we can remember, but Beethoven has to get from point A, the minor, to point B, the more lyrical major, so he writes a transition. So the second functional type here is transitional music. Then there are passages, and in sonata-allegro form it's in the middle of the movement, that are exclusively developmental, where you take the material and play with it. You can make it, expand it and change it that way. You could shorten it, as Beethoven often does and work with just particular motives. It tends to sound very complex. There's a lot going on in the development section. It's the most polyphonic, the most contrapuntal counterpoint, polyphony sort of synonymous, the most complex in terms of the counterpoint, and as we said before, it tends to move around a lot because it's passed, the composers will pass through different keys in the development section. So we've got so far three of what we call the four functional types, or what I have called the four functional types, thematic, transitional, developmental, and now we have to talk about the last one, which is the simplest in some ways, cadential, where the composer will just throw on a lot of heavy, simple harmonic motion to slow the music down psychologically, not the tempo actually, but psychologically, sort of bring it to a close. So we can say a closing functional type. Again, to review, thematic, transitional, developmental, and cadential. Those are our four functional types that will show up within a movement of sonata-allegro form. Question. Student response. Professor John Szwedin. Cadential. Was that it? It's Daniel. Is that right? Yeah. Student response. Well, just take cadence, C-A-D-E-N-C-E, and turn it into cadential, T-I-A-L. I don't know if my spell checker kicks that word back or not, but we use that term in music a lot. This was a cadential gesture, suggesting that we're going to get to the end of something. So remember we had cadence being the end of a phrase. Well, it's just the end of the section here. Any other questions? That was a good question. All right. So to get rolling with this, let's listen to some music now. Enough talk from me. Let's get and listen to some music, and I'm going to play four excerpts here, mostly here again for Mozart, four excerpts, and you see if you can identify which of the functional types is in play here. Okay, Linda, here we go. Okay, we're going to stop there. Let's review just for a moment. How do you tell these functional types? Well, what are you looking for here, listening for? With thematic, you want to be able to kind of sing it or you recognize it as something that you could walk out of here humming, so something that you can sort of take with you. Transitional, this idea of a little bit unsettled and lots of motion. Cadential, as I say, that's probably the easiest something like that, bringing it to an end. And developmental is going to be rather complex, lots of counterpoint going on. So let's go back to the beginning. I'm messing up, Linda, here again, but let's go back to O.7. there and we'll start all over with this, with that in mind. Okay. So that's number one. Here's extract number two. All right. Let's go back now and let's hear one more time and then we're going to ask for a volunteer to take a stab at which of the four functional types you think this is. Okay. So what brave soul will take this one on? Carolyn, please. Transitional. That is correct. Yes, that's correct. Now what did you hear there? And it's hard to play the whole thing again, but what were you thinking? What came to what? Why did you jump to that conclusion? Okay. At the end of it, it did kind of slow down. You had a sense of arrival there. There was lots of motion, there was lots of movement, lots of movement, and at the end a sense of arrival. All right. We've arrived at a new and probably a theme is going to come in at that point. So that is in fact a transition. Let's listen to, once again, to excerpt number two here, if we could, Linda. Sorry. Okay. Well, I think the key there is it's very monotonous. You used the word monotonous. It's very monotonous in the bass. Bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum, or something like that as the melody cascades down against it. But listening to the bass there, you can tell that that's just a very monotonous harmonic pattern. So harmonic patterns in cadential passages here, cadential functional type, tend to be, as Frederick says, monotonous. Okay. Let's go on to number three now. Stop it right there and cue that one again. So what do you think about that name, please? Roger. Okay. Far Away Roger. Thematic, right. Can you sing it? Play it again for Roger. We're really putting Roger on the spot here this morning, but let's see. You don't have to be awfully picano. Okay. So that's it? Okay. Roger says I just play this. All right. So that is a melody. Let's cue that again and just while we're at this, notice what Mozart does with this melody after giving it to us. Sort of does something very interesting, I think. So let's have the beginning of that same number three again, please. So here's our lovely melody, major or minor? Major. Sweet. Sounds delightful. Now watch what he does here. Just drops the third. Just a little twist to minor there. Same melody, but just lowering that third degree of the scale. Okay. So that's a good example of thematic functional type. Here is extract number four. What about this one? Well, what about that one? Yeah, go for the obvious answer here. It's going to be, name please? Lana. I beg your pardon? Developmental. And why? What did you want? Yeah, because it's the only one left, etc., etc., but could you tell us something that you heard there that sort of backs that up or confirms that it is developmental? Yeah. Many threads weaving in and out. And somebody else is going to go, ti-li-li-ya, ti-li-li-ya, ti-li-li-ya, all sort of simultaneously. Many different ideas happening simultaneously, typical of the complexity of the development section. We've got some more on the tape here. We're not going to go through them quite so slowly. Let's play one more. It could be any one of the four. Here's another one, number five. I think it's still on track three, about zero thirty-seven. Okay. Taker's there. Okay. Name please? I should know it. Young lady right in front of Thaddeus. You had your hand up first. Mary Pat. Okay. It was transitional and in just one hearing that's awfully good, but you could hear it kind of build up. Ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti. And then it stopped as if it had arrived at the end of the transition. The musical journey was over so that was transitional. Here's another one. Taker's there. Thaddeus. Students respond. Okay. Was developmental. Excellent. Then I guess, once again, lots of things going on there. Probably developmental and transitional may sound most similar. They're probably the two that are most difficult to differentiate. Thematic, yeah, you can kind of remember that as a melody. Credential, probably pretty straightforward. So there's a tendency with, to confuse the transitional and the developmental. It's just that there's oftentimes with developmental a lot more counterpoint going on. All right. One last one here and then we'll stop this. Driving that sucker into the ground with a sort of a sledgehammer of a cadential ending there. Okay? So that should help you. When we get to sections this week, we're going to be playing pieces and sort of having you track along where we are in sonata-allegro form. Let's turn our attention now, unless there are questions. Any questions about that? If not, let's turn our attention now to theme and variation. We're moving on to theme and variation form, which we will also need for our concert a week from Saturday. Here what we have is not this sort of complex, organic mixture of many different themes, first theme, second theme, concluding theme and things like that. We have one theme usually, usually just one theme, and we will get that theme and then we will get that theme again with something changed. Then we will get that material again with something changed and again with something changed. So think of this as a kind of series of boxcars on a railroad train or something like that, units more or less the same size, but each of those boxcars are going to look a little bit different as it goes by because it might have a little different logo on it, a little bit of different ornamental material on it. All right. So we're going to, let's see, for time maybe I'll not do the Ives. We were going to, well, maybe we will have a little bit of Ives. Theme and variations, again, it goes all the way back to the Middle Ages. And it, they tend to be written on rather simple themes, particularly patriotic themes. Maybe, I was thinking about this the other day, maybe because patriotic themes are pretty simple. So the simpler the theme, the more likely that theme is to become the basis of a set of theme and variations. Maybe it gives the composer more freedom to pursue. Now I think I brought in some variations of Beethoven on God Save the King. Yeah. Here we go. So here's Beethoven writing God Save the King and here it starts out. All right. So a very simple tune. And then he writes a set of variations. Here's variation one. So there's that tune. Now in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, this is through Yale's own Charles Ives. I think he was classed, let me know, eighteen, ninety-eight, something like that. He used to be the organist on the First Church in the Green here. So this is Yale's most famous classical composer, wrote a set of variations on this same tune, but they sound a little bit different because it's closer to the modern period and they're performed here on an organ. So Charles Ives, Variations on America. how long it took that organ sound to clear that church. So that was written right here in New Haven by our own Charles Ives, but again the point is that it's a very simple idea. It's a rather simple tune. Here's another simple tune that Mozart used. Its original title was Variations on A, Vous Direz Je Maman, A, Let Me Tell You Mama. And it's a story of a young woman who has gone to the big city and unfortunately lost her virginity, but we know this tune not with that French text that Mozart first learned it with but this way. Okay. So that's the tune, but originally it was a kind of French popular song going back into at least the eighteenth century. How many different titles can we give to this? What do you know this as? Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Anything else? What? Ba, ba, black sheep. Didn't Sesame Street used to do use letters with it? A, B, C, D, da, A, B, C, D, and so on. So it's gotten a lot of traction over the years. And here's the melody. And here's the first variation. Now my question to you is this. With theme and variation, the composer can keep the theme more or less exactly as it is and change the context around it or he can change the theme. So which does Mozart do in the first version? Thoughts about that? Is he changing the theme or is he keeping the theme exactly the same and changing stuff around it? What do you think? Well, what he's doing is changing the theme. The theme would go, but right at the beginning instead of, I get, so there's only really one note that relates to the theme there, and then, well, now I get. So he's sort of changing the theme by making the notes go quicker and ornamenting around those notes. So that's variation one. Now what about variation two? Does he change the theme or does he just change all the stuff around the theme? So on. So what's he doing there? Caroline? Changing what? I'm sorry. I couldn't hear you. Changing the context. The theme in the right hand stays exactly the same. Okay. Here is the next one. What's that? Well, it goes with this. So has he changed the theme? Yeah, he's changed the theme rather considerably there. Indeed, we wouldn't know that that had anything to do with twinkle, twinkle, little star unless we had had, given to us previously, as we have, the melody. So we are hearing in our inner ear Ya da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da So we know that's the basis of this, and if he wants to deviate from that, we can still say, oh yeah, that's related to that. It's getting rather far away from the original because we sort of locked in the original in our mind, in our ear, at that point. Here is, oh, let's skip that one. We don't need it here. What happens here? Is the theme changed or is it still there and the context changed? And what rhythmic device is Mozart using here? So did he change the theme there? Well, basically no, except just a little bit because he was doing what to it? Using syncopation. So he was syncopating the theme, that kind of thing. And he did one other little fill-up here, if you will, in what we might call the B section of the tune. The tune originally went and now it's going and then. So what's he done to the melody? Anybody hear that? It went, now it's going. Oscar? Yeah. He's filled in the notes of a diatonic major scale with the other notes, the black key notes here, making it a chromatic scale. So he's enriched it a little bit by means of chromaticism. All right. Let's go on to another variation by Mozart here. What's the texture of this variation? Think about the texture of that. Homophonic, monophonic or polyphonic? Polyphonic. Yeah. Was it imitative or non-imitative? Here's the beginning. ______ Imitative, right. So this is actually a kind of throwback to the sound of Bach and this is what we will be engaging when we come to the fugue. It's like Mozart trying to write in a fugal way here with imitation, and what happened to the mode in this variation? Well, he's running it up as a scale, but what kind of scale? Minor scale. Okay. And then, oddly, the final variation. What does he do to the meter in this last variation? What happens there? We were going up, so what's he done to the meter? Well, let me strip away the bass. He's changed it to triple by throwing in an extra bar of filler in between each of his basic duple beats. Then we come to maybe let me just cut to the chase here. At the end of this, he's coming in. What's this all the way to the end now? What do we call this formally? I talked about that with regard to sonata-allegro form. It's one of the parts that shows up also in sonata-allegro form. It has nothing to do really with the theme here. It is a good example of a coda, right? Just something thrown on at the end to say this is at the end. And what's he doing here? What is this? How complex is this? It's just a major triad. He's just ornamenting a major triad. So it's a good, more cadential stuff, sort of very simple material at the end. Okay. Our guest artist is here. I see him at the back. Kensho, come on up. We're going to do another piece for you and we're going to talk a little bit about Kensho, a very interesting guy. How many of you know Kensho Watanabe? Seen Kensho around? Okay. Who's seen Kensho and in what context? Oh, he's in my biochemistry class. All right. Cool. So that means he does hardcore sciences, and you must too. Good for you. You're a far better man than I. All right. So hardcore sciences. Anybody else know Kensho from other contexts? Yeah, Lana? He's in the YSO. What does he do in the YSO? Do you see him sitting all the way at the back? No. You see him sitting all the way up at the front. He's the concertmaster of the YSO. Anybody else know Kensho in a different context, any members of Berkeley College here? Anybody from Berkeley? Nobody from Berkeley? That's a statistical improbability. But you're the conductor of the Berkeley Chamber Orchestra, right? Yeah. So he's a conductor too, which is kind of astonishing because he's not really not a very good musician. He doesn't really know very much about music. Kensho, what note is that? Yeah. What note is this? Yeah. So he has a very keen sense of absolute pitch, which really helps you out if you're in music. Needless to say, as we will be talking more about this, one person in ten thousand has this particular gift statistically. So he's a very impressive guy, and he's also in the five-year M.A., B.A. programs, right? Yeah. So at the end of four years here, in addition to taking all these heavy-duty science classes, he's been across the street and he's going to get an M.A. in music at the same time. I don't know. He was a couple of minutes late today and he said he hadn't got much sleep, and I can sure as heck understand why. All right. So we have a Kensho. What are you up to this year? Everybody can come see you on what? Would that be the thirty-first of October? Yeah. So that you don't want to miss, right? And you kind of have to put that together. Maybe that's why you haven't been getting much sleep. So you're putting that together and I know that you've got a concert coming up and if for some reason, God forbid, we can't make it to our concert on the eighteenth, our make-up concert could very well be the one on the nineteenth. Don't you have a concert on the nineteenth? So if you want to hear Kensho conduct, you could do that on the nineteenth of October. All right. So we've got a piece here, and I don't want to get too far behind. It's a piece by Corelli. It's based on a melody and a bass pattern, and we'll play through little bits of it here and then we're going to play the whole thing. Do we need to tune again? Okay. We've tuned the four strings of the violin. We'll play just a little bit. We're going to take this section by section. Jacob here, he's going to point things out as we go along a little bit. Okay. That's the melody. Isn't that the most gorgeous sound you've ever heard? It's amazing, but do you have any idea how long it takes to produce a sound like that? I mean, how many years have you been sitting here? When did you start playing the violin, Kensho? I started when I was almost three. Almost three. So you were a late bloomer then. And you're probably so busy with other things, but when you were really focusing exclusively on this, how many hours a day would you practice? I was really focusing by like three hours. Max three hours. You go to a conservatory. It's because you've got so many other demands on your time. Are you playing any solos around here this year? I should have asked that question. Not so much. Okay. All right. We'll keep our eye out for that. All right. So that's the theme. And then on in variation two, the piano will play the down beat and the violin plays off the beat. I think for reasons of time, we won't do that one, though, Kensho. Let's go to number three where we get a good example of staccato in music, sort of short, pointed notes. Okay. So we'll stop there. So when you hear Kensho playing staccato, then you know that we are in variation three. Variation four, we've got, he's playing sixteenth notes, so it's going to go fairly fast here, I guess, or maybe not, but he's got a lot to do here in variation four. Okay. So he's really, this is going to be a workout for me. I hope I can keep up with this lad today. All right. Then, yes, the one that sort of scares me is variation five because then he plays the theme and I have all of this fast stuff underneath. Let's just do a little bit of that. Okay. So that's how that is a lovely, lovely theme there. Now number six is sort of fun because the interest here is in the bass of the piano. It's a good example of something we'll be talking a lot about in our course, walking bass. So the notes are all, for the most part, contiguous and they all come in the same note value, in this case the eighth note. So here's the beat and then he plays the melody against that. In number seven we have the violin playing arpeggios. We talked about that. So here's some arpeggios from the violin. Okay. That'll give you a sense of that. Number eight is a tricky one for us, keeping it together because of the triplet pattern. So let's do a little bit with that. And then nine we have sort of an interlude. It's like a transition. Ten we're not going to do anything with right now. The violin plays harmony while there's a kind of fast pattern underneath. Eleven there's a lot of. Oh, eleven is sort of my favorite, but it's a tricky one because of the syncopation between the two instruments. So that's kind of a fun one. And let's see. We need to tell them also, I like number, maybe number thirteen is really my favorite because I've got a very simple theme to play and it has to work like crazy. And toward the end of that he's playing triple stops. You know, it's not that the violin just plays one line. The violin can play two notes at the same time. It can play three notes at the same time. And if you really rip across and shift quickly or just move your bow quickly across the strings, you can give the impression of four pitches, but they all have to be in tune. So you've got to have four fingers usually in four different spots and that's hard to do. You want to play a quadruple stop for them there? It's just any old way. So when you hear those chords, the violin playing chords, oh, that's easy. On the piano or whatever it is, that's easy on the piano. That's hard on these stringed instruments because you've got to get four different fingers in four different spots there. Each of those notes have to be adjusted just fractionally, just right for it to stay in tune. When he does it, you think it's very simple, right? Easy to do. It takes years to be able to do that. Questions before we launch into this? Any questions? So we're going to do the whole thing for you. Now be patient. We're going to run over just a little bit today, but believe me, particularly the end, you'll like it. So Kensho Watanabe playing theme and variations on Corelli's tune and bass, La Folia. ["La Folia"] Sorry. I'm very sorry. We found it. Okay. We just have all these pages and they go awry sometimes. Sorry. Okay. ["La Folia"] Thanks so much, Kensho. It's a great treat for me just to be able to play with a guy. What a luxury. Thank you so much. Beautiful, beautiful music.