This lecture begins with a review of all the musical forms previously discussed in class: sonata-allegro, rondo, theme and variations, and fugue. Professor Wright then moves on to discuss the final form that will be taught before the students' next exam: ostinato. With the aid of music by Pachelbel, Purcell, and a few popular artists, Professor Wright shows the multitude of ways in which the ostinato bass has been used throughout the past several centuries.
00:00 - Chapter 1. Review of Musical Forms 05:19 - Chapter 2. Multiple Themes within Beethoven's Third Symphony 22:57 - Chapter 3. The Ostinato Form in Purcell's Opera 42:12 - Chapter 4. The Pachelbel Canon and Conclusion
All right.
Let us begin, please.
We're going to get started to stay on track for this morning.
Don't forget, of course, that we have this
exciting event next Tuesday, which is our second test.
There will be a review section for that, indeed three of them
next Monday night.
As we did last time, they'll be in Room 207 of WLH
again this Monday.
Seven, eight, and nine, respectively,
and yours truly will be there.
We'll also have Monday afternoon.
If you want individual help, you can come to my office and
one of the TAs will be covering a run of about four or five
hours there Monday afternoon, probably starting around one
o'clock.
And, of course, I'll be sending you a prep
sheet on this so that you will know how to prepare for this
test.
Just as we prepared for the last test, the test itself will be
very similar to the first test except we,
when we get to the listening pieces,
then we will not be so much concentrating on individual
isolated aspects of melody, rhythm and harmony but these
broader questions of form.
What is the form?
Where are we in the form?
That's the essence of the assignment there.
We're working here with form and it's very important.
It brings, I think, my guess is in all of the
listening that you've been doing, pop music,
classical, whatever it is.
How many, when you were listening, ever thought about
form?
Did you ever think about it?
Okay.
One person, I see, raised their hand.
Roger too, maybe Roger raises his hand but not too
enthusiastically.
Yeah.
It's the kind of thing that you could do a lot of playing and
listening to music.
You could take as my seventeen-year-old,
maybe seventeen-year-old, maybe twelve,
thirteen years of cello and I could ask him,
What form do we have?
Where are we in the form?
And he wouldn't really know because he hasn't been exposed
to that sort of thing.
Well, it does help us.
It's a whole dimension of listening that we can plug into
whether it's pop music and you're dealing with verse and
chorus and bridge or even, as we'll see today,
ostinato in pop music or in classical music you plug in the
form.
Now what are the six forms that we are going to be plugging in
here?
Somebody run us through our checklist.
Roger, get us started please.
Oh, yeah.
You can say one and then you pass the baton.
Okay.
Sonata lego, the most difficult,
the biggest one, we spent the most time with
that.
What else?
Chris?
Fugue.
We spent a lot of time with that, fairly difficult.
Daniel?
Rondo.
A little bit easier in the sense that you've got this one
theme that kind of bludgeons you.
You get a theme, then you get something else.
Then that theme comes back and then probably something else yet
again.
Then that theme comes back and then something else again,
again, and then theme and so on.
So you get the object and then a lot of contrast,
but the object keeps coming back.
What else?
Have we mentioned Chelsea?
I'm sorry.
Ternary form.
Yeah, that may be the easiest, kind of just the A,
B, A idea, and we're missing one I think.
Yeah.
Theme and Variations.
Your name please.
I'm sorry.
Christian.
Okay.
Thanks very much, Christian.
So Theme and Variations is the last one.
When you go to a concert, sometimes you can pick up the
program and here is a cover for a program that's going to serve
as the make-up for our, the make-up concert for our
class.
It's next Saturday, I guess, yeah,
a week from Saturday, Jonathan Edwards Orchestra is
going to be performing at Battelle and they'll be doing
the Beethoven Eighth Symphony, the Beethoven Eighth Symphony,
and when you go there you're going to have four movements in
the Beethoven Eighth Symphony.
What's a good guess as to what form the first movement's going
to be in?
Sonata Allegro.
Okay.
Sonata Allegro.
Second movement, wow, it could be in a number of
different forms.
What's a good guess for what the form of the third movement
will be?
Ternary form.
It's going to be some kind of minuet or perhaps scherzo,
I think in this case scherzo, trio, scherzo,
that idea.
Ternary form usually is the third movement of these four
movement symphonies.
And then the last movement, well, we'll have to sort of
come to terms with that, figure that one out on the fly,
and that's what we'll be doing in our test on Tuesday,
although it will be a slow sort of lento fly there.
We'll be going through it much more slowly than just one pass.
So sometimes when listening you've got to hear the music and
make some kind of educated determination as to what the
form is, and then you kind of,
as they say, drop this template of that
particular form down in your mind and then filter the music
thereafter through that model, be it the model of Sonata
Allegro or the model of Fugue or the model of Rondeau.
You kind of hear the piece in that form thereafter.
Questions about that?
All right.
If not, let's proceed with one final form today,
which is ostinato.
That's our sixth form.
We haven't been introduced to that.
We're going to do ostinato.
But before we get to that, I want to recap one thing having
to do with theme and variation form,
because it allows us to bring in some of the other things that
we have been talking about.
So it's a good culminating listening experience,
and that is the finale of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony.
Anybody know why it's called the Eroica Symphony?
Who's the hero that's referenced there?
Caroline?
Napoleon.
Right.
So Beethoven was working on this symphony.
Napoleon was a hero.
Then he gets word from Paris.
Napoleon has had himself crowned emperor.
He thinks, oh my god, Napoleon's just a
tyrant like all the rest of them.
So he's furious and he scratches out on his score.
And I, when you get to the Beethoven chapter of your
textbook, look there.
There's a photograph of the cover of the Eroica Symphony,
and you can see the big hole where Beethoven,
with his knife, scratched out Napoleon's name,
and then later on he goes on to simply identify that as
Symphony for a Hero, Symphony for a Hero,
the Eroica Symphony.
So that's what we mean by that particular thing.
The hero originally was to be Napoleon.
So when we finish this exercise, when you finish this course,
you will have actually been exposed to a number of Beethoven
symphonies.
We're talking about number three here.
We open with number five.
On the concert a week from Saturday you'll have Beethoven
VIII, and those of you that went to
the preceding concert are not barred from attending the one on
the first of November.
You too can get in the door there, so you might want to go
to that, 7.30 in Battelle Chapel, November 1st.
And the concert the other night we had Beethoven VI,
so you will have been exposed to four Beethoven symphonies here
in this course, and that's pretty good for a
beginning course.
Great.
All right.
So let's talk about the finale here, and it's based on,
and it's kind of fun.
It's actually more complex than we would ever do on a test,
but it's fun to work through it.
It's based on two themes.
So this is a set of variations using two themes.
Beethoven liked to do this.
He did this actually in the slow movement of
What's that?
What symphony is that?
Anybody remember?
Yeah.
It was the Beethoven VI that we had at the concert the other
night with the woodwinds and all, and so on.
That was the second theme.
That was kind of the second, the B idea, if you will,
of the two themes.
So there in the slow movement of Beethoven VI symphony we had a
double variation, and what we mean by double
variation is simply that there are two themes in play.
So here we have the two themes.
One, the way he's constructed here, is in the treble.
That's theme number one.
Here's theme number two.
So those are the two themes.
So let's listen to some of this.
It's going to start out with just a little bit of a curtain
raiser.
So we'll have a curtain raiser and then one of the themes will
come in.
Which one does Beethoven start with?
Okay.
Up goes the curtain.
Repeat.
Continue.
Repeat.
Okay.
We're going to stop it there.
So which theme did he choose to work with here,
at the outset?
Anybody know, Daniel?
Yeah.
The bass theme.
And how was it being played?
Was it pizzicato?
So it was the bass theme.
All right.
So that's in a sense we'll say variation one.
Let's go on with variation two here.
Which theme does he choose to use at this point?
Repeat and repeat.
Okay.
So which theme is he using there, one or two?
Yeah.
Again he says two and it was still the bass theme.
It was a little bit harder to hear this time because it was
being covered up above by some counterpoint.
So we've got the theme, we've got counterpoint against
it.
Let's go on to variation number three.
We'll see what happens.
Which one here?
Repeat.
Going on and repeat.
So which theme this time, one or two?
Still two.
But he's moved it up into the first violin.
He's moved it up higher and he's got more sort of fast
running counterpoint against it.
Let's go on to the next.
We've got to get number one at some point.
All right.
Let's stop it there and let's go back to that particular
variation, if you will, please.
I think it's at one fifty-four.
What was the solo instrument there and how did he orchestrate
this?
Well, the first statement of this first theme,
he assigned it to a solo instrument.
Then on the repeat he had the strings take it over.
Then that solo instrument came back and then on the repeat the
strings took it over again.
So it's an interesting use of orchestration here.
Let's listen to this variation again and what is the solo
instrument up on top?
Okay.
Let's pause it there just for a second.
So what's the solo instrument?
Oboe.
Yes.
There's an oboe penetrating up on high.
Yeah.
I wouldn't want to take that too far though.
This is sort of an isolated event here where you do have a
call and a response, and it does happen just in this
one variation but it's going to be limited to this one
variation, whereas in a Bessie Smith
blues tune you would have that call and response idea carried
on throughout the entire composition.
It's a good point though.
I hadn't thought of it in those terms but that's exactly it.
You've got a call by the oboe and then a repeat of that idea
may be elaborated by the strings.
So here we are up here, the solo oboe,
and then we are going to have the response now by the string.
So let's listen to that.
Okay.
We're going to pause it here just for a second.
Now something interesting happens.
When we were dealing with sonata-allegro form we said that
there were four functional types, and this really isn't just
limited to sonata-allegro form.
There are functional types in all kinds of music.
When you go to a movie, a cinema, a film for example,
oftentimes at the end of the scene they will have a fade-out
and listen to the fade-out music.
There's kind of transition music in film music a lot of
times.
Then maybe we get a new scene and it's very prominently
displayed.
Well, maybe we get thematic music at that particular point.
So this idea of theme and transition, even development,
can occur in all different kinds of music and all different
kinds of context.
But just to review that idea, we have thematic music,
we have transitional music, we have developmental music,
and again it doesn't have to be limited to sonata-allegro
form.
We saw developmental music in a section of the fugue called
what?
Anybody remember what we called that section of the fugue that
was so developmental, Thaddeus?
The episode.
So there we, in the episode of the fugue,
we have developmental activity and we get ending,
cadential stuff virtually in every kind of music.
So it's not limited just to sonata-allegro form.
But the question here is what is Beethoven writing at this
particular point?
Here we are in theme and variations but I think we're
referencing one of the four functional types of music in
this next section.
So what functional type is it?
Okay.
So what was that that we just heard?
What would you guess?
Daniel?
A transition.
Yeah.
He's just taking us very simply from point A to point B.
And maybe just a little bit idea of a cadence.
Transitions usually end with a couple of final sounding chords
there at the end.
So that's a transition and we've moved and we've moved from
here, a major key.
What would you imagine we're going to move to?
A minor key and it's probably again, although we don't hear
it, I don't hear it, we don't hear it,
it's probably going to be the relative minor because it's just
simpler structurally to operate that way.
So let's listen now to the next variation here,
but something very interesting happens.
He's referencing another form.
He's incorporating another form in the composition as a
variation.
So what is the other form now?
Let's stop it right there.
So what form is he referencing?
Michael?
Got it right today.
Okay.
A fugue.
Yeah.
And we, in just one hearing, it would be hard to really know
what voices would bring it in, but I'll just tell you generally
what he was doing there was starting up on the top.
Okay.
And then and gradually coming down in terms of range.
So it was soprano, alto, tenor and then bass.
And the bass did something interesting which sort of
reinforces a point we had the other day.
The fugue subject that he's working with, which by the way
So he's kind of varying that melody number one,
kind of varying that melody.
But when it gets to the bass it does something interesting.
Why is that interesting?
What process do we have at work there that we talked about last
time with regard to fugue?
Anybody remember that, Daniel?
Inversion.
And I don't think I made that point clearly enough the other
day, but any time you have
or you could have
going up a minor third and then down a second.
You could go down a minor third and then up a second.
So you're just turning the intervals and kind of a mirror
image there.
So here Beethoven uses a little bit of inversion.
So in the middle of this theme and variation movement he
inserts a fugue, and a fugue inserted inside
another form is called a fugato.
So here as the fourth, I think, fifth variation of
this last movement he inserts a fugato.
Let's skip, if you would please,
all the way up to about 8.00.
We're going to listen to one final variation here,
and we, at this point, we want to concentrate on the
duration of the melody.
We were starting out
with one, two, one, two, in that fashion.
What's Beethoven doing here?
Almost there?
Yeah.
It's a long way to go.
Here we go.
Pause it there just for a second.
So what's he done here to his melody, to the duration of his
melody?
It's now.
Can you express it?
If we were going to go, and now we're going to go.
What's he doing?
Well, come on.
I just hear small little words out there.
Somebody, let's choose somebody who's pretty confident and that
person will yell it out.
Marcus?
I'm sorry.
I didn't hear that.
That's the psychological effect of ritardando,
slowing it down, giving you a sense you're getting
to the end, but once again, technically,
that's not exactly what he's doing.
He's giving that effect by doing something.
That is?
Right.
He's changing the note values.
He's simply doubling the note values, and when we do that in
music, we call that augmentation.
Sometimes when we get to Hector Berlioz, we'll see
diminution.
To give a sense of urgency to the music, you can chop them all
in half.
Well, here he's getting toward the end.
He wants this grand, broad effect.
He's brought in the brasses.
It's showtime.
So what does he do?
He doubles all of the note values in theme number one.
So let's continue, please.
Okay.
And then he sort of fades out and adds a little coda at that
point, but that's the way we end the
third symphony, the Eroica Symphony of Beethoven.
So it's an interesting piece because it's got a fugato in
there, it's got sections that sound like transition out of
sonata-allegro form, and he's working with two
themes.
Questions about that before we move on?
All right.
So let's put that behind us now and go on to talk about
ostinato form.
Once again, we've been through this many times,
but what is an ostinato?
Okay.
I know it's embarrassing.
It's something that happens again and again and again.
It's a sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder
applied to music.
Okay?
Obsessive-compulsive disorder applied to music.
The most famous example of this is probably the
the Bolero of Maurice Ravel, so we put that up on the board
here as our first ostinato piece, 1928,
a piece from the twentieth century.
It's ostinato in every way, in the sense that the melody
keeps repeating over and over again for fourteen minutes.
That keeps going for fourteen minutes and change,
depending upon the tempo of the conductor,
and when we did this, remember, you guys were
providing the bass harmony, bum, bum, bum,
bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum,
and that's all you do for fourteen minutes and thirty
seconds.
So every aspect of that melody, rhythm and harmony is
controlled by this ostinato procedure, and in this example,
as mentioned, from the twentieth century.
But the heyday of ostinato form, well,
really in two periods in the history of music,
one in the Baroque period and two right now,
because when you start listening to your pop music,
go out there and listen to those basses and start charting
those basses and see how repetitious they are.
When Frederick Evans brought in that piece of In Sync or
whatever it was that he brought in,
and I started listening to that, I thought,
my god, he's got a descending tetrachord bass,
ostinato, embedded in that.
Now, I'm sure Frederick didn't sit there scratching,
oh, yes, there's my descending tetrachord,
chromatic descending tetrachord bass there, but it's in there.
It's embedded in so much of this popular music,
and that's kind of what we're going to track here a little
bit, but we're going to start with the Baroque.
So we could start with who's the best or the,
yeah, we could even say the best composer of the Baroque.
Well, J.S. Bach.
So let's start with an organ piece of Bach and we'll listen
to an ostinato bass.
Generally speaking in music, when you get an ostinato,
it's applied to the bass.
It sets up a repeating harmony, so that's what we've got here.
So here's a Passacaglia, just a little bit of it,
by Bach.
And you can see what he's doing.
Once he gets his bass in there, and it's a typical eight-bar
pattern, it's odd how many of these ostinato basses are in
eight-bar units.
So it's an eight-bar pattern here with Bach.
Then all he does is keep throwing over top of that
different rhythmic patterns and slightly different melodic
patterns as well.
But that bass,
Yadi-ta-tum-pa-di-ta-tum-pa-di-di-di-di-di-bing-tum.
He's churning away over and over underneath in that piece
for what instrument by Bach?
Organ, big powerful pipe organ, wonderful, wonderful sound.
All right.
So that's an introduction to the basso-ostinato,
the ostinato bass by Bach.
Let's turn to some music now of Henry Purcell.
Henry Purcell was an English composer working in London at
the end of the seventeenth century.
He was employed by, it must have been,
James II and then I think William and Mary for a little
bit.
So he wrote for the court and he also wrote for the theater.
And in one instance, it turned out to be his most
famous composition, he wrote an opera for an
all-girls boarding school in the London suburb of Chelsea.
I guess it's now part of downtown London.
There's a famous soccer team, Chelsea something.
I don't know.
You see them on TV.
So there's Henry Purcell out at this all-girl boarding school,
and annually they put on a drama.
So it was kind of like a senior class play,
and all of the roles were sung by women except in this case one
role was sung by a male, and that was the role of Aeneas.
So we've got the famous story of Dido and Aeneas.
You've probably read it in literature classes.
You've probably read parts of it in Latin.
It's from Book Four and it used to be in a really good
secondary-type education.
When you're doing Latin, you've had maybe six or seven
years of Latin, you would read the Virgil's Aeneid
in the original Latin.
Anybody do that in your?
Wow.
Holy schmoly.
Latin is making a serious comeback here because it's not
easy, it's not easy stuff.
It's traditional classical Latin where the syntax is
radically different than medieval Latin or any kind of
modern language.
Okay.
Well, good for you guys.
So you know the story.
Somebody tell me the story then.
Michael, what's the story?
Okay.
So Aeneas has to leave for another country.
It happens to be what country?
Yeah.
He's got to follow his destiny and go off and found the city
of Rome, and in the vernacular,
having ditched Dido back in Carthage.
She's not happy about this.
She dies.
Depending upon the theatrical version or the original,
she either stabs herself, falls on a burning funeral
pyre, or dies of a broken heart.
But this is opera, so you know that at the end of
it, the soprano's got to die.
Right?
This is the way operas die.
Operas end, die dead.
So you could do Violetta in Traviata, you could do Tosca
in Tosca.
We've even seen here the Liebestod at the end of
Wagner's Tristan.
Isolda dies after singing the Liebestod, expires.
So it's a convention of opera.
And in this particular opera, we have a famous aria.
It's called Dido's Lament, where she is lamenting the fact
that she has been abandoned by Aeneas.
And it's interesting because it's built on an ostinato
baseline, and it's built on an ostinato baseline that descends.
And this is important because it became a convention for
lamentation.
So this is the baseline for Dido's Lament here.
And it just keeps recycling over and over and over again.
That's the ostinato.
And then up above it, we have the lamentation.
When I am laid in earth, may my wrongs create no trouble
in my breast.
Remember me, remember me, but ah, forget my fate.
So that's what she's singing.
So let's listen to a bit of this, and before we do that,
we have the term on the board up there, ground base.
All that is is the English term for ostinato base,
ground base, ostinato base, the same thing.
But it gives us a sense at least that the base grounds,
it kind of holds together.
It's the foundation for the entire composition.
So let's listen.
We'll start with the ground base, nice and loud here,
Linda, please, and then the singer will come in.
Let's stop it there.
So that's how this plays out, and that base keeps cycling
through the duration of this particular aria.
Listening to this recording gives us the opportunity to
think about approaches to music.
This is a piece written at the end of the seventeenth century,
and actually what in this particular recording they're
playing this and singing in a way that would be rather similar
to the way they would have done it in the seventeenth century.
They have reproductions of seventeenth-century instruments.
And the singer here is trying to create a particular approach
vocally to the music.
So as we listen to this recording one more time,
we're going to hear just a little bit more of it,
and then we're going to ask you to compare this recording to
another recording.
This would be the kind of thing that a reviewer would do.
So let's listen to a bit more of this Recording A,
we'll call it, and then we'll move on.
Let's pause it there, and now we're going to go on to
Recording B.
So what's the difference here in approach in terms of
orchestra, everything, voice,
and how does Recording B differ from Recording A?
So maybe we'll pause it there.
What's your reaction to that?
How do those two differ?
Hands, please, Caroline.
Okay.
First singer had a much more youthful approach and you could
see that as an attempt to maybe duplicate the performance
context of the original performance in a high school,
a girls' school there in late seventeenth-century London.
More specifically, what about the quality of that
voice?
Any thoughts?
Roger?
Okay.
Now, so we have the two recordings.
Which of the two had more vibrato, one or two?
Two had a lot more vibrato, so that's really the big
difference here, that one was a very well-focused
voice with very little vibrato, and maybe that's what gave it
this youthful appeal.
It's almost like the voice of a choir boy or a choir girl,
for heaven's sakes, a pre-adolescent child,
but intending to make it very pure and very clean and very
well-focused.
The second recording, what that might be a recording
that you would expect to hear, a performance you would expect
to hear where?
Maybe in a modern opera theater or an opera hall,
a hall designed for opera, where we've got this huge
expanse that we have to fill.
What about the orchestra?
Frederick?
You mean higher in terms of pitch?
Frederick, you have a very good ear.
Actually, that's true.
There's a lot of it.
I don't want to get into this, but the first recording is
pitched in F-sharp in the old Baroque tuning.
They're trying to really be so authentic.
Pitch in the Baroque era was actually lower than it is today.
We know that because there are tuning forks that survived in
that period that got labeled on an A.
You play that A and it turns out to be our G-sharp.
So aficionados of this particular repertoire,
when they go to perform Baroque music,
they're going to use reproductions of authentic
instruments, they're going to use
non-vibrato singing, and they're going to use the
lower pitch.
I didn't plan on getting into that, but since you picked up on
it, a good few.
Now we don't have to hear that, and to be honest with you,
the only reason I remembered that was I went to duplicate it
before coming in here today.
I went to duplicate those pitches on the piano so I'd be
up to speed with this, and I realized,
jeez, I'd have to do this in F-sharp and that's going to
require some quick transposition up here because I can do it
quickly in G with only two flats,
but F-sharp, well, how many sharps do I got
there and I had to figure all of this out.
So, but that is going on there.
That's an interesting development, yeah.
Anything else?
What about the tempo of the two?
Size of the orchestra always determines to some degree the
tempo.
Oscar?
Yeah.
The second recording was much slower.
I was intentionally trying to beat it up here and it was a
very labored beat pattern.
It was much slower because they had many more instruments,
a lot more people playing.
Axiomatic, the more people you have, the longer it takes for
sound to clear, the slower your tempo will go
unless you have a maniacally dictatorial type of conductor
that will really push you.
So it leads to a, the more people,
the slower the tempo is going to go.
So what we have here is a reproduction of an attempt to
reproduce authentic seventeenth-century performance
as opposed to a modern performance,
big sound, metropolitan opera type of sound.
All right.
Let's move on here.
One interesting aspect of this, I discovered this driving down
Whitney Avenue.
This is true.
Driving down Whitney Avenue one day, I must have been fishing
for ninety-one point five on my FM dial and suddenly had a
seizure or something and I didn't quite make it and I was
listening to Elton John.
Okay.
Listening to Elton John and what did I hear but the
craziest thing?
What I heard was this text.
It's sad, it's sad, it's a sad, sad situation,
and then I heard,
well wait a minute there.
That's the personal bass line.
Elton John has stolen the personal bass line.
Arrest that man.
No.
We don't do this, because as we say,
these bass lines are in the common domain.
As we have said before, you can't sue anybody for the
theft of a bass line and, indeed,
It was all over the place in the Baroque.
This is a type of- it became a kind of musical icon.
Any time an audience would hear
they
would think death or bad news, and actually we still do today.
It doesn't hit the road jack based on that same kind of
ostinato bass.
But in the Baroque you could go back to Monteverdi's
Lamenta della nympha.
You could go to Bach's cantata, Weinenklagen,
Sorgensagen, to Weinkäfts.
You could go to the Crucifixus, the Bach B Minor
match.
What could be more painful or dispiriting than a
crucifixion?
So this was a moniker.
It was a kind of emblem of lamentation, whether it's in
Purcell, whether it's in Bach, or whether it's in Elton John.
So what Elton John was to take this and he used it not at the
beginning of this piece, Sorry is the saddest or Sorry is
the hardest word to say.
He didn't use it at the beginning.
He used it in the chorus.
So here we are in the chorus of Elton John's, I think it's
Sorry is the saddest thing to say or something like that.
...hardest word.
It's sad, so sad, with the sad, sad situation.
And it's getting more and more absurd.
It's sad, so sad, why can't we talk it over?
Oh, it seems to me Sorry seems to be the hardest word.
And then he goes on with the next verse.
Okay.
So that's just one example of the use of that particular
ostinato bass.
We actually call that a lament bass and Mozart even did it.
He wrote a violin sonata on the occasion of his mother's death
in E minor and he has that thing just going down and
descending.
Basically, it's this descending tetrachord here that gets
filled in chromatically.
All right.
So we've got that as an ostinato bass.
What's the most famous ostinato bass of all time,
Baroque or Modern?
The Pachelbel bass.
Okay.
And we've got this thing called the Pachelbel Canon.
Do you have the Xerox for today?
What's the Pachelbel Canon?
Well, we've worked a little bit with this.
I think it was Listening Exercise Eight,
I believe, early on in the course, where we were trying to
have you focus on changing harmonies, and these harmonies
are just generated by this repeating bass line.
There's an irony with the Pachelbel Canon and that is that
you never hear the canon in the Pachelbel Canon.
Why is that the case?
It's because if you look, he's got these three canonic
lines, the three staves up above, all in the same register.
And when people record this, they always do it with the same
instrument, usually just with the violin.
So we have the violins up above, three violins all playing in
the same register.
You can't pick out the canon.
It just sounds like this unfolding jumble.
It's a very beautiful jumble, but it's indistinctive in that
sense.
Maybe if they orchestrated oboe, flute and clarinet,
maybe we could hear the canon better.
What we hear, of course, grinding away
underneath, is the ostinato bass.
So let's listen to just a bit of this, and I was struck the
other day when I went back and listened to this recording on
your CDs.
They have put in this something that's actually Pachelbel
didn't write.
When this starts out, they just start with a
What's that?
It's a descending major scale.
So they just say, all right, here's your basic
tonality, here's your tonal grid or whatever.
So let's listen to the bass start out, then we'll have this
descending scale that Pachelbel didn't write,
and then his canon will start.
And you can see how this works here.
I've indicated A, A gets repeated as B comes in
and so on.
It's pretty straightforward how the canon operates.
Okay.
Here comes the scale now, and now the canon starts.
A one, second voice comes in, first voice goes on to present
We're going to pause it here.
It goes for about four minutes.
This is very beautiful.
It's lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely.
But you know this bass line, right?
Okay.
So there's our D.
Let's all sing it together.
Ready.
Sing.
Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da,
da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.
Okay.
So once you get that in your ear, you have a sense,
It's really in there and that you may have heard that many
different times before.
Now, lots of people made use of the Pachelbel Canon and I know
of at least three and maybe four that I've put up on the board
up there, and you may know of more.
Marcos sent me a YouTube clip of a comedian.
Maybe you guys have seen this.
What's the comedian's name?
He's making sort of so sick of the Pachelbel Canon because
every piece he picks up has got the baseline of the Pachelbel
Canon in it.
What comedian was that?
It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
Okay, so those are my four.
Anybody else know where else they show up?
All right, well let's review but keep in the key of Thaddeus.
Good.
Britney Spears has the Pachelbel Canon?
What a time to be alive.
All right, Thaddeus, go get that for me.
I need this one.
This is gold.
Thank you very much, but check it.
For example, one of the students,
Daniel in here, sent me or gave me and we
talked about it, and let's go to that one.
It would be CD four, track two at about zero
twenty.
He said this may be a knockoff of the Pachelbel Canon.
It's called the Taco Bell Canon.
So let's see if the Pachelbel Canon is in fact
embedded in the Taco Bell Canon here.
Pachelbel bass?
Is that the pattern you were singing?
Yes or no?
I mean, think yes, raise your right hand.
I mean, think no, raise your left hand.
No, it ain't the Pachelbel Canon.
Is it an ostinato bass?
Yes, it's an ostinato bass.
So we could keep playing with that.
I could play you Coolio, the blues traveler,
Vitamin C.
Just for a laugh, let's do Vitamin C,
which is CD two, track one.
You've got to remember this, but it's too good to pass up.
Okay.
So out you go.
Thanks for your attention.
Appropriately enough, it's in the key of C,
Vitamin C, C.
So we talked all night about the best of our lives.
Wait, we're gonna need to turn 25.