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On Teaching Musical Style. David Cope. On Teaching Musical Style. Seven thoughts that I feel have been somewhat neglected in teaching music at the college level. Not just in music theory, but in musicology, performance, composition, world music, and so on. On Teaching Musical Style.
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On TeachingMusical Style David Cope
On Teaching Musical Style Seven thoughts that I feel have been somewhat neglected in teaching music at the college level. Not just in music theory, but in musicology, performance, composition, world music, and so on.
On Teaching Musical Style None of them are particularly new, but special for me in my research: Musical Style.
On Teaching Musical Style Why important to me: Experiments in Musical Intelligence (Emmy). I won’t recant how it works except to say it analyzes voice leading, structure, thematic explication, repetition and variation, and stylistic signatures from works in a database and produces new stylistic credible output.
On Teaching Musical Style Thought 1: Analyzing style by ear: The Game.
On Teaching Musical Style Can you guess which of the following fugues is by Bach and which by Emmy? How do you recognize the style of a composer? Holly Roadfeldt has gracefully agreed to perform these two fugues.
On Teaching Musical Style What marks the one composed in the eighteenth century from the one composed in the twenty-first century? Chromaticism? Use of sequence? Harmonic progression?
On Teaching Musical Style Dissonance and resolution? Phrase lengths? Voice leading? Use of non-harmonic tones? Structural balance?
On Teaching Musical Style Should our students be able to recognize a computer-composed Bach fugue from a real Bach fugue? If yes, why have all of the editors of anthologies which I’ve queried about including an Emmy piece in their books along with a ‘real’ example either refused or not responded to my queries?
On Teaching Musical Style Thought 2: Imitative composition in styles. Student take the place of the computer. To not be able to effectively imitate an historical style is to have lost one of the most important traditions of instructing music.
On Teaching Musical Style We typically require students to imitate Bach chorales. What about Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms sonatas, or Schoenberg and Ligeti piano works?
On Teaching Musical Style Thought 3: Breaking the Rules. They help identify a composer’s style. Bach Chorales contain parallel fifths, octaves, and other no-nos. Hundreds if not thousands of them. We teach statistical probabilities rather than realities. It’s these exceptions to rules that often identify a particular style.
On Teaching Musical Style Here’s an example from J.S. Bach’s setting of Freueteuich, ihr Christen alle. The fifths occur in the second beat of measure two, one of over hundreds of such examples found in the chorales.
On Teaching Musical Style • Bach prefers not to avoid the problem. He could have easily removed the eighth note F on the ‘and’ of beat two, and avoided the issue entirely.
On Teaching Musical Style Parallel octaves, awkward resolutions of non-harmonic tones, poor doublings, all voices moving in the same directions not occurring after cadences, hidden fifths and octaves in improper places, and so on, appear many times. It’s difficult to find one of his works that does not contain one of these problems.
On Teaching Musical Style Other music breaks so-called rules even more numerously and tends to stretch our believability of calling these rules rules, rather than rules of thumb.
On Teaching Musical Style Some argue that if we tell our students about exceptions, they’ll use parallel fifths and octaves whenever it suits them rather than when musically important.
On Teaching Musical Style Explaining exceptions also takes time away from teaching the normative rules they need to know. Is it really an either/or situation, or a both/and?
On Teaching Musical Style Thought 4: Musical signatures. Composers often reveal their ownership of a certain style by what we’ve come to know as clichés. This later derogatory word is shameful to use for such important artifacts of music.
On Teaching Musical Style Here are a few examples of a musical signature used in many different guises by Chopin in his mazurkas.
On Teaching Musical Style These are similar in melodic contour, meter, use of initiating triplet, but different in many other ways. Yet each represents a recognizable cadential figure that identifies the composer.
On Teaching Musical Style The following Mozart examples present a more variable signature in that only the bare shape of the melodic contour remains consistent. Both a Viennese cliché and a Mozart signature.
On Teaching Musical Style Thought 5: Allusions. Thievery, or in my view honorifics to other composers and styles presents another way of recognizing styles. Analyzing, and thus listening to and composing music. cannot be truly meaningful without understanding the allusions present.
On Teaching Musical Style Notable examples of allusions. A) Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13, Sonata Pathétique (1798); and B) from an earlier work by Mozart, his Piano Sonata, K. 457, m. 24, second movement, a favorite of Beethoven’s and one found among his scores.
On Teaching Musical Style Note the keys (key signatures here are misleading), the melodies, and the first three harmonies are the same.
On Teaching Musical Style And here’s another: • Beethoven (op. 13, Pathétique, 1798), b) Schumann (Trio 1, 1847), c) Liszt (IchMöchte, 1845), d) Spohr (Der Alchemist, 1830), and e) Wagner (Tristan und Isolde, prelude, 1859) with the latter seeming to grow naturally from the formers.
On Teaching Musical Style Thought 6: Earmarks. Like signatures and allusions, earmarks repeat with variation in many works composers. Earmarks, however, are cues to musical form.
On Teaching Musical Style Earmarks tell us where a recapitulation might occur, when a movement or work may be ending, or when a cadenza is coming. Here’s an example of the latter from three Mozart piano concertos.
On Teaching Musical Style The preparatory scale followed by a trill in the right hand and an alberti bass in the left are signals that composers expect audiences to recognize. The inevitability of the cadenzas that follow would be extraordinarily missed were they not present.
On Teaching Musical Style Thought 7: Sources Can a computer program create a convincing example of the style of a composer using the previous six criteria without that composer’s music being present in the database?
On Teaching Musical Style As example, here is an output from my program Experiments in Musical Intelligence.
On Teaching Musical Style When I recognized it as a similar passage in Beethoven, I figured that my program had used that as a model and only slightly varied it. Here's the passage by Beethoven.
On Teaching Musical Style However, my program (Emmy) had no Beethoven present at all in its database. Here is the resultant source material as reversed engineered by the program itself.
On Teaching Musical Style All of the music here belongs to Mozart. No one suggests that Beethoven composed his music in this manner, but the music is not only in the same style as Beethoven’s, it’s nearly the exact same music. Something similar to physical and subconscious pattern recognition is at work.
On Teaching Musical Style What do these thoughts demonstrate about our processes of teaching music in colleges and universities? Do we teach musical syntax and not so much musical semantics and dialects?
On Teaching Musical Style What harmony follows what harmony, how do voices move in homophonic and polyphonic music, and so on, are important, but what these harmonies and voicings actually mean musically in context is left, apparently, for our students to discover for themselves.
On Teaching Musical Style We teach music of the past as we should. But there is no reason whatsoever not to use the tools of the present and future to do this. I feel we should include computers in the classroom (students bring their own) as a standard part of the teaching repertoire.
On Teaching Musical Style But maybe these thoughts are not important enough for this. Maybe it would take too much time away from what we’re already doing. Maybe students are not capable of understanding, hearing, and performing these things. I disagree.
On Teaching Musical Style We should be aware of organizations like ISMIR (International Society for Music Information Retrieval) and learn to use software like, for example, Humdrum by David Huron (free).
On Teaching Musical Style I include many other new ways of looking at musical style in my book: Hidden Structure available from A-R Editions (plug).
On Teaching Musical Style I will place this PowerPoint Presentation on my website for those that might be interested in reviewing it again.
On Teaching Musical Style Thank you. And again, a special thanks to Holly Roadfeldt for her performance here today.
