The complete idiot's guide to classical music (8 page)

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
This no-applause-between-movements stuff is a fairly recent innovation. Berlioz cheerfully reported that at the premiere of his
Symphonie Fantastique
, the audience “simply let itself be carried along by the current of the music, and it applauded the ‘March to the Scaffold’ and the ‘Witches’ Sabbath’ more warmly than the other three movements.” In our own day, S. Frederick Starr, when he was president of Oberlin College, wrote a whole article titled “Why I Applaud Between Movements.” “Would it really hurt to allow the violinist to take a bow after the movement in which he solos?” he asks; “what didn’t offend Berlioz won’t offend me. Quite the contrary. Our task, very simply, is to love the music, to enjoy the music, and to remove those impediments that prevent other Americans from doing so.”

 

• Remember what we said about applauding at the end of complete pieces? It doesn’t apply with operas or at the ballet, when custom decrees that clapping and shouts of bravo are quite in order after exciting arias or pas de deux. Again, though, wait until others around you have clapped the first clap, since composers love false endings and insert other pauses into their scores that can entrap the novice into premature applause, not to mention the undying enmity of a savvy listener in the next seat. If you’re really hopped up and want to add your vocal cries of approval to the general uproar, the proper shout for a male artist is “Bravo!,” for a female “Brava!,” and for two or more, of whatever sex, “Bravi!” If you’re really ecstatic, you might try “Bravissimo!,” “Bravissima!,” or “Bravissimi!,” but you risk sounding awfully pretentious. Better consult an Italian dictionary before proceeding with anything stronger.
  

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Vivaldi wrote a lot of his concertos for a convent school in Venice, and in those days, it wasn’t considered dignified to applaud inside an institution of that supposed seriousness. So the audiences at the concerts didn’t clap after a performance, they coughed, shuffled their feet, and blew their noses loudly.

Finally, two more advisements from the witty pens of critic friends. From Byron Belt’s
10 Commandments of Concert Etiquette
: “Thou Shalt Not Wear Loud-Ticking Watches or Jangle Thy Jewelry. Owners are usually immune but the added percussion is disturbing to all.” And from James Keller’s
Audience Oath
: “I will not sprint up the aisle the instant the last piece ends. If I must exit without applauding the soloist, I will wait until he leaves the stage, sparing him the insult of seeing his efforts rewarded with a view of my backside.”

 

• Dress neatly at a performance.
  
 

• Come on time.
  
 

• Use cough drops or sucking candy if you have a tickle in your throat.
  
 

• If you’re not sure when to clap, wait until everyone else does.
  

Just as you don’t have to be an English Lit major to know whether you’re seeing a play by Shakespeare or Neil Simon, you don’t need a Juilliard degree to recognize different styles of classical music. A little listening experience—and reading this book, of course—will help you distinguish between a Baroque suite and a Classical-era concerto, or a Romantic opera and a modern symphony.

Like any work of art, music has many component parts that come together to create the finished product. Because sound is fleeting, you don’t have time to isolate or scrutinize the various elements as a piece is unfolding, as you can, for instance, by looking at just the sunset sky in a landscape painting. But once you understand what the composer put into a musical work, your enjoyment of it takes a giant stride forward.

Chapter 5
 
What Are the Basic Elements of Classical Music?

 

• The elements of classical music
  
 

• The importance of rhythm, melody, harmony, and scales and keys
  
 

• Understanding tempo, form, and structure
  

Like water (which they told us in high school is made up of two parts hydrogen and one part water) and carbon dioxide (which you get by mixing two parts of oxygen to one part of carbon in a chemical reaction), music is made up of certain basic elements. Fortunately, you don’t need a degree in chemistry to appreciate it: just an open mind and an attentive ear.

From the simple folk tune to the most complex operatic ensemble, music is made up of certain basic ingredients, primarily melody, rhythm, harmony, and tone color. Some music evokes the power of a spiritual force, some displays wit and humor, and some is revered for its sheer beauty of sound.

To the ingredients mentioned previously, let’s add texture, form, and structure. The composer has all of these tools of the trade at his or her disposal in the creation of sound. The composer can score a piece for strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion, or the marvelous combination of all of those instruments that we call the symphony orchestra. The composer can put ideas into a single instrument, like the guitar or piano, mix in electronic sounds, or merge words and music. The author can make us laugh or cry, depict bucolic scenes or fearsome battles, give musical life to conflicts between the Montagues and Capulets (or the Jets and the Sharks), or light up the stage with dueling divas (although sometimes that happens whether the libretto calls for it or not).

In effect, there’s a lot that goes into a classical work. Just as a master chef intermixes ingredients to produce a gourmet meal that is pleasing to both the eye and palate, the composer swirls many musical components together in pursuit of a musical piece pleasing both to the ear and soul.

The analogy of chefs and composers isn’t quite exact, since the performer is part of the process too, deciding to add a dash of presto to the polonaise, or add a pinch more crescendo to the concerto. The composer, of course, wrote the original recipe, but it is the interpreter who follows that formula, shifting nuances of color or balance, but staying true to the intent of the composer, whose notes and harmonies must be followed in their prescribed order. In a way, it’s the opposite of jazz, where improvisation is king; the wonder of classical music is that there remain so many different ways of playing or singing the same notes and rhythms.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Creating music by chance is nothing new. Mozart wrote a musical dice game, where each of the measures is numbered, and their order of performance is dictated by the results of consecutive throws of the dice.

In some works by John Cage, Alan Hovhaness, and other composers, improvisation is either built into the score, or the notes of the piece are selected through some random operation. Music with random ingredients will change from performance to performance, but that was precisely the composer’s intent. In other words, from the predictable formality of a baroque dance to the most unstructured modern work, the composer is still the master chef who cooks up the musical meal.

Many famous poems are replete with rhythm: The texts often refer to familiar rhythmic patterns (tick-tock, ding-dong, and so on) while the imaginative use of rhymes, repetitions of phrases, alliteration, and sundry other tricks of the literary trade all help us get caught up in the sound, as well as the specific meaning of the words. Not only do the words themselves refer to familiar rhythmic patterns, but try saying the lyrics to yourself: Even if you’re not sure of the intended
meter
, you’ll find yourself caught in the spell of those sound repetitions, chanting the words rather than merely saying them. Rhythm is fundamental. If not for the steady beat of our hearts and the even flow of air entering and leaving our lungs, all life would cease. Babies learn early on to clap their hands in rhythmic patterns and respond to the catchy cadence of “Three Blind Mice.” Granted, it’s a bit more difficult to follow the rhythmic pulsings within a complex work like Scriabin’s orgasmic “Poem of Ecstasy,” but without some sense of pacing, we’d have no music at all.

 
Important Things to Know
To understand the concept of rhythm, think of it like it’s the pulse of the music: It creates the beat of the tom-tom and the ticking of the clock. Meter is essentially the regular appearance of a beat.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
When the famous writer Henry Miller first heard Scriabin’s “Poem of Ecstasy,” he flipped out entirely. “I played it over and over,” he said, “couldn’t shut it off. It was like a bath of ice, cocaine, and rainbows. For weeks I went about in a trance . . .”

There is the obvious left-right rhythm of a Sousa march (back in the Gay Nineties, his “Washington Post” sparked the dance craze known as the two-step) that makes perfect sense: After all, we have two feet, and if marchers had to wait while the composer added extra beats every so often, the parade would never pass by. The waltz, on the other hand, has to glide along in ONE-Two-Three fashion, even as the Danube (blue or otherwise) flows along rather than marching to an even beat. A mazurka also has three beats, but the accent is on the second one, and that One-TWO-Three rhythm is part of the dance’s special grace and charm.

The word
tempo
comes from the Italian word for time, and it signifies the pace at which music flows. It’s connected to rhythm in the sense that it dictates how quickly or slowly we get from one accent to the next, but it similarly controls the pace of harmonic changes and our perceptions of the emotions expressed within a piece. Composers often try to control the speed at which their music is played by putting precise metronome markings in the scores (a metronome is that clicky device you can adjust to tick off steady beats at specified speeds); interpreters often take those instructions with a hefty grain of salt, slowing down here to make the work more spacious, speeding it up there to make it more exciting. Or so they think.

Tempo markings are traditionally in Italian, just like those shouted “Bravos” and “Bravas” at the opera house. Here are a few of the most common:

 

• Largo: very slow, broad.
  
 

• Grave: how serious can you get?
  
 

• Lento: just plain slow.
  
 

• Adagio: see Lento. It’s a little faster than Largo, if that helps any.
  
 

• Adagietto: a little Adagio, ergo, a touch faster.
  
 

• Andante: literally “going,” moving along at a walking pace, at moderate speed.
  
 

• Andantino: you guessed it—a little andante, so a touch faster.
  
 

• Moderato: yep, at a moderate pace. This word is often used in conjunction with another tempo direction, such as andante moderato, meaning don’t be overzealous about that slow stuff.
  
 

• Allegro: now we’re getting someplace. It means lively, going at a reasonably fast pace.
  
 

• Allegretto: a little allegro, hold your horses a bit.
  
 

• Allegro Molto: “molto” means much or very, so hop to.
  
 

• Vivace: very fast.
  
 

• Presto: as fast as possible.
  
 

• Prestissimo: a little faster than presto. Well, try!
  

It’s unlikely you’ll encounter an interpreter who transforms a composer’s adagio into a presto or vice versa, but even subtle changes in tempo can profoundly alter the mood and character of a work.

We’re back to that tom-tom again. The regular, predictable throbbing of sound can indeed be hypnotic, whether it applies to the churning repetitive rhythms of a tarantella or the slow pulsing of drums at a Native American ritual. A steady beat is frequently used by composers who wish to evoke “primitive” elements.

Within the basic beat, we can find many patterns, sometimes complementing, sometimes clashing with each other. A lot of Baroque music is characterized by energetic, steady, and repetitive rhythms (“sewing machine music” is how some cynics describe it), but the textures are rich while the melodic counterpoint deftly sets one theme off against another; in short, Bach, Vivaldi, and Telemann stuffed their pieces full of intricate and complex decorations. And why not? The term “Baroque” was borrowed from architecture, where it has connotations of elaborate, twisting, involved construction.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Bach, Telemann, and Vivaldi certainly didn’t think of themselves as Baroque composers. In the 18th century, the word meant uncouth, odd, rough and antiquated in taste.