3.8 - Phrase Structure in Music: Beethoven's Ode to Joy

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En provenance du cours de Yale University

Introduction to Classical Music

1544 notes

Yale University

Introduction to Classical Music

1544 notes

Using a simple and enjoyable teaching style, this course introduces the novice listener to the wonders of classical music, from Bach fugues to Mozart symphonies to Puccini operas.

À partir de la leçon

How Music Works, it's Magic.

What is Music? Is music simply the organization of sounds and silences passing through time? Or is it more? Poet Victor Hugo believes music is "what feelings sound like." In this first module, we’ll take apart Hugo’s seemingly simple statement by spending some time asking how and why music induces strong emotions in people across different cultures. We’ll begin with a look at the inner workings of the human ear to determine how our brains process sound waves. Then, we’ll travel to different parts of the world, comparing and contrasting both traditional and popular Western music with sounds from various regions and cultures. You’ll find that it is both culture and the physics of music that determine why we like the music we like! From there, we’ll be ready to take a look at the basic elements of musical composition; rhythm, melody, texture, etc. We’ll also learn how classical composers used these elements in some of their most famous works and how modern artists are still using them today. Finally, we will see how the elements of musical composition have evolved over time and how they have been translated to a universal language enjoyed and understood by millions.

3.1 - What is Melody?3:03

3.2 - Melodic Notation and Scales9:00

3.3 - Major and Minor Scales6:20

3.4 - The Chromatic Scale4:09

3.5 - How We Feel About the Music: Mode and Mood4:56

3.6 - Melodic Structure: The Tonic2:40

3.7 - Modulation: Changing the Tonic (of the Key)8:57

3.8 - Phrase Structure in Music: Beethoven's Ode to Joy14:03

Rencontrer les enseignants

Craig Wright
Henry L & Lucy G Moses Professor of Music
Department of Music

[MUSIC]

When we communicate we do so in sonic form.

Spoken words.

If we want to record what we said or

what we're thinking we can write it down as words.

Strung together, these individual words form phrases, and

taken together, the individual phrases form larger units.

Sentences.

And sentences form paragraphs, and so on.

That's how language is constructed.

The same thing happens in the language of music.

Pictures can be joined to form musical phrases

that can be joined to flesh out a complete melody.

To demonstrate this, we turn to a simple melody, one from the famous

Broadway musical, Oklahoma, by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.

Let's look at it.

Here we see the melody, and we'll talk mostly about the melody here.

Next time we'll talk about the harmony.

So the melody is on top, where we would expect it.

The harmony is below in the chords that are holding there.

The rhythm is in a meter, triple meter, three-quarter notes to each measure.

The measures come in symmetrical units 4 plus 4.

Two short phrases make a longer phrase.

One of eight measures.

Then come two more short phrases that are similar but

not identical to the first eight.

Notice too that our melody stays pretty much within

one octave with the tonic pitch, on either end, high and low.

Finally, notice that the first long phrase

doesn't end on the tonic but the second long phrase does.

The first long phrase opens the music, the second

phrase closes it back down away home,

is another way of thinking of this auditory experience.

Musicians, however, tend to use a fancier term.

Instead of a way home structure, they say antecedent and

consequent phrase structure.

Let me play this for you.

So here is our antecedent, or our away phrase,

[MUSIC]

Not ending on the tonic.

That's the end of the antecedent, or away phrase.

Let's go back home.

[MUSIC]

So there we are.

Back home, and in the tonic.

But whatever you call it, a way home, or antecedent consequent phrase structure.

This structure is quite common in music.

You hear it everywhere.

Be it in the Broadway show tune that we just heard,

a pop song, or in a Beethoven symphony or a Puccini aria.

As we'll hear shortly in one of our later sessions.

Antecedent and consequent phrase structure is endemic to melody in all Western music.

And one last point about melodies, some are easy to sing, some are difficult.

The New York Times recently ran a story about the difficulty of singing

the American national anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner.

At the beginning of sporting events,

this is where we usually encounter this in the United States.

What makes the Star Spangled Banner or any melody difficult to sing?

Usually it's the amount of jumping around in a melody that causes it to be

easy or difficult.

The more leaping or jumping, the greater the difficulty.

Here's a very easy melody.

Easy because the pitches are one right next to the other.

[MUSIC]

Here's a more difficult one in a different kind of notation, a graphic notation.

Actually, it's another Broadway show tune,

written in New York City in 1908 and it's something of an anthem also.

An anthem for American baseball.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

Let's play that just to remind you how it goes.

[MUSIC]

And you can see visually and hear orally how difficult, or

how many jumps this thing has.

It's difficult.

But maybe we've heard it so

many times that we've just gotten used to the difficulty.

Now let's look at this visually by comparing

Take Me Out To The Ball Game with another well known melody, Ode to Joy.

Which Beethoven composed and incorporated in his Ninth Symphony.

So here comes Ode To Joy.

And here's the way it goes, I'm sure you know this too.

[MUSIC]

Notice there that all the pitches are right next to each other.

We call a melody with many leaps such as Take Me Out To The Ball Game a disjunct

melody.

We call one that moves smoothly up and down the scale a conjunct melody.

Take Me Out To The Ball Game, disjunct.

Ode to Joy, conjunct.

Disjunct, conjunct.

The two melodies are very different.

But each has been with us for a long time.

In a way, each is a classic.

But both have a clear sense of scale and

a sense of the tonic and they are both made up of units of four bar phrases.

And both involve antecedent and consequent phrase structure.

But let's see how melodic phrase structure plays out in this Beethoven melody.

Again, we're going to stay with the famous Beethoven Ode To Joy.

Which today serves not as the anthem of American baseball but

as the anthem of the European Union.

And to do this we turn now to a class video.

>> So melodies can be conjunct or disjunct.

And possibly the most conjunct of all melodies [COUGH] in the history of music

was the melody that we looked at very briefly in the first gathering and

that is Beethoven's famous Ode to Joy.

Now, once again, Beethoven was in his 50's when he was working on his last symphony

or proved to be his last symphony.

His ninth symphony and

he'd been tinkering with this particular melody all the way back to, probably 1803.

So it's about 20 years or so.

The ninth symphony is 1823, '24.

As early as 1823, we know he's working on

>> [MUSIC]

>> Trying to get this to work just right.

And eventually, over this 20 year period, he did get it to work just right.

Let me swing this board around.

Here's the famous melody.

I've put it in the key, it's called the bass cleft here.

And it's in a major key.

We don't need to know what the particular notes are, but let's look at this just for

a moment because it works well as a prototype of melody.

It does something that a lot of melodies do.

First of all, as you can see by the trajectory here, it's very conjunct.

Neighboring notes here.

If you look at the German in the text it has to do with [FOREIGN].

Millions B embraced.

And this, I believe is the sort of the national anthem for

the United Nations, so this has to be something that we can all sing.

And if you have conjunct motion, that makes it easier.

It's also very symmetrical.

As you can see, it's nothing but

a pattern of four bars plus four bars plus four bars plus four bars.

And as we said before, music has a syntax.

So that these phrases have to be arranged in a particular way that makes sense.

So we start out here with an opening phrase, ya, ta, ta, ta,ti, ta, ta, ta, ta,

ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, tam.

Is that the tonic, ta tam?

>> Down.

>> Can anybody sing the tonic?

>> Yeah, yeah, [SOUND].

The tonic is actually over here, it's a little bit lower than that.

That was a really hard question, I'm amazed anybody got it, good for you.

So what happens here is this opening phrase that we'll call A.

Musicians like to label stuff just with alphabetical labels to keep it simple.

We'll call this phrase A.

It sort of opens things up.

And we refer to this as the antecedent phrase.

The next phrase, B,

[MUSIC]

is very similar.

[MUSIC]

But here it takes the deviation

[MUSIC]

and gets it back, gets us back to the tonic.

Now we could walk out the door at that point, right?

We're feeling totally stable there.

We've got it all together for the rest of the day.

However, it would be a pretty short melody.

So what he then does is write an extension.

We'll call this C.

[MUSIC]

Very interesting, put an asterisk by this.

Beethoven, in a way, saved this melody, he rescued this melody

which was in danger of becoming excessively four square by doing what.

If I had been writing it.

Da da da da da da da da.

Da, da, da, da.

What did Beethoven do here, we talked about it last time, a rhythmic device?

Syncopation.

He brings his opening note, that F sharp, in a beat early.

This should, you would think, be a half note and this would start on the down beat

over here, but he brings, in effect, the sound of the down beat in a beat early.

Gives it a little bit of pep there at that particular point.

And then what is this here?

[MUSIC]

Well of course, it's a replication of B.

We've got to end on the tonic.

All pieces, classical or pop, one way or the other end on the tonic.

Okay.

So let's have us now, let me put a fermata over this, let's all sing this.

We don't have to read the notes, you don't have to sing any text.

We're just going to sing la.

I'll conduct in four.

So sit back

[MUSIC]

Everybody vocally prepared here?

Here we go.

I'll give you one, two, ready, sing.

La, la, la, la louder louder, la,

la, la, la, la, la, la, good.

La, la, la, la, la, la, la la la la la la la la la.

La, la, la, la, la, la,

la, la, la, la, la, la,

la, la, la, la, la.

La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la,

la, la, la, la, la, la, la.

We'll put a big ritard on it there.

So, we wanted to bang that syncopation, and then of course,

there's no sound on the downbeat here to make the syncopation work.

So that's the melody, seems very simple, but it took Beethoven a long time to sort

of iron all this out, make his perfect melody, the prototypical melody, in a way.

>> And contrary to what my Doppelganger on the screen in that class video said,

this is not the anthem of the United Nations.

It's the anthem of today's European Union.

And indeed, it has a great deal to do with the history of contemporary Europe.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.

And the world, at least the free world, [LAUGH] celebrated that event.

And they celebrated it with the music of Beethoven.

And the principle conductor that was brought to Europe at that time to lead

this singing of the Ode to Joy around Europe was actually an American,

Leonard Bernstein.

So we're gonna end with Leonard Bernstein conducting

an orchestra in a German speaking city of Vienna.

Just a portion of a professional group singing Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

[MUSIC]

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