Music theory

[Dave2002]

About a year ago I asked a question on the forum about chord inversions, and ferney very kindly gave me the explanation I needed.

Indeed, though with a lot of listening done on fairly poor equipment (I’m not saying yours is) the lower notes of chords are often so faint that it’s hard to hear/tell what’s going on.

People who sing, play, or listen to live music may find it easier to identify chord inversions. Then again, many people just listen, and don’t try to analyse as things go along. Is there anything wrong with that?

[ahinton]

take, for example, the opening of Vaughan Williams's Symphony No 5, the sustained C "drone" at the very beginning can either be "heard" as in chromatically unresolved relationship to the chordal processes in D major unfolding above it - a field of unrelieved tension until the resolution that occurs some minutes further on - or as music conveying a state of blissful detachment. Then compare this with

Just as an aside, how's about comparing it with a passage in the remarkable coda of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony, written shortly before it, in which tonalities are superimposed upon a long held pedal C that in one instance sound remarkably similar...

[Serial_Apologist]

Just as an aside, how's about comparing it with a passage in the remarkable coda of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony, written shortly before it. in which tonalities are superimposed upon a long held pedal C...

Hi Alister,

I dare say I should really go and listen to the passage in question , not having heard Shostakovitch 4 for some time.

There are many similar-in-spirit passages in (especially) early 20th century composers' music, across cultures and national boundaries. I'm immediately thinking of the last movement of Mahler 9, where, following the initial statement of the "Abide with Me" soundalike theme, the music enters a state of drifting harmonic stasis or even vacuity that is a million miles from the chromatic hyper-engorgement suffusing so much of the late works. It has always struck me as odd that this passage foreshadows the very differently (one assumed!) motivated spirit of a work such as Satie's "Socrate", where what I believe some musical theorists have defined as pandiatonic harmonic language predominates - one to be taken up by Stravinsky in his Neo-Classical period and others following in his spirit - in which the terrain bleakly stretching out under the keyboard's fingers suggests a sort of draining away of hope, of the implicit energy invested in the putative quest of intervals to fund "closure" - to adopt a still-fashionable term.

I rather think Schostakovitch's questing for the elements transhistorically gathered awaiting kind shepherding in what must at the time have seemed irretrievably irresolvable, (like today must seem to some of us!), was probably as many removes from the Zeitgeist (to use another still-fashionanble word) of post-Victorian, hubristic, socially unequal, now and back then polluted England (Wales and Scotland). RVW, like his friend Holst and his Morrisian cultural milieu, harked back to an age which they might have liked to have been rather more pre-lapsarian than it actually was - after all they were as concerned with whether or not any principles embedded in craftsmanship had survived the evolution of class society with its religious and political adjuncts as we could be - but while in common with Shostakovitch 30+ years further down the road there were tropes (yet another fashionable word) on the form of convivial or once-convivial folk art forms on which associatively to draw in the name of communication, what had once, in one shape, form or other, subject to papal dictats or doctrinals of the like, been the collective unconscious lingua franca, could only be approached and communicated through an altered world and its concomitant viewpoint, analogically expressed in music. Holst's understanding of the sources of his Sanscrit texts - pretty much vouched for by more recent research - would have drawn on the old Indian principle of Maya - that natural processes proceed optimally when left alone, but humankind's interference, by way of the tropes it uses as alibis, is such that it has no choice but to go on interfering - is in some ways the mental equivalent of the impossibility of disinventing nuclear physics: we've learned how to expand "the permissible within the empire of sound" (Debussy to Stravinsky), and likewise how to blow up civilisation. Any fate, any way forward, has to account for loss of Innocence, or faith in the unproven; but, as Jonathan Harvey used to say, John Tavener can give you the state of bliss, my music shows the journey there. Given present-day assaults on the support systems we're some way from there, even given a mind to occupying "there". Or something of that kind! - poor Jonathan no longer being here to defend himself against my heresy!

[Dave2002]

I'm immediately thinking of the last movement of Mahler 9, where, following the initial statement of the "Abide with Me" soundalike theme, the music enters a state of drifting harmonic stasis or even vacuity that is a million miles from the chromatic hyper-engorgement suffusing so much of the late works.

Is that the same as, or a different theme, from the “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” motif? Sorry if I’ve ruined it for you all.

[ahinton]

Is that the same as, or a different theme, from the “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” motif? Sorry if I’ve ruined it for you all.

Nah - different theme, same movement!

[Dave2002]

Nah - different theme, same movement!

Yes - I’m not always familiar with hymn tunes, or variants thereof. Thanks.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

So did he actually play it in A sharp?

https://tamingthesaxophone.com/saxophone-transposition

I sincerely hope not!

[Serial_Apologist]

Nah - different theme, same movement!

BING!!!!