Modulations

[Richard Barrett]

As long as alternating tones and semitones are observed, does it matter?

It's the alternating tones and semitones that give the octatonic scale its "limited transposability" (the fact that transposing it by (any multiple of) a minor third results in the same scale as you started with) and thus its functionality as a harmonically ambiguous structure, which in turn requires equal temperament, in which there is of course no difference between A# and Bb (not forgetting that we were talking originally about the use of these scales by Stravinsky who famously composed at the piano).

[Dave2002]

As long as alternating tones and semitones are observed, does it matter?

Not really.

I come back to an assertion I made earlier about modern expectations. Working on a short piece which has a planned modulation - slight surprise - I thought I'd deliberatedly transpose that section to several different keys to perceive the effect.

What I noted was the following - it was not an exhaustive test:

In one case the modulation actually removed the surprise element - checking later I think this showed that this was because there was a major/miinor relationship between the keys for the modified section.

In most cases there was a surprise, but my 20/21st Century ears were not overly alarmed by any of them. Some were perhaps slightly odder, but not truly horrible.

What I also noted was that sometimes the return back to the main section was more problematic (uglier? Maybe that's not quite the word, but more of a jarring nature ..) and if I wanted a smooth return back that would require some attention.

So I am coming to the conclusion that not all modulations are going to be noticed (by all listeners, though those with very sensitive musical acuity will notice - people like David Owen Norris, who seems to notice every change even in every bar, perhaps ....), whereas some are effective at changing the mood and giving an element of surprise - if indeed that is what the composer wants listeners to experience, or perhaps just to keep their interest and limit their tendency to fall asleep or switch off.

[Serial_Apologist]

So I am coming to the conclusion that not all modulations are going to be noticed (by all listeners, though those with very sensitive musical acuity will notice

The more prolonged a key transition, the less noticeable, I would suppose - the post-Wagnerian chromatic way of transitioning from chord to chord by way of passing notes inviting the listener into its world of enharmonic ambiguity which, for me, hindsightedly, prepares the way for atonality rather than new tonal territory. When it comes to "modern music" I've always felt divided between these two polarities in my loyalties. Frequent modulations, making for constant tonal instability, (as in "when will the music settle and decide which way it wants to go?), for which Reger has in my view been unjustly accused of over-use, are perhaps better suited to small scale forms than large canvasses, when continual modulation can be exhausting.

[Richard Barrett]

inviting the listener into its world of enharmonic ambiguity which, for me, hindsightedly, prepares the way for atonality rather than new tonal territory.

Yes indeed - for me this is a question of how and when a point of resolution is reached. Famously in Tristan, Wagner more or less manages to delay the resolution of the opening discord for several hours, and if you can delay it that long you can delay it indefinitely. And once the concept of tension/resolution has been abandoned, then you don't really have tonality any more, and, according to Schoenberg, what was needed was “a new procedure in musical construction which seemed fitted to replace those structural differentiations provided formerly by tonal harmonies.” (In other words he conceived his twelve-tone technique as filling a "tonality-shaped hole", which on the other hand was felt much less acutely by composers like Varèse and Cage.) Returning to the subject in hand, modulation is something that always occurs within a structural context. Whether a given modulation is or isn't a striking change of direction doesn't depend so much on what happens immediately either side of the transition but on all the other relationships at all structural levels in the piece. This is something that composers in the late Romantic period felt intuitively. Bruckner, for example, modulates all over the place but the gravitational centre of all of those motions is never in doubt. In the case of a composer who hasn't developed such an all-embracing grasp of structure, the same modulations would sound arbitrary and directionless.

[Dave2002]

The more prolonged a key transition, the less noticeable, I would suppose - the post-Wagnerian chromatic way of transitioning from chord to chord by way of passing notes inviting the listener into its world of enharmonic ambiguity which, for me, hindsightedly, prepares the way for atonality rather than new tonal territory. When it comes to "modern music" I've always felt divided between these two polarities in my loyalties. Frequent modulations, making for constant tonal instability, (as in "when will the music settle and decide which way it wants to go?), for which Reger has in my view been unjustly accused of over-use, are perhaps better suited to small scale forms than large canvasses, when continual modulation can be exhausting.

Actually I'll modify or add a comment on my original statement slightly -

So I am coming to the conclusion that not all modulations are going to be noticed ...

Some modulations may be hardly noticed at all, whereas others will have an obvious element of "surprise" - a fairly sudden change. However, there may be several possiblities for such surprise modulations - so many people will notice them, but not necessarily be able to distinguish strongly between them. Some may sound slightly stranger than others, which might be noted.

Where you mention a "prolonged key transition" are you suggesting a fairly long sequence passing through different keys? Depending on how that is done, if each change is of the "not very noticeable" kind, then many people might not notice. At that point the composer can choose to remind them by making an obvious (surprise?) kind of transition back to base, or alternatively do another lengthy sequence back to the original key, which again might appear to be seamless.

[Richard Barrett]

Some modulations may be hardly noticed at all, whereas others will have an obvious element of "surprise" - a fairly sudden change. However, there may be several possiblities for such surprise modulations - so many people will notice them, but not necessarily be able to distinguish strongly between them. Some may sound slightly stranger than others, which might be noted.

Of course (adding to my previous post) the context of some modulation or another isn't just a matter of longer-term structural relationships but also the way that the other aspects of the music are unfolding, since music generally doesn't consist of a sequence of chords of equal duration. There are usually considerations of some combination of melodic structure, rhythm, counterpoint, timbre, dynamic etc. etc. to bear in mind too, let alone the "extramusical" context. Music psychologists often like to conduct "controlled experiments" which concentrate on one of these by excluding all the others, but actually real-life music is never so simple, or hardly ever.

[Serial_Apologist]

Actually I'll modify or add a comment on my original statement slightly -



Some modulations may be hardly noticed at all, whereas others will have an obvious element of "surprise" - a fairly sudden change. However, there may be several possiblities for such surprise modulations - so many people will notice them, but not necessarily be able to distinguish strongly between them. Some may sound slightly stranger than others, which might be noted.

Where you mention a "prolonged key transition" are you suggesting a fairly long sequence passing through different keys? Depending on how that is done, if each change is of the "not very noticeable" kind, then many people might not notice. At that point the composer can choose to remind them by making an obvious (surprise?) kind of transition back to base, or alternatively do another lengthy sequence back to the original key, which again might appear to be seamless.

Not quite, Dave: I was thinking in terms of music in which for lengthy passages, predominant use of intervallic progressions (leading notes?) which maintain a feeling of the music not being in any particular key: those lengthy modulatory processes - arguably announced in the famous "Tristan chord" (though Liszt was "at it" around the same time, and there are numerous precedents in Chopin) and the way each of its unresolved pitches gradually moves semitonally towards resolution, or partial resolution. In speaking of the incomprehension he realised would greet his innovation, Wagner wrote (somewhere!) that he felt he had to take the listener note-by-note, by the hand.

This was going to happen through many different means in the wake of "Tristan" - Sibelius's and Nielsen's very different uses of prolonged pedal notes to define tonal regions where the overlying harmonic movements may be less clear, which composers of many persuasions, from Vaughan Williams to Robert Simpson, took up; the growing independence of contrapuntal part movements in many of Reger's chamber works providing, in part, examples Schoenberg was to take up and carry to the logical end-point of non-resolution. When one gets onto composers who reverted to modal, pre-diatonic ways of conceiving music and shaping chords, especially their devising of new modes, and constructing chords out of them - the motto theme of Debussy's "La mer" being an early instance of this - in the musics of Bartok and Messiaen, to name just two, we are I would argue going beyond modulation in the sense evolved from Monteverdi onwards of narrative-unfolding, though Debussy (and his French contemporaries like Ravel, Satie and Roussel) retained post 1600-styled diatonic means of creating and releasing tension as part of his rich, heterogeneous vocabulary.

Revealingly, pop music of the post-1955 period has largely eschewed subtle usages of combinations of diatonic and modal formulations harmonically, with notable sometimes unintended exceptions: John Lennon baulking at musicologists' reference to "pandiatonic clusters" in one or another of the Beatles tunes; David Bedford drawing the attention of Madness to the unprepared modulations of their 1981 hit "Our House", which had been arrived at purely empirically by their pianist improvising and had not been thought of as "ground-breaking". Of course, we can speculate on why it is that pop music has limited harmonic interest!* World Music enthusiasts - well, many of them - will argue that harmony is of minor consideration in any putative hierarchy of stylistic inputs; but it is interesting to listen out for what one might regard as "advanced" harmonic practices in what the Western racist mindset of the past would have viewed as primitive musics. When I was in the process of excavating my own belief systems from such grooming, I acquired an LP of one of the volumes of recordings of the jazz concerts at the Carnegie Hall organised by John Hammond in 1938/9, to which he invited the most cutting edge jazz musicians and bands of the time to perform in alternation with "primitive" rural blues singers and a capella Gospel singing groups from the Deep South. One thing immediately apparent about the so-called "primitive" bluesmen was how subtle and advanced their harmonic thinking was, both in its own right but, equally importantly, in relation to its internal rhythm and its pacing. In some ways the 12-bar formulation picked up by jazz and later by rock 'n' roll amounted to a delimitation of its original harmonic form to the familiar 1-4/5/4/1 tonic-subdominant-dominant-subdominant form accommodated by what is in fact narrow European diatonic theoretical practice!

We really have to hand it to American black musicians for having devised this simple harmonic framework as a basis for saying so much that identified "the human condition", and which jazz, and popular music at its best, has evolved into the subtle and complex forms developed in jazz and the musics it has influenced since the 1920s. But that was in part attributable to "modernism".. Gauguin, anyone? Picasso??

*

[Serial_Apologist]

Of course (adding to my previous post) the context of some modulation or another isn't just a matter of longer-term structural relationships but also the way that the other aspects of the music are unfolding, since music generally doesn't consist of a sequence of chords of equal duration. There are usually considerations of some combination of melodic structure, rhythm, counterpoint, timbre, dynamic etc. etc. to bear in mind too, let alone the "extramusical" context. Music psychologists often like to conduct "controlled experiments" which concentrate on one of these by excluding all the others, but actually real-life music is never so simple, or hardly ever.

I think this is of immense importance to appreciate - namely the interdepent ways in which harmony, melody, metre and rhythm have evolved in different musical traditions. I must admit this had eluded my appreciation until at some point I began wondering why it was that, with the abandonment (or selective limitation to two, the major and minor diatonic) of the old modes was accompanied by a loss of rhythmic vigour, lasting until the modern period, in which, almost as though pre-scripted by some story teller, Ravel composed his "Daphnis" in 1911, and Diaghilev found great difficulties in instructing the dancers of the Ballets russes to find their feet around bard written in 5/4, and Stravinsky his "Le sacre" a year and a bit later, in which rhythmic and harmonic disjunction went hand-in-hand. As Goehr has remarked, the sheer sensationalism of "Le sacre" overshadowed the process of metric and rhythmic disintegration, or perhaps more accurately, dissolution, happening in the hands of Schoenberg and the composers of the Second Viennese School - which he adduced to what has been described as "musical prose", or the way that the protracted harmonic thinking found in Wagner at his most advanced tended automatically to break down the rhythmic and temporal markers associated with clear cadential definition: this already being tacit in the integrated conceptualisation of metre, rhythm and harmony, going all the way back to Bach, and even for a century before - which makes listening to Monteverdi's "Vespers", with their clear harmonic/metrical definition, so interesting when compared with the modal contrapuntal fluidity to be found in the great Renaissance polyphonic masses of Lassus & co. What it all signified, as I understood it, was the supplanting of a scientific (and at the time mechanistic) view of the universe and its workings - one more in tune with the rising capitalist means of production and wealth creation, and measurability - for previous ages which worked more in tandem with the natural rhythms of seasonality and growth. It's ironic when one thinks that the period of greatest rhythmic anemia, the 19th century (until the nationalists came along!) was the one of greatest capital accumulation and control of "the natural" - previously measured according to supernatural desiderata - until... until, that is, that this was the greatest period of exploitation of the "primitive" peoples, and concomitant suppression of their cultural lineages, artifacts, and, of course, music.

[Richard Barrett]

Ravel composed his "Daphnis" in 1911, and Diaghilev found great difficulties in instructing the dancers of the Ballets russes to find their feet around bars written in 5/4, and Stravinsky his "Le sacre" a year and a bit later, in which rhythmic and harmonic disjunction went hand-in-hand.

The development of harmony in Western music required notation, which in turn required rhythmic simplification, in comparison say to south Indian (Karnatic) music which concentrates its complexity not in harmony but in melodic and particularly rhythmic sophistication. Western notation has of course expanded its vocabulary to encode things like complexly nested rhythms and microtones that it stayed away from for a long time. Of course it isn't coincidental that the revolutionising of Western music in the years around 1900 took place at a time when colonialism had made the classical musics of other cultures more familiar in the West than previously.

[Serial_Apologist]

The development of harmony in Western music required notation, which in turn required rhythmic simplification, in comparison say to south Indian (Karnatic) music which concentrates its complexity not in harmony but in melodic and particularly rhythmic sophistication. Western notation has of course expanded its vocabulary to encode things like complexly nested rhythms and microtones that it stayed away from for a long time. Of course it isn't coincidental that the revolutionising of Western music in the years around 1900 took place at a time when colonialism had made the classical musics of other cultures more familiar in the West than previously.

How all these things pan out is indeed fascinating, also, in addition to standardization, when we think of how notation had implications in terms of securing questions of ownership at an historical juncture when ownership rights really came to the fore for the first time.