Tonality

The composition opens in Db major with a tonic chord. Here Debussy has already broken two rules of conventional voice leading; Debussy begins without the tonic note, introducing it later, where the mediant of the chord (F natural) is doubled. This gesture could also be interpreted as opening with chord iii (still with doubled mediant) moving to chord I on the third beat of the bar; however I think this is less likely to be Debussy’s intention because of the use of a Db chord in bar 9 when the…

Charles Ives is one of the famous American Modernist composers. He was born in 1874 and he composed many compositions until he died in 1954. He was born in Connecticut as a son of Army bandmaster. He began to compose at 12 and he became an Organist at 14. Although he was not famous during his lifetime, he is very well-known as his unique compositional styles. His compositional style combines American popular and church music tradition. The Church music traditions of his youth with European and…

Shostakovich composed the oratorio Song of the Forests op. 81 after he knew Stalin’s Great Nature Transformation Plan from poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky (1915-1994) around the spring of 1949 when they were on the Red Arrow train from Moscow to Leningrad. Owing to the fact that they had already had a collaboration in the past, Shostakovich asked Dolmatovsky to write the poems for the oratorio. After Dolmatovsky completed the poems, Shostakovich composed the music for the poems during the summer of…

In his emotive lieder In der Frühe, Hugo Wolf utilizes key center discrepancies between piano accompaniment and the vocal line, lack of clear cadential motion, and quick-tempered movements through various tonal centers for the purpose of demonstrating the emotional complexity of a lost man struggling to find purposefulness in his daily life. Throughout his lieder, Wolf declares a key clearly with the left hand of the piano outlining the tonic triad; however, as soon as the vocal line enters,…

Rhythmic breakdown In this figure, a whole note takes a whole in a measure, a half note takes two in a measure, a quarter note takes up four in a measure, an eighth note takes up eight in a measure and a sixteenth note takes up sixteen in a measure. As mentioned earlier, this rhythmic grouping only applies when the bottom number is 4. In a compound meter these rhythmic groupings are quite different. B. Meter- is the systematic grouping of beats and their division in regularly recurring…

Fryderyk Chopin composed around fifty-nine mazurkas with only forty-one being published during his lifetime; the remaining compositions remained in manuscript form until being published by his close friend, Julian Fontana, after Chopin’s death. Chopin’s mazurkas are based on the traditional Polish folk dance, the mazur, which are the second part of the three-fold dance routine of the original folk mazurka, also called the “round dance” when all three parts are performed together. The mazur’s…

A unique feature of playing a piano piece is that it, in a sense, transports an orchestra into a single performer’s own two hands; Mozart was able to do just that as a major classical composer. While Mozart’s music across the board demonstrated a mastery of all sorts of musical types, his piano sonatas capture distinct character paired with enunciated form in such a way that is very specific to his style. Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 9 in D major is one of 18 piano sonatas in total, all of which…

reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus this week, on the strength of a belief that it makes for an excellent case study as far as tonality goes. Tales’ temperatures can get taken through their tones getting studied. Tones can range from hopefulness to cynicism to playfulness and everything between. Tonality in Maus changes with each vocal shift from Vladek to Art. But, for the most part, tonality in Maus befits the solemnity inherent within each thematic element this story has. Each reflection by Art…

Another interesting comparison is how the two will act when the other candidate is speaking. During Hilary answering of the first question, Trump is seen writing on the notepad, looking around and nodding at the audience, and generally fidgeting before giving his attention to Hilary. Not only is this distracting and disrespectful to his fellow candidate, but also is a citeational act of masculinity. In today’s gendered hierarchy, a lot of times increasing power through masculinity is at the…

songs of Country compared to the stereotypical gangster, violence-inducing, hoodlum mentalities of Rap has similarities beyond the public eye. The unsuspected truth is that both genres of music are highly alike in their messages through their music, tonality, and in their international influences. Rap and hip hop music tells stories. Country music tell stories. Although they may come from completely different events and experiences, they both seem to relay the same messages. When it comes to…