This lecture begins the third part of the course, which looks at music from a historical perspective. Here Professor Wright focuses on the medieval period. He discusses chant, and its role in the lives of monks and nuns in medieval monasteries, convents, and cathedrals. He then moves on to briefly discuss polyphony.
This lecture begins with a review of all the musical forms previously discussed in class: sonata-allegro, rondo, theme and variations, and fugue. Professor Wright then moves on to discuss the final form that will be taught before the students’ next exam: ostinato. With the aid of music by Pachelbel, Purcell, and a few popular artists, Professor Wright shows the multitude of ways in which the ostinato bass has been used throughout the past several centuries.
In this lecture, Professor Wright briefly explores the manifestations of the fugue form in poetry, painting, and other disciplines, and then gives a detailed explanation of how fugues are put together in music. Though he uses excerpts by composers as disparate as Georges Bizet and Leonard Bernstein to illustrate his points, he draws his main musical examples from J.S. Bach.
In this lecture, Professor Wright discusses the nature of a critical concert review, in preparation for the students’ assignment to review the Saybrook Orchestra’s upcoming concert.
In this lecture, Professor Wright prepares the students for the upcoming concert they will attend, which will include pieces by Mozart, Brahms, and Beethoven. He discusses each of the pieces that will be on the program, paying special attention to form. Additional classical pieces are used to supplement the discussion of theme and variations and rondo form in the concert pieces. The lecture concludes with an example of rondo form found in a piece by the contemporary popular artist Sting.
Professor Wright delves into sonata-allegro form in some depth in this lecture. He focuses especially on characterizing four types of music found within a sonata: thematic, transitional, developmental, and cadential. He then moves on to discuss a different form, theme and variations, which is accomplished through the use of examples from Beethoven’s and Mozart’s compositions. Professor Wright and guest artist Kensho Watanabe then conclude the lecture by demonstrating a set of theme and variations through a live performance of Corelli’s La Folia.
A brief foray into the formal characteristics of contemporary popular music is used to launch this lecture on musical form. After a discussion of the “verse-chorus” form often used in popular music, Professor Wright proceeds to take students into the realm of classical music, focusing particularly on ternary form and sonata-allegro form. Throughout his detailed explanation of sonata-allegro form, he also elaborates upon some harmonic concepts describing, for example, the relationship between relative major and minor keys.
In this lecture, Professor Wright teaches students how to listen for bass patterns in order to understand harmonic progressions. He talks through numerous musical examples from both popular music and classical music, showing the way that composers from both realms draw on the same chord progressions. The musical examples are taken from Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Wagner, Gene Chandler, the Beach Boys, Badly Drawn Boy, the Dave Matthews Band, and Justin Timberlake.
Professor Wright explains the way harmony works in Western music. Throughout the lecture, he discusses the ways in which triads are formed out of scales, the ways that some of the most common harmonic progressions work, and the nature of modulation. Professor Wright focuses particularly on the listening skills involved in hearing whether harmonies are changing at regular or irregular rates in a given musical phrase. His musical examples in this lecture are wide-ranging, including such diverse styles as grand opera, bluegrass, and 1960s American popular music.
This lecture discusses melody and aesthetics; Professor Wright raises the question of what makes a melody beautiful, and uses excerpts from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro to explore this issue. Throughout the discussion, the foundations of classical phrase-structure and harmonic progressions are used to explain some of the choices these three composers made.
