Prof: Okay,
ladies and gentlemen. 
Good morning. 
 
I think things are going to
work better today. 
I'm optimistic about the audio
equipment and about our slide
material and things such as
that. 
All cell phones off and we will
begin. 
Don't forget sections start
tonight at seven o'clock and
there's another set at eight
o'clock and then Friday
afternoon at one thirty and
Monday morning. 
We've got that all online for
you. 
And you do your work product
and you bring it to sections and
hand it in to your TA in section
each time. 
So that's the way this works. 
 
I'll be sending you a global
e-mail bringing you up to date
with some other things later on
this afternoon. 
Okay. 
 
So today we--Actually,
before I get to that,
any questions from you? 
 
Student: Yeah. 
 
Is there stuff to do--
Prof: Is there stuff to
do for section tonight? 
 
Yes, but only the stuff that
was assigned,
the Listening Exercises that
are assigned early on. 
It's just one,
nine through 11,
which you've probably had done
for days now so you just bring
that material and hand it in. 
 
Others will be assigned tonight. 
 
This is shopping period. 
 
We're started sifting through
things and then we'll get
rolling. 
 
Gentleman. 
 
 
 
Today we're going to come to
what I would call the
nitty-gritty of the course. 
 
We no longer have any
introductory material but we're
going to jump into musical
notation and we're going to be
dealing with things such as half
notes,
quarter notes,
things like that,
but before we do this I'd like
to say a couple of words about
musical notation because it
affects how we deal with music,
how we treat music. 
 
 
 
Musical notation is a
particularly Western phenomenon,
and when you stop and think
about it only we in the West,
and by West what I mean is the
United States and Canada and
Western Europe and Russia,
parts of South America,
only we use musical notation
and we use it principally for
our high art music. 
 
That's not to say that the
Chinese don't have an esoteric
form of musical notation,
that the Indians do not have an
esoteric form of musical
notation. 
They do, but it doesn't
intersect quite as intensely as
musical notation does in Western
cultures. 
Most cultures around the world,
if you stop and think about it,
don't use musical notation. 
 
But we do here with our art
music and that has two
advantages. 
 
Let's talk about the advantages
first. 
One, it allows the composer to
specify rather precisely what he
or she wants,
to sort of write things out in
the form of musical details,
so as the result the creator in
this Western art form takes on
greater importance than the
creator in other cultures where
the composer so to speak is more
or less anonymous and perhaps
synonymous with the group as a
whole. 
 
So again the process of
notation allows the composer to
loom larger. 
 
And secondly there's another
advantage of notation. 
It allows us to preserve the
work of art. 
We can kind of freeze dry this
thing and store it and then
bring it back to life more or
less exactly as the composer had
intended. 
 
But this, if you stop and think
about it, takes the traditional
balance of things and throws it
out of proportion. 
In our art music,
our symphonies,
concertos, genres of this sort,
the performer is actually much
less important. 
 
Let's think of this as
architect and carpenter. 
The great architect,
the thinker,
is the composer and the
performer,
the violinist,
gets this piece of--gets this
blueprint or black print in the
case of musical notation and is
expected simply to replicate the
black print. 
Well, that's very different
than what happens in other kinds
of music. 
 
Let's talk about pop music for
a second: jazz,
rock, hip-hop,
blues, that kind of thing. 
You go over to Toad's Place and
you see the band come out and
the first thing they do is plunk
this in front of them? 
No.  That'd be ridiculous. 
 
How many of you--I was walking
with a student over to my office
after lecture the other day to
get some material to him. 
How many of you play in a rock
band or have ever played in a
rock band? 
 
Okay, a number of you. 
 
Young lady out there,
did you use musical notation? 
No. 
 
That would be kind of silly. 
 
Right? 
 
It's--Okay. 
 
So how is it done? 
 
Well, it's all done aurally and
we'll talk a little bit more
about that as we go along. 
 
So the composer in the West is
very important,
more important than the
composer in other cultures. 
Other cultures don't use this
type of prescriptive notation. 
Here's a thought for you. 
 
Musical notation was the first
graph in Western culture. 
"How could that be?" 
 
you'd say. 
 
How could that be? 
 
Well, if you go back to the
formation of musical notation
from the ninth through the
twelfth centuries,
we see that very early on these
two dimensions of music,
the two axes of music that we
talked about before,
pitch vertically and duration
horizontally,
are in place and we have these
spots in this grid. 
So musical notation:
the first grid pattern in
Western culture--
but it does lock us in in
interesting ways that we may--
you perhaps have never
considered--compared to how
music is made in other cultures. 
Let's see how some music is
made in other cultures. 
We're going to play here now as
our first excerpt an Adhan,
and what this is is the Islamic
call to worship which is sung
across the world thousands of
times every day,
and as we listen to this I want
you to think about the vocal
production here. 
 
What's interesting are all of
the vocal nuances,
so let's listen to just a bit
of this please. 
>
 
Let's stop there. 
 
Fascinating. 
 
What a wonderful sound,
but the beauty of it is all
between what we would call the
notes. 
We would specify a precise
frequency here,
another one up here,
but what that gentleman was
singing was all the stuff in
between. 
That made it very beautiful,
and there's no way in God's
earth that we could replicate
that to the Western system of
musical notation. 
 
Let's take another example. 
 
We're going to go to the realm
of Western jazz here and I'm
going to pick on Chuck Mangione. 
 
Anybody ever heard of Chuck
Mangione? 
Yeah.  Okay. 
 
Brian, our tech guy, has. 
 
He's an older fellow. 
 
He's sort of my age,
and the reason I mention Chuck
Mangione is that years ago I
went to school with him. 
He was a couple of classes
ahead of me at the Eastman
School of Music. 
 
I was a fledgling pianist. 
 
He was a very good trumpeter. 
 
Indeed, he was winning Grammys
when he was in his twenties and
has been recording sort of
esoteric jazz and sometimes more
pop jazz thereafter. 
 
Now you can go to a Mangione
concert. 
He will sometimes play the
Shubert Theater there and
they'll have two hours of
spectacular jazz,
but what you won't see,
again, is any sort of music in
front of them. 
 
So how do these musicians
generate two hours of music with
no music in front of them? 
 
Does this mean he doesn't read
music? 
Of course not. 
 
You can't get through these
conservatories like Eastman or
Juilliard or Curtis without
being introduced to an intense
regimen of musical notation,
but it would get in the way of
the music. 
 
So let's listen to a track
here, a sax solo,
and I am going to try to
keep--make some sense out of
this--
because it gets more and more
complex--
by following the electric bass
underneath so let's listen to an
old tape. 
I used to go to bars in
Rochester and listen to this guy
and tape his stuff. 
 
So here's Chuck Mangione with
his saxophonist and a saxophone
cadenza. 
 
It's a wild riff for saxophone. 
 
>
 
That's probably enough. 
 
It gives you an idea. 
 
Now how in the world would you
ever notate that? 
To produce this as a
pre-scripted document that
anybody else could follow? 
 
It was all improvisatory. 
 
If they tried to notate it,
again, it would take all the
spirit out, all the heart out of
the music. 
Well, how do they do that? 
 
How do these performers play
such long spans of music without
any notation? 
 
Is it all memorized? 
 
Well, it's not memorized as we
think of it,
and you may have had music
lessons along the way and your
teacher and your mother said,
"Go memorize your
piece." 
 
It's not memorized like that. 
 
There are certain basic
patterns that they have. 
They might say for that sort of
music:, "All right. 
We're now going to have a
thirty-two-bar solo. 
We'll be in the key of E-flat. 
 
We're going to work through a
one, six, four,
five, one chord progression
as--We'll come back to that. 
We'll sit on the dominant chord
for eight beats and I (Chuck)
will look over and everybody
else will come back in at the
end of Chris's solo." 
 
It would be that kind of thing,
kind of head charts,
general plans,
and within that general plan a
lot of freedom of expression. 
 
So having said that about
musical notation--
something about a cautionary
tale about musical notation--
we should think about how it
affects the way we compose music
in the West and how we perform
music in the West. 
When you go to a concert of
classical music and the music is
played and you start to talk,
what happens? 
Somebody will go,
"Shh." 
Right? 
 
We go to these concerts and we
have to be so quiet. 
Why do we have to be quiet? 
 
That doesn't sound like much
fun. 
Why do we have to be so quiet? 
 
It's because we have these
performers up there that are
reading this blueprint and
everyone is listening,
basically, to see how
accurately they can reproduce,
revivify, this artistic
artifact. 
So that's sort of what's going
on, but it really does
affect how we behave,
even, in a concert. 
Now if you go to concerts of
other cultures and they are
engaged in their own classical,
not just popular,
but classical music,
Indonesian gamelan music for
example,
the audience will be there
swaying back and forth,
clapping, applauding with the
performance with particularly
good solo,
the same thing with Indian
sitar music,
that classical tradition. 
 
Oddly, it's much more like
going to a jazz concert where
the audience is sitting maybe
around tables or something like
that and encouraging and
interacting with the performers,
but again in those cultures no
notation. 
, everybody sits there sort of
mummified, waiting for this
great work of art to come back
to life. 
It's an interesting thing. 
 
And isn't it typical of us in
the West to take something,
music, which is expression and
feeling and motion and movement,
a response to sound,
and turn it into complex
patterns,
complex patterns that can be
visualized and rearranged and
analyzed,
and nowadays even digitalized. 
 
What we've done is take this
spontaneous response to the
creation of sound,
and bodily movement with sound
and replaced it. 
 
We've replaced the ear and the
heart, the ear and the body,
with the eye and the mind. 
 
Ours a much more visual--it's a
much more analytical--type of
approach to music and it has its
pros and cons. 
We get great Mahler symphonies
yet we have everybody sitting
there rock-still at these
concerts. 
Okay. 
 
Having said that and pointing
out the advantages and
disadvantages of notation,
let's plunge in then to a
discussion of it. 
 
I've put on the board up here
the following and we're going to
review this. 
 
It's simply material found on
page fifteen of your textbook
but let's review it. 
 
We say this is a beginning
course so we assume no previous
knowledge. 
 
If you've read through that
material, and you should have
read through it by now,
you know that we have a value
in music. 
 
It's called the whole note. 
 
What the whole note is,
what all these symbols are,
are simply representations of
duration so we have a symbolic
language here that's going to
represent the horizontal axis,
the axis of duration. 
 
And this whole note obviously
can be subdivided into two half
notes and each of the half notes
into two quarter notes,
each of these quarter notes
into two eighth notes,
and so on. 
 
So these are symbols telling us
how long a particular frequency
is to endure. 
 
Similarly, just as we have
symbols for the presence of
sound and its length,
we have symbols that represent
the absence of sound. 
 
We call those of course, what? 
 
Rests.  Okay. 
 
So we're resting over here. 
 
We're not making any music. 
 
So we have the notes and their
values and the rests. 
Notice that they're all pretty
much duple in their divisions. 
Now here's a question for
you--all duple divisions. 
How do we make--How do we get
triple arrangements in music? 
How do we do that? 
 
Well, we take our basic note
and what do we do to it? 
I bet--I'm sure some of you
know this. 
How can we get a half note that
actually equals now three
quarter notes? 
 
What do we do? 
 
Gentleman here. 
 
Add a dot. 
 
What does that do to this value
specifically in terms of ratios? 
It adds--Okay. 
 
It adds fifty percent or a half
to that and that means instead
of two quarter notes that we now
have three,
and we can do the same thing to
any one of these other values
here,
and that's how we get our
triple relationships. 
 
Okay? 
 
So those are the basic note
values normally with a duple
division but we can superimpose
triple by using a dot and the
absence of sound. 
 
Now let's talk for a moment
about the idea of pulse in music
and the beat in the music and
rhythms in music. 
We all know that there is this
thing in music called
"beat"
and to the extent that popular
music is more interesting and
that you--
everybody likes it and will go
dance to it is because it's
really foregrounding beat and
rhythm in an important way that
classical music does not. 
 
So I've put this idea of the
beat up on the board here. 
It's really just a pulse. 
 
It's very much like the human
pulse. 
This is the pulse of music,
and music theorists ever since
the late fifteenth century from
music theory Francinus Gafurius
on--
we could go all the way back
then--have said that the pulse
in music is basically at the
same tempo as the human pulse,
which comes out to be about oh,
we'll say seventy-two beats if
you will,
pulses, per minute. 
 
So we have this pulse,
and it's just kind of out there
streaming, beat,
>
, but we don't like
undifferentiated,
disorganized material in the
West. 
Our psyche says we've got to
bring rational organization to
this. 
 
Ever think about this? 
 
Why do we have this periodicity
when you take history courses? 
Why do we have the Renaissance,
the baroque period,
the classical period,
the romantic period and so on? 
We have it in music. 
 
We have it in history. 
 
We have it in the fine arts. 
 
Why do we have it? 
 
It's simply a convention
established after the fact that
allows us to organize material
in ways that we can grapple with
it,
ways that we can understand it. 
So in music what has happened
is that we have organized this
steady stream of beats in ways
that we can understand. 
We organize them. 
 
We subdivide these into units
of two, for example,
groups of two like this,
or we have an undifferentiated
stream like this. 
 
I am convinced--even though I'm
sure that the Toyota Motor
Company didn't organize it this
way--
I am convinced that on my
automobile when I do not plug in
my safety belt that there is a
bell ringing,
"DING, ding,
ding, DING, ding,
ding." 
 
I don't think they were
thinking of that in terms of
triple meter. 
 
I think they were just a
succession of dings,
but I'm hearing it--my mind
wants to hear this organization,
so there's another organization
here of units of three. 
As you may know,
there's yet another
organization where we could
group this in units of four,
but for all intents and
purposes--there are a few
nuances to it--
four is simply a multiplication
of two. 
 
So in our course we are only
going to have two types of
meter, duple and triple. 
 
These organizations,
taking the beat and organizing
it into groups,
is called superimposing
meter on the music. 
 
Then we want to indicate that
meter to the performer. 
It's a way to tell the
performer how this music is to
be executed. 
 
So what do we do? 
 
Well, in music the most basic
symbol for the beat is the
quarter note. 
 
The quarter note usually
carries the beat. 
Okay. 
 
So here we have a series of
groups of two quarter notes. 
We have the convention of music
of writing this symbol
indicating the beat-carrying
unit of four so I'm writing a
four underneath each of these. 
 
Then I look up here and say,
"Well, in this duple
pattern I have two of these
quarter notes." 
So I'm going to write a two out
there. 
That (4) tells a performer that
the quarter note is carrying the
beat. 
 
And the 2 says that there'll be
two in each of your units. 
These units we call bars or
measures,
and just to finish this off
down here,
we would have three quarter
notes, of course,
in this particular arrangement. 
 
Okay. 
 
Now ultimately what happens
with this is that we begin to
take this stream and organize it
into different patterns. 
I can go >
 
, something like this,
and we would call that a
rhythm, superimposing longs and
shorts, different patterns,
patterns that oftentimes
repeat. 
The dividing up of this stream
into different patterns,
often repeating,
of longs and short,
is superimposing rhythm over
top of this basic beat which is
organized in terms of these
meters. 
So are there questions about
that? 
Did that seem straightforward
enough? 
Now as you may know--some of
you may have played clarinet in
a high school band or something
like that,
neither here nor there if you
did or did not--
but you may know that there are
other meters out there,
these things called six-eight
(and nine-eight). 
I was thinking this morning
>
four, five, six,
one, two, three,
four, five, six,
one, two. 
Well, that's a beat of
basically a duple meter with a
triple subdivision,
but we're not getting into
triple subdivisions here. 
 
In our course the beat is
always going to be a--divided,
to the extent that it's
divided--always going to be
divided into two. 
 
We have only so-called simple
meters rather than compound
meters. 
 
If you want to learn about
compound meters,
go take music 210 and become a
music major. 
That's the kind of thing that
they get into but we're not
doing that here. 
 
We're interested only really in
two things: One,
can you differentiate between
duple and triple meter;
and two, can you recognize some
very basic rhythmic patterns? 
And we'll be doing some of that
today. 
Questions again? 
 
Okay. 
 
 
 
Let me play some music at the
piano. 
This is Bulldog. 
 
Isn't this the Yale fight song? 
 
Who wrote this? 
 
Anybody know? 
 
You've probably heard it eight
zillion times at football games. 
It's great--What a wonderful
fight song--Yale was so lucky to
have this as. 
 
So yes, I think I hear somebody
out there. 
Student: Cole Porter. 
 
Prof: Cole Porter. 
 
Who was Cole Porter,
as I glance through my music
here? 
 
Oh, phooey.  I've lost it. 
 
Who was Cole Porter? 
 
He was a Yale graduate,
class of 1914,
and unfortunately I seem to
have misplaced--Well,
I can generate a little bit of
it here. 
>
 
Okay. 
 
I was sort of trying to
remember the first page of the
missing music there. 
 
So is this in duple meter or
triple meter? 
>
 
Huh? 
 
What do you think and how do we
find out? 
Tap your foot. 
 
Did we find any music? 
 
>
 
Ah, thank you. 
 
Enlightenment from Lynda. 
 
>
 
What-- What's the key here? 
 
What do you listen to? 
 
How many think it's in duple
meter? 
Raise your hand. 
 
How many think it's in triple
meter? 
Okay. 
 
Almost everybody thinks it's in
duple meter and that's correct. 
Now we worked through this just
a little bit once before. 
What is it that tells us that
it's in duple meter? 
It's the bass >
because it's organizing itself
very strongly in duple patterns. 
There's one other interesting
thing in here. 
This would be? 
 
Well, let's think through this
in one additional way,
and that is--notice that in
duple meter we have a strong
beat,
right, "strong, weak,
strong, weak,
strong, weak,
strong weak"
in that sense or if we have
triple it would be "strong,
weak, weak, strong,
weak, weak." 
 
There would be two weak beats
or two unstressed beats between
each strong beat. 
 
We could do this >
and we'd have the "Waltz
of the Bulldog." 
It'd be pretty cool
>
to see actually. 
 
So there it's--I'm simply
taking the Cole Porter piece and
throwing in an extra beat in
each measure,
an unstressed beat in each
measure,
and it works out pretty well. 
 
Notice--this would be--Harvard
would have had a field day with
this melody if he--Cole
Porter--had not done one thing. 
He makes this really rather
snappy by the use of this kind
of stuff. 
 
>
 
We'll come in on
>
and then it's
>. 
What's that a good example of? 
 
Syncopation, yeah. 
 
The term is on the board,
and it's a good example of
syncopation,
sort of jumping in ahead of
time, cutting off the beat,
getting in there ahead of time
and throwing off the metrical
balance for a very short period
of time. 
 
Okay. 
 
So that's a duple meter piece
and what we're trying to do here
is just hear if we've got one
strong and one weak beat or one
strong and two weak beats. 
 
How do we--How should we do
this? 
How are you going to do this? 
 
Well, I think one thing that's
very helpful is for you to start
to move, to move around,
to sway, tap your foot. 
Now we can't do this during a
test in here. 
It'd be a little bit annoying
but we really have--we really do
have to do this. 
 
Now musicians,
being a bit more uptight
oftentimes,
classical musicians,
than other more spirited folks,
have developed this tradition
of using conducting patterns. 
 
Right? 
 
So for duple meter we just go
down, up, down,
up. 
 
It's kind of--maybe a little
shape over to the right,
down, up, down,
up, that kind of thing,
and for triple we do down,
over, up,
down, over, up, down, over, up. 
 
Okay? 
 
So I'm going to start playing
here and you are going to start
conducting. 
 
You're going to listen just for
a second and then you're going
to move and you're going to move
using the conducting pattern. 
>
 
Okay.  Good. 
 
Now I see some of you out there
from--like this,
not really participating,
and if I can get up here--Think
about this. 
 
I'm old. 
 
I'm sort of used to thinking of
myself a "White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant." 
 
I have every reason in the
world to be repressed. 
Right? 
 
>
 
I could--
>
This--So if I could be up here
making a fool of myself on a
daily basis, you guys are much
younger than I and known for
outrageous behaviors. 
 
You can certainly get in here
and move and flow and go with
the beat here. 
 
So here we go. 
 
Everybody together. 
 
>
 
Much better. 
 
 
 
Okay.  I'm watching-- Good. 
 
Virtually everyone has got the
downbeat here. 
You're not going
>. 
You're
going>
, so there is a sense of
downbeat and we'll come back to
that in just a moment. 
 
Let's do a triple meter one. 
 
Here we go. 
 
>
 
Good. 
 
 
 
Excellent.  Very good. 
 
Now I'm going to modulate,
>
go to a different key. 
 
>
 
Can you conduct this? 
 
 
 
Okay. 
 
There's a little confusion here
so let's try to do it together. 
Are you ready? 
 
>
 
Okay. 
 
Now this gentleman out here is
actually doing it different from
what I am doing and what most of
you are doing,
but you know what? 
 
He's doing it correctly. 
 
We're doing it incorrectly. 
 
>
 
What's wrong here? 
 
We're off because our
downbeats, our strong pulses,
always have to come on the
first part of the bar,
this note. 
 
The first part of the bar is
called the downbeat. 
It's the most important thing
and our conducting pattern
always has to have the downbeat
of the hand in sync with the
strongest impulse in the music,
the strong. 
The downbeat in the music comes
with the down motion of the
hand. 
 
So we were getting
>. 
Oh, there's the downbeat,
>
but we were putting that on
two, >
, and we don't want that. 
 
We want >
 
at that point. 
 
So what do we have here? 
 
What's happening? 
 
Well, there's a little bit of
music before the downbeat. 
That's called a pick-up. 
 
Okay? 
 
So we have a little pick-up,
>. 
I was thinking of a diver in
the Olympics. 
They go out there--They do
these little steps just before
they spring off of the board,
>
, kind of gets you,
really landing good and hard on
that downbeat,
so the downbeat is very
important to us and we could
conclude this by saying that
although all music has a
downbeat,
not all music starts with a
downbeat. 
Sometimes when listening to
music you have to wait. 
Listen for a while and your
body almost will start to tell
you, start to signal to you,
where the downbeat is. 
Is it really your body that
will signal this to you? 
I doubt it. 
 
It's your brain up here
processing all of this
information. 
 
We talked about the auditory
cortex the first section and
maybe there are other parts of
the brain that are factoring in
here as well,
but how is it that composers
send this information to,
let's say, our auditory cortex
here? 
 
How do they do that? 
 
Well, there are four principal
ways that composers signal to us
the whereabouts of the down
beat. 
Okay? 
 
So let's review--let's focus on
that just for a moment. 
Okay. 
 
Way number one:
That has to do with duration. 
Notes are simply longer,
held longer. 
That's how we have the sense of
where the down beat is. 
>
 
You have old Amazin' Grace--I
guess it's a spiritual,
right? 
 
Beautiful.  It's beautiful. 
 
But think about that. 
 
>
 
>
 
And all of those long notes are
coming on the downbeat so that's
how we start to hear that as a
downbeat,
and that's how we know to make
our hand go down at that point
so that's one way. 
 
Now another way is through
accent,
and to exemplify this let's
turn to some classical music,
the music of Mozart,
so here we have Mozart's
Fortieth Symphony,
his famous G Minor Symphony,
and we're going to go ahead and
start to play it. 
 
 
>
 
Okay.  Good. 
 
Several of you were actually
conducting this. 
That's great. 
 
Okay. 
 
This happens to be in duple
meter and that's fine. 
That wasn't the question here
but great, you're hearing that
and I'm delighted. 
 
What Mozart has done here--If
we could get the score up here
of Mozart's music--
we would see that he has put a
little arrow over top of--
a wedge--over top of each of
the down beats >
so that the string player will
really accent those,
but the string player would be
accenting them anyway. 
Why? 
 
Any violinists in here or
anybody who ever played a string
instrument? 
 
What are you always told to do? 
 
If you are playing a downbeat
with an up-bow,
are you in good shape? 
 
No, no, no, no. 
 
Your teacher would not be happy
with that. 
Your bowing pattern is probably
backward at that point. 
String players are taught,
whether it's cellists going
this way,
downbeat, or violas and
violinists coming down this way,
that the downward motion of the
hand or the pull across,
the strong pull across,
should come with the downbeat;
that emphasizes the downbeat. 
That's how we know the downbeat. 
 
So so far we've had duration
and accent. 
Mozart is actually writing
accent into this. 
The third way that we--that
composers signal to us,
that we pick up almost
intuitively the whereabouts of
downbeats,
is through patterns of
accompaniment. 
 
We'll call it range. 
 
Okay. 
 
So here's a waltz by Richard
Strauss,
not to be confused--no,
excuse me, by Johann Strauss,
not to be confused with Richard
Strauss whom we heard last time. 
>
 
And so on. 
 
What's important here is the
left hand. 
>
 
That's why we hear a triple
pattern here. 
We're hearing two weak beats,
and the strong beat is always
in the lower position here so
we're getting low,
middle, middle,
>
low, middle,
middle, or it could be
something as we had the other
day in the Tchaikovsky Piano
Concerto, >
low, middle,
high, low, middle,
high, but each time the
downbeat seems to be coming in
association with that lowest
note. 
So range or position here in
the accompaniment can oftentimes
signal this information to us. 
 
And finally,
and most important-- these
others have been pretty
straightforward--
but what has not been
straightforward is something
that you might listen to many,
many times and not be aware of,
and that is chord changes. 
 
We have chords in music. 
 
>
 
They're these building blocks
that support the melody and they
have to change for that melody
to be consonant all the time. 
But where they change
oftentimes is on the downbeat. 
Most frequently,
chord changes come on the
downbeat so composers signal to
us in a fourth way the downbeat
by means of chord change. 
 
Now we're going to play just a
little bit of pop music--
a bit of pop music here,
and by playing this you might
think that I think that I'm hip
or with it. 
We're going to play some rock
and roll. 
Do I look hip or with it? 
 
Hopelessly out of touch with
popular culture and nobody knows
this better than I,
and to prove this I have chosen
a piece because there's a little
story with it. 
I like this piece because it
does something and I've used it
in previous years,
and I put it on and I would
announce,
"I'm now going to play out
of the--
It's an album called
Document by REM ,"
and put it on and REM and it's
fine with me. 
 
That's what it says,
"REM,"
on the printout,
and about two years after I was
doing this a student came up and
said,
"Professor Wright,
it's really not
"Rem."" 
 
Oh, it's not?" 
 
Okay. 
 
So that's how distant I am from
all of this, but let's listen to
a little of this. 
 
It's in a straightforward four. 
 
Rock really comes forth not so
much in twos but in fours so
we'll call this a 4/4,
and you can beat a four pattern
to it or you can beat a two
pattern. 
It doesn't really matter but
notice that whenever the chords
are changing they're changing on
down beat. 
So let's hear a little bit of
this and then we'll stop so they
don't sue us for copyright
infringement and then we'll go
somewhere else and take another
chunk. 
>
 
Okay. 
 
So that's all they're doing
there. 
Every time they're changing
your hand is going down,
so chord changes may be the
most powerful of all of these
aspects of where the down beat
is. 
Okay. 
 
I had intended to give you just
a little bit of a rhythmic quiz
but let's just do one of these
things. 
Here's something else we have
to do in here. 
We have to hear a rhythm and
recognize it so we have a series
of rhythms on the board up
there. 
Please choose a rhythm for
excerpt one, you can choose
rhythm A which is
>
or you could choose rhythm B,
>. 
So I'm about to play a piece. 
 
It's by Chopin. 
 
Which rhythm is in play here? 
 
Which rhythm am I playing? 
 
Is it A or is it B? 
 
>
 
So what do you think? 
 
How many think A? 
 
How many think B? 
 
Okay. 
 
So that's not too challenging. 
 
We'll be doing some of that. 
 
Then >
Chopin is sitting here and he
modulates;
he changes key. 
 
What about this? 
 
Is it--This is number two. 
 
Is it A or B? 
 
>
 
Lovely. 
 
Wasn't it lovely,
a little thing by Chopin? 
How long did it take old Chopin
to think that up,
do you suppose? 
 
Two seconds? 
 
Three seconds of white-hot
inspiration? 
I'm sixty-four years old and I
haven't had one second of genius
in my entire life. 
 
>
 
This is really depressing. 
 
It's discouraging. 
 
I soldier on but it hasn't come
to me. 
You are younger and I'm sure
that your moment of genius is
out there. 
 
It's really the difference
between perseverance,
in my case, and genius--pure,
unadulterated genius--in the
case of Chopin. 
 
What a beautiful melody. 
 
In any event,
the answer is what? 
For two, is it A or B? 
 
>
 
What do you think? 
 
A, yeah, so that's his rhythm,
A there. 
All right. 
 
We're going to end with one
final exercise. 
It's a fun piece I think. 
 
It's fun to do. 
 
It's a piece by Maurice Ravel
called Bolero. 
It's a unique piece. 
 
Maurice Ravel was a French
composer writing in the early
twentieth century. 
 
It's a unique piece because
what he does is take some very
basic patterns and simply
repeats them over and over and
over again for about fourteen
and a half minutes depending
upon the tempo that the
conductor is taking the music. 
So let's listen to a little bit
of this music and I want you,
maybe as a group,
to tap with your foot,
your hand, whatever,
just the beat as you hear it. 
You don't have to pay any
attention to this. 
We'll come to this in just a
moment, but just tap and we'll
all--maybe eventually all
together the beat. 
Here we go. 
 
>
 
Most of you are not tapping. 
 
So everybody start tapping
where you think it is. 
>
 
Okay.  Good. 
 
All right. 
 
Gentleman out here in the
orange shirt. 
I'm going to have you be a
conductor. 
You were doing really well and
you were conducting correctly
early on. 
 
So good. 
 
Here's what we got. 
 
Most people have
>. 
Some people are going
>
and in this course we would
know whether you're hearing
duple or triple based on some
other information so don't worry
about if you're doing
>. 
That's a little bit fast for a
beat. 
What you're doing there is
actually subdividing the beat
into two, but don't worry about
that. 
That's fine. 
 
You're doing eighth notes and
the rest of us are doing--other
people are doing quarter notes. 
 
Okay. 
 
So the beat is
>. 
Now what music have we been
hearing here? 
Santana, where are you? 
 
Okay.  Come on up here. 
 
Take a look at this. 
 
Lynda, come on over here and
take a look at this. 
We should have rehearsed this
in advance. 
We did not do this. 
 
These are two ladies that are
very experienced singers. 
I want you to just stand right
up here, please. 
They have not been forewarned
about this! 
Take a look at this. 
 
>
 
We're going to do it together. 
 
Here we go. 
 
You're going to sing that top
melody. 
One, ready, go. 
 
>
 
Okay, and we're just going to
keep--It'll be fine,
and we're just going to keep
going and once you get to the
end one then we're going to
repeat. 
Okay? 
 
Here we go. 
 
Two, sing. 
 
>
 
Okay. 
 
So you're going to keep going
over and over and over like
that. 
 
I'm going to be this thing here. 
 
Let's just go--This is the
percussion. 
>
 
Okay? 
 
There is no pitch to it. 
 
It is just rhythm. 
 
Up here we have melody and
rhythm. 
Here we have just rhythm. 
 
Underneath we have
>. 
We have basically harmony,
but it has a simple rhythm to
it. 
 
It's a rhythm with a couple of
different patterns. 
You, students,
are going to sing this. 
Okay? 
 
So here we go. 
 
Everybody together, ready, sing. 
 
>
 
Okay. 
 
So here we're going to go--The
gentleman in the orange shirt--I
hate to do this to you but we've
got thirty seconds. 
Stand up. 
 
You were doing a great job. 
 
>
 
Stand up and you can--That's
fine. 
You can face me. 
 
We'll coordinate it better this
way, and just conduct this in
three. 
 
I'll start conducting with you
and then you take over. 
Here we go, one, ready, go. 
 
>
 
>
 
Okay.  Great. 
 
This is actually terrific. 
 
We're going to take it to
Hoboken and Sheboygan. 
We're going to play across the
world with this group. 
Okay. 
 
Thank you very much,
ladies. 
The point here--final point and
then I'll let you go. 
This is a melody with rhythm. 
 
This is pure rhythm. 
 
This is a harmony with a very
simple rhythm here. 
Who is playing the beat? 
 
I asked you to conduct the beat
or to tap the beat. 
Most people--And everybody was
tapping the beat just fine and
dandy, but notice up here nobody
is playing the beat. 
There's nobody up here that's
playing the beat. 
The brain perceives all of this
complex information and it
processes it and it extrapolates
from it the beat,
but again nobody in
music--except the bass drum
player in a marching band--
nobody in music ever does
anything except just play the
beat. 
Okay. 
 
So I'll see you starting this
evening in sections.