Forms in Western Classical Music

by Mahendra Posted on September 10, 2011

[This post is #5 in the West­ern Clas­si­cal Music Series]

After under­stand­ing a few key musi­cal con­cepts, let us now famil­iar­ize our­selves with some of the Forms used in WCM. What exactly is Form and what is Style? I like to think of Form as the ‘struc­ture’ of a com­po­si­tion and Style as a clas­si­fi­ca­tion based on var­i­ous fac­tors like form, instru­men­ta­tion, pur­pose, etc. We will dis­cuss Forms in this post and move on to Styles in the next.

For me, the Form of a work indi­cates the archi­tec­tural struc­ture on which a com­po­si­tion is built. Why is Form impor­tant? This is best expressed by Percy Sholes “Form is a series of strate­gies designed to find a suc­cess­ful mean between the oppo­site extremes of unre­lieved rep­e­ti­tion and unre­lieved alter­ation.” Let us pro­ceed to under­stand Forms.

Rondo

A sim­ple form where a motif or sec­tion ‘A’ is repeated inter­spersed with new motifs between each rep­e­ti­tion: ABACADAE…

Here is a sim­ple Rondo from Beethoven’s String Quar­tet in C Minor, Opus 18, 4th Move­ment (I chose this video as it shows the ‘ABAC…’ pat­tern as it plays):

Beethoven String Quar­tet in C Minor, Opus 18, 4th Movement

(Ignore the video after 6:10 as it moves on beyond dis­cussing Rondo)

Do not equate or con­fuse the sim­plic­ity of the Form with the level of com­plex­ity of the com­po­si­tion — a ‘sim­ple’ Rondo can be a com­plex com­po­si­tion! For exam­ple, here is Beethoven’s Rondo a capric­cio (Op 129) per­formed by Evgeny Kissin in ’97:

Beethoven’s Rondo a capriccio

Canon and Fugues

Canon and Fugues uti­lize Coun­ter­point as a thread to weave their struc­ture together. Observe when we dis­cussed Rondo above, there was no men­tion of Coun­ter­point — it may or may not be there. How­ever, in Canon and Fugues, Coun­ter­point is the very essence or fab­ric of the com­po­si­tion. They con­sist of mul­ti­ple inde­pen­dent melodies that are woven to form a rich tapes­try of polyphony. These are not sim­ple forms to under­stand and require active ‘mind listening’.

A Canon is a Form based on con­tin­u­ous imi­ta­tive coun­ter­point. It uses a melody fol­lowed by imi­ta­tions of the melody after spe­cific dura­tions. The ini­tial melody is played by the ‘leader’, the imi­ta­tion is by the ‘fol­lower’.
Here is César Franck’s Sonata in Vio­lin and Piano in A Major, 4th Movement:

Sim­ple Canon: Franck’s Sonata in Vio­lin and Piano in A Major, 4th Movement

This Canon form is easy to under­stand because the Vio­lin (Fol­lower) always plays the melody an octave higher than the Piano (Leader).

There are many com­plex types of Canons (see Wikipedia for a good intro­duc­tion). One exam­ple is ‘Ret­ro­grade Canon’ where the Fol­lower accom­pa­nies the Leader exactly back­ward in sequence. A Crab Canon is sim­i­lar to a Palin­drome in Eng­lish. The most famous exam­ple of this is Bach’s Crab Canon in his The Musi­cal Offer­ing BMV 1079. The best way to visu­al­ize this is by view­ing the score as a strip whose ends are then stitched together to form a Mobius strip:

Bach’s Crab Canon Visu­al­ized as a Mobius Strip

A Fugue is a com­plex ver­sion of a Canon. It also employs imi­ta­tive coun­ter­point, how­ever, the imi­ta­tion is not strict as in the Canon. A Fugue starts out with a melody called as the Sub­ject, which is stated in all the voices in turn, till every­one is ‘up and run­ning’. This Sub­ject is then manip­u­lated in var­i­ous ways by the Leader, just like in a Canon. This manip­u­lated Sub­ject is called the Coun­ter­Sub­ject. How­ever, unlike in a Canon, the Fol­low­ing voices do not sim­ply imi­tate the Leader’s Coun­ter­Sub­ject — each voice devel­ops its own vari­a­tion of the Coun­ter­Sub­ject. Sounds com­pli­cated? It is.

Lis­ten to Con­tra­punc­tus IV, from Bach’s Art of Fugue, played by Glenn Gould:

Art of Fugue, Con­tra­punc­tus IV

This is just a 3-minute com­po­si­tion, but you may spend days under­stand­ing it. And this is one of the sim­plest fugues Bach composed!

The terms ‘Canon­i­cal’ and ‘Fugal’ are used as adjec­tives to describe com­po­si­tions that have some char­ac­ter­is­tics of these Forms. For exam­ple, Indian music lovers are famil­iar with this song from R. D. Burman:

Canon­i­cal & Fugral ele­ments used in Hindi Film Music

You can see how the arti­fi­cially dupli­cated vocals are canon­i­cal and fugal in nature.

Fugues and Canons are dif­fi­cult forms for begin­ners to grasp. This is because we are in gen­eral used to lis­ten­ing to homo­phonic music with one dom­i­nant melodic line where the accom­pa­ni­ment is in the back­ground. Appre­ci­a­tion of Canons and Fugues requires active lis­ten­ing to mul­ti­ple voices at once, and takes effort.

Canons and Fugues are a world in them­selves within the wider world of WCM. Some peo­ple love them and study them pas­sion­ately, oth­ers ignore them. If you think you’re not com­fort­able appre­ci­at­ing Canons and Fugues, sim­ply ignore them and move on. The uni­verse of WCM is not inhab­ited only on the Canon-Fugue planet, there are other ‘music-forms’ to dis­cover and enjoy! :)

Fur­ther Read­ing on Bach’s AOF for Fugue Enthu­si­asts:
http://www.flagmusic.com/aof.php?r=aof_c_iv
http://www2.nau.edu/tas3/simplefuguesaof.html

Sonata Form

Sonata Form is a rock-solid pil­lar sup­port­ing a very huge body of works in WCM. This is a very impor­tant musi­cal form, used in con­cer­tos, sonatas, sym­phonies, quar­tets, etc. for hun­dreds of years. For­tu­nately, it is not as dif­fi­cult to appre­ci­ate as Canons and Fugues, so you can heave a sigh of relief! :)

A Sonata Form is com­posed of three sec­tions: Expo­si­tion, Devel­op­ment, and Recapitulation.

Expo­si­tion: A Theme 1 is first pre­sented. Fol­low­ing a ‘Bridge’ or ‘Tran­si­tion’, another Theme 2 is pre­sented. The two themes are con­trast­ing in nature, such that the Theme 2 is in a dif­fer­ent Key than Theme 1. There is a Clos­ing Sec­tion towards the end, which con­tin­ues in the Key of Theme 2. The Expo­si­tion is often repeated in its entirety before mov­ing on to the Development.

This very use­ful video dis­cusses the Sonata Form using Mozart’s 40th sym­phony in the back­ground. Here is the Expo­si­tion section:

Sonata Form: Exposition

Devel­op­ment: The Devel­op­ment sec­tion is very much like an impro­vi­sa­tional ICM per­for­mance, except that it’s com­posed. Here, the two themes pre­sented in the Expo­si­tion are manip­u­lated, using parts of both, in var­i­ous dif­fer­ent ways. There is no struc­ture to the Devel­op­ment sec­tion — it is free — the only limit is the composer’s imagination.

Reca­pit­u­la­tion: The Reca­pit­u­la­tion returns to the home key of the Expo­si­tion. It is an altered repeat of the Expo­si­tion, where in sim­ple terms, both the Theme 1 and Theme 2 are “rec­on­ciled” lead­ing to a res­o­lu­tion.
Here is the con­tin­u­a­tion of the video that con­tin­ues onwards to dis­cussing the Devel­op­ment and the Recapitulation:

Devel­op­ment & Recapitulation

Unlike the cere­bral Canons and Fugues, Sonata Form does not nec­es­sar­ily require active “mind lis­ten­ing”. You can intu­itively enjoy music com­posed in Sonata Form with­out under­stand­ing any­thing about Keys, Exposition/Development/Recapitulation etc. The Sonata Form is a broad frame­work with no strict rules, hence com­posers have exploited it more than any other Form.

A note about the uni­ver­sal­ity of Sonata Form is in order. When we learnt writ­ing in school, we were taught “Com­po­si­tion”. There are many par­al­lels between writ­ing and music, as I had once writ­ten about dur­ing my ado­les­cent days. In writ­ing, one uses words, in music, one uses notes. Even the word “note” is used in both con­texts (yes, that is why I used it when start­ing this para­graph). In an essay or a sci­en­tific paper, one presents a sub­ject (Expo­si­tion), dis­cusses it from var­i­ous angles and argu­ments (Devel­op­ment), and finally sum­ma­rizes one’s obser­va­tions in a con­clu­sion (Reca­pit­u­la­tion). Fun­da­men­tally, com­po­si­tion, whether one uses words or notes, is all about ideas. And Sonata Form is how one presents ideas in a rich, ful­fill­ing framework.

Think of your favorite roman­tic movie. Boy-meets-Girl (Theme 1-meets-Theme 2), there is con­flict with parents/villains/whatever (Devel­op­ment), and finally there is a res­o­lu­tion where every­one reaf­firms and acknowl­edges their love (Reca­pit­u­la­tion). Think of how a tree grows. You plant a seed and water it (Expo­si­tion), roots and stem/branches start grow­ing below and above ground (Devel­op­ment), and the emer­gence of a flower that enables pol­li­na­tion and repro­duc­tion is the Reca­pit­u­la­tion! Sonata Form is uni­ver­sal. It is every­where around us.

I have used a fairly obvi­ous trick in this post, a hid­den gem if you like. Do you spot it? Let me know in the com­ments! :)

Fur­ther Reading

Aca­d­e­mic Read­ing on Musi­cal Forms
http://solomonsmusic.net/forms.htm
List of Clas­si­cal Music Forms by Era
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_forms

In the next post, we will dis­cuss dif­fer­ent musi­cal Gen­res and Styles.

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Understanding Key Musical Concepts

by Mahendra Posted on September 3, 2011

[This post is #4 in the West­ern Clas­si­cal Music Series]

After com­par­ing WCM with Indian Clas­si­cal, let us under­stand a few impor­tant con­cepts you will often encounter later in this series.

Major-Minor

In WCM, you will often find works titled as “Sym­phony in G Minor”, “Con­certo in A Major”, etc. What does that mean?

The ‘G Minor’ and ‘A Major’ refer to ‘scales’ or the sequence of notes start­ing from the note C or A. This sequence is dif­fer­ent between major and minor scales.

You do not need to under­stand or be able to iden­tify keys in order to appre­ci­ate WCM. So feel very com­fort­able ignor­ing these terms completely.

For begin­ners & ama­teurs (like myself), what helps is under­stand­ing how major and minor affect the over­all mood of the com­po­si­tion. Com­po­si­tions in the major scale sound con­fi­dent, pleas­ant, and happy. The minor scale, on the other hand, makes music sound melan­choly, intro­spec­tive, and dark.

If you are inter­ested in the struc­ture of major vs. minor scales, watch this:

Major and Minor Scales

As you can see, we real­ize the dif­fer­ence between major and minor when the 3rd note in the sequence is played:

  • In major, the 3rd note is 2-whole-steps above the 1st
  • In minor, the 3rd note is 1.5-steps above the 1st.

Does this mean that works in the major scale don’t use the keys in the minor scale? No. In WCM, we are not con­strained to using only ‘allowed’ keys, like in ICM ‘raa­gas’. A com­po­si­tion in the major scale may use all keys, but it will ‘come to rest’ or ‘resolve’, on the key that is in the major scale (and vice-versa for minor).

Why do major-minor scales cre­ate such con­trast­ing moods? We really don’t know. Research sug­gests that this phe­nom­e­non may not be restricted to music, but we may also be using it in our speech!

Another tan­ta­liz­ing aspect is how fre­quent was the use of Major vs. Minor in the course of his­tory. Sta­tis­tics show that ear­lier eras were pro­lific in com­pos­ing in the major scale, while lat­ter works have focused more on the minor scale. See stats and dis­cus­sion here.

Cat­a­logue / Index Numbers

You will also find “Op. 52″ and “KV 331″. These num­bers refer to the cat­a­logue or index num­ber of that com­po­si­tion within a composer’s reper­toire. You can safely ignore them, unless you want to be snob­bish and excit­edly remark “I like KV 551 more than the 550, as I’m an extro­vert” in a social sit­u­a­tion. The cat­a­loging of clas­si­cal works is quite a com­plex endeavor, and you can read more about it here if you’re aca­d­e­m­i­cally inclined.

Coun­ter­point

Coun­ter­point is not fun­da­men­tal to music, but an essen­tial ele­ment of *all* music, not just WCM. By def­i­n­i­tion, Coun­ter­point is “the rela­tion­ship between two or more voices that are inde­pen­dent in con­tour and rhythm and are har­mon­i­cally inter­de­pen­dent”. What does this mean? This describes it the best: “When there is more than one inde­pen­dent melodic line hap­pen­ing at the same time in a piece of music, we say that the music is ‘con­tra­pun­tal’. The inde­pen­dent melodic lines are called counterpoint.”

The ety­mol­ogy of the word is also very inter­est­ing. Roughly trans­lated as “note against note”, the inter­est­ing aspect comes from the aspect of stitch­ing. The melodies in coun­ter­point are ‘stitched’ together at an angle, such that they weave a pat­tern of har­mo­nious music.

What is the dif­fer­ence between Coun­ter­point and Har­mony? Nice descrip­tion from here: “The study of coun­ter­point empha­sizes the inde­pen­dence of indi­vid­ual lines of music. It deals with ways to com­bine these indi­vid­ual lines together to form a pleas­ant– sound­ing whole. The study of har­mony, on the other hand, is geared more towards form­ing and join­ing together chords to cre­ate a piece of music. Speak­ing in abstract terms, you could say that coun­ter­point is more “hor­i­zon­tal” and har­mony is more “vertical”.

Here is Coun­ter­point on the Guitar:

Coun­ter­point on Guitar

Coun­ter­point in West­ern Clas­si­cal Music: Bach’s Bran­den­burg Con­certo #5

Coun­ter­point in Bach’s Bran­den­burg Con­certo #5

Strictly speak­ing, it is not con­sid­ered coun­ter­point if one of the ‘voices’ is dom­i­nant and the rest are in the back­ground. How­ever, the con­tra­pun­tal tech­nique is uni­ver­sal, even in pop­u­lar music. Lis­ten to this pop­u­lar com­po­si­tion by Shankar-Jaikishen:

Coun­ter­point in Hindi Film Music

There are numer­ous musi­cal tech­niques involved in this very com­plex com­po­si­tion. There is ICM-style accom­pa­ni­ment, there is WCM-style devel­op­ment, etc. The main theme here is a con­sis­tent repeat of the major tone in a 3/3 time sig­na­ture.  (Old hindi film musi­cians used to term the instru­men­tal inter­ludes between stan­zas as ‘M1’, ‘M2’, and so on.) Lis­ten & observe the following:

  • Dur­ing 0:35 to 1:00, the back­ground ‘accom­pa­nies’ the vocals, like in ICM
  • From 1:05 to 1:20, there is coun­ter­point between the piano and the strings
  • From 1:40 the Coun­ter­point starts between the vocals and the orches­tra­tion, which con­tin­ues through­out the song
  • What hap­pens at 1:55, in the M1, is pure Coun­ter­point (and wor­thy of a WCM composition)
  • From 2:20 onwards, it is again back to ICM-style accom­pa­ni­ment to the vocals (if your ears are sen­si­tive, there is some con­tra­pun­tal music play­ing too)
  • There is no seri­ous Coun­ter­point in M2
  • 2nd vocal stanza fol­lows ICM accompaniment
  • Start­ing from 4:20 to 4:50 is Coun­ter­point bliss; amaz­ing, sim­ply amaz­ing use of Coun­ter­point here
  • Even at 5:23, observe how the human vocal per­sists with the rep­e­ti­tion in the tonic, while the back­ground strings move up and down in Counterpoint
  • From 5:37, the lead voice per­sists in its rep­e­ti­tion of the tonic, while orches­tra dances above, below, and beside it, as if it were try­ing to look over someone’s shoulder
  • From 5:50 onwards, no Coun­ter­point, just res­o­lu­tion of what your ears have lis­tened to before

Another exam­ple of ‘true’ Coun­ter­point in Hindi film music in the vocals: observe how the female voice sings a note in true coun­ter­point to the male lead vocal:

Vocal Coun­ter­point

Do I need to explain Coun­ter­point any further?

Syn­co­pa­tion

Syco­pa­tion is the effect pro­duced by plac­ing an accent on a beat of the bar which would not oth­er­wise have been strong.
From Wikipedia: “Syn­co­pa­tion is a gen­eral term for a dis­tur­bance or inter­rup­tion of the reg­u­lar flow of rhythm; a place­ment of rhyth­mic stresses or accents where they wouldn’t nor­mally occur”. Again, the tech­nique of Syn­co­pa­tion is not at all exclu­sive to WCM, it is in fact, more widely used in pop­u­lar and all kinds of music.

Watch this beau­ti­ful, excel­lent video for com­pletely under­stand­ing Syncopation:

Rhyth­mic Accent & Syncopation

Chro­mati­cism

Have you exper­i­mented with Chro­matog­ra­phy as a kid, by ‘sep­a­rat­ing’ out the dif­fer­ent ele­ments in a liq­uid by plac­ing a drop on a spe­cial kind of paper and watch­ing them spread out in con­cen­tric cir­cles? These sep­a­rate ele­ments are dif­fer­ent yet very close. The musi­cal equiv­a­lent is the Chro­matic Scale.

The Major and Minor scales we dis­cussed above use only 7 tones start­ing from a given key. The Chro­matic Scale uses all 12 tones of the octave. Chro­matic tech­niques cre­ate dis­so­nances that lead to a richer texture.

How does a melody sound in its orig­i­nal form and what hap­pens when you add Chro­mati­cism to it? Watch the first part of this till 1:40 (ignore the rest of the s/w demo):

Adding Chro­mati­cism to a melody

Watch this to observe how Chro­mati­cism is used on the Gui­tar in Rock Music:

Chro­mati­cism in Rock Guitar

Some folks mis­tak­enly think that Chro­mati­cism was used in WCM only later, dur­ing Renais­sance Period, but that is not true. Here is Bach’s Chro­matic Fan­tasy BMV903 per­formed by Glenn Gould (the Fugue is not part of this video):

Chro­mati­cism in Baroque Era

In “Idiot’s Guide” terms: When notes that are very, very inti­mately close together are used in a com­po­si­tion, such that they form a palette of col­ors, like you see in your Graphic Art soft­ware — that is Chro­mati­cism. Simple.

Next, we will look at some of the Forms used com­monly in West­ern Clas­si­cal Music.

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Western Classical vs. Indian Classical Music

by Mahendra Posted on August 31, 2011

[This post is #3 in the West­ern Clas­si­cal Music Series]

Related to the chal­lenges in appre­ci­at­ing WCM for Indi­ans, are the dif­fer­ences between WCM and Indian Clas­si­cal Music (ICM). Note that by “Indian Clas­si­cal”, I am refer­ring to both Hin­dus­tani as well as Car­natic. There are sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences between the two, but for our cur­rent focus, they can be con­sid­ered as one. Also, there are excep­tions to every point below, what we’re con­cerned with are broad differences.

Homophony vs. Polyphony / Melody vs. Harmony

ICM is pri­mar­ily homo­phonic, which means its focus is on melodies cre­ated using a sequence of notes. ICM’s magic is pri­mar­ily expe­ri­enced with dif­fer­ent melodies con­structed within the frame­work of the Raa­gas, while WCM’s magic lies to a great extent in poly­phonic com­po­si­tion, where coun­ter­point, har­mony, and the tex­ture cre­ated using mul­ti­ple voices is crit­i­cal. Melody exists in WCM too, but from a broad per­spec­tive, is not the sin­gu­lar or defin­ing focus of most of WCM works. Watch this brief video to lis­ten to the difference:

Homophony vs. Polyphony

Com­posed vs Improvised

WCM is com­posed, ICM is impro­vised. All WCM com­po­si­tions are for­mally writ­ten using the Staff Nota­tion, and per­form­ers have vir­tu­ally no lat­i­tude for impro­vi­sa­tion. The con­verse is the case with ICM, where no ‘work’ is ever writ­ten down, and the Teacher-Student tra­di­tion of learn­ing ICM leads to each per­for­mance being an improvisation.

Vocals/Instrumentation

Vocals are used in both ICM & WCM, but the way they’re treated in rela­tion to other instru­ments is dif­fer­ent. When vocals are used in ICM, all the rest of the instru­ments are mere ‘accom­pa­ni­ments’ — there are Tan­pooras that act like drones, har­mo­nium that fol­lows the tonal­ity of the voice by pro­vid­ing chords, etc. Whereas in WCM, when vocals are used, the instru­men­ta­tion still car­ries a lot of weight in the over­all com­po­si­tion.  In other words, Voice forms the basis of the struc­ture sur­round­ing an ICM recital, whereas it is an addi­tion to the instrumentally-generated struc­ture of a WCM composition.

The term ‘voice’ is hence used in a generic way in WCM and doesn’t always mean human voice. A ‘voice’ can be any theme played by an instru­ment. Thus, one can have a four-voice fugue being played on the piano using two hands, where each hand is play­ing one of four voices at any given time.

Group vs Indi­vid­ual Dynamics

In ICM, the indi­vid­ual per­former shines through his impro­vi­sa­tion. In any recital or per­for­mance, there is a lead vocal­ist or instru­men­tal­ist who expounds the raga, while oth­ers pro­vid­ing accom­pa­ni­ment are rel­e­gated to the back­ground (except for occa­sional inter­ludes where they show off their vir­tu­os­ity). In WCM, the com­poser and con­duc­tor shine as indi­vid­u­als, but the per­for­mance is largely a group effort. It is only in solo works and solo con­cer­tos that indi­vid­ual per­form­ers are under the spotlight.

Rhythm

ICM uses ‘Taal’ — a cycle of beats cen­tered around ‘Sam’ that repeats itself. WCM doesn’t use such com­plex beat cycles.

‘Shruti’ / Microtones

ICM makes exten­sive use of quarter-tones & micro­tones, usu­ally referred to as ‘Shruti’. WCM has a few micro­tonal pio­neers in recent times, but has largely been restricted to using semitones.

Con­so­nance & Dissonance

As far as I know, ICM doesn’t use or encour­age dis­so­nance. Mod­ern WCM has used dis­so­nance exten­sively to add to the tex­ture of the composition.

Nature & Spirituality

ICM has a closer, inti­mate asso­ci­a­tion with nature than WCM. Ragas have spe­cific times of day or sea­sons of the year asso­ci­ated with them, while most of WCM doesn’t have any such char­ac­ter­is­tic. ICM’s roots are spir­i­tual, while sec­u­lar works in WCM have roots in fac­tors like indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ences, sig­nif­i­cant his­tor­i­cal events in human his­tory, enter­tain­ment, occa­sions with dance cel­e­bra­tions, and so on.

Con­clud­ing Thoughts from Rabindranath Tagore

“For us, music has above all a tran­scen­den­tal sig­nif­i­cance. It dis­en­gages the spir­i­tual from the hap­pen­ings of life; it sings of the rela­tion­ships of the human soul with the soul of things beyond. The world by day is like Euro­pean music; a flow­ing con­course of vast har­mony, com­posed of con­cord and dis­cord and many dis­con­nected frag­ments. And the night world is our Indian music; one pure, deep and ten­der raga. They both stir us, yet the two are con­tra­dic­tory in spirit. But that can­not be helped. At the very root nature is divided into two, day and night, unity and vari­ety, finite and infi­nite. We men of India live in the realm of night; we are over­pow­ered by the sense of One and Infi­nite. Our music draws the lis­tener away beyond the lim­its of every­day human joys and sor­rows, and takes us to that lonely region of renun­ci­a­tion which lies at the root of the uni­verse, while Euro­pean music leads us a var­ie­gated dance through the end­less rise and fall of human grief and joy.”

Next, we will try to under­stand a few impor­tant musi­cal con­cepts.

Fur­ther Reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonance_and_dissonance

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Classical Music Appreciation: Challenges & Rewards

by Mahendra Posted on August 26, 2011

[This post is #2 in the West­ern Clas­si­cal Music Series]

After briefly under­stand­ing what is West­ern Clas­si­cal Music, let us think about some of the chal­lenges involved in appre­ci­at­ing it, and why it’s still worth it.

Chal­lenges

Com­plex­ity & Patience

Under­stand­ing clas­si­cal can be dif­fi­cult and takes patience. While you may become famil­iar with a pop­u­lar track the 2nd or 3rd time you lis­ten to it, most WCM works take dozens of repeated lis­ten­ing ses­sions to acquire basic familiarity.

The length of many WCM works is another issue. You can’t just spend 5 min­utes lis­ten­ing, enjoy­ing, and mov­ing on; most works range between 25 to 45 minutes.

Enjoy­ing pop­u­lar music typ­i­cally involves con­sciously lis­ten­ing to the vocals, while enjoy­ing the instru­men­ta­tion only dur­ing the inter­ludes. Lis­ten­ing to mul­ti­ple things at once doesn’t come eas­ily, and can be overwhelming.

Tip: Not all WCM is com­plex. You can move from a gra­di­ent that starts with sim­ple works and pro­gres­sively move to more and more com­plex works.

For exam­ple, does this seem difficult?

Or this?

Lack of Access to Live Concerts

WCM is best enjoyed lis­ten­ing live. Unfor­tu­nately, you may not have easy access to live per­for­mances of WCM espe­cially in coun­tries like India.

Tips: Today, there are sev­eral WCM soci­eties spread across urban India where not only can you learn WCM for­mally, but also attend live con­certs. For exam­ple, in Delhi, Mum­bai, Pune, Ban­ga­lore, etc. Also, it is not nec­es­sary that you attend a live con­cert first in order to start appre­ci­at­ing WCM. The first time I attended a live WCM con­cert was about 8–10 years after I started lis­ten­ing and studying.

Play­back Equip­ment & Environment

The require­ments of your play­back equip­ment and envi­ron­ment for WCM are rel­a­tively strin­gent. You need a greater level of ambi­ent silence. The acoustic deci­bel range of WCM is quite wide, so when lis­ten­ing to the softer pieces appro­pri­ately, your vol­ume level becomes quite high dur­ing other times when the whole orches­tra reaches a climax.

Tip: If you do not have the appro­pri­ate equip­ment and ambi­ence, lis­ten to WCM on head­phones. I started with and con­tin­ued for sev­eral years lis­ten­ing to WCM on head­phones on a Sony Walk­man using old cas­sette tapes.

Lack of Famil­iar­ity & Culture

If you like WCM, you may feel like liv­ing on a dif­fer­ent planet, with appar­ently nobody around you inter­ested in it. You may not have grown up lis­ten­ing to WCM which alien­ates you fur­ther. Elders around you may pas­sion­ately gush about Ustaad Vilayat Khan or some­one else, while there is nobody to lis­ten when you want to pas­sion­ately gush about Beethoven. You might even face resis­tance and admo­ni­tion if you express an inter­est in WCM while seem­ingly remain­ing igno­rant about your own cul­tural heritage.

Tips: I learnt to appre­ci­ate WCM all by myself dur­ing the late 80s, when there was no Inter­net. Today, you have access to the web and social net­works, where con­nect­ing with other enthu­si­asts is much sim­pler. You are not alone, there are many, many peo­ple who may be feel­ing just like you do. Also, you may already be famil­iar with a lot of works in WCM and just not know it. We will cover how WCM is used in numer­ous movies (and adver­tise­ments) later, which might be a new dis­cov­ery for you, where your response would start with – “Oh this? I never knew…”.
Finally, remem­ber that all music is uni­ver­sal. By appre­ci­at­ing WCM you are not dis­re­spect­ing or ignor­ing any other tra­di­tional music or her­itage. In fact, if you are able to appre­ci­ate the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ences between WCM and say, Hin­dus­tani Clas­si­cal, you will gain more insight into Hin­dus­tani Clas­si­cal than you would have if you had ignored WCM altogether.

Does this work seem familiar?

Rewards

If you are read­ing this, there is really no need for me to describe the ful­fill­ment of appre­ci­at­ing WCM, but I’ll express a few points anyway.

WCM is Rich, both Intel­lec­tu­ally & Emotionally

The depth of intel­lec­tual sat­is­fac­tion you can get from Clas­si­cal Music (Indian or West­ern) is unpar­al­leled. The rewards are pro­por­tional to the effort you put in. It is for a rea­son that such music is described as “Clas­si­cal” in the first place!

Are You A Nerd?

Here are 7 Rea­sons Nerds Should Lis­ten To West­ern Clas­si­cal Music, extremely well-articulated.

Mak­ing Friends: Part I

If you dive into appre­ci­at­ing WCM, you will make new friends in real life. Yes, pre­cisely those peo­ple who also feel they’re liv­ing on a dif­fer­ent planet. They will have found some­one to talk to, and you will form a bond.

Mak­ing Friends: Part II

If you are a good friend of any­one, you know that lis­ten­ing is a very impor­tant part of friend­ship. Well, in WCM, you can make friends with Com­posers. These com­posers come from dif­fer­ent eras, with dif­fer­ent skills, dif­fer­ing per­son­al­i­ties, dif­fer­ing ide­olo­gies. Once you under­stand about the life of a com­poser very closely,  he becomes an inti­mate friend.

Just like you get to know a friend by know­ing some­thing about his back­ground, you get to know a WCM com­poser inti­mately by know­ing his back­ground. This is a key aspect of appre­ci­at­ing WCM – if you want to appre­ci­ate a work, you’ve got to get inside the mind of the com­poser and under­stand the con­text of his life when he com­posed it. The reward? See Part III.

Mak­ing Friends: Part III

Once you have fully appre­ci­ated a WCM work, it itself becomes a friend. Believe me, it does. Once you know a WCM work inti­mately, appre­ci­ate its nuances, it becomes a rock that you can turn to any time in your life. WCM has a last­ing per­ma­nence, that has sur­vived cen­turies, so it should be no surprise.

Next, let us look at the dif­fer­ences between West­ern Clas­si­cal and Indian Clas­si­cal Music.

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What Is Western Classical Music?

by Mahendra Posted on August 26, 2011

[This post is #1 in the West­ern Clas­si­cal Music Series]

For some, West­ern Clas­si­cal Music (WCM) is what plays in the back­ground in ele­va­tors, recep­tion rooms, and lounges. For oth­ers, it is what snob­bish ‘intel­lec­tual’ artsy folks indulge in pre­ten­tiously. In a series of blogs posts, we will try to go beyond these myopic per­spec­tives and try to get a glimpse of what is great, enlight­en­ing, and thor­oughly enjoy­able about WCM.

The term “Clas­si­cal Music” orig­i­nates from the Latin clas­si­cus, mean­ing first class, or for the Romans, artistry of the high­est order. It encom­passes a vast range of music styles over a period of 800 years. Some­times, the term “Art Music” is used. West­ern Clas­si­cal is just one among many dif­fer­ent tra­di­tions of clas­si­cal music, so when we’re dis­cussing WCM, we’re specif­i­cally dis­cussing Euro­pean Clas­si­cal Music. To make mat­ters more con­fus­ing, there is a spe­cific period in his­tory referred to as the “Clas­si­cal Period”, which dif­fer­en­ti­ates the style of music in that era from other eras pre­ced­ing and suc­ceed­ing it. We shall delve into these dif­fer­ent ‘Peri­ods’ in sub­se­quent posts. The point is to be con­tex­tu­ally aware of what is meant by “Clas­si­cal” when you’re read­ing or con­vers­ing with others.

Through­out the his­tory of WCM, there have been two strands of evo­lu­tion, usu­ally dis­tin­guish­able from each other, which evolved in par­al­lel – Church Music and Sec­u­lar Music. For exam­ple, Church Music includes Gre­go­rian Chants, Car­ols, Mass, and Requiems, while Sec­u­lar Music includes sonatas, con­cer­tos, sym­phonies, and opera. Both Church and Sec­u­lar Music influ­enced each other, while evolv­ing and adapt­ing to man’s ide­o­log­i­cal progress in his­tory. In this series, I shall be focused on Sec­u­lar Music for the most part, except where dis­cussing notable works or influ­ences of Church Music.

What pri­mar­ily dif­fer­en­ti­ates Clas­si­cal Music from Pop­u­lar Music? Wikipedia lists a set of char­ac­ter­is­tics that can be said to be unique to Clas­si­cal Music, they’re quite infor­ma­tive. The key aspect I would like to high­light is unlike Pop­u­lar Music, Clas­si­cal Music is best appre­ci­ated if there is an effort from the listener.

Because this series of posts is about WCM Appre­ci­a­tion, let me empha­size this ele­ment. There are two ways of appre­ci­at­ing any music – cere­bral and emo­tional, or from the mind and the heart. Cere­bral lis­ten­ing requires a men­tal effort on the part of the lis­tener, while our emo­tional response is usu­ally auto­matic and lies in our sub­con­scious. Nei­ther are the two ways mutu­ally exclu­sive, nor is one right and the other wrong. Both are very valid, very real. We shift from one to the other even dur­ing the process of lis­ten­ing. And, you can appre­ci­ate Pop­u­lar Music in a cere­bral fash­ion too.

You can sim­ply lis­ten to WCM and like it with­out think­ing much about it. If you do, go ahead and enjoy your­selves! Noth­ing what­so­ever wrong about it. I how­ever, pas­sion­ately believe that a superla­tive appre­ci­a­tion of WCM comes from a syn­the­sis of both cere­bral and emo­tional approaches. With­out an under­stand­ing of the form and struc­ture of WCM, or lack of knowl­edge of a spe­cific work’s place in his­tory, you might still enjoy lis­ten­ing to it with­out under­stand­ing it, but you will not fully appre­ci­ate it as it is meant to be. This is a debat­able topic and I don’t wish to engage in such a debate here. You are free to dis­agree. This series of posts is my attempt to pro­vide the insight that when cou­pled with emo­tion, leads to a ful­fill­ing appreciation.

A final dis­claimer: I am an ama­teur, not a pro­fes­sional musi­cian. My attempts to pro­vide insight may likely be clumsy at times or fre­quently, so if you have a bet­ter, deeper under­stand­ing, please do share your insight as we go along. This series is not meant to be a one-way dis­course, but rather to set a plat­form for mean­ing­ful engage­ment and dis­cus­sion on the topic of West­ern Clas­si­cal Music.

There are chal­lenges in appre­ci­at­ing WCM. But the rewards are equally great. We’ll look at both in the next post.

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Western Classical Music: The Landscape

by Mahendra Posted on August 23, 2011

The encour­ag­ing response to my teaser post has pro­pelled me towards think­ing of an out­line for how to struc­ture this series. Here is the first draft of my pro­posed outline.

Intro­duc­tion

  • What is Clas­si­cal Music? Brief History.
  • Dif­fer­ences between Hin­dus­tani & WCM
  • Chal­lenges in WCM appreciation

The Basics

  • Peri­ods (and why they’re important)
  • Genres/Styles (ditto)
  • WCM used in Movies (for eas­ier appreciation)
  • Some key terms explained (Sonata Form, Major/Minor, Coun­ter­point, etc.)
  • Rec­om­mended Lis­ten­ing for Begin­ners (sam­pling across genres/periods)

Resources

  • Movies about WCM
  • Doc­u­men­taries about WCM
  • Books on WCM

Dig­ging Deep Into Spe­cific Works

  • Mozart 40/41
  • Beethoven 5/7
  • And some others

Am I miss­ing out some­thing you were look­ing for? Any sug­ges­tions? Any feed­back appreciated.

Posted in Arts, music | 8 Comments

Western Classical Music Appreciation: Are You Interested?

by Mahendra Posted on August 19, 2011

I have been tweet­ing on week­ends about West­ern Clas­si­cal Music and learn­ing to appre­ci­ate it. Some folks have rightly pointed out that Twit­ter is a very dif­fi­cult medium to impart as well as imbibe any­thing use­ful and last­ing, and that I should be writ­ing blog posts about it instead.

The chal­lenge for me is that every blog post I write is like a com­posed Sonata Form. It will take a lot of effort from my side to write a series of posts about WCM appre­ci­a­tion. Depend­ing upon the num­ber of folks who are seri­ously inter­ested, I’m will­ing to con­sider doing it.

This series of posts would be much like my Favorite Films (A-Z) series of posts that appealed to more film enthu­si­asts than I could ever imagine.

Note that I am not a ‘learned scholar’ of any sort, just an ama­teur enthu­si­ast who is pas­sion­ate about music in gen­eral, and WCM in particular.

I also know this blog has lost almost all of its reg­u­lar read­ers, thanks to many fac­tors, many of them pri­mar­ily because of me.

So I am writ­ing this teaser post to gauge the level of inter­est in WCM appre­ci­a­tion and the extent of my audi­ence. If you hap­pen to read this, and are deeply and seri­ously inter­ested, just leave a com­ment. I will run this post for a week or two, and depend­ing upon the com­ments, will decide whether to dive in and do a series of posts or just ram­ble on aim­lessly on Twitter.

Thank you.

Posted in music | Tagged | 12 Comments

Majida-El-Roumi “Kalimat” (Words)

by Mahendra Posted on August 12, 2011

In the early 1990’s I was intro­duced to Majida El Roumi. I call her the “Nightin­gale of the Middle-East” in def­er­ence to the “Nightin­gale of India”. I present to you her most pop­u­lar and beloved song (which is, unfor­tu­nately, in two parts due to YouTube’s lim­i­ta­tions on the length of videos):

and

This is the orig­i­nal sound record­ing. You will find dif­fer­ent record­ings of this pop­u­lar song per­formed in var­i­ous con­certs worldwide.

In my opin­ion, this nightin­gale has done for Ara­bic music, what Salil Chowd­hury did to Hindi Film Music – learned, absorbed, and incul­cated West­ern Clas­si­cal ideas into their own tra­di­tional music.

Prefer­ably, you should lis­ten to “Kali­mat” at a very, very loud vol­ume as is pos­si­ble, sit­ting at a com­fort­able dis­tance away from the speak­ers, such that the nuances of the entire orches­tra­tion reach you, with­out jarring.

Lis­ten to the orches­tra­tion. The themes are bold, the orches­tra­tion switch­ing between arro­gance & gen­tle­ness, adamant & empa­thetic. The rhythm pulses like a heart­beat, that races to a level of excite­ment and then never looks back. And within that level of excite­ment, the orches­tra­tion man­ages to find adren­a­line as well as empa­thy. Beau­ti­ful as well as artis­ti­cally, musi­cally, almost impos­si­ble. These are emo­tions sweep­ing both mind and heart, and the music sym­bol­izes not only your pul­sat­ing heart­beat, but also your ana­lyt­i­cal mind.

Thanks to HyperActiveX’s com­ment below, I real­ized, I had not cred­ited the com­poser Ihsan Al-Mounzer suf­fi­ciently. Here he is, rehears­ing his own mas­ter­piece (this is an invalu­able video in itself – see how he per­forms the whole com­po­si­tion on just the piano!)

Finally, to the inter­pre­ta­tion and mean­ing. I don’t under­stand Ara­bic, nei­ther did I know about what the lyrics of this song actu­ally meant, until more than a dozen years after I began to love it. For me, it evoked a mul­ti­tude of emo­tions – a feel­ing of cat­a­clysm, how man can con­quer nature ulti­mately, and so on. But the actual lyrics mean some­thing totally dif­fer­ent and they are won­der­ful. Here is the orig­i­nal, intended, mean­ing (cour­tesy):

He tells me,
When he dances with me,
Words that aren’t like words
He takes me under­neath my arm
And plants me in a cloud

And the black rain in my eye
Pours down… pours
He car­ries me with him… he car­ries me
To a night on a rose-filled terrace

And I am like a child in his hand
Like a feather car­ried on the breeze
He car­ries for me seven moons
In his hand a bunch of songs

He gives me a sun… he gives me
A sum­mer and a flock of swallows

He tells me… that I am his mas­ter­piece
And I am equal to thou­sands of stars
And that I am a trea­sure… and that I am
More beau­ti­ful than any paint­ing he’d ever seen

He tells me things that make me giddy
That make me for­get the dance hall and the steps
Words that upturn my his­tory
That make me a woman in seconds

He’s builds me a cas­tle of illu­sions
I don’t live in it except for a few moments
And I return, I return to my table
With noth­ing with me… except words

Isn’t it won­der­ful? I have a very old record­ing of Maji­dah her­self per­form­ing on stage on a VHS cas­sette, and it is price­less. Music can say so much, and say so many dif­fer­ent things to dif­fer­ent people!

Hope you like this.

Posted in music, women | Tagged , , | 17 Comments

Rain, as Catharsis of the Sky

by Mahendra Posted on July 29, 2011

I wrote this in 1993, and I have now trans­lated it to Eng­lish. I am includ­ing both ver­sions here. Eng­lish first.

The Sky had spent many days har­bor­ing its sor­rows within itself. There were many clouds over its usu­ally clear, light and cloud­less frame of mind, due to the weight of many days of conflict.

We often find a unique rep­re­sen­ta­tion of our emo­tions in many facets of nature. The pangs of despair and the ache result­ing from it had found sym­bolic rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the light­ning that ensued.

The sud­den, unex­pected, short-lived, but blind­ing light­ning was slash­ing against the Sky’s heart. The cruel, sav­age light­ning turned the help­less Sky into a wounded soul.

The Wind was con­vey­ing the state of this wounded Sky every­where; it was run­ning in all direc­tions, fran­ti­cally search­ing for help. But no one lis­tened. The flora and fauna on the Earth couldn’t look at this depressed state of the Sky, and wanted to help, but they were rooted to the Earth. They were not free to leave the con­fines of their Mother Earth. The trees were sway­ing lis­ten­ing to the story from the wind, trem­bling in vain attempts to reach out to the Sky, but they couldn’t move.

Notwith­stand­ing all this, the tor­ture of the light­ning con­tin­ued. The Sky’s pains and anguish grew. There were thun­der­storms. The Sky began to shud­der. After cross­ing its limit for grief, the Sky, already drawn to the point of tears, began cry­ing. Teardrops began to fall. As if it was pour­ing its heart out in cry­ing, rain began to fall.

The Earth, who had been wit­ness­ing all this silently, ran to the res­cue. The Earth’s soil emanated that unique fra­grance, reach­ing out to the Sky, offer­ing a shoul­der for it to cry. The Sky was out­pour­ing all its grief that it had held for a very long time, and kept rain­ing, seek­ing the warmth of the Earth. The essence of this embrace between Earth and Sky was sym­bol­ized by that unique fra­grance, where they met and caressed each other…

Now the orig­i­nal Marathi version:

आभाळ अनेक दिवसांचे ओझं स्वतःकडेच बाळगून होतं. खूप दिवसांच्या संघर्षाच्या वजनाने त्याच्या एरवीच्या स्वछ, हलक्या, निरभ्र मनस्थितीवर मळभ चढलं होतं.

आपल्या भावनांचं मूर्त स्वरूप सृष्टीत एका अलौकिक समर्पकपणाने आढळतं, जसं काही दिवसांपूर्वी प्रयत्न करून झगडणारी झाडांची मुळे दिसली. गेल्या काही महिन्यातल्या दुखांच्या वेन्दानांना व होणाऱ्या यातनांना विजांच्यास्वरूपात मूर्तता सापडली.

त्यांच्या अचानक, अनपेक्षित, तात्कालिक तीव्रतेने आंधळं करणाऱ्या विजा आभाळाच्या काळजाला ओरबाडत होत्या. त्या भीषण, क्रूर विजांनी असह्य आभाळाला जखमी करून सोडलं.

आभाळाची ही घायाळ दश वारा सर्वत्र सांगत सुटला, ही घटना सर्व दिशांना पसरवत गेला, मदतीच्या शोधात तो सैरावैरा धावत होता.

पण कोणीही आलं नाही. आभाळाची ही अवस्था धर्तीवरच्या सृष्टीला पाहवत नव्हती. पण ती धरतीला बांधली होती, मदतीला धावायला मुक्त नव्हती. वार्याची वर्णनं ऐकून झाडंविव्हळत होती, व्याकुळतेने आभाळापर्यंत पोहोचायचा प्रयत्न करत होती पण त्यांना आपल्या जागेवरून हलता येईना.

ह्या सर्वाला न जुमानता विजांचा छळ चालूच होता. आभाळाच्या यातना वाढत गेल्या. मेघगर्जना होऊ लागल्या. आभाळ हुंदके देऊ लागलं. प्रतीकार्शक्तीची सीमारेषा ओलांडल्यावर ओथंबलेल्या अवस्थेत अस्वस्थ असलेलं आभाळ रडू लागलं. अश्रू वाहू लागले. आभाळ ढसाढसा रडत असल्यासारखा पाउस पडू लागला.

आत्तापर्यंत शांत बसलेली धर्तीही आभाळाच्या मदतीला धाऊन आली. आपल्या मातीचा दर्वळत्या वासाने तिने आभाळापर्यंत आपल्या आधाराचा खांदा पोहोचवला. आपलं साठलेलं ओझं आभाळ वाहू देत होतं, स्वतःला धर्तीपर्यंत पोहोचवत होतं.

धरती व आभाळाच्या ह्या मीलनाचं सारांश त्या मातीच्या दरवळत्या वासात सामावलेलं होतं…

Posted in marathi, Personal | Tagged | 13 Comments