All right, we've been talking about the Classical period and the events of that period of
time. And one of the things we looked at
in looking at the art of the period was the architecture
and how everything
was very clean,
lots of marble, lots of columns,
very balanced.
That's in great contrast to the Baroque architecture that preceded it.
The same thing happens in music. So whereas we've been in the Baroque period, we
had all this highly ornamented kind of music, very busy,
lots of grandeur.
When we get into the Classical period the music is much simpler in terms of
that sort of thing.
Don't make
the mistake of thinking that the music is easy, though.
Simpler in terms of how it's constructed perhaps,
but very complex as well. So
it's just we're taking out all the little frou-frou-y bits out of the Baroque
period. So...
just as the buildings of the Classical period are very balanced and symmetrical
we see the same thing in the music structures of the period.
No more of
those long rolling out melodies that we saw in the Baroque period.
A melody in the Classical period is going to be
much more
structured in terms of what what you hear personally.
Think about
prose.
We could do some
Faulkneresque sorts of sentences that go on forever. I think it's Faulkner who
tends to write
sentences that last for entire paragraphs.
Think of that as your Baroque model.
What we're not going all the way over to somebody like Hemingway whose sentences can
be really short,
but somewhere in the middle. But we are gonna feel the sense of the
sentence.
We didn't have any breathing points to speak of in Baroque music.
Now we're gonna really feel it: (breathes)
"Okay, that's the end of that little section,
we are moving on."
We call those little breaks phrases.
So in
classical period music the phrases are much more clear and they're very
consistent for the most part.
So if you were listening to a piece of Classical music and you were just tapping the
beat to yourself,
you would find
that the number of beats
between each of those little pausing sections
tends to be consistent.
So you might have sixteen beats
and a breath, sixteen beats and a breath.
So, very balanced,
very symmetrical, very consistent. That is typical
of the classical style.
It gives us a sense of
closure that we didn't necessarily always get in the Baroque period.
It is easier to tell that we are at the end of a
section
in Classical music because it's all so nicely organized for us.
And you might imagine if you'd been listening to Baroque music your whole life, in that period of
time, this might be very refreshing to have this sort of
balanced, relaxed approach to things.
So the melodies themselves, we've already said that they have a fairly
consistent length of phrasing.
They're also going to be, mostly going to be conjunct in nature.
Much more stepwise motion,
not so much jumping about as we would hear in the Baroque period.
So
they're a little more singable, you know; if you had to sing an instrumental
melody from the Classical period, it's a little easier to do than Baroque melody
would be.
We still have that steady rhythm from the Baroque period.
So the beat
is still fairly consistent.
You'll see more slowing down and speeding up, but it's not going to be very
dramatic, it's not going to be like "wow, listen to how much that ritard happened"
or "wow, what an accelerando there."
It's just going to be
a little bit of the give-and-take, usually
toward the end of a section or the end of a phrase. There's not going to be
much of that happening within phrase structures.
So we're keeping that aspect of
the Baroque style.
In harmony,
remember in the Baroque period it was
very quickly moving; the chords changed at all the time.
In the Classical period that's not so much the case.
Remember that we are now well into using the equal tempered system
and that whole major-minor system.
So in the Classical period three chords become really important.
Those, we call them the I chord,
the IV chord,
and the V chord. And those are indicated by Roman numerals, capitalized Roman numerals.
So if you see capitalized Roman numerals
you know they're talking about
chords.
Now if you see lower case Roman numerals we're still talking about chords but that
means they're minor chords, not major chords.
So the I, IV, and V are like
the triumvirate
of chord structure.
You could
sing thousands of songs from the popular repertoire with just those three
songs.
And if you're a guitarist,
if you can learn those .
three chords--sorry, three chords not three songs--
I, IV and V in some key, you can play tons of music. Then that's all
you have to know.
Now that doesn't mean
that's all they played in the classical period obviously,
but those chords are really important.
And so what happens is that you will hear
that one chord
last
for a fairly long time.
Now that doesn't mean that we're just going to hear
"Chooooooord": that would be boring.
But what you listen for as you're listening to the music
is try to figure out what's the note that sort of ties everything else together. And
usually it will be on the bottom because the bass notes are gonna be
the bottom of the chord.
And you can just hear
that there is a note that stays in there for a long time and then
it'll change for a while
and then it comes back.
And we would like to come back to "I" over and over again: that's our home.
So, when you hear that very stable harmonic structure where the chords aren't changing
very much, even though the melody might be moving a lot,
you can still feel like "I can hum this one note for a long time."
That's a good indicator that it's probably Classical style.
Now remember in the Baroque period we talked about terraced dynamics where things are
suddenly louder or suddenly softer.
In the Classical period we start to see
much more use of crescendos and decrescendos. So composers are actually
putting that in the music: get louder here,
get softer there.
There's actually an orchestra in Mannheim, Germany, was sort of the
driving force behind this and
they were so good at it that they actually made up names for the ways that they
did that. So that getting
gradually louder, like really, really building and really, really building until
they had this big finish
was called the steamroller.
And they had another one where they did this disjunct sort of thing. They got higher
and louder: that was called the rocket.
The modern group Mannheim Steamroller actually gets their name from something that comes
from the Classical period
which was a new technique and how to make dynamics change. So down so there's your
mini
trivia lesson,
there's your Jeopardy question for the day.
So we have crescendos and decrescendos now.
One of the things that composers like to use a lot in Classical music,
particularly instrumental music,
was rhythms from dance forms.
Remember this is a period of time when, if you were a bit,
basically
sort of well-rounded,
citizen, even if you weren't rich
you learned certain dances.
You learned to do the gavotte; you learned to do the pavane. You did all these
things with very prescribed steps.
But the music that goes with those dances
also has
rhythms, particular rhythms, that are associated
with them.
So, a composer in the Classical period might say, "okay, I want to write
a suite, a set of dances,
and I'm going to
base this one on the sarabande rhythm," which has
traditionally had
a triple meter and it's has this like
(singing)
rhythm.
You, as a person of the world in the time,
would hear that rhythm and go "oh, that's a sarabande, I recognize that rhythm."
The composers weren't writing this music so you could dance to it;
they were writing it
for listening purposes. But they were taking things that people would have
known.
And it might be if there's a
particular line dance today that has a rhythm that you know always happens--
even the polka, the schottische, those kinds of dances, have particular rhythms--
you would hear it and you would recognize it and be like "oh, that's where he's taking that from."
So composers were using lots of
what we might think of as
popular kinds of styles,
but moving them into
an arts
kind of world.
So where were these composers working?
For the most part they worked for somebody just as they did in the Baroque
period:
working for the church, working for courts. We're starting to see the
beginnings of the sort of independent composer
but there's really not a market yet
for that. You can't make a lot of money
and pay for your family doing that so
they're still working for other people for the most part.
And we'll see that change later.
But for now that's a good model, a good business model for composers and
performers.
So now let's take a look at
some of the big names, or
really big names that you'll know in the Classical period
and look at how they've taken these particular elements of style
and incorporated it into
specific works of music.