Alright. So we've talked about
the beat, rhythm, melody, harmony,
texture, dynamics, tempo,
and articulation. So let's put it all together in a piece of music.
So this is a piano transcription which means this piece was originally
written for something else but it has been written
now for piano, called the Hungarian Dance Number 5, by Johannes Brahms who is a
composer from the 19th Century.
So we had a 19th Century composer, he's going to use lots of different elements
because that's just what they did then.
So let's start first with just the melody. So this is our opening melody
from the Hungarian Dance.
Alright, if you had to describe that melody in terms of articulation
what would you say? OK!
Mostly it's legato. Everything's pretty connected right till the very end we have
a couple of staccato notes
at the end so mostly a very legato kind of melody.
Is it conjunct or disjunct? Does it move by steps or does it move by skips?
(plays music)
We would call that a disjunct melody. Yes, it has a few little passages where the notes
are
moving by steps but mostly it's a lot of jumping around, so we would say this is a
mostly disjunct melody.
Now let's listen to what the harmony part has.
(plays music)
OK, think about that in terms of articulation. How would you describe that?
Yes, it's stocatta. It's mostly
it's like separated notes with the occasional
legato for contrast because we like to have our contrast.
Are you going to call that a melody? I don't think so. It's repetitive,
yes, but it's also not particularly interesting. That's because
all it is is a set of chords. Remember, three notes makes a chord.
So we just have our chords running along behind us. This happens to be in the
key of A minor, so we are in a minor key. Here's a chance for you to listen for that sort
of quality.
Let's put those two parts together.
(plays music)
Okay, so we have those two parts together. What would you call the tempo of that?
Here's our underlying bit... (playing music)
Remember tempo was subjective, so if you were listening to
(playing music) and you were counting that as 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2
you might think that's a pretty fast tempo. But really those are
divided beats. This is a a simple meter
1-2-1-2-1-2 So that's your real tempo.
But again, you still might think that's fast, or you might think it's fun...
fairly slow. The tempo that Brahms has put on the piece
is allegretto moderato, so
a little bit fast, but not too fast. So what seems...
you know that seems like a good tempo to me. That's a comfortable tempo for me to play
it. So that's the noe you're going to get!
So, we had within that,
at the very end, we even had some accents in the...
in the accompaniment part.
(playing music)
Accent! (playing music)
(playing music)
So it's got this nice contrast, nice legatto, disjunct melody on the top.
Staccato - basically chords - on the bottom.
Alright, now the next section of the piece. See if you can figure out what he's done here?
(playing music)
What's different about that? It's exactly like the beginning except everything is
shifted up an octave so we have exactly the same music,
just everything is an octave higher. It just gives you the same melody, so you can
get it in your head,
but it gives us a little bit of variety as well. Alright, let's go to the next section.
So here's our new melody. It's a different section
of the piece now.
(playing music)
Alright, so we have there
accents - pom pom pom. We also have that rhythmic thing that we talked about,
syncopation. So here's our beat (playing music)
bomb - it comes in the wrong place - it's not on a beat!
That's syncopation! (playing music)
And we have that
repeated through this section. Let's listen to the other part.
(playing music)
It's a little more interesting than it was at the beginning because
it sort of bounces back and forth instead of being chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk.
So he's taken the same basic idea,
broken it up a little bit to give you more interest. So here's how it goes together.
(playing music)
Now, dynamics! What do you hear there?
That again is subjective. That particular section is marked as mezzo-forte so
sorto of medium-loud.
The first section is marked mostly piano, so soft.
But if you're playing a solo, you know, there's nobody else playing,
pian is going to be a relative term. It's going to be louder than you might think.
So far we haven't had any really loud parts to this.
Alright, so let's back up a little bit and take you into the next section. See
if you can figure out what happens!
(playing music)
OK, so we had several things that happened there!
we had a little bit of a diminuendo going from the syncopated section into
the next part.
We also had a tempo change, so we went from...
(playing music)
We had a tempo change. Did we retard? Not really! He's one of those that just says, Hey
let's suddenly
be slower! So we slowed down, and when we slowed down,
he also made it softer, so it's really a big dramatic difference.
(playing music)
Another syncopation there! (continues playing music)
And then... (playing music)
'A tempo' - going back to the original tempo,
loud, accented, big contrast from the opening section.
Alright, let's move on.
(playing music)
Nothing particularly dramatic or exciting there, right? We have
a melody that is sort of like chords because we've got (plays music) a little duet going here.
(playing music)
So you might imagine a soprano and an alto singing together there in a nice
little harmony
with the bottom part. Here's the next section.
(playing music)
So here he says, OK, let's go slow, he's got a little retard,
with accents, and he moved the melody to the bottom so that gives us more interest
because it's now down here... (plays music)
...and the right hand is playing the harmony.
Speeds it up, slows it back down,
speeds it back up. So you get this kind of a push and pull going on.
Here's our next section.
Same thing!
Slowing it down! Speeding it up!
(playing music)
And then back to
the same sort of thing so we can see this fairly short piece. This was only two pages
long...
There's lots of things: we have dynamic changes, we have tempo changes, we have
legato versus staccato, we have
octave displacements, we have syncopation.
Lots of different things that we've talked about all combined into a single piece.
So as your listening to pieces further down the line, if you forget what a
particular thing sounds like,
you could come back to this, listen to this again, get a reminder about what those
different techniques
sound like. Now let's talk about the texture of this. That's the one element that we haven't
covered yet.
remember our textures are monophonic where it's just melody.
Does that apply? Obviously not. We've got lots going on.
So we have two choices. The other one is homophonic where we have
basically a melody with some sort of chords going along with it,
or polyphonic, where we would have multiple melodies happening at the same
time.
This is a pretty straightforward example of homophonic texture.
This part... (playing music)
...it's not a melody. It's not something that's going to be
particularly memorable. It's not the
thing that you're focusing on. You're focusing on this.
(playing music)
So this whole piece is a homophonic text. You have a melody that's either here or
occasionally in the left hand and the rest of it is basically
chords or pieces of chords giving
balance and texture and depth to your piece of music. So
that's the last element except for form and we're not going to talk about the form of this
one right now,
but you see all the little pieces come together and we create
one really lovely piece of music by Brahms!