Classical Era Lecture 2 - Characteristics of the classical style

Hello again. All right, so we're continuing with where I left off with sort of an introduction to the Classical era. Last time, I talked a little bit about the dates of the Classical era, which again are 1750 to 1820. No particular significance to those dates, really. We have a gradual transition into the Baroque, else right, into the classical style from the Baroque, and then again from the classical style into the Romantic era, roughly seventy years later. And I talked a little bit about the significance of the word “classical.” We could sort of boil it down pretty simply into: it means something that is old. There’s a reference, a different understanding, that that something is a classic because it’s old, but it’s also good and it is of high quality. And the reason that we know that it is of high quality—whatever the thing is that we’re calling a classic—could be a movie, could be a car, could be a work of art, could be anything, really—the reason we know that it’s good is that it is old, but we still value it. It doesn’t—it’s not degraded with age; in fact, it’s its age has proven its worth, in a sense, because it has stood the test of time.

I also talked a little bit last time about this more general historical era that we find ourselves in. So keep in mind the Classical era in music; when we use that term in music, we mean 1750 to 1820, or thereabouts. But that period of time in general history is, I would say, the tail end of a larger historical era which we would call the Enlightenment, sometimes called the 18th-century Enlightenment. And I talked quite a bit last time—I won’t go in too much into that—about what the Enlightenment was all about. So, huge, fascinating topic, but keep in mind some of the basics of the Enlightenment way of thinking, the Enlightenment approach to things, which stressed logic and being reasonable and using the mind, I guess, as opposed to going with tradition, going with religion, going with feelings. It’s sort of a head versus heart kind of thing. And again, I’m being very simplistic about this; it’s—I’m not really doing it justice by any means, but just to review a little bit what I talked about last time.

Also last time, I talked about how during this time—this period of time is a period of tremendous societal change and upheaval—and I mentioned how this affected, in particular, the role of the composer; that is, the working circumstances that the average composer found himself in, which is undergoing a change from this time—from, let’s say, the traditional court composer type of job description that, let’s say, someone like, you know, Bach had. Had jobs like this, although the last few decades of his life he worked as a church musician. Hiding the oldest of our classical era composers worked for most of his life as a court composer. But over the course of the Classical era, we see a transition so that by the time we get to the end of the Classical era, but with Beethoven, who is the youngest, the latest of our three classical masters—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—after Beethoven, we don’t really see this—this type of role anymore, this kind of job description, court composer. And instead, composers tend to be more freelance; they are in business for themselves, and they sell their music to publishers. They might also make a living as performers. They might have a patron who will—will give them money in exchange for dedicating a piece of music to them, but that’s a little bit different from having a boss who is, let’s say, a prince, whose employee you are, who you have to compose for in a certain way to suit his tastes because he’s paying your bills. That’s a little bit different from having a wealthy patron who commissions a work from you but is not telling you how it should sound or what it should be like.

So this change in society—I should talk a little bit more about the broader change, really, that’s happening—this is, you know, what’s affecting composers is just one small piece of what’s happening in a more general sense. And what is happening is—keeping in mind these different classes of society that I’ve been talking about all along, right, since the Middle Ages—right, the Middle Ages—I’ve said that, okay, we have three main classes of society: there’s the clergy, there’s the nobility, and together they make up maybe one or two percent of the population, and then there’s everybody else. Everybody else—they’re mostly peasants; they’re mostly working the land, because this is—it’s an agrarian society; you just need a lot of people to raise enough—to do the work to raise food to feed everybody. And as we move into the Renaissance, the church, which had been the most powerful segment of society—let’s say the church is the most powerful institution in medieval Europe, and therefore the clergy were the most powerful class of people—their power begins to decline in the late Middle Ages, and the power of the nobility, who were—who had long been sort of nipping at their heels, trying to knock the clergy off from their position as king of the hill—well, in the Renaissance, the nobility come into their own, especially the aristocracy, the very upper level of the nobility. And this trend continues into the age of absolutism, which is the name that we give to this broader historical era within which we find the Baroque. Right, okay. So now what’s happening is that during, let’s say, the hundred years or so from about 1750 on into 1850 and really beyond, but the aristocracy reached the peak of its power during that age of absolutism, which coincides with the Baroque era, and now we start to see a long, slow decline. In some places it’s slower; in some places it’s more rapid, such as in France, where there is a revolution. But whether faster or slower, the nobility is—is on the decline in terms of its power during this time, and it’s this middle class which is on the rise. And again, what do we mean by middle-class? Doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as it means today here in America. What we mean are people who are again educated, sometimes very well-off, but they are not members of the nobility, and therefore, in the existing political structure of the time, they really have no political power at all, and they are clamoring for political power. They—you know, that again, these Enlightenment ideas are filling their heads, and they feel as though it’s not only unjust but illogical that that a very tiny segment of society called the nobility by birth somehow should have the right to run things and to have a very separate legal system where certain rules don’t apply to them. And this is, of course—this is what caused a lot of the resentment that fueled the French Revolution, for example. Okay, so the middle class now is gaining in power, and these are people who have to work for a living and are merchants, are bureaucrats, are skilled tradesmen. And it’s still relatively—you know, all things considered—it’s still a relatively modest layer of society because we are still in an agrarian society in Europe—not for long, though, because the Industrial Revolution is coming, and now we will—in the nineteenth century—will see a transition from the majority of people being needed to work the land to—and therefore living out in the country—and then in a rural agrarian type of society, we’ll see a transition in the nineteenth century to a more urban, industrial society.

Okay, so that recap took a little longer than I intended it to. What I want to talk more about today is specifically through musical, artistic and musical things, and all of these can be found beginning on page 160 in the ninth brief edition. So they had this section here on the classical style, and they have a listing of characteristics of the classical style in music, which—what might be a good idea is to find—earlier—remember we just gone through the Baroque era, and back in the beginning of the section on the Baroque era, we have a similar listing of characteristics of the Baroque style. In fact, I’ve just found that page; it’s 104 and 105 if you have the ninth brief edition. If you kind of hold—if you sort of mark that page with your finger and compare back and forth, you’ll see that many of these things—many of these—it’s organized in the same way, but many of these characteristics are exactly the opposite as what they were in the Baroque era. All right, and it’s good to—to keep in mind where we are coming from. This is true, certainly, I think, of learning in general, but certainly for this class, you don’t want to just—you know, having learned about the Baroque era, you don’t want to just delete all that from your brains. They’re okay, now I gotta clear some—some space in my head so I can, you know, learn about the Classical era. No, you want to keep that in mind so that you can compare, and in fact, the test questions might be phrased in such a way. So, for example, a test question might say, “In contrast to the Baroque era, the classical style features X, Y, & Z.” So you have to know a little bit about both styles, and a great deal of what happens—the changes that occur in the Baroque and the Classical era—are sort of the deliberate rejection of the previous practice of the Baroque era. So you have to—again, understanding where this comes from is important.

Okay, before I—before I get too far into specifically musical things—I will soon—let’s—let’s go back to that word “classic” again. In the last lecture, I said that—I gave an example of one of the characteristics of a classical virtue, a characteristic of the classical style. I said that the classical style—one of the—one of the many aspects of it—is that it tends to be simple. Simplicity is considered a virtue in the classical style, and I gave the example of the little black dress, which is a classic, and one of the reasons it’s a classic is it’s uncomplicated, right? Because anything that is a complication, anything that is an embellishment, a decoration, means that that is something that is perhaps liable to go out of fashion. It might look good today, but who knows whether it will still look good twenty or thirty years from now? And if you don’t believe me, go and find your parents’ high school yearbook sometime and look at what the kids were wearing twenty or thirty years ago.

Okay, so I’m going to list off some more classical virtues; that is, in a classical style. These—anyone who is—who thinks in this way, who considers themselves, you know, a classicist, will tend to value these things. So one of them I’ve already given, and that is simplicity. So simplicity, clarity of structure. In other words, if you’re looking at something—if it’s a work of art, it’s architecture, if it’s literature, something—if it’s—if it has a design that is easy to take in all at once—so you often—based on certain geometrical principles, right?—if the design is too complex, if there’s too much going on, if it’s too intricate, right, that’s—that’s something that we would associate with the Baroque style, right, by the way. And I think I mentioned this before, but I’ll mention it again: the term “Baroque”—that label was applied to the music and the art of, let’s say, the 1600s and early 1700s by people who came along later, by people in the Classical era who looked back at that previous era and said, “Oh, back then the art, the music was so overdone, so complex, so Baroque,” right? The people in the Baroque era themselves did not use that term. That’s a label that, again, was a criticism—remember that—was applied during the Classical era to the stuff that had come before. So the use of that label tells you as much about the people who used it as it does about the people that they applied it to, and it tells you that the people of the Classical era valued simplicity and clarity of form. By the way, a lot of these different aspects of the classical style that I’m going to talk about have to do with form—how something is formed, how it’s constructed—and form has to do with how things relate to each other. The structure of something ultimately has to do with how the parts relate to each other to form the whole. Okay, and this is different. Form—questions of form—considerations of form are different from considerations or questions of content. Content is different from form, right? So, for example, if you have a cookie jar that is cylindrical in shape, all right, that’s the form, and anything that you pour into that jar is going to take on that shape, that cylindrical shape. The content is the cookies or the jellybeans or the flour or the sugar or whatever you put into it, right? In a way, the—the—the classical style is really all about form and is not as—as concerned with content. What is it that we are putting into the form doesn’t really matter so much. The stuff itself is not as important; it’s the structuring of the stuff—how the stuff is put together, right? To a classically minded person, this is what generates beauty—is the relationship of the parts to the whole being in a harmonious, in a proportionate, balanced relationship to each other.

So here’s two other classical virtues, aspects of the classical style: there’s an emphasis on balance, proportion, and symmetry. That which is beautiful must be balanced, proportioned, and symmetrical, because when you think about it, if it were unbalanced or asymmetrical, then—then it wouldn’t be beautiful, right? Now I’m sort of—I’m assuming the pose of a classically minded person. The classically minded person, first of all, assumes that beauty is the good, right? That if you are an artist, if you are a musician, if you are a sculptor, if you’re an architect, whatever—if you’re a poet—then your highest priority is beauty. This is—this is kind of the way it was before the Baroque era. Remember, in the Renaissance, I argued that the highest priority of the artist, of the musician, was beauty, and anything else that you’re trying to do has to take a backseat to beauty, right? Remember I said that in the Baroque era—I know I’m kind of jumping back and forth between eras—but remember I said that in the Baroque era, beauty was not necessarily the most important thing; expressing emotion was the most important thing, right? And sometimes you might have to sacrifice a certain amount of beauty in order to get an emotional response, and this is why, for example, if you look back at the—the examples of Baroque art—that—remember that painting of Judith slaying Holofernes, right?—is that a beautiful painting? Well, it’s the most beautiful painting of a man getting his throat slit that I’ve ever seen, and I guess—but it’s not an inherently beautiful thing. It’s not like you look at that painting and the first thing that comes to your mind is, “Oh, how beautiful.” No, the first thing that comes to mind is you—you know, hopefully you are shocked and you are—you are emotionally affected. Now, I’m like, hopefully it will be beautifully painted, but the beauty is not the main thing; the emotional response is the main thing in the Baroque sort of artistic philosophy. But the pendulum of the arts has kind of swung back now to where it was in the Renaissance, right? And in fact, we’ll see this over and over again, but unfortunately we probably won’t have time in this semester to see it go back and forth, but there is kind of a pendulum that swings back and forth in the arts, in fashion, even in politics. For example, if you—if you look back through presidential elections of the past few decades, you see that we generally have a Republican for four years or eight years, and then people get sick of that and they want a Democrat, and then they get sick of that and it’s a Republican again. So we have action and reaction—same kind of thing in the arts. During the Renaissance, there’s an emphasis put on beauty above all else, right? But then we move into the Baroque era, and there’s an emphasis on getting an emotional response, and beauty must take a backseat. Well, now during the Classical era, the pendulum swings back, and the things that composers are—artists had to do to get an emotional response are seen as kind of like too much—going over the top and sacrificing too much beauty and maybe too complex and too—it’s in poor taste. And instead, we go back to the idea that the art should be beautiful and they should be pleasing. Also, especially in the earlier Classical period, a work of art or a piece of music should not be so serious and heavy and emotionally involving; it should be light and pleasant and diverting. It shouldn’t trouble the viewer or the listener; instead, it should give you pleasure. All right, so again, we have certain differing philosophies of the purpose of art or music itself. And by the way, in the next era, we will move back—that the pendulum will swing back to the emotional side again when we move into the Romantic era, but that’s still—still to come.

Okay, so so far, how many classical virtues or characteristics have I listed? So he said that simplicity, balance, proportion, symmetry, right, clarity of form, and all these—remember—are things that pertain to form. How a thing is formed is what generates beauty to a—to a classically minded person. By the way, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, right? And we hear that expression a lot: “Beauty is in the eye of—is in the eye of the beholder.” What does that mean? It means that beauty is something we perceive in here; it’s not out there. It’s a very objective take on what makes something beautiful. Beauty is in the object. An object is either beautiful or it’s not. If you understand beauty correctly, if you understand what it is that makes something beautiful—things like balance, proportion, symmetry, clarity of form—all of that—that’s what the classically minded person would say. They would say it’s—it’s—if you understand beauty correctly, it’s not in the eye of the beholder; that’s nonsense. It’s not just an emotional response—not like, “Well, you think it’s beautiful, but I don’t think it’s beautiful, and I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.” That would be a subjective notion of beauty, and the classical approach is much more objective in essence. The classical approach—someone who agrees with this would say, “No, there’s sort of a checklist to what makes things beautiful, and this is what we are striving towards as artists or musicians or something, and to the extent that we can—that we can check off the items on this list—that we can create something that is balanced, proportional, symmetrical—then we will have achieved beauty, and the thing will be beautiful.” Now, again, I’m kind of oversimplifying, but—a—this is kind of unavoidable, I think, in talking about these kind of subjects. So the—the—the classical style is objective; believes that there is such a thing as beauty; that it is—it is in the object itself; it’s not properly understood; it’s not merely in the eye of the beholder.

Another aspect of the classical style—and you could probably guess this one—is emotional restraint. To a classically minded person, a work of art or music or literature should not be overly emotional. Certainly, there should be emotion—should be involved—but there’s a point at which—beyond which—you really shouldn’t go, because that leads to sort of cheap, vulgar sentimentality, and it’s—it’s no longer in good taste. Good taste is a very important thing to the classical mindset. What do we mean by good taste? Talent. Well, if you have to ask, you probably don’t have it. It’s a word that’s sort of like, you know, to say that something is tasteful or is in good taste—it’s sort of like using the word “cool” today. Either something is cool or it’s not cool, and if you have to have it explained to you, then you’re probably not cool. But you see composers talking all the time in these days about how such and such is in good taste or not in good taste, and what it often has to do with is avoiding extremes of emotion. All right. Um, I think what I want to do now is I want to maybe focus in more on specific musical things again, beginning here on page 160. So there’s a listing of specific musical attributes of this style, and each of them—they tend to be the opposite of what we have just learned about the Baroque. So if you can kind of keep the Baroque era in mind and just kind of switch everything to its opposite, that’s kind of a good starting point, actually. And of course, there’s more to it than that, but let’s take this first one that they mentioned: contrast of mood. All right, so a typical Classical piece in the Classical era does not have one basic mood that is reinforced throughout, such as we might find in the Baroque era. No, instead we have balance; we have different moods that balance each other out. So you might have—within a single movement of a multi-movement work, for example—things might start out very serious and then get more lighthearted and cheerful in the middle and go back to being very serious, or things might start out happy and then get kind of sad and gloomy but then return to the happy feeling at the end, what have you, right? So contrast—after all, if we only have one thing, if we only have one mood, it’s impossible to have symmetry or balance, because to have symmetry and balance you have to have different things that kind of—in balance each other out or that are symmetrical in relationship to each other. So if we have only one basic mood, well, we can’t have that interesting interplay between—we can’t have contrast. It’s another aspect of the—of the classical style; generally, contrast is seen as a good thing.

Okay, so reinforcing this idea of contrast of mood, variety of moods, flexibility of mood, we also have flexibility of rhythmic patterns. So again, thinking back to the Baroque—remember we said we have one basic mood in a typical movement, let’s say, of a Baroque piece—and that one basic mood is reinforced by a repeated rhythmic pattern throughout. This is not the case in a typical Classical era piece; we have a wealth of different rhythmic patterns in order to—in order to give us that variety of mood, let’s say, from one section to another. Top of page 161, they talk about texture. Now again, let’s compare to the Baroque era. In the Baroque era, I said we start off with mostly homophonic texture because that seems best suited to opera, but as time goes on—as we go from the early Baroque to the mid to the late Baroque—we tend to have sort of an accretion of layers of melody so that by the—we get to the late Baroque—polyphonic texture is kind of back in style again. Think of the music of J.S. Bach; think of a fugue, for example—thoroughly polyphonic; we have many different layers of melody going on simultaneously. We move from the late Baroque into the classical style; there is a rejection of polyphonic texture because it’s seen as being too complex, too busy, too complicated. Who really has time for all these different melodies going on simultaneously? And by the way, this might be another reason why—to review—J.S. Bach was not all that popular in his own lifetime as a composer, because he still composed in this very polyphonic, complex style that was seen as just kind of old-fashioned, too busy, too complex, too much to follow; it wasn’t simple and clear enough. And as I mentioned, J.S. Bach’s own sons—those who were composers—as several of them were—tended to favor this new classical style, and they tended to use homophonic texture. So homophonic texture becomes the preferred texture of the classical style, and remember what homophonic texture is—is when we have one basic melody, one main melody, and some other stuff in the background, which we could call accompaniment, which is clearly subordinate to the melody; it’s in a supporting role. So think of a typical classical piece like this Mozart Sonata [Music], right? So I have the melody in the right hand, accompaniment in the left hand, or think of this old favorite [Applause] [Music]—melody in the right hand, accompaniment in a little bit of both hands, but we have melody which is definitely the—the thing that we’re supposed to focus on; it’s clearly out there in front, and then accompaniment which is more in the background. That is homophonic texture, and that is by far the prevalent texture. However—however—we accept—we occasionally do find exceptions to this; we do sometimes find instances of polyphonic texture or sometimes of monophonic texture in the Classical era. So texture is also treated flexibly; composers do not dogmatically just stick with one texture all the way throughout, necessarily, especially at moments of greater…

Intensity: If the composer wants to sort of turn up the emotional volume on the end—talking about loudness, I'm talking about—if the composer wants to express a little bit more intensity, then he might choose to deploy polyphonic texture. But it usually doesn't last for too long because the composer doesn't want to go on and on in that polyphonic texture. You want to sort of hold it in reserve for a particular moment of greater intensity, and then after it's passed, go back to the more simple and clear homophonic texture.

Alright, next thing that the book talks about—and again, this is a contrast with the Baroque era—it says your classical melodies are among the most tuneful and easy to remember. Well, what do we mean by that? Tuneful—it basically means catchy and simple. Classical melodies are very often—they often have a sort of a folk-like simplicity, and classical composers often deliberately imitated the style of folk tunes because they were catchy, they were simple, they were easy to remember. A great example of this, of course, is "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," which sometimes you hear people say, "Oh, did you know that Mozart composed 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star'?" Actually, that's not true. Mozart did not compose that melody; it was an old French folk song that had been around probably since before Mozart was born. But Mozart did find that melody charming, and he used it as the basis for a composition for piano, a theme and variations, where he states that that folk song theme at the beginning, and then there's a series of variations—different versions of that theme. So composers sometimes actually borrowed folk songs or the melodies of folk songs to use as the basis of their compositions, or they wrote original melodies that sounded very much like folk song melodies.

Another thing they mentioned here is that classical melodies, unlike Baroque melodies, are not—they tend not to be these long, very busy run-on sentences. They are broken up into phrases. Remember, a phrase is sort of like the musical equivalent of a sentence. And just like we have sentences in a book, and those sentences end with periods, and then we go on to the next sentence, and it might end with a question mark or an exclamation point or something like this—this is how classical melodies tend to be structured. They have phrases, which ending cadences—the cadences are sort of like the musical equivalent of a punctuation mark—whereas Baroque melodies tend to be more like run-on sentences; they just kind of keep going and keep going, long and spun out. And remember I said that in the Baroque era, this is what tended to make Baroque melodies kind of difficult to sing because it's hard to find a place to breathe if the melody is like a long run-on sentence. And I—I also said that very often composers didn't really have singers in mind; even if they were writing for singers, they really were thinking more instrumentally; they were thinking of what works well on the keyboard or the violin or two instruments you don't have to actually breathe into, and so it affects how they thought compositionally. Classical melodies tend to be easier to sing because they—they are rooted in singing, often in folk song, right, and they have this structure of phrases that come to an end where you can take a breath and begin the next phrase. And this is true whether we're talking about vocal music or instrumental music. We are—by the way, we're mostly going to focus on instrumental music in this unit. There are—there are a couple of examples in the unit of vocal music—of opera, and I believe also—well, there's definitely some excerpts from—from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, and I think there might be something in there from Mozart's Requiem as well—but the vast majority of what we're going to talk about, what we're going to deal with in this unit, is instrumental music.

Okay, next couple of items: dynamics and the piano. This is the next thing in bold print, so again, thinking about the Baroque era, what did we—what did we know about dynamics and about the keyboard instruments in the Baroque era? Well, in the Baroque era, we tended to have terraced dynamics—that is, sudden, abrupt changes from loud to soft or vice versa, right, forming kind of a terrace with different levels rather than a slope, right. And the reason we tended to favor these terraced dynamics is because the keyboard instruments at the time—the harpsichord and the organ—were not capable of gradual changes in dynamics—for example, crescendos and decrescendos. You can't do that on an organ or a harpsichord because those instruments are not touch-sensitive. No matter how hard you smack down the key on a harpsichord or an organ, or how softly you touch it, it does not affect the volume. Alright, the other instruments could make crescendos and decrescendos, but if the keyboard instrument can't do it, what's the point, really? Because we all have to match, and remember, anytime you have a group of instruments playing, you had to have a keyboard in there—had to have the basso continuo—that was like the rhythm section of the Baroque era, right. So again, reviewing what we knew—the Baroque era—and makes it easier to understand what is different about the Classical era. So for one thing, the basso continuo goes away; it is something that just doesn't carry over into the Classical period; it's considered old-fashioned. All right, so it's something that does not survive into the Classical era. And for that reason, by the way, you no longer find a keyboard instrument in the orchestra. The Classical orchestra does not have a harpsichord or an organ or even a piano in it; there's no keyboard instrument in the Classical orchestra. Also, we have a new instrument: the piano. The piano was invented in the late Baroque era, but it didn't really catch on and come into widespread use until we are into the Classical era, right. Once it does catch on, it pretty much replaces the harpsichord. After, I would say, the 1760s, no one is really playing the harpsichord anymore; they're playing the piano. What's different about the piano is it's a touch-sensitive keyboard instrument. I could demonstrate this right now. I touch this key very lightly; I get a soft sound. I can get it even softer, of course. If you go too soft, it doesn't sound at all, and that's the trick of the piano. But if I hit it harder—a very loud sound. Okay, this is what keyboard players have been waiting for for hundreds of years, and finally they've had it. And therefore, the harpsichord became obsolete within, you know, a few decades of the—let's say—the beginning of the Classical era. The organ was still—was still around, but it, too, was kind of eclipsed by the piano. So the great keyboard players of the Classical era were not really necessarily the organists. We still have organists, for example, in churches and whatnot; there's still—there's still organists playing concerts—but by far the piano is—is more popular, and the great composers of the time, like Mozart, like Beethoven, were primarily pianists. They could play the organ as well, but they thought of themselves more as pianists, and that is true going forward as well. So when you know, from the Classical era on, most of the—the greatest composers tend to be pianists and not organists anymore.

Okay, so because we are no longer kind of limited to the capabilities of the harpsichord or the organ, and because we don't even have a keyboard instrument in the orchestra anymore, and because the instrument we do have—the keyboard instrument which has replaced the harpsichord—is touch-sensitive—can make crescendos and decrescendos—now we have much more flexibility in the area of dynamics. We can have crescendos and decrescendos, and in fact, that the crescendo becomes sort of a favorite musical sound effect of the time. Audiences sort of thrill to the sound of a crescendo that starts very, very, very soft and gets louder and louder and louder. This is like an important new sound effect that composers can exploit. We can still have terraced dynamics if we want; we can still go suddenly from soft to loud or aloud to soft, so we have flexibility; we can do both; we can have gradual changes, and we can have sudden, abrupt changes if we want.

Okay, so the next thing the book talks about—I already mentioned the end of the basso continuo. All right, if you never quite understood what basso continuo was, I guess you don't have to worry because we don't have it anymore, moving into the Classical era. The next thing the book talks about is the Classical orchestra. So we—we started talking about the orchestra as a thing—as a sort of a—an organized ensemble of instruments—the orchestra has—in the Baroque era. But remember, the Baroque orchestra, strictly speaking, was really just the stringed instruments plus a harpsichord, and the harpsichord was there to play the basso continuo chords. As we move now into the Classical era, the harpsichord goes away; we no longer have a keyboard instrument in the orchestra. But what we do have is additional woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments. Okay, so remember, Baroque orchestra—all strings really. And if you go back and listen to the Vivaldi concerto or the Bach Brandenburg Concerto, you pretty much just heard strings plus a little bit of harpsichord in the background. But when you listen to a Classical orchestral piece, you hear strings and woodwinds, brass, and percussion. And I am going to expect you to know the exact instruments that are in the Classical orchestra. So we have the same old string section, which is still sort of the core of the orchestra. The string section consists of the violins—first and second violins—violas, cellos, and basses. And those are basically just the bowed stringed instruments—from small and higher in pitch to large and lower in pitch—violin, viola, cello, and bass. And then we have woodwind instruments, and these woodwind instruments are in pairs because we have a first and second—we have first and second flute, clarinet, oboe, and bassoon. So we have pairs of flutes, clarinets, oboes, and bassoons, and that gives us eight woodwind instruments overall—two flutes, two clarinets, two oboes, two bassoons. We have two pairs of brass instruments in a standard Classical era orchestra—two trumpets—first and second—and two horns—first horn, second horn—so that gives us a total of four brass instruments. And then we have two timpani drums. We have one percussionist with two arms, and he's got a mallet in each hand—two timpani drums. Now, timpani, remember, are the kettle drums—the tunable drums that give you this kind of boom boom boom, right. So the timpani player would tune those two drums to the two most important pitches, basically, in whichever key you are playing in—the tonic pitch and the dominant pitch. So how are you going to keep all this straight? Well, just think—we still have this—we have the same strings—so you've always had the string section—is violin, viola, cello, bass—and then we have pairs for woodwind instruments, two brass instruments, and one percussion instrument. All together, that means that a Classical orchestra is, first of all, about twice as big as a Baroque orchestra, right, and it is much more flexible; it has more variety of tone colors. All of this fits into the Classical idea that we shouldn't have just one thing that we overemphasize; we should have varieties of things that balance each other out, that can be presented in a sort of a proportional, symmetrical way. So we have strings over here, but then we also have wind instruments over there; it gives us more flexibility, more variety. So, for example, in a—in a Classical orchestral work, we might have a theme, and we hear the theme presented to us first in the violins, but then, for the sake of variety, we hear that same theme—that same melody—presented in the woodwinds or in the brass.

Okay, now one more thing before I move away from talking about the orchestra—the—the orchestra—the Classical era represents—or the midway point in the evolution of the orchestra. The orchestra begins in the Baroque era with just the strings and a keyboard instrument; that's the standard orchestra. Of course, composers sometimes added a little bit here and there, but that's like your standard entrée without anything à la carte, all right, without any extras—just the strings and harpsichord. We move into the Classical era, and we add some woodwinds, brass, or percussion, and the orchestra doubles in size—from, let's say, 15 or 20 players to maybe more like 40 or 50 players. But there is a further evolution that happens in the next era that brings us to sort of the modern orchestra of today, which has 80, 90, 100 players in it. So as we move into the Romantic era, we have even more woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments added. One thing I should mention also is that having additional woodwind, brass, or percussion instruments—especially the brass and the percussion—means that the orchestra is capable of much louder sounds than it was back in the Baroque era because you could only play so loud with bowed stringed instruments and the harpsichord—harpsichord is a very soft instrument—but once you add percussion—for those timpani drums can be pretty loud—to simulate the sound of thunder and all that—and brass instruments, especially, right—and once you combine all that—if you have an—in an orchestra that's twice as big—you can—you can have some—some, you know, pretty good volume out of that thing. You can still play soft if you—if you want to, all right. You can—you can direct everybody to play very softly; you can cut out some of the instruments and have them rest while other instruments are playing—just—just feature the soft instruments—you can have more contrast, in other words; you can have louder—loud to offset the soft sounds, right. So again, more flexibility both in terms of tone color and in terms of dynamics, made possible by a bigger orchestra that has a greater variety of instruments in it.

Okay, I am going to wrap up pretty soon. The last thing I'm going to talk about is the stuff that's here on page 162, relating to Classical forms. And in—Act—I'm really just going to the tail end of this lecture; I'm going to introduce the idea of form in the Classical era, and I'm going to—I'm going to tell you how important it is. Form is hugely important in the Classical era, but I'm actually going to have to have a whole other lecture to talk about the different forms more specifically. In fact, I'm going to—I'm just going to state outright that our next test—again, 50 questions, probably eight or nine listening questions—of the questions which remain—let's say that there—that there's something like 40, 42 non-listening questions on our next test—about half of those questions will have something to do with form—with the structure of different types of pieces or different movements within multi-movement pieces of the Classical era. All right, so I'm just sort of putting you on notice—start paying attention to form and trying to understand form. And if you don't understand anything having to do with it, please feel free to email me because I understand that for most people who are not music majors or music professors or classical musicians, you might not really think about the structure or the form of the music that you listen to on—on a daily basis. You might just experience it on a more sort of an emotional level and not think intellectually like, "Well, how is this thing structured?" Alright, you're probably somewhat aware though—certainly subconsciously you are aware of the structure of, let's say, a typical pop song, which is like verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, right—that something like that is the structure that you are probably most familiar with because it's—it's used over and over again—something very similar to it, at least—used over and over again in most popular songs. So that is one example of a musical form, right. We are going to learn about several different types of musical forms. Now, we've already talked about form a little bit in the Baroque era; we learned about binary form, for example, where you have an A section and a B section, and the A section repeats, so you wind up with AABB—pretty simple. We're going to talk more about form in this era—in the Classical era—and it's unavoidable. You might be thinking, "Well, why do we need to know the form so much?" Because that's what the Classical style is about. You—you just—you can't avoid talking about form when you're talking about the Classical style. At its heart, the Classical approach—the sort of Classical philosophy of art—is all about form, right. It has to do with—remember, the Classical idea is that beauty is the most important thing. Where does beauty come from? It is generated by a pleasing relationship of the parts to the whole. Alright, so anyone who is classically minded is thinking about form and structure all the time, and so we have to think about it too if we're going to really understand this stuff.

Okay, so in talking about these Classical forms, I'm going to say again—we are mostly going to talk about instrumental music, alright. We are—we are not really going to touch on vocal music very much because, for example, opera—we've already talked quite a bit about opera in the Baroque era—and although there's, you know, there's wonderful opera in the Classical era, we don't really need to learn much new stuff pertaining to opera. Opera goes—the basics of opera don't really change; the style changes somewhat, but the basics do not. Alright, we still have recitatives and arias and choruses and/choirs and all of those things that we learned in relation to opera—they're still true. And also, remember that instrumental music just is more important now than vocal music. Now, opera is still the big leagues—opera is kind of the exception—but otherwise, composers like Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven are spending much more time writing purely instrumental music than they are writing vocal music. Now, opera—Mozart, for example, wrote a lot of operas; he's probably the greatest opera composer of the Classical period. Beethoven, though, wrote only one opera, so make of that what you will. But we are going to talk mostly about instrumental music. Instrumental music in the Classical era generally is—is in either four-movement form or three-movement form. We tend to find either four-movement works—like the symphony—the typical symphony by Beethoven or anybody else is a four-movement work—but then we also have some types of pieces which are three-movement works, right. So this is the first sort of what I would call macro-level consideration of form that we have to look at—you typically have either four-movement works or three-movement works. What's the difference between a four-movement work and a three-movement work? Well, obviously, there's one less movement. Which movement is missing? Well, it turns out that if you take a—I'm going to hold it—if my fingers down here in front of my black sweater so you can see more clearly—if you take a four-movement work, what we usually find is—and the book has this up on—on page 162—the first movement will be fast in tempo and in sonata form. What's sonata form? We'll talk about that next time. So first movement—fast tempo. How fast? Well, it'll be marked Allegro—that's about two beats per second—like that—will be the tempo usually of the first movement of a multi-movement work—fast tempo, sonata form. The second movement will be slow in tempo, right, because we want to have contrast—that's a slow tempo—and some other form that is not sonata form. Which form will it be? Could really be any form; the only expectation is that it'll be in some different form and not sonata form because, after all, if we're listening to a multi-movement work, we've just heard a first movement which is in fast—which is fast and in sonata form; therefore, for the sake of variety, we will want to hear a second movement which is slow and in some other form. Many other forms are possible; it'll be in some form, but it'll be in a different form. Okay, great. Third movement—this movement, if we're talking about the third movement of a four-movement piece—the third movement will be dance-like; it will be deliberately styled, modeled on a specific type of dance—most likely the minuet. The minuet was the most popular dance of the 18th century, so if you're going to have a dance-like movement in a multi-movement piece, it makes sense to have the most familiar type of dance—the minuet, right. This minuet—now, remember, people are not going to get up and start dancing in that third movement; it's a dance-like piece of music for listening to, right. Now, there was dance-like music for dancing, too, as well, but if you're in a concert and you're listening to a Mozart symphony or something, and you get to the third movement, you don't get up and start dancing; you listen, and you imagine the dance in your head; you are pleasantly reminded of the last time you went to a ball and danced the minuet. So the—the third movement will be dance-like, and it will be in a specific type of form which we call ternary form. Ternary simply means ABA—having three sections—that's the ternary part. Binary means having two sections, right—an A section and a contrasting B section. Ternary means having three sections, and those sections will be—we could diagram it—the A section, then a contrasting B section, which is different—has different melodic material—there's a deliberate attempt to have something new and fresh—and then after that B section passes, we go back and we repeat the A section—ABA form—ternary form. Alright, so that's the third movement of a four-movement piece. The last movement of a multi-movement piece will be fast in tempo again, and it will—it could be in sonata form, but it will probably more likely be in a form that we call rondo form. I'll talk more about rondo form a little bit later; just for now, just say, okay, last movement is going to be fast in tempo, rondo form. We'll talk more specifically about it later. Now, what I—what I meant to get out was what's the difference between a four-movement piece and a three-movement piece. In a three-movement piece, one of these movements is missing; the one that is most likely going to be missing is the dance-like third movement. In a three-movement work, there is no dance-like third movement; there is a third movement; it's the finale; it's the final movement, but we skip over the dance-like ternary form movement, and we go directly from a fast movement which is in sonata form, a slow movement which is in some other form—not sonata form—and a fast movement again to round things off, which will probably be in rondo form.

Now, in subsequent lectures, I will talk specifically about what sonata form is and what rondo form is, but this brings up another aspect of form that I need to talk about, and that is that form exists on different levels in music, right. There's sort of a macro-level form which I've just been talking about, and then there's sort of mid-level form, and then there's sort of micro-form. Sort of like the way to think of—one way to think about form is imagine that we're not talking about music; imagine we're talking about the form of an apartment complex. Let's say I'm a contractor, an architect, or whatever, and I've been given the job of designing an apartment complex. Okay, well, the first thing I guess I would have to think—okay, how much land do I have to build on, and how many buildings—how many apartment buildings am I going to be building, right? Okay, so that's sort of like different movements—that different buildings are like different movements. Now, within each building—going down to the next level of form—how many apartments are there, right? That's sort of like mid-level form. And then, as we take each one of those apartments—how many rooms are there in—in each of these apartments? Are they, you know, some of them might be studio apartments, two-bedroom apartments, three-bedroom apartments. And then we could even get into that—well, okay, in this particular three-bedroom apartment, where are the three bedrooms exactly? Where are the closets? How do you get from the kitchen into the living room? All right, that's—that's sort of more micro-form. Now, we could actually go even—if we really want to go micro—we could say, okay, what are the individual building blocks that I'm going to make this apartment complex out of? Is it going to be timber-framed? Is it going to be concrete blocks? Is it going to be brick? All right, so we can even—we can take structure from the very macro down to the individual building block. And we will do a little bit of that—the individual building block in the Classical era is something called a motive. A motive is sort of like the

Musical equivalent of a brick, a building block. Right? It is sort of irreducible in that you know, if you take a brick and you say, okay, well, I'm gonna make—I'm gonna, you know—that's the smallest individual unit of my structure, the brick. Ultimately, you get down to the brick. What happens if you smash the brick? Well, then you just have—you have just some stuff that the brick was made out of. If you have chemical elements, I guess. Same thing with musical motives.

And by the way, here's the most famous motive in all of music. Okay, that's the opening motive of Beethoven's fifth symphony. Now it turns out when we—when we look at this symphony toward the end of this unit—we'll find out that really the entire symphony is made of this basic structure, mostly the rhythm there: the short short short long. That itself is a structure; it's a very, very basic structure: short short short long. Also, there's a melodic aspect to this motive, right? Then descending third, just this interval of a descending third. Combine that with the rhythm and we get this what we might call a theme, but the theme is made up of this motive. Now we can't really take that motive any farther apart and have it be something that Beethoven created. Beethoven did not invent the note G; he did not invent the note E-flat; he did not create the short note, the idea of the short note, or the idea of the long note, just like whoever made the brick did not make the chemical elements, did not make the clay or the water that the brick is made out of, but he did make the brick out of those things. And Beethoven made this—the most memorable theme in all of music history—out of these very basic elements, and that forms a motive. And the use of this motive throughout the entire symphony helps to kind of give some cohesion and helps to, maybe on a very subconscious level, helps to kind of unify this big 40-minute-long, multi-movement work known as Beethoven's fifth symphony.

So, so keep in mind as we are looking at different levels of structure, we got to keep them straight. So, for example, the four different movements of a multi-movement work, which has four movements—some of them have three, some of them have four—but let's take a symphony, which usually has four. Each one of those movements has different sections, and then within each section there are little subsections. And so we have to keep that straight so that, for example, you don't get confused when I'm talking about the different sections in the first movement that you don't think that I'm talking about different movements in a multi-movement piece. So I will do my best to make this understandable and clear, but if I'm not successful, please send me an email and ask me about this stuff, because again, I understand that this is maybe new to you; haven't thought about music in this way before. So I'm expecting, actually, that you might not understand some of this, that you might need to reread things, rewatch lectures, listen to the listening, and ask me questions. So I will—I'll expect to get some emails and questions from you all.

Until then, why don't we end here? And probably next time I will start to talk about sonata form, and therefore I need to assign some new reading. So I'd like you to read and listen from page 165 up to—oh, let's just say page 168—165 to 168. So we should have already read up to page 165, so read on further to page 168 and listen to the first movement of Mozart's Symphony number 40. So this is a first movement of a four-movements symphony, and this first movement is in sonata form. All right, so we're going to talk about sonata form next time. See you then.