For your blog post due tomorrow (Friday, January 10 at 9 am),
please consider our class discussion as led by Prof. Leydon from the afternoon
on Wednesday, January 9, and comment in 250-500 words on the following points:
· What did you know
about today’s subject before the listening and/or discussion session?
· What did you find
most surprising about today’s subject?
· What would you
like to know more about after experiencing today’s class?
Your post should be placed directly in the comments to this blog
entry, and is due at 9 am on Friday, January 10 at 9 am.
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 is among my favorite symphonies. I came into class today having listened to the 7th on numerous occasions and was relatively familiar with the score. I was aware of Beethoven’s use of third relations in his modulations and where he differed from conventional sonata form in the first movement, the somewhat weird Scherzo and Trio, and the irregularity of the internal repeats in the final movement. As odd as it may seem, I’ve played a trombone choir arrangement of the Allegretto in the fall of my sophomore year, and while it’s not the same as playing the movement as it is written, the transcription made me appreciate the 4 against 3 against 2 passages more than I would just studying the score. I had also analyzed the Allegretto for a music theory class in high school. I had also studied the “manic” rhythms in the Symphony in a music theory class with Professor Alegant, who speculated that Beethoven included these manic rhythms with the expectation they wouldn’t be played cleanly, similarly to how Professor Leydon mentioned she prefers recordings where the triple meter can slide into a duple feel.
ReplyDeleteI was quite surprised that Beethoven was influenced by Hungarian folk tunes and dance music for the final movement of the Symphony. Beethoven’s interest in dance music and his incorporation of this kind of music into symphonies adds another dimension to the character of Beethoven that I didn’t know existed, similar to how I felt about his composition of the 8th. I’m glad we studied the 7th and 8th in succession, because it allowed me to see the comedic elements of the 7th as well as how it contrasted in style. While I find the 7th to be a more serious and profound work than the 8th, I think there are elements of comedy, especially in the 3rd and 4th movements. The ending of the third movement I find particularly funny, with its fake-out abrupt ending. I really enjoyed today’s discussion of Beethoven’s use of rhythm and harmony, especially Professor Leydon’s take on the Symphony.
This isn’t very relevant to today’s class, but I am curious about how the dedication of Beethoven’s symphonies factored into the composition. I find it particularly interesting that the 8th didn’t have a dedication, but I am also intrigued by the 7th’s dedication to the Empress of Russia and how much relevance that has to the composition.
The seventh symphony is famous, and I’ve heard its second movement many times. Before the class, I knew that this symphony is written during the middle period of Beethoven. As history class has mentioned before, Beethoven is developing his musical idea rapidly during that time. Compares to the compositions before, the music was written during this time period sometimes includes a narrative trajectory and epic contracts, mostly reflected in the extreme changing in keys, character, mood, tempo, and dynamics. The piece is longer than the earlier ones, but the connections between different movements are related in a clearer manner. For the symphonies, Beethoven would prefer to add a long introduction at the beginning of the first movement and a long coda also at the end of the last movement rather than composes simply in sonata structures. All of these characteristics are more or less embodied in the seventh symphony.
ReplyDeleteToday’s lecture is really enjoyable. I never knew such things as the panharmonicon or the orchestrion before, which are really astonishing and funny. I liked when professor Leydon leads the class to sing out the lament baseline with different music excerpts, and I also like the way of analyzing on all the rhythmic pattern throughout the whole symphonies while related ideas to other compositions and popular songs, which makes the simple theoretical analysis more vivid and practical. The fact that we can find the same elements from a piece composed of two hundred years before and another piece written two hundred years after is impressive. It makes me think that even though there's two centuries gap, even though there’s already remarkable changes in social patterns and human cognition to all aspects, people’s preference toward a specific kind of harmony and melody doesn't seem to have changed that much.
The acknowledgment of agogic accent is something new to me. Before reaching this particular term, I’m already prepared for the complicated duplets, triplets, and hypermeters, but I never thought deeply about the “accent” before. I simply took it as an extreme dynamic change to startle the audience or emphasized a specific point, and I realized in class today that an “accent” does not only serve for a point of time but also serves for a period of duration. Especially in the seventh symphony, these agogic accents existed throughout the piece push forward the music, bring it on the track that Beethoven expected.
I’m still wondering about the huge differences between the seventh and the eighth symphony. The seventh is composed for the army’s victory, and even it is loud and full of extreme sounding, it is easier to be involved in the music. However, the eighth is more complex and confusing. I have to admit that I prefer the seventh to the eighth. Why Beethoven would use two different manners to compose at almost the exact same time? Is he trying to break through some limits and try new things?
I was already very familiar with Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 before class today. It was my favorite Beethoven symphony when I was 3 years old. These days I wouldn't say it's one of my favorites, but I still love it. I've played it in orchestra and recall finding the repeats in the third movement tricky: remembering that going back means playing the stumbling block of a tag at the beginning was a long process - I frequently missed it and joined on measure 3 upon repeat until we'd had a few rehearsals.
ReplyDeleteI did not know about the chromatic lament bass line. (I'm not much of a harmonic analyst.) I really enjoyed looking at how Beethoven harmonized it and especially enjoyed singing along with it through the opening section.
I love the diagram at the bottom of page 6 of the handout, about accumulating emphasis through successively longer agogic accents inherent in the first movement rhythm. Not only does the rhythm itself propel the music forward with its sense of motion, but the way the rhythm is placed in the meter leads an accumulating sense of emphasis that drives to the end of the line. It was so cool to look at the score under a microscope and determine exactly why these lines have so much direction.
I'd heard tension between 2 and 3 throughout the symphony but had never considered that letting the rhythmic figure in the first movement sound like a duple instead of triple could be "a feature instead of a bug." (Most surprising!) The orchestra in my favorite recording (Jansons with Bavarian RSO) has the most precise and characteristic sense of rhythm I've ever heard - in any piece they play. And even in their performance, 2's sometimes prevail (usually with help from the timpani).
Lastly, I'd always thought of the active bass in the "Ambiguous registers" section as an extension of medieval/folk dance bass drones with upper/lower neighbor grace notes. (I know Beethoven studied music as old as Palestrina, although I don't know when and what he studied. This is something I want to know more about.) When the violas join the celli/bassi alternating between E and D# (right after the snaking bass line shown on page 8 of the handout), it seems like a drone where the grace note has been expanded to equal the length of the fundamental note. Beethoven loves to use oscillating half steps (I always smile when I hear them in his music) for a little bit of tension, suspension, direction, and key definition, why not put them in the bass? The snaking bass line is still a stroke of genius, but if you see it as coming from the descending lament bass on the one hand and drones with neighbor tone grace notes on the other, it doesn't come from nowhere. But maybe the idea is more new than I thought and I should give Beethoven more credit!
Beethoven’s 7th symphony is such a different experience from his 8th symphony, and this was something I knew going into today’s listening session – however, because we so recently listened to the 8th, I was especially tuned into the differences. I knew that the 7th symphony was heroic, grand, and exciting. I also knew the jist of the elements of Beethoven’s middle period that differ from his early period.
ReplyDeleteI was greatly surprised by the rhythmic vitality of this work – there’s just always something going on – and totally understood when Professor Leydon brought it up in her wonderful guest lecture. The entirety of the first movement, past the introduction, rumbles on, and I didn’t realize the constant existence of the three against two pattern. I think that Beethoven really exploits that relationship throughout the first movement, but I don’t find it funny for some reason – just clever. I’ve been thinking about Professor Pau’s questions about humor from yesterday’s lecture, and I think that Maggie’s point about the surprise of a moment makes a lot of sense. I think we find things funnier when they come out of nowhere – think the 8th symphony’s first featured C# - as opposed to when they are set up. Although I don’t find Beethoven’s rhythmic tricks funny, I did find the “switched registers” that Professor Leydon pointed out funny. The call and response so quickly bouncing between instruments very high and very low is a surprise when it comes at the end of the first movement and continues to be funny when it happens later on in the work.
Finally, I found it really satisfying to see that Beethoven frames the harmonic structure of the first movement in its introduction. I love being presented with something like that which I hadn’t noticed on previous listens. I look forward to seeing more examples of places where Beethoven’s intricate planning and executing create a special moment in harmonic or rhythmic structure. I think we’ll discover a lot more of them in the 3rd, 5th, and 9th, to name a few!
Symphony No. 7 is one of my favorite Beethoven symphonies. I’m extremely familiar with the first movement– it’s truly a power walking anthem. There are also several famous horn excerpts from this work that I’m familiar with; the first and second horn part in the middle of the first movement, the first horn part right at the end of the first movement, and the low second horn part in the third movement. I think that the first and second horn part at the big unison section of the vivace blend perfectly together– they’re the love of my life and the bane of my existence. I also did the beginning of the second movement as a written assignment in an aural skills class, so I was familiar with a tiny bit of the theory off that movement.
ReplyDeleteAll of the things Professor Leydon pointed out about Symphony No. 7 seemed so indisputably intentional on Beethoven’s part, for lack of a better word; I feel like dealing with a composer’s intention after they’ve died is always a tricky business, but the way Professor Leydon made points about the rhythm and trading off of extreme registers, in particular, felt very natural and sensical based on what we listened to. I’m not a composer, and I can’t imagine the time and vision that must be required to craft a piece like Symphony No. 7, but everything Professor Leydon brought up in class were things that Beethoven did intentionally, as he wrote them, which presumably means that he wanted people to notice them, which is exactly what we did in class today. I feel like I’m wording this poorly, but suffice to say that Professor Leydon’s lecture pushed me to think about the thought that a composer puts in to composing a work.
The thing I found most surprising about today’s lecture was the point Professor Leydon made about the dotted eighth-sixteenth-eighth rhythm sometimes falling into a duple feel instead of a triple when it drags later on in the first movement; this is something I’d never noticed before in the recordings I’ve listened to, but now that Professor Leydon made me aware of it, I’m never going to be able to unhear it.
Today made me curious about how the dedicatees of Beethoven’s symphonies reacted to his works. We spent a bit of time talking about how Symphony No. 7 was part of a celebration for a general, but he was not who the symphony was dedicated to. I’m also curious about if patronage and dedicatees overlap at all in Beethoven’s symphonies.
I really enjoyed today's class! I hate to sound like a broken record but, as always, I came into class today a blank slate. To use an analogy to describe my experience, the morning listening session was a lot like eating a very delicious but very complicated soup. I liked it, and I could even point out an ingredient or two, but ultimately the mysteries of why exactly this soup tasted good were beyond me. I found today's discussion very helpful, illuminating as it did how Beethoven used various types of accents (dynamic, metrical, pitch, agogic) to achieve the intended effect. I'm a big fan of a phrase the professor used today to describe Beethoven's 7th: "rhythmically mess." Just listening to it, I hadn't realized all the ways Beethoven was playing with time signatures. The conducting and singing exercises really helped drive home for me how rhythmically complex the composition was. I also appreciated first learning about Andalusian bass and then hearing varied examples demonstrating how popular it is even outside of classical music. I'm afraid to say I'm still not picking up on the "humor" in Beethoven other people keep talking about, no music I heard today came close to being as funny as what was coming out of the modern-day Panharmonicon we watched the clip of. Near the end of class today I heard some people mention how bits and pieces of Beethoven's symphonies either came directly from or were inspired by his earlier works. Was this common in symphony writing at the time?
ReplyDeleteAs it is one of my favorite Beethoven symphonies, I have listen to the 7th on numerous occasions. I feel like the piece has so much to offer that it demands more than one listening, and more than one discussion!
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed Prof. Leydon’s discussion very much. I felt it was very important, in the context of Beethoven’s music, to go over the importance of rhythmic accents and rhetoric. Beethoven’s manipulation of the rhythmic “big-beats” and emphases is a major feature of his music. Even when Beethoven is not playing tricks with our expectations, he adds a lot to the music with rhythm. In some cases, the music would cease to excite people without the rhythmic aspect. For example, the Vivace theme in the first movement becomes boring when all notes are of equal note values. Yet, when Beethoven’s dotted rhythm is there, it becomes such a catchy tune! We—or at least I—discovered this in the discussion when we sung both versions (with and without Beethoven’s rhythm).
I felt it was also nice that Prof. Leydon spent so much time on the chromatic “lament” bass line, because it is present in many of Beethoven’s works. For example, besides the ones in the handout, it is the theme’s harmonic progression in Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor, WoO 80.
I felt it was informative that, in the listening session, Prof. McGuire talked about the concept of higher-order musical form, or “metaform”. Beethoven used metaform extensively in his works throughout his middle period. He used it in his multi-movement works to create a sense of unity. In other words, he made connections between the movements. Also, as Prof. McGuire pointed out, the Redoutensaal concert in Vienna in 1814 may have been programmed as a concert in four “movements” (where each of the “movements” was one of four Beethoven works). The 7th Symphony can be thought of as the first movement, the vocal trio as the second, the 8th Symphony as the third (in the role of a Scherzo), and Wellington’s Victory as the finale. This concept is something that I hadn’t really thought of before. After this discussion, it really made sense and made me think about large-scale structure. I tend to get caught up in details and lose track of the big picture and structure, so this was really eye-opening.
One of Beethoven’s most chilling and bizarre moments in the 7th symphony, as Prof. Leydon mentioned, is the coda of the fourth movement with the snaking, dizzying bass line. She stated that this line is actually the same progression as the introduction to the first movement—the chromatic lament—in disguise! I feel this is yet another instance where Beethoven is trying to tie the whole piece together. He uses the same harmonic progression in the beginning of the first movement and the end of the last, no matter how different they sound to our ears!
Overall, I felt today’s listening session and discussion were quite stimulating. I would love to discover more unifying structural elements in the piece, if there are any more. It fascinates me to uncover the underpinnings of one of my favorite works.