Week 1 – Day 2 (Wednesday, August 31st)
Today we worked on the definitions of music and broke them into two categories.
The first category was called “Elements of Music”
This included concepts such as rhythm, melody, harmony, organization and structure, vocal or instrumental, patterns, beat, tempo, tone, pitch, range, timbre, color, tempo, and dynamics (also known as volume).
We learned that the piano is called the piano, which actually means “soft” in Italian, indicating that it is an instrument that can play quietly. When it was created, it was the first keyboard instrument that could play different volumes based on how hard the pianists hit the key. Hitting it hard created a “forte” tone and hitting it soft, made it “piano.”
The second category of our definition of music was more abstract, artistic ideas about music, such as art, culture/history, sound, emotion, language, universal, and feeling.
Week 2 – Day 3 (Wednesday, September 7th)
Today we talked about Dr. Wentz’s “20 Most Well-Known Classical Pieces”
He was sharing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with us when we came in.
The objective is to teach us what the name is of the songs we mostly already know and who composed them.
The first was called “Air on G String” by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Bach was the grandfather of Western music because he figured out how to make sense of the music that people had been making previously in the Renaissance. He utilized the twelve keys, labeled them, and advanced music theory, which is the math behind music. He lived in the Baroque era, which was between 1600-1850 in Europe and he was from Germany.
This piece had multiple stringed instruments and is known as a String Quartet. It features two violins, a viola and a cello.
The contour of the piece goes from high to low and we watched a video to go along with the music that showed high notes higher on the page than the low notes. The melody was typically in the first violin, which played the highest pitches. The dynamics were piano/soft and made us feel calm and peaceful.
We talked about the difference between legato and staccato in music. Legato means smooth where the notes run into each other very connected. Staccato is the opposite where notes are short and disjunct and sound not connected or smooth.
The second piece we heard was called “Sabre Dance” by Aram Khatchaturian. This was heard on the cartoon Tom and Jerry, as well as the show “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.” It was fast and sounded like a circus or another high energy event. The notes were mostly high and intense and the articulation was staccato, as the notes were fast and not connected.
The third and final piece we heard was called “Queen of the Night” aria, which is named after the character in the opera that sings the song. We first watched a young 10 year old boy sing this high and difficult song, then Dr. J showed us the actual opera where the lady sings it. At first it seemed funny because the boy was dressed in German lederhosen and looked to be very German but when we saw it on stage with the advanced woman singing it, it sounded intense and scary. The German text translated to “You must kill your father Sarastro or I will no longer be your mother.” The actress singing the song did a good job of acting and using her body and hands to threaten her daughter, the girl to whom she was singing.
For the second half of the class, we reviewed concepts like melody and harmony. We talked about how melody has to have pitch and it’s the tune that you can sing. Without melody, you have only harmony or basic chords that aren’t easy to sing back. Dr. J played “Mary Had a Little Lamb” without a melody and nobody knew what it was. When he added the melody, everyone recognized the tune. We talked about percussion instruments and how they don’t have a pitch so they can’t play melodies. Instruments that are melodic include the voice, flute, trombone, saxophone, trumpet, and clarinet (for examples). Instruments that can play more than one note at the same time are harmonic instruments. These include a choir, a violin, cello, harmonica, harp, guitar, and piano. These instruments can also play melodies but they are more complex and can also play harmonies.
We ended class by talking about the elements of melody, such as range, contour, and intervals, which are the distance between any two notes. Any song can be written out and we can find the contour of the line by determining if each pitch is higher, lower, or the same as the last pitch played.