Prof. Carol

Timbre. It rhymes with “amber,” not “limber.” So, if you cut down a tree, don’t yell “timbre!” (or don’t yell it too loudly…). Timbre is actually a critical element of music, so let’s look at it. Timbre is the French term for tone quality or tone color. The word goes back to a Middle Greek word for kettledrum called tymbanon. To determine timbre, simply ask: ”Which instrumental or vocal colors are we hearing?”
 
Timbre helps create and distinguish styles of music. Take Big Band Music. If you think of the bands of Benny Goodman, Harry James, or Count Basie, what timbres, or tone colors, come to mind? Perhaps you think of the solo instruments these star leaders played so marvelously, like clarinet (Goodman), trumpet (James), or piano (Basie). Or maybe you hear the overall Big-Band sound: saxophones, trumpets, and definitely trombones. And what about the rhythm section? Without it, there’d be no Swing Era.   
 
Whether we swooned over Frankie Avalon or screamed to Mick Jagger, we witnessed the evolution of a powerful new musical timbre called the electric guitar. In the early years before electric guitars entered the mix, Big-Band guitarists placed their acoustic guitars in front of microphones, so they’d be heard. That amplification added a new twist to the acoustical guitar’s timbre—one that helped define the early Swing sound. 
 
Contrast the playing of Keith Richards or the early Swing sound that to the sound of Roy Rogers playing guitar. Not to mention Jimmie Rodgers! And what about steel guitar? It goes on and on. 

And who decides all of these issues of timbre? In much of music, it’s the composers and arrangers. They usually work in silence, filling the silence with mental sounds and endless questions: Is this musical line (texture) more effective using the timbre of cellos or bassoons? How much of this chord should be played by the harp, and how much by the cellos?  Should the trombones pick up one of those notes? Which sounds better on this melody: trumpet or flute?   What happens if the flute line is doubled below by clarinet? 

If you want a picture of how intense composing and arranging can be, check out the beautiful new autobiography by Grammy-award winner Sammy Nestico: The Gift of Music. Or if you really get interested, get his fantastic and valuable compendium (book and CDs) called The Complete Arranger. 
 
Let’s face it. People aren’t brought up to hear the intricacies of timbre. School curriculums don’t routinely include units where students learn to identify the sounds of instruments, and even draw the instruments to match sounds played on recordings. Some people rarely get to hear live music-making. For them, music happens by pushing a button . . . unless (like the readers of Music After 50!) they take up the hard work of learning to play and sing.

A trained ear can hear a lot more than an untrained one. That’s not to say that music training is a requirement, but that there are ‘secrets’ of music that are revealed to an ear that is trained to hear the basic musical elements: melody, rhythm, harmony, texture, and timbre. Which brings us to the sixth element—the one that’s sometimes present in music: words, or text. Let’s take up text in our next post.

Carol Reynolds, aka Professor Carol, a former music history professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has launched a new company, Silver Age Music. Her latest product is a multimedia course: “Discovering Music: 300 Years of Interaction in Western Music, Art, History, & Culture.” Prof. Carol now lives on a ranch, raises goats, and writes and lectures on classical music (to humans).

Prof. Carol

Texture. It applies to music as well as fabrics! Actually, texture is one of five parameters used to describe style in Western music. These five dimensions are taught in music appreciation courses, so perhaps you’ve encountered them already. They’re: Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, Texture, Timbre, and the sixth one, if there are words, Text.

Melody, harmony, and rhythm are more familiar concepts. But what are texture and timbre? Texture, in music, is the “thickness” or “thinness” of the musical lines. In short, texture concerns the number of lines the ear takes in simultaneously. 
 
Think of a sandwich. A sandwich can be thin, with a layer of peanut butter (and maybe some jam squished in). Or you might eat a jumbo Italian sub with four layers of meat, two kinds of cheese, lettuce, tomato, onions, sauces, and a final layer of jalapeños (that’s how we eat Italian in Texas). Neither sandwich is better or worse—both have a place and an audience. 

Moving the sandwich idea to music, think of music sung by a barbershop quartet. Here, our ears absorb a four-part texture: four singers move together as a unit. Sometimes their lines coincide (four-part harmony) and sometimes they move independently. Either way, we hear four layers, or a four-part texture.

When a composer composes music, he or she thinks about texture. Should I make this part thinner or thicker to convey a different emotion?

To make a thicker, and more interesting, sandwich, we pile on more “stuff.” In music, we’d call it “thick texture” when we pile on more musical lines. Contrast this thicker-sounding texture with a smear of peanut butter, which translates to a single melody line.  Perhaps the composer would choose a thin texture for a scene in a film where a child is walking down a lane.  If other people rush in, then contrasting musical lines could be added, thickening the texture. And intensifying the effect. 

The contrast between thick and thin creates musical tension and release. It’s one of a composer’s favorite ways to create musical excitement.
 
In our cowboy town of Bowie, Texas, we’ve assembled a vocal ensemble. We call ourselves the “OK Chorale” (I know, it’s corny). We sing mostly a cappella, or unaccompanied, vocal music. We’ve been rehearsing a three-part Mass by English Renaissance composer William Byrd. There are just three musical lines (or voices, as they’re called). 
 
With only three vocal lines, how much textural contrast can there be, you might ask? You’d be surprised. Byrd was a genius with sound. One of his favorite tricks is to drop out the top voice—the highest voice—and let the two lower parts keep singing. It’s fantastic how the sound explodes when that high line comes back in!  
 
If Byrd can create tension-release with just three musical lines, think how much more tension-release Beethoven could cook up with a full orchestra. Now here’s the challenge. Take a piece of music and see if you can track the texture. First, separate, in your ear, the musical lines. How many are there?  If it’s a small group, maybe a singer, bass, guitar, drums, keyboard: basically a five-part texture (although the guitar and keyboard can layer extra musical lines into the sound). 
 
Once you determine how thick the texture is (how many layers are in the sandwich?), listen to the song and track the changes in texture. Every time the singer drops in and out, the texture thins or thickens. But what about the other instruments? Does the bass ever drop out?  The guitar?  The drums? And if so, what is the effect on releasing energy, or musical tension? And what happens when those instruments come back in? What emotions did it evoke?
 
It’s admittedly challenging to start listening to music this way. But it’s enlightening, too. Remember, whoever composed or arranged the song thought exactly in these terms. 
 
And if you don’t find enough tension-release in the songs you usually listen to, switch over to something else, perhaps jazz, classical, or Big Band. Take Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo (1930), or the opening of Stravinsky’s Firebird (1911). Remember, every sound counts. 
 
In fact, “sound” is where we’ll start when we take up the topic of timbre in my next post. Happy feasting.

Carol Reynolds, aka Professor Carol, a former music history professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has launched a new company, Silver Age Music. Her latest product is a multimedia course: “Discovering Music: 300 Years of Interaction in Western Music, Art, History, & Culture.” Prof. Carol now lives on a ranch, raises goats, and writes and lectures on classical music (to humans).

Prof. Carol

At the end of my last post, I referred to recent compositions that strike the “right tension” between composer and listener. Let’s pick up that theme.
 
Tension. We tend to think of tension as negative: a tension headache, or too much tension at work. Quite the contrary. Tension is a positive element in life. Think of the chick pecking open its shell. Tap, tap, tap, until, poof, there’s a hole for its startled head to poke through.
 
Tension is critical in the arts. It’s a creative force. Artists are constantly rapping against shells, trying to break through to something bigger, more alive. And you don’t have to be an “artist” to understand artistic tension.  Sometimes, the creative tension inside us leads us to study something—say music—at a later point in our lives.
 
Tension doesn’t exist alone. It needs its opposite: release. Tension-release, tension-release. From poetry to pottery, we find this dynamic, or interaction, in all of the arts.
 
So what about music? How does a composer set up tension-release?  How important is tension-release in capturing the listener’s ear? And, thinking historically, have the basics of tension-release changed throughout the course of Western music?
 
Let’s turn to an exercise in listening. Let’s use arguably one of the most famous pieces of instrumental music: the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: “duh-duh-duh daah” . . . or “Fate Knocking at the Door.” At least, that’s what some people call the opening pattern.
 
Oh that pattern! It’s tense. It starts abruptly. We don’t know where we are in the beat. We can’t figure out the harmony. Just this opening pitch that’s drilled three times (“duh, duh, duh”). Each repeated pitch adds tension. 
 
Then, there’s a drop down to a longer pitch (a little bit of release). But then . . . there’s silence.  Silences (rests) are not always “restful”—this one certainly isn’t. We’re left hanging, unsure what we’ve heard, unsure what will happen next. 
 
Why don’t you take it from there? What happens next? What causes tension, and what creates release? Listen several times to the opening—yes, I know, we’ve all heard it a hundred times. But put on your analytical ears, and listen like a scientist. Track what you’re hearing and feeling in those first 15 to 20 seconds. Because that’s where Beethoven gives us the germ of the piece. In fact, it’s called a germinal motive: it germinates the rest of the movement.
 
I can promise you one thing (and I don’t make promises lightly!).  If you try this kind of microscopic listening, the entire musical experience gets more rewarding. Like any skill, it takes practice. But putting on “composer’s ears” and delving into the nuts and bolts of a musical composition is one fabulous ride. We’ll keep sharpening our analytical ears in the next post and look at a word people associate more with fabric than with music: texture.

Carol Reynolds, aka Professor Carol, a former music history professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has launched a new company, Silver Age Music. Her latest product is a multimedia course: “Discovering Music: 300 Years of Interaction in Western Music, Art, History, & Culture.” Prof. Carol now lives on a ranch, raises goats, and writes and lectures on classical music (to humans).

"Professor Carol"

Frequently, and justifiably, thoughtful people bemoan the way “classical music” left its audience behind in the 20th century. This post was, in fact, spurred by just such a comment on one of my previous posts.

This person and others with similar complaints are referring to the gulf between composer and listener caused by waves of abstract and dissonant music that dominated the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Away flew lyrical melody, engaging rhythm, and accessible harmony.

Form created by contrast and repetition—one of Western music’s treasures—became impossible for listeners to find, much less to enjoy. Add in the intoxicating new kid on the block: electronic music. Here the game revolved around technological possibilities starting with the new reel-to-reel tape recorders. Natural sounds were captured, then manipulated physically on the magnetic tape. (Jeffrey Plaide shows the process in this enlightening clip). The resulting compositions were “performed” by hitting the “on” button. Fascinating stuff, admittedly, but the human listener seemed all too often an afterthought, an object against which the electronic sounds could reverberate.

Of course, experiments in the 1950s simply blew the lid off of an already bubbling caldron. The modernism of Stravinsky, Strauss, and Schoenberg had disconcerted plenty of listeners in the 1910s and ’20s, grabbing them by the throat and shaking their ears out of their heads.

But, since the whole of Western culture was reeling under waves of technological revolution, political upheaval, and war, somehow it all fit. Then, in the 1930s and ’40s, artists showed a clear reaction to the chaos by nurturing a style we call Neoclassicism. Neoclassicism used plenty of modern harmonies and complex rhythms, but unleashed them more subtly, within the constraints of traditional musical forms—forms Bach or Haydn would have employed. It didn’t last.

The 1950s blew in: World War II was over and all hell broke loose. Jackson Pollock scattered blobs of paint across canvases on the floor. Merce Cunningham built dance sets from industrial materials scavenged from trash bins. And John Cage became a regular at the hardware store, buying bolts and screws to lace through his piano strings. Far too many composers, especially those ensconced in academic endowed chairs and institutes, chose to pontificate, rather than communicate. You might say they trusted their theories more than their audience’s ears. (For more on this topic, see New vs. Old Music Unending Battle in Classical Programming.)

The result is easy to analyze from our standpoint today. From Medieval Chant through the great symphonies of the 19th-century, Western music displayed clarity. No matter how innovative the melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic structures, listeners could follow them, if with a bit of effort. There was enough predictable material to give listeners an anchor. Without the anchor, listeners fled. Or at least went into hiding. But if it’s been awhile since you’ve listened to “new” music from the so-called classical world, you’re in for a surprise.

It’s baack. All of it. Aural clarity in the aspects of lyrical melody, agreeable harmony, engaging rhythm, and even perceptible form. (For starters, explore the music of my two favorite “Pauls”: LA composer Paul Cristo and Florida composer Paul Richards).The new music of today, to use the words of star-composer Sebastian Currier, “is meeting the listeners more than half-way.” And that’s the right tension between good composer and attentive listener. I’ll explore this tension, or musical interaction, between composer and listener in our next post.

Carol Reynolds, aka Professor Carol, a former music history professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has launched a new company, Silver Age Music. Her latest product is a multimedia course: “Discovering Music: 300 Years of Interaction in Western Music, Art, History, & Culture.” Prof. Carol now lives on a ranch, raises goats, and writes and lectures on classical music (to humans).

Carol Reynolds

Classical Music. Ah, hah! There’s a label that causes trouble. What does it mean?  Most people would answer “the music of Mozart and Beethoven, Bach and Brahms…those ‘classical’ guys.” But what does that mean?
 
Those guys wouldn’t know what to do with the label “Classical Music.” They couldn’t have envisioned their music still being around centuries into the future.

Immortality? That was the least of their concerns. They were scrappy, hassled men who struggled to get their newest sounds into the mainstream. They needed a paycheck, a hot meal, and a roof over the family’s head. Their job security was frequently zero.  
 
Success and survival for a composer were synonymous. Either a composer had commissions and a patron’s favor, or he didn’t. There was no middle ground, at least not until the 19th century, when increasing numbers of composers circumvented the patronage system and took their works directly to audiences in the relatively new “public concerts.”

We have to pull the powdered wigs off these guys, and try to see them as they were: Talented, highly trained artistic craftsmen, hunched over their desks late at night, running their hands through their [short!] hair and chewing their fingernails to the bone, desperate to get music completed and copied, or to receive a letter of endorsement from some duke to whom they’d sent a new work.
 
Socially speaking, composers were upper-class servants. Look at the constricted language Beethoven had to use in a letter from 1823, in which he was simply trying to find out how King George IV had responded to his gift of a score of Wellington’s Victory: 

In thus presuming, herewith, to submit my most obedient prayer to Your Majesty, I venture at the same time to supplement it with a second [letter]. . . . For many years the undersigned cherished the sweet wish that Your Majesty would graciously make known the receipt of his work to him; but he has not been able to boast of this happiness. . . .

In other words, “Hey, King George, what about that piece I sent you?”
 
New music is always a product of its era. And all of the music we call “classical” today was new at one point, the ink still drying on the page. Would the present age inspire those impassioned notes Beethoven scrawled on paper? So if “classical” is a misleading description, how did it come to be attached to this music? And what was the musical world really like when Mozart hurried down the cobblestone streets of Vienna, late to rehearsals?  We’ll take up those questions in our next post…

Carol Reynolds, aka Professor Carol, a former music history professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has launched a new company, Silver Age Music. Her latest product is a multimedia course: “Discovering Music: 300 Years of Interaction in Western Music, Art, History, & Culture.” Prof. Carol now lives on a ranch, raises goats, and writes and lectures on classical music (to humans).

Carol Reynolds

“How do we bring Classical Music to a wider audience?” How many times have you heard that question? If there were a magic answer, music executives would have struggled their way to it long ago. Instead, CEOs of orchestras and opera companies, critics, performers, and concerned lovers of music stand around, shaking their heads, as if examining an expiring patient. What’s really at stake in this issue? Is it merely safeguarding the ongoing enjoyment of a body of historic music? 

In fact, it’s far more significant. A carefully crafted artistic heritage is being gobbled up by our hyper-driven insta-culture. We no longer train young ears and minds to hear and understand music, nor do we make certain that young people are exposed to music that challenges them. Thus, marvelously crafted music that palpably influenced the course of Western history is threatened with extinction!

Wait! Isn’t that the old buggy whip dilemma? Well-crafted buggy whips were once critical to the operation of society.  But they too became extinct. We can agree that buggy whips are not needed in modern society. But what about music from the buggy-whip days? Is it relevant still? 

It’s more than relevant. We can discard outmoded technology without discarding the science behind it. But our cultural heritage is a different matter. 

Culture is defined by what gets passed from generation to generation. Symphonies, operas, oratorios, sonatas, and other “old” types of music retain their powerful, even life-altering message for us today. Deprived of that message, we are weakened as a society. 

So, if we do decide take up the mantle of preserving Western classical music from extinction, how do we do it?  Especially if it’s not familiar to us. Most people, after all, listen to music for pleasure. Taking on music that is unfamiliar is not always pleasurable.

In this new series of posts, I’ll explore these issues. No easy answers are promised, but we’ll tear down preconceptions where we can, and open up new ideas. Plus, we’ll take up some of my favorite questions, like: “Who the heck was the 18th-century’s super-star Paisiello, and why did Mozart covet his success?” And we’ll look back at things that seem dusty to us (for example, Medieval music manuscripts), to learn why they were at the cutting edge of technology.

So, join on in, and get ready to comment too! I’ll be starting with the biggest bugaboo itself: that term “Classical Music.” Because those two words cause a lot of the problem.

Carol Reynolds aka Professor Carol, a former music history professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has launched a new company, Silver Age Music. Her latest product is a multimedia course: “Discovering Music: 300 Years of Interaction in Western Music, Art, History, & Culture.” Prof. Carol now lives on a ranch, raises goats, and writes and lectures on classical music (to humans).