The heart of Copland's book, and the parts that will give you the most help in listening intelligently to music, are Chapters 4 through 14. In those chapters are all the tools you need to tackle any music that currently interests you, and any unfamiliar music that you want to explore.
Musical Excerpts
Musical excerpts in this chapter, performed by Adam Matlock. In most instances, Adam plays the excerpt twice, the first time at reduced tempo. Page numbers refer to the recommended edition.
How to use excerpts: As you encounter each short musical score in the chapter, stop reading and listen to the excerpt using the videos on this page. Listen more than once if you do not recognize, in the music, the idea that Copland is presenting. Then continue reading.
It is IMPORTANT that you listen to each excerpt as you encounter it. As Copland lectured on this subject, no doubt he had a piano at hand, and wanted his students to HEAR the excerpt as an example of the point(s) he was making. Try to recreate that experience for yourself by using the excerpts at the moment you encounter them.
Excerpts in Chapter 4
Page 36
Score for above; click to enlarge.
Copland's Musical Recommendations for Chapter 4 (rhythm)
1) Bach—The Italian Concerto
2) Tschaikovsky—Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique)
For just the second movement, go HERE. Try counting beats at the beginning, thinking about what Copland tells you on page 31.
Additional, for Chapter 4 (rhythm)
• Babatunde Olatunji -- Chant to the Trainman
• Dave Brubeck Quartet -- Take Five
• Buena Vista Social Club -- Candela
Dancing requires that you recognize the rhythm that will fit the band's music.
This means hearing it, and figuring out how many beats in each repeat, but does not required knowing the time signature.
• Norman Greenbaum -- Spirit in the Sky
How many beats to the measure? What's your dance step?
• Ann Murray -- Could I Have This Dance
How many beats to the measure? What's your dance step?
• Jennifer Lopez -- Let's Get Loud
How many beats to the measure? How do you count it? What's your dance step?
• F. G. Project -- Move Dance Be Born
How many beats to the measure? How do you count it? What's your dance step?
Some of the most complex rhythms in today's music are in rap and hip-hop music. Just to get a tiny insight into how much thought and experiment goes into this kind of music, watch the following video about a pioneer user of music production controllers (MPCs), focussing on one of the most widely used, the Akai MPC3000.
How J Dilla humanized his MPC3000
If you want to know more about music, you need to listen to music that has something to teach you, whether you like that kind of music or not. Doing this can let you hear more in all music, including music that you just happen to like. It's like the people you work with. Some of them you like, some not so much. But if you work well with those you like, and don't try as hard with those you don't ---- well, let's say your can do you job better if you fix that.
For more (and more and more) from Estelle Caswell, the expert and inveterate analyzer of music in the But-I-don't-LIKE-this-stuff! genre, listen to episodes of Earworm (link to first episode).
Caution #1: Parental discretion advised. Language in music excerpts may offend you. (Estelle's language will not.)
Caution #2: You might learn something.
More to Think About
What Was Earlier Musical Notation Like?
A student asked this question in class, and the very next day, a related article appeared in my weekly email from BBC News. It tells about ancient written music, including lyrics and the earliest known musical notation. Where and when? Syria, 3400 years ago. See it and read about it HERE.
A Student's QuestionWhat Was Earlier Musical Notation Like?
A student asked this question in class, and the very next day, a related article appeared in my weekly email from BBC News. It tells about ancient written music, including lyrics and the earliest known musical notation. Where and when? Syria, 3400 years ago. See it and read about it HERE.
Poets break things out in two or three beat chunks of hard or soft beats. Iambic pentameter, for example, represents a line of five repetitions of a soft and a hard beat. Does that in any way correspond to measures in music?
(A rare error in Copland's book might confuse first readers. After his very first simple musical score at the top of page 29. He says that it shows, "... one measured unit of 2/4 time." Actually, the score shows two measures of 2/4 time.)
A measure (or measured unit, as Copland calls it at first) is the space between two vertical lines in a musical score. For example, the short score on page 43 of Copland contains four measures. Measures of music with a particular time signature (like 3/4, sometimes called waltz time) invite phrasing that repeats with each measure:
ONE two three | ONE two three | ONE two three |...,
can | I have this | DANCE for the | REST of my | LIFE ...
sort of like the (sometimes monotonous) repetitions of iambic pentameter.
Even when poetry is written with a regular rhythm such as iambic pentameter, reading it with that rhythm usually does not capture the beauty or meaning of a poem. In Copland's example at the bottom of p. 30, marks of emphasis are placed above the syllables that the strict rhythm would emphasize:
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
(Read the full poem HERE. Who is the you of the poem?)
When one reads the poem with that rhythmic emphasis, it conveys little emotion. When the reader reads the lines for meaning, the emphases are different, the meaning comes across, but the regular rhythms and rhymes of good poetry add something subtle and magical that the rhythmic reading hides.
Good prose can be the same way. For example, read this quotation (you first say it in the resources for Chaper 1), and watch for the poetic devices that make the passage more powerful.
The sky was stained infrequently with the red of a lifeless sunset and, as Michael watched the desolation of summer's retreat, he listened sadly to the sibilant heather lisping against the flutes of the pines, while from time to time the wind drummed against the buttresses and boomed against the bulk of the church.
From Sinister Street, vol. 1, Compton MacKenzie, 1913
While you are at it, count the sound words and music words in this passage.
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While you are at it, count the sound words and music words in this passage.
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