OK, hope you enjoyed that. It's a really as you can hear quiet movement and the recording that I've posted for you is when I downloaded from the Internet and really actually boosted the volume of quite significantly so that it was a bit more audible.

And you'll see throughout the score of lots of really soft, dynamic markings, triple pianos, lots of things are piano throughout with a couple of moments that are an exception to that. So overall, really soft.

And this is of course one of the first kind of important points. I think it is to make here is that when you want to create, you know the most unsettling things in music are often the quiet things because they're sort of at the edge of what you can hear as a listener or what you can detect, or what you can feel.

It's sort of, you know, if you think about.

Someone telling you a story in a scary way that storyteller often tends to whisper sometimes because it's that quiet at the edge of hearing speech that somehow instills more fear than loud. You know, purposeful declamatory speech that has a lot of intensity and gusto behind it.

So soft dynamics are really one of the important.

Elements of creating this kind of sound or this sensation of not feeling settled as a listener when listening to a piece of music?

And so it's no, you know. It's no coincidence by any means that we see so many really soft, dynamic markings. Again, triple pianos everywhere, soft brass writing with mute's.

Everything a lot is done to bring down the volume of the orchestra. In general you can see all the strings have muting.

Here at the opening really just to pare back and pull back the intensity of the sound to really make listeners sit forward and listen a little bit more carefully and alertly.

That brings me to the second point, which is.

I'll call it surges in amplitude.

Actually, I'm going to call it sudden.

There are a couple really.

Powerful moments in this movement where.

The music goes from soft all of a sudden to being quite a bit louder and it's scary. I know this sounds obvious right that the best way to scare someone is to talk really quietly and then all of a sudden yell. But this is the musical equivalent of that idea. We get one of these moments early on in Page two of the full score around right at rehearsal 80 or all of a sudden we're working in the beginning with a really kind of reduced ensemble. All of a sudden pretty much the full orchestra comes in. We get this really intense, menacing sound that suddenly enters.

So here's this moment in the piece.

Couple bars before 80 into rehearsal 80.

Can see there's three of these moments that happen. These big powerful chords with the full orchestra, and again, they're not as loud as they could be. The braska be unmuted, the breast could be playing Forte. You can see he's actually writing mezzoforte dynamics for the brass who are playing in this cord and not all of them are.

And so you know, it's not the most intense contrast between soft and loud as he could have created. But this idea of sudden surges in amplitude is a really important thing for essentially frightening the listener in music psychology. They have something called.

Alerts and alarms and this is trying to describe the phenomenon of when people hear a really loud sound. It scares them, and particularly when people hear you know people are hearing nothing. It's very quiet and then all of a sudden a loud sound comes like a Thunder clap. It's physiological response that we get to a sudden change in sensory information going from really soft to really loud in this case.

And it's something that composers use a lot if you think about horror films, or if you think about other kinds of scary sounding music, you might have heard this technique is used frequently, so again, overall very soft.

And just a few moments when we get a sudden shift upwards and amplitude with a really dramatic effect. I think in terms of unsettling the listener and creating tension in the music.

That's all I want to say about dynamics. I know it's not very much, but just again an overall picture of an overall general shape of approach by Stravinsky. Here I want to talk a little bit about melodic construction.

One of the things I hope you notice as you were listening to the piece is that you know first of all, the melodies are pretty.

Unsingable it's hard to. If you were to listen to this piece that I asked you and everyone in the class to whistle their favorite melody from the piece. It's kind of hard to pick one out.

I think that's partly the use of unusual sounds as well as the techniques of blurring individual lines. I'll talk about later, but there's also some relationship in that to melodic construction.

When you look through the piece, there aren't.

Very good melodies that there aren't very long episodic melodies that give us a clear, soaring idea about what is expressed emotive Lee. Rather, we tend to encounter short melodic fragments.



I'm going to call these short thematics cells theme again. Just meeting a short melody and sell. Meaning you know, clipped into like a little box, almost such that one uses these short themes, not in a way to create Counterpoint.

Imitative counterpoint across the orchestra is something, but rather ones using cells, often times to make a disjunct passage of music that moves quickly from one idea to another, seemingly without.

Too much consequence. So to give you an example of passage like this that's particularly effective in this regard. Let's look at page written, page 91 of the PDF. This is PDF page 6 and this is 1 bar before rehearsal 85.

So one before rehearsal 85.

We get the entrance of the trumpets.

Let me turn up my computer volume a little bit.

But this is one minute and 15 seconds into the recording I've posted online.

Totally new melodic idea.

Here all of a sudden we get the older idea. We've already heard in the peace.

And then just goes quickly as it started, it stops. We go back to the trumpet idea.

And this starts now to get developed in a new way.

So two things are important here. The first is that.

Overwhelmingly, this piece has short thematic materials.

Nothing is long if you know. I think this piece.

I think music becomes much less strange if you've got a long, stable melody that lasts 20 seconds, so he never gives us anything long. It's always short, little bite sized fragments of things to always keep us guessing to always make us feel as listeners unsure what's happening. And this is a combination not just of changing rapidly from one melodic idea to another, but also changing rapidly and decisively from one group of instruments to another group that made trumpets. Then all of a sudden the strings, then the horns and some strings, then back to me to trumpets, then jete strings.

There's a sense in which.

You know, we typically think about good composition orchestration as being it's integrating and dovetailing elements in somewhat of a seamless fashion. This is a much more brute approach too.

Deploying materials onto the page, right? It's cut and paste it's you know.

The kind of thing a kid could cut out of paper and make a collage out of you. Know in musical terms, and this is actually often called.

Collage technique

something that Stravinsky more or less kind of, founded this idea or establish this idea in his own music. This idea of collage technique means taking small bits of things.

Metaphorically, cutting them up and pasting them next to other bits of other things that, without any attempt to smooth the transition or ease the transition in the case of this kind of orchestration, it has the effect of.

Creating uncertainty and creating this kind of suspense in the music that makes us constantly wondering where things are going and not giving us a clear direction at any moment.

OK, so these are the two most general categories I think are probably the most straightforward, but also worth I hope your time listening to me speak about and think about dynamics being overwhelmingly soft with some surges for dramatic effect am alot of construction. Being over overwhelmingly oriented tored short.

Uneventful melodies, let's say.

An pising those together stitching this together in A.

Asynchronous.

Sort of UN streamlined way.

Let's get to the more sort of meat and potatoes of the orchestrational approach to this piece and now talk about sound choices. We know writing for spooky stuff for more or less, going for a lot of soft writing, but I want to spend some time and talk about some of the things he's.

Going in terms of instrument choices.

At the same time, we're going to listen to the piece in sections and at the same time as I'm pointing out interesting sounds that are particularly useful for this kind of approach. I'm also going to be pointing out compositional techniques that are also useful for this kind of approach to so we're not going to go through the same stages, and as I'm going through each section, I'm going to be pointing out ideas in both of these categories. Unusual sounds.

As well as techniques to blur individual lines.

Now the goal of both of these categories is similar to a lot of what I've talked about already in terms of the purpose of these first 2.

You're trying to create a situation where the listener feels unsure of what's happening.

Ann isn't able to grab on to anything too familiar for too long, and so unusual sounds help the composer.

Keep the listener kind of feeling like they're in a New World of sound that they're not used to. You know there used to an orchestra sounding a certain way, and by using techniques that are a little bit outside of what the normal repertoire of sounds is, it puts the listener in a somewhat uncertain or alienated position with regard to their understanding of the music and how their metabolism music. Likewise, if you're constantly blurring.

Compositional ideas so that listeners can't hear straight forward, identifiable melodies or lines in a clear way. It also gives this sense of.

Alienation. It also gives the sense of uncertainty and not being sure.

What's the driving force of the unified message of the music is indeed there is no unified message. It is plural in nature, and that's part of the reason that these works are unsettling is because they don't give us one thing. They give us many things just to say quickly two other pieces that are really interesting to look at. If you're interested in this kind of sound world and these kinds of pieces.

Two other pieces are highly recommend.

You listening to his atmospheres?

On this is by Liberty.

This is a peaceful orchestra where there are like 5 billion devices. Like every violinist has their own part. It's and the score is so huge it's like takes up an enormous amount of paper for the conductor because every violin has their own independent line at certain moments.

A piece that's really interesting to look at with regard to this technique of blur atmospheres Baladi also.

Sorry.

Also, another really great piece to look at and again you can find this online just like you can find the Ligeti is trendy for the victims of Hiroshima apiece by Panda Wretzky.

Panda Wretzky

Pandora Wretzky. Pretty sure I'm spelling that right. Both of these pieces are really interesting in the way that they blur and kind of.

Erase individual sounds through a plurality of stuff happening all the time and both of these pieces are really formative for actually Hollywood composers in writing spooky music. So two pieces to get to know both of them you can find on YouTube.

OK, so let's start.

With the beginning I.

There's not too much for me to say about the first page. I'm going to play it for you. One thing I do want to say is that you know in terms of.

Blurring techniques.

And also maybe making things soft too. You'll see an incredible prevalence of DVC and split parts in this piece.

Meaning, you know, there's never the beginning doesn't have one flute line that all three flutes are doubling at the Unison and one string to string parts. That half of the strings play 1/2 and the other the other half. Everything is always divided into a huge number of different parts, right? So the beginning in the strings.

You can see he's divided violent ones into Divisioin 3. He's got these really cool passengers going between Harmonic on the open, a string to some other pitches.

He's divided the violins into Divisioin 2.

And you can see he's building these really thick cords that are not really something that you would see in other kinds of orchestrational styles. I mean, dividing violent ones into threes and building harmonies like this will also having thick harmonies in violent twos as well as not a super common orchestrational approach. Likewise, you can see violas.

There are three solo Viola's at the beginning of this piece that play this chordal passage here and then he's gotta stay for the rest of the violas, so there's a huge amount division of the orchestra into small numbers of instruments.

And this is one of the important orchestrational approaches that.

Composers often use in this style, and if you listen to these pieces, you'll hear it in spades.

Breaking the group up into so many people that we hear clouds rather than things.

That we here.

That we get a sense of atmosphere rather than a point.

And also this serves to kind of make an unsettling environment for the listener. There's nothing to grab onto, there's so many different parts moving in different directions that we never really feel like we have a stable ground to stand on.

So you can see lots of devices in the strings, lots of devices in the wind writing the flutes and clarinets are playing a series of angular more or less atonal chords going back and forth between.

E flat minor.

And C Sharp minor, so two kind of unrelated minor chords toggling back and forth here at the beginning. And again with really soft dynamics creating a really light wispy sound.

This technique string harmonics are something we'll see a lot in this piece.

The The thing we get very opening in the violins as well as in the cellos he ran in the double basis. String harmonics create a lighter sound that created more ethereal sound. It doesn't do well in loud contexts, but in software contexts they are.

Much more pure and piercing in terms of their pitch than normal string bowing. Perfect for this kind of sound he wants at the opening.

Let's stop right there. This is the cord I was talking about before when I was talking about dynamics. I said there was something loud and unsettling that we get here at Russell 80. Here we are at rehearsal 80. I'm going to make this a sound file that you can listen to separate from the whole piece.

Save other experts selected audio. I'm going to call it cord so it'll be a sound file called core dot MP3 that corresponds just to this cord. Please listen to it outside of the context of this video, 'cause You'll be able to hear a lot more. But listen to this cord a couple of times. I'm going to play it once here and try to describe how you find this cord to be.

Unsettling and unclear.

Once again.

So how is this court unsettling and unclear?

I'm going to call this muddy.

Cord scoring

meaning that as an orchestrator you're writing according to the orchestra and you're purposely making it.

Dense and kind of hard to hear, so the scariness of the court is one thing but the scariest thing comes a lot from the sudden surge and dynamics, as well as some of the dissonant properties of it.

But equally contributing to this, I think 2 is the choice of instruments and what registers there in. He creates this muddy murky sound that has a really Erie effect to it.

And there's really two elements.

One is that there are.

That there are.

Kind of.

Single notes that jut out.

Of that, Amber, Is there single? There's one element. There's this high note that kind of sits in this cord all by itself and feels isolated and lonely, and.

And, um.

And fragile.

And the second element here is what I'm going to call a clouded low register rather than having the low register of this chord be something which is clear and bright and.

Helps establish a root of accord.

He makes this chord cloudy and unclear, and and doesn't give us as listeners are very good sense of sort of confidence in this particular moment. Now the interesting things about this cord is when you listen to it. It sounds really dissonant, and that's partly because we have these other voices moving in quavers that are doing something sort of like what we had at the beginning.

These alternating between these minor chords that are.

That are not part of the same diatonic scale. Oftentimes they are related to the octatonic scale instead of the diatonic scale.

We don't have to worry about that. Let's just ignore those and just look at the notes that are being held.

In

in, in fact, the notes that are being held are not dissonant. All they are a D minor chord and I want to look at.

Those notes with you. This is a.

The same kind of graph I've been doing since the beginning of semester where we look at all the different instruments in the orchestra and how they're distributed in terms of who's playing what note in what register.

We saw this is the technique that other uses in his textbook for talking about cord scoring, and this is indeed the cord at rehearsal 80 as well as it's more or less the same. Court reversal 81 and rehearsal 82.

And you can see if you just quickly glance over the pitches, you will see it is actually just a simple D minor chord, nothing too.

There's nothing different about it if you ignore all of this other stuff which I know, we really can't, but let's just go ahead and do it for now so we can talk about the choices of who he picked to play this chord and where they're playing in their register.

So the first thing I want to say about that.

Is that um?

Most of the density of this court is in the winds.

So it's a D minor chord. We've got DNA on the bottom.

And then we build. He builds the, try it up, and there's two things that I think are noteworthy here, directly related to some of the things I've already mentioned with regard to muddy chord scoring. The first is that he's got this beautiful note that sits on top of this cord. It is written in the piccolo. This a above the above this a here.

And it's also written at the same pitch in violin, one as a harmonic.

You can see violin ones well at least half of them have an A on the open a string as well as a harmonic two octaves higher than that.

I assume this actually is just incorrect notation for a natural harmonic on the string. I don't think this is actually a double stop. I could be wrong about that, but that's my. That's my guess that's not actually a double stop.

They have this beautiful bright harmonic. A up here and that is doubled by the piccolo way up there. The Alto flute, which is a flute that sounds.

1/4 lower than written is also playing on a as well, and the cellos also have a harmonic a. In this case reversal ID two. It's a tremolo.

Harmonik a way up there.

Other than a few clarinets who are playing three instruments, these three clarinets are playing the D minor triad more or less in the middle of the register.

Other than them, we basically had nothing else. All that we have up above Middle C. If you take out those three clients in the middle, is this high a this high, a kind of juts out an lingers? An feels out of place.

It's partly because it's got this harmonic and the piccolo both really bright kind of crystalline timbres that really grab our attention.

But it's also because there's nothing else there. I mean, if you ignore the clarinets, playing the D minor triad in the middle of the trouble Clef, we've got no chord notes below. Sorry in that register. Otherwise, right? All of the assumes in basically our Nets are playing in bass Clef horns are all playing bass Clef notes. Trumpets aren't playing. The trombones are all playing bass Clef notes, and the strings are really barren.

In general, so he's got this cord where he's got a one single thing. Kind of sitting on top that sticks out. And then he's got everything else really concentrated forcefully to the bottom of the Grandstaff.

And this creates this muddy, murky sound. So we've got like I said, all of the French horns here. I've written them in Bass Clef 'cause they're really low. This is written. This is sounding pitch.

So all of the French horns are written in bass Clef. All the trombones are written down pretty low, and they're all muted, so you get that kind of nasal sound that congested sound in the low range. Two bids are both muted as well. Applying download ease, and of course bases are doing a double stop DNA.

Now one of the first things we learned when we talked about chord writing was that it's always important to give at least an octave at the very bottom without any other intervals in there. And if you do put other intervals in there that make it smaller than an octave, you will get a murky dark sound.

Obviously this is what exactly what Ricky wants. He doesn't want to clear brilliant sound like we talked about making in some of the earlier examples this semester. He wants something which is dark and Foreboding.

So much so that he actually, in addition to the pitches we've looked at so far, he also write to timpani part which is trembling on both back and forth between D&A at the same time, something you should never do, and less you want really dirty, murky, hazy sounding chord.

He also writes Bass Drum in here to to really round out the low end and focus us on the low frequency content of this cord. So listen to this cord again. Note how it's really bottom heavy that makes it murky and unclear. And then we also have this strange alien note that sits on top that feels out of place because there's no other instruments really supporting it. Moving our way up the register.

So I'll play it for you, from from on the stream. Please do stop and listen to the core dot MP3 file that's attached to this video as well.

Cool, so not only is this cord surging from a really quiet place and suddenly getting really loud, it's also doing it in a dark, ominous, murky way, which makes it all the more, I think. Frightening and unsettling.

I'm just going to pick up listening to the recording. If you read it or herself 81 on written page 87.

Also in the category of unusual sounds are all of these really effective harmonic tremolos that Stravinsky puts into the music now?

We talked about harmonics. We haven't often seen harmonic tremolos, which is adding the tremolo technique tool harmonic note here. He's adding the tremolo technique to or harmonic note, and also telling the players to play. It's open to cello, which.

I mean, players usually bow harmonics a little bit. Soap on the cello anyhow to get them to sound clearly on their instruments.

But this is going to make it even more bright, scratchy, kind of annoying sound, so we get harmonic.

Trams.

We also get so Pont a really good technique on string instruments for creating that glassy sound which.

Which thwart you know, which is the opposite of warmth.

OK, so increasingly kind of agitated techniques he's using here in terms of string timbres. You can see Super High violin notes as a consequence, which harmonics?

Permit as well as Super High cello writing here to again, this high writing is.

Relatively easy because it's he's using a harmonic technique. He doesn't write it here, but these are very likely artificial harmonics the entire time and you can see he's moving in a stepwise motion.

Or with the violence here, let's just listen to that passage will start at rehearsal 82 and listen for how that high.

Glittery, intense, scratchy sound comes out in the really high registers because of the violin 1, two, and cello. Harmonic tremolos whistle pachelo.

Now we come to what is kind of one of the more first proper melodies in the piece. I mean, when I say proper melodies, I mean that the thing we're about to hear it. Russell 83 is a melody of three bars long. It then repeats itself for another bar and a half more or less.

So this is one of the few times he's really giving us as listeners something to hold onto in the melodic realm.

And of course he has to do something weird to mess it up so it's not too stable, right? He's going to do something which.

Again, give us the longest melody that he will allow.

In the movement of really short thematic ideas.

And so, as a consequence he has to do something to make it unclear and not straightforward to keep up this sound of constantly blurring and making things unsettling for the listener. And So what does he do? He takes this metally melody and puts it into two really weird instruments. Really different instruments from each other.

He puts it into a violent solo.

On harmonics, meaning that the violinist.

I'm going to guess the violence displaying all artificial harmonics here.

In this high violin solo you can see he writes here at 83.

So we get this melody.

It's firstly kind of made in a strange way because it's super high in pitch space.

But then he doubles it.

With Alto Flute of all things.

Which is a really different timbre than violin harmonics.

Alto flute is a bigger version of the normal flute that sounds 1/4 lower than written.

And so he writes the Alto flute.

Here basically two octaves below the violin.

And what this effectively does is it creates a doubling that doesn't really work particularly well in terms of mixing the two sounds. We often think about doubling in the orchestra as picking relatively similar instruments in relatively similar registers. Sometimes an octave apart, for instance, or sometimes at the Unison in order to blend and create a sound, which, because the two instrumental groups that you're mixing, sound similar, you get something coherent out here is picking two instruments which really don't sound at all alike violent harmonics plus.

Relatively low Alto flute? You're going to get that bright piercing sound with the harmonics and that kind of wispy low range flute sound with the Alto Flute. And then he's also putting them two octaves apart, which is a really big interval and the effect here again is that he's taking his longest, most concrete melody and making it.

Strange to us by giving it a really unusual doubling, so really different timbres separated by a really large interval is what we get here at 83.

Cut to something.

Something relatively different.

Now this next page I'm going to spend a good amount of time talking about. Two of these ideas in succession, so let's listen to it first, and then I want to talk about blurring techniques that he's doing here in the orchestration for both the trumpet phrase as well as the horn and strings phrase that is going to follow first. Here's just this passage in its entirety, starting one before rehearsal 85.

So.

I've already mentioned this section briefly when I talked about melodic construction and thinking about collage technique. Having short phrases that interrupt each other, not just the melodic ideas, stop and start, but the orchestration also is strongly contrasting from one idea to the next. Two trumpets become eight solo.

At cellos, sorry, five solo cellos. Then we go back to four horns with some strings. Then we go back to Timmy trumpets, there's discontinuity and disjunct NIS not just in the melodic ideas themselves, but also in terms of the timbres that they realized in the orchestra.

Again, just to go back to it, five solo cellos like what a weird way of.

Again, making blurring the individual making the orchestra about orchestration about the plural, which is key here, but let's let's get back to some of these ideas and ways that he goes about blurring them.

I'm going to open a sibelius file really quick. Why have some of the raw materials of this piece? And I want to talk about two transformation TLE.

Or orchestrational techniques? I suppose I should call them that help make this blurring of the individual possible.

Want the first one doesn't really have a name.

So I'm just going to call it overlapping melodies, and the idea here is pretty simple.

Here we have the trumpet melody that you just heard one before 85.

Why is it so soft on Mia?

Give this trumpet some dynamics so you can hear it a little better.

Still hopelessly soft.

So that is the original trumpet melody, and you can imagine how.

How much more concrete this piece would have been if he would have taken this line and given it to a single trumpet, but at this moment here in the peace.

Was actually just a solo trumpet playing this line, yeah?

It would communicate.

Much more effectively with us as listeners, because all of the melodic information is concentrated into one place and again the system in some things dramatically doesn't want to do So what he does is something that I I'm terming overlapping melodies and it basically means that you give.

The melody is to two different instruments and then delete every other note and each of the two parts respectively and then fill out the durational values so that.

But you end up with is something where you still get the same basic melodic outline, but it's articulated in a way that split between two instruments. So now I've made again the melodic shape is still there, but I've made it especially blurred this melody by giving it to two players or two groups of players. It could be as well letting.

The the sort of vertical letting the horizontal intervals that a melody typically has become vertical by letting them overlap in time.

And this is of course, exactly what Stravinsky does in his piece, right? He doesn't just give this line to a single instrument or a single group of instruments. He takes this melody and split it between two players and you get this kind of back and forth hocket effect. Again, the end result is all about blurring the individual, making it so that we can't hear a straightforward line, but everything is always some kind of composite of activities of lots of different things in summation.

That's one important technique he uses quite often in the rite of spring, and he's really successfully here to create tension. The next technique I want to talk about is 1 bar after verse 85. This is when the music goes back to.

The melody that we heard before in the violin, harmonic solo with the Alto flute.

Except this time he puts in the horns and does some really weird looking string orchestration. I want to talk about first the raw materials of this passage.

These are the raw materials, which is to say the melody and the accompaniment that he's writing here one after 85.

Give me just one second, I'm going to try to turn my volume up here.

Can do that here. Can to order the click just turn all of these up.

So this is the melody that we get one after 85.

And this is the account that we get one after 85.

So neither of these are particularly successful with regard to the spooky orchestration idea because they're too focused there. Two, the energy is to manifest two straightforwardly in a single place, and so for both of these elements, both the melody in the accompaniment, Stravinsky, transforms them to make them so that they're not straightforwardly.

Sort of single things, but have some kind of plurality to them, or some kind of.

Blurring to their contours makes them not straightforward. Let's stop it, I'll just play them both together for you, and I'll talk about. I'll then talk about what he does.

So the first thing he does.

Is any?

Very often when he has a melody like this in the piece.

With the real important exception of this Alto flute and violin harmonic version, we listen to a second ago almost every other time. He has something like this in the PC always.

Makes it complex and less straightforward, by with dense harmonization.

Dense harmonization means, rather than just giving us a single line, you Stack a bunch of harmonies close to it that are moving at the same rate as it.

In other words, they are homophonic.

Sorry.

Sonic

homophonic means it's the same rhythm but different notes, whereas polyphonic is a term that means that you get different parts that are moving at different times. Homophony is different parts that I'm always moving at the same time, and this is a technique Stravinsky deploys a lot to make these really dense harmonizations of melodic figures in the piece. Here's the harmonization he chooses for this particular passage.

And so you can see it's when I say it's dense. I mean that the voices are really tightly spaced and they're right underneath the melody. There's no interval of separation between the melody in the harmony. Everything is packed really closely together, and the reason for this is because it makes the harmony harder to hear, harder to metabolise, harder to hear as a singular thing.

So some really cool writing here you can see he's using a lot of chords that are basically dominant 7th chords.

This is like a B flat seven with the 7th scale degree in the bottom, but then he goes to something that looks like a flat major, but it has a dissonant a in it as well. He goes to something here that looks like that is an E7, so he's using kind of relatively.

Familiar of common practice harmonies in the form of seven chords but but chromatically doing them in a way that doesn't make any sense according to common practice.

That's more of a compositional choice, which I think is effective here. The orchestrational thing is dense, overlapping versions of the same melody, densely harmonized underneath to give us a sense of a lack of clarity and a sense of plurality, rather than having us focus on one part.

That's already a compliment. It's pretty uninteresting Accompagnement If I can say so.

But this is the raw material of what is accomplishment is here, and it's really.

Uninteresting so I shouldn't say it's uninteresting. It's it's even though it's oscillating by half step. It's way too stable. It's sitting in the same place. It's creating a sense of focus in the music that.

Again, you usually want to avoid in this kind of spooky music context, and So what is Stravinsky do? He does dramatic.

Changes in contour.

Meaning, in this meaning leaps.

To break continuity of line. So rather than having a line which you know sits like this and Twiddles around 1/2 step, Stravinsky dramatically changes it so that he's constantly shifting around octaves, boom.

He's always transposing up.

He's doing it twice.

Sure, he does this one. I believe three times.

So let me just give me a second so I can.

'cause the platter sharp.

And then he goes.

Here.

So I've kept all the pictures there.

Same with what I've just done, but I've added huge octave leaps that jump all around pitch space.

And by doing this, Stravinsky creates not just a contour which doesn't focus us. You know the rather than having the line on a single pitch or two, half Step 2 notes 1/2 step apart, he's exploding that out so we don't have a sense of.

Anything to coalesce around in terms of our listening we don't have an anchor.

I'll be 1/2 step oscillating anchor. He's also means that he has to move around between all these different instruments in the orchestra 'cause not everyone, not one instrument group, can play that low in that high.

You can see here he starts this phrase in basis, then goes to cellos, then some of the viewers pick it up, then we get violins coming all the way to the top. It looks like he actually goes to an octave above.

No, he goes to this F# as a harmonic and then back down again so you can see he creates this really big up down phrase.

By taking this half this note that's moving from E Sharp F# D. Sharp to F#. And makes this big full contour with it in order to diffuse its ability to center us as listeners in the music.

OK, so this entire section has really interesting and effective ways of taking.

What could be much more straightforward lines and doing something to blur them? Overlapping melodic entrances so that a single quaver blind becomes to offset in a hocket?

Harmonizing things really thickly and densely right around the top note so that we get this kind of sense of movement almost as much as we get a sense of a melody that rises to the top.

And then taking a complemental materials in making sure they don't ever leave lead to a situation with which is too static, which centers us too much in this case, taking the back and forth half steps of the string parts and making this really ridiculous grand gesture that sweeps from the lowest.

Pitch possible on the instrument well half step above that to something really, really high in violent ones.

OK, another cool technique. We're almost done here, but another cool technique I want to point out that I'm sure you probably noted when you listened is on written page 92, which is PDF page 7 we get the entrance of a really interesting.

So changing the piece which is that the trumpet cell keeps repeating and then it becomes almost like a drone repeating over and over again, and on top of that we get. Eventually we get a new element, which is these gitau parts in the strings. Now we know these are jete because he's got.

Slurs on top of staccatos with a fast repeating note.

And this is a really interesting sound because it's unusual and unsettling, and especially in this delicate sort of light context, makes the instrument sound much different than normal, so should stay here.

Industry instruments and you'll note that he's also got a fairly reduced.

Group of people doing it now. This is a notation I haven't talked about yet.

Whenever you see this in string writing one P, it actually means one desk in English. If you're writing your score in UK English, and one desk means two players like it's like a solo for two players, because string players typically.

Always they sit in groups of two and two people read off the same piece of part together in the same music together. So this means one desk. So this is two people. You can see. This is also one desk of cellos, meaning that this is a solo and this is a solo effectively here. So while this is just a because there's so little else going on, you can get away with making this really light.

Sound only having four string players do it. 2 on the top part and two solo cellos for the bottom part. He also adds in some pizzicato cello below that to add to that kind of.

Bouncy feel that we now get and that change of Timbre he's now made.

Again, always cutting quickly from one to the other, not trying to massage materials together.

So another really cool use of jet a really nice mixture between Getae and pizzicato and the rest of the cellos.

Sort of taking advantage of the fact that these two tempers have a lot in common pits is bouncy and percussive, as is jet a right. So grouping like like kind of colors together to create this really interesting texture, which is really nicely contrasts and juxtaposes the trumpets who are quite continuous and pure in their sound.

And then we get this really cool ending section.

It's a section where essentially the.

This melody of 1 main line and a second line offbeats continues. We get some help chords now that aids also continue.

We get this new element introduced here, which is this quick rising figure. I want to play this part for you once and then talk a little bit about.

The orchestrational technique that's at play here. So this is right before this next page written page 93 PDF, page 8, I'll start right before it so we can catch this first entrance of this ascending figure. In the mixed ensemble.

Things which are cool here. I think the first is that the so this whole section gets gets louder than previous parts of the peace and so elements which were scored in a pretty reduced way. Sort of all get augmented so you can see this jetee originally was just, you know, a couple of instruments. Now it becomes many more instruments, including instruments that higher up as well in the violins.

And so he's he's extruding out a bit more volume from the ensemble to try to make sure all these elements can be heard. And I think they're really. It's really masterfully done in terms of a balance. That kind of kaleidoscopic balance of all these different really interesting sounds that come at us. The it's a really interesting passage to listen to. The one thing I want to talk about with regard to orchestrational technique is this thing.

I don't know how you would describe this thing. I've called it in ascending gesture.

But it's very interesting, it's.

A sort of ragtag group of timbres. By that I mean it's not like it's there's not a lot of temporal cohesion between them. We've got some violins who are doing Schutte. We've got a violin who's doing pits. We've got some viewers doing harmonics. We've got another violin who's playing normal. And then we've got a pickle clarinet in the tube. So really, different timbres, a mix, sort of a bouquet of timbres. Here on this gesture.

But

beyond the justice attempt, the temporal sort of contrast of the different elements here, there's something really interesting going on here, and that's that.

Essentially this is an ascending gesture that let's just say takes us from here to here.

From CDC, let's say.

Anne.

Basically what Stravinsky wants to do is get from here to here, but he wants to do so in a really diffuse way. In other words, he doesn't want to write a fast moving line that we can pick out the pictures of and pick out the intervals of he wants to go from here to here, almost more like a painter than a composer, you know drawing's washy.

Line with.

Feathery brush strokes on the canvas climbing from low to high in a way which gives us a sense of motion but doesn't give us any sense of specific pitches.

And this is the final, I suppose. Techniques for blurring individual lines that I want to talk about, which I'm going to say global contour.

Um?

Shapes.

By the way, almost none of these things I'm talking bout have official names in music composition or orchestration. These are just names I'm trying to give you to describe phenomena that I think are important to know about and to know how to use so global contour shapes it means.

Um, there's a general sense of motion.

That everyone shares. There's also a general speed.

That everyone shares, but very importantly.

Each player.

Varies this somewhat meaning.

You don't just write, you know six against four and all the players get that rhythm. Each player gets its own slightly different variation on the speed each player gets. Its slight variation on the on the pictures that are played. Each player gets a slight variation on the Register and so the result you get is not one line that jumps out of the music. It's it's a field, it's a bunch of points that are all moving together that diffuse the original the individual and give us something much more global, which is really successful in this context. So again, here's the gesture just a few times you'll hear it repeatedly.

And then I want to dive in and talk about some of the actual choices he makes in terms of instruments and timbres.

Such a cool sounded almost sounds like electronic music as opposed to orchestral music. One thing that's cool about it is that it starts in this one group of instruments, and then they actually all stop on the downbeat and the instruments who actually take over the stain of it are the flutes. So not only are there is there temporal variety in the ascent itself, but at the moment of arrival.

The thing that actually holds are not the instruments that initially started moving Clarence and strings, but rather the flutes. You could see flutes here applying harmonics, another kind of interesting sound that you may not think often about, but wind harmonics are possible.

Above an octave below the lowest note of the instrument.

I can spell this Harmon Nicks.

Do I do it? I got. I felt again, OK, whatever.

So when woodwind harmonics are possible, they make the tone lighter and airier and more ethereal unless rich.

They're possible for everyone instrument.

Starting an octave above that instruments lowest pitch except for clarinet, who is an octave in 1/5 below their lowest pitch. You can find details about that in the Adler, but a really nice use. Kind of an unusual sound in this case. Flute harmonics here at the apex of this ascent gesture.

Let's talk about this ancester. So first we've got in terms of rhythm piccolo clarinet.

Again, it transposes up a minor 3rd, so they're all playing C major. It's a simple C major chord, more or less.

Between all of these different groups that are playing this ascending gesture, they're all doing C major flutes, sustain C major again, kind of like that. D minor ominous chord. He uses common practice chords and does something to mess them up a little bit to give us that sense of Alienation. It's not writing good spooky music isn't about throwing everything common. Practice out the window, it's usually about taking common practice elements and messing them up a little bit so that we feel a sense of them being deformed.

So here he's working with this C major chord on top and the ascending gesture as well as the health flutes and then other stuff is happening underneath which harmonically complex affies that, let's say.

So let's look at speeds here. First, we've got piccolo clarinet playing C major. Remember, it transposes up a minor 3rd, so a major is written, but C major is actually what we get.

He's playing C major. He's playing six notes in this timeframe. Violent one is also playing C major, but only playing five. Another part of violin, one it looks like this is muted violins Division Three, so the violence sections chopped up into three. The top third does the five against 4.

5 notes in the time of this gesture.

Normal.

Another third of the violence just do the Getae bounce on the sea so they don't actually.

Rise on those.

Initial pitches, it looks like the last third of the violence actually do see major as well, but pizzicato and you'll note that both of these threads are doing 3, whereas violent five top violins are doing 5 in the time of this duration. Credit Pickles doing 6. Also doing 6 or the violas.

Who are doing a really interesting technique were there?

Doing a harmonic glissando. This means you put your finger lightly down the string and you gliss across the harmonic nodes to make a kind of.

Just come out which for all of the harmonic series and you can see here we get the harmonic beginning elements of the Harmonic Series in C major.

Good choice, of course, with yellow 'cause it's got an open C string an octave below this.

Pretty cool right this? So the rhythms are all really different and we also get this really nice bouquet of timbres from the piccolo clarinet, which is a bit whiny renmore laser like to these also kind of laser like and flashy harmonics to the pits and the Getae which are a bit more percussive and then normal violin for the top third VC which has some slurs to make a bit more of a rounded sound.

Let's just listen to this gesture one more time. Again making a global.

Making a global contour shape gives the music a sense of energy and momentum without giving us a single line to hang onto, and as a consequence all the timbres are usually different and the division of how fast all the notes are in each part is also normally different. This is a technique we see, by the way, both in this spooky or music, but also in fast, exciting music to typically you have fast runs and lots of different players at different speeds to give the contour rather than to give a particular rhythm to the music.

So that's all for this lecture. I hope it was helpful. I'm going to make different sound files for each of these sections that clip out these different elements that I've talked about. They're going to be called chord violin and flute trumpets, horns, strings, and a sentence at a respectively. So in addition to posting the full recording, I'll also post.

These individual sound files, which are essentially just excerpts from the full movement.

Last but not least, please do go online. Check out the post from last week and click on the link.

Of which takes you to a page where you can write any questions for me. You have about orchestration and notation. I will make one final video if I actually get some submissions from you guys with specific orchestration related questions, please do submit them. You know it's like totally a pleasure for me to make 1 final video and talk through some more nuts and bolts. Aspects of notation notation if you want, they can either be questions about how to do something in the score that you're not sure about, or something that you know how to do. We don't know how to make sibelius do so either of those are fair game.

Visit previous posts answering your questions to find the link to submit additional ones.

Finally, I'll be giving you some tutorial slots.

Sometime this week I'll be putting up a doodle where you can sign up for some times over the next couple of weeks to show me your work. Talk to me about how things are going.

My feedback policy is that I will give you feedback on your assessed items, meaning your tasks you're doing for your final assessment. However, I will only answer specific questions about them. That means you ask me. I want to create this effect and I'm trying to do it by doing this, but I'm not sure if it's working well. What do you think I can give you some feedback there, but if you just ask me, how do I get a better mark with this? I'll probably say can you be more specific and etc. So happy to give you feedback on your test items.

And I will email some tutorial slots around shortly. If you do sign up for, just keep in mind you need to have specific questions for me.

Specific areas where you want help and specific things you're trying to do that you want to do better, and I'll be more than happy to help you.

That's all for now.

Be well.

And we will talk soon.