Duple Meter In The Hallelujah Chorus

“Medieval motets tended to be isorhythmic; that is, they employed repeated rhythmic patterns in all voices—not only the cantus firmus—which did not necessarily coincide with repeating melodic patterns.”2 This new isorhythmic principle, brought on mostly by the composer Machaut, was used not only in the tenor voice but also rather with much more freedom in the upper voice parts. The application of discant over a cantus firmus marked the beginnings of this new revolutionary style, the motet, in Western music. The key motet composers in the medieval period were few in number; Phillip de Vitry and Machaut were one of the earliest composers to institute the isorhythmic technique, which set the style for other medieval composers like Willelmus de Winchecumbe. Guillaume de Machaut was a more famous named late-medieval composer to institute the discant which caught on in other music styles and only helped to evolve the motet into its later stylings. These composers helped carry the motet to the new Flemish motet style.

The fifth and final section of Bach’s work is overall the shortest and the most contrasting of all of the other parts. This section is also almost entirely in the tonic major; which is most commonly used as the representation of a final resolution. During the last section, the pedal is used to its greatest extent which covers the full range present on the organ.

Historically in Bach’s day, toccatas often served as introductions Fugues, setting the stage for the complex and intricate composition to follow. “Fugue” can be described as a technique characterized by the overlapping repetition of a principal theme in different melodic lines (counterpoint) and hence the second part of Bach’s composition reflects the particular popularity of this form. Bach made much use of the fugue in his compositions in solo organ pieces as in this particular fugue, with its accompanying toccata, is his best known

An application of Analysis of Beethoven’s ‘Pathetique’ piano sonata No. 8 inC minor, Op.13 with particular focus on musical features such as melody, thematic content, rhythm, form and structure, and harmony.

When Bach was in Arnstadt when he was younger, the organ ordinarily lacked a 16-foot register on the keyboard; consequently, it sounds an octave lower than the normal 8-foot register. Accordingly, in order to create the effect, Bach used octave doubling; consequently, he continued the resounding effect of the opening bars; conversely, there is no octave doubling in any of Bach’s later organ works; moreover, the fugue sounds furious with its uninterrupted series of fast notes. Also, Bach felt embarrassed about his crude style, and he put the work aside; consequently, Bach lost a lot of his other early organ work completely. Conversely, the Tocca and the Fugue has an unstructured form, and that means that keyboard players can let their imagination run wild; as a result, Johann Gottfried Walther described the Toccata as a long piece in which both hands alternate, sometimes accompanied by long pedal notes. For this reason, Bach connected the Toccata’s freedom to the stylus phantasticus; moreover, stylus phantasticus was popular in North Germany from the seventeenth century; in addition, people described this style of composition as “freed from all constraint”. Moreover, it’s remarkable that Bach paired the toccata with the prelude and the fugue because it’s subject to strict compositional rules; nevertheless, the fugue derives its thematic material from the preceding part.

The main objective in the performance of Renaissance music is that everything done by the singer is subservient to the text. Musicians of the Renaissance were fixated on the concept of music serving the text. Composers set poems to text attempting to imitate natural speech and inflection pattern in the rhythms of the music, and wished to write the music in such a way that the words could be understood. Singers should strive toward clear diction, making sure their vowel shapes and ornamentation do not obscure the text.

The fugue is often regarded as a genre defined by strict procedural guidelines. It is notable that three historically important composers, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Georg Friedrich Handel (1685-1759), and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), all employed a closely related fugue subject in three different works. An analysis of each of these works individually, and a comparison of these works collectively reveal numerous latent and salient features, and a reflection of the composers’ style within these works. Analyses also provide an outlook into the fluidity in certain aspects and rigidity in others of the form itself, reflected historically. The three composers analyzed fall closely together in history. J.S. Bach and G.F. Handel were contemporaries, whereas Mozart was born six years after Bach’s death and three years before Handel’s death. Analytically, the angularity of these similar fugue subjects presupposes a treatment regardless of the composer. Because of the shared intervallic content among the subjects of these fugues, despite being written by several different composers, a surprising number of similarities arise. Therefore, it is reasonable to assert that compositional choices made in the construction of the fugue subjects limit the number of results possible.

Bach's "Organ Fugue G Minor" manages to sound both melancholy and lively at the same time. Although the texture of the piece is clearly Baroque in its construction, it has emotional depth that anticipates the Romantic period. The fugue is tuneful, partially because of its inventive repetition and expressive use of contrast. As in all fugues, one melody seems to repeat the other, in a kind of a musical dance. But the different voices are multifaceted and complex. The full range of the organ is represented and the textures of the music are complex.

Handel's "Halleluiah Chorus" from the Messiah is one of the most famous pieces in all of Western classical music. The Chorus uses "the rhythm of the word hallelujah," to structure the piece, lengthening the first note, and creating a stirring 'explosion' of sound at the end (The pure power of Handel's 'Hallelujah Chorus', NPR, 2008). The "King of Kings" passage is a single note, but by "repeating the passage in higher and higher registers...[e]ach one seems to be the highest you could possibly get," creating the "climax of the piece" (The pure power of Handel's

He began to write preludes for organs but did not cover large- scale organization, when two melodies interact at the same time. A few years after playing for the church, Bach made a visit to Dieterich Buxtehude in Lubeck. This visit reinforced Bach’s style in music with the works he has made.

During the later years of his life Bach gradually withdrew inwards, producing some of the most profound statements of the baroque musical form. Bach’s creative energy was conserved for the highest flights of musical expression: the Mass in b

“The Rite of Spring” was written during the Modern Era of music. The characteristics of music during this period used nonsymmetrical patterns in the meter based on five, seven, eleven, or thirteen beats per measure. The meter could shift constantly changing the flow of the music. Composers started using sharply contrasting rhythms simultaneous , this is called polyrhythm. Early modern composers wrote melodies in relation to the instruments instead of the voice. Harmonies became more complex during this time. Composers used stacked chords adding as much as seven notes to one chord. These chords were highly dissonant and were known as polyharmony cords. These chords redefined the tonality and needed new ways of organization in music. These chords also could make distinctions with the dissonance and consonance in music.

The style of the trio involves stylistic elements of both Schumann and Liszt, as is characteristic of several of Smetana’s musical pieces (Clapham 65) and is composed of three voices: the violin, cello, and piano.

In The Interpretation of Music, Thurston Dart writes: 'it is very unlikely that any vibrato was used in the ensemble singing of earlier times; the few theorists who mention it condemn it' (51). In light of the intricate counterpoint employed by Renaissance and late medieval composers, it is natural that clear intonation would have been vital to the clarity of their multi-voiced compositions. David Wulstan suggests that in singing the decorated Baroque songs, singers surely had to provide contrast between trilled and untrilled notes: 'Baroque singers could hardly have sung in such a way that trills were indistinguishable from the surrounding gelatinous wobble' (179). Singers today, in an effort to project their voices in huge performance venues have to use their voice in way that produces, in most cases, a large vibrato. Large vibratos can make it difficult, at times, to hear a distinct pitch, and therefore trills (alternating quickly between two adjacent pitches) are also difficult to hear. Thus, it is easy to idealize a pure vocal quality so that there is a clear contrast between trilled and untrilled notes. Contrast is, after all, one defining characteristic of Baroque era musicÑthus, the amateur assumption has a reasonable basis.

Another method that was used in enriching a melody was by doubling it through the use of parallel consonant intervals. This practice was already employed in the ninth century treatises ‘Musica enchiriadis’ and ‘Scolica enchiriadis’, and the term organum was adopted for several styles of polyphony illustrating two or more voices singing different notes in pleasing combinations according to the set system. The various styles of organum – such as parallel organum, mixed parallel and oblique organum, and free organum – illustrated in ‘Musica enchiriadis’ were ways for singers to embellish chant in performance based on given rules for developing added voices from the chant. Guido of Arezzo described organum in his ‘Micrologus’, allowing a range of choices that could result in a variety of organal voices merging oblique and parallel motion. In most cases, these organal voices were composed orally, either improvised by a soloist or rehearsed beforehand.