5. ...the organization of sound and silence, through the space of time, into forms that carry culturally derived meanings, for aesthetic or utilitarian purposes SOUND & SILENCE CULTURALLY DERIVED MEANINGS
8. ...the organization of sound and silence, through the space of time, info forms that carry culturally derived meanings, for aesthetic or utilitarian purposes CULTURALLY DERIVED MEANINGS
12. “ Tommy used to work on the docks. Union ’ s been on strike, he ’ s down on his luck...it ’ s tough, so tough. ”
13. “ Tommy used to work on the docks. Union ’ s been on strike, he ’ s down on his luck...it ’ s tough, so tough. ”
14.
15.
16. “ Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away Now it looks as though they’re here to stay Oh I believe in yesterday”
17. “ I keep a close watch on this heart of mine. I keep my eyes wide open all the time. I keep the ends out for the tie that binds Because you’re mine, I walk the line.”
18. “ I keep a close watch on this heart of mine. I keep my eyes wide open all the time. I keep the ends out for the tie that binds Because you’re mine, I walk the line.”
Play Rite of Spring. So what kinds of thoughts and feelings does this music bring to mind? The excerpt that you just heard was one of the pivotal turning points in music history It premiered on a hot, balmy summer night of 1913 in Paris, France. Igor Stravinsky, a Russian composer premiered his ballet, The Rite of Spring at the Theatre Champs Elysees - perhaps still the most high-class place you can go in Paris - full of art and culture and class. People filed in, took their seats and heard a odd but pleasant opening in the flutes. Then, all of a sudden, a pagan spring ritual took place before their eyes and heard what you all just heard. The audience began to hiss, boo, and slowly erupted into a riot - there was screaming, blood was shed, policemen had to come in and shut the place down. People hated Stravinsky, and critics tore him apart in the newspapers. Then, exactly one year later, Stravinsky decided to try it again. The same ballet and music was performed - and it was so much of a success that Stravinsky was carried out on the shoulders of the cheering crowd. So - why did they riot? And why, just one year later, did they love the music? How can instrumental music tell such a strong story and move us to such emotion? These are some questions that we’re about to answer.
I ’ ve heard these emotional musical stories my whole life - one of my first memories is my mom playing ( Maple Leaf Rag) Scott Joplin ’ s Maple Leaf Rag on the piano - I ’ d twirl around next to the piano and think I was dancing; or I ’ d lie underneath the piano and watch the dampers move up and down and feel the music ’ s vibrations pass through my body. When I turned 4, I began taking piano lessons myself. And when I turned 9, I started playing the violin, and joined the orchestra. I grew up with my music teachers telling me - when you ’ re playing this, you ’ re telling a story. It ’ s about pleading. Or anger. And when all my friends were hopping on the engineering bandwagon right before college, I declared that I ’ d be majoring in Music Education and Violin Performance - because I wanted passion. I slowly began to see that music is based on some of those cold, hard factual studies like math and science, and I changed my major to that. Then, I found the happy medium between art, science and emotion in Advertising. And slowly, music became a hobby. So for me, music and emotion have always been synonymous. The unanswered question has always been “ why, and more importantly how, does music create emotion? ” Why do major chords sound happy, while minor chords sound sad? Why does Bon Jovi ’ s Livin ’ on a Prayer rally everyone together in bars? Why does Yesterday by The Beatles make us feel so nostalgic? What about that heart-thumbing, boot stomping country music - why does it create such a community following? I have a theory, and I ’ d like to get all of your thoughts and opinions on the matter as well.
But before we can dive into it, we have to come to a bit of an agreement about what music is. Music is usually mentioned in vague terms, like this quote by Gustav Mahler, a 21 st century composer. It’s a very tough thing to put in words, but if you had to play Webster for a day, how would you define ‘music?’
One of my music theory teachers had us do that exercise and then he provided his definition, which I will never forget because it made so much sense. Music is “the organization of sound and silence, through the space of time, info forms that carry culturally derived meanings, for aesthetic or utilitarian purposes.” We’re interested mainly in the ‘culturally derived meanings’ today - because emotion comes from deriving meaning from something. So what are these meanings derived from? From the patterns of sound and silence.
We all understand silence, but sound in music is based off of 6 building blocks: Melody, Harmony, Volume, Timbre, Rhythm. If each song were a story, then these are the elements of the story. They are the plot, setting, tone, characters, and syntax or diction. (click) Usually, the melody line is what tells the story - melody is the plot – it’s made up of patterns of pitches (C, G). Those pitches are strung together to form patterns (Twinkle). Just like a plot, sometimes it literally sounds like people speaking, like a dialogue (Ring Around The Rosie). So melody is the plot. The setting, harmony, is a progression of chords - 3 note structures - that support the melody. (Somewhere over the rainbow). Do you see how that begins to add an element of emotion to the story? When the melody tells the story, the harmony provides the setting and the emotional backdrop. Harmony can set the scene with a minor chord “It was a dark and stormy night,” or a major chord – “Once upon a time.” For example, Space Odyssey. It begins with a major chord, but that one simple lowering of the pitch shows us that something big is about to happen. Here’s where we have to briefly pause and discuss the science behind the music. Most of the time it’s just generally accepted that major is happy and minor is sad; some people say that we are taught to over time to understand it that way; but that’s never been good enough for me. It was only in the past month that I’ve figured out why this really is. Just as a refresher, a major chord is three notes (play), while the minor chord has a lowered middle note.
If we look at the sound waves of these chords, there are two things to note. First of all, there are clear patterns. Secondly, when you add two sine waves together, you get one wave that is the addition of the two. That wave can either be simple, with easy-to-follow patterns, like this pleasant octave - or complex, like this minor second. You can begin to see that one key difference is the structure of the patterns and how complex they are. Despite what we learned in high school physics, there are no simple sounds - when something makes a sound, there is more than one pitch in that sound, and the sound wave is like one of these ones we just saw. There’s the fundamental, which is what we hear. But there are also several other pitches that we don’t hear as loudly. For example, if you run into a metal trash can, you hear several pitches because a trash can isn’t made to be conducive to overtones like an instrument. They’re just running amuck. These overtones are ordered - with the fundamental being the most easily heard, or naturally occurring. What’s interesting, is that the first four overtones - which occur in nature in every object - make a major chord. If we assume that this (C) is the fundamental frequency, then the first overtone is an octave above that note. The next overtone is what’s called a perfect fifth above C (G)...quite a pleasant, familiar sound, yes? The next one is this note (E). And here we have (C-E-G) a major chord that we were talking about earlier; the once-upon-a-time chord. Why does it sound so happy? Because it is found in nature. It’s easy for our brains to process, and the patterns in the sine wave are clear and easy to follow. The overtone for the third note of the minor chord is way out here - it’s the 16th overtone in the series. It doesn’t occur often in nature and literally conflicts with the other notes. Our brains communicate, ‘it was a dark and stormy night. When we watch the movie Jaws, our fear and anxiety builds every time we hear (play) Why? Because it’s made up of a minor second (play), which has the most conflicting overtones we can have. The patterns in the sine waves are extremely complex and therefore the sound is unpleasant.
Most songs mainly use the pleasant chords, so they become culturally expected like our definition noted. Just like all art forms, music has a set of rules, and those rules define the patterns that we come to expect. The rules are based in science, like we’ve seen, but culture makes us expect those patterns. Children learn Mary had a little lamb, Happy Birthday, Twinkle Twinkle, even This land is your land - and those songs are drilled into them. Those songs all have the exact same chord progression (I-IV-V) and those little brains begin to expect what should come first and what comes next.
We’re beginning to see that music is about patterns - patterns in sine waves, overtones, and chords - patterns which are either natural and very simple and easy to understand, or a little more complex and more difficult to process. Writers know what the expected patterns are and they have a license to either use them as we expect them to, or break the rules.
So let’s move our working definition of music towards the art of it - the intangible. My orchestra conductor at TN always told us, “Music is all about where we came from and where we’re going.” A piece of music is about the journey from point A to point B. If you pause it in the middle - you have one chord. If this moment were frozen in time, you’d have no clue what the song is about. It has to be heard in context.
Patterns give us certain expectations. It’s all about your memory of the patterns that just occurred and your predictions or expectations of what’s probably going to happen next. Emotions occur if unexpected happens next. Just like in your day-to-day life, you expect things to go a certain way, and when they don’t, it’s the discrepancy from your expectation that incites emotion. Something either supersedes your expectations, or disappoints you. You then feel surprise, triumph, maybe sadness.
There are countless examples of songs that use patterns to create expectations, which then create emotions. One of the greatest bar songs is Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer . It uses expectations to give us hope. The song starts out with a dark, e minor chord (Living on a Prayer). There’s tons of conflict in the intro (play) - with C major on top of e minor - because those overtones we learned about earlier are directly conflicting each other and our brains are like, what is happening? And we have conflict in the lyrics too, right? (Show lyrics on screen). Then we get to the chorus (Livin on a Prayer chorus & lyrics) - “we’re have way there” and then (G major) wooahh Living on a Prayer. Now, all of a sudden we get this surge of hope. We get this beautiful, G major chord, and the song moves to a completely different key than it was previously in.
It erupts in triumph and hope from the dark, ominous minor opening and everyone in the bar jumps up on top of the tables and rallies together, saying hey guys, we’re half way there, we can do this. Listen to what this would song like if Bon Jovi had stayed in e minor - which is what our brains would expect - (play). It’s not convincing, right? We’d never believe the lyrics that “we’re half way there” because we’re not - with e minor, we’ve never moved from how the song started out. But instead, we’re moving, we’re making progress, we can do this.
Now it’s not just about the chords, pitches, or harmonies; emotions are created because of patterns that are violated in any of the 6 building blocks of music - expectations also include rhythm, timbre, tempo, and volume. Yesterday by the Beatles breaks all your expectations about phrasing - we expect music to have 8 measures to a phrase - which is why dance choreography and cheerleading works off of 8-beat counts (12345678) - but Yesterday, has only seven measures to each verse. It comes in before we expect it to, and we have this overwhelming sense of, “wait a minute, I wasn’t done yet, I can’t believe you moved on...I want to go back!” The music parallels those nostalgic emotions from the lyrics - each verse, or each ‘yesterday’ goes quicker than you expect.
Yesterday by the Beatles breaks all your expectations about phrasing - we expect music to have 8 measures to a phrase - which is why dance choreography and cheerleading works off of 8-beat counts (12345678) - but Yesterday, has only seven measures to each verse. It comes in before we expect it to, and we have this overwhelming sense of, “ wait a minute, I wasn ’ t done yet, I can ’ t believe you moved on...I want to go back! ” The music parallels those nostalgic emotions from the lyrics - each verse, or each ‘ yesterday ’ goes quicker than you expect.
One of the songs that uses several of the musical elements to create expectations and tug at our emotions is Johnny Cash’s Walk the Line. This song is about him being good for love – he tells us that he can be true and that we can trust him. Let’s listen to it.
The music really complements the lyrics. The melody sounds like (play). It starts at this home base, and wanders away for awhile, but always comes back to home base. The harmony convinces us that he can be trusted in any situation. In each verse, Johnny hums and changes key – the setting (remember the elements of our story) changes, showing that no matter what the situation, he will always come back to home base. He can be trusted.
Songs tug at our emotions when patterns and our expectations are manipulated when we least expect it. Composers and great songwriters imbue music with emotion by knowing what our expectations are and then very deliberately controlling when those expectations will be met, and when they won’t. The chills and tears we experience from music are the result of having those expectations artfully manipulated by a skilled composer or songwriter, as well as the musicians who interpret and perform that music.
Let’s go back for a minute to Paris, 1913 - the terrible riot from Stravinsky’s ballet. We now know that we listen to music by making sense of patterns. The neurons in the audience’s brains that night had never heard anything like that - they were used to the predictable music of Bach and Mozart, and the emotional but pleasant music of Beethoven and Debussy. And there didn’t seem to be any patterns whatsoever in The Rite of Spring - there were tons of minor seconds piled on top of each other, conflicting overtones that just wouldn’t let up, for minutes on end - the neurons could make sense of it or predict what was going to happen next, so the people felt an overwhelming sense of confusion, anger - if you can’t predict what’s going to come next and something is that unknown, it’s like the world’s going to end. Hence, they rioted. Then, over the next year, more changes in music occurred, and slowly, people began to understand the patterns in that music. So, the next year, they loved it - because then, they could make sense of it. Our brains can learn patterns and have new expectations, which then, causes new emotions. So as we close, I’d really like to hear your experiences with emotion in music, and your own theories about why and how it happens.
