The Great Courses course classical music music
The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works
Lecture 1 - Game Plan and Preliminaries
- 1700s the orchestra comes into being
- Composers were writing orchestral music thanks to the concept of orchestration
- How a composer assigns instruments to the melodic and accompanimental parts of a composition
- Baroque era
- 1600 to 1750
- Musically revolutionary time
- Opera evolved from modest entertainment to hugely popular industry
- Antonio Vivaldi, George Frederick Handel, and Johann Sebastian Bach created great bodies of work
- Romantic era
- Composers began searching for "expressive originality" at the turn of the 20th century
- Hyper-romanticism
- Major musical forms:
- Ritornello
- Theme returns over the course of a movement
- Most common among baroque-era instrumental procedures
- Theme and variations
- Minuet and trio
- Moderate, three-step dance
- Scherzo
- Same structure of minuet and trio
- Removes ritual repetitions
- Speeds up movements
- Rondo
- Sonata
- Two or more contrasting themes exist
- Double exposition
- Sonata for concertos
- Ritornello
- Orchestral genres:
- Solo concerto
- Multi-movement work
- Soloist is accompanied by (or pitted against) an orchestra
- Concerto grosso
- Multi-movement work
- Multiple soloists are accompanied by (or pitted against) an orchestra
- Symphony
- Multi-movement work composed for an orchestra
- Symphonic/tone poem
- Single-movement orchestral work
- Tells an extra-musical or programmatic story
- Suite
- Concert consisting of a collection of dances
- Extracted from a longer ballet
- Solo concerto
- Terms:
- Classical
- Works of art between the 17th and 18th centuries
- Characterized by clear lines and balanced forms
- Harmony
- Art and science of manipulating multiple pitches
- Homophonic texture/homophony
- Texture in which the melodic line predominates
- Melody
- A succession of pitches
- Polyphonic texture/polyphony
- Texture consisting of two or more simultaneous melodies of equal importance
- Counterpoint
- Texture
- Number of melodies present and relationships between them
- Includes monophony, polyphony, heterophony, and homophony
- Tonal/tonality
- Sense that one pitch is central to a section of music
- Classical