From a technical standpoint, Wagner figured out a way to vastly increase the rate of modulation (changing from one key to another) without his music falling into incoherence. His trick was to draw upon Beethoven's motivic technique-- to anchor the listener to a handful of recognizable short melodies that continually cycle through the complexity of the fast changing keys. That, and a deep understanding of counterpoint, orchestration, and lyrical writing.
Outside of late Beethoven (which a lot of commentators of the time considered incoherent), I don't know any other music in the 19th century that preceded Wagner and had anywhere near the rate of modulation of, say, Tristan or the Ring cycle. That alone must have made it seem to listeners that the music is simply faster or somehow more compressed with meaning than nearly anything in Opera that came before.
That's an enormous qualitative change that likely held sway over listeners as trance music does for newcomers to a cult. And like the introduction of any new technology (whether it's a compositional technique or equipment like a loudspeaker), any philosophy/staging/prejudice/long-windedness you pipe through it is going to get boosted by that novelty, well past the meaning those things would have carried without it.
Digression-- to me, it's a bit of a shame that both "camps" of the latter part of the 19th century-- Brahms and Wagner-- were essentially maximalists. Whether it's the 1st movement of Brahms' 4th symphony or Wagner's Tristan prelude, both composers are going to shuttle a tiny, self-contained motive through every harmonic, textural, and contrapuntal context they can write out before the music ends. This formal strategy persists into modern composition to this day, with a zillion pieces that start with some primordial "seed" from which the entire piece seems to generate its own life. (And the composer ensuring you hear the entire damn life cycle lest you doubt their abilities!)
On the other hand, there were composers like Debussy who seem to have worked out what their "seed" can grow into ahead of time (or else just intuitively grasped such a thing), and then choose for the composition only a few uses of a motive which were the most evocative. Apples to oranges of course, but... instead of 1000+ appearances of the Tristan chord, Debussy's "reflets dans l'eau" gives you four appearances of a little oddball motive-- each one slightly mutated (with the final one even seeming very much like an allusion to-- and rejection of-- something from Wagner's Ring cycle). What happened to get that little motive from point A to point B is left to fan fiction rather than explicitly worked out in the composition. Doing that coherently is a much more difficult task. While a lot of composers borrow the harmonic sounds of Debussy, I don't hear a lot who effectively emulate this part of his writing.
Edit: Hm... rate of modulation isn't really the right metric. It's more like average rate of modulation, along with rate of textural change.
For example, you quite a bit of harmonic turmoil and quick textural change in the development of a Chopin Sonata. But it's surrounded by sections that aren't as harmonically active.
Both Brahms and Wagner flip that pattern around so that the meat of the composition is in flux. Brahms' development sections actually provide respite from that; or, Wagner gives the listener a harmonic acid trip for nearly two hours until the lovers "extinguish the flame" and things start to get in a groove for about 15 minutes or so... :)
It's the same set of techniques. But the fact that Wagner insisted on sustaining that rapid developmental material for the greater bulk of an evening, or multiple evenings, was clearly revelatory for a lot of his admirers.
For those like me who don't know much about the technical aspects of music discussed in this comment (motif, texture, modulation, etc.), I recommend checking out Craig Wright's lecture series on "Listening to Music" offered by Yale Open Courses: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhYB41gNRjT1L2CyJRwtS...
motive: a short series of notes from which a larger theme is created. E.g., first four notes of the 1st movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. To hear how a motive gets turned into a theme, listen to the next ten seconds of the 1st movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony.
texture: whether the music sounds relatively busy or bare at a given moment, using more granular terms for "busy" and "bare" as you learn more about music
modulation: ever wonder why Whitney Houston sounds more energetic at the last chorus of "I Will Always Love You?" It's because she's singing higher than before. But if she's singing the same melody as in the other choruses slightly higher, how could this possibly sound good? It's because the rest of the band also shifted everything up by the same frequency ratio as she did, at the same moment. When everyone does this together, it's called changing keys, or modulation.
However, "pushing a button" to suddenly pitch everything up on a dime is a relatively recent discovery that has flourished thanks to the ubiquity of cheap and powerful computers. Prior to that, composers used ad hoc methods like transitional themes to prepare the listener for the new key, sometimes going so far as to read the music of peers for new approaches. It was quite an inefficient and unproductive time by comparison to the speed and precision with which we produce music today.
I loved your GP comment, but I don't understand your final paragraph here at all.
Sure, writing modulation from one key to another is more work than using a pitch-shifting operation in a DAW. But compared to the work of actually writing a piece of music, it seems like a relatively minor amount of work.
Your GP comment was so insightful, however, that I suspect that your meaning is being missed here. Could you clarify?
To riff further-- writing a modulation is a subset of writing a piece. If we were to quantize modulation "styles" to match, say, a set of DAW operations in a dropdown list, we've made the work of writing a piece easier.
We extend that ease for each aspect of music-writing that gets a similar dropdown menu in the UI. That ease accelerates the production of music.
I find it fitting on HN to insist the common practice period was comparatively unproductive and inefficient. :)
OK, I still don't understand. Are you suggesting that modulating between keys was sufficiently difficult for (say) Brahms, Beethoven or Wagner that they would try to avoid it?
It's not difficult, exactly, but there are only so many ways to do it well.
You can, of course, just start writing different notes, which sounds jarring. There is a whole theory of "voice leading"[1] which provides a toolbox of nice-sounding ways to get from key to key, with various emotional and textural elements attached to each.
(Some if it, I note, is called "Neo-Riemannian theory"[1], which does in fact relate to geometry but is wholly unrelated to Bernhard Riemann.)
You don't actually need any of that theory. You can just compose by ear. And some of that theory has been known since the Middle Ages. But the "classical" era composers worked very hard on pushing the state of that art -- some of which can now be autosuggested by composing software. Which is especially nice when you're doing it for an entire 100+ piece orchestra.
This is exactly my struggle with Brahms' music. There are so many brilliant and beautiful passages in his work but he seems to be determined to take the music in a completely new direction every 16 bars.
I always thought the reason Brahms stands out among his contemporaries is that he's the first post-Beethoven symphonist who actually came close to Beethoven's level. But I've never been a big fan of the early Romantic era compositions.
One overlooked reason his music stands out is because Beethoven's technique is tractable and is still taught as a kind of "divide-and-conquer" technique to composition students. Students can write a coherent piece in essentially any style by building up phrases and sections from small groups of notes that are easy to control. So they enumerate through a few techniques of lining up these little units and listen to the result. Then they go back to listen to Beethoven and Brahms and immediately gain a deeper appreciation of just how completely those composers mastered these techniques to create dramatic musical structures. Rinse and repeat through the generations. This is one of the reasons why Brahms is considered a "composer's composer."
Now, what process is used to teach a composition student to write music that, say, use techniques responsible for what happens in the first minute of the first movement of Schubert's B Minor Symphony, D. 759? It's one of the great beginnings to a symphony, but it isn't really written leveraging the techniques I described above. And while you can analyze it to figure out why it specifically comes off the way it does, there's no easy "divide-and-conquer" technique to abstract out and apply to other settings/styles.
That means there are fewer composers writing toy versions of moments like that to build up a deeper understanding of these other techniques. And there are many other musical techniques like this which do not lend themselves to pedagogy. Mozart is full of stuff like this, where the technique is essentially, "First, learn all the music. Next..." :)
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 51.1 ms ] threadOutside of late Beethoven (which a lot of commentators of the time considered incoherent), I don't know any other music in the 19th century that preceded Wagner and had anywhere near the rate of modulation of, say, Tristan or the Ring cycle. That alone must have made it seem to listeners that the music is simply faster or somehow more compressed with meaning than nearly anything in Opera that came before.
That's an enormous qualitative change that likely held sway over listeners as trance music does for newcomers to a cult. And like the introduction of any new technology (whether it's a compositional technique or equipment like a loudspeaker), any philosophy/staging/prejudice/long-windedness you pipe through it is going to get boosted by that novelty, well past the meaning those things would have carried without it.
Digression-- to me, it's a bit of a shame that both "camps" of the latter part of the 19th century-- Brahms and Wagner-- were essentially maximalists. Whether it's the 1st movement of Brahms' 4th symphony or Wagner's Tristan prelude, both composers are going to shuttle a tiny, self-contained motive through every harmonic, textural, and contrapuntal context they can write out before the music ends. This formal strategy persists into modern composition to this day, with a zillion pieces that start with some primordial "seed" from which the entire piece seems to generate its own life. (And the composer ensuring you hear the entire damn life cycle lest you doubt their abilities!)
On the other hand, there were composers like Debussy who seem to have worked out what their "seed" can grow into ahead of time (or else just intuitively grasped such a thing), and then choose for the composition only a few uses of a motive which were the most evocative. Apples to oranges of course, but... instead of 1000+ appearances of the Tristan chord, Debussy's "reflets dans l'eau" gives you four appearances of a little oddball motive-- each one slightly mutated (with the final one even seeming very much like an allusion to-- and rejection of-- something from Wagner's Ring cycle). What happened to get that little motive from point A to point B is left to fan fiction rather than explicitly worked out in the composition. Doing that coherently is a much more difficult task. While a lot of composers borrow the harmonic sounds of Debussy, I don't hear a lot who effectively emulate this part of his writing.
Edit: Hm... rate of modulation isn't really the right metric. It's more like average rate of modulation, along with rate of textural change.
For example, you quite a bit of harmonic turmoil and quick textural change in the development of a Chopin Sonata. But it's surrounded by sections that aren't as harmonically active.
Both Brahms and Wagner flip that pattern around so that the meat of the composition is in flux. Brahms' development sections actually provide respite from that; or, Wagner gives the listener a harmonic acid trip for nearly two hours until the lovers "extinguish the flame" and things start to get in a groove for about 15 minutes or so... :)
It's the same set of techniques. But the fact that Wagner insisted on sustaining that rapid developmental material for the greater bulk of an evening, or multiple evenings, was clearly revelatory for a lot of his admirers.
texture: whether the music sounds relatively busy or bare at a given moment, using more granular terms for "busy" and "bare" as you learn more about music
modulation: ever wonder why Whitney Houston sounds more energetic at the last chorus of "I Will Always Love You?" It's because she's singing higher than before. But if she's singing the same melody as in the other choruses slightly higher, how could this possibly sound good? It's because the rest of the band also shifted everything up by the same frequency ratio as she did, at the same moment. When everyone does this together, it's called changing keys, or modulation.
However, "pushing a button" to suddenly pitch everything up on a dime is a relatively recent discovery that has flourished thanks to the ubiquity of cheap and powerful computers. Prior to that, composers used ad hoc methods like transitional themes to prepare the listener for the new key, sometimes going so far as to read the music of peers for new approaches. It was quite an inefficient and unproductive time by comparison to the speed and precision with which we produce music today.
Edit: clarification
Sure, writing modulation from one key to another is more work than using a pitch-shifting operation in a DAW. But compared to the work of actually writing a piece of music, it seems like a relatively minor amount of work.
Your GP comment was so insightful, however, that I suspect that your meaning is being missed here. Could you clarify?
To riff further-- writing a modulation is a subset of writing a piece. If we were to quantize modulation "styles" to match, say, a set of DAW operations in a dropdown list, we've made the work of writing a piece easier.
We extend that ease for each aspect of music-writing that gets a similar dropdown menu in the UI. That ease accelerates the production of music.
I find it fitting on HN to insist the common practice period was comparatively unproductive and inefficient. :)
That seems quite contrary to my understanding.
You can, of course, just start writing different notes, which sounds jarring. There is a whole theory of "voice leading"[1] which provides a toolbox of nice-sounding ways to get from key to key, with various emotional and textural elements attached to each.
(Some if it, I note, is called "Neo-Riemannian theory"[1], which does in fact relate to geometry but is wholly unrelated to Bernhard Riemann.)
You don't actually need any of that theory. You can just compose by ear. And some of that theory has been known since the Middle Ages. But the "classical" era composers worked very hard on pushing the state of that art -- some of which can now be autosuggested by composing software. Which is especially nice when you're doing it for an entire 100+ piece orchestra.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_leading
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Riemannian_theory
Brahms does have some more continuous pieces, though. For example, the Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JwKDzPlYQs
Now, what process is used to teach a composition student to write music that, say, use techniques responsible for what happens in the first minute of the first movement of Schubert's B Minor Symphony, D. 759? It's one of the great beginnings to a symphony, but it isn't really written leveraging the techniques I described above. And while you can analyze it to figure out why it specifically comes off the way it does, there's no easy "divide-and-conquer" technique to abstract out and apply to other settings/styles.
That means there are fewer composers writing toy versions of moments like that to build up a deeper understanding of these other techniques. And there are many other musical techniques like this which do not lend themselves to pedagogy. Mozart is full of stuff like this, where the technique is essentially, "First, learn all the music. Next..." :)