[MUSIC] Up until now, we've focused on the situation, the role of music and of the composer in the period leading up to Beethoven. Now, I would like to talk about form. Which really is part and partial of any discussion about the effect of music. People hear the words, form or analysis, in the musical context and they tend to immediately think of something dry and their souls shut off. But, in fact, while form is indeed about rules and about the grammar and construction of music. It is ultimately all about psychology, about not just the way the music is put together or works, but the way it works on the listener. A teacher once told me that to study musical structure is to create a map of the emotional content of a piece of music. No one has ever told anything truer or more useful. It's really no accident that work on harmony and form is often called analysis. It is peeling the onion not really ticking the boxes. There's not time for an extended lesson on sonata form here and I'm afraid I might lose much of my audience if I lapsed into one but for those who would like to delve more deeply into this topic than we can here, Charles Rosin's book the Classical Style is a fantastic place to start. He also wrote a wonderful book called Sonata Forms, but I think the style paints a broader picture of, shall we say, sonata culture. Rosen was that very rare animal. He was neither primarily a pianist nor primarily an academic. It was just all the peace with him, which made him possibly one of the most rounded and all themed musicians perhaps ever. The classical style is difficult and uncompromising, but it explains very painstakingly, but also with real beauty, what the sources of the power in classical period music are. Rosen writes, quote, the sonata is not a definite form like a minuet, a de capo aria, or a French overture. It is, like the fugue, a way of writing, a feeling for proportion, direction, and texture, rather than a pattern. This is why he was able to encompass such a wide variety of music and why it is so difficult to speak about clearly. It was also difficult to create. Bach's music, while it involves certain harmonic relationships that become crucial in the classical style is in very clear cut ways different, pre-classical. And after he died there was a period of at least 15 years before the new style asserted itself. I'm pretty sure it's not a coincidence that after Bach's death, well over a decade passed before Hayden, the next great composer, starting writing great music. And that from that point on, with Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, there's always significant overlap, and a nonstop stream of masterpieces being written. The classical style was slow to come into focus. But once it did, it almost immediately became the basis for much of the most extraordinary music ever. Many people, and not just hopelessly conservative ones feel that the classical era, aka the heyday of sonata form is the pinnacle of western music. So sonata form was difficult to invent. It was also perpetually in a state of an evolution even before Beethoven composer constantly testing the limits of the form seeing if it could accommodate more material, different harmonic centers, tinkering with order of events everything. All of this means that sonata form remains very difficult to define. Yet there are certain rules to it. All of which emerged in the Classical Period. To be clear, the sonata form does not refer to the shape of an entire sonata, but to a single movement, usually the first movement. In the case of Hayden, Mozart, and early Beethoven sonatas, nearly every first movement is in sonata form. There are certainly structural principles which guided the classical composers in putting together the later movements of their sonatas, but they were neither so stringent nor as sophisticated as those that guide sonata form. That it is the first movement, on which this degree of structural attention was lavished, becomes very significant in the story of Beethoven and his influence. In a way, it's good to have a limitation of time discussing sonata form, because it really forces us to focus on those essential elements. So if we're to talk about sonata form briefly, it is the story of two oppositions. The opposition of two themes and the opposition of the tonic and the dominant. These are harmonic terms. I'll be as untechnical as possible in describing this but some jargon will be unavoidable. The tonic is simply the word for the fundamental chord of whatever key tonality we happen to be in. So if we're in B-flat major. [MUSIC] The tonic is simply a B-flat major chord. [MUSIC] The dominant is the name of the chord that begins on the fifth scale degree. In the case of B-flat major this is F. [MUSIC] It is a central fact of tonal music that a dominant always wants to resolve to a tonic. [MUSIC] I'm not sure if this is important exactly because it seems so prosaic or in spite of it. But, that is really all classical tonality is about. There are seven notes in the major scale, which means seven chords before we even start talking about inversions and seventh chords and diminished chords and etc., etc., etc. But looked at at the purest level, this is all embellishment of that tonic dominant relationship. We start at home, the tonic. And then we move away from home traditionally always to the dominant. The tension in the work from that point involved are emotional need for a return home. Before I give a little demonstration of how this works let's return briefly to the other opposition, that of the two themes. The vast majority of sonata four movements have two main themes in contrasting characters. The first naturally is in the tonic key. For this, there are no exceptions. For the second, an overwhelmingly percentage of the time in the early classical period is in the dominant, at least when it first appears, so that is a very broad outline of the sonata form. In the next segment we'll see what it looks like put into practice. Let's take a short break for a review question.
