[BLANK_AUDIO] Welcome to Write Like Mozart, an introduction to classical music composition. My name is Peter Edwards and I'll be the, the host, the tour guide, I guess the instructor for the next six weeks. Before I get to an overview of the class, what I wanted to review was the expectations I have in terms of your knowledge. The things I'll assume that you're familiar with. From the very first video. This isn't a typical music theory class. It's not a music rudiments class. We don't reivew the really basic stuff. I'll assume you already have some of that knowledge. So let me review what that knowledge is. First is an ability to read both bass and treble clefs. For some people you say are upper wind players or upper string players. You may be quite comfortable with treble clef but not so much with bass clef, or the reverse. You play cello or bass, and you're comfortable with bass clef, not so much treble clef. It'll be important to have a familiarity with both of these things. A fair degree of comfort with both of them. Also a familiarity with music, rudimentary music terminology like, note value names. Now I use the words quarter and eighth and half and sixtheenth and thirtysecond, and whole note. If you've learned the British terminology that should be fine. I hope you'll, be comfortable with the translation. I won't use the British terminology of quaver and crotchet and things like that. But it shouldn't be too much of a problem I imagine. If you need to, sort of, do a quick translation in your mind from, say, say quaver to eighth note. Key signatures. It's good if you know all the key signatures, but to be honest, you won't need to know much beyond four sharps or four flats. But a comfort with reading key signatures would be important. Familiarity with reading meter and time signatures. And of course, a familiarity with major and minor scales. It's not so important that you know all the details of these different minor scales like the harmonic and melodic and natural things like that. But a familiarity with them will be important. Also the ability to read, both melodically and harmonically, intervals up to at least a tenth. Up to a twelfth will be good too, but up to a tenth is probably enough. I'll also assume that you're familiar with the basic chord types that you'll find in tonal harmony. So tonal harmony is triadic in nature, so I assume that you have familiarity with the triads. The major, minor, and at least the diminished triads. Augmented triads we won't see, but, of course always good to know it. And as well seventh chords. The ones at least that we find in classical music. So the dominant seventh chord, or the major/minor seventh chord. Minor seventh chords, and to a certain degree major, major seventh chords. But then also the diminished seventh chord, and the half diminished seventh chord. Basic Roman numeral analysis We'll be starting with really basic chord progressions, so having a basic understanding of Roman numeral analysis in the beginning is fine. We'll do a lot of Roman numeral analysis, and I'll be using these symbols a lot. So over the course of six weeks, you'll probably develop your skills with it. And I guess that's more or less it. But I should say if you feel, oh, I'm a little bit shaky on some of these things, then please understand that there's a lot, there are a lot of resources on the web. And one that I think is quite useful is musictheory.net. So if you feel like you need a refresher, visit the website and review some of these things before even beginning week one. Well, of course, we can't cover everything in six weeks. We have a limited amount of time. So, what will we do over the next six weeks? In week one, we'll talk about chord voicing, and even talking about chord voicing, we're already talking about stylistic traits of music from the late 18th Century. We'll talk about basic chord progressions, or harmonic progressions, in root position. And we'll do four part, four part voice leading, and I'll teach you the various, what are essentially algorithms, for moving from chords of different distances away from each-other in root position. And we'll look at the, perhaps the most basic kind of texture that we find, which is homorhythmic homophony. We too will build off of those basic progressions by expanding beyond root position. Chords, and introduce the use of inversions. I'll also introduce keyboard voicing and how to go about making an accompaniment. Week three. We'll look at sequential progressions. Perhaps you're already familiar with sequential progressions. The circle of fifths for instance, is a very common progression that you find in a lot of different genres and periods of music. You find it in classical music as well, so we'll definitely look at that in week three. Along with two other sequential progressions. We'll also look at non core tones, the use of patterns, and a texture type called polyphony. Week four, we continue with our basic progressions, but adding in diatonic substitutions, and I should say, but as we go along over the course of weeks we will be enriching a kind of, say, palette, of harmonic possibilities. We start with very progressions and root position and add in certain kinds of inversions. We won't add in just any kind of inversion. I'll show you certain kinds of inversions that are used. And you'll have kind of a, well, what you see on the website, which is a compendium of harmonic progressions that you find. So, one five one progression. But what kind of inversions do we find, and what kind of substitutions do we find with that, for instance? So, anyway, we'll talk about basic progressions with diatonic substitutions in week four. That is substitution, substituting one chord for another chord in the same key. Cadences, that is how we end phrases. Melodic writing techniques and the building blocks of form, which are called period forms. When we take two phrases and put them together, they create what's called a period form. Week five, we'll continue looking at basic progressions. But this time with chromatic substitutions. That means if you take, a, a chord and you substitute it for another chord, but that other chord is not using the notes of the original key. We have what's called a chromatic substitution. We'll also talk about more elaborate versions of period forms. And I'll introduce you to two voice counterpoint. Week six, we'll talk about what I call progressions within progressions. It's completely possible in classical music to take a simple progression in one key and insert another progression in another key within that original progression. So we'll take a look at how that's done. We'll also take a look at one of the most common tools used in late 18th century music, which is the Alberti bass. And we'll discuss rounded binary form. Every week I hope to offer you a number of resources to help you learn. Now some people feel that watching the videos is how you learn but that's not completely true. The videos help, and they certainly do provide the bulk of the learning. But in order to learn how to do what we need to learn in this class, we have to actually do it. So this is a class where we learn by doing. So that means in addition to the video presentations on topics, I'll also give demonstrations about how to use these new ideas. Or these new techniques I'm showing you, to create music. And we'll also look at some examples from the repertoire. And analyze them, and see how the composers using the things that we talk about to create their music. In some works I even insert what's called guided practice. It's, it's like a video presentation, but instead you have, step-by-step, something to do. And you take one step, and then I take the step with you, and I explain the answer. Then you take the next step, and then, you, you continue the video. And I explain how to do that next step. So that I can give you guided practice. Each week there'll also be self-assessment, and I'll give a solution key for all the self-assessment. Now, in what we're doing, some weeks. You know, in the very beginning, it'll be okay to have a solution, because you won't have many options. But as we go on in weeks, even the self-assessments will be hard to evaluate using the solution key. There won't be a single answer to them. And so there will be a lot of possibilities. We can use the discussion forums as a way to, to clarify things and, and solve problems together. I'll also provide you handouts that will give you kind of like a list of things you need to be watching out for. And you can, kind of a checklist that you can check your work against. Finally, there will be, in addition to handouts, there will be reference materials that are available on course pages. Go to them if you need to review some of the things that are in the videos. This may be a bit quicker as a form of review. And I highly recommend that, in fact, if, if I'm going to be talking about, if you see a video, it's going to be addressing basic harmonic progressions with inversions. Then go to the compendium of chord progressions and look at some of the examples of inversions before you even watch the videos so that you have some basis and some foundation for watching the videos. Then if you have additional questions, or you want to look at a summary of some of the things I talked about in the videos, and go back to those reference materials again. One of the things that I think distinguishes this from sort of garden variety music theory class is that all of the assignments are compositions. And the class is called Write Likes Mozart for a reason. The point of learning all of the things we'll learn about this style of the music is so that we can actually make it. So, assignments, most of which will be self-assign, self-assessments, will all be compositions, or compositional in nature. And if we look at this list of things that you'll compose, it's actually pretty amazing. And if you get to the end of six weeks and you're able to do these things, it will be a huge advance, probably, for many of you, of where you are right now. So what will we do? Well, we'll look at a four voice chorale. We'll compose a four voice chorale. A duo for instrument and piano. A three voice polyphonic passage. Two voice contrapuntal phrase, and an entire dance for piano. Now some of these will be exercises of nature. That is the two voice contrapuntal phrase for instance is a single phrase. It could find its way into a composition as a single phrase but it's not a complete piece in and by itself. The four voice chorale will be a small composition, a complete composition. And the dance for piano will also be a complete composition but nonetheless it will all be composition based. Well, since we'll be composing a lot, we'll need to write down a lot of music so we need to deal with music notation. Now as far as I'm concerned, for any of the self assessments, any method of music notation is acceptable. If you want to do everything by hand. Or if you want to do things computer generated it's fine. For many of you, you already may have a program like Finale or Sibelius that you're using. And of course you're welcome to use either of those programs. If you don't already have a music notation software program, of course you could also buy Finale or Sibelius. They're a bit pricey in their full versions. But you can purchase them. But there are a number of other options as well. There's some free music notation software options. The two main ones I'm familiar with are Noteflight and MuseScore. Now, MuseScore is a downloadable software that you install on your computer, and Noteflight is more like the Gmail of music notation software. That is, you have an account online and all the music notation is done online, your scores are stored in the cloud and It's actually a really nice way if you want to share your scores, embed them in blogs, websites, and things like that. Actually a really nice option. so, if you're looking to maybe learn how to use a music notation software program, but you're not looking on, into spending like $500 to do so, then you might want to try one of these free versions. MuseScore is a bit more like Sibelius. I think it takes a barely a sense of kind of model. Finally, I should say that exercises and assignments are going to be given in two formats. The Noteflight template, and PDF. Now, the nice thing about a Noteflight template is that it's something that I can create in NoteFlight and share with well, 16,000 or 20,000 people, however many students want to, to do the assignment. It's no problem. I can save it as an activity and you can each just get a link to it and you can have it in your own account and work on the assignment and then it saves to your own account. So I'll be using that since it is all web-based. I'm going to use that as a, as a format for the class. But at the same time, I'll also make PDFs available for those of you who want to just, use them in their own music notation programs, or if you just want to do them by hand. If you want to use the note flight templates, you do have to sign up for an account, but the account is free. So that's not a big deal. Well, I guess that's about it in terms of an introduction. Let's move on now and get right into the thick of things and start with talking about chords in classical music.
