I watched the 2017 version of Beauty and the Beast recently with some friends of mine. Being the music nerd I am, the film got me thinking about its theme song. The more I studied it, the more my admiration for it grew.
Alan Menken’s music is straightforwardly diatonic and repetitive, but that simplicity disguises the Classical thought that underpins it. What makes this song deeper than your average pop tune?
Read on.
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“I don’t know how you could possibly write music!”
It’s a refrain I hear often, even from talented musicians. And I can understand why they say that.
Writing music might seem like organizing thousands of isolated pitches and rhythms. For example, my latest arrangement included 2320 notes, 1273 rhythms, and 281 rests.
That’s daunting. But there is another way, and Pachelbel’s Canon and its friends reveal the centuries-old secret.
As some of you know, Chandler Hatch and I are teaching a class at Tufts now called “Star Wars: How Long Ago? How Far Away?” The idea is to use Star Wars as a gateway to learning how to research in the humanities. (You can read the more highfalutin’ description on the ExCollege website, course EXP-0054-VS, Spring 2017.)
To support the music conversations we’ll be having later in the semester, the first several weeks we’ve been doing music fundamentals — naturally using Star Wars music as the examples. Continue reading
I know what you’re thinking:
“Why doesn’t it get boring?”
Some have taken an a mathematical approach to this question. Although these answers demonstrate a raw numerical reason, they offer little musical insight.
The problem is that their premise — “only 12 notes” — is a lie.
Why do altos and tenors often get saddled with parts like this?
Don’t composers know that singing the same two notes over and over again is boring?
To understand what composers are possibly thinking, let’s dive into some music theory . . .
“The four-bar phrase has had a bad press in our time,” writes Charles Rosen.[1. In The Romantic Generation 258. Rosen gives a fascinating exploration of them in his book, but I want to articulate a different approach.] But for all the denigration, four-bar phrases are ubiquitous. Continue reading
Composers work with patterns, which is another way of saying we work with repetition. Thus, if I have three elements, A, B, and C, it would be useful to know how I can reorder them. Continue reading
Some tunes won’t get out of your ears. The chorus from the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” is one of them Continue reading
Why do composers use all those flats and sharps, let alone the weird x’s? Understanding this question can help you both as you play music and as you write it. Continue reading
Many people say melody — the foreground sequence of pitches — is an essential part of music, but lots of music does just fine without any pitches. Even music that uses notes often doesn’t have melodies. So how does music operate when it does not have melodies?
