How to understand the layers of the music
Understanding Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, Sound, and Growth
Music is such an amazing and bewildering creation, it can touch the emotions of the people who listen to it and as well as the ones who perform it, regardless of the instrument or level they are at it. Its appreciation for those who study music can be sometimes overwhelming as it is the result of many layers and elements that interact with each other. Most piano students at some point in their training start to wonder how the music that they play works; they start to raise the awareness of finding themselves asking these questions, what lies underneath the notes on the paper, and it is the task for the piano tutors to answer those questions.
For composition students, this is a must, as their first endeavour is to deeply comprehend the contributing elements that make a piece work. This is how we learn to “connect the dots”, to grasp how the different layers are interwoven in a piece of music. This comes from the Music Analysis and it is indeed a long journey, but extremely rewarding at its end.
As Maestra Gisela Paterno states in her article, “Musical composition is nothing but an intricate architectural combination of five parameters: Sound, Rhythm, Melody, Harmony, and Growth. These parameters are unique among all branches of the arts, as their combination can mean an infinity of connotations either in the composer, the performer or the listener. These categories were coined by the great theorist Jan La Rue in his book “Guidelines for Style Analysis” and although it is not a book about the composition itself, it serves any composition student or anyone who wants to understand the intricacies of the musical phenomena on a deeper level.”
There are five contributing elements: Sound (the timbre, texture and fabric), Harmony (it comprises all chord progressions as well all successive vertical combinations including counterpoint), Melody (refers to the profile formed by any collection of pitches), Rhythm (encompasses many elements, such as the harmonic rhythm, the rhythm of the notes themselves and the speed in which the sounds and instruments change within an orchestration) and lastly, Growth (which delineates and contains beautifully the intricacies of the multi-layered phenomenon of a musical piece, as it includes both the feeling of expansive continuation so characteristic of music and also a parallel sense of achievement something permanent. These two aspects are decisively interactive and can be separated into two parallel functions: Movement and Shape)
Music is essentially movement in every aspect of the word, even a single sound impacts on the air and makes it move. Every sound that is followed by another creates a melodic outline that itself defines a piece, having an abstract meaning to the listener.
Click on the link aforementioned and access to the full article written by my colleague Gisela Paterno for WKMT Music Blog. Understand and learn all about composition lessons in London with her through WKMT.
