What you’re listening for in music is energy. Yes, music is vibrations and vibrations literally produce energy, but I’m making a more abstract point. You don’t really need to listen to form, or structure, or even melody and harmony to understand what is going on when you’re listening to a song. It’s the energy itself–where it’s going and where it just came from that matters.
Music is the language of energy and it’s telling you things in this language which is transferring that literal energy into your body which produces emotion in you (energy in motion). So how you feel is directly being produced by what you hear. The artist already wrote all the notes. All the music was written to sound exactly as it does in every moment. So, if you’re sitting, thinking about your day or your job or something while you’re listening to music–it’s the equivalent of zoning out while someone is speaking to you.
How attentive to the most specific and subtle details can you be if you’re thinking about something else? Stop thinking altogether. Just listen to the energy.
I hate correcting people, but to avoid sounding uneducated at the cocktail party, it should be noted that the ‘i’ in timbre is not pronounced like the word timber but like the ‘a’ in pantry.
This is one of my absolute favorite topics in music and probably the most important for anyone who wants to write and arrange music. And for those who just enjoy listening, this will help you enjoy it even more!
“In musical scores, timbre means the type of instrument to be played, such as a violin, trumpet, or bassoon. But timbre also is used in a general sense to describe an instrument’s sound quality as sharp, dull, shrill, and so forth.”
“How quickly an instrument speaks after the performer starts a note, whether it can be played with vibrato, and many other instrumental qualities are also lumped together as timbre. Timbre also gets mixed up with loudness because some instruments, like the trombone, get more shrill as they get louder. As a consequence, it’s easier to say what timbre isn’t than what it is: timbre is everything about a tone that is not its pitch, not its duration, and not its loudness. However, negative definitions are slippery and provide no new information.”
“There are other ways of representing tones that shed positive light on timbre. Just as colors can be shown to consist of mixtures of light at various frequencies and strengths, sounds can be shown to consist of mixtures of sinusoids at various frequencies and strengths. For instance, when we hear a note played on a trumpet, even though our ears tell us we are hearing a single tone, in fact we are hearing simpler tones mixed together in a characteristic way that our minds–perhaps through long experience, perhaps through some intrinsic capability–fuse into the perception of a trumpet sound.”
“The individual sinusoids that collectively make up an instrumental tone are called its partials because each carries a partial characterization of the whole sound. Partials are also known as components. The principal properties of the partials are their frequencies and amplitudes. The way the partials manifest in frequency, amplitude, and time is what our ears use to determine what kind of instrument made a particular sound.”
“The lowest pitched partial in a tone is called the fundamental. It is generally what our ears pick out as the pitch of the tone. Since, by definition, the remaining partials in the tone are pitched higher, they are called overtones. Our ears use the pattern of overtone frequencies as an important cue to recognize timbres. The overtone frequencies of wind and string instruments are positive integer multiples of the fundamental, where the positive integers are 1, 2, 3, and so on. For instance, if a flute or violin has fundamental frequency f, then the frequencies of its overtones will be positive integer multiples of f. The partials of such instruments are called harmonics. Note that because the positive numbers start at 1, and because 1 X f = f, therefore the first harmonic is the same as the fundamental.”
“Instruments with harmonic partials are usually chosen to carry the melody and harmony of the music because frequencies of the harmonics tend to agree in frequency with the pitches of the diatonic scale. Instruments with inharmonic partials such as drums and bells are usually not used to carry melody and harmony because for the most part the frequencies of their partials do not agree with the diatonic scale.”
“The amplitudes and frequencies of the partials of musical instruments tend to vary in a characteristic way over the duration of a tone, depending upon the instrument and performance style of the performer. Though the variation may be slight, the precise amplitude and frequency ballistics of the partials help our ears to fuse a single percept of an instrument out of its individual partials, and help identify the type of instrument.”
A piece of music that is often used to illustrate the use of many different timbres within one musical composition is Bolero, by Maurice Ravel. It is a very popular and well known orchestral work that is basic in construction and shows how a composer can use timbre to get a lot of mileage out of just a couple melodies.
That’s kind of of down playing the creativity of Ravel, but you get the idea!
Here is a version. I specifically chose a recording without video, because the point is to hear the differences in timbre as the melody cycles through all the different instruments.
Jazz spawned as the offspring of impressionistic harmony and is a natural evolution of the entire western musical harmonic language. In layman’s terms, they just kept adding more notes to chords because they got bored.
In the late 19th Century, composers pushed musical structure to its eventual limits. Jazz, while technically speaking was birthed in the US (and has many rhythmic and cultural elements too), is really just an extension of western European music.
Again, put simply, chords finally became boring after centuries of use and so evolved by adding more notes. In musical terms, chords are built in thirds. A basic chord in music consists of three notes, known as a triad. New composers felt the need to add more notes on top of these three in order to create new sounds and harmonies that excited the listener.
Here is a good primer for definitions of chord qualities and how they sound. This musician has a great YouTube channel for people who want to learn piano.
Andreas Scholl, countertenor
Collegium Vocale Gent,
Conducted by Philippe Herreweghe
Harmonia Mundi
The Agnus Dei is the last section of the Catholic Latin Mass that was regularly set to music in the Renaissance and Baroque periods (c. 1400 – 1750). Agnus Dei means, “lamb of God” and was usually reserved for the more beautiful passages of music written for the different movements of the mass. This is a setting from the Mass in B minor by J.S. Bach from the later baroque period, by this time there were many instruments used as accompaniment to the singing, whereas in the early Renaissance the music was strictly written for voices only.
I chose this image of Beethoven on his birthday because it seems to symbolize how most of us think about the composer. A deep thinker, who labored over every note at the piano, editing and rewriting. Happy Birthday Beethoven.
“True genius in art is eternal patience. Designing, throwing away and designing again. Art must appear to have been created effortlessly.”
With all the chaos in the world, remember to take a small amount of time each day to stop and enjoy everything that you have in life.
“Music has the power to change the way we see things, to transform our senses and our understanding: it presents itself not as a creation but as the creation. This feeling is inextricably linked with the sense of beauty we have been exploring; somehow the internal relations of the composition and its external relation to our experience become related. We are in another world, but through that world we seem to find our own.”
–Edward Rothstein, “Emblems of Mind, The inner life of music and mathematics”
Without a doubt the most amazing creation by human beings ever. I ask anyone to name something more profound. How long did it take to build the pyramids? Hundreds of years? By hundreds of thousands? Western music is a collective effort of every human being and every humans’ ear, evolved over the entire history and existence of humanity dating back to when we stood upright and walked for the first time. We have evolved our ears from something that originally served to caution us of predators, into something that derives pleasure from the way sounds are organized into a system that our brain can process like a puzzle. From that, we have organized patterns of notes and tuning systems that as humans, we can manipulate with instruments–the voice being the most basic of such–to produce notes of sound, that when played back and heard by our evolved ears, produce emotional responses by our brains that help us deal with the most basic and innate feelings of love, pain, pleasure, and happiness. Emotions and feelings so great, that our entire existence is still unable to explain them fully.
