All You Have to Do is Listen

Rob Kapilow

Description

Rob Kapilow has been helping audiences hear more in great music for almost twenty years with his What Makes It Great? series on NPR, at Lincoln Center, and in concert halls throughout the US and Canada. In this book, he gives you a set of tools you can use when listening to any piece of music in order to hear its “plot”—its story told in notes. The musical examples are available free for download to help you hear the ideas presented. Whether you are an experienced concertgoer or a newcomer to classical music, the listening principles Kapilow shares will help you "get" music in an exciting, fresh new way.

"Kapilow gets audiences in tune with classical music at a deeper and more immediate level than many of them thought possible."
—Los Angeles Times

"Rob Kapilow is awfully good at what he does. We need him."
—The Boston Globe

"A wonderful guy who brings music alive!"
—Katie Couric

"Rob Kapilow leaps into the void dividing music analysis from appreciation and fills it with exhilarating details and sensations."
—The New York Times

"You could practically see the light bulbs going on above people's heads. . . . The audience could decipher the music in a new, deeper way. It was the total opposite of passive listening."
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
PREFACE.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

HOW TO USE THE WEB SITE.

PRELUDE: All You Have to Do Is Listen.

1. Does Music Have a Plot?

2. Beginnings Are Everything.

3. Repetition.

4. Comma, Semicolon, Period: The Meaning of Cadence.

5. Compared-to-What Listening.

6. Forward-Backward Listening.

7. The Challenge of Memory.

8. Form Is a Verb.

9. From Dancing to Listening: Minuets and Scherzos.

10. Sonata Form: A Story in Three Acts.

11. Passacaglia, Chaconne, and Fugue: Out of One, Many.

12. How Could This Come from That?: The Art of Theme and Variations.

13. The Individual versus the Community: The Concerto.

14. Finished versus Complete.

POSTLUDE: The Role of the Performer.

GLOSSARY.

CREDITS.

INDEX.

Sujets

• Musique
• Technique musicale
• Technique musicale
• Techniques musicales
• Music
• Instruction
• Appreciation
• Study

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 14 octobre 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470443385
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
 
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PREFACE
Acknowledgements
HOW TO USE THE WEB SITE
PRELUDE
 
Chapter 1 - Does Music Have a Plot?
 
A Plot by Haydn
 
Chapter 2 - Beginnings Are Everything
 
“Sticky” Ideas
It’s Got Rhythm
Music without Words
First Impressions
 
Chapter 3 - Repetition
 
Exact Repeats
Transposed Repeats
What Does It All Mean?
A Dazzling, Summarizing Example
 
Chapter 4 - Comma, Semicolon, Period
 
Comma, Semicolon, Period
Comma
Semicolon/Period
Deception and Delay
One Hundred Years Later
Contemporary Music
Atonal Music
Cadere: To Fall
Cadences
 
Chapter 5 - Compared-to-What Listening
 
Compared-to-What Mozart
Compared-to-What Haydn: From Phrase to Section
One Hundred Years Later It’s Still Compared-to-What
Compared-to-What Debussy: The Art of Reharmonization
Haydn Redux
 
Chapter 6 - Forward-Backward Listening
 
A Forward-Backward Nursery Rhyme
What Just Happened?
What Does It Mean?
Retrospective Music
Forward-Backward Beethoven
Are We There Yet?
How Things Turn Out
Walking in the Fog
 
Chapter 7 - The Challenge of Memory
 
Remembering Callahan
Remembering Schumann
Remembering X
Remembering X, Y, and Z
Rejecting Memory
Cultural Memory
 
Chapter 8 - Form Is a Verb
 
Popular Music
“I Got Rhythm” Redux
“Home”-“Away”-“Home”
Cadences Are Everything
Ex-Post-Facto Forms
“Träumerei”
“Away”-“Home”
 
Chapter 9 - From Dancing to Listening
 
From Life to Art
Two-Repeat Form
Two Parts or Three Parts?
 
Chapter 10 - Sonata Form
 
Three-Act Stories
Musical Travel: Key and Modulation
Act I: The Exposition
Act I: Part II
Act II: The Development
Act III: The Recapitulation
A Final Thought
 
Chapter 11 - Passacaglia, Chaconne, and Fugue
 
An Obstinate Bass
“Dido’s Lament”
“Remember Me”
Chaconne/Passacaglia, Passacaglia/Chaconne
Modern Versions
Fugue
Fischer’s Fugue
Bach’s Fugue
 
Chapter 12 - How Could This Come from That?
 
A French “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”
What Is a Variation?
Decoration as Idea
The Meaning of a Variation
Bass, Mode, Meter, and Harmony
The Beethoven Revolution
From Simple to Abstract
Abstract Hearing: How Could This Come from That?
 
Chapter 13 - The Individual versus the Community
 
To Dispute or to Unite?
The Ritornello
The Solo Sections
Community in the Classical World
The End of the Beginning or the Beginning of the End?
 
Chapter 14 - Finished versus Complete
 
Definitions and Distinctions
Romantically Incomplete: Schumann
Romantically Incomplete: Chopin
Romantically Incomplete: Liszt
The Need for Closure
Is the Unfinished Symphony Unfinished?
Finished yet Incomplete
 
POSTLUDE
GLOSSARY
CREDITS
INDEX

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Copyright © 2008 by Rob Kapilow. All rights reserved
 
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
 
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eISBN : 978-0-470-44338-5
 
 

 
To the memory of Nadia Boulanger—the greatest teacher of music and listening I have ever known— and to my wife, Claire, and my three children, Benjamin, Sarah, and Adam: they are the music of my life.
PREFACE
Though I have spent more than twenty years trying to help listeners hear more in great music, for the first seventeen of those years, I never even considered writing a book. To write about music in any kind of meaningful detail requires that the reader be able to hear the music you are describing, and until recently this has been an obstacle faced by all books and printed materials written for the general public. Though a trained musician might be capable of looking at musical notation in a book and hearing the sound in his head, for most untrained people this is simply not possible. Consequently, in the past, a book about music either had to be so general as to be understandable without reference to the actual sounds of a piece, or if the book included detailed examples in musical notation, it largely excluded the general public without the specialized knowledge required to hear or play the examples. About ten years ago, some books began to include CDs to try to help solve the problem, but their relationship to individual examples or detailed descriptions was cumbersome and complicated and ultimately did little to solve the general listener’s problem.
Recent advances in technology, however, have improved the situation, and these advances are what made me eager to write this book in the first place. When I do a live program with musicians present, I am able to take a small amount of music and work with it measure by measure—take it apart instrument by instrument, change it, highlight key details of rhythm, melody, and harmony, and then put the excerpt back together again. Now, thanks to new Web-based technology, I can do something similar in book form for all listeners—whether they can read music or not. There are ninety-three musical examples in this volume that are printed in musical notation in the book itself but are also printed on the Web site associated with this book. (See “How to Use the Web Site.”) All the excerpts in musical notation can be heard on the book’s Web site and they are designed to scroll in real time with a visual scrollbar as the music is playing. In addition, key points from the book’s discussion of each example are written on the musical notation on the Web site. So if the text refers to an interesting chord in measure 4, as the music plays and scrolls to measure 4, the chord will be marked in such a way that any listener can hear and see the reference whether or not he can read music. Though an experienced musician might be able to hear all of the examples simply by reading the printed notation, the Web site opens up the book’s musical content and discussion to any listener regardless of his musical background or training. A first-time listener might require more than one hearing of each example to fully grasp its content, but I guarantee that the repetition will be valuable.
It is my deepest hope that this new technology will allow all interested music lovers, with or without musical training, to have access to a kind of detailed musical discussion that was previously available in book form only to those with prior musical training. Though the examples might require effort and attention to master, in the end, all you have to do is listen.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To write a book requires the foolhardy belief that with all that has already been written, you might still have something of value to say. Since the thought would never have occurred to me on my own, I would like to thank several key people who over my strenuous objections talked me into considering the possibility that I might be able to write something that could help listeners deepen their appreciation of music. First of all, two people at Lincoln Center—its president, Reynold Levy, and Vice President of Programming, Jane Moss—who for no apparent reason believed in this book without having the slightest idea what form it would ultimately take. At John Wiley & Sons, my editor, guiding spirit, partner, and perfect reader, Hana Lane, who was the kind of supportive yet critical taskmaster every first-time author should be lucky enough to have. My literary agent, Carl Brandt, who through three years of doubt and confusion as the project took shape was not only a willing ear for every new idea and suggestion I had, but also an unfailingly enthusiastic believer, critic, and facilitator. Louise Barder and the staff at 21C Media who were advisors, supporters, and sounding boards on every aspect of the project. My agent at IMG, Charles LeTourneau, who embodies the spirit of “yes,” wholeheartedly championed the project, jumping in eagerly to help make it possible even though by no stretch of the imagination should it have fallen