How to Listen to Classical Music: Motifs and Seeds

How can we follow a piece of classical music? How do composers structure their pieces, and what can we latch onto when listening to make our experience more enjoyable? In this video, I want to introduce you to a fundamental idea which is used in a huge amount of classical music, and I hope that this idea will help you to follow and appreciate music with a greater understanding. I like to call it a musical argument. Not argument as in bickering or a bar fight, but more the kind of argument you find in a speech, debate, or essay. First, an idea is presented, and then this idea is reinforced, developed, and allowed to grow and flourish. And through this process, this kind of argument, the goal is to convince the audience of the idea's strong potential. The same happens with music. In the simplest possible terms, the composer will present their musical idea or ideas. Think of them as seeds. Then he develops these ideas, cultivates them, lets them grow in order to show their full musical potential, and how a full piece of expressive music can be developed out of these musical ideas, just as a tree can grow from a seed. And this can be done in many different ways. A piece in sonata form might have a more complex argument with more levels to it than a simple prelude, and so choosing a specific form, like sonata form, means the composer will be arguing in a certain kind of way. But in this first video, I just want to focus on this fundamental concept, which occurs across all kinds of classical music. The concept of the musical seed or seeds, which are grown and developed by the composer into a fully expressive piece of music. Now, not all music is structured like this. In some cases, like, say, late Italian opera, it might be best just to enjoy the flow of the music rather than listening for a musical argument. And my other video on listening for expression looks at how you might enjoy that. But a huge amount of music does do this, especially from the 1700s onwards, so I think it's a very useful way to think about music. So let's start with a musical form called the prelude. Bach wrote dozens of preludes for keyboard. So did Chopin, so did Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and others. And a traditional prelude will typically focus on one or two musical ideas and show off their expressive musical potential within just a few minutes. Here's the famous C major prelude by Bach, the very first prelude from his 48 preludes and fugues that make up his collection, The Well-Tempered Clavier. In this prelude, the musical idea is quite simply these arpeggios, the word arpeggio coming from the Italian for play the harp. The entire piece is simply him using these arpeggios to develop a full expressive piece of music. He starts comfortably at home in C major without a worry in the world, but then he starts to feed more emotion into his music. And over the course of this piece, he allows himself to stray farther and further from home, making his arpeggios more disturbing. Until eventually, with drama and tension building on G for a long time, he returns to C major, home. And so he creates this fully-fledged dramatic and interesting piece of music all through the vassal of one musical idea, the arpeggio. Now let's look at Chopin's prelude in E minor from his great 24 preludes. The main musical idea which the prelude focuses on is simply this, just two notes and the relationship between them. But remember, through one or two musical seeds, Chopin wants to let the piece grow to full fruition, to show how a full expressive piece of music can grow from small ideas. And how much suffering does he squeeze out of this simple idea? One of the most effective ways of developing a musical idea is to change the harmony underneath it. That is, to change the chords that are accompanying or surrounding the melody. Let me show you how. Here, the same notes are playing again. It's just a B and a C. You'd think that nothing much is happening. But the chords underneath it sink lower and lower, wallowing deeper and deeper in grim sadness. And finally, the melody drops lower, but the harmonies keep sinking. And this keeps happening throughout the piece in an amazing way, until finally we're on the home stretch. But even here, instead of giving us an easy ride, he keeps giving us the wrong chords, just to add that last bit of drama, keeping us on tenterhooks until the final resolution. And so you see how changing the chords around the melody is a very effective way to develop the music, to bring about new expressive moods, to reveal new potential in a musical idea we thought we already knew. It's worthwhile listening through the preludes of composers like Bach, Chopin and Rachmaninoff, and hearing how, whatever period they were writing in, they present a musical idea and show its musical potential, creating an expressive piece of music from a simple seed, each within the space of a few minutes. Beethoven would do something similar. In his very first piano sonata in F minor, this is the first theme. There are two musical seeds here, this, and this. And so later, after a lengthy development, he's on C, and he wants to take the piece back home to F minor. If he were a bad composer, he could just do this. Easy. Too easy. Beethoven wants to build maximum drama, and so he delays this resolution and uses it as another opportunity to develop one of his seeds. That's much more effective. Different composers do this developing in different ways. Franz Liszt would use the developing variation. He'd give you a melody like this one, and then keep returning to it with a new variation. And each variation would develop the theme in a new way, building more drama or taking it in a new expressive direction. But it's the same concept. He presents his theme, and then he shows its musical potential by allowing it to grow and develop expressively throughout the piece, just as a seed grows into a flourishing plant. And of course, the leitmotif in film or opera does the same. We're given a theme, which can then be developed or altered to dramatic effect. So there you have it. And while we've only looked at a few types of musical forms, this happens in all kinds of symphonies, sonatas, fugues, standalone pieces. The composer presents his ideas and then uses these seeds to grow a full expressive piece of music. I want to make more videos like this in future, introducing you to great pieces and ideas in classical and film music. So you can like, subscribe, and let me know what you might want to see next. Thanks for watching.