Venus, the Bringer of Peace - Annotated Score/Quick Study Guide: Mvt. 2 The Planets by Gustav bHolst

This is another score study video using the planets as an example of how to level up your score study. So I just, the previous one was Mars, the Bringer of War, and what I did with that is what I teach people when they're first starting out and they know nothing about scores. You're just going through and making an observation. That's all that you're doing. You're just dealing with one page at a time and noticing something. What I'm doing in this one, I'm going to use Venus, the second movement of the planets. I use Venus as an example of how to target an orchestration lesson. So specifically, we're going to look at string writing. Now, Venus as a movement, it's a slow movement. It's very calm. I mean, Venus is the bringer of peace. It's supposed to be a nice contrast between all the war-like sounds we've heard with Mars. But what makes this a very effective study for orchestration is the very simple use of the strings. It's a very easy movement to get into. Most of it is just basically based on the quarter note. It's actually very slow and very simple, but there's a lot of small and subtle orchestration that's going on that's very much worth learning for. So what I have done here is I've gone through the score and I've elaborated the different parts that have something that's interesting, and I'm specifically trying to target the strings. Now, obviously, you know, the first page, there's no strings, and it's horn and woodwinds. So obviously, when there's no strings or anything going on, I target other things. But the general focus of this video is this is how you can learn string writing. And you can go through a score, and once you've had a minute to get used to it, you can really focus on, well, what is this composer doing with the strings? I'm going to take a couple of moments to point out what I think are very particular, worthy moments to study. This is how you could do it. Do the exact same thing you do with the general observation, but specifically targeting a different orchestrational group that you want to work with. So strings, percussion, brass, woodwinds, whatever it is that you want to particularly learn from, and seeing how they connect with everything. So this is kind of like a next level sort of thing. Beyond general observation, it's really kind of a targeted approach. This is movement two of the planets, Venus, the bringer of peace. So this moment here, where we just landed, is actually very much worth digesting a little bit here. So if you'll notice on this situation, it's these four bars before measure 30, where the andante is, where we have that kind of nice landing there. This little build up is extremely simple, but it's very effective, and there's a lot that you can learn from it. So notice how he uses the flutes paired with the second violins as this long pedal tones, held on that B flat, and he uses just the cellos at the beginning to kind of do this sort of left-handed piano arpeggiation. So it's just the one moving line. We've literally got the sustain, and then we have one thing moving against, and that's extremely effective. But not only does he do that, he does this really great dovetail effect. So having the basses reach the cellos, and then go up to the violas. When he does this, you want to pay attention to how he stacks them together, having them usually overlap by like one or two notes. This is super effective orchestration, and it's very simple, and he uses this to go all the way up to the full hit at the andante on the B major 7 there, which is a really lovely moment, a moment of contrast. We have the pedal tone with the sustain, and then we have these pushing, running eighth notes, which is kind of the most active that we've been in the piece, and then a contrast against that with just the held sustain note. So again, this is a very simple moment, but there's a lot going on there that is really effective in the music making. Okay, that moment is a very interesting one here. So one of the things that we've been paying attention to in this is how Holst uses octaves in this, and when he doesn't. So there are a lot of very simple orchestrational choices with having the violin 1 and violin 2 working at the octave, same with the basses and the cellos, but what makes this moment here in measure 80 such a nice moment is that this is kind of like the full string voice here. Notice how 1st and 2nd are together in one octave, so he's really unifying them as a section together. There's just the violin section for this one melodic spot, and then we have the viola and the cello doubling the octave below. So it kind of is like a version of the two violins working together, two violin sections together. In this case, it's the full string orchestra. The only exception to this is the basses, which are obviously, they don't go that high. And this kind of orchestrational effect of having the full string section is very popular. You hear it a lot in film music. John Williams does this sort of thing a lot of the time with like E.T. and all these big grand statements. There's at least one time that it's usually the whole string section using this particular thing. Because it's a very powerful sound, you want to be sparing with how you use it, really only for moments of emphasis like this, because otherwise you're just having your strings do the same thing all the time. But that's a very powerful way to get that kind of beautiful string sound to really dominate is by having them all work together in those octaves in this way. So it's a very powerful moment to learn from. And then of course the ending here. I really like how he uses this sort of echo effect where he has the ending, he has the violins divided, so there's technically four parts for the violin sections, but he really only uses the divisi in the second violins in the very last measure. And I think that's a very effective thing. It's just a whole note at the end of it that just holds over. But the back of the section, usually the seconds sit behind the first violins, so it just makes it that much more quiet and that much more of an atmospheric thing. And I think it's a very subtle small choice that often gets lost in this. So yeah, as you can hear, Venus is a pretty cool moment. There's a lot to study with this. A harmonic analysis would definitely be a worthy study in this, I don't really cover that in this point. That is something you get to later on in score study, but for this we're just learning how the instruments work and go from there. So yeah, thank you so much for watching. It's always fantastic getting to hang out with you, and we will see you in the next video. Cheers!