18th-century Western Art Music
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10.1: L. Poundie Burstein with Quynh Nguyen and Jennifer Roderer, “The Best Laid Plans . . . and Others: An 18th-Century Compositional Outline” - explores how an 18th-century music theorist attempted to distinguish essential material from elaboration in a contemporary composition; would be suitable for the study of phrase structure and small forms, for considering melodic construction, and for exploring the history of music analysis
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7.2: Kara Yoo Leaman, “Dance as Music in George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco” – addresses conflicting patterns in music and choreography and connects this metric dissonance to a melodic motive in Bach; suitable for students at all levels, especially study of metric dissonance
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7.1: Stephanie Probst, “Music Appreciation Through Animation: Percy Scholes’s ‘AudioGraphic’ Piano Rolls” – discusses piano rolls with music-analytical overlay; includes a visual analysis of Bach’s B-flat major fugue from WTC I; suitable for introducing students to different visual models for analyzing form and for introducing fugue
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6.3: Daniel Ketter, “Discovering Essential Voices in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Solo Instrumental Suite Movements” – suitable for teaching binary form (especially differences between Baroque and Classical binary form), paired with Brody, “Teaching Bach’s Binary Forms” (see bibliography); discusses how Bach implies distinct voices in his solo instrumental works; suitable for advanced students studying linear analysis (pairs well with Rothstein, “on Implied Tones”); see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yguQ1Q3kGB8&list=PLoDoWaIYcEP_bCYiTYBNnFwG2TypHrTDG and discussion in Headlam, “Music Informance: Performance for the Information Age” in the Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory
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5.4: Scott Murphy, “‘Fifth Above, Third Below’: Discerning Canonic Potential” – shows how to identify whether a subject can be treated in canon; considers examples from Clara Schumann; suitable for students of counterpoint at all levels
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3.1: L. Poundie Burstein with Quynh Nguyen, “Parenthetic Aside in a 1789 Analysis of Mozart’s K. 284” – introduces a historically informed way to understand the two-part exposition (the exposition with the secondary theme) in a Classical sonata form; suitable for upper-level music students and students composing a Classical-style sonata first movement; discusses performance implications of treating the secondary theme as a “middle passage”
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1.2: Peter Schubert, “Contrapuntal Thinking in Haydn” – Professor Peter Schubert explores contrapuntal thinking in an unexpected “place,” the first theme group of the last movement from Haydn’s Symphony No. 99 in E-flat Major (1793). He demonstrates how melodic fragments from the theme and accompaniment are repositioned in relation to one another, sounding not only above or below in invertible counterpoint but also before and after. Schubert reveals that the latter two positions (before and after) produce longer melodic lines. This video is suitable for students at all levels who would like to learn more about contrapuntal thinking in music of the high classical style. For more on contrapuntal thinking, see the author’s companion videos “Contrapuntal Thinking in Marenzio” and “Contrapuntal Thinking in Brahms”; videos on improvising counterpoint; and two textbooks, Modal Counterpoint: Renaissance Style, 2nd. ed. (Oxford University Press, 2007), and Baroque Counterpoint (co-authored with Christoph Neidhöfer), revised and expanded ed. (SUNY Press, forthcoming in Nov. 2023).
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1.3: Edward Klorman, “Multiple Agency in Mozart’s Chamber Music” – Professor Edward Klorman emphasizes how historical sources, including musical scores, can draw our attention to the social interplay among individual performers, or “personas enacted by the individual players” (4:38–41), within string quartets. Using an excerpt from the last movement of Mozart’s String Quartet in G Major, K. 387 (1782), as an example, Klorman illustrates his concept of “multiple agency,” a perspective that “celebrates the creative role of performers” and that yields “vivid analytical interpretations that can be masked by conventional, omniscient vantage points” (4:10–28). This video is suitable for students at all levels who would like to learn more about the socio-historical and -cultural dimensions of composition and performance. Basic knowledge of musical form and tonality are welcome but not necessary. For further reading, please see the author’s monograph Mozart’s Music of Friends: Social Interplay in the Chamber Works (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Edward T. Cone’s The Composer’s Voice (University of California Press, 1974).