EPTI love music. It's always been something that I've understood like a second language, and whether it be Rihanna, Duke Ellington, Justin Timberlake, The Decemberists, Michael Buble, or even Phoenix. I love variety and I love exploration of the new (because hey, new is all about context), and I felt that it was probably time that I started a series of pieces on the field that has defined my career path as an artist, and constantly challenges me to reexamine who I am and why I like the things I do. I am of course talking about classical music.
This is how this is going to work. I'll be writing a short piece on a work that I've either been recently been listening to myself or like a whole lot, talk a little on how It's constructed, why I like the choices made, and some of the historically important information that could provide some interesting insight into how you hear the piece. The pieces I'll be looking at are likely going to be more off the beaten path than you might be used to because as a composer I'm much more interested in outlying and interesting topics than popular works. I hope that this series helps to show you just how interesting, dynamic, and fun 'classical music' can be, because it is a field that I love dearly.
<span style="font-size:32px;font-weight:bold;">Carlo Gesualdo</span>
Tristis est anima mea
This isn't my first experience of the sheer crazy that is Gesualdo, but it certainly personifies why I love this composer so much. But a little context. Gesualdo was a nobleman and composer who lived with his wife in Venosa Italy (circa 1600), until he caught her having an affair and killed both her and her lover. He then mutilated the bodies and left them for all to see, as, being an Italian nobleman the law considered this matter closed. But this haunted him for the rest of his life.
Say what you will about this, as a composer he wrote some of the most daring, and innovative music with styles and ideas that were in upwards of 300 years ahead of their time. Much of this probably sounds ok to your ears, but here's a little context:
This music by Heinrich Schutz is much more of a typical example of compositional writing of the time (written in the same year). Predominantly diatonic stepwise motion, closely related key relationships (usually by 5th), and not too many chromatic deviations. The Gesualdo however uses a lot of dissonance, odd scalar figurations (major/minor mode mixing), and all of a sudden will have bizarre chordal relationships that either don't resolve or don't see any kind of use until much, much later.
One great example is between 0:50 and 1:15 where the melodic line that you would expect to go to a G-major triad instead goes to a-minor with an F-sharp passing tone that completely obscures the chord to make you think it's an augmented triad. Not only does this accented passing tone confuse the listener, but this is quite odd as we approached this passage from F-major which wants to resolve to C-major (and does), but instead of following traditional practices it resolves to D-major instead of d-minor (mode mixture), and then follows a series of cadences that you think are going to resolve in one way, but don't until the E-major triad at about 1:20, so that's about four separate deceptions in a row that thwart the resolution of that line for a long time.
Another is between 2:04-2:33 where we start in D-maj and would expect a half cadance at 2:14, but instead it resolves on III. What? And then things get really nuts. With no preparation whatsoever an E-maj triad appears, which then resolves to C-major with a 7-6 suspension, which then resolves to B-major, and from B to A.
This makes the overall progression here - I - bVI - V, where the flat VI is a chromatic upper neighbor chord to the dominant, but the V is actually V/V (V of V, or secondary dominant), which doesn't resolve to V but straight to I through some clever chromaticism. This is also of course noting that in our D-maj context that the final resolution on A-maj is a V in D (secondary of a secondary), and somehow all that crazy we just heard in-between relates back to the original tonal center. For music in the 1600s this had never been done before, and are tonal relationships that wouldn't really see much, let alone regular use until after Beethoven's death (~210yrs later).
And it's beautiful.
Regardless of whether you've studied theory or counterpoint, you still can hear how striking those sounds are and how exciting they can be when your expectation is set, and then thrashed by the choices of the composer. This is why I - and coincidentally most composers - love Gesualdo, and why this is a great example of him, because he so often does what no one dared to do, and ends up with some of the most exciting and interesting sounds.
