On Teaching

Musical Style

David Cope
 On Teaching Musical Style

Seven thoughts that I feel have been

somewhat neglected in teaching music
at the college level.
Not just in music theory, but in
musicology, performance, composition,
world music, and so on.
 On Teaching Musical Style

None of them are particularly new, but

special for me in my research:

Musical Style.
 On Teaching Musical Style

Why important to me:

Experiments in Musical Intelligence
(Emmy). I won’t recant how it works
except to say it analyzes voice leading,
structure, thematic explication,
repetition and variation, and stylistic
signatures from works in a database
and produces new stylistic credible
output.
 On Teaching Musical Style

Thought 1:
Analyzing style by ear:

The Game.
 On Teaching Musical Style

Can you guess which of the following

fugues is by Bach and which by
Emmy? How do you recognize the
style of a composer?
Holly Roadfeldt has gracefully agreed to
perform these two fugues.
 On Teaching Musical Style

What marks the one composed in the

eighteenth century from the one
composed in the twenty-first century?
Chromaticism?
Use of sequence?
Harmonic progression?
 On Teaching Musical Style

Dissonance and resolution?

Phrase lengths?
Voice leading?
Use of non-harmonic tones?
Structural balance?
 On Teaching Musical Style

Should our students be able to recognize

a computer-composed Bach fugue from
a real Bach fugue?
If yes, why have all of the editors of
anthologies which I’ve queried about
including an Emmy piece in their
books along with a ‘real’ example
either refused or not responded to my
queries?
 On Teaching Musical Style

Thought 2: Imitative composition in

styles.
Student take the place of the computer.
To not be able to effectively imitate an
historical style is to have lost one of
the most important traditions of
instructing music.
 On Teaching Musical Style

We typically require students to imitate

Bach chorales. What about Mozart,
Beethoven, and Brahms sonatas, or
Schoenberg and Ligeti piano works?
 On Teaching Musical Style

Thought 3: Breaking the Rules.

They help identify a composer’s style.
Bach Chorales contain parallel fifths,
octaves, and other no-nos. Hundreds if
not thousands of them. We teach
statistical probabilities rather than
realities. It’s these exceptions to rules
that often identify a particular style.
 On Teaching Musical Style

Here’s an example from J.S. Bach’s

setting of Freuet euich, ihr Christen
alle.

The fifths occur in the second beat of

measure two, one of over hundreds of
such examples found in the chorales.
 On Teaching Musical Style

• Bach prefers not to avoid the problem.

He could have easily removed the
eighth note F on the ‘and’ of beat two,
and avoided the issue entirely.
 On Teaching Musical Style

Parallel octaves, awkward resolutions of

non-harmonic tones, poor doublings,
all voices moving in the same
directions not occurring after cadences,
hidden fifths and octaves in improper
places, and so on, appear many times.
It’s difficult to find one of his works
that does not contain one of these
problems.
 On Teaching Musical Style

Other music breaks so-called rules even

more numerously and tends to stretch
our believability of calling these rules
rules, rather than rules of thumb.
 On Teaching Musical Style

Some argue that if we tell our students

about exceptions, they’ll use parallel
fifths and octaves whenever it suits
them rather than when musically
important.
 On Teaching Musical Style

Explaining exceptions also takes time

away from teaching the normative
rules they need to know.
Is it really an either/or situation, or a
both/and?
 On Teaching Musical Style

Thought 4: Musical signatures.

Composers often reveal their ownership
of a certain style by what we’ve come
to know as clichés. This later
derogatory word is shameful to use for
such important artifacts of music.
 On Teaching Musical Style

Here are a few examples of a musical

signature used in many different guises
by Chopin in his mazurkas.
On Teaching Musical Style
 On Teaching Musical Style

These are similar in melodic contour,

meter, use of initiating triplet, but
different in many other ways. Yet each
represents a recognizable cadential
figure that identifies the composer.
 On Teaching Musical Style

The following Mozart examples present

a more variable signature in that only
the bare shape of the melodic contour
remains consistent.
Both a Viennese cliché and a Mozart
signature.
On Teaching Musical Style
 On Teaching Musical Style

Thought 5: Allusions.
Thievery, or in my view honorifics to
other composers and styles presents
another way of recognizing styles.
Analyzing, and thus listening to and
composing music. cannot be truly
meaningful without understanding the
allusions present.
 On Teaching Musical Style

Notable examples of allusions. A)

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in C
minor, Op. 13, Sonata Pathétique
(1798); and B) from an earlier work by
Mozart, his Piano Sonata, K. 457, m.
24, second movement, a favorite of
Beethoven’s and one found among his
scores.
On Teaching Musical Style
 On Teaching Musical Style

Note the keys (key signatures here are

misleading), the melodies, and the first
three harmonies are the same.
 On Teaching Musical Style

And here’s another:

a) Beethoven (op. 13, Pathétique,
1798), b) Schumann (Trio 1, 1847),
c) Liszt (Ich Möchte, 1845), d)
Spohr (Der Alchemist, 1830), and e)
Wagner (Tristan und Isolde,
prelude, 1859) with the latter
seeming to grow naturally from the
On Teaching Musical Style
 On Teaching Musical Style

Thought 6: Earmarks.
Like signatures and allusions, earmarks
repeat with variation in many works
composers. Earmarks, however, are
cues to musical form.
 On Teaching Musical Style

Earmarks tell us where a recapitulation

might occur, when a movement or work
may be ending, or when a cadenza is
coming. Here’s an example of the
latter from three Mozart piano
concertos.
On Teaching Musical Style
 On Teaching Musical Style

The preparatory scale followed by a trill

in the right hand and an alberti bass in
the left are signals that composers
expect audiences to recognize. The
inevitability of the cadenzas that
follow would be extraordinarily missed
were they not present.
 On Teaching Musical Style

Thought 7: Sources
Can a computer program create a
convincing example of the style of a
composer using the previous six criteria
without that composer’s music being
present in the database?
 On Teaching Musical Style

As example, here is an output from my

program Experiments in Musical
Intelligence.
•
 On Teaching Musical Style

When I recognized it as a similar

passage in Beethoven, I figured that my
program had used that as a model and
only slightly varied it. Here's the
passage by Beethoven.
 On Teaching Musical Style

However, my program (Emmy) had no

Beethoven present at all in its
database. Here is the resultant source
material as reversed engineered by the
program itself.
On Teaching Musical Style
 On Teaching Musical Style

All of the music here belongs to Mozart.

No one suggests that Beethoven
composed his music in this manner, but
the music is not only in the same style
as Beethoven’s, it’s nearly the exact
same music. Something similar to
physical and subconscious pattern
recognition is at work.
 On Teaching Musical Style

What do these thoughts demonstrate

about our processes of teaching music
in colleges and universities?
Do we teach musical syntax and not so
much musical semantics and dialects?
 On Teaching Musical Style

What harmony follows what harmony,

how do voices move in homophonic and
polyphonic music, and so on, are
important, but what these harmonies
and voicings actually mean musically
in context is left, apparently, for our
students to discover for themselves.
 On Teaching Musical Style

We teach music of the past as we

should. But there is no reason
whatsoever not to use the tools of the
present and future to do this.
I feel we should include computers in the
classroom (students bring their own) as
a standard part of the teaching
repertoire.
 On Teaching Musical Style

But maybe these thoughts are not

important enough for this. Maybe it
would take too much time away from
what we’re already doing. Maybe
students are not capable of
understanding, hearing, and
performing these things.
I disagree.
 On Teaching Musical Style

We should be aware of organizations

like ISMIR (International Society for
Music Information Retrieval) and
learn to use software like, for example,
Humdrum by David Huron (free).
 On Teaching Musical Style

I include many other new ways of

looking at musical style in my book:
Hidden Structure available from A-R
Editions (plug).
 On Teaching Musical Style

I will place this PowerPoint Presentation

on my website for those that might be
interested in reviewing it again.
 On Teaching Musical Style

Thank you. And again, a special thanks

to Holly Roadfeldt for her performance
here today.