What are the commonalities between a Beatles song, a Beethoven symphony, and much African music? They are all shaped by musical structure—the beats, measures, phrases, and passages that are essential to the architecture and emotional pull of a piece of music.
Join Dan Kruse at 3:30 p.m. Thursday (Oct. 27) for his second lecture on musical structure, “The Shape of the Song.” There will be plenty of audio and You Tube examples to facilitate audience engagement. With his background in ethnomusicology, he will show how this way of examining music can span cultures, genres, and eras of music and guide listeners to deeper musical connections.
In Part 2, Kruse will trace the evolution of the sonata form, also called “sonata-allegro” or “first-movement form,” a compositional approach developed and refined during the early Classical music era and which continued to figure prominently in the methods of many later composers. Kruse will also touch on the emergence of 12-tone music in the early 20th century, as well as minimalism, with its percussive and repetitive musical phrases, exemplified in the music of composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
But analyzing musical structure gets really interesting when Kruse dives into the polyrhythmic and often cyclical forms of Indonesian gamelan and West African music. In 2004, he spent two summer months in Africa engaged in field research on the music and dance of Ghana and made an audio documentary of his experience.
Written by Caroline Bates, Academy Village Volunteer