1. Listen to Benjamin Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, In this music the tone color or timbre of the instruments is very important. What is the overall plan the composer uses to
organize these timbres over the entire duration of this music? They’re not just random choices of instruments.
Are there instances where this kind of attention to timbre is found in popular music also?
2. A Baroque opera like Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas wouldn’t seem to have much in common with a solo violin concerto like Antonio Vivaldi’s “Spring” from The Four Seasons, but in both works
drama is a key element.
The listening guides are on pp. 125 and 104 in the text, the music is on both the CD-ROM and the online study guide, where the Purcell may be labeled “Thy hand, Belinda” and “When I am laid in
earth” or simply “Dido’s Lament.”
What evidence of Baroque drama do you hear in these pieces? In what ways do you think the harmony supports the drama of the music?
3. Let’s consider two pieces of music for voice next: part of Mozart’s Requiem and Schubert’s Lied or art song, “Erlking.”
The text describes these on pp. 185 and 199. In the Classical period form was an important concern for composers and listeners alike. These two pieces approach formal design very differently. Are
the forms of these pieces as described in the text easy to hear with practice? Both of these pieces are very dramatic in nature—how do their individual approaches to structural design (form)
reinforce the drama that you hear?
I’m sure you’ll want to comment on the similarity in the verbal meaning attached to both these examples–program music in a sense?
4. Berlioz and Smetana
The term “Romantic” has a different meaning from the usual understanding of it when we talk about music history. Listen to the fourth movement of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Bedrich
Smetana’s symphonic poem The Moldau.
These are described on pp. 219 and 225 of the textbook. What is Romantic (with a capital R) about these two pieces? How does the composers’ use of the (Romantic) orchestra support the meaning of
the music?