#one of them is i put hemiolas in EVERYTHING

[emilyhopebunny]

I made this timpani part kind of minimalist, and it made a pretty pattern :)

[reylo-musings]

The Hemiola: Two sides of the same coin.

Y’all.

Y’all. I am so sorry. I literally have been non-existent for the better part of 18 months, and I’m truly sorry. I’ve sat down to write this meta like 8 times between December 2017 and now, and life has just been a LOT. But I’m here. It’s happening. Here ya go.

Sooooooo. For my non-music nerds out there, the word Hemiola probably means literally nothing to you so let’s try to all get on the same page first before diving into this music meta. There are a few videos out there that do a good job trying to explain the concept, but tbh, it’s a little difficult to grasp if rhythm and math aren’t your favorite subjects in the world, so don’t stress too much if you’re just giving this post a blank look, I don’t blame you.

In the simplest of terms, hemiola is a switch from an overall 2 beat division to a 3 beat division, or the other way around. This can either occur by actually stopping one beat division and changing to the other, or by using both divisions simultaneously on top of one another.

Imagine you have 6 pieces of candy and want to distribute them between friends, but you want to make sure that everyone gets the exact same amount. Mathematically, your only options would be 1 piece each to 6 people, 2 pieces each to 3 people, or 3 pieces each to 2 people. Or I guess technically you could say “screw you” to your friends, and keep all the candy yourself. You do you.

But for the purposes of talking about hemiola, we are most interested in the scenarios where the candies are divided between either 2 or 3 total people. 

Musically, if you are given 6 notes, you can either choose to group them in sets of 2 or sets of 3. This grouping determines the “meter” of the piece. Meters which group notes in sets of 2 are called “simple” and those that group in sets of 3 are called “compound”.

This is why you may see music written in a 3/4  meter, but also music in a 6/8 meter, even though mathematically they reduce to the same fraction. 3/4 meter is the simple meter, the one where the 6 candies are shared equally between 3 people.

6/8 meter is the compound meter, the one where the 6 candies are shared equally between only 2 people.

Musically, each piece of candy represents 1 eighth note. A 3/4 meter puts the emphasis on every other note and a 6/8 meter places the emphasis on every third note.

Some of the most common instances of hemiola in musical literature will be totally switching from the 3/4 meter to the 6/8 one and continuing back and forth as often as you would like. The most popular of these examples is in “America” from West Side Story. Here’s a video. Visually, the pattern looks like this:

This can also be visualized by looking at the eighth notes more clearly.

The emphasis on the words “I” and “Be” establish the 3 note grouping, but then the punctuation of the syllables in “Me Ri Ca” establish a 2 note grouping. If you watch the video until around 3:35, the choreography has them clapping on all the unstressed beats and they change from sets of 2 short claps to 3 more spread out claps and back and forth. The lighter unlined boxes in each color represent those unstressed beats they are clapping on.

So, this video is super awesome and ties all this stuff together nicely. It gets a little jargon-y but the first 5 minutes or so are what’s really great to listen to. Especially the part around 3:50 where he talks about the implied hemiola that exists in the GoT theme, cause we’re coming back to that.

Ok, so, kinda getting it? Sorry this turned into a bit of a music theory lesson. But here’s the wrap up:

In a hemiola, there is no one side that is “right” or “wrong”. Both sides are mathematically equal to one another. They are perfectly balanced with one another and the power can either shift from one to the next, or they can operate simultaneously within the same duration of time.  

They are two sides of the same coin.

Ah, there it is. Now you see where I’m going with this. =)

Ok, so, Throne Room battle. That’s where we at. The music here is genuinely really hard to analyze aurally. If I had some actual sheet music to look at, that’d be great, but I ain’t got that so we’re just going with our ears.

The normal type of music that we’re used to hearing out in the world is consistent steady-metered music. 99% of your pop songs are written in a simple 4/4 meter and never change. If they’re not in 4/4, they’re probably in 3/4 or 12/8 but still usually stay consistent the whole time. This feels good to our brains as background music.

Battle music? Not super effective if it’s nice and consistent. The constant fluctuation of meters and rhythms and tempos and all that jazz puts us mentally on-edge. If the battle music is too consistent, we as viewers will subconsciously think we already know what’s going to happen. We feel at ease and won’t be so anxious. (Spoiler alert: Composers can also use this for shock value by making you too comfortable when the on-screen action is juxtaposingly overwhelming and then use it to hurt you when there’s a twist. They’re sneaky. They enjoy your pain.)

The throne room battle music? Very inconsistent. Honestly, so much inconsistency that I genuinely cannot determine the meter for good chunks of it. But there are a few key points where Williams does actually bring enough stability back to determine some semblance of structure. We first really start to hear this structure after the room starts burning. When the battle first started, they were back to back fighting the same enemy from two sides, but as they get separated and things start falling apart around them, they are each fighting their own individual battles. This notion becomes most obvious when there is the moment we see Kylo look over as Rey gets hurt. We as viewers recognize that they are fighting for the same goal, but they each have to be strong enough individually in order to reach it. One of them can’t just carry the other on their back to get there together.

In this moment, the music is actually a bit difficult to hear over everything else happening on-screen, so the soundtrack is a bit more telling. The track for this is “A New Alliance”.

The barebones is this: There is an overall very pounding, berating feel; lots of heavy emphasized notes that are in “simple” meter. It’s worth noting that Rey doesn’t get as much battle screen time as Kylo, but seeing as she’s fighting 1 and he’s fighting like 6 at a time, that completely makes sense. The longest on-screen battle action she gets once the room starts burning is after she’s gotten hurt and we see the sequence where she’s kicked to the ground and she gets back up and keeps fighting. During her on-screen action, the music changes. But not just the music, we get a hemiola. It’s more of that implied hemiola in the GoT intro, but definitely still an overall hemiola. Her theme is played in a 2:3 ratio to the stomping simple meter music we’ve been hearing through Kylo’s screen time. After it cuts back to him, his stomp music comes back. It cuts to Rey again after Kylo is in the head lock, and we again hear her theme hemiolaed (Is that a word? It is now.) over the existing “simple” time, but it sorta dissolves back into the agitated music.

Overall, this is not a lot to dig apart musically because it all happens so quickly and not for very long, but the concept is very much there. We are hearing this musical ratio, this balanced relationship, and it is a clear development from what we’ve heard from their previous battle music. There’s a now REALLY old meta that I wrote about 238 eons ago (at least that’s how long it feels it’s been since early 2016) that dealt with the relationship of Rey and Kylo’s music during the Starkiller battle. The boiled down version of that meta was that each of their themes was being affected by the other’s. Rey’s got darker, Kylo’s lost its stability.

This however is a new kind of relationship between their themes. No, we aren’t hearing Kylo’s typical 5-note theme, but let’s be honest, the man fighting in that room back to back with Rey after murdering Snoke wasn’t exactly “Kylo Ren” anymore. I’m not saying that he was exactly “Ben Solo” at this point, but whoever he was, that boy don’t got his own theme yet. He does have a concept though. He’s primal, he’s basic, and he’s a bit emotional. The music we hear for him shows that concept. It’s sporadic, yet simplistic. Rey’s theme has never really changed all that much. We’ve seen other moods leech into it slightly, but she’s stayed pretty consistent within herself and how she handles life. She’s just learned how to hone in on stuff now.

So this new kind of relationship, this coexisting rhythmic beauty, is just lovely to my musical reylo ears. We are really getting this “two sides of the same coin” idea from every side. We’ve gotten it in costumes. We’ve gotten it in dialogue. We’ve gotten it in cinematography. And now we get it in music. Everyone is stepping up to the plate in their own respects to show this fantastic ying-yang concept that exists between the two halves of our protagonist, and John Williams is no exception.

For the many many of you who have been asking about a “reylo” theme, this is the best I can offer you for right now. I’m sorry that it’s music theory jargon heavy, and I’m really sorry if you have just been blank staring at this whole post and not following me at all. It really is honestly the PERFECT musical representation of these two, and my music nerd brain is loving it to death, even if it only lasted for like 6 measures out of the entire score of the film.

[oilsteven80-blog]

UCLA Wind Ensemble concert celebrates centennial of Leonard Bernstein’s birth year

Take Yo-Yo Ma, Gustavo Dudamel and Lang Lang – combine them and multiply by two.

Now you have the cultural presence of Leonard Bernstein, said Travis Cross, the conductor of the UCLA Wind Ensemble and Department of Music chair.

In its first concert of the year, entitled “Mostly Bernstein: Westside West Side,” the UCLA Wind Ensemble will celebrate the centennial birth year of the late Leonard Bernstein, an American composer, conductor and pianist of the 20th century, Cross said. The performance will take place Friday, honoring Bernstein with a program that includes his scores for the Broadway productions “West Side Story” and “Candide.” Bernstein’s work was originally written for a full orchestra, but Friday’s performance will feature versions repurposed for wind ensembles, Cross said. The revised renditions highlight sounds from each instrument in the ensemble and showcase Bernstein’s versatile musicianship, Cross said.

“(Bernstein) played a more central role in American life than any classical musician alive today,” Cross said. “If you ask 100 musical theater artists in America, ‘What’s the most important musical of all time?’ more than 50 of them would say ‘West Side Story.’”

The concert will begin with “Overture” from “Candide,” continue with various tunes from “Symphonic Dances from ‘West Side Story,’” and end with “Make our Garden Grow,” which is also from “Candide.” “West Side Story” is Bernstein’s most famous work, Cross said, while “Candide” was not as much of a commercial success but has become a classic in the repertoire for orchestras and wind ensembles. “Make our Garden Grow” ends with a full sound with triumphant ringing, Cross said.

The UCLA Wind Ensemble will perform “Mostly Bernstein: Westside West Side” as their first show of the school year. Though the work was originally composed for a full orchestra, it was transcribed for a wind ensemble. (Niveda Tennety/Daily Bruin)

Bernstein’s works helped define the category of American classical music, said Jonathan Tompkins, a graduate master of music student in trumpet performance and trumpeter in the ensemble. In the 1700s and 1800s, the majority of renowned classical works were completed by European musicians in European styles. People were seeking an individual, distinctive American music style, Tompkins said, the first of which was rock ‘n’ roll. Bernstein, who lived in New York in the early 1950s, was surrounded by the rock ‘n’ roll genre, in addition to blues and other music styles. His musical environment translated into his compositions, with hints of the traditional Brazilian genre and dance samba finding its way into the “West Side Story” score.

“I really love playing it, because those are American melodies,” Tompkins said. “They were back then in the ’50s, and because Bernstein put them into his work, they’ve just been totally solidified.”

The musicals’ soundtracks highlight Bernstein’s individual style as a classical musician, Cross said. Bernstein completed his musical training at the Curtis Institute of Music and Harvard University and had a background as a classical composer, yet he infused his composition for the musicals with elements of jazz and Latin dance music, Cross added. In “Mambo” from “Symphonic Dances from ‘West Side Story,’” a raucous, upbeat tune, the ensemble will yell “Mambo!” between various melodies, Cross said, and the audience is welcome to join.

The arrangement also includes the cha-cha, and Bernstein balanced these genres with jazz, contemporary and classical melodies by utilizing intricate rhythms, Cross said. “America” from “West Side Story” is penned in 6/8 time signature, but every other bar of the music comes with a shift in strong beats and accented notes, referred to as a hemiola. Bernstein was one of the first musicians to incorporate hemiolas into his compositions, Cross said, sewing syncopation into classical music.

While Bernstein’s compositions for Broadway were meant to be performed by the classical musical theater pit, a full orchestra with both string and wind instruments, this concert will feature wind players and no string sections, hence the transcription of Bernstein’s original arrangement to the modified version being performed Friday.

Part of what makes Bernstein’s compositions so interesting is the variety between instrumentation – and players of each instrument are featured at some point. Different instruments get the chance to shine in the program, Cross said. In the overture to “Candide,” there are other various quirky features in the piece, including offbeat rhythms from the lower-pitched instruments, balanced by a moment where a melody of the piccolo plays out of nowhere, said Layla Stefanacci, a second-year music performance student and oboist in the ensemble.

Stefanacci said in the “Somewhere” section of “Symphonic Dances from ‘West Side Story,’” the original piece includes a segment for a string quartet, but when written as a band quartet, begins with the English horn, followed by the flute, bassoon and then oboe. Toward the end of the symphonic dances, Stefanacci said one of her favorite moments in the performance is when she gets to solo and play a high F – one of the highest notes on her oboe – accompanied by the second oboe.

“A lot of times, in orchestra pieces, you have very string-heavy stuff, and then the winds rest nearly 100 measures, and then we’ll play like one note that has to be perfect, and then we’ll rest,” Stefanacci said. “(For this concert), every part … we all have to do all the crazy runs, all the crazy stuff in the middle, we all have to do it.”

Bernstein’s compositions constitute the majority of the program, but the ensemble will also perform “Sheltering Sky” by John Mackey and “Early Light” by Carolyn Bremer from the Cal State Long Beach composition faculty, who passed away in September. Bremer’s “Early Light” is an homage to baseball and captures a sense of Americana. Her compositions complement Bernstein’s, Cross said, as they were both contemporary American musicians.

“Leonard Bernstein was the most iconic American musician of the 20th century,” Cross said. “(Bernstein) just kind of did everything, and a lot of what we play is his music – he left this legacy of incredible music that we play, but one of the reasons he became really famous was because he was this star conductor.”

Source: http://dailybruin.com/2018/10/31/ucla-wind-ensemble-concert-celebrates-centennial-of-leonard-bernsteins-birth-year/