Uh first of all let me say that I am delighted to be back home at Harvard I'm also somewhat petrified at the Grandeur of the poetic chair I'm occupying a chair which has over the years grown into something more like a throne owing to the long list of eminent persons who have occupied it it's a tough act to follow but I am comforted by the sense of having come home again and happy to be realizing my old student Fantasy of what it's like to be on the other side of the desk now that I am
on this side of the desk all I seem to be able to think about is how it felt to be on that side it felt good if you want to know the truth those 30 odd years ago mainly because I was very lucky in my Master's piston and Merit in music krid and Spencer and literature deos and Hawking in philosophy but there was one master who bridged it all for me me through whom the sense of beauty Analytic method and historical perspective all came together in one luminous Revelation and I would like to dedicate these
six lectures to his memory he was Professor David prw of the philosophy Department a brilliant scholar and a deeply sensitive aesthetician it was in this now disdained and rather unfashionable field of Aesthetics that I I learned from him not only a great deal about the philosophy Of beauty but also the fact that David prawl was himself an instance of the beauty he loved in mind heart and spirit those are terribly old-fashioned words in these days of behavioristic obsessiveness and I hope you will pardon such ancient words as mind heart and spirit especially since I believe
in them as strongly now as I did then uh perhaps the principal thing I absorbed from Professor PRL and from Harvard in general was the interdisiplinary spirit that the best way to know a thing is in the context of another discipline so these lectures are given in that Spirit of cross disciplines which is why I'll be speaking of Music along with quixotic foray into such Fields as poetry Linguistics Aesthetics and Even Heaven Help Us a bit of Elementary physics uh the title of this lecture Series is borrowed from Charles Ives who wrote that brief but
remarkable piece of his called the unanswered question way back in 198 Ives had a highly metaphysical question in mind but I've always felt he was also asking another question a highly a purely Musical one wither music as that question must have been asked by musical man entering the 20th century today with that Century 65 years older we're still asking it only it's not Quite the same question as it was then and so the purpose of these six lectures is not so much to answer the question as to understand it to redefine it even to guess
at the answer to wither music we must first ask when's music what music whose music it would be pretentious to assume that by the end of this series we will answer the ultimate question but it's reasonable to assume that we'll be in a better position to make some educated Guesses let me start with a particularly nostalgic and Vivid recollection for my years with Professor PRL the time back in 1937 when I first heard a recording of Aaron Copeland's piano variations I fell in love with the music it seemed so Fierce and poetic IC and utterly
new this music opened up new worlds of musical possibilities to me and I wrote a raving report on it for my Aesthetics Course and Professor prw became so interested in it that he decided he wanted to learn it himself what a man he even bought me the sheet music so I learned it and taught it to him and he taught it back to me and we analyzed it together it became Our Song now this is not just a Sentimental anecdote because as we were analyzing the Copeland variations I made a startling discovery that the first
four notes of the Piece which are the germ of the whole composition are really these four notes with the fourth note an octave higher and I suddenly perceived that these same four notes in another order formed the subject of B C minor Fugue from the well-tempered clav chord and then I discovered the same four notes transposed with the first note repeated germinating the variations in Stravinsky's octet and the same four notes then Popped up in yet another order and key as the initial motto of Ravel Spanish raps City and on top of all that I
suddenly recalled some Hindu music I had heard I was a big Oriental music buff at the time and there were those same four notes [Music] again and at that moment a notion was born in my brain that there must be some deep Primal Reason why these discret structures of the same four notes should be at the very heart of such disperate musics as those of Bach Copeland Stravinsky Ravel and the ud shanar dance company and all this and more I poured out to David prw and that was my first Norton lecture to an audience of
one from that time to this the notion of a worldwide inborn musical grammar has haunted me but I would never have dreamed of basing a lecture series on a Notion so IL defined and apparently nonverifiable if it were not for the extraordinary materials that have appeared in recent years on the similar idea of a universal grammar underlying human speech I've been profoundly impressed and encouraged by the burgeoning of thought in this relatively new linguistic area an area that might be called chomskian by so naming it I don't mean to restrict my observations to Noam Chomsky's
work alone it's a term of convenience since he is the best known most revolutionary and best publicized name in that area along with his colleagues and disciples many of whom are now in radical disagreement with him he has produced a body of work that has re invigorated Linguistics to a point where it seems new light may be shed on the nature and structural functions of that elusive thing called Mind in other words by studying in depth why we talk the way we do by abstracting The Logical principles of language we may be in a position
to discover how we communicate in a larger sense through music through the Arts in general and ultimately through all our societal Behavior we may even discover how we are mentally constituted because language is species specific that is it's common to all of us who belong to the human species and only to us of course Tomorrow morning cheerful new facts about dolphins or a certain chimpanzee named Sarah May throw a monkey WR wrench into the works but uh meanwhile this philosophical science called Linguistics seems to have become our new EST key to self-discovery with each passing
year it seems to substantiate ever more convincingly the hypothesis of innate grammatical competence as chsky calls it genetically endowed language faculty which is Universal it's a human endowment it proclaims the autonomy of the human Spirit well so does music but how do we investigate musical Universal ity by so scientific a means as linguistic analogy music is supposed to be a metaphorical phenomenon some kind of mysterious symbolization of our innermost affective existence it lends itself more easily to description in purple Pros than in equations even so great a scientist as Einstein said that the most beautiful
experience we can have is the mysterious of course he played the fiddle and loved music but then why do so many of us constantly try to explain the beauty of Music thus apparently depriving it of its mystery the fact is that music is not only a mysterious and metaphorical art it is also in itself a science it is made of mathematically measurable elements frequencies durations decibels Intervals and so any explication of Music must combine mathematics with Aesthetics just just as Linguistics combines mathematics with philosophy or sociology or whatever it is precisely for this interdisciplinary reason
that I am so attracted by the new Linguistics as a Fresh Approach to music why not a study of musical Linguistics just as there already exists a psycholinguistics and a sociol Linguistics all right let's try it uh Luckily the study of linguistics is a three-fold science and so provides us with three handy categories in which these lectures can be conceived one phology two syntax and three semantics phology syntax semantics these are the three departments of linguistics and they point the way for our musical investigation as well in this first lecture we'll be oriented phonologically examining
both language and music from The most fundamental point of view that of sound itself the stuff of which verbal and musical utterances are made and that should give us a solid base to build on so that in our next session we can plunge into syntax the actual structures that arise from that phonological stuff and from then on the remaining four lectures will confront the challenges of semantics that is meaning both Musical and extra Musical meaning semantics can be seen as the Natural result of adding phology and syntax together sound plus structure and the resultant semantic
inquiry will inevitably bring us around back to IES unanswered question wither music in our time well now you can see why I became so excited when I began reading the new Linguistics which postulated the notion of innate grammatical competence because suddenly my old undergraduate notion of a universal musical grammar was reanimated It had Lain dormant for years paralyzed I suppose by that deadly cliche music is the universal language of mankind after a thousand repetitions of that one usually with the connotation support your local Symphony Orchestra the uh well- meant phrase becomes not only a cliche
but a misleading one how many of you can listen to 40 minutes of a Hindu Raga with intelligent comprehension to say nothing of merely Staying awake and how about certain kinds of avanguard music not so Universal are they well thought I so much for the universal language of mankind but then when I began reading the new Linguistics I thought here's a fresh way to pursue my intuitive idea which had grown stale and deteriorated into a platitude in other words by building analogies between Musical and linguistic procedures couldn't that cliche about The universal language be debunked
or confirmed or at least clarified okay let's clarify universality is a big word and a dangerous one at the same time that it implies likeness it also implies diversity remember T's remark that the most universal quality of man is his diversity this Paradox lies at the very heart of linguistic study because at the same time that a linguist is Investigating any one particular language or even a family of languages trying to formulate a descriptive grammar he is also searching for the underlying similarities among different languages or families of languages at least the new linguists are
they construct the descriptive grammars by analyzing the mental processes of human speech thus deriving sets of rules that hopefully apply to all human languages in fact to all possible human languages Both known and unknown now that's a tall order but a magnificent goal requiring an inspired guess a great scientific leap of the mind and if that goal can be attained and the universality principle proved it can turn out to be a timely and welcome affirmation of human Brotherhood but how do linguists go about such a task well one way is by seeking out what they
call substantive universals for example in the realm of Phology which is our main concern in this lecture linguists propose a substantive Universal which says the following all languages share certain phone Mes in common that is minimal speech units that arise naturally from the physiological structure of our mouths throats and noses since we all share those features we share likewise the sound ah for instance a sound produced by simply opening the mouth and vocalizing Ah every normal human being can do this in any language there is simply no exception even though the vowel may vary according
to the shape of the oral cavity or according to one's social background producing such variants as claw and class and class but they are all versions of the same phon ah and so must be considered universal now that's a substantive Universal for you other linguists of course I'm skipping enormous numbers of other substantive Universals and distinctive features and I don't want to BR you with with all that but other certain other linguists go about seeking universals in different ways such as etymologists who point out that the interesting thing about the Spanish word avlar to speak
and the Portuguese equivalent F to speak is not that they seem to be totally different words but that they are the same word deriving from the same Latin root fabul but with Phonetic deviations and let's not go into why they deviated though it's a fascinating subject let's agree only about the common origin there's the key common origin because if one continues in this way working backwards through history in search of even earlier common Origins one arrives at startling points of universality only such investigation has to stop short as soon as written languages run out because
obviously the Ultimate evidence of universality in speech is to be sought in the oldest languages of man prehistoric languages which preceded so to speak the Tower of Babel moment in human evolution but such ancient languages simply don't exist they were spoken millions of years ago long before written languages were developed which was only thousands of years ago and so being stuck without written evidence historical linguists are forced into Speculation ideally what they're sink seeking is a parent language one universal tongue that may have been common to all of early Mankind and that's the tallest order
of all because it means wandering in the mids of prehistory one tangible accomplishment at least has been to find a name for this field of inquiry and that name is monogenesis denoting the the theory of all languages springing from a single Source a fine word monogenesis and a Thrilling idea it Thrills me anyway to the point where I stayed up all of One Night making monogenetic speculations of my own I tried to imagine myself a homonid and tried to feel what a very very ancient ancestor of mine might have felt and might have been impelled
to express verbally I scribbled Pages full of basic monosyllables which felt somehow right which seemed to belong together and which delighted me with their Curious logic I began by imagining Myself a harmed infant just lying there contentedly trying out my newfound voice then I got hungry calling my mother's attention to my hunger and as I opened my mouth to receive the nipple lo I had invented a primal word ma mother now this has got to be one of the first Proto words ever uttered by man still to this day most languages have a word for
mother that employs that root ma or some phonetic variant of it All the romance languages M Madre so on the Germanic m m the Slavic mat matka the Hebrew Navajo even Navajo Shima even Swahili and Japanese and Chinese they call her mama well that was a small Triumph but then I began expanding what about ma plus L say Mal now there's a Proto syllable for you my first Association of course was with all the familiar words conting Badness Malo Mal MO All Latin derived languages of course but then I thought in the Slavic family of
languages that syllable connotes smallness Mali malinki and so on Sudden hypothesis could there just possibly be a monogenetic connection way back then between the concepts of Badness and smallness why not remember we're being hominids now and it's perfectly conceivable that what small small must be automatically bad to be small is to be weak to be only human As against the powerful Gods as against a huge magical Earth and Sky hence weakness is undesirable hence bad it's bad to have a small Harvest small energy small stature small dinner Malo well then I thought if that's true
then big must equal good there must be a corresponding kinship between bigness and goodness so on I went searching through all the dictionaries I could find and what do you think I found it look the most Familiar root denoting bigness is gr gr the growling of the big tiger producing all those big words Grande grandier gross great grow and even including in Dutch where the G is softened to a gutural now these are all Latin and Germanic but again look at the Slavic where again the G is gutteral lied to and behold the Glorious word
kosi which means so inevitably and Comfortingly good and is brave and big Brave good and God somehow it all adds up way back before and behind and beyond all these comparatively recent languages there must lurk I fondly hoped one universal parent tongue which contains the great simultaneous equation big equals good and small equals bad Triumph but why am I burdening you with my private game playing this less than Scientific speculation it's hardly what a linguist would call authentic and I cannot say strongly enough that I claim the right to be wrong it's every teacher's academic
right and I stand ready to take the risk involved just as any theorist or scientist does and so my monogenetic speculation interests me and I hope you because of what it suggests about music the origins of music and the Very nature of musical materials the notes Themselves let's make a simple analogy and return for a second to to being that homonid infant who invented the Proto word ma well we quickly learn to associate that morphine with our supplier of milk right and so we call her when we need her ma now on a purely phological
level that begins that sound begins with an attack an IUS Ma and ends in a descending Glide that's the way we speak IUS plus Glide of course the Glide may also be upward if the intention is interrogative ma but now let's feel a tremendous intensification of our need of our hunger of our impatience and so we intensify the ictus by prolonging it Ma and lo and behold we are singing music is Born the syllable has become a note Ma just eliminating the Glide or to use the technical jargon of our time the morim is Rewritten
as a Pitch event and what an event that must have been way back then but what we seem to be getting to is a hypothesis that would confirm another famous cliche namely music is heightened speech after all what causes such a heightening intensified emotions hunger impatience certainly the deepest universals we all share are emo s affects we all have the same capacity for passion fear anticipation aggression We all display the same physiological manifestations of affect our eyebrows go up with anticipation our hearts pound with passion and fear affects us universally with goose flesh and in
the sense that music May Express those affective goings on then it must indeed be a universal language May maybe even a Divine one to invoke yet another cliche I have often thought that if it's literally true that in the beginning was the word then it must have been a sung Word the Bible tells us the whole creation story not only verbally but in terms of verbal creation God said let there be light God said let there be a firmament he created verbally now can you imagine God saying just like like that or let there be
light as if ordering lunch or even in the original language ye or Y or I've always had a private fantasy of God singing those two blazing words y or now that could really have done it music Could have caused light to Break Forth but all I've just done is to prolong the ikus again what I've created is simply heightened speech which would seem to corroborate yet another cliche about music beginning where language leaves off I think schopenhauer that one in other words if the theory of monogenesis is valid and speech indeed has common Origins and
if the heightening of that speech produces music then music may Also be said to have common Origins and is therefore Universal whether the notes issue from the mouth of God or from that hungry infant but where do these notes come from why do our ears select certain notes and not others for example why do children tease one another in a specific sing song way two very special notes which children also use to call one another Jer Daris whatever and uh which are Often used by them in their singing games Little Sally water now that's the
same two notes only now expanded to three notes Little Sally or perhaps you once yelled o free does that sound familiar well again we must ask why just those notes in that particular order research seems to indicate that this exact constell of two notes and its three note Variant is the same all over the world where every children tease each other on every continent and in every culture in short we may have here a clear case of a musical linguistic Universal and one which can be identified and explained in a non-vacuous way I want to
take a little time to do this carefully because in the explanation lies the key to Musical universality in general the answer to the question why just those notes and Eventually to the question why those notes in Mozart and why those notes in Copeland or in schernberg or whoever and in having an answer we musicians have a singular advantage over the linguists who ask their question why just those sounds in human speech and they seek their Answers by constructing a very complex hypothesis which is still very much in the working stage subject to proof or disproof
amplification or derision but we musicians are luckier we Have the built-in pre-ordained Universal known as the harmonic series now to those of you who know all about the harmonic series I beg your Indulgence for a few minutes so that I can sketch it out for those who don't this acoustical phenomenon called the harmonic series or overtone series is not hard to understand if you remember the basic high school fact that all sounds are produced by vibrating bodies which send out Waves now if such a vibrating body is irregularly constituted like this floor or this piano
it will emit waves which are irregular and our ears will perceive them as noise ow but but if the source of vibration is of a consistent structure like any one of the strings in this piano it will emit regular waves and we hear them as a musical Tone of course the source doesn't have to be a string it can be a column of air as in a clarinet or a column of Steel as in a tubular bell or a stretched animal hide as in a kettle drum but whatever it is it produces what's called energy
in vibratory motion that's the official language by being beaten blown plucked struck or friction ised with a bow now let's settle for a piano string let's say this one which is of a particular length Tension thickness and density and when struck by its Hammer produces sound waves at a frequency of 132 vibrations per second and is known to the world as the note C now comes the interesting part if I sit at the piano and play that low C you may think you're hearing only that one tone a dark Rich bass note but you're not
you are simultaneously hearing a whole series of higher tones that are sounding at the same Time and these are arranged in an order pre-ordained by nature and ruled by by Universal physical laws if this is news to you I hope it's good news is all these upper notes of which you may be unaware result from a phenomenon of nature whereby any sound producing Source or I should say pitch producing Source such as this piano string vibrates not only as the whole string in all its whatever inch Glory sounding that low C but also in Fractional
segments of that string each vibrating separately it's as though the string were infinitely divisible into two halves into 3/3 four4 and so on and the smaller those segments are the faster they vibrate producing higher and higher frequencies and therefore higher and higher tones overtones or harmonics as they're sometimes called now these overtones are harmonic are all sounding together with the fundamental sound of the full string And this is the basic principle by which the entire harmonic series is generated starting on any fundamental tone now if you already knew all that from high school physics you
will also know that these overtones are naturally less apparent to the ear than the fundamental which is in this case low C and in fact they sound more and more faintly as they go higher now any note I strike will contain its own series of overtones but the lower the note I Strike the more abundantly audible will be its harmonic series which accounts in part for the comparative richness of this low sea now remember I spoke of a pre-ordained order in which the overtones appear let's see if I can make you actually hear those overtones
in that order the first overtone of the series according to the laws of physics has to be exactly an octave higher than the Fundamental C we've been hearing in other words it's going to be this C an octave higher now if I silently press down the key of this higher sea and hold it so that the string is free to vibrate and then abruptly strike the fundamental sea an octave lower what do you [Music] hear you are clearly hearing the first ovat tone vibrating sympathetically an octave above its fundamental I hope you Heard it did
you listen again clear as a bell so obviously this upper C is an integral part of the C and octave below it's a builtin harmonic sounded by the two halves of that lower string vibrating independently now the next overtone of this pre-ordained order results from that that same fundamental string vibrating in three parts and this one will be the first different over tone that is the first one you'll hear other than a c and it's Going to be a g this G and now let's repeat our experiment I press this new one down silently and
then again strike the fundamental C what do we hear now that G right a new tone again clear as a bell you want to hear it [Music] again now we've just reached a very significant Point have you noticed that the fundamental tone and its first overtone are really the same note C but An octave apart but this new overtone G is a fifth away from C so we now have two different tones and once they are established in our ears we are in possession of the key to the whole tonal system a system based on
the concept of tonic and dominant tonic and dominant this C represents the idea of tonic which has the function of establishing the tonal Center of Any Given key and the function of the dominant is To Aid an abet in the establishment of that tonality through a special relationship it enjoys with the tonic owing to their proximity in the harmonic series but more of that later right now on to the next overtone which is again a c a fourth higher than the G we just heard shall we repeat the experiment I press it down silently there
it is you hear it let's do it [Music] Again now the next one is again a new pitch this time a third higher than its predecessor notice that the intervals are getting progressively smaller as we Ascend the series began with an octave and then a fifth and then a fourth and then now a third and this new ome will be this note E [Music] listen it's a bit fainter but it's there for all to hear shall I try it [Music] Again hear it way back there one last [Music] time it's clear and there you have
the first four overtones of the series the fundamental plus 1 2 3 4 three of which are different pitches those three now it must be obvious to you that these three notes rearranged in scalar order constitute what is known as the major Triad which is the very nucleus the Cornerstone of most of the music we hear from day to day whether it's a symphony or a hym or a blues and this Triad with its tonic dominant relationship plus the third sandwiched in between this Triad is the foundation of Western tonal music as it is developed
over the last three centuries or so along with the development of our Western culture in general and let's not make the mistake so many People make of regarding this Triad as a basic Universal that's a misapprehension that's far too common in that it fails to recognize that our accidental culture is only one of many world cultures in spite of its current prevalence and worldwide influence and in spite of the fact that it thinks it's the only important culture a perfect example of this in fact uh of this m misconcept ception Arises with the very next
overtone in the series which is a stranger to Western tonal culture in fact this next overtone doesn't even appear on the piano which means I can't demonstrate it for you as I have all the preceding ones more exactly stated it is not to be found on the piano in its natural pure form as it derives by physical law from that fundamental C string let me digress for a moment to tell you why you see this piano like all all keyboard Instruments is a tempered instrument which means simply that its notes have been tempered or tampered
with I don't mean a joke by that I just mean to clarify the word so that each one of them each one of these notes can serve its function in all 12 keys at once this Readjustment in tuning became inevitable when music reached its tonal adulthood around 1700 and found that it didn't have to remain in one key from the beginning to the end of a piece but Could modulate from one key to another in the course of it but the notes deriving naturally from the harmonic series will work in only one key at a
time do you follow that one key at a time that is what's in tune in one key is likely to be out of tune in another would you believe that if this piano were to Encompass only natural untempered tones this single octave space would have to contain 77 different keys well you can understand that a Compromise had to be made somewhere and that somewhere was the moment in history when the rapid development of tonal harmony coincided with the equally rapid development of keyboard instruments with their fixed unchangeable tones and that's how the tempered clav aord
came to be to say nothing of this Baldwin Grand and that's why I can't play you this next overto but actually if we approach it pianistically in our Ascent of the Harmonic series we find it somewhere around here lying in the crack between this B flat and this a it's one of those Blue [Music] Notes now that blue note can be construed by the human ear as either the higher version of the note B flat or the lower version a in either case it requires a little push up or down to be accommodated on a
piano But whichever way we construe it It becomes our newest overtone so we are now equipped with four different overtones the C plus the G plus the E plus that blue note that dubious a or if we rearrange them in scalar order c e g and sort of a and here we hit a real musical linguistic Universal because now we can understand and explain that famous worldwide teasing [Music] chant because all it is is a constellation of those first four Different overtones with the tonic omitted or rather implied you see this tonic C which is
the same note as the fundamental C is heard in the mind's ear and only the three new overtones are sung and so these three Universal notes are handed To Us by Nature on a silver platter but why are they in this different order because that's the very order in which they appear in the harmonic series G e and so of a and q e d now this is a substantive Universal the sort of thing linguists hunger for but the likes of which are simply not available to them indeed as we Ascend further in our harmonic
series more and more fascinating and incontrovertible universals keep appearing for instance this next new overtone is this one that is the next new overtone is this one D and so we now Have five different tones to play with which we again put into scalar order and Presto a new Universal is given us the five note or pentatonic scale now because of that dubious last note the scale can take either of two forms one culminating in B flat and the other culminating in a now let's opt for the second of these the lower one which is
by far the most common of the two now this is Humanity's favorite Pentatonic scale and by the way this is the scale you couldn't find so easily on your own piano by playing only the black notes in fact the universality of this scale is so well known that I'm sure you could give me examples of it from all corners of the Earth is from Scotland pure pentatonic or from China or from [Music] Africa and from American Indian cultures and from East Indian cultur and from Central and South America and Australia and Finland and well that's
a true musical linguistic Universal but let's be careful about making linguistic analogies we could conceivably equate a fundamental tone such as this C with the basic morphe ma which we discovered before and then extend the parallel by equating the overtones of that fundamental C with a set of words evolving from that Ma syllable maybe it's all still Speculation but what appears to be much more convincing is the analogy between chomsky's innate grammatical competence and the innate musical grammatical competence which we may all possess universally that is our inbuilt capacity to construe those naturally serialized overtones
and to construe them in different ways just as the various cultures of the world may have construed basic monogenetic materials and constructed out of them thousands of Particular grammars or languages all different from one another analogously varied human cultures can construe this pentatonic scale in different ways depending for example on which of the five notes is taken to be the tonal Center for example this one that's one way or this [Music] one you see how it makes it a whole different pentatonic but they the same five notes or this one same five notes Again but
a different scale and there is always that blue note to be considered if the ear construes it as the upper B flat instead of the lower a a it will give us a whole other pentatonic scale which produces some beautiful African music and there are even more complex processes which we won't go into but which account for the existence of the highly differentiated Japanese pentatonic Scale does that sound familiar or the unique pentatonic of B [Music] music but enough of pentatonics I think we've seen enough of the way the harmonic series operates to recognize the
fact that as we Ascend the series always finding new tones to be added oops there we are to be added to our collection we can eventually account for six and seven node scales including Greek modes and church modes and the dionic scales both major and minor and eventually all 12 tones of our so-called chromatic scale which is um of course due to the miracle of tempering we get those 12 equidistant tones and you may well ask why just 12 tones patience you'll find out in a minute it but even these 12 toones don't exhaust the
potential of the harmonic series the upper reaches of the series Continue to furnish us with intervals even smaller than the half tones that make up our chromatic [Music] scale intervals such as the quart as quarter tones or even thirds and fifths of tones all of which still inhabit areas of experimentation and electronic research to say nothing of rones which are such an essential part of so much Oriental music but the overriding fact that emerges from all this is that all Music whether pop folk symphonic modal tonal atonal polytonal microtonal well-tempered or ill-tempered music from the
distant past or the imminent future all of it has a common origin in the Universal phenomenon of a harmonic series and that is our case for musical monogenesis but is it necessarily a case for universality think what about those Hindu ragas that so many people find difficult to comprehend well I suggest a Simple answer in the light of our linguistic analogies just as the grammars of human languages even mutually unintelligible ones may have sprung from the same monogenetic sources so the same in the same way highly varied musical tongues which are also strangers to one
another can be said to have developed out of their common origins in purely phonological terms these tongues are tonal languages that Have developed out of a universal naturally ordered tonal structure now I trust you realize that all this has been enormously compressed and undocumented by historical musical examples because that would take all night but this is not a Linguistics course nor is it a history of Music course what we're trying for is a very high overview of musical development in terms of a vocabulary constantly being enriched by more and more remote and Chromatic overtones it's
as if we could see the whole of Music developing from prehistory to the present in 2 minutes let's again Pretend We're hominids and that the Smash Hit of the moment is let's say fair Harvard well here we are in our homonid Hut [Music] cring and now maybe our wives and maybe our prepubescent Sons join in and automatically we're singing not in Unison but in octaves since men's and women's voices are naturally an octave apart and with blessing surrender the now that octave interval I wish I could sing an octave so I could really show you
what I mean but that octave interval happens to be the first interval of the harmonic series as you remember right okay now centuries pass and the next interval of the harmonic series is assimilated by human ity Namely the fifth and now we can be singing This by those F now of course this little change brings us forward a mere 10 million years into the 10th Century ad and into a fairly sophisticated musical culture but now we admit the next interval of the series The Fourth and now we can mix intervals of the octave and the
fifth and the fourth well that's beginning to sound Like pany and again comes a great leap as music absorbs the next overtone the third and just listen to the difference it's a whole new music richer me Yer with a new coloristic warmth and as we know this new interval of the third course I like the older sound better but anyway uh as we know this new interval of the third introduces into music the phenomenon of the Triad so that now Fair Harvard can begin To sound more like its Victorian self and so there is born
what we now call tonal music a stable tonal language firmly rooted in the basic notes of the harmonic series the fundamental and its first different overtone the fifth now and forever more to be known as the tonic and the dominant and that fifth interval really does dominate because once this tonic dominant relationship is established it's a field day for Composers there can now be fifth of fifths of fifths of fifths each one of them a new tonic producing a new dominant A whole circle of fifths 12 of them in fact always winding up with the
starting tone where they're proceeding upwards let's say from the low c g d a e b f c sh G D B flat F C that's again C believe it or not or proceeding down W starting from that C F B flat E flat a flat g flat flat I'm Sorry C back to C that's a circle of 12 fths and that's the answer I promised you that's how we get the 12 different tones of our chromatic scale other words if you take all those 12 of the circle of fifths and put them together in
scale order you'll get this and what's more those 12 notes generate a circle of 12 Keys through which thanks to the perfecting of the tempered system composers can now go freewheeling at Their own chromatic pleasure now this means that ultimately Fair Harvard can sound like this now that's chromatic porridge and in our own Century it's going to become goulash how does music contain this loose runny chromaticism by the basic principle of diatonicism that stable relationship of tonics and dominance subdominant and super tonics and new dominance And new tonic and we can now modulate as freely
as we want as chromatically as we want and still have complete tonal control this great system of tonal controls was perfected and codified by Bak Johan Sebastian Bak whose genius was to balance so delicately and so justly these two forces of chromaticism and diatonicism forces that were equally powerful and presumably contradictory in nature now this point of delicate Balance is like the still Center in the stormy flux of musical history a condition of such stability that it was able to continue without remarkable changes for almost a century and this roughly 100 years became a golden
age now this is not to say that the word drastic changes in style and form during those hundred years as after all this Golden Age saw the emergence of a whole new Roco style to say nothing of the phenomenal rise of Sonata form in the Hands of such Giants as Carl Philip Manuel Bach and heyen and Mozart and Beethoven himself but these changes are syntactic and semantic changes which we'll be examining and enjoying in future lectures right now we're limiting our investigation to phenology and in these terms we can see the peak attained by Bak
continuing as a kind of plateau level and lofty right into the music of Beethoven now at this point I would like To invite you to listen with me to one of the Supreme examples of this Golden Age Mozart's G minor Symphony a work of utmost passion utterly controlled and of free chromaticism elegantly contained I'll try to prepare you a bit somewhat with a few illustrations of this control and containment so that you can hear the symphony hopefully with fresh phonological ears and remember what we're looking for is the wonderfully Creative ways in which chromatic flexibility
can be systematically contained within the framework of tonic dominant relationships it's a curious thing and a crucial one that through this perfect combination of opposites chromaticism and diatonicism there is distilled the essence of ambiguity of all things now this word ambiguity may seem the most unlikely word to use in speaking of a golden age Composer like Mozart a master of clarity and precision but ambiguity has always inhabited musical art indeed all the Arts because it is one of Art's most potent aesthetic functions the more ambiguous the more expressive up to a certain point of course
there's a limit which we're going to run into in the course of these lectures and we're going to run into a state of such increased ambiguity that problems of musical Clarity are bound to arise and that's When we'll be confronted headon by I's unanswered question with and Meanwhile we're still in the Golden Age with ambiguity classically contained in the Augustine balances and proportions inherent in this Mozart symphony let's look at it very briefly you all remember the opening first movement now this whole section moves quite easily and diatonically from its G minor tonic to its
first Cadence which is naturally enough on the Dominant and just as easily slipping back into the tonic back we are now of course you remember that this tonic dominant relationship arises from the adjacency of the fundamental tone in this case G with its first overtone that basic interval of the fifth and from there the music proceeds by a circle of fifths a downward circle of fifths to its relative major B flat which is exactly where it's supposed to Be for the appearance of the second thematic [Music] section but notice that Mozart's theme is already chromatically
formed and it gets more so as it goes on and even more so when it repeats what's this a whole new key A flat major sudden new key unrelated to either B flat or G minor how did we get here by the well-known circle of fifths do you hear those T consecutive Fifth striding inexorably from dominant to Tonic in the base dominant tonic dominant tonic dominant tonic while above the melodic line descends by chromatic half steps into the nether regions of a flat major there's that classical balance we were talking about chromatic wandering on the
top but firmly supported by by the tonic dominant structure underneath and you see now what I meant by the beauty of ambiguity it's the Combination of those two contradictory forces chromaticism and diatonicism operating at the same time that makes this passage so expressive so we're in the midst of a chromatic Adventure right how do we get out of this range a flat territory by a simple chromatic shift like Sid slipping on skis and there we are back safely in B flat major Where We Belong now if you could follow that you can follow any Number
of similar Adventures for instance the way Mozart starts his development section he's established us firmly in B flat major but no off he goes on another chromatic [Music] Adventure which lands Us in the impossible key of FSH minor now this was done by absolute whim arbitrarily it's a bit of chromatic acrobatics if you will startling us into a development section Which is just what a development section should be startling new looks at old material but event he must get us back to a recapitulation in G minor the original home soil and he's completely free to
make this journey as chromatically as he wishes his fantasy is totally released it's a development section it's free wheeling time but even here the basic dionic laws contain and control that free wheeling and passion and fantasy and all by those Progressions of fifths the dominant seeking its tonic and each tonic turning into a dominant seeking its tonic and that turning into a dominant seeking its own tonic over and over again we were in F minor right now through a sequence of such progressions he changes that FSH tonality from a tonic function to a dominant function
which is seeking its tonic B natural and here we are there's B natural but now B natural Is a dominant seeking its tonic e and so into e we go and by the same chain of fifths E6 a that's a and then A6 d d and so on through the circle until we're finally LED back home to G minor but even this lead in to the home key is chromatically written firmly held in place of course by a dominant pedal Listen to This creepy crawly [Music] chromaticism and we're back to our oh so Gratifying and
welcome recapitulation in G minor now I must point out that these Adventures are much more complex and subtle than I've made them sound the procedure is not always exactly by fifths and there are twists and turns which would take hours to describe accurately even to a classroom of Harvard music students the best I can do is to give you some insight into this Marvel of ambiguity the dionic containment of Chromaticism so that when you hear for in is in the second movement this extraordinary chromatic [Music] passage you can also be aware of the strong dionic
underpinnings those fifths again striding inexorably from tonic to [Music] dominant see if you could hear them even in the third movement the minuette which is extremely dionic is hardly chromatic at All Mozart can't resist just before the end one of his Charming chromatic excursions but instantly it all writes itself in a classical dominant tonic [Music] Cadence but the most breathtaking chromatic trip of all occurs in the final movement which begins as you remember it's innocent enough and tonally not too eventful throughout the whole Exposition but then again comes the development section and all hell Breaks
[Music] loose do you realize that that wild atonal sound passage contains every one of the 12 chromatic tones except the tonic G what an inspired idea all the notes except the tonic it could easily pass for 20th Century Music if we didn't already know it was Mozart but even that explosion of chromaticism is explainable in terms of The circle of fifths not that I dream of burdening you with it but take my word for it that Outburst of chromatic rage is classically contained and so is the climax of this development section which uh finds itself
suddenly in the key of it's not so sudden in the key of C minor C Shar minor which is as far away as you can get from the home key of G minor sounds pretty remote doesn't it [Music] and again believe me all these Phological arrivals and departures to and from the most distantly related areas operate in the smoothest most Moz artian way under perfect dionic control well what does this all add up to let's find out by hearing the whole work as performed on film by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and I hope we be
listening to it with fresh phonological ears la la e [Music] la [Music] la [Music] la [Music] the [Music] [Applause] la [Music] [Applause] [Music] a [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh e [Music] the [Music] I'm [Applause] [Music] the the the [Music] the [Music] w the [Music] oh [Music] all [Music] [Music] he [Music] a [Music] e n [Music] what a piece now last night at the first presentation of this Lecture the Harvard Square theater this performance of The Mozart symphony was interrupted in the middle of the first movement by a bomb scare and we all had to go
out into the street nobody knowing whether we were going to come back and resume or not and wait for almost an hour until we had word that the police had cleared the whole theater and during that wait I must say that I was sick at heart And overcome by despair because why had I been talking my guts out for an hour and a half on human Brotherhood and universality only to have this kind of Despicable disproof of human Brotherhood thrown in our faces but when I came back and we all came back and so many
of the audience did come back to my amazement And listened from the beginning again through to the end of this Symphony I must say that my faith was restored and doubled not only by this incredible piece of music which I guess if one had to point to a work that symbolized in itself the essence of the whole fian experience of man since the Renaissance this would be it but also because of the number of the Audience that waited it out and came back and listened to it terribly [Music] moved of course I wouldn't have been
so upset if the interruption had come during my talk but to interrupt Mozan to interrupt that extraordinary wholeness and continuity that entity which is this work was the greatest insult of all but as I say my faith was restored just to hear It and just to hear it with those people and through them so I feel even more confident of what I was trying to say in the beginning than I had when I wrote it just a short word now about uh our subject next time which will be syntax if you remember the second of
the three linguistic departments Musical and linguistic syntax in which we'll be examining the Actual formations of these phological elements we've been discussing in this time and then we'll be ready to understand the semantic problems of music from Mozart to the present and hopefully come closer and closer to understanding and maybe even answering IES unanswered question thank you Happ e [Music] for
