Home » Posts » Salvati, Blog 2

Recent Comments

Salvati, Blog 2

The first piece I listened to was “Kyrie from the Pope Marcellus Mass”. It came to me initially as a very interesting and beautiful piece. I listened to it a couple of times to truly hear every element I wanted to. One of the first musical elements that stood out to me was harmony. Harmony refers to the sounding of two or more pitches at the same time. When listening you can hear the many voices singing in different pitches, which ends up classifying as a Consonant, which are harmonies that sound pleasing. The next musical element I wanted to bring up was the rhythm, which means the ways in which music is organized into distinct time units. The piece had a smooth rhythm and within that another element of rhythm was clear to me, which was the tempo (the speed at which a piece of music or part of it is played), which was slow. The last musical element was melody, which is a unit of pitches (or tones) sounded in succession–one after another (“tune of a piece of music, the part of the song that you would sing on your own”). From looking into the different melody types online, from a website called www.blog.holistic-songwriting.com, I concluded that this song had a direction melody. This is because it uses “different notes and doesn’t have a clear base pitch”. 

The second piece I listened to was “Alapana from “Sitar, Sarode, and Tabla””. I like the different sounds I heard from this piece right off the bat. one of the first musical elements I noticed was the texture, which is the ways in which different musical parts fit together. When you listen to it, you can hear many different instruments throughout it. I think this classifies it as having a polyphonic texture. Another musical element I can hear within this piece is timbre, which is the particular sound or color of an instrument that makes it unique. I heard an array of string instruments at the beginning, and later on heard more percussion. The last musical element is once again the rhythm, and the way the tempo in this piece has a much faster movement to it, rather than the slow paced tempo in the last one. 

My process of close listening entailed listening to each piece a couple of times. I would review the meaning of each element and try to listen for that specific one in each piece, each particular time I had listened to it. The pieces were both good in their own ways as they were very different from each other.