NOTE: Pärt defines T-voice positions slightly differently (see Paul Hillier's Arvo Pärt book). For Pärt, there are three broad categories: "superior," "inferior," and "alternating." For pedagogical purposes, I've presented positions without including "alternating" as an underlying position type. Rather than make "alternating" a fundamental *position*, I categorize it as a way of elaborating an underlying structure (by alternating between a position above and a position below). That's a pretty subtle adjustment, but wanted to mention it somewhere.
This has to be one of the best music theory videos on youtube and it blew my mind to see that this video has only 158 views. This is usually information I'd had to pay $80 for a textbook to get! Edit: spoke too soon
I’m so happy RU-vid recommends these videos to us regardless of views. Hopefully Galen’s channel will get more views! But it’s nice that quality is being pushed out!
Omg, I'm having a musical paradigm shift watching this. Never had heard of Part before. His approach clicks with the way my brain works. Galen, really beautiful examples. Please make more tintinnabuli videos.
Pärt's brilliance is making mechanical process music so pop-sounding that it starts to feel deep. Boulez's Structures but diatonic and with vaguely religious names.
So well done. What a great contribution to the RU-vid library of educational music theory/composition videos. No surprise it's finding such a big audience!
This was a brilliant video! So inspiring, and so genuinely educational! Arvo Part has been a new discovery of mine, and his Tintinnabuli style was brought up in one of my classes but not dived in to. This was such a happy coincidence to find on my feed! Will definitely be playing around with some of the principles you laid out in this (again) fantastic video!! Hope to see more great videos like this one from you in the future!!!
Wonderful explanation, thank you 🙏 I'm looking to apply these compositional techniques to a world of electronic music and it's a cool puzzle to think about the various shapes, offsets and logic rules and how I can recreate them with components in software and hardware
Near the beginning of this year, I wrote several small choral pieces at a breakneck pace. My composition instructor commented how it reminded him of Pärt sometimes and told me to look him up. I never really understood tintinnabulation until now, but I am shocked to find that one of those short choral pieces (the one I consider my best) essentially uses T-voice construction throughout
This is beautifully demonstrated, and such a clear narration. Would love to hear even more audio clips as each section is presented, especially the real Pärt examples - is there a copyright restriction on those sort of things?
Using excerpts for educational purposes is generally considered fair use, but using full pieces usually requires licensing. In most audio examples, I provided a "related piece" in the caption which you can also seek out, and for which many of the compositional strategies discussed just before should apply.
This is really cool! I've been getting into Arvo Part's work recently, and it is amazing. Maybe a video about "Fratres"? No rush, but it would be cool to see :)
Thank you so much for this video. Would you be possible willing to the something like this som other of your other courses on composer´s techniques. I find this very fascinating. Greetings from Sweden. :)
Has anyone been mysteriously unsubscribed from a load of their favourite RU-vid channels therefore having to resubscribe again? I’m getting sick of it!
Very clear teaching and useful information! My one recommendation to 'level up' the quality of the video would be to spend a bit of time in a DAW learning how to breathe life into your MIDI instruments, so that the beauty of your music can reach more people than just those who understand the theory of why it works.
There's more for me to learn in DAWs, but here's where I also confess that this project was taking too long and I cut some corners mainly in the audio mockup process. As one example, I realized that having the tempo more consistent--while less natural--allowed me to streamline the animation process by copy/pasting or by setting a consistent scroll speed. I definitely prioritized animation over mockups for this theory video, but I appreciate the advice and will work on improving the DAW side of things in the future.
@@individualism20 If it's just for personal use, I have scores to my youTube music over on the Patreon site. (But if you're looking to license it for recording or commercial use send me an email.)
The Pärt-Bach parallel you draw with the Cello Suite opening is super interesting. I think it expresses very neatly this feat you mentioned in the beginning for Pärt's music to sound both old and new, since he basically reconstructs this tension between counterpoint and chordal harmony that exists in baroque music, but entirely on his own terms. Very cool video, thanks.
Incredibly high quality. So much so that I feel no words could do this video justice. A spectacular masterpiece... every second shines with clearly obvious hours of effort and dedication.
What a good video!, precisely for a composition project I am needing to use Tintinnabuli and with your explanation it has become much clearer to me; I feel happy that just after a couple of days looking for information on the subject (which I feel is not so easy to find or that they know how to explain it correctly) it is a gem to have found your content today. I thank you deeply and I hope you continue creating more content of such good quality, you deserve much more reach and recognition for your work
It‘s definitely on my agenda to cover more weird and modern techniques in some capacity, ideally as a 2-3 video series. Hoping one of those video ideas will get finished and copyright cleared sometime this fall!
Hm. This is utterly engrossing. I can tell a lot has happened to Common Practice theory since I sat enraptured by Henry Onderdonk and Andrew Imbrie, hearing them dissect Bach and Mozart within the textual guidance of Rameau, Schenker and Walter Piston. I must point out that Part's innovations, if that's how he refers to them, are not dramatically different in spirit from Boethian and Gregorian counterpoint, which form the bones of Purcell's triadic harmony, tonal home key and rounded melodic, narrative arc. The new terminology here addresses a new angle for seeing "sound through time," but the principles of proportion and symmetry, sequence & surprise, pause & happenstance, assertion & recapitulation, all cooperate just as before with sounds that strike our ear as "lyrical." These foundational impulses are vertical in the history of all arts, and also horizontal across them, as Raphael's plump-cheeked Madonnas and Titian's ravishing colors dazzle our eye, and prefigure the rounded, graceful arcs of melody in Bach and Handel, or alluvial and autumnal evocations in Brahms and Dvorak. The shape of beauty, sound of power and story of truth all rely on the same emotional fuels, visual codes and verbal physics because evolutionary psychology is a mix & match of dynamic, plastic responses, not rigid keys for specific locks to self-sealing cubbyholes. If that's how we learned or felt or tended toward, then mammals would never have gone off flying and birds wouldn't be swimming. Byron wouldn't have died as a rebel for revolutionary Greece and Borodin wouldn't have been a Nobel-worthy chemist. I think Part explored complex emotions with new sounds but not with a different human heart or unfamiliar sound waves.
@@KlavierKannNichtMehr Wow, that's a great question. Off-hand I'd say no, because Part is originating his fundamental esthetics of the lyrical with Western impulses. But actually, composers like Lou Harrison and John Cage started out as typical students of Rameau tonality but quickly shifted their ear to Indonesian gamelan sounds and Asian tonal families. So we'd have to ask a composer who's familiar with both tonal theory and non-Western theory systems. I personally love diatonic, modal and whole-tone scales, so microtonal scales are a challenge for me to warm up to. (But I love Fairuz, it turns out!)
This is super interesting. What are the limits to this? Can you use this system with any scale/mode and triads within that scale? Can you use it with atonal scales, such as whole-tone or diminished? I am truly fascinated by this. Subscribed and I will show this video to all my musician-friends. Thanks, and keep up the good work!
i have used exactly these kind of extended techniques - very useful in teaching composition. As long as you impose some kind of strict limitation on note choices. Doubling a line with specific but alternating intervals is another idea.
If you want to write original music, I don't see why there should be any limits on scale/mode/triad! But if you want to sound like Pärt, you'll probably at least want to make sure that the three notes of the triad are all members of the scale you choose. I know he has used more exotic scales than what I mention in the video, though. I believe I may have heard something from the album "Arvo Pärt: Orient and Occident," but I don't recall the specifics. Please report back here if you find an example with a cool, unusual, underlying scale example (if I find anything, I will too)!
The clarity and excellence of this video are stunning. Your students are really fortunate and i could wish i was one of them. I’ll never listen to Pärt the same again, and my own compositions will also be affected. Thank you!
It's surprising that this system doesn't find its way into more music syllabi. I imagine it could easily be worked into a course on minimalism, or one on tonality, or even one on serialism!
This video took me a couple of watches to fully grasp Pärt's style, but now i understand it, im having fun improvising at the piano. This guide broke the style down so well!
This was incredibly informative and well-made, and it gave me some newfound appreciation for the music of Pärt, which in the past I found rather dull, before listening to pieces like Da Pacem.
Thank you for this video. All ideas were really clearly laid out and easy to understand. I love resources like this which give you the tools to try and start writing the music you love
Songs like the healing of arinushka are the most genius: how else to describe a melody that is so simple and logical yet so new and memorable and moving. Millions of musicians try to make melodies, but 99% fail and their melodies are grey, uninspiring or unoriginal. Making a simple yet new and memorable melody is a feat!
I’m taking AP Music Theory in school right now and I’m proud to say I can understand this… mostly lol 😅 I would love to see more of these types of videos!!
This was phenomenal! Could I possibly wish upon a star for a similar video about Górecki's sacred/holy minimalism (i.e. the style of Symphony 2's second movement, Symphony 3, Beatus Vir, O Domina Nostra, etc.)?
This is very good. Of course, species counterpoint is very helpful in understanding this kind of thinking. Plainsong and faux-bourdon doubling likewise.
Interesting system, but it doesnt tell you much about what youre actually writing. Definitely a nice tool in conjunction with other systems, but alone youll wnd up writing music you dont actually understand
Hey man, great video and such a detailled work. Is it possible to tell us something about the connection between the religious texts as a orientation for the lenghts of the notes? I know there is a method behind it, but maybe you can describe it more detailled? Thanks :)
Thanks for the kind words. I know that Pärt saw a lot of religious spiritual connections in the way he envisioned this music. I don‘t consider myself a Pärt scholar and don‘t have any info about religious note durations. If you find anything out about it, please reply back to this comment thread! I‘d love to hear about it!
Not really religious per se, but I believe in his Magnificat (which has a sacred text) he does end phrases of the text with longer notes. That about as far as my knowledge goes there!
@@GalenDeGraf Hey, so after my presentation about Arvo Pärt and his style in my musicology study, I think I can tell you something about the note lenghts and the text word ratio. A lot of his inspiration and orientation and structure for his notation come from liturgical texts and it's really important to say, that word of god and the purely declamatory of the text is the centre of his composition, because he want that the listeners can hear and understand everything of the religious messages or stories, because thats is his essential goal in his compository work. Becaus of that, every single word, syllable and even the punctuations must have the same weighting. So you can say, that the structure of the text is the real composer of the music. It's nearly impossible to tell you a strictly rhythm method, becaus every work is different and everytime the syllable got another lengths and Pärt uses other procedures to decide, which syllable got which note lengths and why. So for example in De Profundis every word got its own bar and even every single syllable in this word is composed just with half notes. But there are also some differences in other compositions like in Passio. The last syllable before coma got a half-note, before a point a whole-tone and after a point there is a instrumental Interlude with the half lengths of the phrase, which sounds before. But sometimes there is also the beginning or end of a phrase longer then the other notes (the starting point in note lengths in passio are quarter notes) But also the meaning and the protagonist is important for the note length. When Piltus sentences Jesus to death (cruxifigate), every of the syllables is a dotted whole-note and when Jesu died on the cross, there is a two synkopated brevis-notes (one note, which sound for fucking 4 bars long!) You can see, that every text and composition is different an the rules for the note lengths is not in every work the same. I hope, that this was helpful and interesting to read. Chears mate
@@4tone146 Thanks for reporting back! I find a lot of fun in Pärt's music in figuring out the design for the formula of each of his pieces, since they're all different at least when it comes to specifics. That's probably also what keeps his music from sounding formulaic (as in boring) even though it is formulaic in the technical sense of following a formula.
"Formulaic" can mean (literally) "following a formula," but also "predictable, boring." Since aspects of the "formula" for Pärt's music are custom written for each piece of music, it doesn't necessarily sound "predictable," since each piece will follow a slightly different formula. But also, isn't using a formula an essential aspect of most tonal idioms, such as cadences and common progressions? If anything, Pärt's music might seem refreshing in its ability to try out new tonal formulae at its core...
