The idea
A surprise is a relationship between two things: a norm the listener already carries, and one event that breaks it. Without the first, the second is noise.
Haydn's method rests on that. He builds phrases so regular you could set a watch by them, four bars asking and four bars answering, then removes the regularity at the moment you stopped noticing it. The source course calls it a joke told to an audience that knows the setup (Source course, Lesson 12).
Stop treating the ordinary as filler. Eight square bars are not what you write when you run out of ideas. They are a loaded spring.
Watch
How to improvise with musicality
- [02:08] "when you play one note you create an expectation... anything else you play is in relation to that note." That is the smallest version of the whole lesson.
- [09:44] the advanced idea: build a rising line long enough that the ear commits, then drop to the bottom instead of resolving high. "They expect you to just end high, but then you're like, no, I'm gonna go all the way down to the bottom."
Advanced Pianists Need This!!!
- [00:24] the structure: bars 1 and 2 are two arbitrary notes, bars 3 and 4 answer, bars 5 and 6 call, bars 7 and 8 must close on the two notes you opened with. An antecedent and consequent with a memory requirement bolted on.
- [03:14] the pass criterion, and Greg failing it on camera at [02:57] before retrying. "It doesn't really matter what you play in between as long as you repeat those same notes."
- [04:38] the line that makes this a Haydn lesson: "it's how you use the material that you're playing, no matter what the material is." The source course says the same about Haydn, that the material matters less than what you do with it.
How To Improvise
- [05:11] Variation, which Ruslan Sirota learned from Hal Crook: play a phrase, rest, then play the same rhythm with new notes. "Something changes but something stays the same. That's called composition."
- [08:47] Variation Extension, the tag on the end, which turns a pair of phrases into a question and an answer.
- [11:24] the hard permutation: new material first, so you hold the original rhythm in mind while departing from it. The improviser's version of a development section.
Listen
Haydn, Symphony No. 94, first movement. Pass one: the Adagio cantabile introduction alone. It is not the piece. It is the room going quiet. Pass two: the Vivace assai theme, four bars of antecedent ending away from home and four of consequent ending at home. Count them out loud. Pass five: find the moment in the development where you lose your footing, then the long bass note announcing the return.
Haydn, Symphony No. 94, second movement. The nickname belongs here, not to the first movement. The Andante states a quiet tune, repeats the first strain even quieter, then puts a full orchestral hit where nothing was owed. Check it against the recording yourself. The source course walks through the first movement at length and does not put the famous chord there, which is a small lesson in reading a course against its repertoire.
Haydn, Symphony No. 104, first movement. Pass one: the main theme, a rising scale figure with a repeated-note rhythm. Pass two: count how many separate ideas the exposition contains. The answer is close to one. Pass five: track the repeated-note rhythm as it moves from voice to voice, appears slowed down underneath, and gets cut to its first two notes.
Haydn, Op. 33 No. 2, last movement. Listen to the final minute three times without the score and say out loud, in real time, whether the piece has ended. You will be wrong.
Meshuggah, "Bleed," 1:20 to 2:10. Lucas gives a timed account. The cymbals state 4/4 clearly until roughly 1:25. At about 1:25 the drums move to eighths with a popping kick. Around 1:40 the cymbals join the new pattern and the vocals are left carrying the 4/4. From about 1:58 the lead guitar marks the downbeats. Nothing changes tempo. What changes is which instrument is telling you where the bar is.
Meshuggah, "Lethargica." Lucas's example of the rotated riff, a loop arranged so it sounds as if it begins in the middle. Do not count it. Point at the downbeat and check whether the band agrees.
Radiohead, "2+2=5," 1:45 to 2:10. Osborn puts the section-group boundary at 1:54 on a colossal shift in volume, texture and timbre. The boundary is marked by loudness and register, not by a cadence.
Monk, "Straight, No Chaser." A simple blues motif, repeated until you predict it, then displaced by one beat. Tap the first three statements and feel the fourth arrive in the wrong place.
The comparison
The exact parallel. Haydn's false recapitulation and Meshuggah's rotated riff both depend on a norm the listener supplies for free. The source course defines the false recapitulation as the main theme returning in the development in the wrong key, seeming to start the recapitulation, and it is explicit that the device only works on a listener who has internalized the convention (Source course, Lesson 12). Lucas's rotated riff works the same way. Her account: Meshuggah builds songs in segments of eight, sixteen or thirty-two bars of 4/4, these segments rather than verses and choruses are the formal units, and a looping riff whose durational pattern makes it sound as though it starts in the middle forces the listener to re-orient. In both cases the composer spends most of the piece teaching you a rule so that one event can break it.
Biamonte's term for the general case belongs in your vocabulary. In her survey of metric dissonance in rock she identifies formal functions, among them initiating dissonance, where a passage begins displaced and settles, and sectional demarcation, where the dissonance marks a boundary the harmony does not mark. In Haydn harmony marks the boundary. In Meshuggah no harmony is available to mark it, so meter does the whole job.
Where it breaks, first break. Haydn's surprise is recoverable. The false key of a false recapitulation is heard as false because tonal syntax tells you what the true key is, and the true return is more satisfying for the delay. Cone gives you the terms for the contrast. Lucas's rotated riff deliberately misaligns a passage's temporal beginning and its rhythmic beginning, and where Cone's functions can be recovered from tonal syntax and phrase rhythm, Meshuggah offers no syntactic evidence for a correct orientation, so the ambiguity is permanent rather than retrospectively resolved. Haydn's joke has a punchline. Meshuggah's has no reveal.
Where it breaks, second break. In Haydn the surprise is rare, which is what makes it expensive. In Meshuggah the condition is constant. Lucas notes that the looping riffs fall in and out of alignment with the background structure but rarely overcome it, because the cycling is cut off at the end of the hypermetric segment. The riff is truncated wherever it happens to be, and that truncation is the form-generating event. A Haydn movement that surprised you every eight bars would have no norm left to violate. A Meshuggah song does not want one.
Haydn's device is one placed event in a regular design. Meshuggah's is a systematic misalignment that never resolves. Choose, and say which you chose.
At the piano
Build the period first. In C major, right hand, write four bars ending on a half cadence, so the last melody note sits over G major and sounds unfinished. Then write four more that begin with the same first two bars and end on a full cadence in C. Play it at 72 bpm, hands separately at first. That is the source course's antecedent and consequent pair, where the antecedent poses a harmonic question and the consequent answers it.
Then break it three ways, one at a time.
- Extend the consequent. Repeat bar 7 twice before allowing bar 8 to land. The listener counted to eight and you are at ten.
- Silence the cadence. Play the consequent, stop one beat before the tonic, hold two full beats of silence, then land.
- Move the theme to the wrong key. After the eight bars, restate bars 1 and 2 in E-flat major, same rhythm and shape, nothing else changed. A false start in miniature.
Left hand and tempo. A root and fifth, one attack per bar. Climb 60, 72, 84, 96, and add the joke only once the plain version is boring to play. If it still takes effort, the surprise will not read.
Exercises
1. The period, twelve times
Do. Write one four-plus-four period in C. Play it in all twelve keys, up by half steps, at 72 bpm, without rewriting it.
Done when: you can start in any key cold and both cadences land where they should, with no hunting.
2. Greg's two-note return
Do. Run the exercise from "Advanced Pianists Need This!!!" over a blues in D. Two notes in bars 1 and 2, an answer in 3 and 4, a call in 5 and 6, and bars 7 and 8 ending on the original two notes.
Done when: you close on the original pair exactly, three cycles running, and once more from a deliberately dissonant pair.
3. Variation, three forms
Do. Over the same blues: a phrase and a rest, then its rhythm with new notes, then its rhythm with new notes plus a tag, then new material first with a return to the original rhythm.
Done when: you can do all three on demand and name which one you are playing before you start.
4. The false recapitulation, written
Do. Take the period from Exercise 1. Write a sixteen-bar development that fragments its first two bars, moves through at least three keys, then restates bars 1 and 2 in a key that is not the tonic. Follow with four bars over a held dominant bass note, then the true return.
Done when: a listener who has heard the period three times reacts at the false return, relaxes at the true one, and can tell you which was which.
5. Metric surprise, no harmony
Do. On one pitch, play a riff of five sixteenth notes looped over a 4/4 pulse you keep with your foot. Run it four bars. Cut it off at the end of bar four wherever it lands and start a new segment.
Done when: you can state where in the riff the truncation fell, and hear it as the section boundary rather than as a mistake.
6. Rotation
Do. Write out a seven-note rhythmic cell, then four rotations of it, each starting from a different note. Loop each rotation over the same pulse for eight bars.
Done when: at least two rotations sound as if they begin somewhere other than their notated first note, and you can say which note the ear picks as the downbeat.
Compose
Write a piece of exactly forty bars for piano that contains one structural joke and nothing else unusual.
Constraints. Bars 1 to 16 establish a four-plus-four period and repeat it with the melody an octave higher. Bars 17 to 32 develop only the first two bars, using fragmentation, one inversion, and at least one passage in a key with a different signature. Bars 33 to 40 return the period intact.
The joke goes in exactly one place and is the only irregularity in the piece: either a false return of bars 1 and 2 in the wrong key between bar 25 and bar 30, or a silence of at least two beats immediately before the final cadence. Write the other version as a second ending, so you have both on paper.
Play the whole thing at 72 bpm from the page. If a passage is unplayable at that tempo, the passage is wrong.
Checkpoint
- Play a four-plus-four period from memory in three keys, naming the cadence at each half's end.
- Complete Greg's two-note return, three consecutive cycles, once from a dissonant pair.
- Play a variation, a variation with a tag, and a reverse variation, naming each before you play it.
- Hand over the forty-bar composition with the joke marked and one sentence justifying its placement.
- Say what the false recapitulation and Lucas's rotated riff share, and the two places the comparison stops.
- Point at the moment in "Bleed" where the cymbals stop carrying the 4/4 and say what takes it over.
Read
- Source course, Lesson 12 (/library/garnett-course.pdf). Thematic economy, the generative theme, periodic phrase structure, comic timing from opera buffa, the false recapitulation, and the dominant pedal before the return. Read it after the listening.
- Olivia R. Lucas, "'So Complete in Beautiful Deformity'" (Music Theory Online 24/3, 2018), https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.18.24.3/mto.18.24.3.lucas.html. An hour's read. Take the rotated riff and her habit of putting spectrograms beside conventional transcription.
- Nicole Biamonte, "Formal Functions of Metric Dissonance in Rock Music" (Music Theory Online 20/2, 2014), https://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.14.20.2/mto.14.20.2.biamonte.html. The taxonomy of formal functions. You will use these terms for the rest of Part B.
- Brad Osborn, "Understanding Through-Composition" (Music Theory Online 17/3, 2011), https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.11.17.3/mto.11.17.3.osborn.html. Only the "2+2=5" paragraphs for now. The rest is the spine of L24.
- Score of Haydn Op. 33 No. 2, last movement. Any free edition, last page, read while listening. The gap between the page and what your ear did the first time is the subject of this lesson.