Remember? When we talked about Melodies, we took Bach’s C Major prelude as an example and found an important sound talking point right before the end, the long pedal point. And as you surely recall as well, then came Charles Gounod, put his famous melody onto it, and if I listen right,
something seems to have changed because of that:
The new melody has shaped the course of the former rather simple line of tension and added some additional curves that seem to make the original chords rather supporting them in their new complexity then just to follow their original course (still complex enough though ;-).
What happened?
Gounod created an additional, a related text, a con-text to the prelude, he somehow caused a context modulation, or, let’s call it, the sounds of his melody contextified Bach's chord sequence.
Actually, this is a very common relationship of sound groups or sequences in music, but I have chosen to share it as one of my first sound listening and shaping inspirations as I’ve got the feeling that sounds in territories that are decided to change common harmonic rules and regular rhythmical flow in favor of free tonal and rhythmical bending still may fall in love with it!
A contextification in a "free sound territory"
Let me show one example from my Black Sonata that juggles just with five tones of the black piano keys while waeving a kind of a heart-beat-like texture. After a bit more than 40 seconds the exact structure appears again, but now together with a melodic adventure added onto it:
I hope the sounds in this pentatonic sound territory were successful enough to convey the message!
If so, we may want to continue to look to further applications, where classical methods of musical design can give inspiration to much further sound territories. Maybe we can call those inspirations
and move on to the next example of a contextification which happens in a bit more extreme, more dissonant sound territory.
This one is taken from my Piano concerto and repeats a short string sequence 3 times while overlaying it with more and more additional sequences of brass, flutes and percussion sounds, creating much tension and fast losing sight of the original tune.
That’s already hard to catch, I admit. But there are even different kinds of contextification, not just layering textures one onto the other.
One very common, for example, we can see in almost every classical sonata form. Remember when we last dealt with this form? When we talked about Haydn’s “Emperor” quartet and the trouble finding the right dress for it?
For today, I leave it to you to guess, what this different kind of contextification might look like, stay tuned!
More readings:
More info about "Black Sonata", Spotlight 4, see The Magic E@r, chapter 5.8
Scientific example of context modulation with regard to "the Effect of Acoustic Properties of Speech"