Music Understanders Report In!
Yes, music understanders. I don’t care if mister high and mighty spellchecker thinks it necessary to shove a wiggly red line under it, it’s a word. Lexographical iniquities aside, here’s the meat of today’s problem: I’m dumb when it comes to music theory. I have no classical training, and barely any professional teaching to speak of. I do have a basic grasp of a bunch of stuff, but that sets a pretty low bar hanging to bang into. I’ll evidence this complaining and not-quite self-loathing with an example. Take these two sections in Mahler 6, juxtaposed here sequentially (filled with long words tonight we are) one from the exposition, and one from later on:
This is one of my favorite bits in the first movement, the unexpected change in that descending sequence is ridiculously satisfying. So what’s going on here? My not terribly educated guess is the second version modulates to some related major key (such as C-major) instead of dropping all in A-minor. At least, I assume it’s in A-minor since that’s the tonic of the symphony and it’s the first theme.
Sometimes I really wish I had had a bunch of music lessons.
Tags: classical music, keys, mahler, theory