The Music of Frozen

24. February 2015 · Write a comment · Categories: Glissandi · Tags: , , ,

I’ve been fascinated for the last few months by Disney’s Frozen – more specifically, by the music of it. Yes, having children I know many of the words (though not as well as my three-year-old, who corrects me from time to time. At some point I’d like to look at it more in-depth, but in the interest of shipping, I’ll share my thoughts here.

There’s a pretty good selection for most people – “Frozen Heart” for a men’s chorus; the duets between Anna & Elsa, and Anna & Hans; ‘fun’ solos from Kristoff, Olaf; a ‘fun’ chorus for the Trolls, and, of course, Elsa’s blockbuster “Let It Go.” That last one, in particular, I really like, though I have mixed feelings about the lyrics – while “A kingdom of isolation,” is brilliant in its garden-path syllables (“kingdom of ice…”), I wish “Let it go, let it go, Turn my back and slam the door” at least attempted a slant-rhyme (“slam the do-oar” etc.)

But my overall favorite moment, and the one that sparked this post, is the final, climactic scene.  Anna and Elsa are wandering through the mist and blizzard, while Kristoff rushes to rescue Anna. The music is in the background, but it so perfectly matches the action and emotion of the scene that I find myself rewinding just to rewatch it. While Anna wanders, the music is slow, plodding, and mournful – she’s dying and she knows it. It pans over to Kristoff, and immediately picks up in time and mood with the galloping of his steed’s hooves. It’s a great scene, and a rare moment of true musical, sound, and visual harmony that I don’t see much in film anymore.

An Overview of Western Music – Part 1

04. November 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: Glissandi · Tags: ,

As a classically, academically trained musician, I’ve been fascinated for some time as to why “Popular music” deviated from “Academic music” around the end of the 19th century. It’s a topic I’m always interested in hearing opinions on from experts. I’ll confess it’s not a topic I pretend to be an expert on; I’m sure many a musicologist could shoot holes in my views faster than a half cadence in a Sousa march. This week, I’ll attempt to briefly walk through the history of Western music from up to the end of the Medieval period (~AD 1400).

Greek Foundations (~600 BC – AD 500)

Western music seems to have much of its roots in our music theory heritage from the Greeks. From them we’ve received our tonal sequence of eight half- and whole-steps (the black and white keys on a piano, with the last note repeating the first an octave higher), referred to as a diatonic scale. These were arranged into a series of modes – think scales, starting on different white keys: Ionian (C-C), Dorian (D-D), Phrygian (E-E), Mixolydian (F-F), Lydian (G-G), Aeolian (A-A), and Locrian (B-B). Additionally, the ideas of consonance (‘nice’ sounding chords) and dissonance (‘clashing’ chords) come from this time period, though the definitions of consonance and dissonance have shifted. Much of Greek music history was influence by Mr. “a2 + b2 = c2” Pythagoras himself, who mathematically defined many of the intervals we use today, based on the untempered perfect fifth (generated by a string, divided into a ratio expressed as 3:2 – ie, a C string, divided at the point of ratio 3:2, will sound a G).

The Evolution of Chant (~AD 500 – AD 1400)

The early medieval church took many of the Greek diatonic modes and used them as the basic for chants in the liturgy. While all the modes seem to have been used (with the exception of the Locrian, as it is the only mode in which the tonic-dominant interval is a tritone, rather than a perfect fifth – this was seen as an extreme dissonance, and has been referred to as diabolus in musica – “the Devil in music”). As time passed, the primary modes that were used became the Ionian and Aeolian – matching to our modern “major” and “[natural] minor” scales.

While the earliest chants were performed monophonically (no harmony, all voices singing the same notes), gradually the rules were relaxed allowing first octave harmony (the same notes but seperated by octaves), then fifths. This latter development became crucial to much of the later evolution of harmony – because parallel fifths became accepted, the possibility arose of a diminished fifth existing – the aforementioned diabolical tritone. To avoid this, the harmonizing voice was required to stay on a different note – which added a new interval to harmony. Additionally, this caused music to begin having counterpoint – voice wouldn’t necessarily move at the same time.

We’ve now (oh so briefly) covered about 2,000 years of music. Next week, we’ll cover the following 600-odd years to the present.

Read part 2 here