grade 6 music theory?

Question

Grade 6 music theory is so hard!!! >.< the last few lessons are all G. Knowledge about music stuff, and this particular question i cant find is: Lizt, a Romantic composer, used the principle of theme transformation in his B minor sonata for piano. Explain theme transformation (or metamorphosis).

what is theme transformation? does anyone know?

Answer 1

PIANO CONCERTO No.2 IN A MAJOR, S.125
Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Franz Liszt was a man of paradoxes and extremes who could only flourish in the Romantic period. He was a superficial showman and contemplative artist, mystic and hedonist, genius and poseur, saint and sinner. He broke many a commandment and many a heart, exhibiting incredible flamboyance in his virtuoso piano performances before adoring audiences, yet longing for a life of religious contemplation. He fathered numerous illegitimate offspring but ended up taking minor orders in the Catholic Church with the right to the title Abbé Liszt. He witnessed first-hand the cultural and musical transformation of Europe but unfortunately never wrote his life’s memoirs, being “too busy living it.”

Entitled originally Concerto Symphonique, Liszt’s Piano Concerto in A Major took 22 years and four revisions from the first version in 1839 to its final form in 1861. It is a unified, single-movement work, comparable in structure to his tone poems, and, in contrast to its predecessor, the athletic Concerto No.1 in E-flat, is said to be “for poets only.” The term Concerto Symphonique was coined by the romantic French composer and pianist Henry Litolff to denote a work that was actually a symphony with piano obbligato, in which the thematic material was usually reserved for the orchestra. Liszt admired both Litolff and the form, and for most of the A Major concerto the piano remains subdued, working in true partnership with the orchestra. Only near the end does the soloist unequivocally dominate.

The Concerto opens with a dreamy theme in the woodwinds including an unusual chord progression that serves as the basis for the whole work and undergoes many contrasting transformations in mood, rhythm, key and tempo. Theme transformation was one of Liszt’s favorite techniques for achieving musical unity in a work. It involved making significant changes to the theme, while retaining its basic shape and identity. A snide critic once commented that, if the Concerto were given “a poetic or dramatic title, it might have been something like The Life and Adventures of a Melody,” and, indeed, the Concerto’s principal theme is analogous to the childhood, youth, adulthood and old age of a single individual. While the concerto consists of only one movement, the shifts in tempo, in addition to a couple of cadenzas, provide the musical contrast common in multi-movement works.

The response to the inevitable question as to the distinction between thematic transformation and variation involves a certain amount of nitpicking. Generally, however, variations retain the phrasing and harmonic structure of the original theme, most often – but not always – a binary structure of which each strain is repeated. Thematic transformation is more like the changes in a theme in the development section of a sonata allegro form and it is this latter model that Liszt expands upon. The originality of Liszt's transformations is their emotive, sometimes programmatic, function. An examination of the various transformation of the theme of the Second Piano Concerto can clarify this idea.

After the wind introduction, the theme is repeated with an arpeggio accompaniment as the first entrance of the piano. Shortly thereafter, the solo piano restates the theme with a new harmony and a wholly new texture. A set of variations would present one new aspect of the theme after another, while in the Concerto, Liszt provides long transitions with entirely new music setting up harmonic tension before the resolution into the next iteration. At other times, he disguises the theme, sending it underground as an accompaniment.

One of the most memorable sections occurs in the middle – like a slow movement – where the cello takes up a hauntingly beautiful transformation of the theme with delicate piano accompaniment. After a series of further mood swings, from self-aggrandizement to pathos, the work ends with a march-like statement of the principal theme and a dramatic finale.


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http://www.music.eku.edu/faculty/davis/mus555symphoniclit/mus555lecturenotes.html#liszt

The Nineteenth-Century Symphony
Franz Liszt (1811-1886; 1848)

Franz Liszt becomes music's first Liberace-type showman. He was an international phenomenon and played the role perfectly. His virtuosic shows left women passed out in the audience. He himself would feign exhaustion only to regain composure in the nick of time and continue. Ladies adorned him with numerous undergarments and room keys. He would begin the show by marching on stage in his Cossack warrior outfit, complete with sword. He would remove his gloves and sword, then cape, and then begin to play. His romantic liaisons were numerous. Paganini did similar antics, including filing his strings so that they would break at a pinnacle moment - obliging him to leap to another string and continue in death defying fashion. But Paganini, suffering form the same disfiguring disease as Abraham Lincoln, was not nearly as handsome a man as Liszt.

Liszt, like many other romantic composers, was deeply influenced by Berlioz. He knew after hearing the Symphonie Fantastique that his path would be programmatic. Liszt's music derives from a wealth of writings, paintings, and other influences. His main innovation lies in form. He largely abandons the four movement symphony and typical sonata structure in his symphonic poems and in his Dante program symphony. Faust uses altered sonata forms and an aria with a later appended chorus. He borrows Berlioz's concept of cyclical unity (idée fix) and begins using one or two principal motives or themes to organize his works. ------>His concept of Thematic Transformation usually keeps the pitches intact while changing meter, rhythm, and harmony to fit the mood or moment. His symphonic poems are generally one movement and loosely organized. The main theme spins out motives for further development/continuation (sequence/repetition) in a rhapsodic style (unfolding). His chromaticism further weakens tonality and his progressions are untraditional. He, like Berlioz, uses tempo, dynamic, metrical, and orchestral devices structurally. He uses Berlioz's expanded orchestral pallet and extends it to regularly include 3 trumpets. His orchestration, like that of Berlioz, is designed to effect, depict, or describe his program. His programs describe the source and philosophy of his inspiration without assigning them to particular orchestral effects. The listener derives the connections. <------- Strauss will assign these quite specifically. His two symphonies, keep in mind his several symphonic poems, are Faust (1854, rev.1861 and 1880) and Dante (1856).

Answer 2

I'm sorry I'm clueless- But thats grade 6 theory OH my lord I had iteasyin the past music classes LOL but try eithr googling the question or use Ask.com ??
good luck

Answer 3

Transformation, thematic.

A term used to define the process of modifying a theme so that in a new context it is different but yet manifestly made of the same elements; a variant term is ‘thematic metamorphosis’. With Cyclic form and the desire for continuity between movements, the process became a favourite method in 19th-century music of giving greater cohesion both between and within separate movements of multi-movement works. It was also widely used in opera. Great ingenuity was devoted to changing the rhythm, melodic detail, orchestration or dynamic character of a theme to adapt it to a different purpose, often for programmatic reasons. Thematic transformation is no more than a special application of the principle of variation; yet although the technique is similar the effect is usually different, since the transformed theme has a life and independence of its own and is no longer a sibling of the original theme.

Dance pairs of the early 17th century provide notable cases of thematic transformation at a time when variation form was also coming into favour for larger musical structures. In his keyboard dances, Bull frequently derived the melody of the galliard from that of the pavan, with free modifications, so that neither is strictly a variation of the other, but they might be said to be obverse to one another. In the later Baroque period, thematic treatment of this kind was channelled into either fugue, by means of such techniques as augmentation and diminution, or variations, rather than into the balancing of varied couples on the basis of a single thematic idea. Bach at least showed no enthusiasm for building preludes and fugues out of shared material. Mozart used thematic transformation for occasional dramatic effect, as in the quartet in Act 2 of Così fan tutte, where the music is hurried out of a grazioso 6/8 into a presto 4/4. In his Symphony no.103 (the ‘Drumroll’) Haydn transformed the Adagio introduction at the end of the Allegro.

Thematic transformation belongs above all to the 19th century, when composers exploited through it the possibilities that arose from giving themes dramatic or human significance in instrumental or vocal music. At the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Pathétique’ Sonata op.13, a process of transformation turns the taut dramatic figure of the first bar into the sweeter version in the relative major which appears at the fourth bar; dynamics, accompaniment and harmonic simplification all contribute to the growth of the initial idea (exx.1a and b). In the finale of his Ninth Symphony, a large variation scheme provides a prototype of many 19th-century thematic transformations, when the ‘Joy’ theme is transformed from its normal 4/4 metre in D into a 6/8 Alla marcia in B for a heroic passage in the text. The four-note figure that pervades the last four string quartets can be seen subtly transformed, above all in the Grosse Fuge op.133, where it provides a wide variety of fugal textures, starkly contrasted.

There are other examples in Beethoven in which transformation is used as a formal symphonic technique. With the addition of programmatic significance it featured prominently in unifying large-scale Romantic works. Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830) led the way in demonstrating the dramatic strength of a theme that recurs in all movements (the Idée fixe) and is transformed in each movement according to its context. The same theme could thus represent the flux of passion, the elegance of a ball and the grotesque dance of a witches’ sabbath while at the same time transferring a fixed image from the mind of the composer to that of the listener. Berlioz was later to use other thematic transformations with great subtlety, particularly in La damnation de Faust (1845–6).

The practice of thematic transformation is particularly associated with Liszt, who applied it as a thoroughgoing source of musical development. In Eine Faust-Symphonie (1854–7) the Mephistopheles movement is built out of transformations, symbolizing negations, of the themes of Faust and Gretchen presented in the first two movements. Les préludes (1848) shows the glorification in full orchestral dress of the somewhat hesitant theme of the opening. In the Piano Sonata in B minor (1852–3) Liszt achieved one of his most miraculous metamorphoses of musical character when a diabolic figure that appears in the bass near the beginning becomes a theme of infinite sweetness and longing.

Such processes became a regular part of later 19th-century music, especially in the hands of Liszt's followers. The Russians made particular use of them: there are good examples in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and Swan Lake, in both of which a minor theme is transformed into a triumphant major theme at the close. Perhaps the most far-reaching application of thematic transformation occurred in Wagner’s treatment of the Leitmotif, for the motifs, especially in the Ring, are combined, adapted, extended and altered in shape, rhythm and colour to reflect the dramatic action at all points; examples include the majestic version of Siegfried’s horn call that rings out in his funeral music in Götterdämmerung, and the apprentices’ spiky version of their masters’ noble theme in the prelude to Die Meistersinger. In addition, many of Wagner's motifs stand in relationships to each other that gradually become clear during the course of a work and in which transformation merges with symphonic development.

Not even Brahms escaped the general acceptance of thematic transformation as a standard technique in the late 19th century, although he showed much less interest in it than his contemporaries. His clearest use of it is in the Intermezzo in E minor op.119 no.2, a case which makes plain the distinction between variation technique, so common in Brahms, and a single transformation, which is comparatively rare.

While the naive type of transformation (turning a joyful melody into a sad one by putting it into the minor, for example) lost favour in the 20th century, more sophisticated types, combined with more general thematic development, are to be found in music of all kinds, particularly that which accepts wholeheartedly the symphonic heritage of the past.