Sonata Cycle, Part Iii - Openbucs

(grab the caption to drag it to a different location on the screen) Alright, we've had our nice slow movement we're very relaxed after that. Ready for something different. But instead of just jarring us back into something exciting with a third movement that's fast, we're gonna have a sort of transitional movement that will get us back to fast without y'know stressing us out too much. So the third movement in the sonata cycle is called the minuet and trio. A minuet is an old dance from the like seven... early 1700's late 1600's, very formal; if you think about all those movies you've seen where they wear great big dresses and the men are all wearing wigs and the women have lots of big hair and they're very you know very proper and like that, that's a minuet kind of dance. So this is a structure that comes from the dance world, but that's not intended to be danced to in this particular place because this is an instrumental piece for listening to. In the minuet, we have two different ways that we can construct it. We have... we could have an 'a' theme and we can have a 'b' theme, and we'll use little letters so that we know that these aren't great big sections of form like we talked about for ABA. If we have an 'a' and a 'b,' the 'a' is repeated, and then the 'b' is repeated and we're done with the minuet. Then we would go to the trio which would have the same sort of structure so if that's 'a' and 'b', then this trio is going to be 'c' and 'd,' each of which is repeated. But we also have another option which is the one that Mozart uses in his minuet in this piece and that is to have our little 'a' and then have a very short new material for 'b' that leads into 'a' again. So we would have 'a' and then 'b-a.' So 'a' would be played twice and then 'b-a' would be played twice. When you get to the trio we have to have a parallel structure so instead of 'c' and 'd' we would then have 'c' 'dc' each of those repeated. In the minuet, you might have a full orchestra playing although in many cases it's going to be a little bit smaller there anyway because it's because of the nature of the dance. When we get to the trio, some of those instruments will not be playing. So if there were brass instruments in the minuet they're probably not playing in the trio. So it gives you not only a contrast in the melodic structure but you get a contrast in the instrumentation as well. So minuet, all repeated, trio, all repeated. So that sounds like we should be finished, right? I said it was a minuet and trio! We have to go back and do the minuet again! So if you are looking at the music you would have the minuet, it would have its repeat sign, you'd go back and you'd have your trio, and repeat sign and you'd go back and then it would say 'da capo,' meaning go back to the head. So you go back to the beginning and play the minuet again but this time you only hear it once. We've already heard it twice, we don't need to hear it two more times. So that's what we call standard practice in music; repeat the minuet the first time, don't repeat it the second time. Alright, so let's listen to Mozart's minuet from the Serenade. (music playing) OK, I also forgot to mention that within those things... those things he repeated... so that was actually our little 'a' twice, and now we're gonna have our little 'b-a,' twice. So there's a lot of repetition in this. If you listen to that and think about the first movement you can hear sort of shades and that rocket theme; dom bom bom bom bom... It's moving up! It sounds a lot like that! That's one of the reasons we don't applaud between the movements because you might forget what that sounded like in the first movement and now you can say, "Oh, you know, that's sort of like something I already heard." Alright, let's move on to the second half of the minuet. (music playing) repeated (music playing) (music playing) Now we're in the trio! Something New! (music playing) (music playing) OK, could you hear in that one how we had our new theme 'c,' and then we had that little 'd' that led back in to 'c.' Hopefully we're getting better at listening for those things. I didn't point it so I gave you a chance to do that. Now we're going back to the minuet, this time without the repeats! (music playing) And you notice that there's no coda on that. We went back and played exactly what we had at the beginning, so there's no need for a coda. We are now at the bottom of that. So that's our minuet movement. Now we're going to go back to that last movement and go back to something allegro again!