Toccata

The song starts out with a lot of fast notes with lots of dissonance. The melody is very unorthodox. It has phrases that come back and such, but the tune is not catchy like melodies normally are. After a while of this, the song resolves to a sort of modal melody that I could not decipher just by listening. It was probably dorian or mixolydian or something. It then reaches this segment of very peculiar noises where the composer probably just found different things that he could do on the piano and put them all in a song. I think it’s purpose was to keep the audience on edge and to transition to the next part. The next part seems to alternate between fast, separated notes and short and fast runs that sound a little dissonant. After this phase of the song it “rests” into a polyphonic texture melody. This means that there are two melodies going on at the same time. Music today tends to use homophonic texture, which means that there is one melody over very prominent chords.

My first listen to this, I was caught off guard. I was expecting…so to speak… an ACTUAL song. This piece was so different from anything I’ve ever heard somebody call music that I actually thought that pieces like this didn’t exist. I knew that people messed around with stuff like this but I never knew people actually COMPOSED stuff like this.

My first glance at the score, I was surprised at how many actual notes there were. But not because there were less than I thought, because there were MORE than what I thought. I was very surprised to see how the right hand was actually pretty busy and that the left hand actually had more than just banging on the strings inside the piano.

There are a couple things that I would use from this piece in my own compositions. First, I would analyze further the usage of polyphonic rhythms and harmonies. I’ve always been fascinated by how composers are able to have two complex things going on at once, but it still sounds together. The best way I can explain it is that they will use rhythms that line up nicely together or, when the rhythms are not nice like that, they use a repeated bass line call an ostinato so that when the melody gets more complex, the bass line doesn’t distract the listener from it.