Another piece from the Bach Well Tempered Clavier, the Fugue in C minor BWV 847.
CD 160 121 in the Vienna Master Series put out by Pilz, entitled The Well-tempered Clavier Vol. 1/I, Christiane Jaccottet, harpsichordist
But post-Ring of Fire, sometime around 1690 someone just back from Havana might have written this:
Tu Conga Bach From Bach in Havana, by Tiempo Libre, put out by Sony.
Very different instrumentation, very different chords, very different rhythmic treatment of the same basic melody.
Here's a piece by Georg Friederich Handel, composer of Messiah, written around 1706. It is the Sarabande from the Harpsichord Suite in D Minor, as arranged for orchestra.
Sarabande from the Harpsichord Suite in D Minor, as arranged for orchestra, from Handel's Greatest Hits, various performers, put out by Sony.
Sometime around 1680, if you had attended a salon at the palace of the Medicis in Florence, you might have heard something like this.
Prayer in the Night, from the album The Opera Band, put out by Victor, performed by Amici Forever.
And then around 1650 in a tavern in Hamburg, you might have heard this:
The Wabash Cannonball, from the album Another Country, put out by RCA Victor, performed by Ricky Skaggs and The Chieftains.
Frederic Chopin wrote this in 1847:
Waltz No. 7 in C sharp minor, Opus 64 No. 2, from the album Chopin put out by Regency Music, performed by various artists.
However, a down-time composer might have produced something like this:
Waltz Opus 62 (Chopin) from the album The Natural, by Buddy Wachter, put out by Plectra Musica Profunda, Buddy Wachter (and it really is Opus 64 — that's a typo in the title)
The banjo has a very interesting history, which I'm not going to go into now, but if you're ever in Oklahoma City, I encourage you to go by the American Banjo Museum and check it out.
Around 1660, in southern Spain, a musician may be experimenting with that exotic instrument, the "u-ku-le-le", and he might put out something like this:
Google Jake Shimabukuro and look for Bohemian Rhapsody
And around the same time, a guitarist in Naples who had just taken delivery of his new up-time mature design guitar, might be trying it out with something like this:
Bohemian Rhapsody from the album Classical Demands by Edgar Cruz (Feel free to check him out at http://edgarcruz.com/)
(At this point we had a question from the audience about whether the down-timers had guitars before the Ring of Fire. The answer is yes, but they were very different from the mature up-time guitars. They were smaller in body and neck, there was no standardization of strings-luthiers would make them with anywhere from four to ten strings, often doubling them in octaves like an up-time twelve string-and the sound was softer and not as resonant.)
Earlier in the presentation there was a question from the audience about how they would use rock instruments with orchestra. I deferred the answer until this point in the presentation.
First sample of possible orchestra effects:
Opening of Pinball Wizard from Tommy, London Symphony Orchestra, put out by Essential Records, ESM CD 404.
Second sample:
Overture of the 2000 revival of Jesus Christ Superstar, put out by Sony.
Third sample:
The Call of Ktulu by Metallica from S amp;M concert album, put out by EMI, cd 62504-2.
Orchestra music will change a lot. Not just the guitars, but all the percussion.
And instrumentalists will think of things to do differently with their instruments, especially those who play the low register instruments. So maybe, one summer evening in Paris, you might be walking in a plaza and hear something like this from a group of musicians sitting off to one side:
Where the Streets Have No Name, by 2 Cellos, from the album 2 Cellos, put out by Sony.
The next topic up was serial music. (And yes, there is a standard joke about 'cereal' music, but it's hard to set up.)
Serial music is a style of composition that was developed in the early 20th century by Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna. It's more commonly known as 12-tone music. (When I asked for a show of hands for those who knew what serial music was, I got a lot fewer hands raised than when I asked for those who knew what 12-tone music was.)
There are twelve tones available within the span of a musical octave in Western music. If you take a piano keyboard and play every note up the keyboard from middle C to the B just before the next C, you'll play twelve tones.
The concept behind this school of serial music is rather simple. You take the twelve possible tones, and you arrange them in a pattern such that no one of the tones is repeated until every possible tone has been played.
In this text I can give you an example I couldn't give in the audio presentation, as I had no video capability.
Example: C-E-C#-F#-F-D-A-D#-B-A#-G-G#
You can play the row left to right, right to left, stack it vertically, or reverse stack it vertically. But the rule is you can't repeat, say, the F until you have played through the rest of the row and then started the row over again and played up to the F#.
Okay, back to the presentation.
You can write some good music doing this. The problem is, it is very rigid, and very formulaic. And a lot of composers latched on to it because once they create the row and its pattern, you don't have to exercise a lot of creativity. You just manipulate the row a few times, and you're done. They got lazy, and wrote a lot of second-rate music.
My personal opinion, there are four composers who wrote first rank twelve-tone music: Arnold Schoenberg, who created the concept; his disciples, Anton Webern and Alban Berg; and Aaron Copland.
Here's a sample of a twelve-tone row:
You'll have to listen to the podcast up at the top of the page, please.
For twelve-tone, that's not a half-bad melody.
What are the down-timers going to think about this? I think they're mostly going to think the whole idea of rigid serialism is silly. However, the idea of serial patterns in music is not unknown to them. They have musical forms that use repetition as part of the basis of musical works: forms like fugues, canons, chaconnes, and passacaglias. So they're going to look for works in the up-time music that exhibit repetition and serial techniques. And they're going to find things like this:
Ravel's Bolero, from Ravel — Bolero by Pierre Boulez and the Berliner Philharmoniker, put out by Deutsche Grammophon, cd G2-39859.
And this:
Mars, from Holst: The Planets by John Eliot Gardiner and The Philharmonia orchestra, put out by Deutsche Grammophon, cd G2-45860.
And this:
Money, by Pink Floyd, from the album Dark Side of the Moon, put out by Capitol.
All using serial techniques, whether melodic or rhythmic or both. And the Pink Floyd piece starts out in 7/4, to boot.
And then, back in that salon in Florence, you might have heard this one:
Senza Catene, from the album The Opera Band, put out by Victor, performed by Amici Forever.
I played the whole thing because I think, of all the clips I found, this was the single best example of the kind of thing that the down-timers will do in the first generation or two after the Ring of Fire. An up-time rock ballad, arranged in five-part Italian voicing. Wow. And Paula Goodlett's (Our Fair Editor) favorite song, at that.