When a Baroque Composer Invented POLYCHORDS 200 YEARS EARLY!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 พ.ย. 2022
- Jean-Féry Rebel (1666 - 1747) composed his ballet ‘Les Elemens’ in 1737. The first movement, from which the music in this video comes, is an unsettling depiction of chaos and feels as shocking as the famous polychord in Stravinsky’s ballet ‘The Rite of Spring’, written nearly 200 years later. Whereas Stravinsky’s ballet provoked a riot in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris on 29th May 1913, Rebel’s score was apparently greeted enthusiastically by a large audience at the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris on 17th March 1738.
MUSICAL EXCERPTS USED IN THIS VIDEO
Jean-Féry Rebel: Les Élémens: simphonie nouvelle pour ballet
1. Le Cahos.
Musica Antiqua Köln
Reinhard Goebel, conductor
links -
Original full recording - bit.ly/3OQNy3S
#polychords #baroque #musicprofessor
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Edited by Ian Coulter ( www.iancoultermusic.com )
Produced and directed by Ian Coulter
Truly a Rebel
Llllllk
0
from 1666...
Dammit, you beat me to it
this is where the word is derived from
@@javiermedina5313 The year that Isaac Newton invented gravity, and made the tones fall over....
If Bach was the heavy metal of his time then this guy is death metal.
Is the Author's point that Rebel was the founder of extreme rebellions against cloying sweetness music? For Bach, dissonance usually exemplifies the evils, trials, failures, everything sad and bad that is overcome with sublime harmonies: the opposite of valuing dissonance for its own sake.
@@777rogerf - interesting thought!
I find it funny how people say this and that guy were metalheads of their era... yet most metal groups can't develop their pieces beyond repeating the riff A 4x, then riff B 4x, ad nauseam. There's literally zero coherent development in metal music and it's a miracle when you can here at least the simplest of modulations. 😆
@@consonaadversaparsdepends on the sub genre of metal. More prog abs djent bands are more experimental. Thrash and death metal are still technical but can be a bit repetitive at times like you said.
@@emperorsheev5790 "Experimental" still doesn't mean those guys can compose. :) Like being a hollywood composer these doesn't mean you have to know how to actually compose...
In 1673 composer Heinrich Bieber wrote a piece called Battalia a 10 that has a section that is supposed to be soldiers playing their regional folk songs all at the same time. A very spectacle driven piece.
You have cleverly predicted the topic of our next video!
@@themusicprofessor it’s been a piece I’ve been enamored with since first listen.
@@oregontenor1237 - your comment is featured in our video about Biber's Battalia: th-cam.com/video/c66uGCSoBuA/w-d-xo.html
That legitimately frightened me. No joke, that chord is seriously distressing to listen to. Holy crap.
of course he was born in 1666 💀
LMAOO
I was about to comment the same!
The piece is called "Elements" and 1666 was the year of Great Fire
Bro is literally the definition of “😈”
I love baroque. So elegant and something-else.
The chord is laid out in a satisfying way. All the notes of D Harmonic minor, but drops the tonic an octave (prevents the chord from being muddy) & puts the leading tone under the supertonic. Submediant on top is spicy, especially being a half-step from the dominant. With the other instruments playing thirds you get more texture, additional clarity, & an easy way to play the extended chord. Also, since this is harmonically-advanced, especially compared to contemporary music, the simple rhythm stops the piece from being too cryptic.
His name was Rebel and he was born in 1666. What else should we expect? :p
This is why baroque is amazing
this ballet introduction wants to depict the chaos. baroque composers used to do that sometimes. It really sounds like 20th century!!
Thank you for this! As a Schnittke complete fan I very much like things like that
th-cam.com/video/NtGTJ6_KD2c/w-d-xo.html
Chad Schnittke enjoyer
Wagner: *Tristan chord*
Jean-Fery Rebel: 💣
It’s like the harmonic minor version of the “A Hard Day’s Night” chord
Look at that «i» chord. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a dominant V with a 9th above it...
my favorite comment ever
So crunchy!
Thank you Izzy. Seems an apt description!
This is definitely cool, but there is also a traditional Japanese instrument called a sho and it traditional only plays tone clusters!
Just discovered your channel and didn't find it when searched, but maybe you did mention him - Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer - is the one who came to my mind when listening to this. No less astounding. A Bach contemporary who would bring a heart of any metal head to melt ;)
His "Vertigo" sounds modern and as unexpected for us as this piece you showcase in this video. Or - my favorite - La Marche des Scythes played by Skip Sempé.
What a delicious chord! I already love this composer and this is all I've heard from him (yet). :)
Your animations are very good.
Rebel is beautiful, thank you! Спасибо за Ребеля, удивительный композитор!
Great and Nice Rebel! /...the chord closely resembles the Acciaccatura chords of Gasparini's basso continuo( " L'Armonico pratico al cimbalo" Venezia 1708 ) or the saturated tierce coulee chords of the "Preludes non mesure" for harpsichord.
Beautiful!
Really unsettling.
Stravinskian indeed. Putting the tonic and a dominant on top of each other. Check out the beginning of his Symphony in C. After the unison intro, the first chord is tonic+dominant, then dominant+secondary dominant, eg C+G and then G7+D7.
For the sake of the full picture: first, the chord describes Chaos, the thing that existed before anything else and that gave birth to everything that exists (gods, elements, you and me). The Chaos does NOT mean "total mess". Closer to the monotheistic understanding would be "the Cause" (But NOT Lord... in Greek's view, even the Lord would come out of Chaos). Indeed, as the chord contains all notes of the scale, it contains everything that exists, all music possible, written, unwritten, and to-be-written in that scale.
Then, Rebel uses this as an extreme form of dominant chord and indeed, it is resolved further into the piece, as depictions (or Leitmotiven in Wagnerian sense) of water, fire, earth and air appear. The rest of the music is utterly tonal, with no further wait-what effect
I appreciate that a guy your age keeps up with the memes of the day.
At this point, he is so much of a "Rebel" that it turned into a washing machine.
Rebel only used two more notes of the root together with its diminished dominant chord. The same chord without F and A is used by Bach in his Toccata BWV 565 short after the beginning. Root D together with C# E G Bb. This is an A7 with Bb instead of A together with its resolving root D from D-Minor. This is often used since the late Rennaissance until the romantic period (Chopin). To involve the two other notes from the d-minor chord creates the 7-tone chord of all notes of the harmonic d-minor scale: D E F G A Bb C#. That is the material from wich all the music will be build within d-minor, not chaos but the root of all the music. It only sounds chaotic for us and is meant by Rebel to show the creation of the universe.
Love the figured bass 234567# xD
It's a d minor triad and 4 non-chord tones that together make up a C# fully diminished 7th chord. And likely -- I say likely because I'm only hearing about Rebel's existence now -- used for some kind of dramatic support for some aspect of the plot of the ballet...
Correct. The notes of the minor scale are being presented as a vertical sonority which is itself a depiction of ‘chaos’.
Thank you - it's simply d minor with its associated diminished #7 chord, what's unusual is hearing them simultaneously rather than sequentially.
Buzzkill
@@ejb7969 ?!??
It's also an interesting exercise to try a Cowell-ish analysis and say we take A as the root of the two chords, where D minor forms below it the way subharmonics do, and above, following the harmonic series, A Major 9 - only the 9th is a semitone below the corresponding harmonic partial i believe -... Now it appears to spectacularly follow the logic predicted in his book "New musical resources" in the polyharmony chapter (i say predicted, but it seems someone beat Cowell to it by a couple centuries :P). Maybe it's this, intentional or not, acoustic soundness that makes it such a sweet chord (in my opinion).
The pulse really reminds me of Bartok especially the 4th string quartet.
The first time I listened to the this chord in "Cahos" I thought Schoenberg was too late.
Bro the editing is so funny
The stabbing scene from psycho
if someone presented this to me as shitpost I would 1000% believe it, the guy was born in 1666 and named rebel
I liked this chord
Well... He was born in 1 666... Ha ha ha, dad joke.
Yes, and if you calculate the number of bars they all add up to 666!! (actually they don’t!)
what was the musical context of this chord/ context explains much in most forms of creative art.
so what work did this come from and what preceded and followed it?
With a rebel yell he said more more more :)
rebel: la préfiguration est un dispositif littéraire qui --
Hitchcock likes this video.
That chord is an A7(13,b9) over a D root. So it is suspending the V7chord over the root of the I chord. Mozart did this a lot, but V7 chord did not have any extension notes. I do think it is rare for that time period to have a dominant 7 with a natural thirteen and flat 9. That chord implies the Half-Whole diminished scale. I hope this info is useful to some one! It does sound pretty crazy! I enjoyed the video and humor very much. Thanks for creating it.
This reminds me a bit to "Jaws".
I was stunned by Bach's use of the 3rd of the tonic under the dominant chord in his Fantasy and fugue in G minor. ie Bb under D chord, but now that I think way back, I was startled when I first realized Mozart put a G in the base of a D chord in Eine Kleine... Which is pretty mild really, almost expected. But the first time you taste even mild chilli, it burns, then you get addicted.
What must the harpsichordist have thought when he first saw the figured bass of the first chord?
I Knew it was him...I have one disc of his work..I haven't yet spent much time but I think of him as the end of baroque and the beginning of classic..
1:12 When you uncover a new new clue in LA Noir
What was the piece of music?? I want to listen to the whole thing!!
Take a look at the video description!
Most normal baroque repertoire in Ohio 💀
Hahahaha.
Distributing a chord across several timbres has a way of letting you get away with voicings that you might not accept on a single instrument.
I walked over to the keyboard and experimented a bit, revoicing to see whether I could find something which would have made some sense in the 18th Century.
Try D F A, C♯ E G B♭. It is a Stravinskyesque polychord, C♯dim7 over D minor, if you want to interpret it that way. However, that upper-extension dim7 chord would voice-lead quite nicely into the D minor itself. I could imagine Bach doing exactly that.
I followed the link to the full recording. To "resolve" this chord Rebel just takes the upper extensions away, giving us a monophonic melody line in D minor.
This is an unusually large appoggiatura chord, but it is an appoggiatura chord.
Excellent analysis!
This sounds like something out of a sequel to the horror movie, "Psycho"
I love your videos 🎵🤟
Thank you.
Hey I recognise that chord it's the "frustrated pianist" chord
Well spotted!
Aye, there’s the rub.
Thanks for digging up this tasty root vegetable!
0:13 "Catfish"
How about the discords in the motets of Carlo Gesualdo and even earlier (Renaissance) mannerist composer?
First time I listened to it I was utterly shocked. Sounds like Grisey, but three Centuries ahead/before!
Goopd to hear someone mention Grisey in the comments!
in jazz i use this harmonic minor sound often , like 251 .... DAFGBbC#E ,, DAEFAD,, GFCFAC ,, GFBEG#B to CEADGC
When I look at the harmonies of Scarlatti.... and realize they're from the 1600 & 1700s... 😭
If Schoenberg knew Bach
1:44
Best part of the video
VII(7) and I simultaneously. When you know that, it does't sound completely wrong.
Musical rules and standards of the time be like "I'm shocked by this 'Rebel'!
Could the James Bond chord have been inspired by it since the notes of the James Bond chord are C-Eb-G-B-D, and in it we have the root, minor third, perfect fifth, major seventh and major ninth, and in this chord the notes are C-Eb-G-B-D-F-Ab and in it we have the root, minor third, perfect fifth, major seventh, major ninth, eleventh, and minor sixteenth ?
Really interesting comment! I doubt that John Barry knew the piece actually, but it's true that the James Bond chord (C minor maj 7 + 9) sounds 'dangerous' because of its high dissonant content, although its sense of tonality is more straightforward than Rebel's chord which extends another diminished triad further
Nowadays: "That time Dua Lipa moved her hips".
Scarlatti K 119 and 175 also have clusters 😍
True!
interessante 🧐
There battles galore and Battle music... All composers "stole!" from each .. the arrpeggio theme from Beethoven's jEroica symphony vaguely from 9 year old
Mozart"s Tiny musical Bastien and Bastien . About witch craft
Pre Hairy Potter...
Stravinsky did help himself to catchy themes from Mozart.
Stravinsk audience was public
This guy was playing for experts
They were both writing for an audience.
Los franceses siempre adelantados.
I don't think I'd analyze it as a polychord, but I'm just analyzing till the first minute of this video: th-cam.com/video/41A9SzM06Uw/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=SP%27sscorevideos
The reason I wouldn't consider it as a polychord (again: I didn't sit through it and analyzed it thoroughly) is because it's just the harmonic minor scale of D being played harmonically, and I don't see it as chords of different functions or different tonalities/modes being played over each other, and a further ahead of this part he plays some melodic lines in the same scale, which makes me thing it's not really an overlapping of chords. Also, the bass being in D and being the most distant note of the set makes it standout, which shows me that D is indeed the fundamental. I'd like to hear if you have a different approach or perspective, I love debating about this stuff :)
Excellent observation there Caio. I’m not going to disagree with your brilliant assessment! The notes of the minor scale are being presented as a vertical sonority which is itself a depiction of ‘chaos’. There is a hint of (what we might nowadays term) polychordal construction in the way the chord is voiced in colliding thirds: B flat and G in the 1st violins, E and C sharp in the 2nd violins, A and F in the flutes. The figuring in the continuo part makes it clear that Rebel is thinking of all the notes of the minor scale sounding together. I think the real point I’m trying to make is that ballet music has always pushed musical parameters to extremes in its symbolic depiction of events on stage, in the 18th century no less than in the 20th.
@@themusicprofessor I'm not experienced with ballet music unfortunatly to agree or disagree with you, but it does make sense to me that in cases where music is working as a support to other artistic expressions (like ballet or movies) seems easier to apply some sonorities that otherwise wouldn't be acceptable by the aristocracy or the upper-class (which tended to reject the new or the different in music, often being called ugly). But I agree with you that most, if not all, modernism in music was based in something of the past, serialism was used in the Renaissance and Barroque periods, microtonalism was used before the equal temperament when there were keybords with more than 12 notes in an octave, Bach and Mozart had chromatic subjects in some pieces, Carlo Gesualdo in many pieces hahaha, etc. I love geting to know more compositions that shows my students that even in the past composers woudln't base themselves just in the theory, and that theory comes after art. If you have more examples of pieces of that "flee" from the conventional before late Romanticism, please share with me. :D
Alfred?
Dm-maj7b13?
Sounds like Tenet
chord
WTF ENDING AT 1:44?!?!?
Could be this a cluster instead of a polichord?
It could. A diatonic cluster. It contains the notes of the harmonic minor scale sounded together.
Dude. Look at the treble clefs. The way they're drawn makes it look like the first line is G.
Well spotted! They are drawn that way because the first line IS a G. In the Baroque era, composers often shifted the G clef down to that line. The manuscript of Bach's 48 also uses the clef in this position. So here the top staff is B flat and G, the 2nd stave (soprano clef) is E and C sharp, the third staff is A and F with a high Flute A coming in the 2nd bar. It's fascinating how differently notation worked in those days.
Clever stuff. Reminds me of the Alan Parsons Project's intrumental "the Fall of the house of Usher" at about 6:30 in. I think Andrew Powell wrote the score. Cleary influenced by your subject!
th-cam.com/video/Ni9HhLQJF0k/w-d-xo.html
perhaps so, Tudor, although the chords you mention also remind me (oddly) of the string chords in Nick Drake’s ‘River Man' which is not a scary song at all!.
@@themusicprofessor nothing new in music eh Matthew? Unless you count Mozart 🤣
Is this a half diminished 7th over the tonic? Crunchy though
It is indeed crunchy. It’s a diminshed 7th superimposed on top of a tonic triad (it contains all the notes of the D harmonic minor scale).
Sounds much more broke than truly Baroque
Maybe he was just tone-deaf.
Oh!, nice 50's horr... yes.
Big Deal! How does it resolve? Context? He was obviously going for as discordant and moment as possible in his time. Some shocking scene in a drama? So what? MacDuff's infants are thrown on to swords in Shakespeare hundreds of years earlier. Meh.
I hope I'm reading this correctly. Am I right in saying you're not impressed by this?
Hi. Not on its own. Like I say, what's the context? How does the drama lead up to this? Or resolve from it? Does it have a working out that makes tonal sense, or was it purely a discordant crash to shock the audience? "Invented" Polychords? I doubt it. I'm not familiar with this composer, but I'm associating polychords with cumulative pile ups like in Mahler 10 - 1st mvt. Or Debussy / Ravel. You had "HOW?!" in the thumbnail. So I clicked through expecting a narrative showing the 'How' - but all I got was the reiterated dischord in isolation. If it was in the middle of a Bach-style Canata - and made musical sense, then I'd be impressed. Contemporaneous Purcell is shiveringly impressive in the Cold Genius song from King Arthur. Anyone can make an ugly crunch - it's how it fits in and resolves is what makes it interesting. The Tristan chord on its own would also not make sense, but for its linear resolutions. Where does it come from? Where does it go? That's the How in harmony, surely. :)@@themusicprofessor
Nosferatu
🤣 Y'all be up in here clickbaiting J-F Rebel! 🤣
Nothing is above being clickbaited!
I LAUGHED SO HARD! HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHA OHGODITHURTS
It's just a +7 b6 delay except the resolution is played all the way instead of just having the bass
This video would have been way cooler if you just played the piece. 😞
Thanks Chad. When the role of channel creative consultant comes up, you really must apply for the job.
Fully agree, the editing is annoyingly amateur and the video doesn't even show the context of the piece. Yet this "professor" is being so snippy about it.
Nice video but I’d go a bit lighter with the edit, as it was very unsettling - way more unsettling than the actual music was. But of course still a good content.
its Satan!!
No madness, nothing Stravinskyan,... Plenty of French composers of that time experimented with clusters.
Thank you for your comment. There are certainly clusters before this (e.g. Biber) and contemporary ones in Scarlatti’s sonatas, but I can’t think of anything equivalent to this (sustained all-notes-of the-minor-scale clusters) among French composers of this period, but if you have examples, it would be fascinating to hear them.
bump (where are those examples lol)
This could be very interesting but your sensationalism spoils the point.
Would you like me to run the title past you before we post next time?
No, I mean it would be relevant to talk about the composer and explain what he did, since your video is supposedly dedicated to him, rather than showing your ability to create videos for Halloween, music teacher. Please teach.
Well, if you like Ravel you can't be a bad person.
And? ...
Sorry?
Bach did this in Toccata Fugue in D min , its not that new
Which point in the piece are you referring to?
Why is this surprising? People have been experimenting with sound forever
True, but it's still a surprising effect for the 1700s.
@@themusicprofessor I'm no expert in this subject, but I expect that in the 1700s it was difficult for music to be published. For all we know, composers had been experimenting with all sorts of things only to be thwarted at the last stage. We see only a fraction of what was tried, and we only see the efforts of those composers who were lucky enough or popular enough to be published.
I don't believe that we are any more enlightened in music now than people were back then. I think that there are fewer obstacles now.
I doubt yoy can find much (or any) evidence for your supposition. It's an interesting thought, but it adds nothing to the discussion.
@@ejb7969 Sure, that's the point. No publication means no evidence. Very hard to prove anything. At the same time, I don't think it's surprising to find one example of polychords from a baroque composer that was published.
@@simongross3122 You're unsurprised because you believe there were probably many other similar polychord experiments that were unpublished, and so it wasn't such a novel idea on Rebel's part.
I think that's an unprovable theory that devalues, without evudence, what most people believe was Rebel's originality in writing it.
It tears him down on a hypothetical surmise. It's destructive without adding anything useful to the discussion.
It's like saying that Beethoven could have been a space alien of merely average ability from among his far superior civilization. Without evidence, it's a worthless statement.