Romantic Changes:
Exploring historical differences in the use of
articulation rate in major and minor keys
Matthew Poon
Michael Schutz
[email protected]
[email protected]
McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind
Method
Background
• Both speech and music use acoustic cues such as timing to communicate
emotion (Scherer, 1995)
• We have previously shown that within a corpus including Bach’s (WTC,
Book 1) and Chopin’s 24 piece sets of preludes, major key pieces are both
higher and faster than minor (Poon & Schutz, 2011).
• However, Chopin’s use of articulation rate differed markedly from Bach’s,
consistent with suggestions that Romantic era composers “reversed” their
use in major and minor keys (Ladinig & Huron, 2010; Post & Huron, 2009).
Figure 1: Example
from Chopin’s
Prelude no. 16,
showing how
articulation rate
was tallied and the
metronome
marking used.
m. 1=4 APS,
m. 2=10.667 APS
Results
Italy
12
Classical era
Articulations-per-second
France
France
Herz
(1825)
Kalkbrenner
(1827)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
France
France
Hungary
Hummel
(1815)
10
8
8
6
6
4
4
2
2
Major
Minor
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
0
8
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Poland
12
12
Romantic era
(all 5 sets)
10
Articulations-per-second
Italy
Concone
(1820+)
Clementi*
(1811)
12
(all 5 sets)
10
Hungary
Kessler
(1835)
10
8
8
6
6
4
4
2
Major
Minor
0
Italy
Alkan
(1847)
Heller
(1851)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Chopin
(1839)
Busoni (1881)
2
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Measure number
Figure 2: Summaries of the articulation rates by era (two left panels), along with data from individual sets (right panels). While the Classical-era sets consistently show that major-key pieces are faster than minor-key pieces, Romantic era sets do not – in fact, some of the
Romantic-era sets show that the minor-key pieces are faster than the major key pieces. Error bars indicate 1-standard error
* Many of Clementi’s preludes were less than eight measures long, and subsequently there is not enough data to show any meaningful results beyond measure 6
+ Beuerman (2003) placed the writing of Concone’s Preludes between those of Hummel and Herz, but the exact date of composition is unknown
Conclusions
• Our results extend previous work showing that although major Classical music is faster than minor, the opposite is true for Romantic era
music (Post & Huron, 2009) by providing a rigorous, measure-by-measure illustration of this across 10 sets of piano preludes.
• Both Ladinig & Huron (2010) and Post & Huron (2009) hypothesize that the Sturm und Drang movement that occurred between Classical
and Romantic eras may be a possible reason for this reversal.
• In music, Sturm und Drang was a movement characterized by extreme emotional expression. Some of these expressions, such as
seriousness or drama, are also generally portrayed using the minor mode (Hevner, 1935).
• For more information on this ongoing project, visit us online at www.maplelab.net/overview/music-and-emotion
Selected References
Beuerman, E. (2003). The evolution of the twenty-four prelude set for piano. D.M.A. dissertation. University of Arizona.
Hevner, K. (1935). The affective character of the major and minor modes in music. American Journal of Psychology, 47, pp. 103-118.
Ladinig, O., & Huron, D. (2010). Dynamic levels in Classical and Romantic keyboard music: Effect of musical mode. Empirical
Musicology Review, 5(2), pp. 61.
Poon, M. & Schutz, M. (2011, August). The Emotional Piano: Exploring Pitch Height and Articulation Rate in Major and Minor Keys.
In P. Q. Pfordresher (Chair), Society of Music Perception and Cognition, Rochester, NY.
Post, O., & Huron, D. (2009). Western classical music in the minor mode is slower (except in the Romantic period). Empirical
Musicology Review, 4(1), pp. 1-2.
Scherer, K. (1995). Expression of emotion in voice and music. Journal of Voice, 9(3), pp. 235-248.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part through NSERC (RGPIN/386603-2010), Ontario Early
Researcher Award (ER10-07-195), Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and McMaster Arts
Research Board grants to Dr. Michael Schutz; as well as a Humanities Undergraduate Student
Research Award (2011), and NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award (2012) to
Matthew Poon.