The idea
Greg told you that you have consistency and that your music lacks movement. This lesson is the first half of the fix. It is about what an idea has to be in order to move at all.
Source course, Lesson 3 draws the line: a melody is a complete statement, a motive is a fragment, a seed, a cell. "Its incompleteness is precisely what makes it generative." A melody resists development; take a sixteen-bar melody and try to develop it and you break it into motives first.
Two things give a motive its identity: interval content and rhythmic profile. The course's most useful rule is counterintuitive. The simpler and more distinctive the motive, the greater its generative potential. A complex motive has too many features, and the listener cannot track which transformations preserve identity.
You already do this without knowing it. In your lesson you played a three-note fragment of a video-game theme and Greg developed it with you. That fragment was a motive. What you have never done is take one deliberately and stay with it for four minutes.
Watch
Motivic Development???
- The setup at [00:33]: define a cell of exactly three notes. His example is a half step plus a whole step.
- At [00:44] the restriction: solo through the whole tune using only that cell, out of time, "so you can actually explore."
- At [00:59] the procedure for each chord: look at the chord, decide where the cell should land, land on a chord tone rather than an upper extension, then work backward to find the approach.
- At [01:31] the freedom inside the restriction: the cell can be inverted and reordered, up or down, "as long as you're landing on the chord tones when you want to land on."
- At [02:47] the two payoffs, which are the two halves of your problem: foresight about where you are landing, and consistent material to get there.
- At [03:08] the failure mode it cures: "flying all over the place and doing all these things, using vocabulary that says nothing because you're not developing any musical ideas."
How to Transcribe and Study a Line on Piano
- The full procedure Greg dictates: transcribe it, analyze it, work out why it is great, pick one piece of it, learn it hands separately and in octaves and hands together, dissect the chords, break out separate ideas, flip each idea on its head in time, then all of that through all twelve keys by half step, then flip it harmonically and do all keys again.
- His analysis method worth stealing this week: mark the highest and lowest notes of the line as focal points, then look for the half-step chains linking the interior notes. He finds two interlocking lines inside one single-note phrase.
- The octave-displacement observation: the phrase's last note is a half step above its first note, an octave down, "and the brain connects these two notes." He adds the necessary caution: "these are not things that he's thinking of consciously when he's playing it, I'm sure, but they are intuitive reasons that it sounds great."
- Interruption as a device: a descent from G to G flat, mimicked as C to B, with the root F inserted in between before resolving. He names it as motivic development and generalizes it: "it works on a micro level and a macro level."
5 solos every pianist should transcribe
- Watch only the Keith Jarrett section, where Greg's study method is the exercise for this lesson: "I wrote it out on paper and then I looked for the motivic development, circled it, did lines through the progression, found similar cells of different ideas."
Listen
Bach, Fugue in C minor, WTC I, BWV 847.
Correction first, because you will read the wrong version elsewhere. The source course's prose description of this subject is inaccurate, and so is the version that circulates with an eighth rest inside the subject. The rest comes before the subject, not inside it. The alto is silent for one eighth, then plays, in one continuous figure: C, B natural, C, G, A flat, C, B natural, C, D, landing on G at the start of bar two. Every pitch and bar number in this lesson was checked in the Humdrum digital edition, kern/wtc1f02.krn at https://github.com/humdrum-tools/bach-wtc-fugues, which follows the Bach-Gesellschaft text. Check it yourself before taking anything on trust, including this sentence. Score facts come from scores.
Pass 1. The opening statement alone. Its most audible feature is the contrast between the held opening and the rapid motion after it, which Source course, Lesson 3 calls "the motive's fingerprint."
Pass 2. The entries. Alto in bar 1, soprano with the answer in bar 3, bass in bar 7. The bass entry is late, and the delay is the first structural decision in the piece. Some accounts, including the source course, put the bass in bar 3. The score does not.
Pass 5. Hunt transformations, and hunt them honestly. This fugue has no inversion and no stretto of complete entries. What it has is fragmentation. The episodes at bars 9 and 22 run on the subject's head alone, two voices half a bar apart, which is where the stretto story comes from. The full entry map is alto 1, soprano 3 (answer), bass 7, alto 15 (answer), soprano 20, bass 26, soprano 29 over a tonic pedal. All of it comes from two bars, which is why the piece is in this module.
Sonny Rollins, "St. Thomas" (Saxophone Colossus, 1956). The course calls this one of the great demonstrations of motivic development in jazz. Rollins opens close to the melody with a short, rhythmically simple figure. That is the seed. He then transposes it, displaces it across the barline, extends it, contracts it to its opening interval, and inverts the contour. At every point you can hear the relationship between what he plays now and what he played before. Listen five times and, on the fifth, call out each transformation as it happens.
Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, first movement. Listen for the claim the course makes about the second theme: the lyrical contrasting theme is built from the same rhythmic cell, short-short-short-long, embedded in a longer line.
Meshuggah, "Lethargica" and "Pineal Gland Optics" (obZen, 2008), riff entries. Lucas documents both as rotated riffs beginning in media res: the riff's durational pattern is arranged so the loop sounds as if it starts mid-phrase, which forces you to re-orient and blurs the segment boundary. Listen to each riff entry ten times and try to decide where the riff "begins." You will not settle it, and that is the composed effect.
Between the Buried and Me, Parallax II: Future Sequence (2012). Hannan's conference paper argues that material returns across riffs, songs, and the whole album, and that when it returns it tends to be expanded. Listen across tracks rather than within one. This is a conference paper rather than a peer-reviewed article, so hold the claim at that weight.
The comparison
The parallel, stated exactly. A fugue subject and a metal riff are both short, both defined by interval content plus rhythmic profile, and both are subjected to systematic operations that preserve some features while altering others. The course's own summary of Rollins is the bridge: what Rollins does in the moment over three minutes is structurally identical to what Bach does on paper over five. Add Meshuggah and the same sentence still holds, with rotation as the operation.
Where it breaks, in three places.
Retrograde behaves differently. The course is candid that retrograde is more common in post-tonal music than tonal, "because in a tonal context the reversed motive often sounds completely unrelated to the original." In a riff idiom with no functional harmony it survives much better, because there is no tonal syntax to scramble. Here the modern idiom is friendlier to a classical operation than the classical idiom is.
Rotation is not a fugal operation at all. Lucas's rotated riffs are none of the eight techniques. They change where the cycle is considered to begin, with the note content unchanged. Bach never needs this, because a fugue subject enters against a metrical frame that says where it starts. A looped riff over a fixed 4/4 grid has no such guarantee, so the starting point becomes a free parameter and therefore a compositional one. Add rotation as a ninth technique, specific to loop-based music.
Expansion on return is the modern default, and Bach's is not. Hannan's finding on BTBAM is that returning material tends to come back larger. Bach's returns are usually the same size in a new key or a new voice. Both are development, and they produce opposite formal shapes: Bach accumulates by density of entries, this repertoire accumulates by length.
The operation that changes no notes at all. Rotation moves where a cycle is heard to begin. Grouping dissonance goes one step further and changes nothing whatever about the pattern, only how it is grouped against a fixed meter. Brad Osborn documents it in Radiohead as one of five rhythmic techniques, and his own examples are "Weird Fishes" (2007) and "Lotus Flower" (2011). Put "Weird Fishes" next to a rotated Meshuggah riff and hear the difference: Lucas's rotation asks you to find a new downbeat inside an unchanged loop, while Osborn's grouping dissonance keeps the downbeat and makes the pattern refuse to line up with it. Both are transformations in the sense this lesson means. Neither is available to Bach, because both need a fixed grid that the material can argue with. Add grouping dissonance as a tenth technique.
Held to the same standard, one honest gap. Tool is the band most often named in discussions of motivic and metric design in this genre, and this curriculum's research found no peer-reviewed metric analysis of any Tool track with stated locations. The widely quoted meter-change tallies for "Schism" are fan counts. There is one lead worth following: Tool appears in the corpus of Osborn's article on terminally climactic form, which is a claim about how songs end rather than about meter. Start there, then transcribe the rest yourself and label it as your transcription.
At the piano
The cell. The course's cell is C, D flat, F, a minor second and a perfect fourth. Source course, Exercise 3.1 asks for twenty minutes on it.
Order of work:
- Transposition through all twelve pitch levels: C, D flat, F, then C sharp, D, F sharp, onward.
- Inversion: C, B, G. Then transpose the inversion.
- Retrograde: F, D flat, C.
- Augmentation, each note held two beats. Diminution, each note as short as you can.
- Combinations. The inversion in augmentation. Fragment it: the opening minor second alone, sequenced upward, then the fourth sequenced downward.
- Intervallic expansion: C to D to G. Contraction: C to D flat to D.
The course sets a count. Fewer than twenty distinct ideas from three notes means you have not exhausted it. More than thirty means you are starting to think motivically.
Hands. Right hand alone first. Then left alone, slower, which will be uncomfortable and is the point. Then hands in octaves. Counterpoint between the hands waits for L4.
The Bach. Play the BWV 847 subject slowly, from the score, naming each interval out loud. Then find it in the other voices. Source course, Exercise 3.2 warns you not to expect to finish this in one sitting.
Exercises
1. Twenty minutes on three notes
Do. The full ladder above on the cell C, D flat, F. Count the distinct ideas you generate and write the count down.
Done when: Your count is above twenty and you can play any five of the ideas on request without hunting.
2. The Greg cell restriction
Do. Choose your own three-note cell. Solo through "Autumn Leaves" out of time, using only those three pitch classes in any order or octave, landing on a chord tone of each chord. Name the target chord tone out loud before you play the chord.
Done when: You get through the full form without adding a fourth pitch class, and you can state the goal note one chord ahead of where you are playing.
3. Trace the subject
Do. With the score of BWV 847, mark every entry of the subject: which voice, which bar, whether it is the subject or the tonal answer, and whether it is complete or a head fragment. Mark the two episodes that run on the head alone.
Done when: Your marked score accounts for all seven complete entries and you can say why the words "inverted" and "in stretto" do not appear anywhere on it. You can play the subject in any of the three voices' registers from memory.
4. The Rollins call-out
Do. Play the "St. Thomas" solo five times. On the fifth, call out each transformation in real time.
Done when: You can name at least four different transformations and point to where each one happens.
5. Rotation by hand
Do. Take a six-note riff of your own. Write out all six rotations of it, each starting on a different note of the cycle, and play each rotation as a loop over a click.
Done when: You can play any of the six on request and say which one sounds most like it starts mid-phrase.
Compose
Still no original composition. The output is a transcription, chosen so the analysis is the assignment.
The assignment. Transcribe sixteen bars of Keith Jarrett's solo on "The Way You Look Tonight," starting from about 1:04, where Greg says the solo begins.
Constraints:
- Right hand only.
- Work at 50 percent, learning the end of each four-bar chunk first and extending backward.
- Write it by hand. Then, on that page, do the Jarrett method: circle the motivic development, draw lines through the progression, mark the similar cells.
- Finish with one page answering three questions. What is the seed cell? Which of the eight techniques does he use on it, and where? Does anything return expanded, in Hannan's sense?
If sixteen bars is too much this fortnight, transcribe eight and analyze those properly. A fully analyzed eight beats an unanalyzed sixteen.
Checkpoint
Before L4:
- Twenty or more distinct ideas generated from the cell C, D flat, F, with the count written down.
- A full chorus of "Autumn Leaves" soloed out of time on one three-note cell, goal notes named one chord ahead.
- BWV 847 subject played from the score, correctly, with the eighth rest before it rather than inside it, and traced through all seven entries on a marked score.
- Four transformations named in real time during the Rollins solo.
- Six rotations of your own riff, playable on request.
- Eight to sixteen bars of Jarrett transcribed, handwritten, with cells circled and the three questions answered.
Read
- Source course, Lesson 3. The eight techniques, and the Wolpe pitch-class-set material on organic modes, which returns in L29.
- The score of BWV 847. Freely available and, as the course says, it should be part of your permanent library. Read the subject off the page before you read anyone's prose about it.
- Lucas 2018, Music Theory Online 24/3. Read the sections on "Lethargica" and "Pineal Gland Optics," on rotated riffs and beginnings in media res. https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.18.24.3/mto.18.24.3.lucas.html
- Hannan, 'Rotation Through Cycles' (Progect, 2021). A conference paper on expanding repetition across Parallax II. Take the album-scale idea and hold it at conference-paper weight.