Music for a while

MUSICAL ELEMENT

DETAILS

Organisation of pitch

·       Right hand harpsichord plays the melody

·       Left hand harpsichord plays the ground bass and acts as an accompaniment for the voice entering in bar 4

·       Soprano singer for the vocal line

·       Figured bass written in original score

·       Frequent ornaments:

-        Lower mordents:  Bars 1, 10, 11, 18, 24, 25

-        Upper mordents: Bars 11, 22, 36

-        Appoggiatura: Bars 2, 4, 35

-        Trills: Bar 13

-        Arpeggios: Bar 38

·       Imitation between the melody and vocal part e.g. falling 3 note phrase in bar 3 and again in bars 7 and 9

·       Ascending sequences e.g. bars 10-11 in the voice and harpsichord right hand

·       Descending sequences more common in the voice e.g. bar 13 in ‘eas’d’ and bars 23-25 in ‘drop’

·       Uses syllabic phrases e.g. ‘mu-sic’ in bar 4

·       Melody is most scalic with many passing notes

·       Lots of word painting e.g. ‘drop’ is a descending sequence in bars 24-25 and is also onomatopoeic and ‘eternal’ is drawn out into a long melisma in bars 19-21

Tonality

·       Key is A minor at the start and for most of the piece, the tonic…