Thinking About Music: John Paul Ito

• Thinking About Music Lecture Series •
OLD AND NEW SURPRISES OF COMMON TIME: HOW BACH AND VIVALDI USED COMMON TIME DIFFERENTLY AND WHY WE CARE

John Paul Ito, Associate Professor of Music Theory from Carnegie Mellon University

Baroque composers often used common time as pairs of 2/4 measures, with beats one and three equally strong and each just as good for starting a melody. If a theme in a Vivaldi concerto shifts between starting on beat one and beat three, this is business as usual, not something to “bring out” in performance. This is old news for musicologists, but fresh for many performers. What the musicologists don’t know is that statistical analysis puts Bach much closer to modern practice than Vivaldi. Vivaldi’s shifts are arbitrary, but Bach’s have meaning within larger patterns – patterns which performers can observe and inhabit.

Location: Baur Room
Admission: Free

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