I love music and am currently learning guitar so I found this very interesting and insightful. But to be quite honest, I didn’t really understand the part on musical notation and the shading meant to “indicate[s] passages of rhythm- meter correspondence.”

I seriously never realized how much goes into writing music. But some people are just musical- do they put all this thought into the details or does it just come naturally? “Composers can write cadences with all possible shades of solidarity and finality,” “Composers also take care to make sure some phrases contrast with their neighbors.” There are so many qualifications for good music and I never realized how much of a science it really is. But, for someone who can just write good music, do they think about all this as they’re writing it? Can there be an excellent composer who doesn’t know all this…?

In the reading, the author praises the quality of castrato voice and claims that “the castrato voice…more powerful and brilliant than a woman’s soprano”.  However, can a male spontaneously express a female’s emotion through his singing, since “opera’s ability to project emotion was the real basis of its appeal”?

“The singer would do more than just repeat A. He or she would also ornament the music with improvised runs, cadenzas, and so on, so as to create an exciting enhanced affect the second time around” (141). Can one of the reason that opera projects emotions so well be that the singers themselves are singing what they feel at that moment? They feel as though they are one with the drama unfolding so can the emotions in themselves be what the audience feels so attracted to?

• What effect does the “continuity” of the prelude have on the audience? (pg 5)
• Shout out to Ashley… pg 6 where it talks about musical form. Even a chaotic climax has a clear organization in music.
• Can we talk about the difference between relative duration and absolute duration?
• What is it that allows people to have perfect pitch?
• Is opera always dramatic and serious? Why did it start off as this in the first place?
• How do all the parts of music that we read about work together to portray such intense emotion?
• And weird question… but what came first, the music itself or the parts of music? How is it that a person that has no knowledge of those parts become amazing at it? Can you know the parts inside and out but be musically impaired (from a performance perspective)?

If the castrato voice was so prized, even more so than the female soprano, was it worth their sacrifice if they had to play women in all of their operas? Actually, was it even considered a step down for a man to play a woman? (142)

In Baroque Italian arias, “the composer wrote the music for A and B only, leaving the performers to do the rest” (141). Was this sort of freedom and responsibility usually granted to performers of the Baroque era?

The vocals of opera are stronger and there is a greater emphasis placed on their technique when compared to a typical musical theatre show (140).  How does the acting in an opera compare?  Is there just as much emphasis placed on acting technique, or are vocals much more important?

I can’t access the pdf for “listen” so…

my question is can anybody else open it?

how can emotion be intensified by vocal virtuosity ?