# Themes involving octaves



## Vachtangov (Jul 30, 2012)

I'm interested in finding more music that involves (prominently) octaves in the thematic material, preferably at a fast pace, from the 1600-1940 period. Here are the examples that I've found myself:
1. Mozart's 29th symphony, opening theme. Downwards octave leap as the main motive.
2. Beethoven's 13th piano sonata (E flat major), second movement. Rapid register changes by octave. (My favorite Beethoven piece, btw).
3. Schumann's op. 111 Fantasiestucke, 3rd piece, opening section. Again, register changes by octave. Since Schumann is well known for an inclination to motivically unite the different movements, it is perhaps also noteworthy that the Poco mosso section from the second op. 111 piece has rapid right-hand arpeggios that all either end or begin an octave below the right-hand melody.
4. My favorite: an episode from Massenet's "Thais" (Act 1), where the leading character is given a fashion makeover by two courtesans. Almost the entire 2 minute episode consists of little else than E in different octaves, with a brief syncopated D at the end of the bar. Once the singers start singing (the two girls sing a 6-times repeated E each in a different octave), the accompaniment is changed to include some more harmony notes, but in an inconspicious way.

As I said, I'm interested in the more-or-less traditional THEMATIC material, rather than developing passages in Beethoven's string quartets or non-tonal experiments by 20th century composers.


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## Delicious Manager (Jul 16, 2008)

Beethoven 9 - scherzo.
Mozart - Haffner Symphony, opening.


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

Do you mean octaves as in you have a melody doubled at the octave? or a melody with prominent octave leaps?


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## Vachtangov (Jul 30, 2012)

BurningDesire said:


> Do you mean octaves as in you have a melody doubled at the octave? or a melody with prominent octave leaps?


I'm interested in whatever puts the interval of the octave prominently in your ear, makes it sound special or interesting. It can be doubling at the octave if it sounds specific and interesting in some way (doubling which starts suddenly or breaks off somewhere unexpectedly, for example). Of course, mostly it's octave leaps I'm interested in.


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

Vachtangov said:


> I'm interested in whatever puts the interval of the octave prominently in your ear, makes it sound special or interesting. It can be doubling at the octave if it sounds specific and interesting in some way (doubling which starts suddenly or breaks off somewhere unexpectedly, for example). Of course, mostly it's octave leaps I'm interested in.


Well I must mention the first movement of Ligeti's Musica Ricercata then, which only uses 2 pitch classes (and the second one, D only appears as the last note). That means the entire rest of the piece is just the pitch A in various octaves. In this, Ligeti makes leaping from the same note to various octaves of it sound melodic :3 Its very cool~ and then we get a nice Sol-Do! ending. XD


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## Vachtangov (Jul 30, 2012)

Delicious Manager said:


> Beethoven 9 - scherzo.
> Mozart - Haffner Symphony, opening.


Damn, I have terrible ear. The 9th scherzo should've been obvious, I've always loved it. I have to say that I prefer how Mozart used the octave in the less famous 29th; in the Haffner it is more demonstrative, as in "Here's a very expressive leap", while in the 29th it is seamlessly integrated in the melody, which is what I'm particularly interested in.


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

I hope that's enough octaves for you.


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## Vachtangov (Jul 30, 2012)

That's certainly a cool piece to play for someone who has no musical ear and then go: It was all the same note!  But here's my reasoning: it is not that difficult to use octave leaps in a music where there are really no rules whatsoever. Like Scelsi for example wrote entire pieces on a single note, whether I understand his music or not (I don't) is not the point - the point is that in tonal or extended-tonal music using the octave in places which we hear as "the melody" presents specific obstacles and the composer has to find original solutions every time. So even such a cheap thing as a "catchy tune" would be a real compositional problem if you had to use an octave leap in it.


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## Jeremy Marchant (Mar 11, 2010)

Opening of the Vivaldi _Gloria_ RV589 - lots of octave Ds in the orchestra


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

Here's another piano piece that uses a lot of octaves (and I'm a little proud to say I play it myself): 
Richter plays Scriabin Op. 8 No. 5: 



Terrible interpretation of the same piece but with score


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## emiellucifuge (May 26, 2009)

The opening of Dvorak's Stabat mater consists of octaves. Quite effective in conveying a sense of emptiness.


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

Vachtangov said:


> That's certainly a cool piece to play for someone who has no musical ear and then go: It was all the same note!  But here's my reasoning: it is not that difficult to use octave leaps in a music where there are really no rules whatsoever. Like Scelsi for example wrote entire pieces on a single note, whether I understand his music or not (I don't) is not the point - the point is that in tonal or extended-tonal music using the octave in places which we hear as "the melody" presents specific obstacles and the composer has to find original solutions every time. So even such a cheap thing as a "catchy tune" would be a real compositional problem if you had to use an octave leap in it.


who says there's no rules in Ligeti?  Besides, most of Ricercata is modal, or tonal. That movement implies tonality, ending with a V-I, and to me only using one pitch class presents the problem of making it interesting and beautiful with such minimal material. You can't rely on harmonic nor melodic tension, so you must turn to things that are usually considered secondarily, as in rhythm, timbre and register (those go hand in hand with this piece), and dynamics. I get what you mean about it being difficult to make a coherent melodic phrase with huge leaps, but plenty of composers have done such things with huge leaps, and thats only counting modal and tonal writers like Chopin, Debussy, Ives and Zappa. 

Oh! a good example just came to mind~






and there's also plenty of colorful, expressive use of the octave in the music of Ives, especially this sonata:


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## Vachtangov (Jul 30, 2012)

BurningDesire said:


> who says there's no rules in Ligeti?  Besides, most of Ricercata is modal, or tonal. That movement implies tonality, ending with a V-I, and to me only using one pitch class presents the problem of making it interesting and beautiful with such minimal material. You can't rely on harmonic nor melodic tension, so you must turn to things that are usually considered secondarily, as in rhythm, timbre and register (those go hand in hand with this piece), and dynamics. I get what you mean about it being difficult to make a coherent melodic phrase with huge leaps, but plenty of composers have done such things with huge leaps, and thats only counting modal and tonal writers like Chopin, Debussy, Ives and Zappa.


I'll have to engage in a bit of a polemic here. I did like the Ligeti piece but I can't accept the notion that it (or Ligeti's music in general) has "rules" in the sense of something defined from outside that you have to "deal with" compositionally. I dislike serialism, but at least that system does present a set of rules; whereas Bartok, Ligeti, Ives (Debussy in his piano pieces too) invented rules for themselves as suited them at any particular moment and that is a wild contradiction of the definition of "rules". Obviously, if you set up a musical problem for yourself (like using only one pitch class), then regardless of the presence or absence of any rules the main criteria for the solution is that it gives the listener pleasure; but here's the problem - you can't actually claim that the Ricercata piece will sound like anything else but "difficult music" to the layman - it's not like Ligeti managed to make it sound like a Gershwin tune or a Strauss waltz. If you've "trained" yourself to like Ligeti or post-war music in general, you will like this piece; but it's not appealing to the "universal mind", to the native musical faculty which only likes either "simple music" or music that is clever enough to camouflage its cleverness as simplicity. To write clever music which sounds simple is to write double clever music. That's what I'm interested in. 
And I also don't agree with the idea that an octave is just one of several possible big leaps, it's a totally special case. I think it was Debussy who had his ideas about scales that exceeded the octave but to my mind the octave is always a sort of a structural full stop, a negation of normal melodic movement. It's not like a repetition of a note (which is perfectly melodical), it's a sort of a "turning in" into the note, sort of a "navel gazing" motion. That's why it's particularly difficult to use melodically, and each succesful case where that has been done, where the aforementioned native musical capacity is "fooled" to hear the octave leap as normal melodic movement, always requires a particular kind of musical genius which in our days unfortunately has been lost due to the notion "simple"="stupid".


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## Lunasong (Mar 15, 2011)

Haydn's "Hornsignal" Symphony # 31 has a prominent octave in the _Allegro_ movement.


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## Vachtangov (Jul 30, 2012)

Lunasong said:


> Haydn's "Hornsignal" Symphony # 31 has a prominent octave in the _Allegro_ movement.


The posthorn signal was apparently a falling octave. Bach used it in the Capriccio sopra la lontananza... where there is a posthorn aria and a fugue on posthorn octaves.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

The opening choir motif of Bruckner's Te Deum has an effective octave drop, especially with the whole choir singing in unison.


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## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

Bach, Art of the Fugue, Contrapunctus 9 begins with an upward octave leap.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Vachtangov said:


> I'll have to engage in a bit of a polemic here. I did like the Ligeti piece but I can't accept the notion that it (or Ligeti's music in general) has "rules" in the sense of something defined from outside that you have to "deal with" compositionally. I dislike serialism, but at least that system does present a set of rules; whereas Bartok, Ligeti, Ives (Debussy in his piano pieces too) invented rules for themselves as suited them at any particular moment and that is a wild contradiction of the definition of "rules". Obviously, if you set up a musical problem for yourself (like using only one pitch class), then regardless of the presence or absence of any rules the main criteria for the solution is that it gives the listener pleasure; but here's the problem - you can't actually claim that the Ricercata piece will sound like anything else but "difficult music" to the layman - it's not like Ligeti managed to make it sound like a Gershwin tune or a Strauss waltz. If you've "trained" yourself to like Ligeti or post-war music in general, you will like this piece; but it's not appealing to the "universal mind", to the native musical faculty which only likes either "simple music" or music that is clever enough to camouflage its cleverness as simplicity. To write clever music which sounds simple is to write double clever music. That's what I'm interested in.
> And I also don't agree with the idea that an octave is just one of several possible big leaps, it's a totally special case. I think it was Debussy who had his ideas about scales that exceeded the octave but to my mind the octave is always a sort of a structural full stop, a negation of normal melodic movement. It's not like a repetition of a note (which is perfectly melodical), it's a sort of a "turning in" into the note, sort of a "navel gazing" motion. That's why it's particularly difficult to use melodically, and each succesful case where that has been done, where the aforementioned native musical capacity is "fooled" to hear the octave leap as normal melodic movement, always requires a particular kind of musical genius which in our days unfortunately has been lost due to the notion "simple"="stupid".


This part of your post is just a bunch of assertions, without a trace of objective meaning. The "universal mind", that sounds more like a new age thing... "clever enough to camouflage its cleverness as simplicity", I, sincerely, don't think that you are more clever because you 'camouflage your cleverness as simplicity'. You are clever or you are not. By the same logic, I can say "clever enough to camouflage its cleverness and simplicity as chaos", and I can claim that people who do that are really clever. I mean, since when 'simplicity' is representative of cleverness _in art_?. In mathematics, may be,... but in art?...
By your logic, a simple and clever piece of music is more clever than a clever and complex one. I don't think so.


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## Lisztian (Oct 10, 2011)

From 4:20


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## Vachtangov (Jul 30, 2012)

aleazk said:


> This part of your post is just a bunch of assertions, without a trace of objective meaning. The "universal mind", that sounds more like a new age thing... "clever enough to camouflage its cleverness as simplicity", I, sincerely, don't think that you are more clever because you 'camouflage your cleverness as simplicity'. You are clever or you are not. By the same logic, I can say "clever enough to camouflage its cleverness and simplicity as chaos", and I can claim that people who do that are really clever. I mean, since when 'simplicity' is representative of cleverness _in art_?. In mathematics, may be,... but in art?...
> By your logic, a simple and clever piece of music is more clever than a clever and complex one. I don't think so.


What I meant is that music of any complexity could and should be comprehensible to everyone - it should SOUND simple (I never said it should BE simple). I actually think that's almost a direct quote from something Mozart once said. Whatever complexity and originality you have for the connoisseurs, if you can make that same piece of music accessible to every normal person (without reducing the complexity in any way), then you have a double achievement. I could go the piano right now and compose a piece using the wildest discords imaginable and top it with a minuet melody using 11th and 13th leaps exclusively, and I'd post in on youtube and I could probably find someone crazy enough to like it. There's a whole lot of people in the world who are prepared to like something just because it drives other people up the wall. That's why I asked for examples from 1600-1940 because I didn't want to get into subjective judgements over composers and styles - in that period composers (Schoenberg excepting) were obliged to appeal to masses of at least nominal broad-ity, so whatever techniques they used were confirmed by a representative sample of listeners approving of the result.


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## Vachtangov (Jul 30, 2012)

Manxfeeder said:


> The opening choir motif of Bruckner's Te Deum has an effective octave drop, especially with the whole choir singing in unison.


In all the performances of Te deum that I've heard the syllable "mus" (te deum laudamus) where the octave drop occurs is almost completely inaudible!


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Vachtangov said:


> In all the performances of Te deum that I've heard the syllable "mus" (te deum laudamus) where the octave drop occurs is almost completely inaudible!


That may be why Bruckner has the brass following along in unison.


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## Vachtangov (Jul 30, 2012)

Manxfeeder said:


> That may be why Bruckner has the brass following along in unison.


He has timpani, bassoons, an organ, cellos and basses playing the note towards which the octave drop occurs from at least 2 bars before. The combined overtones from all these make the octave leap difficult to notice.


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

Vachtangov said:


> What I meant is that music of any complexity could and should be comprehensible to everyone - it should SOUND simple (I never said it should BE simple). I actually think that's almost a direct quote from something Mozart once said. Whatever complexity and originality you have for the connoisseurs, if you can make that same piece of music accessible to every normal person (without reducing the complexity in any way), then you have a double achievement. I could go the piano right now and compose a piece using the wildest discords imaginable and top it with a minuet melody using 11th and 13th leaps exclusively, and I'd post in on youtube and I could probably find someone crazy enough to like it. There's a whole lot of people in the world who are prepared to like something just because it drives other people up the wall. That's why I asked for examples from 1600-1940 because I didn't want to get into subjective judgements over composers and styles - in that period composers (Schoenberg excepting) were obliged to appeal to masses of at least nominal broad-ity, so whatever techniques they used were confirmed by a representative sample of listeners approving of the result.


Why _should_ it have to sound simple? People can comprehend complex ideas, even in music. I like that there's the full gamut of beautiful music: complex ideas that are masked in simplicity, simple ideas shown in complexity, complex ideas presented complexly, and simple ideas presented simply, and none is inherently better or worse than the other.


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

Also, another example: Over the Rainbow composed by Harold Arlen.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Vachtangov said:


> He has timpani, bassoons, an organ, cellos and basses playing the note towards which the octave drop occurs from at least 2 bars before. The combined overtones from all these make the octave leap difficult to notice.


That's weird; I've never had that problem. But I tend to hone in on brass parts.


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## Hausmusik (May 13, 2012)

John Williams is fond of them. The _Star Wars_ main theme is just a deferred octave (it jumps a fifth, them a descending cadance before it leaps to the octave: Do, Sol, Fa-Mi-Re-DO, Sol, Fa-Mi-Re-DO, etc.) and the little theme the spaceship plays in _Close Encounters_ features a downward octave leap.


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## Vachtangov (Jul 30, 2012)

Manxfeeder said:


> That's weird; I've never had that problem. But I tend to hone in on brass parts.


Of course, you might also have a better stereo than I  But I personally don't approve of Bruckner's instrumentation methods. His insistence on using the bass tuba as the bass for the trombone group (there's a special trombone for that) is just one of the examples of his throw-everything-at-them-and-see-what-sticks approach. Love his music, but not the orchestration.


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## Vachtangov (Jul 30, 2012)

Hausmusik said:


> John Williams is fond of them. The _Star Wars_ main theme is just a deferred octave (it jumps a fifth, them a descending cadance before it leaps to the octave: Do, Sol, Fa-Mi-Re-DO, Sol, Fa-Mi-Re-DO, etc.) and the little theme the spaceship plays in _Close Encounters_ features a downward octave leap.


Can't agree with your analysis - I think it's a I-II7 progression, and that's a seventh leap. Or, alternatively, I-V7-I (the leap is from the fifth of V to root of tonic with a preceding slightly unusual stepwise descent from 7th), followed by II, which is a perfectly normal T-D-T-S progression.


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## Vachtangov (Jul 30, 2012)

BurningDesire said:


> Why _should_ it have to sound simple? People can comprehend complex ideas, even in music. I like that there's the full gamut of beautiful music: complex ideas that are masked in simplicity, simple ideas shown in complexity, complex ideas presented complexly, and simple ideas presented simply, and none is inherently better or worse than the other.


But I'm not making any judgement here, it's just that I personally (as an amateur composer) am interested in the specific compositional techniques of balancing your expression rather that in unfettered expression.


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## Ramako (Apr 28, 2012)

I recently posted this elsewhere - "The free arts and the beautiful science of composition will not tolerate technical chains. The mind and soul must be free." Joseph Haydn


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## Hausmusik (May 13, 2012)

Vachtangov said:


> Can't agree with your analysis - I think it's a I-II7 progression, and that's a seventh leap. Or, alternatively, I-V7-I (the leap is from the fifth of V to root of tonic with a preceding slightly unusual stepwise descent from 7th), followed by II, which is a perfectly normal T-D-T-S progression.


As you wish.


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## drpraetorus (Aug 9, 2012)

Tara's theme from Gone With the Wind


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Prokofiev, who composed only tonal music, IS "Mr. Octave Leap" in both thematic material and the rest of the musical fabric -- absolutely one of his most favorite gestures, tricks, devices.

Try any one of the piano concerti, Symphonies, etc.


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## jalex (Aug 21, 2011)

Duplicate.


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## jalex (Aug 21, 2011)

Mahler #10 movement 1 adagio theme begins with an ascending octave jump.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Vachtangov said:


> That's certainly a cool piece to play for someone who has no musical ear and then go: It was all the same note!  But here's my reasoning: it is not that difficult to use octave leaps in a music where there are really no rules whatsoever. Like Scelsi for example wrote entire pieces on a single note, whether I understand his music or not (I don't) is not the point - the point is that in tonal or extended-tonal music using the octave in places which we hear as "the melody" presents specific obstacles and the composer has to find original solutions every time. So even such a cheap thing as a "catchy tune" would be a real compositional problem if you had to use an octave leap in it.


You are laboring under a grievously crippling handicap if you have assumed music composition, from any era, has or had 'rules.'


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## MaestroViolinist (May 22, 2012)

The March from Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges has quite a lot of octaves in it, I think... It's been a while since I've heard it.


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

PetrB said:


> You are laboring under a grievously crippling handicap if you have assumed music composition, from any era, has or had 'rules.'


There have been certain rules, such as the limitations of contrapuntal complexity placed on composers like Palestrina and his contemporaries, or the codification of voice leading and tonal writing that strongly governed composers up until the end of the 19th Century. Then there's the rules of the 12-tone system, which can be pretty strict, and the limitations put on composers in totalitarian states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. And most composers follow their own self-imposed rules, to help them organize their ideas.


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