Pitch and Dynamics
| High and low pitch and loud and soft dynamics are heard so instinctively that they hardly need illustration. Listen, however, to the vivid way they are deployed in one of the most famous of classical compositions, the “Unfinished” Symphony by Franz Schubert. Symphonies usually consist of four separate big segments, called movements; musicologists are still baffled as to why Schubert wrote two superb movements for this work and started but never finished the rest. | |||
| PITCH | DYNAMIC | ||
| 0:00 | Quiet and mysterious | Low range | pp |
| 0:15 | Rustling sounds | Middle range | |
| 0:22 | Wind instruments | High | |
| 0:35 | Single sharp accent | sf (sforzando, “forcing”) | |
| 0:47 | Gets louder | Higher instruments added | Long crescendo, leading to f, then ff, more accents |
| 1:07 | Sudden collapse | piano followed by diminuendo | |
| 1:15 | New tune | First low, then high | (Marked pp by Schubert, but usually played p or mp) |
| 1:52 | Cuts off sharply; big sound | ff, more accents | |
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(Similar pitch and dynamic effects for the rest of the excerpt) |
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| 3:07 | Sinking passage | Individual pitches, lower and lower | |
| 3:45 | Ominous | Lowest pitch of all | pp |