Comparing The Responsorium And Introitus

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Music is an art that seems subjective. After all, some like classical music, others like pop, and some even enjoy country. Different genres and pieces of music appeal to different people, dependent on the tastes of the individual. However, there is a sort of musical standard that must be upheld, for a collection of random pitches without pattern or cohesion can hardly be called music as it is currently understood. There must be a certain order to a piece, though the order does not have to be universal. Old Gregorian chant pieces, such as Responsorium: Libera me, do not necessarily follow a specific time signature, and don’t even use the same scale as that which is most recognized today. Another piece, Introitus from St. Matthew’s Passion by …show more content…

Where the Responsorium is simple, Introitus is complex. Both songs are pleasant in their own right, but Introitus has more depth in sound. Because Introitus has those extra layers, not simply in the form of multiple voices, but also in using dissonance in a way that sounds beautiful, the listener hears something that is more alive. There is a beauty in what isn’t perfect, and Introitus shows that. There are moments in which the voices do not sound together smoothly, but that still is better than the Responsorium, where there isn’t even possibility for dissonance. There is no room for the ingenuity required to make multiple distinct voices come together, because the Responsorium in only one line, and one voice. There is an excitement in multiplicity. For, just as life is boring without other people, music is boring without other voices. The same can be said about dissonance. No one is perfect, so why should music be? Music should tell a story, and stories have moments of light and dark, high and slow, excitement and melancholy. No one wants to read a story where nothing happens, and no one wants to listen to music that has no life. That’s what makes a piece profound and rich. It’s the beauty of imperfection, the depth of the ugly, where the most intriguing pieces of music come from, and that is exactly what Schütz accomplishes in

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