Ländlers by Giuliani

Analysis

The Four Ländlers of Opus 80 were very rewarding to analyse. The chord base was simple and also the structure was clear. As a structural and harmonical base I chose Ländler 3. I divided it into four parts and searched the chord changes in each part.

The high-level structure of this context-free grammar consists of the starting symbol Landler on the left-hand side and of the four Parts on the right-hand side as follows.

Landler -> Part1 Part2 Part3 Part4

In the middle-level structure there is the four Parts on the left-hand side and the degrees of the chords in the each bar on the right-hand side:

Part1 -> up-beat I I V I
Part2 -> I I V Id
Part3 -> V I V I
Part4 -> I I V end

The low-level productions consist of the chord degree on the left-hand side divided in the terminal symbols as follows.

I -> 74:1 73:1 76:0.75 81:0.25

Each terminal symbol consists of a note number and a duration separated by a colon. The note-number is coded according to the MIDI-standard (c1=60). A duration of 1 equals a quarter-note, 0.5 equals an eight-note etc.

Thus, the note example is coded as follows.

I -> 73:0.5 71:0.5 73:0.5 74:0.5 76:1

The up-beats and the ends were coded separately as well as the the ending of the first half of the piece (Id) in the Part2. This bar gives the form of Ländlers 3 and 4 to the generated Ländlers.

I made also a grammar for the accompaniment (Landler ac). This grammar is totally deterministic, i.e. a generation yields always the same result.

Click here to see the whole grammar.

With this grammar I generated new Ländlers. I notated one of them as an example. It was generated with the seed number 5. I named it Ländler s5. This example contains also a recording.

Results

It was a surprise to observe that the unlogical melody lines of Ländler s5 did not have a terribly harmful effect when listening to Ländler s5. For example the second and third bar:

Note the melody line downwards e3, d3 sharp and a ninth jump down to c2 sharp.

An other example from bars five and six:

Note the melody line downwards e3, d3 sharp and c3 sharp.

On the contrary the peculiar melody lines give some fresh flavor to the Giuliani style and makes one listen more carefully to the music. After I played the four original ländlers followed by Ländler s5 the defects of Ländler s5 became obvious. As a composition Ländler s5 is very unidiomatic for the guitar. In the analysis, the melody lines were divided into sections according to the degree of the chord in one bar. This makes Ländler s5 very puzzle-like. The melody jumps from one position to an other and has no logical continuity or tension. Anyway, some fragments of Ländler s5 are quite satisfactory. For example, I liked the four last bars and bars 8-12, but the junction of these bars is not nice.