Intervals in Music

Music is made of intervals. Intervals are not merely mathematical or technical calculations of note distances. How one feels and traverses any given interval is what gives music its emotional life.

I feel there’s no genre of music where the feeling of the interval is more crucial and life-giving than in opera. I’ve been guest-leading the OperaHK Orchestra in Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet these past couple of weeks, indulging in feeling ALL the intervals every day. Perhaps this is because the drama and framework of a plot (no matter how simple or even simplistic) add to the potency of every emotion. The timing of the music also needs to fit precisely into the rhythm of the drama. One has to go from shock to despair in exactly two and a half beats, and the timing of HOW the former transforms into the latter needs to be bang on, too! (It has to make sense emotionally, like acting, even if you’re only playing an orchestral tutti part.) I find opera-playing to be incredibly cathartic. It is a luxurious outlet to be allowed to feel intensely, while having the safety to do so with abandon in an extremely controlled manner. I think some form of this paradoxical indulgence and escape is what draws many people to the arts. As someone who can have too many messy feelings in life at times, I think the drama and theater that anchor the emotions provide the exact order this chaos of a psyche needs!

I still can’t put my finger on what makes the interval so potent in opera, though. Those pleading diminished 7ths, the sighing augmented 4ths, the anguish in a simple half step. Yet one interval might express anger, while another conveys total resignation. It’s akin to Maria Callas saying that all acting instructions are in the text. For musical instructions, the interval will guide you. But they must be more than just read and played; they need to be felt for any true understanding to emerge.

To feel intervals is to love them, which I think is a big part of what it means to love music. The more deeply you feel them, the more music gives back. I was working on scales with a 6-year-old student the other day. Imagine my joy when, during an exercise commonly perceived as tedious, he said, “I love the mi-re-do, I love that part.” (I happened to catch the moment on video, too—see my story!) The simple, natural pleasure he felt is one and the same as my love of indulging in operatic (and other) intervals. The only difference is our emotional complexity.

Too many students are only taught how to play two notes, but not how to traverse the journey between them. Too many professional musicians, well, do the same. Precision in examining what to do with an interval is, in fact, the precision of good technique and execution. It is also a musician’s signature. The ones with unique voices have distinct ways of finding paths from note to note, and from there, can carve new worlds from phrase to phrase, movement to movement, piece to piece, and genre to genre.

But it all starts with the interval. And it can begin with a simple mi-re-do from a child.——————————————————————-
(Some additional context: the opening section of Dvořák’s Humoresque is quite literally a series of intervals. There are many different ways to work on “feeling” intervals. These methods sometimes involve movement, sometimes examining the precision of bow speed and division, and sometimes singing. In this lesson, we explored all of those, and then some:)

Beginning of lesson

Deliberate (exaggerated) work

In context: during final run-through of lesson