Call & Response

Hi everyone,

In today's post I will be talking about the phrase 'Call & Response'.

'Call & Response' is where you have two or more characters within a piece of music who are talking to each other, thus creating a musical dialogue.

Two Characters

For a two character 'call & response'; this usually occurs developed between a pianist and an instrumentalist. The pianist takes one character, and then the instrumentalist will take on the second character; and within pieces of different music you will hear the pianist 'calling' for the instrumentalist; and then the instrumentalist will 'respond' back. When the piano 'calls' to the instrumentalist; they will use a either a phrase or variation, and then the instrumentalist will 'respond' back either repeating the same phrase or variation to enable the 'response'.

Multiple Characters

You also can have pieces that contain multiple different characters. I'm going to use 'The Erlkonig' for this one, as it contains three characters - you have the boy, the father and the Erlkonig; and I'm also going to focus this piece on the violin. For the violin you have four strings, two staves and three different characters. Somehow on the violin, you have to create a dialogue between all three characters, and to also tell a story at the same time. It's a tricky piece of music to learn, and you also have to understand this piece of music to enable you to tell a story. Just bare in mind that this piece is written for solo violin, not multiple violins.

Paganini

Paganini also uses 'call & response', but in a slightly different variation. In Paganini's 24th Caprice each variation starts with a phrase, and then that phrase is repeated. But on the second phrase it's also extended slightly just so then that variation can come to an end before starting the next variation. What you can do is create two different characters; first phrase - one character and the second phrase is the second character. The trick is to make the second phrase sound a little bit different from the first phrase; and by this it will also make the overall piece sound more interesting to the listener.