Elegy For Young American Analysis

Elegy for Young American is a very jarring and powerful piece of music. It can relate to a few pieces of art. One of the pieces is a black and white piece where up close, a lot is going on and you can see very minor details that are important, but in the whole piece offer very little. The art gives you an uneasy anticipatory feeling just like the music does. Another piece of art that can relate to Elegy is the praying women with the rosary, even though the women is praying to win the lottery and the piece of music isn’t about that it can relate, because while the piece is going on you’re hoping and praying that there will be some kind of relief to all the dissonance and raw texture the piece provides. The piece of artwork could also be seen

Based on its origin one can make the assumption that it will be a somber piece. It is beautifully composed with moments of dissonance that come to momentary relief as consonant. The meter does not stay constant through out the piece; often speeding up suddenly and can change from duple time to triple in an instant. Elegy has different phrase lengths, which can leave the listener with a feeling of uncertainty. This piece doesn’t fit into a precise form. The textures throughout the piece are mostly transparent, with the exception to the building of the climax where it gets thicker and could be considered polyphonic. The number of voices sounded is a wide variety from bass up to high treble. The timbre is tied to how dramatic that section of the piece is, but it subtly shifts throughout the piece. While the tone and color of the piece is melancholy and dark, the end is hopeful and not quite happy, but more accepting of what happened previously, leaving the listener completely content. Lo Presti uses a very big dynamic spectrum, starting and ending the piece with it being very pianissimo (pp) while the climax is fortississimo