Compare and contrast the use of melody and rhythm in Sweelink's Pavana Lachrimae, Mozart's Piano Sonata in Bb, and Berlioz's Harold in Italy.

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Compare and contrast the use of melody and rhythm in Sweelink's Pavana Lachrimae, Mozart's Piano Sonata in Bb, and Berlioz's Harold in Italy.

The three pieces were composed in different periods of music, which shows how melody and rhythm have developed over a spread of over 200 years. The Sweelink was the first of the three to be composed around 1615, there is a falling 4th at the start of the piece in the soprano line portraying sorrow. It has a lot of stepwise movement in ascending and descending scales which also run through to the varied repeats. There are many variations of melodic figurations such as bars 17-18 resembling bars 1-2 but using semiquavers. There is use of melodic imitation for example in bar 16 the top line is imitated in the bottom line in bar 17 where the shape and notes are very similar.

The whole piece is very rhythmically active as it mostly moves in semiquavers, and has a regular metre with one chord per bar for most of the piece apart from cadences such as in bar 7 where there are two chords per bar. Rhythmic imitation is used in bars 39-41, where a motif consisting of two quavers and a crotchet are used between two parts.

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Mozart's Piano Sonata, like the Sweelink is mostly scalic and stepwise but also uses arpeggios. Periodic 8 bar phrases are used like the one starting at the upbeat to bar 15-bar 23 at the imperfect cadence. Motifs are also developed in this piece as well, for example the first motif of the piece at bar 1 is varied at the beginning of the development section at bar 64 (with an upbeat), by it being in a different key and the last three notes are an ascending scalic pattern instead of a leaping pattern. There are many places in the ...

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