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Unit XXV The New Music
“From Schoenberg I learned that tradition is
a home we must love and forgo.”
—Lukas Foss
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75. New Directions
…innovations in the last half of the twentieth
century have outstripped the most far-reaching
changes of earlier times…
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The Arts since the Mid-Twentieth Century
• Social turmoil reflected in the arts
• Movements in the arts
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Abstract Expressionism
Pop Art
Post-Modernism
• Feminist and ethnic art and literature
• Widespread experimentation in poetry,
literature
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The Arts since the Mid-Twentieth Century
• Performance art
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John Cage
Laurie Anderson
• National schools of filmmaking
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Germany
China
Poland
John Cage
“As these two forms—human and machine—begin to merge a little bit, we’re
talking about technology really as a kind of new nature, something to measure
against, to make rules from, to investigate.”
—Laurie Anderson
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Toward Greater Organization in Music
Arnold Schoenberg
• Application of Schoenberg’s 12-tone method
• Total serialism
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Toward Greater Freedom in Music
• Counter to total serialism
• Chance determines portions of “happening”
• Indeterminate
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aleatoric music
open form
• Collage
• Microtonal scales
“My music liberates because I give people the chance
to change their minds in the way I’ve changed mine.”
—John Cage
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The Postwar Internationalism
• United States
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Milton Babbitt
John Cage
Earle Brown
Morton Feldman
• Italy
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Luciano Berio
• Greece
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Iannis Xenakis
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The Postwar Internationalism
• Poland
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Krzysztof Penderecki
• Germany
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Karlheinz Stockhausen
• France
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Pierre Boulez
• Russia
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Pierre Boulez
Sofiya Gubaidulina
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76. The New Virtuosity of the Modern Age
• Contemporary virtuosity
• Avant-garde specialists
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Cathy Berberian
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George Crumb (b. 1929)
and Avant-Garde Virtuosity
• American Composer
• Emotional, dramatic,
expressive music
• University of Pennsylvania
• Federico García Lorca
“Music [is] a system of proportions in the service of a
spiritual impulse.”
—George Crumb
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Crumb: Ancient Voices of Children
(Listening Guide)
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Cycle of songs
Soprano, boy soprano, oboe, mandolin,
harp, electric piano, percussion
Voice is used like an instrument
Vocalise
Singing into amplified piano,
singing microtones
Listening Guide PDF
International percussion
Dark intimations of poetry
“I feel that the essential meaning of this poetry is concerned with the most
primary things: Life, death, love, the smell of the earth, the sounds of the wind
and the sea.”
—George Crumb
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77. Contemporary Composers
Look to World Music
Important Experimenters
• Henry Cowell (1897–1965)
Music
Japan, India, Iran, rural Ireland, America
Foreign scales
Tone clusters
• Harry Partch (1901–1974)
• Microtonal music
“I believe composers must forge out of the many influences
that play upon them and never close their ears to any part of
the world of sound.”
—Henry Cowell
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John Cage (1912–1992)
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American Composer
Prepared piano to simulate
Javanese gamelan
– Items inserted in the piano
strings
East Asian philosophy
Quest for tranquility
Indeterminacy
Role of silence: 4’33”
“I thought I could never compose socially important music.
Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful
to society.”
—John Cage
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Cage: Sonata V, from Sonatas and
Interludes (Listening Guide)
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Written for prepared piano
Percussive effects
Non-Western timbre
Seemingly without a clear meter
Listening Guide PDF
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The Javanese Gamelan
Indonesian music
Music for ritual ceremonies
Court and shadow puppet theater
Two tunings:
sléndro pentatonic
pélog heptatonic
Cyclical rhytmic structure (colotomic)
“Simply said, gamelan music is the most beautiful music
in the world, and I for one see no reason to do any other
kind of music ever again.”
- Lou Harrison
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Javanese Gamelan Music: Patalon
(Listening Guide) Listening Guide PDF
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Central Javanese music
Shadow-puppet theater piece
Pentatonic melodies
Colotomic rhythmic structure
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Bright Sheng and the Meeting of
Musical Cultures
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Bright Sheng (b.1955)
Innovative contemporary composer
Blends Western and Asian ideas
Artistic suffering during the Cultural Revolution
(1966-1976)
Arrived in US in 1982
Teaches now at the University of Michigan
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Bright Sheng’s Music
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Integrates Western and Eastern elements
– Compositional style and instruments
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Pipa, sheng, erhu, yangqin, dizi, suona
Evokes Chinese folk songs
China Dreams is a nostalgic work
– Set in four movements
– Scored for large Western orchestra
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Sheng: China Dreams, Prelude
(Listening Guide)
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Prelude is the first of four movements
Evocative of Chinese folk music
Pentatonic melodies contrast dissonant
chords
Syncopation creates meter-free sound
ABA structure
Listening Guide PDF
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An Introduction to Chinese
Traditional Music
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Abing (1883–1950)
• Chinese composer, born Hua Yanjun,
• Orphaned, adopted by Daoist monk
• Expelled for playing Daoist music in secular
setting
• His works are now standards at Chinese music
schools
• Six works recorded before 1950
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Abing: The Moon Reflected on the Second
Springs (Listening Guide)
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Solo erhu
Modern version adds jangqin
Based on a pentatonic scale (D-E-G-A-B)
Melody played 3 times, with ornamentation
jangqin
Listening Guide PDF
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78. Music for Films
“A film is a composition and the musical composition
is an integral part of the design. “
—H. G. Wells
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The Role of Music in Film
• Establishes mood, characters,
creates a sense of place and time
• Irony (running counter to the action)
• Principal types of music in a film:
Underscoring
Source music
Leitmotifs
“Nonsense. The idea originated with Richard Wagner. Listen to the incidental
scoring behind the recitatives in his operas. If Wagner had lived in this
century, he would have been the Number One film composer.”
—Max Steiner (responding to the idea that he had invented film music)
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Music in the Silent-Film Era
• Accompanied by solo piano or organ
• Special organs produced effects
• Three types of music:
– Classical
– Well-known tunes
– New music
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The Sound Era
• Late 1930s: Golden Age of films and film
music
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Max Steiner
Eric Korngold
• Germany, France, and the Soviet Union also
pursued filmmaking
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The Postwar Years
• Popular genres included with 20th-century art music
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Bernard Herrmann
Miklós Rózsa
• Theremin included for eerie effects
• Later composers
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Aaron Copland
Leonard Bernstein
• Post-1940s film music
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Elmer Bernstein
Jerry Goldsmith
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Beyond Star Wars
• Revolutionary visual effects in Star Wars
(1977)
– Score by John Williams
– Full symphony orchestra
– Use of leitmotifs
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John Williams
• Television in the 1950s and 1960s
• Turned to film in the 1960s
• 1970s successes:
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Star Wars
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Superman
• 80s, 90s, and currently:
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Indiana Jones
Jurassic Park
Harry Potter films, Munich, etc.
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Williams: Raiders March, from
Raiders of the Lost Ark
(Listening Guide)
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Heard during closing credits of Raiders of the
Lost Ark (1981)
Fashioned from two leitmotifs
– Indiana Jones and Marion
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Three-part form
– Indiana Jones theme, Marion's theme, Indiana Jones
theme
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Instrumentation and beat of a traditional march
Listening Guide PDF
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James Horner
• Los Angeles
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Studied at the University of Southern
California, UCLA
• Successes:
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Star Trek II and III
Apollo 13
Titanic, etc.
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Synthesizers in 1980s Film Scores
• Instrument of choice for popular musicians
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Danny Elfman
• Oingo Boingo
• Tim Burton
• Successes:
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Beetlejuice
Batman
Men in Black
Spiderman films
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
“Writing the melody is the easy part…. But then, it’s what you
do with it. That’s the skill, that’s the art, that’s what makes a
great film score.”
—Danny Elfman
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Hans Zimmer
• Popular music background
• Successes:
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Rain Man
The Lion King
Madagascar
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,
etc.
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Rachel Portman
• First woman to win an Academy Award for
Best Music
• Successes
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Emma
The Joy Luck Club
The Cider House Rules
Legally Blonde II
Love Actually
The Princess Diaries II
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79. Technology and Music
Two technological trends in the late 1940s and early 50s
• Musique concrète
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Paris
Pierre Schaeffer
• Tape music
“I have been waiting a long time for electronics to free music
from the tempered scale and limitations of musical instruments.
Electronic instruments are the portentous first step toward the
liberation of music.” —Edgard Varèse
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Electronische Musik
• Cologne
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Herbert Eimert
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Oscillator (electronic waveform generator)
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Waveform manipulation
Synthesizer
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Evolution of the Synthesizer
• RCA 1955
• Columbia-Princeton’s Electronic Music Center in
1959
• Robert Moog and Donald Buchla synthesizer in
the 1960s
• Morton Subotnik’s Silver Apples of the Moon (1967)
• Widespread popularity, Switched-On Bach (1968)
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Walter (later Wendy) Carlos
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Electronic Music con’t
• Digital frequency modulation synthesis
replaced analog systems
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John Chowning at Stanford University
Yamaha DX7 (1983)
• Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI)
adopted 1983
• Digital samplers
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Computer Music
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Computer savvy and musical inspiration
– Bell Laboratories in the 1950s
– Max Mathews
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Hiller and Issacson’s software MUSIC
(1956)
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Important Figures in Electronic Music
Edgard Varèse (1883–1965)
• French composer
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Poème electronique (1956–58)
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Philips Pavilion at Brussels World’s Fair
Electronic and concrète sounds,
multi-channel tape
Colaborated with Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis
Lighting effects and projected images
400-plus speakers
2 million people experienced the work
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Mario Davidovsky (b. 1934)
• American composer
• Electronic sounds with live music
• Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center
in New York
• Harvard University
• Synchronisms (1963–88)
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Tod Machover and Musical Interactivity
• Tod Machover (b.1952)
• A leader in the contemporary music scene
• Goal in music is to "make people pay
attention and listen carefully"
• Creates "smart" computers that follow
gestures and intentions of performers
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Dextrous Hand Master
“The technique we invented… is a fantastic way not only to
extend virtuosic instruments but to break down boundaries
and open doors to musical experiences for ordinary music
lovers.
-Tod Machover
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Machover: Hyperstring Trilogy:
Begin Again Again . . . , excerpts
(Listening Guide)
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Piece for solo cello
– Inspired by J. S. Bach's Cello Suite No. 2
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Cellist controls live computer electronics
– Written for Yo-Yo Ma
– premiered at Tanglewood in 1991, recently revised
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Conceived as the first in a trilogy based on
Dante's Divine Comedy
Listening Guide PDF
Form = two large parts
– each with a theme and four variations
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80. Some Current Trends
• Minimalism and New Romanticism
“Now that things are so simple,
there’s so much to do.”
—Morton Feldman
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Minimalism and Post-Minimalism
• Barest essentials
• Features
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repetition
very little variation
• Turns away from serialists
• Non-Western ideas
• Primary Composers:
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Terry Riley
Steve Reich
Philip Glass
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Spiritual Minimalism
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European trend
Nonpulsed music
Chains of lush modal or tonal progressions
Primary composers:
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Arvo Pärt
Henryk Górecki
John Taverner
“Arvo Pärt’s music accepts silence and death, and thus reaffirms
the basic truth of life, its frailty compassionately realised, its
sacred beauty observed and celebrated.”
—Paul Hiller
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Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)
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Estonian composer
Concert, film, and stage composer
Neoclassicism, serialism
Religious convictions and Soviet Union
West Berlin
Latin and Orthodox church choral music
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Pärt: Cantate Domino canticum novum
(Listening Guide)
• Inspired by medieval chant
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Latin text, based on Psalm 95
• Untraditional notation
• SATB chorus and organ
• Tintinnabular (bell) style
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Word painting
• Varied texture, use of counterpoint
Listening Guide PDF
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John Adams (b. 1947)
and Post-Minimalism
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American composer
Harvard-trained, wrote serial music
Interest in rock
Based in San Francisco
Advocate for contemporary music
Late Romanticism and minimalism
Collaborations with Peter Sellars
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Adams: Tromba lontana (Distant Trumpet)
(Listening Guide)
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1986 fanfare commissioned by Houston Symphony Orchestra
Repetitive accompaniment
2 solo trumpets at opposite sides of the stage
Bell-like timbres in percussion
Sustained harmonics in strings
Repeated notes in woodwinds
Listening Guide PDF
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New Romanticism
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Reaction to the intellectual and alienating
12-tone movement
Favors a harmonic language from the late
Romantic era
– Precursors: Samuel Barber, Ned Rorem
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Libby Larsen and the Musical Voice of
Women
• Libby Larsen (b.1950)
• One of few composers making a living with music
alone (not an academic position)
• Born in Delaware and raised in Minneapolis
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Co-founded the Minnesota Composers' Forum
Now the American Composers' Forum
• Inspired largely by nature and writings of women
“Music exists in an infinity of sound. I think of all music
as existing in the substance of the air itself. It is the
composer’s task to order and make sense of sound, in
time and space, to communicate something about being
alive through music.”
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Larsen: Sonnets from the Portuguese,
Nos. 5 and 6 (Listening Guide)
• Worked closely with singer Arleen Auger
• Auger premiered the work & the recording won
a Grammy in 1994
• Set to poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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Love poems secretly written during the
courtship with Robert Browning
• Larsen describes the songs as "metaphor[s] of
resolved and unresolved harmonies"
Listening Guide PDF
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Larsen: Songs from the Portuguese
Nos. 5 and 6 (Listening Guide)
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No. 5 "Oh, yes!"
– Disjunct lines
– Alternation of speechlike quality with lyrical lines
– Dissonance and chromaticism with reference to
Musselmans and Giaours
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No. 6 "How do I love thee?"
– Free-flowing, arched lines according to the text
– Expressive use of instruments
– Subtle text-painting
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Coda
“Just listen with the vastness of the world in mind.
You can’t fail to get the message.” - Pierre Boulez
Perceptive listening is achieved gradually,
with practice and effort
Enjoy music!
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