1 My Musical Journey and Beyond My journey My musical knowledge and experience were fairly low before entering this course. I had only been a part of middle school band class as a percussion player and the main reason I even joined that was because my friends were in there and we would goof off. I never had any musicians in the family, or anyone that was interested in music to any degree, so my eyes were never opened to how far music has come. Men and women have toiled, racking their brains trying different things to advance music to where we are today. It is quite crazy how we still listen to music from centuries ago and the people have been deceased for hundreds of years, but their names are still on people's tongues and in people's minds. So my major takeaway from this course was the ability to identify the different aspects of a song that date back decades or even centuries. Not only that, but I also if I dedicate myself to something that I’m truly passionate about, I can change the world, even if it is in one section of it. The French Menace Napoleon Bonaparte, self-proclaimed emperor of France after seizing power in a coup, had a long series of being a warmonger when he did not get his way. This aggressive attitude ultimately led to Napoleons' downfall and also a famous musical piece being written. In 1807, three years into Napoleons' reign as emperor and after a victory against the Russians at the battle of Friedland (which is now modern-day Russian exclave of Kaliningrad), Russian emperor Alexander I met with Napoleon and the two entered into an alliance with one another (Guar 2013 ). While this worked to cool tensions for a while, the French emperor kept pushing his 2 luck with Russia - as France had made a Polish puppet country right on the Russian border, which made the Russians fear the rise of another Polish state that would take up arms against them. While this and other factors angered the Russian government, they were not provoked enough to consider going to war with France. That is until Russia broke the “Continental System”, which was Napoleon's continental-wide embargo and blockade of the UK (a global powerhouse of trade), but also a sworn enemy of France. The reason Russia broke the treaty was because it was crippling the Russian economy with the national debt rising and the value of currency dropping at an alarming rate. This angered the French and the fuse was lit. Napoleon and around 680,000 troops made up of men from many different nations assembled on the Russian border, but even with the Russians outnumbered two to one, morale was high (McLean). As the French forces moved into the country pouring over Russia like waves, Napoleon started getting cocky even though was losing troops by the thousands every day (even though he had barely even fought). This arrogance would backfire on Napoleon during the battle of Borodino. The battle was fought between Napoleon's 130,000 and the 120,000 Russian troops. Napoleon started the battle by ordering a frontal assault, ignoring his advisor's advice to do a massive flank around the Russian army which Napoleon cited as “too risky”. As the French progressed they paid for every inch they took, even sometimes being driven right back out at the point of a bayonet. As Napoleon's men cut through line after line of Russian troops the Russian men held firm. After so many losses in the French army, the French generals requested the last of the reserve forces, “Napoleon's personal guard”, to which he refused, seeing victory within his grasp. Exhausted and hungry, but never without hope, the Russian troops held hour after hour until the battle came to a crawl. As the French took the city center, the retreat order was given to Russian troops, and as the smoke cleared, over 30,000 dead lay strewn across the fields (Das 2011), The French won their pyrrhic victory - but this was the beginning of the end for 3 Napoleon. So Napoleon walked into Moscow, which had now been evacuated and set ablaze, and seeing that there was no peace that was going to be made with emperor Alexander I and with his army in shambles, Napoleon started his retreat back to France with nothing to show for his efforts. -The point? What does this backstory have to do with music? Well, the Russian defense of Borodino went down in history as a great victory for the Russian people, highlighting the unbreakable resolve of the soldiers that fought that day in defense of their country, and even though they had lost, they made their enemy pay. Even around 68 years later, (in the 1880s) the defense of Borodino still inspired pride amongst the Russian people. So the Russian composer, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, was commissioned to conceive a piece commemorating the battle, to which he accepted (Hopkin 2018). The piece in question was called the “1812 Overture” and the hope was to inspire the same feelings of patriotism and pride, but also with a bit of a melancholy touch as well. It was to remember not only the achievements, but also the losses it took to get there. The piece itself took six weeks to produce and Tchaikovsky took full advantage of that time to make sure he could represent the story of the battle properly. -1812 Overture The song was meant to stir feelings inside Russians and others alike and show off how it was on the battlefield in 1812, and Tchaikovsky delivered. The piece starts off with violins strumming in a soft slow manner, in a depressed manner, like all hope of winning has been lost and you’ve given up. That is until the woodwind flutes and a more joyous set of violins come in, lightening the overall mood and symbolizing the hope they must have felt seeing their fellow soldiers beat back the invaders and not give them any ground. Then the music quickens and everything starts playing faster, like the soldier just snapped out of it and realizes if they want to survive they have to act 4 fast and fight. The music then starts getting louder, crash symbols, tubas, and trumpets with them all fighting for your attention by raising the volume, like a soldier in the midst of gunfire and artillery fire all around and him not knowing what to focus on. The music then turns to a more somber tone again, but not for long - the beating of marching drums and inspiring trumpets comes in to give everyone the courage that they need to continue. But regardless of how much you believe, sometimes the odds are stacked against you, and this is represented by the music turning more frantic again as the soldiers retreat back into the town and beyond. The tone stays like this alternating between fast and slow, until near the end where all the instruments unify into a beautiful symphony with all the instruments from before working together and adding things like bells (and even cannons firing) to celebrate the ejection of the foreign invader and the end to the war (Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra 2010). The devices he uses to achieve this are contrast and variation. Contrast, for the fact that it goes from this quiet, slow piece to a speedy high-energy piece for contrasting each other. Variation because it keeps bringing back nearly the same parts of the song, but it keeps adding more instruments and changing keys to add to the feeling of hope building. Twentieth-century music The twentieth-century of music was a big turning point for music itself, because of the fact that musicians realized that they deserved to be able to express themselves through music in whatever way they wanted to. The reason this sentiment was on the rise was because famous composers like Mahler and Richard were veering away from the firmly established systems established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This led to the rise of two new tonal systems called Impressionism and Expressionism. 5 -Impressionism Impressionism gained popularity because of a style of painting that had its origins in France. The purpose was to give the viewer a general sense of what the viewer was looking at rather than giving them the whole picture, and so people adapted this style and dubbed it “Impressionism”. The way impressionism worked was by making their music around a single harmony similar to how you get a general gist of a picture looking at it through a blurry lens - but never quite seeing the whole picture. This music was often anticlimactic, never quite reaching the peak of the song. It would stay like that for the duration of the song, seeming to be getting close to a climax, only for it to continue on (Chauhan 2011). Some of the most notable composers for impressionism were Debussy and Ravel who popularized impressionism by telling non-centralized stories of nature and myths. But sadly, impressionism lost popularity during the twentieth century, and in its stead, expressionism took the mantle. -Expressionism Expressionism took off because people in music were sort of stuck in the pre-established systems and there are only so many ways to tell your story the way you want to be able to. With this being around the time of the civil rights movement, people were ready for change and freedom. So many turned to expressionism, because its main function was to be able to ‘express’ yourself and your emotions, opening the way to endless avenues you can take in order to say what you want. This music was a trip inside the musician’s mind about whatever topic they were writing about. The way they achieved this was by having Dissonance, which was disharmony between notes and more complex rhythms, and the addition of different instrument combinations. As more people turned to Expressionism, it led to the prominence of atonality and serialism. Atonality was a major shift away from traditional music, by having no tonal center - meaning it was not bound by the tonality 6 of a piece and could change at a moment’s notice. On the contrary, serialism was a pattern in a song that repeated over and over again. People that use this technique thought of music as more of a math problem, hence the name ‘serial-ism’ (Sinha 2014). The ideas of Expressionism still take root today in the form of people not being afraid to break the rules of music in pursuit of selfexpression. The World and Opera Opera, in its earliest form, was nothing more than an ancient commercial break, so to speak. Originally called an Intermezzi, which had circus performers like jugglers and animal tamers go and perform their acts. This worked very well and became a staple of Intermezzi, but people were already thinking of ways to adapt that show into the musical performance itself, thus the ‘opera’ was born. Opera itself was a combination of a drama and musical put into one performance, originally starting with just simple background music, overlaid with vocals, telling the story of ancient Greece. But this would be added onto by a composer by the name of Claudio Monteverdi. For his performance of Orfeo and Ariana, he made the prior background music into a grand spectacle, bringing it to the forefront of the performance equally as important as the vocals themselves, this helped shape opera for what it is today and what it's remembered for. But that was just the foundation, many countries enacted their own style to add upon the opera (Lotha 2004). -French opera The French were famed for their opera performances, and they owe that to Italian composer Jean Baptiste Lully who popularized the opera shows which were originally ballets and combined them to create shows that were larger than life. Crowds clambering, choruses harmonizing and all this behind exquisite ambiance. People loved these shows, but they wanted more variation and the 7 composers obliged, splitting off into different compositions of opera. Some of the variations were more lighthearted like the “Opera Comique”, which were opera comedies and had people speaking rather than singing. But if you weren’t into that, there was the opposite “Lyric opera” which was focused on telling serious stories behind the backdrop of meticulously created melodies and vocals. But some people were not happy with the traditional ways being changed, most notably Christophe Willibald Gluck. Gluck wanted to go back to simpler times in opera and a new movement was born called “naturalism”, which focused on the dark side of humanity like sex, violence, and just generally immoral things - and people loved it. Thanks to the history of this, and the contributions made by composers, opera is still around in France today (Lotha 2004). -Italian opera Italians loved opera! It was a huge entertainment industry and they prided themselves on their vocals back then with things like “bel canto” operas, which were mainly focused on appreciating the human voice (so naturally it was a lot of singing). Then they grew too big and the meaning of the original pieces were lost, because singers just ended up showing off their vocal range instead of properly telling a story, and people wanted a return to the more dramatic opera pieces we know today. That's when Gioachino Rossini came in and revitalized the opera scene with his renditions of “The Barber of Seville” (to which he got thugs sent after him) and “Willam Tell” (Gorlinski 2011). These helped to bring attention back to the drama and opera scene in general and cleared the path for people that would come after him. -American opera? But what about American opera? America was an outlier in accepting opera music and it never quite caught on because movies with sound took the opportunity before opera could take root in the United States. That and music for a movie could be produced faster and receive less scrutiny 8 than its real performance counterpart. However, that's not to say that opera was gone for American entertainment because aspects of opera snuck their way into Hollywood musicals. Musicals were similar in the fact that they were telling a story through vocal singing and accompanying orchestral music. But the way that they differentiated themselves was the singing could stop and let the music take the reins for a moment, while in an opera the singing never stops. This new wave created performances like “The Wizard of Oz” and “Animal Crackers in My Soup" by Shirley Temple, these pieces are fondly remembered and listened to today (Chilton 2021). Style periods of music Each period of history had its music defined by the circumstances of the time and even what the people believed and valued. But most put the four major points of music history as the Baroque period which started around the 1600's and ended around the 1750's. The Classical period, which was around the 1730's to the 1820's. The Romantic period was around the 1800's to the 1850's. Finally, the Twentieth Centuries which lasted from the 1900's to the 2000's. -Baroque The thing that made the baroque period so memorable was because, prior to this, the church had an iron grip on everything that went on - from politics to music the church had their hands on everything. With fewer restrictions placed on artists, creativity exploded. This was the period that saw the introduction of the concerto, the sonata, and the opera. Everyone was taking advantage of this newfound freedom. Artists were free to express themselves more and writers who were under the very watchful eyes of the church could write what they wanted to. It was a time of overcoming those who held their creativity hostage (Rawady 2018 & Classic FM). -Classical 9 The classical period is one that many people hold near and dear to their hearts. Composers started branching out their orchestral instruments, adding things like violins, viola, cello, side-blown flute, clarinet, and trombone to give that air of variety in musical performances. This was around the time of Beethoven and Mozart, people who are held in some of the highest regards mainly because of their creative minds and devotion to musical production. While this was the time of legends, it was also a very serious time. The French revolution was in full swing around the 1789's and this divided people who wanted to go back to the traditional way of doing things and the people who wanted a more progressive future and people lost trust in one predominant figure, seeing them as naive and hypocritical (Kuznetsova). -Romantic The romantic age of music was one of political and idealistic revolution with figures like Karl Marx (Communism) and Charles Darwin (Darwinism). This led to a rise of the middle class of society that demanded that their feelings be properly represented in songs. This culminated in romantic music being considered more emotional and imaginative music, with the personal style of the artist mixed into the middle, mainly with the piano, which was a staple of classical music (Lotha 2006). Conclusion You see all these elements, however all ten pages of this essay are nothing but a small glimpse into music's past. The work, the innovations to the craft, cannot be printed into words on a page but at least we get a little glimpse into the history of music and how we got the sounds of today. 10 Work Cited Chauhan, Yamini. “Impressionism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2011, https://www.britannica.com/art/Impressionism-music. Chilton, Martin. “The Sound of Film Musicals: How Songs Shaped the Silver Screen.” UDiscover Music, 4 Jan. 2021, https://www.udiscovermusic.com/in-depth-features/filmmusicals/. Classic FM, https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/periodsgenres/baroque/#:~:text=The%20Baroque%20period%20saw%20an,flourish%2C%20in% 20particular%20instrumental%20music. Das, Darshana. “Battle of Borodino.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2011, https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Borodino. Gorlinski, Virginia. “Italy in the First Half of the 19th Century.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2011, https://www.britannica.com/art/opera-music/Italy-inthe-first-half-of-the-19th-century. Guar, Aakanksha. “Alexander I.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2013, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alexander-I-emperor-of-Russia. Hopkin, Owen. “The 1812 Overture: The Hit That Tchaikovsky Hated.” Classic FM, 26 Mar. 2018, https://www.classicfm.com/composers/tchaikovsky/guides/1812-hated-hit/. Kuznetsova, Natalia. “Music Appreciation.” Lumen, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/musicappreciation_with_theory/chapter/overview-ofthe-classical-era/. 11 Lotha, Gloria. “Early Opera in France and England.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2007, https://www.britannica.com/art/opera-music/Earlyopera-in-France-and-England. Lotha, Gloria. “Romanticism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2006, https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism. McLean, John. “History of Western Civilization II.” Invasion of Russia | History of Western Civilization II, 2011, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hcccworldhistory2/chapter/invasion-of-russia/. Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. Ouverture 1812, Op. 49, Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg9oO_SEqAo. Rawady, Wendy. “What Are Some of the Most Important Historical Events That ...” Quora, 2018, https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-most-important-historicalevents-that-happened-during-the-Baroque-period. Shukla, Gaurav. “German Romantic Opera.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2008, https://www.britannica.com/art/opera-music/German-Romanticopera. Sinha, Surabhi. “Serialism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2014, https://www.britannica.com/art/serialism.
