“Innigkeit” “Maximalism” Ludwig Van Beethoven - from his middle period (up to 1816) - Music thought to represent his own struggles (deafness) - The Heiligenstadt Testament - resolve to do what he was born to, compose - “Joy through suffering” - Music was individual, about intimacy and emotion Lawrence Levine - High/Low Distinction - “Classical music” is elitist - American historian on populist history - Classical music and opera made elitist in the early 20th century - “Highbrowed” and “lowbrowed” originally descriptions identifying race and intelligence by the shape of one’s cranium Minstrelsy - late 19th and early 20th century - Montreal until 1950s Franz Schubert (1797-1828) - reputation gained after death - Modeled after Beethoven - Schubertiads (home/salon jam sessions by amateurs) - Lied/lieder changed from folk - piano as equal, grouped in song cycles (story) - Form depended on text: sustain mood/image - strophic, changes - modified strophic, longer - through-composed - Set 59 of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poems - Early 20th century, liederabend featuring African American singers were prominent - “Musical Germanness” in 19th century - thought Germans understood deeper sources of music more fully and intuitively than others Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) - The Devil’s Violinist - virtuoso - Performed with dramatic flair - Violin has history being associated with the devil - “Little Pagan”, sunken eyes, no teeth (jaw disease) Franz Liszt (1811-1886) - “Paganini of the Piano” - Studied with Beethoven’s pupil, Czerny - Got a modified grand piano - One kid marries Richard Wagner - - - - - Invented modern format and conventions of solo piano recitals Flamboyant - wrote showy and virtuosic music for himself Hungarian Rhapsodies - “exotic” sounds were liked by the audiences More influential as composer than pianist Chromatic harmony helps Wagner, thematic transformation impacted Wagner’s leitmotifs and Brahms’ developing variation - Neue Zeitschrift für Musik Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) - fame rivaled Beethoven - Playful, light music - Considered work with more practicality and functionality than Beethoven - Bel Canto - vocal line and voice takes on a significant role, highlights the solo singer - Bellini and Danizatti were immediate successors Jenny Lind : The Swedish Nightingale Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield : The Black Swan Adelina Patti Sissieretta Jones (1869-1933) : The Black Patti - Performed for segregated interracial audiences - Known as the finest singer of her time - Opera companies weren’t hiring African American singers - White audiences were concerned they didn’t suit classical music - categorized them as “minstrel shows” Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869) - “There’s no business like show business…” - Master orchestrator - wrote for incredibly big orchestra (130 musicians) - New instruments and techniques - Creative orchestration - transgressed rules of voice leading - One of his first books on orchestration - bible on the subject throughout the 19th century - Symphonie Fantastique - most famous work - hero supposed to be Beethoven, but audience heard Berlioz as protagonist - Harriet Smithson (Ophelia) - musical autobiography - Idée Fixe Associative, Representational, and Narrative properties. Aristotle: beginning, middle, end. Richard Wagner (1813-1883) - Believed he was the natural successor of Beethoven - wrote fictional story about his meeting Beethoven - King of Bavaria, Ludwig II was his patron - obsessed with Wagner - Sketched specially designed theatre for the opera, patron funded it - Bayreuth Festspielhaus - still the site of his operas and grave run by Wagner’s heirs - Modeled on Greek ideals - day of theatre - amphitheatre - theatre of Epidaurus - Philosopher of opera and music - "Jewishness in Music." - initially anonymous - Wagner's orchestra was much larger than those used by other operatic composers - great prominence to brass instruments Wagnerian Leitmotifs - can speak of leitmotif families because many of them share features Tristan und Isolde (1859) - Libretto by Wagner himself (based on 13C Romance) - one of the classic tales of Western literature - Wagner's opera is now more famous than the text on which it was based by Gottfried von Strassburg - Tristan chord - not only expresses, but embodies longing, yearning - created due to the delayed resolution of the harmonies in this music - Wagner is said to be one of the first composers to move toward what Lizst and Mahler would take up, and what Schoenberg would eventually call the "emancipation of dissonance." (freeing of dissonance) The Ring Cycle (Der Ring der Nibelungen) - 4 works: Der Ring der Nibelungen - 1848: Siegfried’s Tod - later renamed Götterdämmerung (Icelandic epic - Völsungasaga and 13C German epic - Nibelungenlied) - Siegfried (1851) - Die Walküre (1851/2) - Das Rheingold (1852) - "a stage festival play for three days and a preliminary evening." - The Ring Cycle consists of 15 HOURS OF MUSIC John Williams, Star Wars - Wagner's music has been the most influential on the world of film music composition - John Williams (b. 1932) is perhaps the best-known film composer - collaborated with Stephen Spielberg on a string of films, including Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Indiana Jones, and Jurassic Park - collaborated with George Lucas on the Star Wars trilogy: A New Hope (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983) - Rise of the Valkyrie from the Ring Cycle Brahms and Symphony #4 - major themes of the late nineteenth century was the pull between between tradition and innovation - While progress was certainly celebrated in the nineteenth century the interest in music of the past also increased - The discipline of Musicology, after all, was established in the nineteenth century, which focused on the study of the historical "greats" such as Bach, Handel, Palestrina, Mozart, etc - But in 1800, the percentage of music played at concerts by living composers was 80%. By 1860 or 1870, that percentage was 20% - Eduard Hanslick (the dean of Viennese criticism) thought music should be understood and appreciated on its own terms (not tied to something outside music), since this attachment and referencing rendered it less pure and independent - He championed Brahms for upholding the great tradition of German classical instrumental music - Brahms was though to have provided another path of continuation of Beethoven’s legacy--his 9th Symphony--without resorting to voices - For the two decades that followed, the symphony was not seen as an attractive genre for composers--it was simply outmoded (hence, the term "the dry decades") - Wagner even made the bold declaration (in The Artwork of the Future) that Beethoven's 9th had made all purely instrumental music obsolete - Brahms was steering music back to its proper course and realm: that of pure instrumental music and away from the ill-advised direction that Beethoven's romantic followers (Liszt and Wagner) had taken with the symphonic poem (Liszt) and music drama (Wagner) Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) - Developed a great love for music of great composers of the past (CPE Bach, Couperin, etc.): traditionalist - Born in Hamburg, lived in Vienna - Keyboard player, traveled with Hungarian violinist - Schumann’s protégé - Relationship to New German School - Brahms was the leading German composer of his time in every field but opera - Between 1872-5, Brahms directed chorus and orchestra of the ‘Society of the Friends of Music’, which (surprise!) programmed mostly German music from the sixteenth century to the present. - Brahms fully understood what it meant to compose for audiences whose tastes were formed by the music of dead composers - Brahms applied forms like sonata form, and adhered to and referenced traditional genres of instrumental music - But Brahms also fused them with folk and current classical idioms to create a new personal style - music was deeply Romantic in that it had a lyrical beauty and was highly expressive - met the Schumanns when he was 20 and they became lifelong supporters of his music, and surrogate parents to Brahms - As Schumann passed his magazine over to a new editor (Brendel), he was allowed one last article, which he titled "Neue Bahnen" (new paths) about the future of "new music" - Mentions Brahms Schumann’s (Beethoven’s?) Legacy… - Launched Brahms’s career - Joseph Joachim, formerly concertmaster of Liszt’s orchestra at Weimar - Joachim had noisily defected from his position to lead the opposition to the New German School - the ‘well-known and respected master’ who had put Brahms in touch with Schumann was the violinist Joseph Joachim - Joachim and Brahms’s letter parodied in Neue Zeitschrift - Hans Neubahn and J. Geiger - Approached symphonic writing with care... 20 years for Symphony 1! - In 1870: “I shall never compose a symphony! You have no idea how someone like me fears when he hears such a giant marching behind him all the time!” - Brahms had a very successful career. By the 1880s, Brahms could compose whatever he wanted, without minding patrons or the public's desires. The War of the Romantics - Letter war - signed by Joachim and Brahms - Brahms approached symphonic music carefully and with deliberation. He knew they would have to stand beside Beethoven's. As a result, he wrote only 4 - He wrote his first symphony in his 40s, and had laboured over it for over 20 years - He is famous for saying, in 1870, “I shall never compose a symphony! You have no idea how someone like me fears when he hears such a giant marching behind him all the time!” Brahms vs. Wagner - Brahms was famous with all kinds of musicians by the time he was 40 (scholars and also household pianists). - Wagner came to regard Brahms, young enough to be his son, as a threat. In an essay of 1869, Wagner called Brahms "wooden, and prim." He teased him for not being able to write an opera (!). - Brahms premiered his Symphony 1 in 1876... same year as the premiere of Wagner’s Ring Cycle (operas). - The reception of Brahms's first symphony was epic. The pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow claimed that it should be known as "The Tenth Symphony." von Bülow was a charter member of New German School, disciple of Liszt at Weimar and close associate of Wagner... former husband of Cosima), was also conducting premieres of Tristan and Meistersinger. - After Brahms was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1879 at the University of Breslau with a diploma hailing him “the leader in the art of serious music in German today”, Wagner struck back. Wagner, in true style, composed an essay in fury entitled "On Poetry and Composition" - “I know of some famous composers [...] who in their concert masquerades don the disguise of a street singer one day, the hallelujah periwig of Handel the next, the dress of a Jewish Csardas-fiddler another time, and then again the guise of a highly respectable symphony dressed up as Number Ten. [...]” Features of Brahms's Music - Wide melodic spans - Cross-relations between major and minor forms of the tonic triad - Metric ambiguity - Thick orchestral textures Symphony No.4 in E Minor, Op. 98 Fourth Movement (1884-85) - carried the weight of the genre - premiered in 1885 by the court orchestra at Meiningen in Gemany, conducted Brahms himself - Brahms wanted to write a masterpiece for the ages, combining elements from the nineteenth-century symphonic tradition and more distant past in a unified vision that was uniquely Brahmsian - bases the entire movement on the Chaconne, a form that reflects Brahms's fascination with Baroque music - Brahms's chaconne is based on one of J.S. Bach's ostinatos - based on Bach's Cantata 150 (one of Bach’s earliest and most traditional works) “Brahmsian web of allusions” - Bach 4-mm. ostinato (Cantata 150) - Beethoven Eroica (#3) - variations in finale - bass line first in upper registers - groups variations into large sections that suggest sonata form - Buxtehude’s Ciacconia in E-minor - Couperin’s Rondeau-passacaglia - Brahms is able to make strong references to the past, all while creating something new - Brahms is using techniques from 3 eras: theme & variations popular during his own time, sonata form from Classical period, and the chaconne from the Baroque period Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) - Pianist, composer and conductor - Operatic conductor - Programmaticism: Wagner’s symphonic dramas, Mahler’s dramatic symphonies - drew often on folk poetry (Des Knabes Wunderhorn, Rückert, etc.) - Maximalism - He decided to make a living as opera conductor, and in 1897, was appointed as Director of Opera in Vienna at the Vienna Court Opera--the most powerful musical position in Europe (!) - Mahler was renowned during his life as a conductor, but not really as a composer - His music was never fully accepted by the public and remained a "summer composer," conducting for most of the year, and composing in short bursts during the summer while at his summer cottage with his wife and children - Mahler spent his life feeling like an outsider (significantly, he was a Jew) and felt that he was not understood by the public - Like Wagner, Mahler was an intellectual and a philosophical thinker - following Wagner, Mahler worked on his expansion and diversification of the orchestra, and like Beethoven, included voices in his symphonies (numbers 2, 3, 4, and 8) - Mahler often drew often from folk poetry by German poets Brentano and Arnim (Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and later from Rückert) and then included references to these pieces in his symphonies - Mahler's music was emblematic of the maximalism that characterized the fin-de-siecle: longer, larger, key relationships, dissonance and postponed resolution - Service calls Mahler a very "un-classical" composer, and also one of the greatest sound artists of all time Symphony No. 2 in C Minor - Premiered Berlin - December 1895 - “Resurrection” Symphony - - - - References: Beethoven, Wagner, sigh motives Obsession with the primitive and pastoral (Des Knaben Wunderhorn) Maximalism (S8 858 singers, 171 instrumentalists) S9, Das Lied von der Erde (1909), and S10 (unfinished): themes of death, funeral marches, Kindertotenliederreferences - Mahler often referenced the German tradition in his works: the first page of the score references three Beethoven symphonies (5th, 3rd and 9th) - He also used German folk songs with texts by German folk poets. - he wanted to surpass his predecessors in sublimity and intensity (mass of sound, harmonic palette) - Mahler's obsession with the pastoral and primitive is a feature of much early modernist art - Modernists are conscious of their separation from the ‘natural world’ and long for a return to it (a sort of "neoprimitivism" - which we will explore further when we look at Stravinsky) Mahler's Nostalgia - Debussy called this music "primitive music with all modern conveniences." - The melody is simple, but the harmony is sophisticated. This allows the piece to convey a double message: an urgent need to return to simple values and the impossibility of achieving simplicity - Nostalgia, as we will learn, is the most complicated and modern of all emotions - It is an ecstatic renewal of faith in spite of everything. Here, maximalism is a means of renewal, or at least an effort to drown out doubt. In this way, Mahler's music can be seen as an aesthetic antithesis of the philosophical and moral nihilism of the modern world. - In other words, art is no longer a representation but something more than that--an entity of its own - This is maximalism at its most maximalist! Modernism - modern life was fraught in many ways and it created a sense of crisis or anxiety in people - Time zones were coordinated in "World Standard Time" in 1884 - Those who understood themselves as futurists embraced these, others wanted contact with the primitive (however defined) and also with the past (through nostalgia). We see this in the music of Stravinsky (primitivism) and Mahler (nostalgia--countryside soundscapes, etc.) - The American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, are understood by many historians to have ushered in modern political era - the middle class continued to dominate public life. - Check out T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" of 1922, which expresses exhaustion and cultural crisis - Eliot had to include explanatory notes, which was characteristic of modern art (its density and difficulty) - The poem contains many images of death and decay, which express the disillusionment with the moral decay post-WW1 - Chagall's I and the Village stages the tension between present and past, and demonstrates the crisis of consciousness that is the modern period - This makes sense in the context of the political climate surrounding the first world war Early Twentieth-Century Modernism in Music - In the years before WWI, a group of composers carried out a radical break from the musical language of the past: we refer these composers as the early twentieth-century modernists - Modernists by definition did not aim to please listeners or viewers at first sight/ hearing - Instead, they wanted to challenge our perceptions and capacities, providing an experience impossible through traditional means - They did nevertheless see connections between their art and the art of the past - Mahler's and Wagner's music was considered, you'll remember, as maximalist music: music that employed huge orchestras, works with lofty extramusical connotations (remember Mahler's semantic density), and chromaticism - Rachmaninoff chose to stay in a relatively tonal realm and to compose music that appealed to Romantic sensibilities and listening preferences. So did Ravel, Vaughan Williams, and Strauss (well, sometimes) - The demand for originality was pushing the limits of tonality forward, and yet the risk was that composers who strayed too far might lose their audiences - composers like Debussy, da Falla, Janacek, and Scriabin went beyond the tonal idiom in the early 1900s as each developed a personal musical language that followed its own rules - even when we have tonal sonorities in a work, we often can’t call it tonal because the harmonic language diverges too far from what we call common practice tonality - enter the realm of post-tonal music; that is, music that embraces atonality to neo-tonality, and other systems as we will see Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Impressionism - was an original and rebellious musical mind, and won every prize in sight - achieved recognition in 1902 with his opera Pelleas et Mélisande, but was hounded by debt and his failing health - Debussy's music exhibits an ambiguity with functional harmony, which he first gleaned from Rimsky-Korsakov (Russian composer and teacher of composition) during a lecture at the Paris Exposition in 1900, and from Eric Satie - One way to understand this is that his is a harmonic language in which no key is defined concretely - achieves this through the use of whole tones and the pentatonic scale, which has no semitones - also used programmatic titles to contain and organize his pieces without a traditional tonal language Impressionism in Debussy’s music - Impressionism can be understood as the evocation of mood or atmosphere, understatement, passivity, appeal to the senses - Claude Monet “Impression: Sunrise” (1872) - It was first used as a derogatory term (like the term "Baroque") implying that Monet's technique was sloppy - eventually accepted as it seemed suited to how French artists differed from Germans - The term applies to French artists in the 1870s and 1880s (Monet, Renoir, Degas, etc.), and to poets like Verlaine whose poems were soft, expressed subtleties of feelings, were understated, and created a mood - The term "impressionist" also alludes to the impressions that this work gives when looking at nature (sensuousness vs. psychology) - Many during Debussy’s own lifetime viewed the composer as an impressionist - Debussy was flattered to be considered an impressionist in alignment with Monet - Debussy's music features an understated quality, a love of beauty and freedom of nature, subtlety, primary orchestral colours that use free motion, and a sense of originality that bypasses academic formulas. - Debussy didn't want to be reduced to an "ism." - he expressed that he thought his work was more suited to a symbolist aesthetic - Symbolism promised knowledge through senses of the spiritual--a way of seeing art beyond the phenomenal world into the world of higher reality - Formally: Debussy hated developmental forms, since he thought they constrained his artistic freedom. Nuages demonstrates this beautifully Nocturnes: No. 1, Nuages (Clouds) 1897-99 - An example of Debussy’s impressionistic style - Extends Chopin’s and Schumann’s techniques - Provocative, pictorial - Based on the painting, Nocturnes: Blue and Silver- Chelsea James McNeill Whistler 1871 - “The work renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow solemn motion of clouds, fading away in gray tones lightly tinged with white.” - Clouds don't have a sound, so it's the impression of them that might be represented through music - Nuages is provocative and pictorial - The ways that the piece evokes the subject of clouds is interesting: they shift imperceptibly, effortlessly, and are also static in a way - The piece, especially the B section was inspired by gamelan--you can hear this in the pentatonic collections that Debussy employs Balinese Gamelan Heard by Debussy at Paris Expo 1889 - The pentatonic scale was prominent in Javanese gamelan music, which Debussy heard at the Paris Exposition in 1889 Non-Traditional Elements - Debussy used many non-traditional elements to novel effect in Nuages - The significance of the different pitch collections that Debussy uses can't be overstated - Unusual in that he did not want the balanced sound of German orchestra - Instead, segregates the orchestra into "choirs" or groups - Timbre and orchestration are memorable - Forward motion is eschewed through static repetition of short phrases The Avant-Garde & Eric Satie - iconoclastic - irreverent - antagonistic - nihilistic - “Fountain” -Marcel Duchamp (1917) - The term "avant-garde" was originally a French military term (which meant preparing the way for the main army) - mid-nineteenth century, it referred to French artists who saw themselves as a vanguard in music - In France primarily around this time, we see the first stirrings of a movement that challenged the original modernist tradition and grew in importance throughout the century. - Art (and music) that seeks to overthrow accepted aesthetics and start afresh. Erik Satie (1866-1925) - the "velvet gentleman" - Anti-Romantic: short, repetitive, little or no melody, unemotional, irreverent, satirical - was one of the earliest French composers to really carve out an original position for himself - met Debussy and Ravel who found him eccentric - Satie's music emerged as a broad reaction to the late Romantic style - It was refreshingly anti-Romantic - Usually, these pieces have little melody, are monotonously repetitive, with no development of ideas - lack of key or time signatures. - It pokes fun at older composers, like Chopin and Wagner and even Beethoven! - It spoofs the serious tone of most Romantic music - It makes fun of Wagner's indication of every leitmotif at every appearance! - There is no key signature or barlines: a blatant rejection of convention here Erik Satie Vexations (1893) - John Cage performed this in 1963 in 18 hours in 40 minutes (setting the Guinness book of World Records) - Satie was a huge influence on Cage - it challenges Romantic notions of expressivity and individuality - it employs modality and unresolved chords - it is decidedly anti-sentimental Stravinsky's Neoclassicism as Modernism - term neoclassicism comes from the study of visual arts (Picasso), theatre, and primarily architecture, where neoclassicism was characterized by Greek and Roman-influenced styles, geometric lines and order - But in music, it’s symptomatic of a general swerve in the arts in the interwar period - changed in meaning significantly throughout the first half of the century (and there continues to be debate as to its precise meaning) - This period brought about a renewed interest in music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - Stravinsky abandoned orchestras for his ballets and turned to smaller ensembles (with chamber music, piano, and vocal compositions) - Stravinsky was one of the instigators of the movement, but neoclassicism was also adopted by Milhaud, Copland, and Prokofiev - the French Avant-Garde : the French were self-conscious about their lack of nineteenth century figures - the term was a French invention to produce a counter or balance to the domination of German culture in the nineteenth century - - - - - That it denotes a return to a simpler concept of form whose structure is more predictable (and often in music this is Classical or Baroque!) Represents a reaction to the excesses of Romanticism prominent features of the classical style: - balanced phrases - Classical instrumentations - Classical forms - objectivity - clarity - more transparent textures Neoclassical composers used these features to counter prevalent forms and features of Romanticism. This manifested itself in a rejection of the looser (and larger) forms, and heightened emotionalism of Romanticism he embraced a distinctly non-Germanic or even ANTI-Germanic Approach Pulcinella (Paris, 1920) - The impresario Diaghilev returned to Stravinsky to get him to compose a ballet with Massine, and with Picasso - The ballet would be based on the early eighteenth-century composer Pergolesi's work Pulcinella, with characters drawn from commedia dell’arte - there are many aspects of it that are quite traditional and faithful to Pergolesi's original, but Stravinsky also includes many unexpected modulations and rhythmic interest that is ultimately from the twentieth century - It sounds distinctly "anti-modern." Stravinsky & Neoclassicism - Turns to Western art music’s past for “new” source material - Disillusionment with Russian heritage - Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suites, and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major - Term used with respect to Stravinsky in 1923: refers to a linear, contrapuntal turn in his writing - “My music is architectonic, not anecdotal; an objective, not a descriptive construction.” -Stravinsky, 1923 - he turns away from Russian music and to Western art music as a source for imitation, quotation and allusion - the upheavals in Russia in 1917 deprived Stravinsky of his inheritance & also of much of his income - the term became rehabilitated; and became recognized as a current in twentieth-century composition. It seemed to refer to a linear, contrapuntal turn in Stravinsky's writing - met with outrage from the public and the press. This was partly due to the general acceptance (if not wild popularity) of his Russian style. - This is surprising in that his neoclassicism does, in many ways, seem like a step backward (in time, at least). But Stravinsky saw it as a move forward, a progression of his style. Octet for Wind Instruments (1923) - Prokofiev thought the first movement sounded like "Bach with smallpox" since the harmonic language is certainly not Bach Charles Ives and American Modernism Dvorak in America - one cannot consider American music without understanding the impact of the ideas (and music) of the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak on its musical identity - came to America in 1892, and recognized immediately that its art music needed to be revamped - Dvorak was hired to head the National Conservatory in New York to "help American composers find their own voices and shake off the European sound," as Tom Huizenga writes in this great piece on Dvorak in America ("Immigrant goes to Ame-ri-ca/ Many hellos in Ame-ri-ca"). - Dvorak first published a letter in which he believed that a national music would be best fashioned from what the music of African American and First Nations composers, in the New York Herald in Sunday, May 21, 1893 The Grand Old Man of American Music: Charles Ives (1874-1954) - Charles Ives is one composer who followed through on Dvorak's ideas for American music in an incredibly unique way - first American figure to attempt to create an American style that represented American life - Ives (through his father) created creating what we would now call polytonality, - This was an idea that was later developed by other composers independently, but Ives was first to use it systematically - Ives really valued the individuality cultivated with his father--in many ways, he didn’t want to give into Parker’s traditional training. - Horatio Parker, who is known as the "white light in American music." - The stress of his musical career was ultimately too much for Ives. His solution was to give up music altogether - The dominant American view was that of the ‘gilded age’--in other words, many believed that "classical music was for sissies and women" (Rossiter’s words) - A career-making moment for Ives occurred in 1939 when the pianist John Kirkpatrick played the Concord Sonata in NYC, after which a critic hailed the piece “the greatest music composed by an American.” - Ives has been known as one of the most "American" composers, and most significantly, "America's great musical maverick," "The First American Modernist," and "The Grand Old Man of American Music." New England Transcendentalism (1930s - 1950s) - Ives followed a particular branch of philosophy - New England transcendentalism. - NE Transcendentalism arose out of a group of intellectuals in New England 1930s-50s (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Hawthorne) - Emerson developed the idea, connected with Romantic philosophy, that instincts and intuition were the key to divinity. By respecting one’s intuition, one could gain direct access to the wisdom of God. - Ives himself was quite taken by this movement. He wanted his music to provide the rush of sentiment and enthusiasm (some transcendental, some nostalgic) - To accomplish this Ives was prepared to go to stylistic extremes that forced him (or enabled?) to renounce his traditional schooling in order to follow his ‘instincts’ to a degree that few other composers could match Piano Sonata No. 2 - “Concord, MA, 1840-60” (1909-19) - The piece, despite it modernism, was American in nature (based on theme) - In this sonata, each movement is named after a core member of the New England Transcendentalist group - Ives knew that music was beyond any analogy to language - he tries to musically represent the philosophical approaches of all four figures after whom its movements are based. - Alcott Movement (III) - an allusion to Beethoven 5 - Beethoven was revered by the New England Transcendentalists - Despite his modernism, Ives had a surprising Germano-centric idea about Beethoven as a channel of the divine. - Many Americans felt that the German tradition, German composers, were the greatest that ever lived - Ives saw himself as a descendent of the Beethovenian line (like Schoenberg)- but as an improvement or growth out of it, as both a eulogy and a critique Ives’s Musical Borrowings - Everyday language of hymn tunes (Jesus, Lover of my soul), a march (Columbia, gem of the ocean), a spiritual song, a hymn (Martyn), etc. - In this sonata, there are 2 musically and programmatically-related thematic families: - Human faith family - Corn Field family - 'Emerson' movement - Most of the movement is based on what Ives called the ‘Human Faith melody’ (designation Ives himself used in essay on Alcotts), which is a long melody based on series of 7 motivic fragments ranging in length (from the 'Human Faith Family' of melodies). He wrote the melody itself, but it contains references to known tunes - Ives is able to create music that means in complex ways--it is semiotically rich, and because it alludes to so many musical emblems of America, ultra-American Three Places in New England: “Putnam’s Camp” (1903-13) - We hear unprecedented levels of dissonance and rhythmic complexity. - This is a programmatic piece of Ives, typical of many of his later pieces. - Usually these are nostalgic, evoking his idealized, (and occasionally fictionalized) New England boyhood - The place was a historic site near his birthplace- a field that served as campgrounds to troups under the command of Israel Putnam, the Revolutionary War General who was Connecticut’s most illustrious military hero. Dmitriy Shostakovich (1906-1975) - Composing prodigy: famous at 19 for 1st symphony, performing internationally - Neoclassical, dodecaphonic (12-tone), and modernist - Much of his music is full of “new-objective irony”; utilitarian genres (marches, waltzes) The context of Soviet Russia: Totalitarianism - During his leadership of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin ordered the deaths of an estimated 30,000 people, including thousands of artists. Music-making under Totalitarianism - Following October Revolution of 1917, role of music in new regime was uncertain - Many Russian composers fled to Europe or USA (Koussevitzky, Horowitz, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Stravinsky) - Under Stalin, all workers must contribute to the state. - Arts policed and watchdogged unlike in Germany or Italy (other totalitarian regimes) - Arts transformed into a delivery system for propaganda. Composers could not retreat from society: social parasite Leningrad, 1923 - Ironically, during the 1920s, a genuine Soviet Avant-Garde emerged. 2 main groups were organized: - Association of Contemporary Musicians (“traditionalists”) - Symphonies - string quartets - Operas - influenced by developments in W. Europe - RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians: “The Soviet Avant-Garde”) - anti-Western, anti-jazz - Anti-folklore - supported revolutionary utilitarian music - interested in the new objectivity (like German Gebrauchmusik) - march-like songs for mass group singing, set to agitational propaganda lyrics Union of Soviet Composers... & Formalism - A Composer’s union was formed, but the real power lay elsewhere...interested in enforcing conformity - Leo Tolstoy “What is Art?” (1898)- Christian doctrine: art must be communitarian, didactic and comprehensible to all - What does this mean for music? Boris Asafyev, “Musical Form as Process”(1930) - Formalism: a work in which abstract musical elements outweighed programmatic content. - Also, anything difficult or unsettling for the “average listener” (... modernism!) The doctrine that emerged: Socialist Realism - “A creative method based on the truthful, historically concrete artistic reflection of reality in its revolutionary development.” (1932, First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers) Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934) - woman rebelling against patriarchal society - murders husband, father-in-law, and husband’s nephew - murders a boy with her lover - Sentenced to jail in Siberia, on the way there her lover falls in love with another woman Shostakovich Symph 5, mvt 2. Berlin Philharmonic, cond, Solti - “The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing.” John Cage (1912-92) - Born in California; little formal training, but did study with Schoenberg (began in 12-tone), and with Henry Cowell - Avant-Garde: challenges music’s very purpose, not only its techniques - Prepared piano (ca. 1940) - Music as sound; the emancipation of noise! - Chance, Indeterminacy, Blurring boundaries between art and life! John Cage Music of Changes: Book 1 (1951) - An example of chance music: music that contains some elements determined by chance - Note: this aleatoric music is one kind of indeterminate music - Name from Chinese book of prophecy, the I Ching - Complex proportional form (29 5/8 durational units; each 29 5/8mm long)... - Charts of possible sounds, dynamics durations, tempos - Each chart has 64 elements on it- from which to choose. 1 chart determines how many elements occur within a segment. 1 chart determines the tempo, 8 charts each for sounds, dynamics, durations... and half were silences - Sounds seem to occur randomly at random intervals, dynamics, durations, speed, etc. - Difficult, but “a mistake is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is” (Cage). New Sounds and Textures - Use of new instruments, sounds and scales - Harry Partch: gourd tree - Rejects equal temperament and Western harmony: new system developed with 43 notes based on just intonation - Henry Cowell: Cage’s teacher - Cluster chords on piano Milton Babbitt (1916-2011) - Was supposed to study math at U-Penn, but studied at NYU (12-tone enthusiasts) - Mathematician and composer at Princeton; later taught at Juilliard - Became leading proponent of “total serialism”: other parameters of a piece (durations, dynamics) are regulated by serial procedures - Argues that composers, like scientists, engage in research to advance knowledge Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) - Leading German composer of his generation - Taught Darmstadt 156 onward. Met Messiaen, Boulez - - - - - Met Pierre Schafer and Musique Concrète; worked in a Studio for Electronic Music Studied phonetics at Bonn University 1953: seminal figure (along with Boulez and Nono) of the Post-war Avant Garde Ensemble in 1960s (Expo ’70) World fame when he appears on cover of Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album 1967 Gesang der Jünglinge (1955-6) - Focused on electronic music from 1953 onwards - Use of a young boy’s recording of the sacred text (“Preiset den Herrn!”) sung - Analyzes the recording and creates electronic sounds that mimic attack, tone, timbre of the child’s voice - Total serialism - First multi-track work (4 channels) to combine electronic music and musique concrète - Established visibility of the electro-acoustic medium The Canadian League of Composers (1960) - “It was a turning point; there was no point in Canadian music. It didn’t exist. We figured that since nobody knew we existed, we should create the Canadian League of Composers in order to have something to resign from. [...] For the English-Canadian composers the roots, when I was a child, were in English music. There was a big tradition of vocal and church music. 2 Tropes of Canadian Music - Multiculturalism/Mosaic Trope: compositions representative of diversity of population - Landscape Trope: compositions representative of landscape Harry Somers (1925-1999) - b. Toronto 1925, studied comp under Weinzweig at U. Toronto - Pianist, until 1948, then composition - 1949: Canadian Amateur Hockey Association Scholarship to study composition for a year in Paris with Milhaud & Messiaen - 1950: taxi driver, copyist, and professional guitarist, radio show host - 1960s: first composer to be able to earn living almost entirely from commissions - Internationally renowned; interested in honing a Canadian sound - Compositional Traits: - Somersian ‘long line’ - Sharp, nervous, rhythmic vitality - Falling semitone: meaning? - Dynamic Envelope (cresc and decrescendo; creates tension— dynamic unrest) - North Country (1948) - Evocations - Loon (1966) r. Murray Schafer (1933-2021) - World Soundscape Project & Soundscape Studies at Simon Fraser University in 1960s - Book The Tuning of the world (1977): “Throughout this book I am going to treat the world as a macrocosmic musical composition.” - “Ear Cleaning” - “Schizophonia” in which a sound has been split from its originator - And even... “ecomusicology”! Train (1976) - Written for junior school string orchestra (Scarborough) - Modeled after a cross-Canada trip he took over 6 days Toronto - Vancouver and back, 1976 - The distance between Vancouver and Montreal (4,633 km) determines the duration of the piece (so, each 1000 km takes up to 1 minute, or, each km lasts .6 seconds) - Percussion punctuates stations - Stations passed at night are played on bell instruments; day = drums/wood - Size of city corresponds with loudness of percussion - Strings give idea of terrain—pitches determined by altitude - Standard CPR whistle tuned to E-flat minor triad Cris Derksen: Two-Spirit Cree Composer & Cellist - Cris Derksen, a Juno-nominated Indigenous cellist and composer, is internationally renowned for her genre-defying music that bridges the traditional and contemporary. Hailing from Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta, Derksen comes from a lineage of chiefs from the NorthTall Cree Reserve on her father’s side and strong Mennonite homesteaders on her mother’s. Her work intricately weaves together her classical training and Indigenous heritage with modern electronic elements - White Man’s Cattle 2019 Minimalism - 1960s USA, then international - La Monte Young (b. 1935): drone music, Fluxus “happenings” - Anti-modernist: opposed to abstract expressionism - A reduction of materials to their essentials; regularity of formal design - Took on philosophical focuses of postwar AG movement (anti-Romantic, in ways; move to simplicity) - Relentless repetition of simple elements - Key composers were inspired by the musical traditions and spiritual practices of India, Bali, and West Africa Terry Riley (b. 1935) - One of minimalism’s founding figures - LA Monte Young, Fluxus happenings - All-night concerts; collaborations with visual artists like Robert Bensen - In C (1964) Steve Reich (b. 1936) - Crossover work: worked with Pat Metheny - “Steve Reich and Musicians” - Believed that minimalism reflected the realities of American life - Repetition of a single musical “object” - Phase Shifting - Come Out (1966) Philip Glass (b.1937) - American, influenced by Indian music - 1968: formed the Philip Glass Ensemble: amplified instruments from Art Rock. Collaborated with rock musicians like David Byrne, Paul Simon. - Additive structure: Strung Out (1967) subjects a pentatonic module to variation by increasing & decreasing its length. - Einstein on the Beach (premiered at the Met, 1976). - Planned on the basis of a set of drawings by Wilson. 3 recurring images: a train, a courtroom scene, and a spaceship. - non-narrative, singers don’t use regular language
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