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40 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Franz Schubert
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• “first romantic” – all forms • Remembered for over his 700 Lieder compositions (including Erlkonig, with text by Goethe)
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Hector Berlioz
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• Early Romantic, French composer; best known work is his Symphonie fantastique, a programmatic symphony. o Each of its five parts is unified by the varied repetition of the idée fixe melody (repeats the same thing over again in 5 different parts). • Our focus piece was “March to the Scaffold,” Mov. IV, Symphonie fantastique, whose scoring included the ophecleide. • This composer scored of extended techniques, like col legno bowing (using back side of bow – the wood side – to knock on the fingerboard of a violin). • His Symphonie fantastique was inspired by his obsessive love for Harriet Smithson
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Stephen Foster
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• America’s first fully professional composer and songwriter. • “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair” is an Irish-style lament, and its melodic structure, a-a-b-a, will be expanded to a larger form in Tin Pan Alley standards as well as Beatle songs: • AABA is a most common form for American pop songs.
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Nicolo Paganini
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• Italian violin virtuoso whose prodigious skills on the instrument so astonished his audiences that it was rumored that he traded his soul away to possess them. • His legacy: 24 Caprices that are mastered by only a few classical string players, but studied by all. • Master and innovator of many extended techniques for violin.
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Franz Liszt
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• Hungarian-born piano virtuoso whose “Transcendental Etudes” are mastered by only a very few pianists. • His technique changed performance practice for the pianoforte, and was inspired by Paganini’s mastery of the violin. • He invented the solo “piano recital.” He also pioneered the tone poem, a single-movement work for orchestra that most usually was programmatic in some regard.
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Frederic Chopin
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• Polish/French composer and piano virtuoso; specialized in writing for solo piano; tempo rubato; • Polonaises, inspired by his Polish homeland. Preferred to perform in small, salon settings.
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Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel
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• Middle-Romantic era composer and virtuoso pianist, sister of Felix Mendelssohn• Her career was cut short for reasons of expectations and social norms regarding women
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Giuseppe Verdi
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• The most successful composer of 19th-century Italian opera. • An anagram of his last name was celebrated as a call for Italian independence from Austria. • His “La Donna e mobile” is one of the most celebrated arias in all of opera: it is included in his opera, Rigoletto. Synonymous name for Italians vs Austrians
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Richard Wagner
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• most influential German Romantic-era composer. • Specialized in music drama,/opera = the Gesamtkunstwerk. • “Tristan und Isolde” stretched tonality near to its breaking point • He wrote all the libretti to his own works, including the massive Ring Cycle, comprising four related music dramas.• Note his use of leitmotiv (leitmotiv – or “leading motive”), functioning as both dramatic and musical “identifier” for this or that character, place, idea, etc.• Built his own theater at Bayreuth, Bavaria.
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Johannes Brahms
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• forwarded by Robert Schumann as the antidote to Wagner and the New German School “music of the Future.” • German Late Romantic composer of Symphony No. 3 – and example of “absolute” as opposed to “programmatic” music. • His music frequently employs hemioloa, a rhythmic device also used by Renaissance composers.
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Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky
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• Late-Romantic, Russian composer: composer of the ballet suite, The Nutcracker, one of his best remembered and popular works (“Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies”).
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Georges Bizet
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• French composer of “Carmen”, a mature Romantic opera whose gypsy protagonist, Carmen, defied all stereotypical and conventional virtuous heroines of French opera.
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Bedrich Smentana
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• Bohemian composer of operas, chamber works, and TONE POEMS• Composed the cycle of tone poems, Ma Vlast (“The Moldau”)
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Antonin Dvorak
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• Czech nationalist who thought national identity was a solid foundation for personal style. • Wrote his Symphony No. 9 From the New World in America; he urged American composers to draw upon their own home-grown sources (African-American spirituals).
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Giacomo Puccini
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• Exemplar and mainspring composer in the Verismo movement (greater realism); composer of La Boehme. Verismo opera.
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Claude Debussy
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• The first modernist composer • In his Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun,” this composer elevated timbre/tone color to fundamental importance in composition • Selective orchestration – shrunk the orchestra in “The Afternoon of a Faun”• Influenced by Symbolist poets, especially Stephane Mallarme
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Stephane Mallarme
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• Debussy’s favorite poet and founder of poetic Symbolism; author of the poem “Afternoon of a Faun,” that so inspired Debussy. • Symbolism strives for impression of feelings
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Igor Stravinsky
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• Russian composer. Early ballets were Russian folk-based (including the Rite); • Middle period was “neoclassical”; in his final period he adopted Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone System. • This composer “emancipated rhythm” in his works, and particularly in “The Danse of the Youths and Maidens,” from the Rite of Spring, where rhythmic ideas are essential to the composition.
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Segey Diaghilev
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• Director of The Russian Ballet (Ballets Russe) whose success was in Paris, rather than Russia. • He commissioned the Rite of Spring, as well as Stravinsky’s earlier ballets.
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Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov
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• senior member of “The Mighty Handful” of Russian nationalist composers: a master of orchestration (like Berlioz before him) and teacher of Stravinsky.
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Arnold Schoenberg
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• Founder of 2nd Viennese School; first composed in late Romantic fashion, then pioneered “atonal” or post-tonal styles. • Subsequently he invented a systematic approach to atonality with his “Twelve-Tone System,” also known as serial composition, or composition with twelve tones, or dodecaphonic music. • Composer of the freely atonal Pierre Lunaire, for which he invented the vocal technique and style of rhythmized speech called Sprechstimme. A later, Post-World War II work was a twelve-tone secular cantata, A Survivor from Warsaw.
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George Gerschwin
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• American modernist composer who synthesized jazz dance band orchestra, Latin rhythms, jazz piano style and European concerto tradition, in Rhapsody in Blue.• American composer who crossed over from “popular” songwriting to classical-scale works for concert hall and opera house. • “Porgy and Bess,” an aria from his folk opera
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William Grant Still
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• American modernist composer who simultaneously worked as an arranger for Harlem’s New York-based Black Swan Records label, performed in a Broadway pit orchestra, and studied composition with Edgard Varese, the most radical modernist in America. • His Afro-American Symphony was a groundbreaking work, the first symphony to incorporate the banjo in its score, and the first symphony by an African-American to attain a place in the concert hall repertory.
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Charles Ives
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• American early Modernist; father George instructed him with “ear stretching” exercises. • Trademarks of his style are multiple stylistic layers (e.g., The Unanswered Question), use of tone clusters (also employed by his protégé, Henry Cowell), and “musical quotations” of hymns and popular songs interwoven into his own compositions. • Working in relative isolation, and on his weekends and holidays away from his insurance business, he anticipated a great many aspects of European modernism.
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Modest Mussorgsky
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• 19th-century Russian composer and member of “The Mighty Handful” formed of nationalistic composers• This composer's Pictures at an Exhibition, was a programmatic suite of piano pieces (later orchestrated by Ravel) that aurally depicted the artist figuratively “looking” at an exhibition of paintings and drawings.
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Maurice Ravel
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• composer of Le Tombeau de Couperin, a suite for piano (also orchestrated) that pays homage to friends of this composer killed in World War I; • it is also an homage to French Baroque music.
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Bela Bartok
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• Hungarian composer who founded a personal style drawing upon and synthesizing East-European folk music concepts with modernist approaches to harmony and melodic and formal techniques.
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Aaron Copland
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• American composer trained in the U.S. and France; drew upon jazz and folk musics of the United States and Mexico. • Arranged an old Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts”, as the capstone for Appalachian Spring, originally a ballet score for select chamber ensemble later scored for a larger orchestra for concert hall performance.
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Lev Termen
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• Russian inventor/musician who invented the Theremin, an early electronic instrument, much appreciated by Edgard Varese as well as The Beach Boys and Led Zeppelin.
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Edgard Varese
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• French-born, American avant-garde modernist: composed Poeme electronique, for the Philips Electronic Company’s Pavilion for the Brussels Worlds Fair. • He envisioned “sound masses,” and created them using electronically generated sounds (including invention from 1920s, the Theremin) recorded directly to magnetic tape.
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John Cage
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• post-1945 avant-gardist American modernist. • This composer ventures into exploration of anti-systematic, aleatoric (aleatory) or chance composition. • In 1940, he wrote for his “invention” of the prepared piano (while at Cornish School in Seattle) (see Sonata No. 2 for Prepared Piano).
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Pierre Boulez
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• French composer who, along with his German colleague Karlheinz Stockhausen, advocated “Total Serialism” in the post World-War II 1950s and 1960s. • Total serialism would apply Schoenberg’s concept of the tone row to ALL musical parameters; rhythm, timbre, form, dynamics, etc.
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The Beatles
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• we emphasized their connection to modern western “art music.” • “Tomorrow Never Knows” John Lennon, soundscape of electronic sounds• Although they came into the public eye as a pop group, they became rock’s preeminent rock “avant-garde” artists through use of radically experimental studio production, extended techniques, and borrowings from East Indian classical music, as heard in George Harrison’s “Within You, Without You.”
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Jimi Hendrix
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• Seattle-born composer and guitarist. “Purple Haze” was his breakout hit in 1967. More ambitious albums were produced in the following three years of his short career. • He composed what he called “sound paintings,” including “1983, A Merman I Should Turn To Be/Moon turns the tides, gently, gently” – a science fiction song and soundscape (or “sound painting”) of an underwater excursion to the Lost City of Atlantis.
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John Adams
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• composer of Dr. Atomic , this composer represents a post-modernist and post-minimalist composer.
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Bright Sheng
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• His Prelude to his symphonic suite, China Dreams, exemplifies his personal mélange of Chinese influences and European forms and instrumentation
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Avro Part
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• tintinnabulation, referring to the sound of bells, generally, and more specifically to the timbre and sound envelopes of bell or bell-like sounds, is usually more associated with the work of this composer
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John Corigliano
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• John Corigliano’s main man is Bob Dylan, rock poet and singer-songwriter ne plus ultra (although Dylan once slyly described himself as being just “a song and dance man”).
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Jennifer Higdon
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• “Neo-Romantic.” Blue Cathedral (2000) does indeed hearken back to the tradition of Liszt’s tone poem, and bears a personal inscription dedicated to the memory of the composer’s brother. The composition is also accompanied by her profoundly heartfelt and poetically imaged program
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Frank Zappa
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• This composer was as interested in contemporary art music as he was in post-war rhythm & blues.• a 20th-century bandleader and “composer working in rock”
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