Music Final Exam

Front 1

Milton Babbitt

Back 1

Milton Babbitt
-Went to Princeton, was a serialist composer, which is music that uses the twelve-ton method, used especially for music that extends the same general approach to series in parameters other than pitch.
-Went to undergrad for math, but was actually hired as a faculty member in music
-Put music and math together
-This is a work that combined prerecorded tape with live performers
-Philomel is for soprano soloist with a tape that includes altered recorded fragments of the singer as well as electronic sounds.
-The live tape and the singer engage in dialogue, accompanied by synthesized sounds
-Used electronic music
-In three sections, begins with the single vowel sound and gradually words emerge. THen the echo song takes place after her transformation

Front 2

John Cage

Back 2

John Cage
-1912-1992
-Prepared piano: various objects, such as pennies, bolts, screws, wood, rubber, plastic, weather stripping, bamboo, are inserted between the strings, resulting in percussive sounds when the piano is played.
-His sonatas and interludes consist of 16 "sonatas", most of them are in binary form, without thematic returns, also contains 4 interludes.
-Chance music: left some of the decisions normally made by composers to chance, he created pieces in which the sounds did not convey his intentions, but simply were.
-He tried to work without any knowledge of what might happen - his purpose is to eliminate purpose, and wants people to learn to exist like nature.
-Didn't want his music to be about feelings, just wanted the sounds to take over
-He used non-western ideas because he grew up in an area where people were questioning western ideals
-His music is spiritual in a far Eastern kind of way
-Had a cosmopolitan ideal teacher

Front 3

Aaron Copland

Back 3

Aaron Copland
-1900-1990
-Went to France to study Classical Music
-Began to embrace in jazz
-His songs are featured in a lot of modern day commercials
-He was a big contributor to "American Music", which sounds like folk songs, patriotic, jazz, and he embraced all American ideals in his music.
-His music combined modernism with national American idioms.
-Was exposed to ragtime and popular music from a young age
-Was a teacher and a lecturer and a conductor
-Organizer of musical alliance
-Quintessential American Composer - extremely American (european background is so influential to him making him big because Europe was embracing jazz music more than American actually was because of the depression).
-The end of jazz age was marked by the stock market crash in 1929.
-Wanted his music to be accessible to everyone so he wrote music in a language the broad masses of people could understand because it was during the Depression.
-His music is rich harmonically, but is not atonal; his music preserves a sense of a tonal center.
-Rhythms are lively and flexible, and he exploited instrumental color and spacing.
-He won an Oscar, Pulitzer, and received Honorary Degrees

Front 4

Claude Debussy

Back 4

Claude Debussy
-1862-1918
-French, drew from the French tradition a preference for sensibility, taste, and restraint
-Music is called impressionist music, closer to symbolism, a connection reinforced by his friendships with symbolist poets and his use of their texts for songs and dramatic works.
-He typically evokes a mood, feeling, atmosphere, or scene.
-He creates musical images through motives, harmony, exotic scales, instruments, and other elements/
-Uses chromatic and whole-tone chords
-Makes good use of the flute for the melody and piano.

Front 5

George Gershwin

Back 5

George Gershwin
-1898-1937
-Came from a very poor unmusical family
-Him and Ira, who was a lyricist, wrote musicals that are very popular today
-His first Broadway hit was Swanny
-At 20 years old, he was a great pianist, was writing songs and musicals, borrowed from jazz
-The bridge is the circle of 5ths in this song.
-Porgy and Bess was written in 1935, more closely knit to a musical, and the orchestra part sounds more classical.
-He called it a folk opera, and has been produced both as an opera and as a musical, it draws from both genres
-The music features recurring motives like Verdi or Wagner, but the musical style is spiritual, blues, and jazz.

Front 6

Charles Ives

Back 6

Charles Ives
-1874-1954
-Synthesized international and regional musical traditions
-Experimental Music: focused on exploration of new musics, sounds, and techniques
-Wrote pieces that were polytonal, with the melody in one key and the accompaniment in another, or with four voices each on their own key.
-Wrote 4 symphonies, 2 string quartets, 200 songs, 4 violin sonatas, 2 piano sonatas
-American Program Music: his pieces celebrate aspects of American life, such as the Civil War, Washington's Birthday, Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving. Some works are more philosophical.
-In all of these Ives uses references to American tunes or musical styles to suggest the meanings he wanted to convey. - Three places in new england
unique use of the voice, she has to sing very fast. She has to wistle, which isn’t used in the 19th century.
-It shows Ive’s way of being able to compose many different styles.
It is juxtaposed by a very quieter, contemplative and slower section later in the song.
It is a collection of more than 100 songs that Ives wrote
-His "Three Places in New England" piece is a symphonic piece but sounds very atonal - has a constant beat underneath everything of piano chords.

Front 7

Oliver Messiaen

Back 7

Olver Messiaen
-1908-1992, most important French composer
-Composed many pieces on religious subjects for violin, clarinet, cello, and piano.
-Sought to embody in music a stance of ecstatic contemplation. They present an experience of concentrated meditation on a few materials.
-Shows heritage from Debussy and Stravinsky
-Wrote down birdsongs in musical notation and used them in several compositions, where they convey a sense of contemplating the gifts of nature and the divine.
-Modes of limited transpostion are collections of notes, like the whole tone and octatonic scales that do not change when transposed by intervals.
-Has the piano piece that sounds awful. - Don't confuse with Shoenberg's Gavotte and Musette

Front 8

Steve Reich

Back 8

Steve Reich
Born in 1936
-Developed a quasi-cantonic procedure in which musicians play the same material out of phase with each other.
Phase shifting: Supposed to listen to it over time, process is more important that the product
Minimalism: take a small amount of material and stretch it over a long period of time. The change is very gradual. It is completely written out and has a set design.
His music is sometimes called "postminimalist"

Front 9

Arnold Schoenberg

Back 9

Arnold Schoenberg
-1874-1951
-Was a serial composer, serialism organizes atonality.
-Serialism only worries about the pitches. Total serialism is everything about the piece - dynamics, rhythm, etc.
-Writes atonaly, pitches that avoided any note as a tonal center.
-Avoids key signatures, and wants to get rid of chord progressions
-12 tone technique: not a style, but a technique of organizing pitches, all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale placed in a specific order, the row is a basis of compositon: both melody and harmony are derived from it.
-The row can be used contrapuntally (inversion, retrograde, retrograde inversion)
-The row can be transposed
-The row can be used horizontally and vertically, and the row can be segmented.
-Tried to bring influences of early composers
-He had "Bach" embedded in his pieces
-Gavotte: very aristrocratic dance, has a dull upbeat, very "up up down", things are groups into 4 pitches
-Musette: played on a bagpipe, has a tritone drone all the way through, balanced binary - each section has the same ending.

Front 10

Igor Stravinsky

Back 10

Igor Stravinsky
-1882-1971
-Took the opposite approach as Shoenberg
-Wrote ballets, consistently wrote them, wrote more than a dozen
-in 1910 he wrote fireverd
-In 1957 he wrote Agon
-He has much diversity in his music
-Ends up in Paris, in his last ballets there is less of an emphasis on strings, more of an emphasis on brass/horns
-Rite of Spring ballet in 1913: crazy orchestration, bitonality, polyrhythmic - two rhythms going on at ones, uses it to accent different beats
-Thought that strings were too emotional
-Uses Ostinato, a motif or phrase that is persistently repeated in the same musical voice
Serge Diaghilev, had a bigger impact on Stravinsky because he was the one who brought him into the ballet.
-Primitivism: a deliberate representation of the elemental, crude, and uncultured, and cast aside the sophistication and stylishness of modern life and trained artistry
Very Jaws sounding

Front 11

Iannis Xenakis

Back 11

Iannis Xenakis
-1922-2001
-Wrote music for acoustic instruments
-Greek who spent most of his career in France, was an engineer and a composer. He saw math as fundamental to both music and architecture
-In Matastaseis he gave each string player in the orchestra a unique part to play.
-Each player had a glissando, moving slowly or quickly in comparison to other parts.
-He plotted out the glissandos as straight lines on a graph that add up to create an effect of curves in musical space. Then he transferred the lines to standard musical notation.