Music History 2 Exam 2

Front 1

Symphonic poem

Back 1

One-movement orchestral works of contrasting character and tempo, presenting a few themes that are developed, repeated, varied, or transformed.

Front 2

Thematic transformation

Back 2

A method devised by Liszt of providing unity, variety, and narrative-like logic composition by transforming thematic material to reflect the diverse moods needed to portray a programmatic subject

Front 3

Tone poem

Back 3

An orchestral work in one movement on a descriptive or rhapsodic theme

Front 4

Bel canto

Back 4

An elegant style of singing ("beautiful singing") pioneered by Rossini that focused on technique, beautiful tone, agility, flexibility, and allowed for improvisation. Reflected the idea of the voice as the most important element

Front 5

Reminiscence motive

Back 5

Harkening back to an earlier theme or motive of an opera. Similar to leitmotif

Front 6

Giuseppe Verdi

Back 6

Music is the epitome of Romantic drama and passion. Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata

Front 7

"Second Age of the Symphony"

Back 7

Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Brahms; produced symphonies that are equal or competitive to Beethoven

Front 8

Tombeau

Back 8

Work of homage to someone who is dead

Front 9

Mahler Symphony No. 1

Back 9

1. Creates a musical "space" and a sound world

2. Movement 1 creates a forest world w/ high drone, horn calls, etc.

3. Symphonic poem in two parts; mimetic music masquerading as absolute music

Front 10

Charles Baudelaire

Back 10

French poet and creator of symbolism

Front 11

Symbolism

Back 11

1. Allegory: x = y

2. Symbolism is more than that; has multiple meanings

Front 12

"A Faun in the Afternoon"

Back 12

1. Poem about absence

2. Stéphane Mallarmé

3. paroles vacante: void of words, wordless

4. "Mental" theater: the life of the mind

5. Poetry is evocative like music

Front 13

"All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music"

Back 13

1. Quote by Walter Pater

2. Highlights the reversal of the trend where music follows other art; instead, music goes abstract first

Front 14

Impressionism

Back 14

1. Indistinct outline (impression of figures through play of light & shadow)

2. Fragmentary motifs (full of suggestion and illusion)

3. Emphasis on color and strikingly visible brushstrokes (tactile surfaces)

4. Less importance given to human subjects and "subjectivity"

Front 15

Erik Satie

Back 15

1. Avante-garde composer

2. Parodies Romanticism and the Austro-German musical tradition

Front 16

"Dried Embryos"

Back 16

Piece by Erik Satie that parodies Romanticism and their fixation on nature by writing about crustaceans

Front 17

The Rite of Spring

Back 17

1. Piece by Stravinsky about a sacrificial dance of primitive peoples

2. Focuses on primitivism and crude and uncultered elements, casting aside the sophistication and stylishness of modern life

3. Clashes against the grace and beauty associated with ballet

Front 18

Igor Stravinsky & Erik Satie

Back 18

Both composers go against the subjectivity of the Austro-German musical tradition; subvert elements of the tradition

Front 19

Arnold Schoenberg

Back 19

1. Second Viennese School

2. Developing variation (influenced by Brahms) and non-repetition

4. Twelve-tone technique

5. "Emancipation of the dissonance"

6. Integration of melody and harmony

7. Chromatic saturation

5. Viewed himself as part of a tradition

Front 20

Chromatic saturation

Back 20

All twelve chromatic pitches within a segment of music

Front 21

Developing variation

Back 21

Technique where development and variation are united in that variations are produced by developing existing material

Front 22

Twelve-tone technique (dodecaphony)

Back 22

1. 12 pitches of chromatic scale arranged in order chosen by the composer

2. Tones can be used harmonically or melodically

3. Row can be used in prime (original) form, inversion, retrograde, or retrograde inversion

4. Composer states all twelve pitches of the series before going on to use the series in any of its forms again

Front 23

Abstraction

Back 23

Enables use to listen to line, contour, gesture and timbre instead of focusing on pitch

Front 24

Charles Ives

Back 24

1. Experimental music

2. Composed in isolation

3. Quoted American hymns and popular tunes in collages; General William Booth Enters Into Heaven

4. Fascinated by place & memory, national identity

5. Wanted to forge a unique American voice in the European tradition

Front 25

Charles Ives 4 Stylistic Regions

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1. European classical

2. Protestant church hymns

3. American vernacular music

4. Experimental music

Front 26

Cumulative form

Back 26

Withholding the complete until the end of the piece w/ the development coming first

Front 27

Henry Cowell

Back 27

1. Chord clusters

2. Direct playing of strings of piano in The Banshee, The Tides of Manaunaun

Front 28

Diastematic

Back 28

Musical notation in which the pitch of a note is represented by its vertical position on the page

Front 29

Edgard Varèse

Back 29

1. Not interested in discrete pitch intervals but continuous pitch

2. Uses rhythmic cells and develops them spatially

3. Thinks of music spatially; as bodies of intelligent sounds moving in space

4. Electroacoustic music

5. Poème électronique, Ionisation

Front 30

Experimental music

Back 30

Forces us to rethink music and its practice; radically new

Front 31

Tomorrow Never Knows

Back 31

1. Musique concrète

2. Harmonically static, drone, Mixolydian

3. Imitates chant, no chorus just verse

4. Rotating leslie speaker

5. Wanting to sound like Dalai Lama "chanting from the top of a mountain"

6. First psychedelic song in the tradition

Front 32

Musique concrète

Back 32

Music built on recorded materials; not performed

Front 33

Eleanor Rigby

Back 33

1. String octet

2. Changes parameters of a rock song beyond entertainment into art music

3. Dorian

Front 34

I am Sitting in a Room

Back 34

1. Conceptual art

2. Acousmatic invisible sound sources/displacement of sound sources

3. Turns his room into a vocoder

4. Exploring properties of speech, sound, and space

Front 35

Pierre Schaeffer

Back 35

1. Musique concrète

2. Mimetic, but Schaeffer was unsatisfied with that and aspired towards abstraction

3. Aims to use sound as the material for composition in service of abstraction -> requires manipulation of sound material

Front 36

Minimalism

Back 36

1. Reduction, repetition, process, pulsation

2. Reaction against serialism and chance music

3. Changes the way in which we listen

4. Intelligibility

Front 37

Steve Reich

Back 37

1. Minimalism

2. Interested in perceptible processes that unfold over time

3. Phase music

Front 38

Phase music

Back 38

Music that uses phasing as a composition technique; merging in and out of synchronicity by patterns offset in time/tempo

Front 39

Prolation canon

Back 39

Canon that adds a note duration, increasing rhythmic prolongation

Front 40

Éliane Radigue

Back 40

1. Electronic music compuser

2. Used ARP 2500 as her primary instrument

3. Viewed music as an exploration of sounds with subtle changes

Front 41

Gustav Mahler

Back 41

1. One of the leading Austro-German composers of symphonies after Brahms and Bruckner

2. Heavy use of musical topics

3. Interested in presenting a sound world; Symphony No. 1

Front 42

Brahms

Back 42

1. Pathbreaker in that he saw the music of the past and present as material to draw upon

2. Had to write music similar to the classics but that offered something new and attractive

Front 43

Olivier Messiaen

Back 43

1. Extended techniques from Debussy and Stravinsky to create unique post-tonal music

2. Sought to embody in music a stance of ecstatic contemplation

3. Modes of limited transposition (octatonic, whole tone scales, etc)

4. Influenced Boulez, etc

Front 44

Alban Berg

Back 44

1. Combines Romantic lyricism with atonality and 12-tone technique

2. Wozzeck

Front 45

Sprechstimme

Back 45

"Speaking voice"; approximating written pitches in the gliding tones of speech, while following the written rhythm

Front 46

Anton Bruckner

Back 46

1. Sought to absorb Wagner's style and ethos into the traditional symphony and of church music that united the technical resources of the 19th century with a reverent approach to the texts

2. Fourth Symphony

Front 47

Richard Strauss

Back 47

Influenced by Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz, drawing on colorful orchestration, types of program and transformation of themes