Music History Exam 2

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Nuages

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Composer: Claude Debussy
Year: 1899
Instruments: Wordless Female Chorus
Plot: The immutable aspect of the sky and the slow movement of clouds fading away
Other: Part of the Nocturnes, inspired by impressionist painting by James Whistler

Impressionism, Symbolism

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Vers La Flamme

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Scriabin

1914

Piano

Constant heat would cause the destruction of the world

big build up and crescendos throughout the piece leading towards the flame

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Embryons Desseches

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Satie

1913

Piano

Example of Dadaism

Involves dead fish embryos...

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Pierrot Lunaire

Back 4

1912

Song Cycle

Solo Voice, strings, woodwinds, and piano

Uses Sprechstimme style

From 21 Poems from Albert Giraud

Rondeau form in 3 parts

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Piano Suite, Op. 25

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Schoenberg

1921

Piano

12 tone

Serialism!

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What are the eight forms of a row in the Piano Suite, Op. 25?

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Two Versions of the Prime row
Two inversions of the row
Four Retrogrades, one for each

He creates a sense of staying in a single key. SPELLS BACH

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Wozzeck

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Berg

1922

Opera, 3 acts

Expressionism

portrays the harsh life of a former soldier in the german army who struggles to make a living while others succeed

based on george buchners play

uses sprechstimme

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Symphony, Op. 21

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Anton Webern


1928

Chamber Orchestra

12 tone

intstruments get only one or two notes, extreme registers, arched form

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The Rite of Spring

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Igor Stravinsky

1913

Ballet

Scenes of Pagan Russia

Vaslav Nijinsky Choreographer

sacrag pagan ritual where elders watch a young girl dance to her death as a sacrifice to the god of Spring

very controversial, riot broke out

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Symphony of Psalms

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Igor Stravinsky

1930

choral symphony

uses psalm text in choral parts

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Mikrokosmos, no. 123

Back 11

Bela Bartok

Part of a collection of 153 pieces arranged by order of increasing technical and musical difficulty,

staccato and legato

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Music for strings, percussion, and celestra

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bela bartok

1937

4 movements, no key, changing time

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General William Booth Enters Into Heaven

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Charles Ives

1912

after Vachel Lindsays poem

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Symbolism

Back 14

Individual images carry the works structure or meaning, but sometimes the meanings are hidden or not in the music

Musical Example : Nuages

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Impressionalism

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External impressions of items. The equivalent to Monets art

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Avant Garde

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-Art that seeks to overthrow accepted aesthetics and start fresh

1. Began in the years before ww1
2. it is not marked by a shared style, but a shared attitude- an unrelenting opposition to the status quo

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Futurism

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1. Italian futurists rejected traditional musical instruments
2. Luigi Russolo argued that musical sounds had become stale so he divided noises into six families and helped make new instruments that became known as intuonarumori (noisemakers)

3. The movement anticipated other later developments, including electronic music

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Modernism

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Young composers wanted a more radical break from the past, but cherished past traditions as well

1. They reassessed inherited conventions
2. They challenged perceptions and capacities of music
3. they did not aim to please listeners on the first hearing
4. They were critical of easily digested art and saw their own work as continuing the classical traditions

Example: Schoenberg... really everyone except dada

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12 tone method

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Pitches are related to each other , not to a tonic.

Basis of the compositions are rows or series

1. a row contains the 12 pitch classes arranged in an order. They can sound seperately or together
2. the composer states all of the pitches in the row before going to another
3. the original version if called the prime
4. It can also be used as an inversion, backwards, or backwards and inverted

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Serialism

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In the 1950s, Schoenbergs 12 tone techniques were extended to things other than pitch

It was an order of ANYTHING

These techniques were adapted by Stravinsky and are also evident in Schoenbergs piano suite

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Dodecaphonic

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Uses all 12 tones equally

Schoenberg likes it!

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Emancipation of Dissonance

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Schoenbergs concept of freeing dissonance from its need to resolve to a consonance.

Developed after Tristan took 2.5 hours to reach consanance!

Schoenberg used 3 methods to create unity without tonality:

Developing variation: looking backwards to Brahms to connect to old traditions

Integration of harmony and melody

Chromatic Saturation
looking forward, uses all 12 pitch classes within segments of music

example: piano suite

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Sprechstimme

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Approximates the written pitches with gliding speech tones

example: Pierrot Lunaire

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Row/Series

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A row contains the 12 pitch classes arranged in order

the pitches can be played seperately or together

the composer uses all pitched in a row before going to another row

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Prime

Retrograde

Inversion

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Prime- the original form of the row
Inversion- the inverted form
Retrograde- the backwards form of the row

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Abyss of Freedom

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Abyss of Freedom (gaping hole of atonality)

• Need to resolve tonally is gone = complete freedom (Stravinsky talks about how frightening having no rules is)

• Straus “stands on the cliff” of atonality

Different composers deal with the abyss in different ways

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Dadaism

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Stripping away everything normal and accepted

They put ordinary items in the museum

Eric Satie- Embryo song
Music is often modal
Repetition is important
He mocks program music and Wagner

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Second Viennese School

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Schoenberg, Berg, Webern

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The Path to the new music

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Weber felt that evolution in art was neccessary and that history can only move forward, not revisit events or ideas of the past.

The path to the New Music was a series of lectures in which Webern argued that twelve-tone music was the inevitable result of music's evolution

His beliefs gave him the confidence to continue composing despite much opposition; he saw himself as a researcher making new discoveries

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Klangfarbenmelodie

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Weber's idea of tone color melody, in which changes of tone color are perceived as parallel to changing pitches in a melody

At times there is just one nore per instrument, creating tiny points of sound, which has been described as pointillism

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Diaghilev

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Sergei Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to compose for the Ballet Russes

The famous trio, also including Nijinsky, created Rite of Spring, Firebird, and Pertrushka

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Primitivism

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A deliberate representation of the crude and uncultured

An example is the Rite of Spring, in which the scenario, choreography, and music are all marked by primitivism

The ballet, set in prehistoric Russia, doesn't tell a story, but shows a fertility ritual in which an adolescent girl is chosen for sacrifice and dances herself to death.

Vaclav Nijinsky was the choreographer

The audience broke into a riot at the premiere

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Neoclassicism

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A broad movement that took place from the 1910s to the 1950s

Composers revived, imitated or evoked styles, genres, and forms of pre-Romantic music, particularly from the eighteenth century

It rejected the high emotions of Romanticism

Stravinsky used it as a new avenue for his own style. His music has an emotional detachment that can be seen as anti-romantic

ex. Pulcinella

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Neotonality

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Tonal centers are established through repetition and assertion, not through traditional harmony

Ex. Stravinsky uses repetition of E throughout the piece in different ways. He also juxtaposes E and G.

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Principle of Non Repetition

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Don't repeat any of the 12 tone notes

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ethnomusicology

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Bartok collected thousands of folk songs and edited them into collections and wrote about folk music

he used audio recording in his field research

he argued that peasant music better represented the nation than urban music