Music History II Exam 5

Nationalism

identification with one's own nation and support for its interests

Mikrokosmos

Bartok; 153 progressive piano pieces in six volumes, written between 1926 and 1939 and published in 1940

Gebrauchsmusik

“music for everyday use“; music meant to be played and practiced for skill rather than contemplation; Hindemith

Polytonality

using many keys at once

Parade

Ballet by Satie; meant to represent variety shows performed outside theaters, using common material; Surrealism

La Creation du Monde

Ballet by Milhaud; “The Creation of the World”; used a jazz band scoring similar to those heard in Harlem

Total serialism

a compositional technique where not only pitches but also other musical elements like duration, dynamics, and register are organized into ordered series, or "rows," to create a piece of music

Method of composing with twelve tones

Schoenberg; Tonreihe (tone series) or tone row as the bases; Reihenkomposition (composition with rows); serialism

Tone row

an ordering of all the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale from which both motivic and harmonic content will be derived

Permutations

An ordering or reordering of a tone row

Prime

The initial ordering of a row that will determine how the other rows are formed

Inverted

Inversion of a tone row (if it starts with an ascending fourth, its inversion will begin with a descending fourth)

Retrograde

A row begin played backwards

Retrograde-Inversion

When a tone row is both inverted and played backwards

Bertolt Brecht

Kurt Weill’s chief collaborator in adapting opera to contemporary demands; called his theatrical style “epic theater”; his plays incorporate narrative, montage, and fourth-wall breaks

Die Dreigroßchenoper

Weill/Brecht production; “The Threepenny Opera”; 1928; Box-office hit Singspiel play/opera that worked off of “The Beggar’s Opera”; original production cabaret singers and dramatic actors rather than opera singers

Wozzeck

Berg; Most enduring German-language opera of the 1920s; combined Romanticism and Expressionism; based on his time in military service; international hit

Ethnomusicology

Study of music outside of the Western classical tradition using field work methods originially found in anthropology

Additive rhythm

a musical concept where smaller rhythmic units are combined to create larger, often irregular, rhythmic patterns; adopted from Indian classical music

Jazz

A largely improvisatory form of music that began and evolved in the African American culture of the American South during the early 20th-century

Neoclassicism

A 20th century return to the principles of the Classical era; order, balance, clarity, economy, and emotional restraint

Entartete Kunst

“Degenerate music”; music condemned by the Nazi Party; incl. jazz, serialism, and music by Jewish composers

The Craft of Musical Composition

A book by Hindemith that outlines his method of composition

Socialist Realism

Doctrine promoted by Stalin and the USSR; arts were meant to be accessible to all and preferably rooted in folklore; forced artists to work under extreme control and censorship

Formalism

the concept that a composition's meaning is entirely determined by its form; musical experience relies on cognition, less a matter of sense than a matter of mind; “the whole gives meaning to the parts”; NOT supported by the Soviet Union

Ragtime

the highly syncopated African American music that was extremely popular in the 1890s–1910s and was most associated with the piano works of Scott Joplin

Blues

can refer generally to a style of expressive performance as well as a musical form; uses call and response techniques common in African and African American music

Twelve-bar blues

three lines; opening, second (repeat of opening), third (ends with a rhyme of the last two lines); tonic-subdominant-dominant/tonic; each line coincides with a four-bar musical phrase in 4/4

Broadway Musicals

American musical comedies; an American spin on the European tradition of operettas

Quartal harmony

building chords by stacking notes in fourths (perfect, augmented, or diminished) instead of the traditional thirds; popular in modal jazz

Tone clusters

extended piano technique of laying palms, fists, and forearms on the keyboard

Nadia Boulanger

Legendary music educator that studied and taught piano at the Paris Conservatoire

Rhapsody in Blue

extended work for piano and large dance orchestra; commissioned by Paul Whiteman for a concert displaying modern music; opens with a clarinet glissando, used to grab the audience’s attention; settles into a medley of five tunes, resembling a Tin Pan Alley chorus, connected by cadenzas and virtuoso passages; in his words, takes blues and puts them into a larger and more serious form; regarded as the most important example of American folk music in the concert repertory

Les Six

A group of young French composers in the early 20th century that displayed uses of surrealism and impressionism; Poulenc, Auric, Milhaud, Honegger, Tailleferre, and Durey

Surrealism

“a collage of ordinary things”; musical concept that creates a magical world through the use of the mundane and ordinary (Satie’s Parade)

How or how aren’t the works of Elgar and Vaughan-Williams nationalistic?

elgar: pomp and circumstance, imperial pride

Vaughan williams: deliberately collected and incorporated folk tunes

Discuss the music of Bartok, including the influences on and goals of his music.

Influences: Modernism of R. Strauss; Hungarian nationalism, both folk and political;

His influence of folk music “liberated him from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys”, which provided the basis for blending national styles with modern ideas

Describe Bartok’s three ways of using folk music.

Took actual folk tunes, mimicked them, or rewrote them with modern characteristics

Discuss the music of Ives, focusing on innovative techniques found in his work.

tone clusters!!!! distinctly american with folk music

Discuss aspects of neo-classicism as shown in works of Stravinsky.

Stravinsky utilizes neo-classicism in works such as the Octet and Histoire du soldat, in which he uses a deliberate imitiation of older musical styles. He was especially inspired by his hero, Tchaikovsky, who often wrote in a neo-Baroque style. He wrote Histoire du soldat using musical concepts of another time, such as smaller orchestration and tonal clarity.

Describe the basic elements of serialism.

Composition based on tone rows. There is a “prime” form of the row, and ordering that determines other related rows in four different ways: transposition, inversion, retrogression, or retrograde-inversion. As a result, a tone row could generate 48 different versions of itself.

How are Webern’s or Berg’s serial works distinctive from those of Schoenberg?

Schoenberg

Berg used serial techniques in a similar way to Schoenberg in the sense of using hidden messages, but in a way that evokes a sense of Romanticism. Many of these hidden messages, such as those in his Lyric Suite, are allusions to his lover Hanna, such as the use of their initials or fateful numbers.