Music of Modern Era Midterm

1- Richard Wagner

1859- Prelude to Tristan and Isolde

2- Richard Wagner

1859- act III, scene 3 “Transfiguration” from Tristan and Isolde

Wagner gral info

• First composer to write his own librettos- “poems” for his “dramas”

• He hoped to revive and renew the ritual theater of ancient Greece

• He considered people’s reliance on Christianity a weakness

Endless melody

A seamless stream in which every note is thematic and meaningful

Wagnerian Leitmotifs

• Structure in compositions featured tiny musical themes repeated in everchanging combinations

• Shorter than what is typically a full-fledge theme.

Tristan and Isolde general info

• Wagner interested in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The idea of “will”, in music the desire for resolution.

• Music tension tries to portray the emotional, sexual and psychological tensions and fluctuations

• Tristan chord: French +6 chord with a predominant function. F- B- Eb- G# passing to the A (B is the tritones from F)

• Still tonal music, chromatic

• Avoids cadential resolution

• “Endless melodies”

• Romanticist romantic yearing

• Didn’t call them operas, called them music dramas instead.

Storyline of Tristan and Isolde

• Love story: Tristan and Isolde are seized to forbidden love, they attempt to acto un it but are forcibly separated

• Tristan is mortaly wounded, Isolde doesn’t die she “becomes one with the world.” dying in sympathy “transfigurating”

• Just then does the piece resolve.

Gesamtkustwerk

The total work of art

1- Gustav Mahler

1888- First Symphony, mvt. III

Mahler’s First Symphony

• “Funeral March”

• Intro played by double bass uncomfortably high

• Sense of something being streched, pushed into an uncomfortable place.

2- Gustav Mahler

1902- Gustav Mahler, Fifth Symphony, mvt IV (Adagietto)

Mahler’s Fifth Symphony general info

• Part of Mahler’s middle period

• Deathly atmosphere is fostered by the slow tempo in which the movement was performed

• Suspension upon suspension

• “Aching” towards resolution

• Wanted to express the world in his pieces

• Tereskin refers to Mahler as a maximalist

• Mahler was nostalgic, torn between the past and the present/future.

• Piece can be read as a love letter as well as a death letter

Maximalism

Radical intensification of means towards traditional expressive ends

• Emotional expression

• Metaphysical issues addressed

• Sensuality

• Larger orchestras

• Longer, louder and more complicated textures in pieces

• Increase the range of key relationship.

• More dissonance and postponment of resolutions.

Mahler gral info

• 9 Symphonies

• Jewish family

• One of fourteen kids (8 of them passed)

• Age of 16, Vienna conservatory

• 1897 offered to be director of the Vienna Court Opera

• He combined Beethovenian symphonic tradition with Wagnerian dramatugy and philosophical import

• Creating “Dramatic Symphonies”

Lied

Setting poetry to classical music (between 1880-90s Mahler focused on folk poetry)

Richard Strauss

1905- end of final scene, from “Warum…” from Salome

Strauss gral info

• Interest in Nietzsche’s philosophy, specifically “Thus spake Zarathustra”

• Salome specifically is based on Freud’s connection between desire and death.

• Born in Munich.

• Wrote two conventional symphonies than moved to program-music with a four movement symphonic fantasy

• First tone poem “Macbeth”

Salome

• Story taken from Oscar Wild’s play in French

• Ilicit desires from Salome

• Salome daughter of Herodias who is Herodes’ wife.

• Salome was attracted to John the Baptist, the prisoner

• King Herod desires Salome, she does the “Dance of the Seven Veils.”

• After she dances she gets the prophet’s head on a platter and kisses it on the mouth.

• Herod orderds Salome’s death

• Desire is maximalized.

• Laws of tonality are broken.

• Opening suggests C#m and Gm which give place to the dissonant tritone

• At the end the D major chord stands out resolving a half step lower, on Cm rather than on C#m (the key of the piece)

Salome Motive

1- Arnold Schoenberg

1899- Verklarte Nacht [Transfigured Night]

Schoenberg Gral Info

• Music theorist, and composition teacher, self-taught

• One of the most disruptive composers in the history of Western Music

• Tried to expand Viennise heritage

• Influenced by Dehmel (German leading poet and prominent decadent) he was erotic, sensual, resonant with Freud’s psychoanalyitc theories

• Early period: tonal, highlu chromatic

• Middle period: atonal

• Late period: 12-tone period

• Combines Wagner’s “roving harmony” and Brahm’s “developing variation”

Emancipation of dissonance

• One of Schoenberg’s goals to be achieved in his pieces

• Schoenberg’s theoretical writings: Hamonielehre (theory of harmony)

• Schoenberg preferred to call atonal “pantonal” suggesting a single transcendent, all-ecompnassing tonality.

Expressionism

• Cannot be fully understood apart from Freud’s psychoanalytic movement.

• Explore human unconscious, in Freud’s case through scientific inquiry in Schoenberg’s case through art.

• Portraying something that is hidden not only from others but from oneself as well.

Grundgestalt

• “basic shape”

• a motivic complex that could serve as a source for everything htat happened in a composition

Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night- Schoenberg)

• tone poem, unusually, for string sextet rather than for orchestra

• Poem is about two people walking, she expresses being pregnant and all the fears this entails and the conflict of also being in love with the man with shich she is walking with. He responds in an accepting way.

• Uses a ninth chord and piece is rejected (Ab- C- Eb- Gb- Bb, in fourth inversion)

Atonal Miniatures

• Trend to create short pieces where all tonal references were abandoned

Pierrot Lunaire

• A atonal collection of twenty-one miniatures.

• Part of Schoenberg’s middle phase, atonal - expressionist phase

• Each poem had 13 lines, divided in 4+4+1+5, first and second lines come back as seventh and eighth

• He transferred the Xs from the note heads to the stems so that the spoken technique could be transferred to hald notes and dotted halves.

• It is not the performer’s responsability to recreate the mood based off the meaning of the words. but rather solely on the music.

Speaking voice in Pierrot Lunaire

Sprechstimme

• Maintan accurate rhythm as if one was singing

• Be aware of the difference between singing voice and speaking voice.

Speech song

Sprechgesand

2- Arnold Schoenberg

1912- I. “Mondenstrunken: [Moondrunk'], Pierrot Lunaire

Mondenstrunken

• First tone poem in Pierrot Lunaire, sets the scene for all the hallucinatory verses to come.

• There is an intentional structure to the notes, three notes in the violin against seven in the piano, 7×3=21

3- Arnold Schoenberg

1912- VIII “Nacht” [Night], Pierrot Lunaire

Nacht- Schoenberg

• Text about night and the unsettling feeling of the darkness

• Stops thinking about notes in relation to a key but starts thinking about the intervalic relationship between notes.

• Relationship between notes of M and m 3rds

• Three note motive that is set and repeated in various forms throughout the piece: grundgestalt. 

• Free notes, empancipating the dissonance

• Form of passacaglia, comes from Spanish “pasar” to go by, gives the sense of movement an unstable walk

Erik Satie

1887- First Sarabande from Trois Sarabandes

• Sarabande: barroque style dance suite

1- Claude Debussy

1894- Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun

• Choreography by Nijinsky

• “2 dimensional stage” designed by Baskt

• Nijinsky “flattened” the dance to a 2 dimensional plane.

2- Claude Debussy

1899- I. Nuages [Clouds], Nocturnes

• Octatonic-scale (non-diatonic) is the pattern

• Fifths used often, general sense of things moving down

• No tonal direction

• Specific focus on instrumentation (orchestral color) experimentation with timbre, how can a certain sound quality be achieved with different combinations of instruments.

3- Claude Debussy

1903- “Pagodes”, Estampes [Prints]

• Pentatonic scale used

4- Claude Debussy

1907- “Cloches a travers le feuilles” [Bells through the leaves”, Images,book II

• Wholetone scale used

5- Claude Debussy

1909- “Violes”, Preludes, book I

Violes

• Offeres intensified version of this new harmonic freedom

• First section composed off of a whole-tone scales

Impressionism 

• Interested in how light and image impressed itself on our eyes, or any sensation on our sensory aparatus 

• What is sight all about? light

Stravinsky

• Early period: Russian Period. Wanting to portray russian mythology and ritualS

Why does the tritone keep showing up?

• It is exactly the middle of the octave

• Empancipates dissonance.

Rite of Spring Gral info

• Ballet premiered 29 May 1913 in Paris

• Scandal in music history. Cause commotion in the audience because of its primitive representation.

• Inspiration and initial idea: a virgin dancing herself to death before the ancient slavic sun god.

• Created in tablaeaus: models representing a scene

• Tableaus based around a Russian holiday pagan rituals

• The ballet has two tableaus:

  • The adoration of the Earth

  • The Sacrifice

• Each has an introductory section, a series of dances and concluding ritual.

• Introduction played by the bassoon in an unusually high register, melancholic melody.

• The bass, octatonic countermelody.

• melody from the introduction adapted from folk tunes, specifially Lithuanian wedding songs. (combination of authenticicity and modernity)

• Melody fragmented as well as several different ideas happening at the same time

• Maximal dissonance to portray the inhumanity of the primitive religion.

• Choreo by Nijinsky, Impresario Diaghilev.

1- Igor Stravinsky

1913- Introduction to Part I, The Rite of Spring

2- Igor Stravinsky

1913- “Dance of the Adolescentes”, The Rite of Spring

• Regular meter (2/4)

• Regular rhythm (eighth notes)

• Irregular accents

• “Unthinkingness”

3- Igor Stravinsky

1913- “Dance of the Earth (Part I finale), The Rite of Spring

• Ending of Tableau 1

• Montage of ostinatos 

• Two type of rhythmic innovations, static, unchanging ostinato or vamp

• Rhythm of irregularly spaced downbeats, requiring changes in the notation of meter and bar lines, “variable downbeat”

• No pattern for the entrance of chords

• regular meter

• not very regular rhythm 

• irregular accents

4- Igor Stravinsky

1913- “Sacrificial Dance of the Chosen One”, The Rite of Spring

• two rhythmic / metric types

• The static ostinato and the active shifting stress.

The Rite Chord

Eb7 (in first inversion) and a Fb chord, two tetrachords a tritone apart.

Vaughan Williams

1910- Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis

• Thomas Tallis was a British composer

• Uses Phrygian mode

• Mysterious sound

• Scored for string quartet and double string orchestra, to create and antiphonal sound (what we consider stereo today)

Bela Bartok

• Born in Hungary, what today is Romania

• Ethnomusicologist

• Relates peasant’s music and the “remote language of atonality” attributing atonality to old Hungarian folk songs.

• Considered folk music had the ability to transform music culture.

• Collected recording form slovak peasants with a “horn” which is marked on a wax cilindir, he’d go back listen to it and transcribe it

1- Bela Bartok

1908- Bagatelle No.4 Fourteen Bagatelles, Op. 6

• Harmonizes a folk song

2- Bela Bartok

1936- mvt I Andante tranquilo, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta

• Instrumentation is divided into two groups on the stage

• Theme and it’s inverse outlining tonic to tritone and back

• Starts at A and goes up and down by 5ths ending up on Eb, tritone from the initial note. 

• At the end a single line quickly outlines this “tonic to tritone” journey.

3- Bela Bartok

1936- mvt. II, Allegro, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta

• In sonata form, exposition, 1st theme, 2nd theme and cadence theme

• Verticle edgy sound.

4- Bela Bartok

1937- first of the Six Dance in Bulgarian Rhythm, no. 148 in Mikrokosmos, vol 6.

Charles Ives Gral Info

• Born in Connecticut

• Parents were musicians

• 14 y/o youngest person to get a organist license

• Uses bitonality or politonality, having two key areas in the same piece

• Experiments with quarter tones, politonality and polyrhythms

• Ives was not trying to found a music style, instead he was trying to add a certain “communicativev dimension to his music through the essentially literary device of allusion”

1- Charles Ives

1914- II. “Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Conn.” Three places in New England

• Scherzo like form

• Second of Three Places in New England

• Field that served as campground to troops under command of Israel Putnam.

• Ives imagines a child getting lost in this campground at a military fair.

• Juxtaposition and fragmentation of two groups of instruments against eachother playing at different tempos.

• Overlapping and constant use of known tunes such as a phrase of “Yankee Doodle” or the bass instruments playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the end of the piece.

The Concord Sonata

• Closely related to the European tradition, particularly German.

• Celebrate nostalgia rather than progress.

• The essence of New England Transcendentalism was symbolized by Ives’s use of the first four notes of Beethoven’s fifth symphony

2- Charles Ives

1920- “The Alcotts,” Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass 1840-60

• After Bronson Alcott and Lousa May Alcott

• Chordal hymn like sound

• Composed with no bar lines

3- Charles Ives

1920- IV. “Thoreau,” Piano Sonata No., Concord Mass

• After Henry David Thoreau

• “The Human Faith Melody”: Ives imagined Thoreay playing on the flute in his boar in Walden Pond. The second line of which recalls the opening of Beethoven’s Symphony no.5

• Ending is an atonal chord

5- Igor Stravinsky

1923- I. Sinfonia, Octet for Wind Instruments

• Example of the Neoclassical style (rejection of atonality and of German compositions at the time)

• Sonata form

• For flute, clarinet, bassoons, trumpets and trombones.

• Complete sonorous scale, rich register

• Eliminates nuances, replaced by volume instead. Only dynamics are forte and piano

• Piece should be executed, not interpreted

• “New version of absolute music”

• Polemic- poles, complete opposites leading to controversy. “Some Ideas on my Octuor”

• Octour as a musical object for ensemble of musical instruments. It is sound.

• Not an “emotive” work it is solely about the counterpoint of the piece.

6- Igor Stravinsky

1923- II. Tema on variazone. Octet for Wind Instruments

7- Igor Stravinsky

1923- III. Finale, Octet for Wind Instruments

4- Arnold Schoenberg

1923- I. Praludium, Suite for Piano, op. 25

• No direction

• No resolution

• Notes in relation to one another rather their function within a key

• Part of Schoenberg’s late- 12-tone period. 

• A tone row is not a melody but the organization of all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale.

• “Prime row” 

• Inversions and retrogrades

5- Arnold Schoenberg

1923- II. Gavotte, Suite for Piano, op.25

Alban Berg

1926- mvt. I Allegretto giovale, Lyric Suite for string quartet

• Berg never lets go of romanticism and combines it with 12 tone

• mixes free atonality and strict twelve tone

• Prime row 5 (first row) includes all possible intervals.

• Lyricism, desire for order and the audience’s understanding and connection with the piece.

Anton Webern

1938- mvt. I, Massig, String Quartet

• Structural rigor

• Vertical piece

• Spaced out notes

• “atomistic”, fragmented piece

• Webern was interested in franco-flemish composers, specifically Bach and would ‘hide’ note combinations in his pieces that spelled out Bach, Bb= B, A, C, B=H

Ragtime

• anti-romantic sentiment past world war 1

• American composers wanted to create distinctive american music

• Jazz was used to refer to what formerly had been ragtime: highly syncopated African American music, popular in 1890s-1910s.

• Combines the “for on the floor feel of sousa marches and cakewalk.”

• Cakewalk is a dance done at southern plantations and minstrals (paradoy in which black and white people put coal on their facces)

The Blues

• an African American folk that fed into jazz.

• Generally a style of expressive performance as well as specifically to a musical form later standardized, 12 bar blues’

• I—> Four bars, IV—> four bars, I for two bars and then V for two bars.

• Used as a means for survival and addresses daily life experiences

• Addresses affective labor as well: child rearing, taking care of the sick and educating as “women’s work”

• “Race records” were sold, marketed to black consumers

• lyric’s form a-a-b, repeat first line and closing line

• rhyme form a-a-a, allows for musical and lyrical improvisation.

Blue notes

• in a C major scale, Eb, F#, Gb, Bb

• the sound of “bending” sound neither major or minor

• sense of instability

Spirituals

combines elements of West-African music, call and response, messages of better life either in heaven, looking for togetherness and community.

Division of music when looking at historiagraphy

• Classical vs. Popular

• Cultivated vs Vernacular

• Vernacular comes from “verna” in latin, meaning “family slave” common uneducated people.

Scott Joplin

1899- Maple Leaf Rag

Mamie Smith (voice), Perry Bradford (composer)

1920- “Crazy Blues”

• People did not want this record solely for Mamie’s voice but for its meaning

• Went addressing the frustration of an abusive lover, to desire of suicide to being tired with the system and wanting to confront this issue.

• Expressing tiredness of feeling tired.

• Not in a standardized 12 bar blues.

• Musical community formation, people would gather at record stores to listen to these songs

G.W. Thomas (composer)

1927- Sippie Wallace, Louis Armstrong, “If You Ever Been Down.” Blues

• The break: the inbetween section where the response takes place, has historical and racial implications as well

• Wallace sings and Armstrong replies on his trumpet

• Clarinet also is a part of the call and response in the second 12 bar

• Armonstrong improvises the third twelve bar

• Improvised polyphony

• The call and response is important as an expression of acknowledgement “I hear you and I reply”

William Grant Still

1930- mvt. I, Moderato assai, Symphony No. 1 (“Afro-America”)

• First theme shows blue notes, and is based off a 12 bar blues.

• Grant was a black composer determined to put black music into the symphonic setting

George Gershwin

1924- Rhapsody in Blue

• Gershwin tried to bridge popular music and classical music.

• Clarinet bends (blue notes) the way in which the voice would bend.

• Work has multiple themes

• Contrasting romantic second theme

Duke Ellington

1943- “Come Sunday,” Black, Brown, and Beige

• Wanted to present black music on stage

• Wanted to perform this in Carnegie hall multiple times.

• This piece addresses questiond of colorism.

• Piece moves through work life, spiritual life and happy night life.

• The song became a standard

• Mahalia Jackson, famous gospel singer sang it.

• Strong beat imitation off the sound of workers heaving whrn railroads ar put down, trying to portray the hard and taxing work done here.

• Originally instrumental, then transformed into vocal piece

• Idea of song being connected to church.

• Ellington wanted their music to be taken seriously regardless of the audience’s color

• Jazz enters symphonic culture.