Music History III Quiz 3 People

Louis Armstrong

This person was an American jazz trumpeter, singer, and composer, widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in jazz history. Born in New Orleans, he revolutionized the genre with his virtuosic trumpet playing, innovative improvisation, and distinctive gravelly voice. His career spanned several decades, producing iconic recordings such as What a Wonderful World, Hello, Dolly!, and When the Saints Go Marching In. His charismatic stage presence and groundbreaking musical style helped bring jazz into the mainstream, leaving an enduring legacy in American music.

Duke Ellington

this person was a leading composer and musician of the Jazz Age. They were one of the most influential American musicians of all time. They wanted to cross the divide between Jazz and art music. His favorite composers were Debussy, Stravinsky, and Gershwin. He moved from Washington Dc to Harlem to play at the Cotton Club. He was a Jazz pioneer in the 30s and 40. In the 50s and 60s, he toured internationally with the US paying for it since he was an American national treasure. He believed that jazz was art music and could be listen to for its own sake.

Paul Hindemith

One of the most prolific composers of the century, violinist, violist, and conductor. He was born in German, but escape Germany due to tense relationship with the Nazi Regime.
Musical style and language
• Initially Neo-Romantic, briefly Expressionist, then adopted aesthetic of “The New Objectivity”
• Complex counterpoint within “lean” textures
• Neo-tonal, often called Neoclassical, but in a very different style from Stravinsky
• Developed his own unique Modernist style, challenging to the listener, but well-received
• From the 1930s on, he wrote in a more accessible, neo-Romantic style
• Less dissonant linear counterpoint, systematic tonal organization
• “Music for Use”
• “Harmonic fluctuation”: consonant chords, greater dissonance, return to consonance
• In his later works from his years in the US and Switzerland he returned to his Modernist style
• Taught an entire generation of composers at Berlin Academy, Yale University, and University of Zurich

Sergey Prokofiev

Early music was radically modern – striking dissonance,
driving rhythms
• Early reputation as an iconoclast
• Fled Russia after the Revolution of 1917, traveled the
United States and Europe as a composer, pianist, and
conductor
• Returned to the USSR in 1936 amid promises from the
government of commissions and performances
• Romeo & Juliet, Peter and the Wolf, film score for Alexander Nevsky
• Also wrote music for state occasions such as the anniversaries of the
Russian Revolution
• In 1948, was attacked along with other composers
• “Anti-democratic formalism” instead of “socialist realism”
• Music thereafter was much simpler but also much less successful
• Died in 1953 on the same day as Stalin

Dmitri Shostakovich

Soviet composer and pianist; career under Stalin
• Scholars read a lot of double meanings into his music due to the fact that it was created
under an oppressive Soviet regime
• Early works combined traditional discipline with experimentation – modernist
• First Symphony (1926) launched him to international fame at age 19
• Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934)
• Initially very successful in the USSR and abroad, until Stalin saw it in 1936
• Stalin loathed its modernist language and the realistic/grotesque violence and sex
• The opera was attacked in print, and Shostakovich feared for his life (Stalin’s Purges)
• His Fifth Symphony (1937) was a reaction/response to this criticism – in an idiom more accepted by authorities, but also
with a tone of bitterness and mourning (movement III)
• 1948 crackdown in which he was denounced for “formalism”
• Had to write music for patriotic films and choral hymns to the State to be “rehabilitated”
• Music “for the drawer”
• Later works often employed a musical cipher
• German spelling of his name: D-Es-C-H – used in String Quartets, concertos, 10th Symphony
• Joined the Communist Party in 1960
• A decision variously described as a show of commitment, a mark of cowardice, the result of political pressure, or his free decision

Ruth Crawford Seeger

A modernist/experimentalist
• Influenced by dissonant contrapuntal techniques and serial
organization
• Experimented with applying serial techniques to musical
parameters other than pitch.
• The New Deal completely transformed her focus
• She decided that preserving folk songs would be a greater contribution
to society than writing modernist works that few would hear or appreciate
• Collaborated with Sandberg, Lomax, and her husband Charles on compiling
field recordings of folk songs and editing transcriptions of them
• Published transcriptions & arrangements of American folk music
• The first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship in music

George Gershwin

Starting out writing popular songs and Broadway shows.
• By the late 1920s and 1930s, became the most performed
American composer of classical genres.
• Classical influences and tutors
• Nadia Boulanger and Ravel turned him down!
• Saw no “line” between popular and classical music;
straddled the two “camps” throughout his entire career.
• Saw the potential of jazz and blues to add new dimensions
to art music, so incorporated their influence into his art music.
• Most famous piece: Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
• Commissioned as the centerpiece of a concert of “art music” infused with jazz called “An Experiment in
Modern Music
• A “jazz concerto” for solo piano and jazz ensemble
• Incorporates stylized pop song forms, ”blue” notes, and other jazz and blues elements.

Aaron Copland

Early influences and training
• Youth: ragtime and pop
• Studies in France: Nadia Boulanger, Stravinsky, Honegger, Milhaud
• Clarity, logic, elegance
• Radio and Recording steered him in a new direction
• Sought to appeal to a larger audience
• Heavily influenced by his belief in socialism
• Reduced his modernist language into the purest version of dissonant
counterpoint, then combined it with diatonic melodies and harmonies

He was the quintessential Americanist

Benjamin Britten

British composer of the tonal or neo-tonal tradition
• Influenced equally by the Classics (mother wanted
him to be the Fourth B!) and other 20th-century
composers (Debussy, Schoenberg) and film
music!
• Like Aaron Copland, he tempered his
explorations with simplicity to make it widely
appealing
• "One of my chief aims is to try to restore to the
musical setting of the English Language a
brilliance, freedom and vitality that have been
curiously rare since the death of Purcell”
• Humanitarian messages and social engagement
• Public service  music for children and amateurs
• Allegorical pleas for tolerance (religious and sexual)
• Pacifism  War Requiem (1962

Olivier Messiaen

French composer, organist, and ornithologist!
• Most important French composer born in the 20th century
• Developed a unique and deliberately innovative musical
language
• Technique de mon langage musical (1944)
• Traité de rythme, de couleur, and d’ornithologie – 7 volumes!
• Deep Catholic faith
• Music as contemplation
• Compositional language
• In some ways an extension of the approaches of Debussy and
Stravinsky
• Pitch language: modes of limited transposition, harmony, color &
sonority (à la française)
• Rhythmic techniques: rhythmic pedal, nonretrogradable rhythms,
additive rhythm
• Birdsong
• Synaesthesia
• Total serialism

Milton Babbit

• Composer, music theorist, mathematician
• Recognized as “carrying the mantle of Schoenbergian serialism”
• Considered his first published of the 1940s works to be “concerned with applying the pitch
operations of the 12-tone system to non-pitch elements”
• In other words, he developed his own take on TOTAL SERIALISM independently and before
Europe!
• Sought congruence in the organization of the different elements serialized
• Published many articles that systematically explored the compositional possibilities of 12-tone
and serial music
• Significant works in this arena: Partitions for piano and All Set for jazz ensemble (both 1957)
• Significant influence on his many and varied pupils at Princeton

Karlheinz Stockhausen

He is German

Found the objective process and concept of
“automatic composition” appealing
• Saw it as liberating, rather than creating or controlling,
sound structures
• Found the “inhuman” element of total serialism divine
• Unlike Boulez, who wanted a consistent systematic language for all,
He utilized a different serial approach for every piece
• Wide variety of techniques
• Systematizing/serializing other elements in addition to those that his contemporaries were
using: register, tempo, subdivisions of a note value (instead of additive durations)
• Permutational serialism: the constant re-ordering of a 12-element collection (often rotation)
• Moving from “points” to “groups” as elements in a series
• Notable totally-serial works: Kreuzspiel, Kontra-punkte
• Immensely diverse body of work – embraced other approaches as well
(electronic!)

Pierre Boulez

Any musician who has not experienced – I do not
say understood, but truly experienced – the
necessity of dodecaphonic language is USELESS.”
• An iconoclast – critical of everyone and everything
• Sought to develop a standard language out of total serialism to be used by all,
as he believed Schoenberg had done with his 12-tone system.
• His early forays into total serialism were, in his view, unsuccessful as they
sounded random
• He sought a more expressive musical language that was still systematic
• His totally-serial works utilize rows of the different musical elements that are
interrelated in complex ways (like Webern)
• “Almost impervious to analysis”

John Cage

The leader of a new avant-garde movement questioning the
very essence of music: what is music?
• He studied with Henry Cowell...
• ...who introduced him to the possibilities of exploring new sounds
altogether
• ...and who also introduced him to the concept of tala, an approach
to rhythm grounded in duration, highly developed in Indian Classical Music.
• ...and Arnold Schoenberg
• ...who impressed upon him the importance of a musical structure that relates a
whole to its parts.
• Composed serial works, then more experimental works in the ‘30s and 40s
• After WWII, turned to much more radical re-conceptions of music
• An artist/philosopher with tremendous influence!