music test 5

Varieties of Modernism

This term refers to a special self-consciousness on the part of the artists themselves, of their position at the forefront of new development.

\#Avant-garde

Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky were examples of early modernists. This term has long been embraced by radical artists and thinkers to denote the forefront of the activity. Not all modernist composers were members of the avant-garde

\#Progress and uncertainty

- Industrialization is one of the 2 overriding historical facts of the nineteenth century. The progression of tech also progressed music. There was a sense of progress in music and the world. The progress of weaponry was a scary thing for the time.

\#The response of Modernism-

In music, the basic assumptions concerned the composing of melody and its close associates with harmony and tonality. These assumptions too were thrown into close associates' harmony and tonality.

\#Impressionists and Symbolists

The Impressionism movement is the best-known modernism movement, dating from the 1870s, when people were astonished by the flickering network of color patches. Followers of this movement called themselves released. Impressionism: A movement in art and music which highlights the play of color and light on the canvas and gives particular attention to timbre or tone color.

\#Symbolism

A movement in art, music, poetry using symbolic images and indirect suggestion to express mystical ideas, emotions, and states of mind.

\#Claude Debussy

Uses intense tone color in place of melody. He is known as a member of the first Avant Garde. Uses the new scales of the world. Known as a impressionist.

\#Parallelism

similar motion of voices

\#Pedal point

a held note, usually in the bass

\#Ostinato

- a repeating fragment

\#Arnold Schoenberg

Known as the "Second Viennese School"

\#Schoenberg's "Emancipation of Dissonance"

Serial music and the Twelve-Tone System to
organize atonal music

\#sprechstimme

vocal technique:a combination of song and speech

\#Chirstaves

- Also a member of the Avarde guard

\#Symbolism

A consciously unrealistic movement, followed soon after impressionism. They were against the idea of realism and thought everything had to be symbolic in art. They like to break down grammar, syntax, and conventional thought sequences to approach the elusive, vague reference to Wagner's music.

\#Expressionists and Fauves-

Expressionist sought to express the most extreme human feelings by divorcing art from everyday literalness. Music makes use of vivid and distorted shapes or musical gestures to make unrealistic images that suggest strong, expressive emotions.

\#Modernist Music Before WW1-

While the music of the best was based on the logic of using familiar elements of tune, motive, harmony, tonality, tone color and rhythm. During the time of the world wars, we see an development in tone color and rhythm.

\#Experiment and Transformation: Melody-

Melody, harmony and tonality all work closely together. Tonality functions as a way of organizing music. This style of tuneful music seemed to be mostly popular in Vienna.

\#New Horizons, New Scales

Debussy sensed a resonance between his own music and the shimmering timbres of the gamelan, and also the scales used in Indonesian music. New scales were employed for themes or even whole movements.

\#Pentatonic scale

A five-note scale playable on the black keys of a otubain

\#Whole-tone scale-

- Divides the octave into six equal parts. All of its intervals are whole steps.

\#The octatonic scale

A specialty with eight pitches in a octave

\#Serialism-

The 'new language' of music invented in the 1920s

\#Consonance and Dissonance

Some pitches sound nice together, some do not.

\#Atonal Music

Some music reached a point which no toral center could be detected at all.

\#1895-1913 Before WW1

We see new concepts like that of Darwin. Freud, Einstein. There also is an improvement in technology and a rise in nationalism.

\#Early Modernism

The first major phase of avant-garde music took place in Paris and Vienna from around 1890-1914. It was a period of rapid development in all the arts, as we have seen, in which the basic tenets of nineteenth-century art were challenged everywhere.

\#Debussy and Impressionism

Debussy borders the late 19th century and early 20th century styles. Debussy's tone colors avoid the heavy sonorities that were usual in late romantic music. His orchestra is more often a single, delicately pulsing totality to which individual instruments contribute momentary gleams of color.

\#Clouds, from Three Nocturnes

This piece is described as impressionist symphonic poems. The piece starts with chords, played by clarinets and bassoons. These chords do not function conventionally, but it seems sufficient to exhaust the composition and bring it to a near halt, over a barely audible drumroll. The theme Is thought to be in a more fluid ABA form.

\#Stravinsky: The Primacy of Rhythm-

Igor Stravinsky earliest work followed from that of his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky focuses on power rhythm. He made ballets, which focused on the abstract use of folk tunes. His pieces needed large orchestra to show the power of his music.

\#The Rite of Spring, Part 1

Was controversial for how loud and violent the piece was. The ballet has no real story, basically being a concert piano piece.

\#Introduction-

- The halting opening theme is played by a bassoon at the very top of its normal register. There is a buildup to extraordinary polyphony that is highly dissonant. In general, the whole section sounds static.

\#Omens of Spring" and "Dance of the Adolescents"-

Opens with a sense of rhythmic irregularity. A single dissonant chord is repeated over and over again.

\#"The Game of abduction"-

New violence is introduced with this section a whirlwind of brilliant rhythms with music frantic pounding on the timpani.

\#Round Dance of Spring"-

"- The dance reaches a relentless climax with glissando trombones, gong, cymbals and big drum. This style is known as barbaric and tough.

\#Expressionism

- Music started to become more emotional and complex. Schoenberg was the leading expressionist in music. He pioneered in the "emancipation of dissonance" and the breakdown of Tonality.

\#Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire(Moonstruck Pierrot)-

Known as the most famous song cycle of the 20th century, it creates a gloomy, sad theme, with music that lacks tunes or happiness.

\#Sprechstimme

an extreme example of the avant-garde composers searches for new expressive means. This creates a distorted, parodied, and haunted poem.

\#\`No.8 "Night"-

The music is dominated by the three-note ostinato shown in the margin. The poem presents the nightmarish side of expressionism, we could easily imagine the screaming figure of Edward munch's painting represented here.

\#No.18 "The Moon fleck"-

The song itself, the tone shifts abruptly from the intensity , from horror to nagging bother of an obsession. It uses extremely complicated technical means to achieve a unique sonorous effect.

\#Alban Berg, Wozzeck(1923

Known as one of the most powerful exponent of expressionism in Music. Berg's music creates high tension, writing continuous orchestral interludes during the blackouts between one scene and the next. Write more of this if needed.

\#Charles IVES

America had no rich tradition of classical music, so it took some time for them to catch up with Europe. Charles Ives emerged in the early 1900s, but his music was not liked until the 1950s. He was America's first important nationalist composer, a true American original, with amazingly radical ideas about music.

\#Second Orchestral Set, Second movement, "The Rockstren Hills"-

the title has a true Inversion ring, the grandeur of nature joins a human festival, apparently some sort of religious revival meeting. The piece begins with several false starts, as woodwinds and brass then enter. We catch a fragment of a cakewalk, a ragtime dance of the 1890s. As the tone collapse, a piano can be heard playing a four-note segments of the whole-tone scale.

\#The Unanswered Question-

This famous work is more quiet, serene and solemn compared to that of Ives other works. There are three dependent levels of music throughout. There is the smooth string choir, the dissonant woodwinds, and the single trumpet, sounding like a voice. These levels do not fit together in the least, but there is an unusual nondialogue between them that works.

\#Post World War one

The composer of this period saw a Continuation of nationalism and return to traditional forms: Aaron Copland, William Grant Still, Bela Bartok. They did not want to be challenged, just have easy, predictable forms.

\#Nationalism

What is the musical language of the country, we saw a rise of this after WW1.

\#Vernacular Music

- Music indigenous to a place, the "home" language.

\#Bela Bartok

a Hungarian pioneer of Ethnomusicology, along with Zoltan Kodaly. Used folk songs in simple and complex settings. These folk songs are seen in such much of what he writes. Use of predictable forms. Bartok tends to use Sonata form in his music. Always very rhythmic and colorful. From the mid-1930s on, his music gradually became more accessible.

\#Aaron Copland

Very beloved composers of the 20th century, his music is used often for inauguration. Studied in European conservatories ("cultivated" music) Returned to America to develop an "American" music. Uses simple, consonant intervals with wide range to depict wide open spaced in the American landscape. Use of standard forms. Born in Brooklyn. Very high notes against very low notes, used to depict the land scape in the music. Return to older forms and genres.

\#Grant Still

- Use of American music: Spirituals, Blues scale, Banjo. One of the very few African American composers of the time. Use of standard form. Uses Rondo form in his music.

\#Music During WW2

A lot of art was centered on government control. The Nazi's created racist messages towards African Americans, discriminating against jazz and those who are minorities. Nazis only liked certain types of music, like Wagner, and Nazi military music. There was a group of French captured musicians that would play for the people of their camp.

\#Post ww2 Music

Continuation of Serialism, minimalism, new sounds and chance music. The Second Avant Garde.

\#Serialism

Now with multiple serialized elements. The music itself, but the rhythmic, dynamics units are very predictable.

\#Minimalism

Very little pieces of music over a long period of time, over and over again.

\#New Sounds

- Edgard Varese, Musique concrete and synthesized sound.

\#Aleatoric or chance music

Music which leaves decisions on some parts of the music up to the performer. Length of notes, what notes are played, how many times you play a note.

\#Crossing Genres

Ravel, Gershwin, and Bernstein

\#Leonard Bernstein:West Side Story

- A musical that uses three simple notes to create the music.

\#Modernism

Radical Modernism was a primary source of creative energy in the period from before World War 1 until after World War II. Most avant-garde music was played to a small, esoteric audience. Composers worked with the ideas of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, selectively adopting no more than they needed to fulfill their own creative visions.

\#Mixing Classical Form and Jazz Maurice Ravel:-

Ravel born in 1875 was later attracted to Paris. Ravel carved out a place for himself between impressionism and Neoclassicism. His harmonies and chord progressions. often remind us of Debussy. Musical exoticism found a modernist voice in Ravel, and a few composers have ranged as widely in imagination as he did.

\#Piano Concerto in G

Ravel's lighthearted piece for piano and small orchestra, this concerto is Ravel's tribute to jazz. With Ravel, everything is slightly skewed, as if through a special filter, with a delicacy and elegance.

\#First Movement(allegramente)

The first theme is not jazzy. A long, lively, folklike tune is presented in the sort of fabulous orchestration that is this composer's hallmark. The piano now introduces a second theme that recalls blues. A third theme suggest romantic popular songs of the 1930s

\#Folk Music, Nationalism and Modernism Bela Bartok-

- Growing up in Hungary in the 1890s, the young Bartok was first swept away by the international avant-garde leaders. Bartok was a man of multiple careers, pianist, educator and musicologist as well as composer. Folk Music ensured that Bartok's music would rarely become as abstract as modernist music was.

\#Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta(1936)

This work can be thought of as an informal symphony in the usual four substantial movements, composed for a specially constituted small orchestra. Besides strings, Bartok includes piano, harp, celesta, timpani, and other percussion. The celesta makes its first entrance with an exquisite effect halfway through the first movement.

\#Second Movement(allegro)

)- The music bubbles over with variety, an exhilarating rush of melodic fragments, striking rhythms, folk-dance fragments, and novel percussion sounds. All held together in sonata form. There is a full stop after the bridge, so self-conscious that we might wonder if Bartok is making fun of sonata-form conventions.

\#Varieties of American Modernism

Though it had been anticipated by Charles Ives, American musical modernism did not really take off until 1920s. The musical climate was more favorable to new ideas, partly because the war had brought greater awareness of all things. There was an incorporation of jazz, blues that were very American based styles of music. New York and San Francisco were popular areas that incorporated the new styles of American music.

\#William Grant Still

The first big Modernist composer who was African American. He studied in NYC with Edgard Varese and had works performed by the International Composers Guild. In New York. He was an important part of the Harlem Renaissance. Use of American music. Spirituals, Blues scale, Banjo. Use of standard forms. Still's music incorporates styles derived from blues and jazz, and his songs, operas, ballets and symphonic. We can think of Still's music as a strain of musical nationalism in modernist guise.

\#Afro-American Symphony

This piece employees a fairly conventional Romantic orchestra, if one augmented with a few unexpected instruments. On the other hand, the melodies, harmonies, and rhythms throughout the symphony have the flavor of jazz and blues. The scales used focus more on blues and jazz.

\#Blues Scale

Differs at several points from the diatonic scale, as can be seen in the comparison of two in the margins.

\#Aaron Copand

- By the middle of the 1930's the reputation of another American modernist, Aaron Copland was growing. Copland music passed through several stylistic phases, including a period of avant-garde modernism. Copland's later music grew more traditional. He adopted a nationalist agenda, writing very Americanism music, like jazz and cowboy songs.

\#Appalachain Spring(1945)

The ballet was choreographed and danced by Martha Graham, a towering figure in American modern dance. Copland composed the ballet music, and later arranged from it a concert suite in eight continuous sections.

\#Appalachain Spring(1945) sections

Section 1- The ballet begins with a very still, clear, static passage of a kind that Copland made very much his own. Solo instruments play meditative figures in counterpoint, an occasional solemn pulse is heard in the harp.
Section2 - A slower melody, like a hymn, rises up in counterpoint to the dance figures, in the wind instruments. After a section of irregular rhythm, the music dies down into a prayer version of the hymn.
Section 3-6- The tempo picks up, evoking another, whirling square dance and a danced sermon. Slower, quitter statement of the hymn are also heard.
Section 7- This dance is choreographed to a set of variations. The 4 variations are extremely simple, little more, really than playing of the tune or part of the tune.
Section 8- finally, after some music the programs and landscape music return once again. We realize that Copland has ingeniously made one grow out of the other. The ballet concludes very quietly.

\#Music and Totalitarianism

The Nazi's limited the music that was listened to at the time. Music like Beethoven and Wagner was allowed, however that of Jewish composers and more liberal composers was banned.

\#The Late Twentieth Century

The horrific events of the early 1900s lead to a new phase of experimental modernism in the 1950s and 1960s, considered even more radical than the period before World War 1
By the 1970s, we saw a turn away from the extreme implications of the second phase of radical modernism

\#The postwar Avant-garde

Experiment and innovation reemerged as the driving forces in music during the third quarter of the twentieth century. First, highly intellectual constructive tendencies came to force. Meanwhile, other composers moved in the opposite direction, relinquishing control over some elements of musical construction and leaving them to chance. Some of these same composers worked to make music simpler.

\#Serialize

Meaning to composed predetermined series of note durations or tone colors or dynamic levels and compose with.

\#New Sound Materials

There was a demand for new sound materials, as the orchestra stalled. Composers made new demands on the standard of music. They had to do wacky things to get the attention of the crowd. Jazz style bands became more popular and overall, we moved to a more digital age.

\#electronic music

Electronic sounds were so new and advanced at the time. They could generate new sounds.

\#Musique Concrete

- Shortly after World War II, composers began incorporating the sounds of life into their compositions. This is sampling of natural sounds, by using special efforts.

\#Synthesizers

Designed specifically for music with arrays of sound-producing modules connected by "patch cords" to create complex sounds. Synthesizers can interact via computer with live musicians to produce today's cutting-edge interactive computer music.

\#On the Boundaries of Time

Sonority is one of two areas in which avant-garde music in its post-World War II phrase made its greatest breakthroughs. The other areas were time and rhythm.

\#Webern, Five Orchestral Pieces(1913)

The whole piece, all of six measures long, can be shown on one line of music. This piece can be described as a very short time segment of very high intensity. In fact, it is only 6 measures long

\#Terry Riley in C

It is a very simple piece, with repeating music lines lasting 45 minutes.

\#Chance Music

- A particular motive, repeating it while another moves on to other motives. In C is a prime example of this. The term also can refer to song were the composers leaves certain elements up to chance. Whereas earlier modernists had questioned traditional assumptions about melody, dissonance, and meter, chance composers questioned even more basic assumptions about musical time.

\#The New Generation

After World War II. Promising composers seemed to appear like magic from almost every corner of the globe. The history of music in the second half of the twentieth century is saturated with the works of these composers. Yet as the twenty-first century gets under wat, by and large the music of these composers has not found its way into the experience of most ordinary listeners.

\#Edgard Varese

A fascinating case of a visionary who bridged both avant-garde phases of musical modernism. The music he wrote in the 1920s was some of the most radical anywhere at that time. He developed an approach to rhythm anywhere at that time. Near the end of his career, he had historic electronic pieces including Deserts and Poeme electronique

\#Poeme electronique

The piece was written for an exhibit sponsored by the Phillips Radio Corporation the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. The music came from around the studio at different angles. A brilliant sound displays a variety of electronic efforts. Varese introduces isolated pitches that appear to be arbitrary though in fact they merge into another sustained chord.

\#Gyorgy Ligeti

Ligeti exemplifies both the search for new sonorities that occupied the postwar avantgarde and their new attitudes toward time. Some of his music uses no clear pitches or chords. What remains are sound complexes- Slowly change with time, blocks of sound that can be experienced better then they can be described

\#Lux Aeterna

Ligeti's Lux aeterna is written for sixteen solo singers and chorus: often they sing chords that include twelve pitches of the chromatic scale. The words of Lux aeterna are taken from the Requiem Mass, but they can scarcely be heard and understood; the piece is a study in sheer vocal sonority.

\#John Cage

Known as the most consistently radical figure of postwar music, he was the father of chance music. Known for his piece 4'33'' which was 4:33 minutes of silence, the piece of music was the sound made from around the piece. Cage posed questions that challenge all the assumptions on which traditional music rests. Cage wants us to open our ears to every possible sound around us.

\#Music At The Turn of the Millennium-

The second wave of avant-garde composers after World War II questioned the traditional features of music in more basic ways that any other generation in European history. New styles emerged that communicated more directly and openly with listeners and renounced the complications of some avant-garde styles.

\#Steve Reich and Minimalism-

The most famous style emerged from the 1960s, it made music less complicated, focusing on more simple melodies, motives and harmonies repeated many times.

\#Music for 18 Musicians

A use of early classic of the minimalist style, it is rigorously, almost schematically organized. It falls into an introduction, twelve connected sections lasting about four minutes each. It is very basic with 4 singers, a cellist, violinist, two clarinets and 4 pianos, three marimbas, two xylophones and a vibraphone.

\#George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue(1924

)- Rhapsody is a term with ancient Greek roots, it exhibits freedom of form and expressive flights of fancy. The piece offers a profusion of melodies in a loosely organized work. Most of it is blues scale and jazz.

\#The Musical After 1940

After WW2, musicals shifted to a sentimental and innocent vision of the world for America in the postwar era. At the same time, other musicals tackled more challenging subjects, including racism, trade unionism and gangs.

\#The 3 ordinal Avant-garde

Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinksy.

\#Leonard Bernstein West Side Story-

Bernstein was one of the most brilliant and versatile musicians of the time. West Side Story boasts three exceptional features, its moving story, sophisticated score, and its superb dances. It is similar to Shakespeare's play Romeo and JulIt is similar to Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet.iet.

\#Non-representational

artwork that is made from pure shapes or forms that do not purposefully refer to the real world. No definitely recognizable subject matter

\#Literature and Art Before World War 1

We saw a separation of technique from expression. There was an emphasis of technique. There was a use of schematic, even mathematical devices in the art.

\#Pizzicato

plucking the strings, it is used in Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.\#