20th Century Music Review

Several areas were not covered in detail:
- Percussion
- Electronic music
- Duke Ellington
- Postmodern aspects of Bang on a Can and Minimalism

Program music: Instrumental music that describes something specific (e.g., a river, a love affair, an ocean).
Electronic music: Music created using electronic instruments or resources. It focuses on how the music is made rather than the composer's intention.
Pierre Schaeffer's "Étude aux chemins de fer" (1948): An example of both electronic and program music because it uses sounds from the natural world (railroad) and is about something specific (the railroad).
These concepts can be visualized as interlocking Venn diagrams.

Music made from naturally occurring sounds.
- Example: Sounds of birds singing.
Mimos Polyglottos: Northern Mockingbird (piece by David Dunn featuring sounds of a mockingbird).
- The mockingbird acts as a "performer" in this piece.
Musique Concrète uses real-world sources.
Steve Reich's "Come Out": Uses real voices, making it Musique Concrète.
- The opposite would be using electronic oscillators or synthesizers to create source material.
Example: Steve Reich “Come Out”- looped human voice

Difference between "Étude aux chemins de fer" and "Mimos Polyglottos".
- "Étude aux chemins de fer" uses train sounds that are then manipulated (looped, cut up, interspersed).
- "Mimos Polyglottos" simply records the mockingbird.
The classic example of Musique Concrète involves manipulating real-life sources after recording.

Karlheinz Stockhausen: His work can feel like Musique Concrète due to how it was recorded and manipulated.
- Piece features a soprano voice (boy's voice) from the Book of Daniel.
- The voice is manipulated with studio techniques (played faster, cut up).
- Also incorporates sounds of oscillators, electronic instruments, and speaker movements.

Composers often use electronic music to express social meanings.
Stockhausen's piece:
- Reflects on World War II and the composer's sense of estrangement.
- The text from the Book of Daniel (young people thrown into a fiery furnace) relates to the Holocaust.
Pauline Oliveros' "Bye Bye Butterfly":
- Uses Puccini's Madame Butterfly drowned out by electronic effects.
- Signifies the transition of women's worth from being tied to a man to not being tied to men.
Pauline Oliveros' Sonic Meditations:
- Deep listening exercises with text scores (instructions in words, not musical notation).
- Involves a community listening and singing a note, copying other people's notes, and finding the center note of the cluster.
The meditation encourages deep listening within a community.

Uses the voice of a man unjustly accused of murder.
The man repeats "Come out to show them" (referring to opening a wound to prove his injury).
The looped voices create a sense of a community of people.
The message is about an unjustly accused person.

Minimalist piece by Steve Reich.
Two people clap a rhythm in unison.
One person skips a beat, putting the rhythm out of phase.
The patterns shift as one person moves ahead, creating a full circle after 12 repetitions.
While not explicitly about social issues, it can be interpreted as being about community.

A specific technique where a 12-note phrase is played, and then one person plays 11 notes, causing the rhythms to go out of sync.

A Romantic composer who lived into the 20th century but whose style remained rooted in the 19th century.
His music is super expressive, big orchestras, full of the kind of turbulent personal emotions that we associate with romanticism.