Final Exam Mus

Pulse

A constant presence throughout the work

Musical Impressionism

A number of French composers of the later 1800s attempted to break from tradition in order to experiment with greater subtlety and expressive ambiguity. They regarded the major/minor system of functional tonality based on the pull of the active tones to the tonic as a formula that had become too obvious. Instead, more subtle harmonic relationships come into play. Rather than viewing dissonance as a momentary disturbance, composers began to use it as a goal in itself, freeing it from the need to resolve.

Experimentalism - John Cage

He is central to any notion of an experimental music, not least fro the fact that he was one of the first composers to embrace and define the term. In his landamark essay "Experimental Music", Cage accepted the designation to describe both his own music and also music he liked and to which he felt an affinity. Cage outlined two important conistion crucial to the formation of an experimental aesthetic: First, He underscored the importance of creative use of technology, which has remained signigicant to the experimental tradition. Second, Cage's definition argued that music consists of sounds that are both intentional(notated by the composer) and Unintentional (environmental). Experimental composers not only have acknowledged the latter but have embraced it, demonstrating a willingness to relinquish control over sound.

Comparison between the surface features of modernism and minimalism

Modernism: Atonal Aperiodic/Fragmented Complex Hyperbolic Expression Minimalism: Tonal or Modal Rhythmically regular, continuous Simple Deadpan expression

Primitivism

Near the end of the 19th century, some artists became disillusioned with Western art, and began looking to other "Less Developed" cultures for inspiration. Less romantic origin to this impulse, both in its rejection of the West and in its yearning for the spatially and temporally exotic, Primitivism is perhaps too extreme to be assimilated by Romanticism. Furthermore, its relative lack of interest in the subjectivity of the artist is also a far cry from Romanticism's deeply subjectivist perspective. Some composers embraced the primitivist movement too. They tended to favor folk-line melodies, ostinato rhythms, irregular meters, and emphasized percussion and brash orchestration.

Musical Minimalism

Originated in the West Coast of the US in the late 50s/early 60s. The current has usually been interpreted as a reaction against the predominant avant-garde movements of the time: serialism and indeterminacy, but there were also other factors determining it inception, like the increased exposure of young American composers to extra European musics and the popularization of recording technology.

Sonorism examples

Penderecki: Anaklasis, Threnody, String Quartet No. 1, Polymorphia Gorecki: Scontri, Genesis Kilar: Riff 62, Generique, Diphtongos Szalonek: Les sons, Improvisations sonoristiques

Henry Cowell Most important works

Quartet Romantic - 1917 Quartet Euphometric - 1919 Mosaic Quartet - 1935 Solo Piano Pieces: The tides of Manaunaun Aeolian Harp Sinister Resonance The Banshee

Total Serialism

First postwar musical avant garde movement. Its members belonged to the generation of composers born between 1920 and 1930, who were around 25 years old at the end of the second World War. They criticized what they saw as the inchoerence of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method because it didn't treat all musical parameters (pitch, duration, timbre, dynamics, etc.) with the same organizational criteria. Wanted to make a clean break from the past. Advocated a radicalization of modernism's tenets. In total serialist works, composers applied the serial method not just to pitches but also to durations, dynamics, and timbre.

Young's work divided

Serial Music (1956-58) Conceptual Art (1959-61) Mature work, sustained sonorities in just intonation (1962-present) However, there is extreme continuity between these periods.

Expressonism

Term was applied to a prominent trend in German and Austrian literature and visual arts of the first two decades of the twentieth century and by analogy it was also applied to some musical works, most often those of the "Second Viennese School". The projection of the artists turbulent subjectivity onto the world was the central trait of the expressionist aestetic. Expressionism started to be consistently applied in discussions of music around 1918. In a narrow sense, it embraces most of Schoenberg's post-tonal, pre-dodecaphonic output that of his "free atonal" period, roughly from 1908 to 1921. Certain works from this time by his pulils Berg and Webern also qualify. This Early "pure" expressionism communicates as a kind of psychogram: its musical language take Wagner's chromatic melodies and harmony as its starting point but largely avoids cadence, repetition, sequence, balanced phrases and reference to formal or procedural models.

John Cage Significant Pieces

For prepared piano: group of twenty pieces that are intended to portray the eight "permanent emotions" of Indian Aesthetics - The Erotic The Heroic The Odious Anger Mirth Fear Sorrow The Wondrous. and their common tendency towards tranquility. In late 1940s cage started to develop and aesthetic of silence. his goal became not just to evoke stillness, but to practice it, allowing his work to be as empty and flat as the raked sand of Ryoanji. Outlined his plan for a piece consisting of four and a half minutes of silence, to be called "Silent Prayer"

Significant composers of Total Serialism

French: Pierre Boulez German: Karlheinz Stockahusen Italian: Luigi Nono

Charles Ives Works

Fugue in Four Keys on "The Shining Shore" From the Steeples and the Mountains The Unanswered Question(best known) All display polytonal and atonal canons, multiple layers distinguished by rhythm, pitch content, and sonority, and the combination of atonal and tonal planes, often with a program to explain the unusual musical procedures.

American Modernism

Had some difference with its European counterpart. Relative unimportance of history on the American side. Induvidualist approach of American modernists. American composers were generally more pragmatic than European modernists.

Dodecaphony

The Twelve tone technique. This method was devised to control the relative frequency of appearance of pitches in the music, thus avoiding the risk of giving more importance to one of them over the others. When working with the twelve tone method, the first thing a composer does is constructing a tone row. The row, or series, is in an ordered sequence containing all twelve pitch classes, and it is to become the fundamental material of the composition. All melody and harmony will be derived from the row through several transformational procedures, like inverting the row, reading it in reverse order, or combining both operations to read the inversion in reverse order.

Minimalism

The most successful of many labels applied to an artistic movement that emerged in the 1960s in the United States, first in sculpture and painting, and subsequently in music. It was a reaction against what young artists of the 1960s saw as the autobiographical, gestural excesses of Abstract Expressionism.

In C

The score reads: "Any number of any kind of instruments can play" for this reason, there are many versions of In C, with different combinations of instruments. The material of the piece is comprised of 53 modules of differing duration. Some consist of only one note, but others are much longer. The performers are instructed to play the modules in order, starting with the first, repeating it as many times as each player desires, proceeding to the second, repeating it as many times as desired, and so on. The only additional constraint is that they are supposed to stay within two or three modules from each other as the performance progresses, but they are free to stop playing at some points and rejoin the ensemble at a later moment, thus providing differentiation in the density of the texture and dispensing with the need for a conductor, since it's the players themselves who decide when and what to play. This piece represents the inception of the second—and eventually much more popular—branch of minimalism: the one oriented to pulsation, repetition and gradual process

Important Works

Trio for Strings [X] for Henry Flynt Compositions 1960 The Well Tuned Piano The Four Dreams of China "Dream House" sound and light installations(In collaboration with Marian Zazeela)

John Cage Continued

he turned deliberately towards the world of unintended sound, announcing that his goal was to be "free of individual taste and memory" But such sweeping statements were somewhat misleading. Cage employed chance operations only in the ordering and coordination of musical events. The selection of materials, the planning of structure and the overall musical stance were still shaped by his stylistic predilections. He learned by using chance operations that, if given a set of sounds and a structure built on lengths of time, any arrangement of the sounds and silences would be valid and interesting. Chance, by helping to avoid habitual modes of thinking, could produce something more vital than that which the composer might have invented alone. Following this breakthrough, Cage set to work on "Music of Changes" a lengthy work for piano solo that applies chance to charts of sounds, rhythms, tempos, and dynamics. Imaginary Landscapes for 12 radios, composed in 1951, the same year as Music of Changes, was written using an identical system, again demonstrating that it was quite irrelevant what specific sounds happened within the constraints of a rhythmic structure. In 1952 he stated this premise in its most provocative form in 4'33", the final realization of his long-planned "Silent Prayer." The piece consists of three movements, each completely silent. 4'33" became his most famous and controversial creation.

Sonorism

term coined by musicology to describe the impulse toward sonic explorations in 20th century music. Refers to the avant-garde style that emerged in Poland in the 1960s. This current placed timbre squarely at the center of compositional interest. The word derives from "sonoristics" which refers to a "new branch of knowledge with the sound technique of the twentieth-century music as its subject.

Important Figures of the first generation of Music Minimalism:

La Monte Young (1935) Terry RIley (1935) Steve Reich (1936) Philip Glass (1937)

Henry Cowell

An American Composer Born in Menlo Park, CA 1897 Died in NY 1965 Strong supporter of many of the main developments in the 20th century music, including the exploration of timbrel resources the systematization of modernist techniques and the use of materials and instruments from extra European cultures. First part of his life was a crusader for modernism. Preforming his own music, he undertook three European tours, played in Cuba, Toured the US and was the first American composer invited to the USSR(1929). His tone clusters and direct manipulation of the piano's strings scandalized some audiences, but they also generated sensational publicity, establishing him as an internationally notorious performer-composer. Also helped promote music by other composers. Founded the New Music Society of California in 1925. Was also behind the Pan American Association of Composers from 1928 to 1934. In 1927, he founded the score publication New Music Quarterly, which he later expanded with an orchestra series, various special editions and record editions and record label. Throughout his life, Cowell became increasingly interested in extra European music. Seemed to contradict his ultramodernism, but it was a symptom of his sense that Western musical complexity had reached its limit.

Stylistic features of Minimalism

Anonymous design Deadpan flatness Unadulterated or industrial color Rejection of any form of comment, representation or reference.

Members of Viennese School

Arnold Schoenberg Alban Berg Anton Webern

Sonorism (continued)

As a stylistic label, "sonorism" has apparent advantages over "textural music", which seems too vague, or "sound-mass music", which limits the notion to one type of texture. In contrast, "sonorism" captures the essence of the movement as having to do with a broadly conceived notion of sound, while also validating it as a twentieth-century 'ism'. It is in this broad sense that the term has been adopted by composers and theorists in Central and Eastern Europe, most notably in Russia.

Pierre Boulez

Best known and most serial work was also the last he composed in that style, "Structures", for two pianos, written in 1952 and 1961. Le Marteau sans maitre Domaines Eclat Notations pour Orchestre Repons

John Cage

Born LA 1912 Died NY 1992 Influence of his compositions, writings, and personality has been felt by a wide range of composers and artists around the world. He had a greater impact on music in the 20th century than any other American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, and a tireless inventor of new ways of producing artistic works. From an early stage in his career, Cage relied on duration as the basis of musical structure, because he realized that neither sound nor silence were fundamental, but shared, in duration, a common substrate. One of his most famous inventions was the prepared piano, which requires the insertion of screws, bolts, and other objects between the strings of an instrument.

La Monte Young

Born in Bern, Idaho 1935 Recognized as a founding figure in minimalism, Young is also an advocate for just intonation and a champion of North Indian vocal music. He has often spoken about the importance sonic remembrances from his childhood, such as whistiling wind and humming electrical transformers, would have his later life as compositional inspirations. DRONES were always his main interest and basic musical device.

Terry Riley

Born in Colfax, CA 1935 Main influences in his work are jazz and indian classical music, two traditions that share an intense focus on improvisation. A virtuoso keyboard player, he supported his work as a composer until the late 1960s by playing in piano bars. Following this he taught indian classical music at several institutions. Riley wrote in C, his best known work, in 1964. Although he has always been the first to acknowledge La Monte Young as a precursor, In C defined the minimalist style of modular repetition and was the first work to bring minimalism into mainstream culture through its Columbia recording from 1968. "In C", by Terry Riley, is one of the most significant works of the second half of the XX Century. At the time of its composition, serialism dominated avant garde musical circles and the idea of tonality was anathema. Therefore, the very title of the piece - a reference to the most common tonality in Western music - implied a challenge to the status quo. Another immediately perceptible feature of the musical surface that was unusual at the time is the pulse, a constant presence throughout the work.

Charles Ives

Born in Danbury, 1874 Died in New York, 1954 Most Important American composer of the first part of the 12th century. Regularly borrowed or reworked Church hymns and popular songs as themes in his compositions. A lot of his features in his mature music come from his experience as an organist, including his penchant for improvisation, virtuosic demands on performers, orchestration with layering or juxtaposition of contrasting timbres (akin to contrasting ranks of pipes on the organ's different keyboards), Spatial effects (based on alternating Great and Swell keyboards), and frequent use of pedal points, fugal textures, and hymn tune elaborations, all characteristics of the organ repertoire. Went into insurance business where he would achieve considerable success. Introduced both hymn tunes and American popular songs into a piece in the classical tradition.

Modernism

First emerged as a historical phenomenon between 1883 and 1914. The term is used in music to denote a distinct and continuous tradition within the belief that the means of musical expression must be adequate to the unique and radical character of the age is of the utmost importance. The self conscious search in the years immediately before 1914 by composers and performers for a language of music adequate to and reflective of the contemporary moment revelaed a conception of modernity dominated by the progress of science, technology and industry, and by positivism, mechanization, urbanization, mass culture and nationalism.

Claude Debussy

Born in France, 1862. Studied music since childhood, went to Paris Conservatory at age ten. As an adult, worked as accompanist for singers and also as music teacher. In his music he experimented with Harmony, Timbre and Form to create a distinctive sound. He emphasized, Dissonance as a focal point rather than as a brief sonority passing to resolution. This points to an interest in timbre rather than just focusing on the organization of thematic structures. Most important works: Prelude a "L'apres midi d'un faune", Nocturnes, and La Mer, the opera Pelleas et Melisande, the sonatas for ciolin and piano for cello and piano, and his solo piano music, including two books of preludes, and the etudes. It's important to note that Debussy, has misgivings about the use of the term "Impressionism" to describe his music. On more than one occasion he mentioned that he felt more affinity with Symbolism, a contemporary French literary movement that sought to evoke poetic images through suggestion rather than description, through symbol rather than statement.

Arnold Schoenberg

Born in Vienna, 1874 Died in Los Angeles,1951 Author of important compositions: Second String Quartet, The Monodrama Erqartung, and Opera Moses und Aron. His works generated hostile reactions since his first performance. In his early works he had already taken steps in the development of chormaticism that was to lead him to abandon triadic harmony and tonality itself by 1908, and each stage in his progress aroused fresh rejection.

Prepared Piano origin story

Cage had a dancer in need of a percussion ensemble score, but the hall in which the performance was to take place did not have sufficient space to accommodate the players. Cage responded by, in a way, turning the piano into a percussion orchestra.

Modernism in Music

Clear, intentional departures from immediate historical precedents became hallmarks of early Modernism. The basic assumptions underlying the compositional traditions of the nineteenth century underwent scrutiny, particularly the concept and practice of tonality, the reliance on recognizable rhythmic regularities, the dependence on traditional instruments and sonic effects and the use of extended compositional forms. The link between music and narration became problematized. Modernity demanded the shattering of expectations and the confident exploration of the new forms. This would inspire the continuing search during the century for new systems of pitch organization as alternatives to tonality, and for new instruments. Lush sonorities, repetition and reliance on extra-musical narratives were chief targets in modernist discourse about music.

Basic Materials of Minimalist Music

Drone: a sustained sound maintained throughout a piece or section of music. Module: a short pattern, usually repeated several times before being substituted by another pattern.

John Cage Continued part 2

During the 1950s, designed different chance-controlled compositional systems, eventually ceasing to use charts, which had the tendency to produce repetitions of events. In the Music for Piano series, imperfections on the paper became notes by the application of staff lines and clefs. In these "time-length" works, Cage investigated ways of opening up his compositions by making their notation ambiguous, a situation he referred to as "indeterminacy" This meant the results of his compositional systems were no longer fixed objects but took on more the character of processes. The performer's role was to animate the process Cage had set forth, producing results that, while having certain similarities, would differ in details at each performance or "realization"

Experimentalism

Encompasses a diverse set of musical practices that gained momentum in the middle of the 20th century, characterized by its radical opposition to and questioning of institutionalized modes of composition, performance, and aesthetics. Initially an American phenomenon, the music styles that have been called experimental do not share on defining compositional characteristic, but all of them reject musical institutions and institutionalized musical values, working outside the European art music mainstream. Frequently defined in opposition to the values and aesthetics of the modernist avant-garde. Some scholars draw the line between the "experiemental" and the "avant-garde" by its relationship to the mainstream: avant garde composers work at the extremities of a musical tradition, whereas experimentalists work completely outside of that tradition. As a result, experimental music displays musical values that stand in opposition to the music of the modernist avant-garde: Chance procedures instead of total control, graphic scores and written instructions instead of conventional musical notation, radical simplicity instead of complexity, and unorthodox performance requirements instead of traditional notions of virtuosity.

Impressionism Characteristics and Procedures

Exotic Scales (pentatonic,whole tone) Unresolved dissonances Parallel chords Rich orchestral tone color Free rhythm

Sonorist Composer Explorations

Explored contrasts of instumentation, texture, timbre, articulation, dynamics, movemnt, and expression as primary form building elements.

Characteristic techniques used by minimalist composers:

Extension (Young) Repetition (All) Phasing (Reich) Addition/Subtraction (Glass)

Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question

His best known composition. Scored for strings, woodwinds, and solo trumpet, the work exhibits a clear stratification of material per instrumental family: the strings play a tonally ambiguous chorale that is restated several times with subtle changes. On top of it, the trumpet plays a five-note ostinato that repeats six times without change. The woodwinds respond to this ostinato in an increasingly strident way until they finally stop playing. The trumpet then sounds the ostinato one last time. Programmatic Composition. The strings should play off stage, or atleast away from the winds, are to represent "The Silences of the Druids - who know, see, and hear nothing, the trumpet intones, "The perennial question of existence" and states it in the same tone of voice each time. But the hunt for "The invisible answer" undertaken by the flute and other human beings, becomes gradually more active, fast and louder through and animando to a con fuoco. "The Fighting Answerers" as the tim egoes on, and after a "secret conference", seem to realize a futility, and begin to mock "The Question" the strife is over for the moment. After the dissapear, "The Question" is asked for the last time, and "The Silences" are heard beyond in "Undisturbed Solitude. This is a composition of extreme originality. The superposition of strata, the methods used to differentiate them and the materials that constitute them were radically new when the piece was premiered in 1946, not to mention when it was composed, almost 40 years earlier.

Two Important Composers in Primitivism

Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok(Hungarian). Bela Bartok wrote a solo piano piece named Allegro Barbaro, in which he treated the piano as a percussion instrument. The work incorporated the melodies, rhythms, and harmonies of Hungarian peasant music. Igor Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring, BEST KNOWN WORK OF PRIMITIVIST MOVEMENT. The subject matter of this ballet revolves around the imagined rites of a prehistoric Russian tribe in which a woman is sacrificed as an offering to the gods of spring. Ostinato patterns are a near constant presence in the composition, and variable length melodic figures or cells act as the main determinants of metre.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Important compositions: Kreuzspiel - 1951 Gruppen(for three orchestras) Gesang der Junglinge Kontakte(percussion and tape) Stimmung (Voices) Licht (Cylce of 7 opreas for the days of the week)

The Theatre of Eternal Music

In 1962 La Monte Young established this ensemble, dedicated to drone-based performance. At various times the group included percussionist Angus MacLise, choreographer Simone Forti, musician/artist Tony Conrad, instrumenalist John Cale (later famous as a member of the Velvet Underground), Billy Name (later Warhol's archivist), composer Terry Riley, and visual artist Marian Zazeela - who soon married Young and became his constant collaborator. This group performed pieces: The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys The Four Dreams of China During this period, Young began exploring rational tunings, and quickly became fascinated by the acoustical and artistic possibilities afforded by just intonation. In 1964 he unveiled the first version of what would become his magnum opus, "The Well-Tuned Piano"

Impressionism

Initially a school within French Painting. Term would be later used as a musical style. Impressionist painters emphasized the role of light in portraying their subject matters. Also interested in movement and in playing with visual perspective. Characterized by delicate but clearly articulated brush strokes which produced a hazy impression of the subjects, but also revealed the rich and intricate palette of colors involved in producing that overall effect.

Next Evolution of Cages thinking

When he encountered Morton Feldman in 1949 the important thought of embracing chance. "whatever sound comes along" was inspirational. In his opinion feldman had "changed the responsibility of the composer from making to accepting" In late 1950, cage was given a copy of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese oracle text in which images are selected at random from a set of 64 by means of tossing yarrow sticks of coins. The I Ching chart arrangement of the 64 images gave Cage the idea of using a coin-tossing oracle as a way of selecting the sonorities from his own charts. Chance operations forever altered Cages aesthetic of silence. he before saw silence as impassiveness, flatness, or aimlessness. he now saw it as a complete negation of the composer's will, tastes and desires. Silence had nothing to do with the acoustic surface of events, but instead was a function of the inner forces that prompted the sounds. Acoustic silence changed from being an absence of sound to being an absence of intended sound.

The Banshee, By Henry Cowell

Written in 1925, The insutrment IS NOT played in the conventional way. The performer is required to stand on the side opposite the keyboard and play directly on the strings rubbing, plucking, or hitting them with either the flesh of the fingers or the nails, while another person sits at the keyboard to hold down the damper pedal.

John Cage last 5 years of compositions:

in 1987 Cage wrote a piece for flute and piano named "Two" This was the first of a series of 43 compositions over his last five years of output that together form the major final phase of work. All of these 43 pieces have two things in common: First they consist of mostly short fragments of music (often single notes) which have a flexible placement in time through a system of "Brackets" - a range of times (given in minutes and seconds) indicate the period during which the musical fragment may begin and another range the period during which the music must be completed. Second, each piece is named by the number of performers involved; superscripts distinguish compositions for the same number of players (Two, Two2, Two3, etc.) These two features have led to these works being referred to as the "number" pieces. Austere and spiritually powerful, they represent a return to pure music for Cage, without thematic associations.