Music History 3: Unit 2
What are characteristics of Piazzolla's tango nuevo style?
motivic repetition; fugue, canonic writing, imitation; polyrhythms, polytonality; percussion effects; jazz-derived harmonic progressions, often dissonant (from progressive and cool jazz of the 1950s; lush sense of texture and soundscape; detailed arrangements going well beyond the usual orquesta tipica of the tango; quasi-improvisatory freedom of tempo and expression from each player
Who was Ruth Crawford?
A vital participant in "ultra-modern" school of composition in NYC, which included Copland and Cowell; studied with and then married composer and musicologist Charles Seeger, helped him revise Tradition and Experiment in New Music and a Manual on Dissonant Counterpoint; wrote innovative and experimental NY compositions-- dissonant counterpoint and indigenous American serial techniques; one of the earliest composers to extend serial controls to parameters other than pitch
In what ways did Cage use chance methods as a way of imitating nature in its manner of operations?
1. Use chance methods to write a composition that is then conventionally notated 2. Using instruments that create non-musical, random sounds 3. Repress any musical events in the piece and let the music trickle in from everyday 4. Give the performer graphic notation that she/he will interpret entirely personally, conceptually, differently each time; this establishes a fluid relationship between composer and performer
Who was Astor Piazzolla?
Argentine composer, bandleader and bandoneon player; pioneer of the Tango Nuevo in second half of the 20th century
Who was Jimi Hendrix?
Arguably the most important musician of the second half of the 20th century; his sonic explorations changed the sound of popular music
What are characteristics of Coltrane's A Love Supreme?
A suite of blues, modal jazz, and non-vocal religious recitation
What is transcendentalism?
Belief in an ideal spiritual state that transcends the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuitive awareness
Who was Sun Ra?
Born and died in Birmingham, AL; his afrofuturist vision and avant-garde approach would inspire many musicians
Who said "all the art of the past must be destroyed"?
Boulez
Who said "I always think the relationship between a teacher and a student should be short and maybe violent. You don't need to spend years together. All you need is an explosion: you are the material to explode, the teacher I the detonator."
Boulez on Messiaen
What work did Stravinsky call "the only truly significant work of this new age"?
Boulez's Le Marteau sans Maitre
Who said "You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance."?
Charles Ives on art having to be real
Who said "Every great inspiration is but an experiment."?
Charles Ives on nothing happening without experimentation
Who were three early American avant-garde composers?
Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, and Ruth Crawford
Who organized the "Jazz Workshop" series?
Charles Mingus
Who wrote Fables of Faubus?
Charles Mingus
Who wrote Anthropology?
Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie
Who were some great bop artists?
Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk
What are characteristics of bop?
Chromatically altered chord progressions, chromatic chord substitutions, ultra-fast tempos; but style still often melody-oriented
Who was Charles Mingus?
Composer, bandleader, bass player; fascinated by idea of creating large, extended, or otherwise unusual forms in jazz
Who was Tania Leon?
Composer, conductor, educator; founding member of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, worked there as a pianist, conductor and composer, starting in 1969; professor at Brooklyn College since 1985 and at the Graduate Center of CUNY; associate conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra since 1992; new music advisor to the NY Philharmonic; as a composer, combines elements of gospel, jazz, African, and Cuban styles
What was Entartete Musik?
Degenerate music; Nazi propaganda attempt to label modern, jazz-influenced, and Jewish composers as queer
Who was Marcel Duchamp?
Described as a surrealist or dadaist, the original anti-art movement
What are musical concepts of afrofuturism?
Dissonant harmony, dense textures and layers harmonically and instrumentally/sparse textures and layers, odd meters, free meter, atonal/polytonal chords and harmony, otherworldly instrumental effects, African percussion suggesting African diaspora
What was John Cage influenced by?
East and South Asian philosophies, especially Zen Buddhism from Japan
Wh wrote the orchestral piece Ameriques: Americas, New Worlds?
Edgar Varese
What are two famous tangos?
La Cumparsita and Jalousie
What were characteristics of Ives's mature style?
Layers of conflicting music, often in a spatial concept; quotation of American traditional music: hymns, marches, songs, national tunes, several tempos at same time, tone clusters, etc.
Who was Pierre Boulez?
Messiaen student, composer, conductor, feared and lionized propagandist for modernism
What is afrofuturism in music?
Utilizes many different musical, technological, lyrical, and visual concepts to create new worlds, to creatively alter past worlds, and to manipulate contemporary worlds to offer a different vision of the African experience throughout the disapora
Who said to Ben Weber in the 1950s "I hear you are homosexual and a 12-tone composer. You can't be both. Which is it?"
Virgil Thomson
What are two examples of identity politics in play in the 20th century?
Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and Debussy's Golliwog's Cakewalk
What are characteristics of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time for violin, cello, clarinet and piano?
Written in winter at German POW camp in Silesia; birdsong: blackbird and nightingale; rhythmic techniques include "rhythmic pedal" in piano; additive rhythms; non-retrogradable rhythms
Who was George Clinton?
70s funk and much of hip hop came directly from his afrofuturistic concepts with the band Parliament, most notably the albums Mothership Connection and The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, as well as the band Funkadelic
What is afrofuturism?
A multi-disciplinary aesthetic that explores the following themes: science fiction, technology, liberation and freedom, the past and the future, imagination, Afrodiasporic experiences and Pan-Africanism
Who earned their living by writing scores for horror films from Hammer and Amicus Studios?
Elisabeth Lutyens
Who wrote for Dr. Terror's House of Horrors?
Elisabeth Lutyens
What is characteristic of Latin American modernists?
Embraced the modernist example of Stravinsky-- tended to emphasize rhythm in a Stravinsky fashion, but in Latin patterns rather than in east European ones
What are characteristics of early Cage?
Explored new, often unhitched, and otherwise "irrational" sounds of percussion and novelty pianos- brake drums, prayer stones, tin cans, etc.
What were concepts in afrofuturism lyrics?
Extraterrestrial themes, imaginative metaphors, extraterrestrial alter egos, diaspora ideas/concepts
What are characteristics of Alma for flute and piano written by Leon?
Filters Cuban dance rhythms and hints of jazz through a French-Debussy lens
What are characteristics of Boulez's Le marteau san maitre?
For mezzo-soprano with flute, xylophone, vibraphone, percussion, guitar, viola; transparently scored: very French sounds, but also "exotic"
What is bebop?
Form of jazz modernism starting in mid- to late 1940s, revolt against commercialism of 1930s swing bands
Who found categories of 20th century musical style similar to sexual identity types?
Fred Maus
Who said "non-tonal compositions are queers in the concert hall" and "knowing that a piece is twelve-tone gives you the starting point for interpreting all its details"?
Fred Maus
What are characteristics of non intentional (indeterminate) music?
Hearing the piece is the listener's own action; really impossible to distinguish music and noise; calling some sounds music is a value judgment; against musical systems
What are technological concepts of afrofuturism?
Heavy synthesizers and different gadgets/effects to alter sound, new instruments like the theremin, electric violins, electric devices on wind and brass instruments, recording studio techniques used to create new, otherworldly sounds
Who considered tonality as "a basic law of Nature"?
Heinrich Schenker
Who composed The Banshee for piano strings?
Henry Cowell
Who developed the tone-cluster and ways of playing inside the piano?
Henry Cowell
Who when paroled from prison suddenly shifted from experimentalism to tonal "normality" in 1940?
Henry Cowell
Who was Elisabeth Lutyens?
Innovative English serial composer who was born into a distinguished family, wrote modernist music at a time when musical conservatism dominated the British scene, wrote in a highly developed abstract language long before the continental Darmstadt modernist composers, sidelined by the British musical establishment until the later 1950s
What are characteristics of Revueltas's Homenaje a Federico Garcia Lorca?
Instrumentation: piccolo, E-flat clarinet, 2 trumpets, trombone, tuba, piano, percussion, 2 violins, and bass; rondo-like form (ABACABAC coda)
Who wrote Piano Sonata "Concord, Mass."?
Ives
Who wrote Three Places in New England?
Ives
Who wrote Music of Changes for piano?
John Cage
Who said "I have nothing to say, and I am saying it"?
John Cage on aiming to destroy the compositional ego
Who was Silvestre Revueltas?
Mexican composer with an eclectic style, including highly original symphonic works, film scores, and chamber music; studied in the US, but his experiences in Mexico and Spain were more influential; his music based on folk melody, ingenious orchestrated, and driven by strong motor rhythms; most famous pieces include Sensemaya and La Noche de los Mayas
What are examples of Piazzolla's tango nuevo?
Milonga del Angel, La Muerte del Angel, La Resurrección del Angel
Who developed different manners of serialism in America and Europe?
Milton Babbitt, Boulez and Stockhausen
What were identity politics in 20th century music composition?
Modernism, neoclassicism, minimalism, "American music", totalism
What was the climax to musical rationalism?
Modernists of the so-called Darmstadt School who gathered in Germany, hailing Webern as their model
What is tango?
Most popular Argentine urban dance of the 20th century; expressive and nationalistic symbol of the Argentine character; sexual, nostalgic, melancholy, defiant, exhibitionist
Who was Charles Ives?
Musical experimentalist, brought up in post-Civil War New England; wrote four Symphonies, including Symphony No. 4; influenced by Transcendentalist thinking of American writer-philosophers, e.g., Thoreau and Emerson
What is the definition of queer?
Odd, non-normative; a critique of identity; an identity label for separatist, non-assimilating politics
Who was John Cage?
Opposed the ego-driven mindset of Western rationalism; did this by experimenting with chance (aleatoric) techniques via new methods of composing music and new systems of writing out music, both of which had the effect of making music function more like an oral tradition
What is rationalism in music?
Over the four centuries between the Renaissance and the mid-20th century, composers were trying to control and order more and more aspects of music
Who was Henry Cowell?
Pianist, composer, editor, new music activist, multiculturalist; according to John Cage, Cowell said the "open sesame" that ushered in American modernism; his influence is incalculable
Who said "the bandoneon has a velvet sound, a religious sound. It was made to play sad music."?
Piazzolla
Who were main Darmstadt modernist figures?
Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen
What are identity politics?
Political activity and theorizing founded in the shared experiences of members of certain social groups
Who said "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."?
Ralph Waldo Emerson on courage and fear
Who said "The only person you are destined to become, is the person you decide to be."?
Ralph Waldo Emerson on self-reliance
What was happening with American music in the 1950s?
Rock 'n' roll, post-bop jazz, improv, and "chance" musics emerge as forms of rebellion against the rigidity of the old rationalist order; moving away from notation
Whose tonal, post-romantic Hermit Songs was booed at a performance in Rome in 1952?
Samuel Barber
Who said "I do not, as apparently all theorists before me have done, consider tonality an eternal law, a natural law of music."?
Schoenberg
Who said "I had to fight for every new work... I had lost friends and I had completely lost any belief in the judgment of friends. And I stood alone against a world of enemies."
Schoenberg on his musical style became a political matter
What were significant precursors to afrofuturism in music?
Science fiction films of the 1950s, Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, The Black Arts Movement and Black History Curricula, Robert Moog and the development of the synthesizer, science fiction television
What are characteristics of Ives's General William Booth Enters into Heaven"?
Setting for male voice and piano of poem by Vachel Lindsay on the evangelist and founder of the Salvation Army; almost a dramatic-cinematic scene, with musical quotations helping paint the scene of Booth's ascendance; vocal melody paraphrases hymn "There is a fountain filled with blood"
What are characteristics of Crawford's String Quartet mvmt. 4?
Shows Crawford was aware of a profound analogy of rhythm and pitch, and of the possibility of projecting the same musical motives in both dimensions; 4th mvmt contains a systematic palindrome, whose second half is an exact retrograde of the 1st up a half step
What were visual concepts of afrofuturism?
Stage clothing suggesting science fiction/extraterrestrial sensibilities, often while suggesting Afrocentic themes, album covers and promotional materials
What is Cage's prepared piano?
String and hammer manipulations turned piano into a one-man percussion ensemble
What are the Three Pillars of Afrofuturist Music?
Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix, and George Clinton
Who was Olivier Messiaen?
Taught at Paris Conservatoire, where his students included Boulez and Stockhausen; one of very few outside Vienna who knew music of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and would teach it to younger composers; wrote in very personal styles using transcribed birdsongs, ancient Hindu rhythmic formulas and Greek rhythms, Japanese traditional music, tonal selections that are meditative or ecstatic, an eclectic example from Turangalila Symphonie
Who was John Coltrane?
Tenor and soprano saxophonist, bandleader and composer; affected jazz writing by developing and extending the whole notion of creatively reharmonizing standards
What kind of music did a lot of gay composers write in the 1940s and 1950s?
Tonal
What were different dualities that became politicized in art music in the 20th century?
Tonal vs. atonal, dissonant vs. consonant, progressive vs. conservative, abstract vs. for-the-people, academic vs. popular
What did Boulez and other Darmstadt modernists advocate for?
Total musical organization; developed serialism, extending Schoenberg/Webern's principles of strict order to duration, dynamics, texture, attacks, rests; compositional attempts to organize every element according to serial principles