20th Century Music History Test 3

"Who Cares If You Listen?"

"Who Cares if You Listen?" is an article written by the American composer Milton Babbitt and published in February 1958, issue of High Fidelity. In addition to being the single most well-known work by Babbitt, it epitomized the distance that had grown between many composers and their listeners. In the words of Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times, "To this day, it is seized as evidence that he and his ilk are contemptuous of audiences"

Elliott Carter

(1908-2012), US composer; full name Elliott Cook Carter. He was noted for his innovative approach to meter and his choice of sources as diverse as modern jazz and Renaissance madrigals.

Olivier Messiaen

(1908-92), French composer; full name Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen. His music was influenced by Greek and Hindu rhythms, birdsong, Stravinsky, Debussy, and his Roman Catholic faith.

John Cage

(1912-92), US composer, pianist, and writer; full name John Milton Cage. He was noted for his experimental approach, which included the use of aleatory music and periods of silence. He also experimented with musical instruments.

Benjamin Britten

(1913-76), English composer, pianist, and conductor; full name Edward Benjamin Britten, Lord Britten of Aldeburgh. Notable operas: Peter Grimes (1945), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), and Death in Venice (1973).

Milton Babbitt

(1916-2011), US composer and mathematician, noted as a pioneer of electronic music; full name Milton Byron Babbitt. His compositions developed from the twelve-note system of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton von Webern.

Dizzy Gillespie

(1917-93), US jazz trumpet player and bandleader; born John Birks Gillespie. He was a virtuoso trumpet player and a leading exponent of bebop style.

Charlie Parker

(1920-55), US saxophonist; full name Charles Christopher Parker; known as Bird or Yardbird. From 1944, he played with Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie and became one of the key figures of the bebop movement.

Iannis Xenakis

(1922-2001), French composer and architect, of Greek descent. He is noted for his use of electronic and aleatory techniques in music.

Pierre Boulez

(1925-2016), French composer and conductor. He was the principal conductor with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra 1971-78.

Miles Davis

(1926-91), US jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader; full name Miles Dewey Davis. His influence on "cool jazz" is heard in his Birth of the Cool recordings (1948-49). His album Kind of Blue (1959) introduced "modal jazz." In the 1960s, he pioneered the fusion of jazz and rock.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

(1928-2007), German composer, an important avant-garde composer and exponent of serialism.

Bug Mudra

(1989-'90) for two guitars (electric and amplified-acoustic), electronic percussion, conducting dataglove, and interactive computer electronics

Krzystof Penderecki

(born 1933), Polish composer. His music frequently features sounds drawn from extramusical sources and note clusters, as in his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) for fifty-two strings. Notable religious works: Stabat Mater (1962) and Polish Requiem (1980-4).

4'3"

4′33″is a three-movement composition by American experimental composer John Cage. It was composed in 1952, for any instrument or combination of instruments, and the score instructs the performer(s) not to play their instrument(s) during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements. The piece consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, although it is commonly perceived as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence".The title of the piece refers to the total length in minutes and seconds of a given performance, 4′33″ being the total length of the first public performance.

Text Score

A score for the vocal text of a song

"Schoenberg Est Mort"

An article about when Schoenberg died

Atmosphères

Atmosphères is a piece for full orchestra, composed by György Ligeti in 1961. It is noted for eschewing conventional melody and metre in favor of dense sound textures. After Apparitions, it was the second piece Ligeti wrote to exploit what he called a "micropolyphonic" texture. It gained further exposure after being used in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Black Angels

Black Angels, subtitled "Thirteen Images from the Dark Land", is a work for "electric string quartet" by the American avant-garde composer George Crumb. It was composed over the course of a year and is dated "Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970 as written on the score. Crumb is very interested in numerology and numerically structured the piece around 13 and 7. The piece is notable for its unconventional instrumentation, which calls for electric string instruments, crystal glasses, and two suspended tam-tam gongs.

Concerto In Slendro

Chamber piece by Lou Harrison

Colin McPhee

Colin McPhee was a Canadian composer and musicologist. He is primarily known for being the first Western composer to make an ethnomusicological study of Bali, and for the quality of that work.

Edgard Varèse

Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse was a French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States. Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm

Electronic Music Studios

Electronic Music Studios Ltd. is a synthesizer company formed in 1969 by Peter Zinovieff, Tristram Cary and David Cockerell.

George Crumb

George Crumb is an American composer of avant-garde music. He is noted as an explorer of unusual timbres, alternative forms of notation, and extended instrumental and vocal techniques.

Gunther Schuller

Gunther Alexander Schuller was an American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian and jazz musician

Harry Partch

Harry Partch was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation and was one of the first 20th-century composers

Henry Cowell

Henry Dixon Cowell was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario

Henry Brant

Henry Dreyfuss Brant was a Canadian-born American composer. An expert orchestrator with a flair for experimentation, many of Brant's works featured spatialization techniques.

Secundal harmony

In music or music theory, secundal is the quality of a chord made from seconds, and anything related to things constructed from seconds such as counterpoint. Secundal chords are often called tone clusters more generally, especially when non-diatonic.

Just Intonation

In music, just intonation (sometimes abbreviated as JI) or pure intonation is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by ratios of small whole numbers. Any interval tuned in this way is called a pure or just interval.

Indeterminacy

Indeterminacy is a composing approach in which some aspects of a musical work are left open to chance or to the interpreter's free choice. John Cage, a pioneer of indeterminacy, defined it as "the ability of a piece to be performed in substantially different ways".

Ionisation

Ionisation (1929-1931) is a musical composition by Edgard Varèse written for thirteen percussionists. It was among the first concert hall compositions for percussion ensemble alone, although Alexander Tcherepnin had composed an entire movement for percussion alone in his Symphony No. 1 from 1927. The premiere was at Carnegie Chapter Hall, an annex to New York City's Carnegie Hall, on March 6, 1933, conducted by Nicolas Slonimsky, to whom the piece was later dedicated. One critic described the performance as "a sock in the jaw

Le Marteau Sans Maitre

Le Marteau sans maître is a composition by French composer Pierre Boulez. First performed in 1955, it sets the surrealist poetry of René Char for contralto and six instrumentalists.

Lou Harrison

Lou Silver Harrison was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K. P. H. Notoprojo.

Luciano Berio

Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.

Matastaseis

Metastaseis is an orchestral work for 61 musicians by Iannis Xenakis. His first major work, it was written in 1953-54 after his studies with Olivier Messiaen and is 8 minutes in length.

Micropolyphony

Micropolyphony is a kind of polyphonic musical texture developed by György Ligeti which consists of many lines of dense canons moving at different tempos or rhythms, thus resulting in tone clusters vertically.

Morton Feldman

Morton Feldman was an American composer. A major figure in 20th-century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers

Otto Luening

Otto Clarence Luening was a German-American composer and conductor, and an early pioneer of tape music and electronic music. Luening was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to German parents, Eugene, a conductor and composer, and Emma, an amateur singer.

Philomel

Philomel, a serial composition composed in 1964, combines synthesizer with both live and recorded soprano voice. It is Milton Babbitt's best-known work and was planned as a piece for performance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, funded by the Ford Foundation and commissioned for soprano Bethany Beardslee. Babbitt created Philomel in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, of which he was a founding member.

Pierre Schaeffer

Pierre Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician.

Sonatas and Interludes

Sonatas and Interludes is a cycle of twenty pieces for prepared piano by American avant-garde composer John Cage.

String Piano

String piano is a term coined by American composer-theorist Henry Cowell (1897-1965) to collectively describe those pianistic extended techniques in which sound is produced by direct manipulation of the strings, instead of or in addition to striking the piano's keys.

Switched-On Bach

Switched-On Bach is the first studio album by the American musician and composer Wendy Carlos, released under her birth name Walter Carlos in October 1968 by Columbia Records.

Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seule

Symphonie pour un homme seul. Symphonie pour un homme seul (Symphony for One Man Alone) is a musical composition by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, composed in 1949-1950. ... The Symphonie was premiered at a concert on 18 March 1950.

Tabuh-Tabuhan

Tabuh-Tabuhan: Toccata for Orchestra, composed and premiered in Mexico in 1936. Its title translates as "collection of percussion instruments," and it combines Balinese and traditional Western musical elements. It is scored for Western orchestra but, in McPhee's description, the core of the ensemble is a "'nuclear gamelan' composed of two pianos, celesta, xylophone, marimba, and glockenspiel," giving it a highly percussive balance of sound.

Klavierstück 11

The Klavierstücke constitute a series of nineteen compositions by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Stockhausen has said the Klavierstücke "are my drawings"

The Tides of Manaunaun

The Tides of Manaunaun is a short piano piece in B♭ minor by American composer Henry Cowell (1897-1965). It premiered publicly in 1917, serving as a prelude to a theatrical production, The Building of Banba. The Tides of Manaunaun is the best known of Cowell's many tone cluster pieces.

Turangalila-symphonie

The Turangalîla-Symphonie is a large-scale piece of orchestral music by Olivier Messiaen. It was written from 1946 to 1948 on a commission by Serge Koussevitzky for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

War Requiem

The War Requiem, Op. 66, is a large-scale, non-liturgical setting of the Requiem composed by Benjamin Britten mostly in 1961 and completed in January 1962.

Sequenza (III for female Voice)

The third of fourteen compositions for solo instruments or voice by Luciano Berio.

Third Stream

Third Stream is a term coined in 1957 by composer Gunther Schuller, in a lecture at Brandeis University, to describe a musical synthesis of jazz and classical music. Improvisation is generally seen as a vital component of Third Stream

Modes de Valeurs et d'insensités

This movement is the most-discussed of the four, as the first work by a European composer to apply numerical organization to pitch, duration, dynamics, and mode of attack. Because the treatment of the parameters is modal and not serial (that is, the elements are treated simply as a scale, without any implications for how they are to be ordered), there is no question of the material determining the work's form

Threnody To The Victims of Hiroshima

Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima also translated as Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima is a musical composition for 52 string instruments composed in 1960 by Krzysztof Penderecki. Dedicated to the residents of Hiroshima killed and injured by the first-ever wartime usage of an atomic bomb

Tod Machover

Tod Machover, is a composer and an innovator in the application of technology in music. He is the son of Wilma Machover, a pianist and Carl Machover, a computer scientist

Vladimir Ussachevsky

Vladimir Alexeevich Ussachevsky was a composer, particularly known for his work in electronic music.

Witold Lutoslawski

Witold Roman Lutosławski was a Polish composer and orchestral conductor. He was one of the major European composers of the 20th century, and one of the preeminent Polish musicians during his last three decades.

Serialism

a compositional technique in which a fixed series of notes, especially the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, are used to generate the harmonic and melodic basis of a piece and are subject to change only in specific ways. The first fully serial movements appeared in 1923 in works by Arnold Schoenberg.

Prepared Piano

a piano with objects placed on or between the strings, or some strings retuned, to produce an unusual tonal effect.

Bebop

a type of jazz originating in the 1940s and characterized by complex harmony and rhythms. It is associated particularly with Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie.

Spatialism

an art movement founded by Italian artist Lucio Fontana in Milan in 1947 in which he grandiosely intended to synthesize colour, sound, space, movement, and time into a new type of art.

Theremin

an electronic musical instrument in which the tone is generated by two high-frequency oscillators and the pitch controlled by the movement of the performer's hand toward and away from the circuit.

Synthesizer

an electronic musical instrument, typically operated by a keyboard, producing a wide variety of sounds by generating and combining signals of different frequencies.

Free Jazz

an improvised style of jazz characterized by the absence of set chord patterns or time patterns.

Musique Concrete

music constructed by mixing recorded sounds, first developed by experimental composers in the 1940s.