Chapter 34: Postwar Crosscurrents

Hymnen (1967)

"Anthems." Work for Stockhausen for four-track tape, composed using national anthems. Stockhausen also made a version with solo instruments and a shortened version with orchestra.

A Ceremony of Carols (1942)

A choral piece by Benjamin Britten scored for three-part treble chorus, solo voices, and harp. Written for Christmas, it consists of eleven movements, with text from The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems; it is in Middle English. Written at the same time as Hymn to St. Cecilia, the two works are stylistically very similar.

prepared piano

A piano in which various objects--such as pennies, bolts, screws, or pieces of wood, rubber, plastic, weather stripping, or slit bamboo--are inserted between the strings, resulting in delicate, complex percussive sounds when the piano is played from the keyboard.

Colin McPhee (1900-1964)

American composer and ethnomusicologist. His pathbreaking research on Balinese music documented a decade when the island was relatively free from outside influences and culminated in the writing of Music in Bali, which remains the principal treatise on the island's music. He studied thriving musical traditions, as well as those on the wane, by travelling around the island to work with a variety of orchestras and by turning his native-style house in Sayan into a gathering place for local musicians. He combined the roles of composer and scholar in his approach to Balinese music. He transcribed dozens of gamelan works for two pianos, solo piano, and flute and piano, and in 1936 he wrote Tabuh-tabuhan, his first major orchestral work to incorporate Balinese materials.

Morton Subotnick (1933--)

American composer and teacher. He founded and directed the San Francisco Tape Music Center (1961-6), and performed extensively as a clarinettist and conductor. His teaching career includes positions at Mills College, NYU, and the California Institute of the Arts, where he directs the Center for Experiments in Art, Information, and Technology. He is recognized as one of the leading composers of electronic music and works involving instruments with other media, including film, video, and interactive computer music systems. In 1967, using the Buchla synthesizer, he created Silver Apples of the Moon, the first electronic work commissioned by a recording company (Nonesuch). The work became the first in a series of tape pieces intended for home listening rather than the concert platform.

Milton Babbitt (1916-2011)

American composer and theorist. He has contributed extensively to the understanding and extension of 12-note compositional theory and practice and has been one of the most influential composers and teachers in the USA since WWII.

Harry Partch (1901-1974)

American composer, theorist, instrument maker, and performer. He dedicated most of his life to implementing an alternative to equal temperament, which he found incapable of the true consonance his ear and essentially tonal aesthetic demanded. He invented an approach to just intonation he called "monophony," realizing that traditional instruments and performers would be inimical to his system, he designed and constructed new and adapted instruments, developed notational systems, and trained performing groups wherever he was living and working. By the 1940s he had transformed a profound antipathy to the European concert tradition into the idea of "corporeality," emphasizing a physical and communal quality in his music. Instruments include: Adapted Viola (viola with a cello's neck fitted on it); Ptolemy, a reed organs returned to Ptolemaeu's musical scale; Chromelodeon; Marimba Eroica and Bass Marimba; Cloud-Chamber Bowls; Diamond marimba; Gourd Tree and Cone Gongs; Kitharas; Mazda Marimba (made of Mazda light bulbs); Spoils of War.

Earle Brown (1926-2002)

American composer. A leading representative of the New York School established in the early 1950s in association with Cage, Feldman, Tudor, and Christian Wolff, he pioneered such concepts as graphic notation, time notation and open form.

George Crumb (1929--)

American composer. Born to accomplished musical parents, he participated in domestic music-making from an early age, an experience that instilled a lfielong empathy with the Classical and Romantic repertory, as his Three Early Songs (1947) exemplify. He studied at Mason College, the University of Illinois, the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Most of his published scores are facsimiles of his manuscript, distinguished by astonishing clarity, precision, and elegance, and by arresting graphic symbols in which staves are bent into arches, circles, and other pictorial devices. In the two volumes of Makrokosmos (1972-3)--each a set of "12 Fantasy-Pieces after the Zodiac" and steeped in multiple references--every fourth piece is notated as a symbol, with staves drawn to represent, for example, a cross, a double star, a spiral galaxy. His concern for the visual has led to many of the published score having uncommonly large dimensions. Critics have accused him of emphasizing surface sensation at the expense of real substance. But one can argue that the medium is the message: the allusions, stylistic juxtapositions and whimsical quotations are the music's very heart. These evocative soundscapes have an alluring breadth, and their uniquely haunting atmosphere has earned the composer many admirers.

Lou Harrison (1917-2003)

American composer. He was recognized particularly for his percussion music, experiments with just intonation and syntheses of Asian and Western styles. His works employed Chinese, Korean, and Indonesian instruments as well as Western instruments and even those of his own construction. His style was marked by a notable melodicism: even his percussion and 12-note compositions have a decidedly lyrical flavor.

Morton Feldman (1926-1987)

American composer. Influenced by abstract painting, his music often employs alternative notations and organizational systems that contribute to a compositional style centered on gestural, timbral, and non-metric relationships.

John Cage (1912-1992)

American composer. One of the leading figures of the postwar avant garde. The influence of his compositions, writings, and personality has been felt by a wide range of composers around the world. He had a great impact on music in the 20th century than any other American composer. His key philosophical ideas circled around three concepts in music: chance, indeterminacy, and the blurring of boundaries between music and life.

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)

American composer. One of the most honored and most frequently performed American composers in Europe and the Americas during the mid-20th century, he pursued, throughout his career, a path marked by a vocally inspired lyricism and a commitment to the tonal language and many of the forms of late 19th-century music. Almost all of his published works--including at least one composition in nearly every genre--entered the repertory soon after he wrote them and many continue to be widely performed today.

Elliott Carter (1908-2012)

American composer. One of the most respected composers of the second half of the twentieth century, he blended the achievements of European modernism and American "ultra-modernism" into a unique style of surging rhythmic vitality, intense dramatic contrast, and innovative facture. Although considered by many America's greatest composer after Copland's death, he remained a loner on the American musical scene, affiliated with no group or school and indifferent to the changing demands of fashion and the marketplace. He once commented that the most radical work an American composer could write would be one like Brahms's Fourth Symphony, which assumed the most highly developed musical culture in its listeners. By the time he exceeded 100 years, his inspiration undiminished, he had produced more than half a century of just such subversively refined masterpieces.

I-Ching

An ancient divination text and the oldest of the Chinese classics. It was originally a divination manual in the Western Zhou period, but over the course of the Warring States period and early imperial period was transformed into a cosmological text witha series of philosophical commentaries known as the "Ten Wings." Used by John Cage in many aleatory compositions such as Music of Changes for piano.

indeterminacy

An approach to composition pioneered by John Cage in which the composer leaves certain aspects of the music unspecified. Should not be confused with chance.

chance

Approach to composing music pioneered by John Cage, in which some of the decisions normally made by the composer are instead determined through random procedures, such as tossing coins. Chance differs from indeterminacy but shares with it the result that the sounds in the music do not convey an intention and are therefore to be experienced only as pure sound.

The Technique of My Musical Language (1944)

Book by Messiaen on his compositional theories.

War Requiem (1961-62)

Choral work by Britten interpolating 9 poems by WWI poet Wilfred Owen into Latin Requiem mass. Scored for soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists, boys' choir, chorus, organ, and orchestra; it was written for, and first performed in, the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. Britten interleaves the English texts so that they comment on the Latin, as in the "Lacrimosa," where the melodic links between the soprano's Latin and the tenor's English verses highlight the futility he feels at the death of a friend in battle.

Modes of limited transposition

Collections of notes, like the whole tone and octatonic scales, that do not change when transposed by certain intervals; for example, an octatonic scale transposed a minor third, tritone, or major sixth will yield the same set of notes.

Gunther Schuller (1925-2015)

Composer, conductor, and writer. The son of a violinist with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, he studied theory, flute, and French horn privately and played horn professionally with the American Ballet Theatre (1943), The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (1943-5), and the Metropolitan Opera in NY (1945-59); he began his career in jazz by recording as a French horn player with Miles Davis (1949-50). In 1955 he founded with John Lewis the Modern Jazz Society, which gave its first concert in Town Hall, NY, that same year and later became known as the Jazz and Classical Music Society. While lecturing at Brandeis University in 1957 he coined the term "third stream" to describe music that combined elements of Western art music and jazz; during the following decades he became an enthusiastic advocate of this style and wrote many works according to its principles, among them Transformation (1957, for jazz ensemble).

Sinfonia (1968-69)

Composition by Berio commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. Composed in 1968-69 for orchestra and eight amplified voices, it is a musically innovative post-serial classical work, with multiple vocalists commenting about musical (and other) topics as the piece twists and turns through a seeminly neurotic journey of quotations and dissonant passages. The eight voices are not used in a traditional classical way; they frequently do not sing at all, but speak, whisper, and shout words by Claude Levi-Strauss, whose Le cru et le cuit provides much of the text, excerpts from Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable, instructions from the scores of Mahler and other writings.

Le marteau sans maitre (The Hammer without a Master, 1954)

Composition by Boulez that sets the surrealist poetry of René Char for contralto and six instrumentalists. In it, Boulez fused the pointillist style and serial method with sensitive musical realization of the text. This work in nine short movements sets a different ensemble to each movement (a la Pierrot); the ensemble is comprised of alto flute, xylorimba, vibraphone, guitar, viola, and a variety of soft percussion instruments. The contralto vocal line is characterized by wide melodic intervals, glissandos, and occasional Sprechstimme.

Silver Apples of the Moon (1967)

Composition by Morton Subotnick composed specifically for release on Nonesuch. This was Subotnick's first full-length LP of electronic music, and the album became an dinternational sensation. Its title it taken from Yeats' "The Song of Wandering Aengus," in which the composer found inspiration. Structured as a series of sonic plateaus and throughs, Part A has a fascination vocabulary of points, glissandi, spatters, hisses, whistles, and sirens, and the variety of tones and gestures sustain interest. Yet, in contrast to the first part's capricious shapes and irregular sections, Part B develops rather predictable sequences over a steady ostinato.

Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths, 1955-56)

Electronic work by Stockhausen in which a boy's voice, speaking and singing the Benedicite, is transformed, multiplied, and combined with electronic sounds; it is played by five spatially separated loudspeaker groups.

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

English composer, conductor, and pianist. He and his contemporary Michael Tippett are among several pairs of composer who dominated English art music in the 20th century. Of their music, ___'s early on achieved, and has maintained, wider international circulation. An exceedingly practical and resourceful musician, he worked with increasing determination to recreate the role of leading national composer held during much of his own life by Vaughan Williams, from whom he consciously distanced himself. Notable among his musical and professional achievemenets are the revival or English opera, initiated by the success of Peter Grimes in 1945; the building of institutions to ensure the continuing viability of musical drama; and outreach to a wider audience, particularly children, in an effort to increase national musical literacy and awareness. Equally important in this was his remaining accessibility as a composer, rejecting the isolationism of the postwar avant garde and developing a distinctive tonal language that allowed amateurs and professionals alike to love his work and to enjoy performing and listening to it.

Michael Tippett (1905-1998)

English composer. His importance lies not only in his revitalizing contribution to the genres of symphony, concerto, opera, string quartet, and sonata, but also in his awareness--displayed in his writings as well as his compositional practice--of the complexities of the modern condition and the artist's role in relation to this. One result of his longevity was an engagement with the radically different social and cultural climates across the century, particularly reflected in a dramatic, modernist change of style in the 1960s.

Opus 1970 (1970)

For the Beethoven bicentennial in 1970, Stockhausen created a version of Kurzwellen that supposed a special case in which all radio stations just happened to be broadcasting material by Beethoven. This version is known variously as Kurzwellen mit Beethoven, Kurzwellen mit Beethoven-Musik, and ____. In order to produce this situation, Stockhausen replaced the radios with four different tape collages of excerpts from Beethoven compositions interspersed with readings (by Stockhausen) from the Heiligenstadt Testament, subjected to a variety of electronic transformations to simulate the effect of short-wave transmissions. These tapes could be "tuned in and out" by the performers, just like radio transmissions.

Sequenzas (1958-96)

Fourteen compositions for solo instruments or voice by Berio. The pieces, some of which call for extended techniques, are: I: for flute II: for harp III: for female voice IV: for piano V: for trombone VI: for viola VII: for oboe VIII: for violin IX: for clarinet X: for trumpet and piano resonance XI: for guitar XII: for bassoon XIII: for accordian XIV: for cello

Pierre Boulez (1925---)

French composer and conductor. Resolute imagination, force of will and ruthless combativeness secured him, as a young man, a position at the head of the Parisian musical avant-garde. His predecessors, in his view, had not been radical enough; music awaited a combination of serialism with the rhythmic irregularity opened up by Stravinsky and Messiaen. This call for a renewed modernism was widely heard and widely followed during the 1950s, but its appeal gradually weakened thereafter, and in the same measure his creativity waned. He began to be more active as a conductor, at first specializing in 20th-century music, but then, in the 1970s, covering a large and general repertory. Towards the end of that decade he turned his attention to an electro-acoustic music studio built for him in Paris, where he hoped to resume the effort to create a new musical language on a rational basis. After a brief hiatus, though, conducting became again his principal means of expressing his independence and clarity of vision.

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)

French composer of Greek parentage. He belonged to the pioneering generation of composers who revolutionized 20th century music after WWII. With the ardour of an outsider to academic musical life, he was one of the first to replace traditional musical thinking with radical new concepts of sound composition. His musical language had a strong influence on many younger composer in and outside of Europe, but it remained singular for its uncompromising harshness and conceptual rigour.

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1922)

French composer, organist, and teacher. He was a musician apart. The sources of his music may be traced on the one hand to the French organ tradition and on the other to the innovations of Debussy, Stravinsky, and Bartok, but right at the start of his career he found a modal system that has a completely individual sound, and to this he remained true, even when he vastly extended the possibilities of his style after WWII. He was alone, too, among major 20th century composers in his joyously held Catholic faith, which again was unswerving, however much he came to value non-European cultures, especially Indian and Japanese. As a teacher he instructed many of the most prominent composers of the next two generations. Compositional ideas include: 1. Music as contemplation. Sought to embody in music a stance of ecstatic contemplation. His works typically present an experience of concentrated meditation on a few materials, like a musical mantra. 2. Birdcalls. Often wrote down birdsongs in musical notation and used them in several compositions. 3. Harmonic stasis. Harmony avoids moving forward to resolution; rather, chord series are simply repeated to create a sense of stasis or meditation. 4. Duration, not meter. Treats rhythm as a matter of duration, not meter. Meter, as a series of beats organized in measures, is a human or worldly thing, associated with dance and heartbeats. When we respond to music metrically, we are in our bodies, but when we attend instead to durations we are in the realm of time, ruled by the divine. 5. Beautiful sounds. Preferred beautiful timbres and colorful harmonies.

Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995)

French composer, theorist, writer, and teacher. His tape compositions of 1948 originated musique concrete. There are difficulties in considering his work separately as a composer, novelist, and essayist, for one of his deepest wishes was to build bridges between circumscribed fields of thought. Nonetheless, it is through his musical ideas that he reached a wide public. His musical thought rests on the primacy of the ear over conventional aesthetic considerations. It is his view that recording has placed all sounds--whether music, noises, animal cries or whatever--on an equal footing, since all are experienced in the same manner. They may thus be treated as 'sound objects,' distinct from their acoustic and notated sources.

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007)

German composer. The leading German composer of his generation, he was a seminal figure of the post-1945 avant garde. A tireless innovator and influential teacher, he largely redefined notions of serial composition, and was a pioneer in electronic music. His seven-part operatic cycle Licht is possibly the most ambitious project ever undertaken by a major composer.

György Ligeti (1923-2006)

Hungarian composer. After being exposed to two tyrannies in his youth, Nazi and Stalinist, he left Hungary following the 1956 Russian suppression of his country's independence and found himself, in western Europe, confronted by another stern ideology, that of the Darmstadt-Cologne avant garde. The effect was twofold. He was liberated to pursue long-cherished ideals of musical advance, but at the same time his critical, contrary spirit was sharpened. Unlike many of his young colleagues in the west, he was suspicious of system, rejoiced in the delightfulness and evocativeness of sound, and steadily reintroduced--though in quite new ways, guided by an exact ear--things that serial orthodoxy had refused, such as simple harmonies, ostinatos and palpable melodies. Just when this process of recuperation might have led him in the early 1980s to join the new dominant movement of postmodernist collage and retrospect, he found further stimulation and contradiction in non-European musical cultures, especially Caribbean, central African and East Asian. Always paradoxical, he found this music of the world enhancing his sense of himself as musically a Hungarian, and began to publish or republish many of hte compositions he had written decades earlier.

Missa brevis (1959)

In the 15th and 16th centuries this term denotes a complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass in which all movements are short. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the term came to mean principally a setting of the Kyrie and Gloria only, usually intended for us in the Lutheran service. In the 20th century the term was used for masses of modest proportions, very often with accompaniment for organ only. Britten's in D is a setting of the Mass completed in 1959. It was composed for George Malcolm's retirement as organist and choirmaster at Westminster. It contains only four movements, omitting the Credo, notable since the sung Masses of the Westminster Cathedral Choir would have usually included this movement, central to the Catholic faith.

Luciano Berio (1925-2003)

Italian composer. At a relatively early stage in his career, he succeeded in transcending the closed world of the European avant garde to address a wider public. The vivid, gestural idiom that he developed in the 1960s, and the creative consequences that he drew from other, often extra-musical aspects of the culture around him, established for him a world-wide reputation that sustained his subsequent exploration of a wide, and sometimes challenging, arc of musical resources. Of formidable creative energy, he proved one of the most prolific composers of the later 20th century. Berio's long-established status as the leading Italian composer of his generation remains secure.

Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996)

Japanese composer. It was during his military service that he had his first encounter with Western music, which had been banned in Japan during WWII; a military officer played a gramaphone recording of the French chanson Parlez-moi d'amour to him a group of fellow-conscripts. The song left a deep impression, and when, after the war, he was employed at an American military base, he took the opportunity to listen to a good deal of Western music on the radio network set up for the US armed forces. At the age of 16 he decided, notwithstanding his lack of musical training, to take up composition. He received intermittent instruction with Kiyose from 1948, but was otherwise essentially self-taught.

Tabuh-tabuhan (1936)

Major orchestral work by Colin McPhee that incorporates Balinese materials.

Revelation in the Courthouse Park (1962)

Music-dance drama in one act by Harry Partch to his own libretto after The Bacchae of Euripides. Partch actually used the term 'music-dance drama' only with reference to Oedipus, but it serves for all five of his major theater works, some of which are more overtly operatic than others. This work, like the others, features Partch's unique musical instruments prominently on stage, and their players contribute both movement and voices to the choral and dance climaxes. In addition the work features an 8 piece marching band and two guitarists, all of whom participate directly in the action. Partch's updating of Euripides makes the tragedy a modern one of sexuality and sex roles, of ecstatic ritual and the majoritarian tyranny it may conceal. The composer clearly identified both with Dion/Dionysus, master of the sacred revels, and Sonny/Pentheus, the nonconformist outsider; the irreconcilability of these roles constitutes the heart of the tragedy.

Oedipus--A Music-Dance Drama (1951)

Music/dance drama by Harry Partch based on Yeats' take on Sophocles. Partch said of this work that it should achieve "emotional saturation, or trascendence." It begins slowly, with the bigger instruments held in reserve and long stretches of the play delivered as straight dialogue. Unlike his later opera, Revelation in the Courthouse Park, this work attempts to recreate the musical spirit of Greek drama in fairly strict terms. There is much spoken dialogue (though Partch's unique instruments play almost continuously), and all singing is in the 'intoning voice' that is Partch's equivalent of recitative. The concluding dialogue is drastically curtailed and replaced with pantomime and a musical climax of wordless syllables--a characteristic Partchian touch.

Threnody: To the Victims of Hiroshima (1960)

Musical composition by Penderecki for 52 string instruments composed in 1960. The piece--originally called 8'37", applies the sonoristic technique and rigors of specific counterpoint to an ensemble of strings treated to unconventional scoring. He named it after hearing the work performed for the first time and feeling the weight of its emotional impact. The piece's unorthodox, largely symbol-based scare sometimes directs the musicians to play at various unspecific points in their range or to concentrate on certain textural effects; they are directed to play on the opposite side of the bridge or to slap the body of the instrument. Penderecki sought to heighten the effects of traditional chromaticism by using microtonality. The piece includes an "invisible canon," in 36 voices, an overall musical texture that is more important than the individual notes, making it a leading example of sound mass composition.

Symphonie pour un homme seul (Symphony for One Man, 1950)

Musical composition by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, composed in 1949-50. It is an important early example of musique concrète. The work was premiered at a concert in March 1950. Comprising 22 movement of music produced using turntables and mixers, it was difficult to perform due to technical problems. The number of movements was reduced to 11 for a broadcast in 1951, and then to 12 for the revised 1966 by Henry.

Noye's Fludde (Noah's Flood, 1957-8)

One act opera by Benjamin Britten on the text of a medieval miracle play; intended for a mixture of professional performers with children of various ages and includes hymns that the audience is invited to sing.

Third Construction in Metal (1941)

One of several pieces by John Cage, all scored for unorthodox percussion instruments. The pieces were composed in 1939-42 while Cage was working at the Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle, Washington and touring the West Coast with a percussion ensemble he and Lou Harrison had founded. This work was dedicated to Xenia Kashevaroff-Cage, to whom the composer was married at the time and who played in his percussion orchestra. ___ is scored for four percussionists. There are 24 sections of 24 bars each, and the rhythmic structure is rotated between the players: 8, 2, 4, 5, 3, 2, for the fourth, 2, 8, 2, 4, 5, 3 for the first, etc. Instruments include: North West Indian rattle, 5 graduated tin cans, 3 graduated drums, claves, large Chinese cymbal, maracas, teponaztli

Peter Grimes (1944-45)

Opera in a prologue and three acts by Britten to a libretto by Montagu Slater after George Crabbe's poem The Borough. In terms of productions and performances, it is one of the most successful of 20th century operas after those by Puccini and Richard Strauss. For at least 20 years, performances in English were dominated by the voice and personality of Peter Pears. The more determinedly commentators seek to emphasize the opera's weaknesses, particularly in the libretto, the more memorable its musical ideas and the more resilient its formal design appear to be. By comparison with Kat'a Kabanova, or Wozzeck, it may seem conventional in structure, conservative in style. Yet the ambivalence of its subject matter--in particular, the way the audience is left to decide whether or note the protagonist is to be pitied rather than blamed--and the remarkable vitality of the music, come together to create an experience that rarely fails to grip in the theater. This work established Britten's career and became the first English opera since Purcell to enter the international repertory. It centers on a fisherman who is disliked by the other residents of his village, pursued by mobs, and ultimately driven to suicide. The theme of the individual persecuted by the crwod can be read as an allegory for the condition of homosexuals in a hostile society. Tellingly, the protagonist is not a sympathetic character; we are meant to see ourselves, not in him, but in the ugly crowd that unthinkingly persecutes outsiders on the basis of suspicions and misinformation, forcing a poignant catharsis in the final tragedy.

Saint Francis of Assisi (1975-83)

Opera in three acts by Olivier Messiaen to his own libretto. The work is in eight self-contained scenes, each further subdivided into small units, often placed in repetitive patterns. The solo vocal writing suggests plainchant (though the modes are Messiaen's own), and the sense of a liturgy is enhanced by a monumental chorus of 150 voices. The orchestra is on a similar scale (120 players), and includes large woodwind and tuned-percussion sections as well as three ondes martenot, all providing resources for the vivid amplified birdsongs that underline and punctuate the score. Each scene is the exposition of a single moment in the saint's life, omitting the conflicts of his early years to center his faith and attainment of grace: there is no dramatic continuity either within the scenes or from one to another; rather they are single, static and separate, like a cycle of stained-glass windows.

The Devils of Loudon (1968)

Opera in three acts by Penderecki. It has a German libretto by the composer, based on John Whiting's dramatization of Huxley's novel of the same name. The first and most popular of Penderecki's operas, this is emblematic of the composer's interest in historical events of traumatic nature. As suggested by its title, the opera draws its story line from the 1632-38 mass demonic possession in the town of Loudon, France. However, rather than a narrative of these historical events, the opera underscores a more general dichotomy between central and local power, and thus provides a political commentary, denouncing thereof the iniquities committed by the totalitarian states of the mid-20th century.

Billy Budd (1950-51)

Opera in two acts by Britten to a libretto by E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier, after Herman Melville's story. It was commissioned by the Arts Council of Great Britain for the Festival of Britain in 1951. Like Peter Grimes and Gloriana, the opera demonstrates Britten's ability to create an opera in a distinctively "grand manner" through the use of elaborate ensembles and unrestrained outpourings of emotion, often with richly orchestrated accompaniments. The theme of the opera relates to homosexuality.

Death in Venice (1971-74)

Opera in two acts by Britten to a libretto by Myfanwy Piper based on Thomas Mann's novella. Britten had it in mind as an operatic subject for many years, and in Sept. 1970 he invited Myfanwy Piper to write the libretto. Of all his operas, this is the most dependent on the particular vocal qualities of Peter Pears (Britten's parter), to whom it is dedicated. The intimate, intense character of the music reflects the refinement and delicacy of the Pears sound at that relatively late stage of his career, and the musical idiom--an economical blend of Britten's personal adaptation of 12-note features in association with those fundamental elements of tonal harmony that he never abandoned--is the fullest demonstration of the flexibility and focus of Britten's own late style.

Adagio for Strings (1936)

Orchestral work by Barber (an arrangement of the second movement of his string quartet).

Atmosphères (1961)

Orchestral work by Ligeti. It is noted for eschewing conventional melody and meter 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 Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Metastaseis (1953-54)

Orchestral work for 61 musicians by Iannis Xenakis. His first major work, it was written in 1953-54 after his studies with Messiaen. The work was premiered at the 1955 Donaueschingen Festival. In the piece, each string player in the orchestra has a unique part to play. In many sections of the work, each player has a glissando, moving slowly or quickly in comparison tot he other parts. Xenakis plotted out the glissandos as straight lines on a graph that add up to create an effect of curves in musical space. He then transferred the lines to standard musical notation. The resulting motions, of a chromatic cluster gradually closing to a unison or a unison expanding to a cluster, resemble changes achievable in electronic music through the use of pitch filters. The overall effect is very strongly visual, although the materials are musical.

Barber's Piano Concerto (1962)

Piano concerto by Barber commissioned by the music publishing company G. Shirmer in honor of the centenary of their founding.

Tippett's Piano Concerto (1935-55)

Piano concerto by Tippett that demonstrates his admiration for Javanese gamelan music in its textures and instrumental combinations.

Catalogue d'oiseaux (1956-58)

Piano work by Messiaen; each of the 13 pieces includes the notated song of a different bird.

La Koro Sutro (1972)

Piece by Lou Harrison that combines Western and Asian instruments.

Pacifika Rondo (1963)

Piece by Lou Harrison that combines Western and Asian instruments.

Quatre études de rythme (Four Rhythmic Studies, 1949)

Piece by Messiaen wherein the composer created a "mode" comprising thirty-six pitches, each assigned a specific duration, dynamic level, and articulation to be used every time that pitch occurred. Although the pitches were arranged in three divisions, each including all twelve chromatic notes, the piece itself was not serially organized. It inspired, however, Messiaen's student Pierre Boulez to write the first European work of total serialism, Structures (1952).

Lux aeterna (1966)

Piece for 16 solo singers written by Ligeti in 1966. The text (in Latin) is from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass: Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine, cum santic tuis in aeternum, quia pius es, which means "May everlasting light shine upon them, O Lord, with they saints in eternity, for thou art merciful." The piece features many of Ligeti's characteristic styles, including: micropolyphony, which Ligeti described as "the complex polyphony of the individual parts, embodied in a harmonic-musical flow in which the harmonies do not change suddenly, but merge into one another; one clearly discernible interval combination is gradually blurred, and from this cloudiness it is possible to discern a new interval combination taking shape; cluster chords; and focus on timbre

Three Compositions for Piano (1947)

Piece for piano by Babbitt. The first to apply serial principles to duration.

Krzysztof Penderecki (1933--)

Polish composer and conductor. He first came to prominence as an explorer of novel string textures and for many years his name was popularly synonymous with avant-garde Polish music. His subsequent allusions to 18th and 19th century idioms and genres, in his choral and operatic works as well as in his purely instrumental pieces, has produced a substantial body of work which challenges many assumptions about the nature and purpose of contemporary music.

Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994)

Polish composer and conductor. He studied composition and the piano but was prevented by WWII from studying in Paris. During the war he eked out a living as a cafe pianist with his fellow composer Panufnik. After the war he completed his first major orchestral work, the First Symphony, whose concept and language owed much to Bartok, Roussel, and Prokofiev. When it was unexplicably banned by the Stalinist authorities in 1949, he tried to keep a low profile, complying like many others with mass songs and small-scale occasional pieces. Nevertheless his folk-based works of the early 1950s, such as his music for children, and, most notably, the Baroque-influenced Concerto for Orchestra (1954), are acknowledged highlights of the period of socialist realism in Poland.

Hymn to St. Cecilia (1941-42)

Setting of text by W.H. Auden for unaccompanied 5 part chorus by Britten, Op. 27. St. Cecilia is the patron saint of music, and there is a long tradition in England of writing odes and songs to St. Cecilia. The most famous are those by John Dryden, Henry Purcell, Hubert Parry, and Handel.

Dover Beach (1931)

Song by Barber to poem for baritone and string quartet on text by Matthew Arnold (poem). Written in the days preceding WWII, might be taken as an attempt to warn, for it sets with almost miraculous appropriateness one of the grimmest poems of WWI.

Hermit Songs (1952-53)

Song cycle by Barber commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and first sung by Leontyne Price. The ten songs, based on comments written on the margins of medieval manuscripts by Irish monks, are infused with a modal harmonic language of great stylistic integrity; they led Schuman to hail Barber as an unmatched art-song composer.

Babbitt's Third String Quartet (1970)

String quartet by Babbitt. In it, there are eight layers or voices, each instrument having two voice, arco (bowed) and pizzicato (plucked). At the beginning, each voice has its own row form and transposition. Babbitt so arranged it that each of four groups of voices--the arco voices, the pizz voices, the violins, and the lower strings--features one of each type of row form. Moreover, although none of the rows is completely stated in this passage, each segment of approximately two measures includes all twelve pitch-classes.

November Steps (1967)

Work by Takemitsu for traditional Japanese musical instruments, shakuhachi and biwa, and western orchestra. The work was commissioned by the NYPhil. An example of the composer's late career insofar as it includes Japanese instruments rather than shies away from them.

Carter's String Quartet No. 2 (1959)

String quartet by Elliott Carter completed i959 and debuted in 1960 by the Julliard String Quartet. The work is considerably influenced by the music of European avant-garde composers who were gaining celebrity at the time, particularly Boulez's Le martequ sans maitre. This is a much more fragmentary piece than his earlier quartet: the four instruments play very individual roles and unpredictably bounce off one another. Indeed, Carter instructs the players to sit as far apart as possible so that they appear to be playing different pieces simultaneously.

Lutoslawski's String Quartet (1964)

String quartet by Lutoslawski wherein pitches and rhythms are specified but not the coordination of parts; the players begin a section together, but each plays independently, changing tempo as desired, until the next checkpoint is reached, when at a signal from one of the players they begin together again.

Lutoslawski's Stymphony No. 3 (1983)

Symphony by Lutoslawski wherein some sections invite individual players to dwell upon a figure in the manner of a soloist playing a cadenza; at other times, eight stands of violins, guided by prescribed pitches but only approximate durations, go their own ways like tendrils of a vine. These passages achieve a freedom and eloquence hardly possible through precise notation and show the power of limited indeterminacy within a traditional genre.

Turangalila-symphonie (1946-8)

Symphony by Messiaen for large orchestra; its title comes from the Sanskrit turanga ('the passage of time, movement, rhythm') and lila (play in the sense of divine action on the cosmos, also the play of creation, destruction, life and death, also love'). It is the largest of Messiaen's three works inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolda, the others being Cinq rechants and Harawi.

Takemitsu's Requiem (1957)

Takemitsu's first large scale work for a large ensemble (string orchestra), and the one that introduced him to the West. It was dedicated to the memory of his colleague, the film composer Fumio Hoyasaka. As it turns out, this exposure to the West occurred by way of Stravinsky's having heard the piece while on tour in Japan in 1959. His enthusiasm for the music led him to declare the work a masterpiece, commenting directly on its sustained intensity. The rest is, as they say, history. The piece is a multi-sectional work in one movement that, aside from the third section, displays very little in the way of melodic or textural contrast. It exudes the sound worlds of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and the Second Viennese School. The overall formal symmetry ABCA gives the work a tautness that evoked Stravinsky's apposite comment on the work's intensity.

musique concrète

Technique created in Paris in 1948 by Pierre Schaeffer (soon joined by Pierre Henry). It grew out of Schaeffer's experience in radio, but was also inspired by film soundtracks. The word "concrète" originally conveyed the idea that the composer was working directly (concretely) with the sound material, in contrast to the composer of instrumental or vocal music who works indirectly (abstractly) using a symbolic system of notation which represents the sounds to be made concrete by instruments and/or voices. In ___ sound materials could be taken from pre-existing recordings (including instrumental and vocal music) and recordings made specially, whether of the environment or with instruments and objects in front of a studio microphone. These source sounds might then be subjected to treatments before being combined in a structure; the compositional process proceeded by experiment. Schaeffer intended that sounds should be perceived and appreciated for their abstract properties rather than being attached to meaning or narratives associated with their sources and causes.

Klavierstück XI (Piano Piece No. 11, 1956)

The ____ constitute a series of 19 compositions by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. He has said that they "are my drawings." Originating as a set of four small pieces composed between February and June 1952, Stockhausen later formulated a plan for a large cycle of 21 pieces; he composed the second set in 1954-55, and the single XI in 1956. Beginning in 1979, he resumed composing them and finished 8 more, but the plan seems to have been abandoned for all 21. This piece is famous for its mobile or polyvalent structure. The mobile structure and graphic layout of the piece resembles that of Feldman's Intermission 6 for 1 or 2 pianos, in which 15 fragments are distributed on a single page of music with the instruction: "Composition begins with any sound and proceeds to the any other." In the same year, Earle Brown had composed Twenty-five Pages for 1-25 pianists, in which the pages are to be arranged in a sequence chosen by the performer(s), and each page may be performed either side up and events within each two-line system may be read as either treble or bass clef. This piece consists of 19 fragments spread over a single, large page. The performer may begin with any fragment, and continue to any other, proceeding through the labyrinth until a fragment has been reached for the third time, when the performance ends. Markings for tempo, dynamics, etc. at the end of each fragment are to be applied to the next fragment. Though composed with a complex serial plan, the pitches have nothing to do with the twelve-tone technique but instead are derived from the proportions of the previously composed rhythms.

Licht (1977-2003)

The collective title of a projected cycle of seven operas by Stockhausen, each of which is named after a day of the week. The cycle was conceived in 1977 and completed in 2003. Up to 2007, only the first five operas have been staged, though semi-staged performances have been given of all individual parts of hte final two operas: Mittwoch aus Licht ("Wednesday"), and "Sonntag aus Licht ("Sunday").

Projection 1 for cello (1950)

The five ____s, dating from late 1950 and early 1951, are among Montron Feldman's earliest compositions and his first to employ graphic, rather than conventional, notation. In composing these very spare works, Feldman was influenced by fellow composer Varese's notions of the "projection of sound in space." What Feldman called the "stasis" of paintings by his friends Mark Rothko and Philip Guston also contributed to the sound world of the works.

Carter's Cello Sonata (1948)

This work by Elliott Carter marked a breakthrough for the composer. In it, he moved decisively away from his former populist style, which had been influenced by Copland, towards a style that was both more academic and more personal. The ____ utilizes devices that would recur often in later Carter compositions: metric modulation, complex relationships of tempo deployed to achieve continuity, subtle thematic and harmonic transformation, and most notably the assignment of a certain character to each instrument. In the work, a passionate cello opposes a coldly logical piano; though the two instruments occasionally come together, they never really resolve their differences.

Structures I & II (1952; 1961)

Two related works for two pianos by Boulez in which both pitches and duration and serial and dynamics and articulation are used to distinguish rows from one another. I consists of three movements, or "chapters," labeled Ia, Ib, Ic, composed in the order a, c, b. The first of the second book's two "chapters" was composed in 1956, but chapter 2 was not written until 1961.

Barber's Violin Concerto (1939)

Violin Concerto by Barber in three movements. Barber provided these program notes for the premiere performance: "The first movement — allegro molto moderato — begins with a lyrical first subject announced at once by the solo violin, without any orchestral introduction. This movement as a whole has perhaps more the character of a sonata than concerto form. The second movement — andante sostenuto — is introduced by an extended oboe solo. The violin enters with a contrasting and rhapsodic theme, after which it repeats the oboe melody of the beginning. The last movement, a perpetuum mobile, exploits the more brilliant and virtuosic character of the violin."

Black Angels (1970)

Work by Crumb for amplified string quartet; conceived as a response to the Vietnam War, it depicts a 'voyage of the soul' in three stages--Departure, Absence, Return--and makes much use of diabolic imagery and number symbolism.

Ancient Voices of Children (1970)

Work by Crumb for soprano and treble with instrumental ensemble, to words by Federico Garcia Lorca.

Available Forms I (1961)

Work by Earle brown influenced by Calder's mobiles in which each of the score's six unbound pages specifies four or five events. The conductor, who has general control over dynamics and velocity, begins with any event on any page and, in almost a painterly fashion, creates from the available materials an individually shaped version of the work.

Concert for piano and orchestra (1957-58)

Work by John Cage for any combination of piano, flute, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, tuba, 3 violins, 2 violas, cello, and double bass, with optional conductor. The work comprises 64 pages to be played, in whole or in part, in any sequence, involving 84 "types" of composition. To be peformed, in whole or in part, in any duration, with any number of the above performers, as a solo, chamber ensemble, symphony, concert for piano and orchestra, aria etc. This work was used as much for the choreographed piece by Merce Cunningham entitled Antic Meet, with stage decors and costume design by Robert Rauschenberg. The notation of each part uses a system wherein space is relative to time.

Variations IV (1963)

Work by John Cage for any number of players, any sounds or combinations of sounds produced by any means, with or without other activities. This work was originally used as music for the choreographed piece by Merce Cunningham, "Field Dances," with stage and costume design in the original version by Rauschenberg. ___ is the second work in a group of three of which Atlas Eclipticalis is the first (epresenting 'nirvana') and 0"00 is the third (representing "individual action"). It represents "samsara," the turmoil of everyday life. As in the earlier ___ pieces, the materials here are transparencies (1 sheet with 9 points and 3 small circles) and a short written instruction. All points and circles are cut up for the creation of a program; 7 points and 2 circles are needed, which are all to be dropped on a map of the performance space, creating places where actions might be performed.

Imaginary Landscape No. 3 (1942)

Work by John Cage for tin cans, muted gongs, audio frequency oscillators, variatble speed turntables with frequency recordings and recordings of generator whines, amplified coil of wire, amplified marimbula (a Carribean instrument similar to the African thumb piano), and electric buzzer. All of the ___ pieces include instruments or other elements requiring electricity. Although all five of the works were included in a Mode recording of "Percussion Works I," two of the pieces do not use percussion as such. The booklet included with the aforementioned Mode recording includes a quote from Cage: "It's not a physical landscape. It's a term reserved for the new technologies. It's a landscape in the future. It's as though you used technology to take you off the ground and go like Alice through the looking glass."

Musicircus (1967)

Work by John Cage in which nothing is given more than an invitation to any number of musicians willing to perform simultaneously anything or in any way they desire. The manuscript is a list of musicians for the first performance, including a diagram for their positions in the performance space; it also indicates various works by Cage and Satie that were performed, as well as a few non-musical works. Composed in 1967. Premiered in Illinois.

Requiem (Ligeti, 1963-65)

Work by Ligeti for soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, twenty-part chorus (four each of sop, m-s, alto, tenor, and bass), and orchestra. He sets about half of the piece's traditional text--the Introitus, the Kyrie, and the Dies irae--dividing the latter sequence into two parts, De die iudicii (Day of Judgement) and Lacrimosa (Weeping).

Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941)

Work by Messiaen for clarinet, piano, violin, and cello; he wrote it while he was in a Silesian prisoner-of-war camp, where it was performed the following year. The work is in 8 movements: I. Liturgie de cristal//"Crystal liturgy," for the full quartet. In his preface to the score, the composer describes the opening of the quartet: Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the threes. Transpose this onto a religious plane and you have the harmonious silence of Heaven. II. Vocalise, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps//"Vocalise, for the Angel who announced the end of time," for the full quartet. "The first and third parts (very short) evoke the power of this mighty angel, a rainbow upon his head and clothed with a cloud, who sets one foot on the sea and one foot on the earth. In the middle section are the impalpable harmonies of heaven. In the piano, sweet cascades of blue-orange chords, enclosing in their distant chimes the almost plainchant song of the violin and cello. III. Abime des oiseaux//"Abyss of birds," for solo clarinet. IV. Intermède//"Interlude," for violin, cello, and clarinet. V. Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus//"Praise to the eternity of Jesus," for cello and piano VI. Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes//"Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets," for the full quartet. "Rhythmically, the most characteristic piece of the series. The four instruments in unison imitate gongs and trumpets (the first six trumpets of the Apocalypse followed by various disasters, the trumpet of the seventh angel announcing consummation of the mystery of God) Use of added values, of augmented or diminished rhythms, of non-retrogradable rhythms. Music of stone, formidable granite sound; irresistible movement of steel, huge blocks of purple rage, icy drunkenness. Hear especially all the terrible fortissimo of the augmentation of the theme and changes of register of its different notes, towards the end of the piece." VII. Fouillis d'arcs-en-ciel, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps//"Tangle of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of time," for the full quartet. VIII. Louange à l"immortalité de Jésus//"Praise to the immortality of Jesus," for violin and piano.

Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus (1944)

Work by Messiaen for piano; each of its 20 movements has a title, for example "Regard du Père," "Regard des anges."

St. Luke Passion (Penderecki, 1963-66)

Work for chorus and orchestra by Penderecki. The work contains text from the Gospel of Luke as well as other sources such as the Stabat Mater. Despite the piece's almost total atonality and use of avant-garde musical techniques, the musical public appreciated the work's stark power and direct emotional impact and the piece was performed several more times soon after its premiere on March 30, 1966. It is almost entirely atonal, except for two major triads which occur once at the end of the Stabat Mater, a cappella, and once, an E major triad, at the very end of the work with full choruses, orchestra, and organ. It makes very frequent use of tone clusters, often played fortissimo by brass or organ. Occasionally Penderecki employs 12 tone serialism, and utilizes the B-A-C-H motive.

Telemusik (1966)

Work for four-track tape by Stockhausen.

Transformation (1957)

Work for jazz ensemble by Gunther Schuller that exemplifies his concept of the "third stream," a trend in music that combines elements of Western art and jazz.

Music of Changes for piano (1951)

Work for solo piano by John Cage written in 1951 for pianist and friend David Tudor. It is a ground-breaking piece of indeterminate muic. The process of composition involved applying decisions made using the I Ching, a Chinese classic text that is commonly used as a divination system. The I Ching was applied to large charts of sounds, durations, dynamics, tempo, and densities.

Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48)

Work for solo prepared piano by John Cage. In this work, Cage expresses his interpretation of the permanent emotions of the Indian tradition: the Heroic, the Erotic, the Wondrous, the Comic (the four light moods), Sorrow, Fear, Anger, the Odious (the four dark moods), and their common tendency toward (central) Tranquility. This was Cage's first comopsition using Hindu philosophy as a basis, and he composed them in a period of time during which he was reading extensively the works of the Indian art historian and critic Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Numbers I through VIII and XII through XVI are written in AABB rhythmic structure, using varying proportions. The first two have no structural repetitions, while the last two as well as Sonatas IX, X, and XI have prelude, interlude, and postlude.

total serialism

applying Schoenberg's techniques of the twelve-tone row to other musical parameters besides pitch, including durations, intensities, timbres, etc.

added values

compositional technique employed often by Messiaen whereby dotted eighth notes amid even eighths, for example. produce units of irregular length.

nonretrogradable rhythms

rhythmic figures that are the same forwards as they are backward

metric modulation

technique developed by Elliott Carter in which a transition is made from one tempo and meter to another through an intermediary stage that shares aspects of both, resulting in a precise proportional change in the value of a durational unit