20th Century Flashcards
20th century concepts
- U.S. emerges as world power
- WWI ended large European empires, independence for W. Europe
- Nazism drives many to U.S.
- Economic depression in US
- WWII - economies recovering in Europe
- Cold War - western nations response to contain spread of communism
- Electric microphones, other technological advances
Impressionism, Cubism, rise of music industry, recordings and radio. Globalization
“Modern generation” of composers
Debussy (1862-1918) - piano, opera, orchestra, other chamber music. “Nuages” - timbre combined w/motive, scales = musical image. Almost sounds like Stravinsky, but much less in your face.
Ravel (1875-1937) - Borrowed dance suite ideas, interested in ideas outside of France (Waltz, Spanish influence)
Vaughn Williams, Janacek, Sibelius, Rachmaninov (piano preludes, sound nationalistic) & Scriabin (piano “Vers la flamme” not tonal, but departing from home base and returning)
Tonal and post-Tonal music
- Schoenberg - Atonality (no note is tonal center), used variation, integrating harmony/melody, and chromatic saturation. Pitch class sets. “Pierrot Lunaire” - chamber music w/voice
- Berg - Studied w/Schoenberg. Wozzeck - Opera w/lots of atonality and only a few repetitive motivic fragments
- Anton Von Webern - Symphony Op. 21 - 12 tone procedures, canons, instrumentation and form
Avant Garde
French movement to overthrow accepted aesthetics and start afresh
Satie (Gymnopedies)
Les Six - Honneger, Milhaud, Poulenc, Tailleferre, Auric, Durey
Stravinsky
1st a Russian nationalist
-Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1910-1911), Rite of Spring (1911-1913). Dissonance, scales in Russian classical music (diatonic/octatonic)
L’Histoire - economy after WWI poor. smaller ensembles
Neoclassical - turn away from Russian (France/russia relations dissolved)
Bartok /(1881-1945)
Studied folk music, implemented in piano compositions
“Mikrokosmos” - solo piano. Short 2-part piano piece with almost bi-tonality
“Music for strings/perc./celeste” - listen for celeste. Palindromes, speech-like, rubato
Germany
Krenek, Weill (3 penny opera, Mack the Knife melody), Hindemith. new music between the wars
Hindemith - Neo-romantic style (Mathis Der Maler)
Russian composers
Prokofiev - “Alexander Nevsky” (1938) Some dissonance, but an emphasis on a nationalistic melody.
Shostakovich - Symphony no.5 in D Minor. (1937)
American music - turn of 20th century
Band music - Sousa (post-civil war, before WWI)
Parlor/popular songs - Stephen Foster (Jeannie w/the light brown hair)
Tin pan alley - vaudeville like music
African Americans - Spirituals and influence on popular music, gospel, blues R&B, etc.
Classical American composers (from throughout the Americas)
Ives (1874-1954) - vernacular and experimental. (“General Booth Enters into Heaven” English text w/atonal piano)
Villa Lobos - Combined choro with classical music. “Bachianas Brasileiras” Syncopation, some chord progressions. Vocals w/no lyrics
Ultramodernists
Varese - Lots of percussion, industrialist. No conventional melody/harmony or regularity. All sounds acceptable.
Cowell - Tone clusters, new textures and procedures
Ruth Crawford - String quartet with lots of harsh sounds, creeping pizzicato. Preserving American traditional music, also ultramodernist
“Americanists”
Copland - Appalachian Spring. Modernism plus American nationality, including appealing to larger audience
William Grant Still - AFro American Symphony. 12 bar blues incorporated
Vernacular styles
Joplin - piano rags
Pop songs/stage music - American subject matter w/vernacular sounds of vaudeville/tin pan alley. Later, Gershwin, Kern, Irving Berlin, and even later, West Side Story (Bernstein)
Jazz
- Blues structure. Big band jazz/swing/dance music
- Later, bebop and harmonic advancements
“Heirs” to classical tradition post 1945
Messiaen(1908-1992) - exotic birds, interested in bird calls. Harmonic stasis, music as contemplation
Britten (1913-1976) - Peter Grimes and music for films
