Key Terms, Ideas and Prompts Flashcards
SYMBOLISM
Oblique/abstract forms of expression (metaphor, allusion) - ambiguous
EXPRESSIONISM
- Aesthetic associated with the 2nd Viennese School
- Intuitive composition, reflective of the unconscious inner psyche
- Free from convention and tradition
SERIALISM/DODECOPHONY/12-TONE COMPOSITION
- System wherein all tones have equal prominence in musical construction
- All 12 tones must be played before a tone can be heard again
- In a set order and transformed by inversions and/or retrogrades
NATIONALISM
- Group with shared ethnicity/racial experience (not a political entity)
- ‘Imagined sense of belonging via essentialist constructions of self hood’
NOSTALGIA
- Longing for a previous time or place
- Can be for non-existent place or unexperienced
- Mourning of the past (pre-industrial simplicity)
KITSCH
- In poor taste due to excessive garishness (tacky)
- Decorative objects considered by many people to be ugly, without style
- Sometimes appreciated ironically
ARTISTIC SYNTHESIS
- Sum of artistic perspectives to create something new
- Reconciling artistic and aesthetic viewpoints
DADA
- WW1 artistic movement reaction to the horrors of war
- Anti-Art/Anti-Aesthetic/Anti-Rationalism (satire, nonsense)
- Seeking to destroy traditional values (Anti-Bourgeoise), radically left-wing
SURREALISM
- Post WW1 artistic movement
- Expression of absolute reality, uniting the conscious and unconscious mind
- Juxtaposing the fantastic and the grotesque
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
- Unconscious, expressive/emotional art
- Abstract and spontaneous, gestural
PERFORMANCE ART
Art that is created through the actions of the artist/spectators
PRIMITIVISM
- The simple and unsophisticated - often viewed with pity/derision as antithesis of progress
- Idealisation of an imagined pure, ‘authentic’ primordial human culture (nostalgia, exoticism, pre-individualism)
NEOCLASSICISM
- Popular in France during the pre/interwar period
- Return to the aesthetic concepts of Classicism: order, balanced forms, thematic clarity, economy and emotional restraint, modality/extended tonality
- Anti-Germanic revival of French historical/baroque musical forms
EXOTICISM
- Evocation of a distant ‘Exotic’ land
- Assimilation of borrowed musical materials to signal something ‘Other’
- Often entirely inauthentic and used for ‘colour’
ORIENTALISIM
- Offshoot of EXOCTICISM
- Representation of the ‘Orient’ or the East as well as diasporic communities like the Jewish and Romani
- Essentialisation of non-western cultures
CULTURAL RELATIVISM
- Notion that no culture is more developed than another, just distinct
- Accompanied the shift from COMPARATIVE MUSICOLOGY/ESSENTIALISM to ETHNOMUSICOLOGY/PLURALISM
ESSENTIALISM
- The belief that music is a natural expression of biology and ethnicity
- Linked to COMPARATIVE MUSICOLOGY
PLURALISM
- The belief that musical culture is not tied to race but cultural tradition and can be learned; one can embrace multiple musical traditions
- Linked to CULTURAL RELATIVISM and ETHNOMUSICOLOGY
POLIS
- A group of people belonging to the same political sphere
- Sharing political beliefs
POLITICS
- Combination of prescription, change and hope for the future
- Fuelled by ideology
VERFREMDUNGSEFFEKT
- ‘The Alienation Effect’ (Brecht)
- Way of distancing the audience from emotional involvement
- Reminding them of the artificiality of theatre
- Prompting critical evaluation on what is presented to them
WEINMAR CABERET
- Risqué, underground establishments responding to current events
- Using Jazz and American Popular music
- Post-WW1 tensions and cultural explosion collide
SOCIALIST REALISM
- Belief that art should be a faithful mirror of life as experienced by the everyman
- A pedagogical tool that informs social ideas
- Depicting struggle, but with an uplifting end (associated with Stalin)
FORMALISM
- Art for Art’s sake
- Imitation of Western Art Music
CONSTRUCTIVISM
Use of method and process in musical composition
THE CHILLING EFFECT
- The suppression of free speech and legitimate forms of dissent among a population because of fear of repercussion
- Brought on by 20thC political climate: Wars, Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, apartheid etc
- Facilitating the rise of musical production addressing topical issues
ESOTERIC
Intended for and understood by only a small group of people with specialised knowledge
TOTAL SERIALISM/MULTIPLE SERIALISM
Multiple musical parameters of composition decided upon by serial methods
POINTILLISTIC
Musical texture where pitches are presented as isolated ‘points’ rather than in a continuous melodic line
EXPERIMENTALISM
- ‘Anything goes’ attitude
- Untethered by history and and aesthetic/philosophical argument
- Aims to explore all possibilities
MODERISM
- Linear/progress orientated path, extending yet situated within past tradition
- Legitimising oneself in lineage of European masters (popular with American students who felt lost regarding their own national musical heritage)
- Academic cannon prefers modernism: easier to analyse, modernist composers in teaching positions/positions of power
- Lack of performance popularity due to elitism - allows the unappreciated modernist to feel consoled that his music is too complex for the layman
POSTMODERNISM
- Acknowledging the multiplicity of pathways ‘a directionless field’
- Anti-narrative (fragmented, eclectic, destructive), critiquing modernism and requisite colonial/imperial ties (global connectivity, intersectionality)
- Addressing class and power inequalities; accessible and preoccupied with reception, emotion, spirituality
- Transient; local, multi-layered/subjective IDENTITY instead of universal and absolute
CHANCE COMPOSITION
Fixed musical product composed via chance methods
INDETERMINACY
Composing approach in which some aspects of a musical work are left open to chance or to the interpreter’s free choice
SYSTEMATIC ACOUSTEMIZATION
‘Hearing without seeing’ (Chion)
MUSIC CONCRETE
- Music technology movement headed by Pierre Schaeffer at the ‘Groupe de Recherches Musicales’ in Paris (1948)
- Sound Reproduction: using sounds recorded on tapes as compositional building blocks that can be manipulated
- Real acoustic sources and everyday sounds
ELECTRONISCHE MUSIK
- Opposing music technology movement headed by Werner Meyer-Eppler at the ‘The Studio for Electronic Music’ in Cologne (1951)
- Music Production: creating new sounds with electronic equipment
- Manipulation of the physical properties of sound
THE ITALIAN FURTURISTS
- Movement in the 1910s/20s headed by Luigi Russolo
- Interested in modern industry, progress, machinery, urbanisation; romanisation of modern warfare
- Non musical sounds written in to musical scores and performed with noise machines
MUSIQUE CONCRETE INSTRUMENTALE
- Lachenmann
- Focus on the ‘energetic process’ of sounds ‘in the source’
- Asking ‘what happened’
FLUXUS
- Performance Art group based in NYC founded in the 1960s
- Inspired by the Post-Modern and Dadaism
- Reappropriation of Classical listening practices (concert hall)
STOCHASTICISM
- Xenakis
- Randomly generated elements created by strict mathematical process (laws of probability)
ESCHATOPHONIES
The last sounds’ - derived from study of ‘last things’ (death, afterlife)
POSTSTRUCTUALISM
- Blurring of boundaries between philosophy and art
- Conceptual framework only separator
TINTINNABULATION
- ‘Little Bells’ - system of construction designed by Avo Part
- Intersection of tonic triad outline and diatonic stepwise counterline
- Strict but internally free
THE ANTHROPOSCENE
The (current) Age where humanity is the dominant geological force (John Luther Adams)
POST-NESS
- The active effect of what has come before
- POST as a ‘lateness’ or late style, rather than mere succession or rejection
MICROPOLYPHONIE
- Ligeti
- Many single lines in a dense canon loose their individuality and become a whole entity in itself
FORMULA COMPOSITION
- Stockhausen
- overarching musical unit/basis or ‘core melody’ with heavily specified pitches, dynamics, durations, timbre, and tempo
- Motif defines the large-scale form as well as all the internal musical details of the composition
- 3 transformations: projection, expansion and Ausmultiplikation (elaborations on a longer note)
Bartok’s 3 Folk Assimilations/’Transmutations’
1) Change/vary/accompany existing
2) Tune of one’s own design, made up of idiomatic features
3) Full assimilation, creating a atmosphere around the tradition
Anti-modernist arguments (as outlined by Boulez)
- Too much science, no sensibility (too much art, no heart)
- Desire to be original at all costs, hence artificiality and exaggeration
- Loss of contact with the public owing to excessive individualism
- Refusal to accept history and the historical perspective
- Lack of respect for the natural order.
Varese’s ‘liberation of sound’
- ‘Unadulterated by “interpretation” ‘
- Escape the tempered system
- Machines performing beyond human possibilities: dynamics, cross-rhythms
ALEATORY
- Some primary element of a composed work’s realization is left to the determination of its performer
- Fixed design/composition with unfixed product
DEVELOPING VARIATIONS
Developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea
Principles of musique concrete (Schaeffer)
1) Primacy of the ear
2) Real acoustic sources/everyday sounds
3) ‘new language’; accepting ‘sonorous objects of every kind’
IMPRESSIONISM
- emphasis is on the overall impression rather than outline or clarity of detail
- conveying the moods and emotions aroused by the subject rather than the subject itself with evocative titles
- Timbral/textural focus
PUNKTUELLE MUSIK
- tone-to-tone composition, non linear in conception
- each note assigned compositional values (pitch, duration, dynamic, attack) to remain discrete
- Associated with Stockhasuen, Boulez (integral serialism)
VARIABLE FORM
(Stockhausen) Performers’ individual capabilities and the circumstances of a particular performance (e.g., hall acoustics) determine certain aspects of a composition
POLYVALENT FORM
(Stockhausen) Multi-perspective works with graphic notation that can read upside down, in any order - up to performer discretion
Gorbman’s 7 film music compositional principles (1987)
Invisible, inaudible, signifying emotion, narrative cuing (referential and connotative), continuity and unity
Film > Music
- Extension of Wagner’s GESAMTKUNSTWERK where the drama supersedes the imports of individual artistic elements
- Generic and homogenous scores that could be repurposed and adapted at whim of the director
- Latest stage of production
- High turnover
- Primary need was to synchronise with action
Music during the Golden Age of film
- Romantic/melodramatic idiom inherited from silent film era and early sound cinema
- Signifying nostalgia and utopian excess (art as escapism)
- Any deviation seen as a representation of an exotic other - seen in western, horror and film noir charctererisations
Film < Music
- Musical anaesthetic to render the audience member critically unconscious
- Perceived ability to patch over weaknesses in a film’s plot
- Discrete, not drawing attention to itself and therefore a successful communicator/manipulator of meaning
- Depiction of characters’ inner feelings uncommunicated by visuals alone
FILM NOIR
- 1940s descendant of German expressionist cinema and stylised Italian Neorealism
- Hard-hitting psychological crime dramas with dark subjects
- Dissonant modernist scores
- Product of US Post-War cynicism/nihilism and rise in consciousness of social issues
Types of film scoring
- Neutrally underscoring dialogue
- Leitmotifs (character based and conducive of divadom/individualisation)
- Mood music
- ‘Catching the action’ or ‘Mickey Mousing’
- Localised music
- Depiction if inner feelings/underlying themes
Film in America
- Growing nationalistic/realistic style instead of European romanticism
- Domesticity and simplicity
- Epitomised in the American Western
SPECTRALISM
- Europe, 1970s onwards
- Using the physical properties of sound as the basis of compositional material
- Experimenting with consonant frequencies (harmonicity) and rhythmic regularity (periodicity)
What are the two schools of SPECTRALISM?
- French ‘Groupe de l’Itineraire’
- German ‘Feedback Group’
‘Listening outward’
- JLA Music in the Anthropocene
- Engaging with the world around us to create more grounded connection
- Opposing human-centric, personal narrative/heroic individualism
- Power to inspire and renew human consciousness, feel empowered to change it
- Orientate ourselves in the harmonic ecological atmosphere
NEOPRIMITIVISM (Henry Cowell)
- Return to the direct primary modes of expression, unhampered by ecclesiastical rules, scales, rhythms or modern history
- Vivacious and Simple; universal (evolutionarily)
- Rhythm at the forefront
- Often inauthentic, essentialised and generalised - considered ‘primitive’ due to unfamiliarity with its syntax
SAVAGE: wild, confused, noisy
SIMPLE: soft, soothing, melodious
Other names for ‘musique concrete’
- Schaefer’s renamed to ‘acoustmatique’ to distance the practice from early debate
- ‘Electroacoustic’: the electronic modification of acoustic sounds
- UK ‘radiophonic’
Holm’s 7 advantages of Electronic music
1) Unlimited sonic palette
2) Expansion of tonality (microtonality)
3) Urtextual purity
4) Temporal (chronomonic) manipulation
5) Materiality
6) No biological/physical limitations in performance
7) No timbral proxy - new experience and imagination
SOUND ART
Electronic music not necessarily for the concert hall, instead used in audio installations of other environmental situations
ELECTRONICA
Use of electronics in popular music styles
The ‘gradual process’ of minimalism
- Reich 1968
- Clear and accessible, not seeking to express hidden depth or meaning
- Against composer as dictator and places composer, performer and listener on the same level
- Composition and performance given sounded audible connection
- Encourages attentive/close listening, away from ‘he/she/me’ and towards ‘it’
AVANT-GARDE
- ‘Vanguard’: people leading the way
- Defined by composer intention and reception not style
- Attitude of revolution and want to redefine music
- Challenging social and artistic values ICONOCLASTIC
- Depends on linear history - aggressive and novel, shaking the foundations of artistic understanding
- Short self-life: often for shock value with little underlying profundity; loosing their status once ‘challenging’ article is accepted and assimilated into common practice
The Modernists’ Creative Crisis
- The death of originality
- Discomfort in standing still but fearful that the ceiling of possibility has already been reached
‘Avant Garde of Happenings’ (Kramer)
- Rebellion against the institutions of high modernism
- Popular music, psychedelic art, acid rock, alternative and street theatre
- Actualised into mass media (no longer Avant Garde): too popular/too familiar
Alienation of the Modernist
- Poor musical education, marginalised in schools
- Arrogance of the Modern composer - composing for validation of peers and composing for posterity
- Doubly alienated: ‘Classical’ composer outside of the 19thC western canon
- Listener creativity at the expense of the death of the composer - meaning/interpretation varies between individual audience members
NOISE vs Music/Speech
- Organisation/coherence
- Biological hearing process picks out clear pitched tones
- Familiarity (cultural and individual context): music/speech is something we known how to decipher and understand; produced vocally by humans
- Noise is continuous, uncontrolled and outside of discrete categorisation; undeveloped/unrefined, primitive
- Carries no message, a waste product/by product rather than purposeful
- Attentiveness vs ignorance
The Apollonian and Dionysian myths of musical creation
APOLLO: music gifted by God - serene, mathematical, natural, transcendental
DIONYSIAN: irrational and subjective - human, expressive, emotional, romantic
SOUNDMARK
- Schaefer
- Community sound, specifically regarded or noticed by a local community
Intimacy of sound
- Hearing, like touch, is received through tactile vibrations
- Tangible presence from a distance
- Appeals to deep groove or entrainment within
- Eye points outward, ear draws inward/there are no earlids
Dilemmas of the Avant Gardist
- Maintain position outside the mainstream and forfeit opportunities to work with large scale ensembles and international names
- OR enter into the approved culture and try to change this from within and risk corruption of morals
- Avant guard dead: an music is acceptable and nothing shocks; political expression is now the norm and implicated with every performance
Return of the subjective
- METAPHYSICAL spiritual aims and higher purpose
- Conducive of existentialism
- Electronic music ‘unperformable and invisible’; access to another dimension
- Mathematical, ecclesiastical, natural/transcendental
- ‘The overwhelming’ uncontainable and unexplainable
Topical issues and popular music
- Favourable idiom/accessible - message spread further
- Motive of mass appeal (no necessarily in a capital sense)
- Risk of message being lost and its value diminished
FRANCE vs GERMANY
- Since the early modern: Italy v France v Germanic
- Expressionists vs Neoclassical/Impressionist
- Electronic and Spectral schools (gov funded)
- production and reproduction map onto notions of new discovery (PROGRESS) and adaptation of new materials (neoclassical ‘REGRESS’)
The downsides of PROGRESS
- Stress and existentialism of ‘WHAT’S NEXT?’
- Individualism - unconcerned with struggles of the present/humanitarianism
- Perpetuation of past values upholds oppressive barriers
- Hyperinflated consumerism - growth in tech/circulation/intangibility causing high turn over and lack of attention span leads to devaluing of music (ambient/background music)
Cultural tensions
- Wars, rise of fascism/socialism/communism, redistribution of territories, breakdown of empire, liberation of ethnic states
- Mass migration, easier global transport, settling down
- Growling consciousness of intersectional identity
- Changing attitudes towards imperial/colonial conquest
VOLKSGEIST
- Herder in the 19thC
- Distillation of national identity through cultural products
CHRONOMONY
The measurement of time
