Listening Quiz #6

Question 1

Describe Four Songs, op. 13, i. “Wiese im Park”

Answer 1

• By Anton Webern
• 1916
• Genre: chamber art song
• Ensemble: soprano and chamber orchestra of 13 players
• Style: Romantic characteristics
• Atonal

Question 2

Describe Cantata No. 2, op. 31, v. “Freundselig ist das Wort”

Answer 2

• By Anton Webern
• Genre: cantata

Question 3

Describe Le marteau sans maître, vi. “Bourreaux de solitude”

Answer 3

• By Pierre Boulez
• 1953
• Genre (entire piece): cycle of chamber art songs
• Genre (this movement): chamber art song
• Ensemble: alto voice with mixed chamber ensemble (alto flute, viola, guitar, vibraphone, xylorimba, and various other unpitched percussion)
• Compositional process: integral serialism (pitch, rhythm, timbre & dynamics are all ‘serialized’)
• Harmonic language: atonal/atonality
• Texture: pointillistic/pointillism
• Setting of poem by symbolist poet René Char

Question 4

Describe Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano v. Interlude No. 1

Answer 4

• By John Cage
• Genre: interlude
• Ensemble: solo piano (prepared piano)

Question 5

Describe Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano vi. Sonata No. 5

Answer 5

• By John Cage
• Genre: sonata
• Ensemble: solo piano (prepared piano)

Question 6

Describe Gesang der Jünglinge

Answer 6

• By Karlheinz Stockhausen
• 1956
• Combined concrète sounds, based on a recording of a boy singing, with purely electronic sounds
• Electronic sounds included sine tones and filtered noise, which had been created through subtractive synthesis, in which components of a complex sound (usually electronically generated ‘white noise’, which contains the entire audible spectrum of frequencies) are filtered out to produce new timbres

Question 7

Describe Sinfonia ii. O King

Answer 7

• By Luciano Berio
• 1969
• Genre: symphony
• Ensemble: includes voices singing and speaking
• The voices frequently don’t sing at all, but speak, whisper, laugh, cry, hiss, shout, etc. -> all of which could be considered extended techniques for voice and are found sounds

Question 8

Describe Sinfonia iii. In ruhig fliessender Bewegung

Answer 8

• By Luciano Berio
• 1969
• Genre: symphony
• Ensemble: includes voices singing and speaking
• The voices frequently don’t sing at all, but speak, whisper, laugh, cry, hiss, shout, etc. -> all of which could be considered extended techniques for voice and are found sounds
• Movement: intended as the scherzo movement of the 5-movement symphony
• A collage of literary and musical quotations -> the primary material quoted is the 3rd movement (Scherzo) of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (The Resurrection Symphony), which is quoted in its entirety, starting at the beginning of the movement and ‘underpinning’ it throughout -> functioning as a ‘carrier’ for additional musical materials, most of them also quotations ranging from Monteverdi to Stockhausen
• These additional quotations are fragmentary and are joined together like the separate pieces of a puzzle
• Also incorporates a largely spoken text made up mainly of quotations (especially from Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnameable)

Question 9

Describe Stripsody

Answer 9

• By Cathy Berberian
• Performed by Cathy Berberian
• 1966
• Ensemble: solo voice
• Historically informed performance (17th century music)

Question 10

Describe Lux Aeterna

Answer 10

• By György Ligeti
• 1966
• Ensemble: scored for 16-part a cappella singers (16-part polyphony)
• Latin and sacred text from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass (funeral Mass)
• Style: sound-mass composition
• Harmonic language: atonal (atonality)
• Texture: micropolyphony
• Used in Stanley Kubrik’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey (without composer’s permission)
• Example of neo-classicism that looks back to Medieval music

Question 11

Describe Atmospheres

Answer 11

• By György Ligeti
• 1961
• Ensemble: full orchestra of conventional instruments (strings, woodwinds, brass) without percussion

Question 12

Describe Arnold Schoenberg

Answer 12

• 1874-1951
• Austrian Jewish composer, most associated with Vienna before he emigrated to the US to escape the Nazi rise to power
• Arguably one of the 2 most important composers of the 20th century
• Influential teacher, author of primary texts, and innovator whose music (atonal music) became one of several trends of modernism
• Influenced by the highly chromatic, innovative music of German late-Romantic composers (Brahms, Bruckner, Wagner), and like them, saw J.S. Bach and Beethoven as musical forefathers
• He “abandoned tonality” altogether around 1908, composing the first works of atonal music, in the forms and genres of art songs, string quartets, and orchestral works
• His music was highly rejected by many of his contemporaries
• His music, and that of his students, were banned by the Nazis
• Forced to emigrate to the US in the late 1930s and taught music composition and basic theory at University of California LA late in his life -> one of his students was John Cage
• In 1922, he announced his invention of 12-tone composition -> introduced this new concept as a refinement to address a ‘flaw’ with his previous atonal idiom

Question 13

Describe Anton Webern

Answer 13

• 1883-1945
• Earned a PhD in Musicology from the University of Vienna, writing his dissertation on the music of composer Heinrich Isaac
• Studied composition privately with Schoenberg, using Schoenberg’s new invented methods (atonal music after 1908 and 12-tone music after 1922)
• He created his own style within these new compositional idioms
• Active, international conductor
• Like Schoenberg, his musical career was ruined by Nazi suppression after 1933, because his works were banned as ‘Entartete Kunst’ (degenerate art)
• His music is the most ‘abstract’ (non-representational) of the Second Viennese School
• He intentionally ‘pared down’ his music to only that which is necessary, without repetition -> believed repeating musical ideas or creating ‘purely decorative’ art was decadent
• Many of his works are miniatures (only 2-3 mins and sometimes 30 secs)
• His works are often described using the literary term: aphorism/aphoristic
• His works are delicate, with sparse textures and very brief musical gestures, sometimes of only 1, 2, or 3 notes
• Frequently used silence as an essential element of his music -> influential on John Cage and others
• Used many novel instrumental effects (extended techniques) in his music, such as harmonics (string harmonics) and col legno, which are all manipulations of bowed string instruments (such as the violin)
• Like Schoenberg, after 1922 he began to compose using the 12-tone or serial technique of composition, creating some of the most abstract works of the early 20th century
• His serial works are highly organized: concentration on abstract, symmetrical details of musical structure, most of which can’t be heard by the listener, but which came to fascinate and influence later avant-garde composers and music theorists after 1950
• His 12-tone (serial) works are characterized by disjunct melodic lines, which contain wide difficult leaps, even when composed for the human voice -> he described his art songs as the “most difficult works ever written in that genre”
• Many of his piano and orchestral songs exhibit Romantic characteristics -> reliance on classic & romantic genres, settings of lyric poetry, colorful orchestral timbres, extreme contrasts for expressive purposes, programmatic instrumental gestures that “paint the meaning of the text”, etc.
• His serial works were profoundly influential on the younger generation of avant-garde composers after the end of WW2, and he came to be venerated above Schoenberg, who was criticized for relying on an illogical combination of 12-tone technique and traditional music forms, rhythms, and gestures

Question 14

What’s atonal music?

Answer 14

• AKA atonality/pantonal music/“free atonality”
• Schoenberg referred to the advent of atonal music as “the emancipation of dissonance” -> in his atonal music, dissonance is used freely and intuitively, with no governing rules of harmony
• Atonality is a term for harmonic language (not style, genre or form), and involves the intentional avoidance of any pitch center (atonal = no tonic) through the careful avoidance of chord patterns common in tonal music
• In atonal music all 12 pitches of the equal-tempered octave may be used at any time and in any combination: it’s the epitome of a completely intuitive, chromatic music
• Problem: how does a composer create coherent musical forms without using “key areas” (the major and minor keys used in tonal music) as a basis? How does one know when a piece of music is finished, if there’s no return to tonic?

Question 15

Describe expressionism

Answer 15

• Style of art, music, and theater, especially associated with Germany and Scandinavia between 1880-1925
• Often stresses intense, subjective emotion, isolation, madness, or some extreme and/or deranged psychological state
• Stylistic reaction against the pleasant subjects and soft pastel colors of impressionism and the realism of southern European Romantic art
• Expressionist painters used bright, clashing colors, infused with darkness, colors that are wrong, disturbing, and suggestive of psychic violence
• Often painted the canvas black to start
• Expressionist artworks often involve distortions of both color and form, creating a sense of unease, and an altered perception of reality
• Ex: Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”
• Can be a form of social protest & commentary, depicting the horrors of war, the despair of poverty & disease, man’s
  inhumanity to man
• Expressionism has been disparaged as “the aesthetic of ugliness”
• Expressionist artists described their work as a search for brutal honesty and alternative forms of beauty
• Arnold Schoenberg was an expressionist musical composer (atonal music)

Question 16

What’s neoclassicism?

Answer 16

• Style term
• Intentional use of genres & styles from previous style periods (especially the Baroque and Classical Eras) in works of the 20th century
• Reaction against late romanticism and impressionism
• Neoclassic composers looked back to and consciously imitated some aspects (forms, genres, ensemble types, etc.) of 18th-century music (music of the High Baroque Era -> J. S. Bach)
• After WW1, neoclassicism was a reaction against all aspects of the previous romantic aesthetic, which had involved nationalism and a focus on subjective personal expression
• Neoclassic works by Stravinsky and others show a preference for non-programmatic genres -> preferred absolute music
• Much neoclassic music was intended to be an objective musical expression free from all non-musical associations
• Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna is an example of neoclassicism that looks back to Medieval music

Question 17

What’s pizzicato?

Answer 17

• AKA Bartók pizzicato
• Plucking the string of a bowed-string instrument so hard that it snaps back against the fingerboard, making a percussive sound

Question 18

What are extended techniques?

Answer 18

• Any innovative, unconventional manner of producing a sound on an otherwise conventional instrument
• Ex: screaming into a trombone, making kissy-face sounds into an amplified flute, opening a piano and playing on the strings, or smashing an electric guitar on stage (a dramatic act that also creates a distinct sound)
• The use of extended techniques often has both sonic and dramatic effects
• Ex: string harmonics, col legno, Cage’s prepared piano, Berio’s Sequenza III, Berio’s Sinfonia

Question 19

Describe Pierre Boulez

Answer 19

• 1925 - 2016
• French composer & conductor
• In the 1950s, one of the most uncompromising advocates of a new, avant-garde, anti-Romantic musical aesthetic
• Attended and taught at the summer music program in Darmstadt, Germany, becoming one of the most influential composers, thinkers, and authors among the “Darmstadt School” of avant-garde composers
• Important ‘mouthpiece’ for the new post-1950 modernist music
• Argued for a new and fundamentally rational music aesthetic, criticizing the previous generation (Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Messiaen, etc.) for not going far enough with their innovations, especially with musical rhythm and form
• Advocated for integral serialism (aka “Control Music”), which expanded serial procedures beyond pitch to control (order) all musical parameters: not only pitch but rhythm (duration), dynamics, instrumentation (scoring), form, etc.
• Created musical works that are fundamentally abstract and non-representational -> musical equivalent of abstraction in arts (painting, sculpture, etc.)
• His most famous, early experiment in integral serialism is Structures 1A for two pianos (1952)

Question 20

What’s integral serialism?

Answer 20

• AKA total serialism or Control Music
• Compositional method
• Expanded serial procedures beyond pitch to control (order) all musical parameters: not only pitch but rhythm (duration), dynamics, instrumentation (scoring), form, etc.
• Integral serialist works often sound chaotic and random, even though they’re meticulously constructed in an exacting manner that creates numerous complex musical inter-relationships, which are much more obvious to the analytical eye (studying the score itself) than they are to the listening ear

Question 21

What’s pointillism?

Answer 21

• Type of texture
• Contains seemingly random (but carefully if abstractly organized) points of sound, each of which are isolated in a separate range (high or low) and timbre
• These works have nothing that can be called a melody in a conventional sense, which is a retreat away from the lyricism of Romantic music
• Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître has a pointillistic textures

Question 22

Describe John Cage

Answer 22

• 1912 - 1992
• Guru of the Avant-Garde
• Influential American avant-garde composer, philosopher, author, lecturer, and visual artist
• Cult hero of the international avant-garde whose conceptual music has been influential in both “classical-art” and popular music
• He was a student of Arnold Schoenberg while at University of California in LA
• Although impressed with Cage as an original thinker, Schoenberg doubted Cage’s future as a composer
• Deeply influenced by the sounds and spiritual teachings of diverse non-Western cultures: percussion music, the sounds of the Indonesian gamelan, and especially the teachings of Zen Buddhism
• Important early composer for percussion ensemble in the late 1930s and early 1940s
• He referred to percussion music as the “all-sound music of the future . . . because all sounds are acceptable to the composer of percussion music”
• Under the influence of Henry Cowell’s string piano, he created the prepared piano
• He composed works for prepared piano in various classical-romantic genres (including sonatas, interludes, character pieces, concertos, etc.) and some of his works defy a clear genre description
• Important advocate of aleatory or aleatoric music (aka indeterminacy or chance music)
• He created and advocated for a type of performance known as the multi-media happening -> he often called for multiple of his pieces to be performed simultaneously in concert
• He is inviting us to live the life we are living, to pay attention to each moment, each sound -> he challenges us to see ourselves in our everyday life as artists
• He loved sounds

Question 23

Describe 4’33”

Answer 23

• By John Cage
• 1952
• Important and controversial work
• Pronounced 4 minutes and 33 seconds
• Inspired by painter Robert Rauschenberg’s all-white canvases
• The first version of the work was for solo pianist
• At the first performance of this work, David Tudor, a pianist who was a friend of Cage, walked out on stage, sat at the piano, started a stopwatch, and then proceeded to sit there and make no intentional sounds for 4 mins 33 secs
• He often structured his pieces using precise timings -> stopwatch is often necessary for an accurate performance
• He titled many of his pieces with the amount of time required, avoiding any reference to musical genre
• This piece has become a cult classic, and celebrations of avant-garde music have contained numerous performances of it for every type of ensemble imaginable

Question 24

What’s the percussion ensemble?

Answer 24

• Cage was an important early composer for percussion ensemble in the late 1930s and early 1940s
• He referred to percussion music as the “all-sound music of the future . . . because all sounds are acceptable to the composer of percussion music”
• General rule: if you see “western classical art music” played by an ensemble of nothing but percussion (or that prominently features percussion) then the piece is definitely from post-1920

Question 25

What’s a prepared piano?

Answer 25

• Under the influence of Henry Cowell’s string piano, Cage created the prepared piano
• Type of extended technique for piano accomplished by inserting objects between the piano’s strings according to the composer’s specific instructions
• Cage composed works for prepared piano in various classical-romantic genres (including sonatas, interludes, character pieces, concertos, etc.) and some of his works defy a clear genre description

Question 26

What’s aleatoric music?

Answer 26

• AKA aleatory/indeterminacy/chance music
• The intentional introduction of random elements during the composition and/or performance of a piece of music
• An aleatoric piece of music will contain something that’s not predictable by the composer while she is creating the piece or by the performer(s) while realizing it in sound
• Cage was an advocate of aleatory music
• Musical scores ~1900 contain many precise instructions for nearly every aspect of producing a sound -> aleatoric music demonstrates a disdain for such fussy details - Constitutes one of the most important “anti-Romantic reactions” to occur in art in the post-1945 avant-garde
• Aleatoric music represents letting go of the control found in Romantic music
• Such works often allow the inclusion of any sounds (and silences) into the musical work, even those usually identified as noise or which might be accidental during the performance

Question 27

Aleatoric elements can become part of a piece of music at one or both of what 2 stages?

Answer 27

1. During composition: when the piece is first being created by the composer
2. During performance: when the performer(s) attempts to realize the work in sound (and silence)

Question 28

What are the 4 classic manipulations of taped sound?

Answer 28

1. Editing/filtering out portions of the sound (by physically cutting the tape and through the use of filters)
2. Varying the playback speed (manipulation of playback speed)
3. Tape/sound reversal: playing the sound backward
4. Overdubbing: combining different sounds (adding to the sound)

Question 29

What are chance operations?

Answer 29

• Making random choices while composing music
• Ex: Cage mentions how we wrote a piece on large sheets of graph paper, and that he had flipped coins to make random choices
• His description of his process involves both elements of randomness (flipping coins to generate random numbers that he then transforms into musical events) and structure (precise number of coin flips, etc.)
• This paradox is one of the primary conceptual foundations of Cage’s methods and ideas

Question 30

What’s graphic notation?

Answer 30

• Any unconventional written (printed) manner of conveying musical ideas, usually through pictorial images that seem more related to the visual arts than to music
• Graphic scores can involve various levels of musical detail, sometimes including some elements of conventional musical notation that can be interpreted normally but often involving images that have no clear musical meaning and therefore require additional explanation from the composer and/or interpretation by the performer
• Graphic notation can be used to create a score that is so wide open to interpretation that different performances might be unrecognizable as the same piece
• Graphic scores and other forms of aleatoric music make great demands on performers’ abilities to improvise sensitively as they interpret the images and/or instructions in the score
• Many trained musicians are reluctant to attempt something so far outside their normal experience, but others enjoy the freedom and creativity involved, the opportunity to improvise within more-or-less broadly defined guidelines

Question 31

What’s the happening?

Answer 31

• Cage created and advocated for this
• Type of performance known as the multi-media happening, in which multiple forms of art (music, dance, recitation or poetry reading, visual arts, etc.) are simultaneously performed or displayed, without strict coordination
• Cage often called for multiple of his pieces to be performed simultaneously in concert

Question 32

What’s electroacoustic music?

Answer 32

• Originated in Western art music in the years after WW2, following the incorporation of electric sound production into compositional practice
• Initial developments in electroacoustic music composition are associated with the activities of composers based at research studios in Europe and America (including the Groupe de Recherches Musicales at the ORTF in Paris, the home of musique concrete, the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) studio in Cologne, where the focus was on the composition of elektronische Musik, and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York, where tape music, electronic music, and computer music were all explored)
• Musique concrète is an approach that’s prevalent among composers of electroacoustic music

Question 33

What’s musique concrète?

Answer 33

• Earliest significant developments took place in 1948 at the French National Radio, where sound technician Pierre Schaeffer began producing short tape studies based on transformations of natural sounds, such as those of a train or a piano
• Similar to John Cage, Schaeffer saw any natural sound as a potential sound object, and therefore suitable as a basis for musical material -> attitude and approach that’s prevalent among composers of electroacoustic music
• All tape music based on natural, or concrete sounds (existing in the real world)
• Although Schaeffer’s earliest tape pieces merely juxtapose recording excerpts, typically composers of musique concrete manipulated the sound objects to create new timbres, sometimes completely eroding the original identity of a recorded sound

Question 34

What’s “pure” electronic music?

Answer 34

• Music constructed of sounds that are produced artificially, by purely electronic means
• The first studio designed to produce music entirely by electronic means was founded in 1952 by German composer Herbert Eimert at the West German Radio in Cologne
• On top of variable-speed tape recorders and filters, echo chambers, amplifiers, etc. found in musique concrete studios, the Eimert’s studio contained electronic sound-producing devices: oscillators and noise (sine-wave) generators
• With these, composers could construct their own sound material (construct and precisely control the timbre of the musical sounds) rather than rely on natural sounds with predetermined timbral characteristics that are impossible to completely remove
• Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Studie I (1953) and Studie II (1954) are the first examples of pure electronic music -> these works systematically explored one of the
  basic techniques of early electronic sound
  construction: additive synthesis
• Stockhausen’s Study II became the first published score of electronic music

Question 35

What’s additive synthesis?

Answer 35

Technique through which sounds are created by combining sine waves (“pure” pitches with no overtones, generated electrically by machines called sine-wave generators) to create artificial overtone structures and new timbres

Question 36

What’s subtractive synthesis?

Answer 36

Technique in which components of a complex sound (usually electronically generated white noise, which contains the entire audible spectrum of frequencies) are filtered out to produce new timbres

Question 37

Describe Berio’s sequenzas series

Answer 37

• Among Berio’s best-known compositions are his series of works for solo instruments published numerically under the name Sequenza
• The first, Sequenza I (1958) is for flute and the last, Sequenza XIV (2002) is for cello
• Although Berio called these works Sequenza, avoiding all genre designations, the works can be considered the fantasia genre
• His Sequenze explore the fullest possibilities of each instrument, often calling for extended techniques, extreme virtuosity, and theatrical mannerisms and motions
• Sequenza III for solo voice was originally composed for and performed by singer and composer Cathy Berberian

Question 38

What’s fantasia?

Answer 38

• Genre term
• Always denotes a single-movement work for solo instrument, characterized by an imaginative, formally innovative, and virtuosic, and perhaps improvisatory character
• Although an early genre that dates back at least to the Renaissance, Berio’s Sequenzas meet many of the criteria for this old instrumental genre

Question 39

What’s a collage in music?

Answer 39

• Use of literary and musical quotations in a piece
• Collage of these quotations
• Found in Berio’s Sinfonia, iii. In ruhig fliessender

Question 40

What’s a sound-mass composition?

Answer 40

• Style term
• Can be in any genre
• Renounces conventional melody, harmony, and rhythm in favor of sound masses with sliding and merging orchestral clusters, creating a succession of various timbres that might be static or dynamic or both simultaneously
• The forms of such works are perceived as the successions and interactions of dissonant “sound masses” from which no melody or harmony emerges
• These works often consist of seeming “static tableaux of sound color,” which are often comprised of detailed activity among the performers, the intricate details of which are lost in the textural effect (micropolyphony)

Question 41

What’s micropolyphony?

Answer 41

• Texture term
• Textural effect in which individual parts are lost within a complexity of sonic activity
• This is often accomplished by having individual instruments within a large ensemble (orchestra or choir) play either imitative or non-imitative polyphony that is so closely spaced in time that the individual parts can’t be discerned
• All you can hear is a wash of changing sound that doesn’t sound like conventional melody and harmony

Question 42

Many of Anton Webern’s works are often described using what literary term?

Answer 42

aphorism or aphoristic

Question 43

Describe Karlheinz Stockhausen

Answer 43

• 1928-2007
• First to compose pure electronic music and publish the score of electronic music
• Composer of Gesang der Jünglinge

Question 44

Describe Luciana Berio

Answer 44

• 1925-2003
• Italian composer who managed to transcend 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 worldwide reputation
• Held important teaching positions in both Italy and the US
• In the US, among other positions, he taught composition at the Juilliard School of Music (1965-1971), where he founded the Juilliard Ensemble, which promoted the performance of contemporary music

Question 45

Describe Berio’s Sinfonia

Answer 45

• 1969
• For amplified vocal octet and orchestra
• In 5 movements
• Genre: symphony -> although all 5 movements include voices singing and speaking (the inclusion of voices does not preclude a work from being a symphony)
• The voices aren’t used in a traditional classical way -> frequently don’t sing at all, but speak, whisper, laugh, cry, hiss, shout, etc., all of which could be considered extended techniques for voice and are found sounds
• 2nd movement “O King” connected to Martin Luther King, Jr.