Modern Period Flashcards
Puccini (1858-1924)
Italian composer.
o ‘Giovane Scuola’ – young Italian composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Includes Puccini, Leoncavallo, and Mascagni. They were often associated with the notion of verismo and the Milan Conservatory.
o It is often suggested that Puccini decided to pursue opera after a performance of Aida in 1876.
o Despite losing a one-act opera contest by Sonzogno (a publishing company), Puccini was brought to the attention of Ricordi following a performance of the work in Milan. Ricordi believed that he had found the successor to Verdi. Ricordi provided Puccini with a modest retainer to enable him to compose in relative comfort; and after the comparative failure of his next opera, Edgar (1889), Ricordi saw his confidence in the young man justified by the triumph of Manon Lescaut at Turin in 1893. From then on Puccini’s fortune was assured.
o The Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa operas:
La bohème (1896): Based on Murger’s collection of short stories.
Tosca (1900): A version of Sardou’s drama.
Madama Butterfly (1904): Based on a play by Belasco.
o La fanciulla del West (1910): Based on Belasco, written for and premiered by the Met.
o La rondine (1917)
o Il trittico: Il tabarro: Based on a Grand Guignol story by Didier Gold.
o Forzano operas:
Suor Angelica
Gianni Schicchi
o Turandot: Based on a fiaba by Carlo Gozzi. Puccini finished everything but the final duet, which was completed by Alfano using Puccini’s sketches.
o General Style:
In his mature operas, each act tends to define itself by means of an individual structure, one that has its own rhythm and—above all—its own particular atmosphere. In part these structures are articulated through a highly personal use of recurring motifs, ones that can rarely be pinned down to a fixed ‘meaning’ (in the classic manner of Wagnerian leitmotifs), but that are often important in defining new episodes in the drama (the opening motif of La bohème is a famous example, as is that which begins Tosca). But in each act there will also be opportunities for the finite, self-contained melody, ones that typically use every means, both orchestral and vocal, to ensure a maximum identification with the character or characters.
Puccini’s interest in the modern music of his day, especially Debussy’s, undoubtedly fertilized his mature style. His operas symbolize the ‘Italietta’ of his day, concerned as they are for the most part with personal emotions and scene-painting, without extensive reference to wider issues (the political overtones of Sardou’s Tosca are consistently played down in the opera). But his supreme mastery of the operatic craft, his melodic gift, and his emotional sincerity combine to keep his operas as freshly alive today as when they were written. The intense sadness that permeates so much of his music reflects his own temperament. For beneath the successful composer with his penchant for blood sports, fast cars, and women was a lonely and sensitive man. While he was typically regarded during much of the 20th century as an essentially conservative figure, perhaps even an appendage to the great 19th-century tradition of Italian opera, there are now signs that his highly individual approach to musical drama could equally be seen as an important contribution to the modernist dramatic tradition, to be assessed on the same level as such self-styled ‘avant-garde’ composers as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók.
Strauss (1864-1949)
German composer.
o The tone poems
Avant-garde
o Originally a military designation for an advance party of soldiers, the term has come to signify a group of composers or other artists who assume the role of pioneers on behalf of their generation, rejecting established practice in their striving to pave the way for the future.
o In the polemics of Schumann, Wagner, and the New German School, certain defining avant-garde traits can already be discerned, among them a refusal to capitulate either to tradition (perceived as moribund) or to mass culture (perceived as regressive), and the positive expectation of hostile and uncomprehending reactions from contemporaries.
o Many avant-garde figures, notably Schoenberg in the 20th century, remained hopeful of the ultimate acceptance and wider adoption of their innovations—even though such recognition would, paradoxically, entail the reintegration of the avant-garde into the dominant artistic establishment. Such was widely perceived as the fate of the European avant-garde after World War II, its composers (including Boulez and Stockhausen) rapidly absorbed into the institutions of the radio station and international music festival, and its techniques (such as serialism and open form) acquiring the status of new orthodoxies. The notion of an avant-garde, enshrining as it does the characteristically modernist belief in the inevitability of progress within a single, authentic historical tradition, came to be viewed by many as no longer credible in the pluralistic, postmodern climate of the late 20th century.
Impressionism
o A philosophical, aesthetic and polemical term borrowed from late 19th-century French painting. It was first used to mock Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, painted in 1873 and shown in the first of eight Impressionist exhibitions (1874–86), and later to categorize the work of such artists as Manet, Degas, Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Cézanne and Regnault. ‘Impressionist’ also describes aspects of Turner, Whistler, the English Pre-Raphaelites and certain American painters, as well as the literary style of Poe and the Goncourt brothers, and the free verse and fluidity of reality in symbolist poetry.
o The word ‘Impressionism’ did not appear in conjunction with a specific musical aesthetic until the 1880s. The secretary of the Académie des Beaux Arts used the word in 1887 to attack Debussy’s ‘envoi’ from Rome, Printemps. Besides displaying an exaggerated sense of musical color, the work called into question the authority of academic values, and so the work’s ‘impressionism’ appeared ‘one of the most dangerous enemies of truth in art’.
o The use of impressionism is often traced back to Hume, who describes an impression as the immediate effect of hearing, seeing or feeling on the mind. This was brought back into discussion in the 1860s as French positivists began to study perception. They believed that impressions (a synonym for sensations) were primordial, the embryos of one’s knowledge of self and the world and, significantly, a product of the interaction between subject and object. It began to be used to describe painters that were depicting sensations, rather than the literal objects (Castagnary: ‘they render not the landscape but the sensation produced by the landscape’).
o In music: Similar issues were associated with 19th-century music deemed Impressionist. Critics hailed Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony as the first attempt to ‘paint the sensual world’ in sound even though it followed a long tradition of programme music by composers as different as Janequin, Byrd, Marais, Telemann, Rameau and Gluck who used sound to suggest pictures or the composer’s emotion before nature. Wagner’s nature music, especially the Forest Murmurs from Siegfried and vaporous moments in Parsifal and Tristan, also elicited vague references to musical Impressionism. Palmer argues that although Chabrier ‘lacked the intense preoccupation with personal sensation so characteristic of Debussy,’ he was the ‘first to translate the Impressionist theories’ into music, his chiaroscuro-like effects predating those of both Debussy and Delius.
o It was Debussy’s extension of these ideas which had a lasting impact on the future of music. Printemps, an evocation of the ‘slow and arduous birth of things in nature’, parallels not only the painters’ turn to ‘open-air’ subjects, but also their exploration of unusual colours and mosaic-like designs. Debussy extended the orchestral palette with harp harmonics, muted cymbals and a wordless chorus singing with closed lips (later Delius did the same in A Song of the High Hills and Ravel in Daphnis et Chlöé). In Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and subsequent pieces he increasingly emphasized distinct sound-colours (those produced by individual instruments, rather than the composite ones of chamber or orchestral ensembles). And, like the Impressionist painters and later the symbolist poets, Debussy wanted music not merely to represent nature, but to reflect ‘the mysterious correspondences between Nature and the Imagination’.
o Interest in acoustics: Just as contemporary physics informed new ideas about painting, Helmholtz’s acoustics and developments in the spectral analysis of sound fed composers’ interest in musical resonance and the dissolution of form by vibrations. In much of Debussy’s music, as in Impressionist pieces by Delius, Ravel and others, the composer arrests movement on 9th and other added-note chords, not to produce dissonant tension but, as Dukas put it, to ‘make multiple resonances vibrate’. This attention to distant overtones, particularly generated by gong-like lower bass notes, produces a new sense of musical space, in effect giving a greater sense of the physical reality of sound.
o It was also associated with notions of individualism. In music the association between Impressionism and innovation was more short-lived than its visual counterpart and more narrowly restricted to Debussy and those whose music resembled or was influenced by him. These composers’ attempt to explore the fleeting moment and the mystery of life led them to seek musical equivalents for water, fountains, fog, clouds and the night, and to substitute sequences of major 2nds, unresolved chords and other sound-colors for precise designs, solid, clear forms, and logical developments. To convey a sense of the intangible flux of time, they used extended tremolos and other kinds of ostinatos as well as a variety of rhythmic densities. But, like the painters who stressed not new realities but new perceptions of it, Debussy explained that this music’s ‘unexpected charm’ came not so much from the chords or timbres themselves – already found in the vocabularies of composers such as Field, Chopin, Liszt, Grieg, Franck, Balakirev, Borodin and Wagner – but from their ‘mise en place’, ‘the rigorous choice of what precedes and what follows’. For Debussy form was the result of a succession of colors and rhythms ‘de couleurs et de temps rythmés’ or, as Dukas put it, ‘a series of sensations rather than the deductions of a musical thought’. This concept in turn demanded new approaches to performance. In interpreting Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, the pianist Ricardo Viñes used the pedals liberally when playing fast-moving passages in the high registers ‘to bring out the hazy impression of vibrations in the air’.
o The term ‘impressionism’ is not wholly accurate. In Debussy’s case, his music also relies heavily on tradition (like the Five and medieval music) and folk idioms, ideas that were not closely connected to the use of the term in the visual arts, where innovation was particularly important.
Ragtime
o A style of popular music of black American origin that flourished at the turn of the 19th century. It arose in the slavery period as an accompaniment to plantation dances like the cakewalk. Banjo rhythms were transferred to the piano when such instruments became available to black musicians in minstrel shows and at other entertainments. Early ragtime, mainly written for the piano, followed the form of contemporaneous marches and waltzes—an introduction and several contrasting sections—and was characterized by a strikingly syncopated melody over a regular bass, generally in 2/4 time. Composed rags were widely published and became extremely popular among white amateur pianists, though it is likely that the black creators of ragtime would have played in a much freer manner than the written music suggests. Although it was mainly piano music there were arrangements made for small orchestras to accompany the cakewalk vogue of the 1890s, and there was also a strong vein of ragtime song. The ragtime flavor survived in the early kind of small-band jazz known as Dixieland. o Joplin (1867/68? – 1917): American composer and pianist. He came from a musical family, and during the 1880s worked as a travelling musician. In the mid-1890s he settled in Sedalia, Missouri, and wrote songs and ragtime pieces for piano. The second of these to be published, Maple Leaf Rag, eventually became so successful that it provided him with a steady though modest income. Out of a desire to see ragtime accepted as an art form and not simply popular entertainment, Joplin embarked on the composition of a ragtime opera (a ballet and an earlier opera had been staged in 1899 and 1903 respectively), but the result, Treemonisha, completed in 1910, failed to reach the stage in his lifetime; it was eventually given in 1972 (when his piano rags were attracting renewed and widespread attention) and won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1976. Joplin was the pre-eminent composer of piano ragtime. Working primarily in a popular idiom, he strove for a ‘classical’ excellence in his music and recognition as a composer of artistic merit, rather than one simply of popular acclaim. Although he lavished much of his creative efforts on extended works, it was with his piano rags – miniatures rarely exceeding 68 bars of music – that he attained greatness. Both he and Stark referred to these pieces as ‘classic rags’, comparing their artistic merit to that of European classics. The comparison is not unwarranted, for Joplin clearly sought to transcend the indifferent and commonplace quality of most ragtime. This aim is evident in his comments regarding his music, in his plea for faithful renderings of his scores and – most of all – in the care and skill with which he crafted his compositions. Joplin’s rags, unlike those of most of his contemporaries, are notable for their melodically interesting inner voices, consistent and logical voice-leading, subtle structural relationships and rich chromatic harmonies supported by strongly directed bass lines. These qualities are all apparent in Rose Leaf Rag, where Joplin also replaces the traditional ragtime bass pattern with an original figure.
Mahler (1860-1911)
Austrian composer and conductor.
o Mahler’s ten symphonies are often viewed as the finest monuments to the declining years of the Austro-German domination of European music and adumbrate developments that were to revolutionize the Viennese tradition in the works of Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern. Mahler’s symphonic works received great attention in the 1960s, after years of neglect. They have become particularly conducive to ‘hermeneutic’ readings.
o Symphonies 1-4 (The early symphonies):
1: Grew out of Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (1883–5), a cycle of poems partly inspired by the failed romance with Johanna Richter, although the cycle should not be read as being simply autobiographical. The link between the two works is emphasized by the fact that most of the material of the exposition of the symphony’s first movement (following the slow introduction) is derived from the cycle’s second song. There are two versions (5-mvt., essentially a symphonic poem, and a 4-mvt. version, popular now).
2 (“Resurrection”)/3: Both symphonies include solo song and choral elements. Each was interpreted by Mahler (through annotations in the manuscript score, published movement titles or discursively elaborated narrative programs) as articulating ideas of democratic inclusiveness and leading to a utopian vision through a drama of spiritual and even social struggle. Structural similarities between the Second and Third Symphonies include the unequal disposition of the movements in two parts, the first alone comprising Part 1, and the bold mixture of genres adopted for the movements of Part 2, including a minuet-tempo second movement, a scherzo based on an independently existing Wunderhorn song (Ablösung im Sommer) and a solo contralto setting as fourth movement. In the Third Symphony, however, the choral fifth movement shrinks in proportion and scope to a short setting, for contralto, women’s chorus and children, of a naive religious text from the Wunderhorn anthology; it is followed, in the finale, by Mahler’s first extended orchestral Adagio.
4: The four-movement Fourth Symphony (completed in 1900) seems to accept the contradictory nature of the Austro-Hungarian empire in its last stages, framing its more modestly proportioned evocation of classical symphonic manners as a complicatedly humorous conceit: a ‘child’s vision’ illuminated by the closing Wunderhorn song for solo soprano, Das himmlische Leben.
o Symphonies 5-6 (the middle-period, purely orchestral):
5: The overall narrative of the Fifth Symphony (whose tonality moves from C# minor to D major) optimistically resounds with acquired cultural power. Rolland heard in it worrying signs of what he saw as Germanic force and self-confidence.
6 (“Tragic”): This was composed during the period of Mahler’s closest contact with the younger Viennese modernists, to whose circle his uneasily progressing marriage to Alma Schindler gave him access. Conducted by Mahler with the subtitle ‘Tragic’ on at least one occasion, the Sixth displays an inverse relationship between symbolic subjective security and structural conciseness (it has four movements, the first with repeated exposition in the Classical manner). Specific biographical reasons for its cumulatively depressive and even suicidal manner are often sought, although Mahler explored as a logical proposal the insight that subjective authenticity and a positively constructed teleology (permitting a happy ending) might have no causal link.
o Symphonies 7-8 plus Das Lied:
7: The Seventh appears once again to have developed, with the two intermezzo-like ‘Nachtmusik’ movements of 1904, from an attempt to write music of a different character to that of his last completed symphony. For the first time since the Third Symphony he developed a movement from an initiating figure (supposedly inspired by a trip across the Worthersee) - eventually the tenor horn line with its characteristic rhythm and supporting harmony, which he likened to a mysterious voice or sound of nature: ‘Hier röhrt die Natur!’ was how Mahler characterized it for Richard Specht.
8 (“Symphony of a Thousand”): Mahler conceived ‘inspirationally’ after a period of anxiety about composing a new work (a common theme in Mahler). His anxiety found exuberant expression in the words of the Latin hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, whose setting he rapidly sketched as the first part of a symphonic cantata for double chorus, boys’ choir, soloists and large orchestra (including mandolin, celesta, piano, harmonium and organ). The second part, reverting to the manner and metaphysical preoccupations of the Second and Third Symphonies, became Mahler’s most ambitious essay in festival-symphonic ceremonial; he described the Eighth as a joyful ‘gift to the nation’. The polyphony is inspired by his recent study of Bach, while he sets the closing scene of Goethe’s Faust in the second movement.
Das Lied von der Erde: partly inspired by the crisis surrounding the death of Marie. This orchestral song cycle, based on German versions of ancient Chinese poetry collected by Hans Bethge in Die chinesische Flöte (1907). Real Chinese music may have inspired the metrical innovations which contribute to quasi-heterophonic passages for solo instruments. In the extended last movement, ‘Der Abschied’, such passages project stylized images of the natural world as described by the singer ‘In narrative tone, without expression’. For tenor and contralto soloists in strict alternation (the second movement permits the contralto to be replaced by a baritone), the cycle’s six movements fall into three pairs. The middle pair recall youth and beauty while the first and last present a tensely contested balance between energetic abandonment to existential despair (particularly in the two drinking songs; the ape howling its laughter amid gravestones is a crucial image in the opening movement) and a more controlled attempt to maintain lyrical equilibrium beyond the destructive expressionist ‘moment’. The possibility of that balance, of an extended symphony in the conventional manner, was to be the implicit theme of Mahler’s last two works, neither of which (like Das Lied von der Erde) he lived to hear performed.
o Symphonies 9-10 (final two symphonies):
9: The four-movement Ninth Symphony is based on such a conflation (the loss of Alma, referred to in late poems and score annotations as his muse or ‘lyre’: associated both with the art he practised and with the sensual and conceptual solace it ideally offered) in a symbolically terminal statement of the tradition in which Mahler worked. Anticipating the expressionists’ alienated reliance upon individual subjective authority while seeking to contain its threat within the cultural form of the extended symphony, he developed in the opening Andante comodo a revised version of his favoured expositional duality. A melody of consoling, elegiac lyricism in D major (some commentators have heard it as a form of lullaby), is succeeded by a dissonant, tensely animated D minor music of expressive anguish and aspiration whose reward – a heroic, fanfare-like gesture – is both a climax and the prelude to an intensified return to the initial idea.
10: Accorded official status as an uncompleted work, the Tenth Symphony acquired mythical significance that was emphasized by the posthumous publication in facsimile of its evidently complete draft. This has provoked a number of fully realized performing versions (the major task being the transcription and orchestration of the second, fourth and fifth movements, the first and third having been more or less completely scored). The most widely performed is that by Deryck Cooke. Like its predecessor, the Tenth begins and ends with slow movements, although the symmetry of its final, five-movement structure is related to that of the Seventh Symphony; like the Ninth, it proclaims its private meaning in manuscript annotations that are often precisely matched to musical detail.
o In 1875, Mahler was taken to Vienna to play to Julius Epstein, piano professor at the conservatory. He was accepted as a student, but though successful in piano competitions at the conservatory, he abandoned playing in favor of composing. While in Vienna he attended lectures on philosophy at Vienna University and some of Bruckner’s lectures. In the course of the next two years he worked as a piano teacher and wrote the libretto and music of his first major work, the dramatic cantata Das klagende Lied, which provides glimpses into his later style.
o He began to make a name for himself, principally as an opera conductor, serving at houses in Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, and Hamburg. He was appointed conductor of the Vienna Opera in 1897, the Philharmonic one year later. He moved to New York in 1907, where he conducted the Met, returning to Europe during the off-season.
o Many stress the influence of the folk-tale anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn on Mahler’s musical style, particularly the elements of satire, parody, and grotesquerie.
o The stylistic and generic plurality of ‘voices’ in his symphonies has been prized as a function of their subversively modernist, even postmodernist, character. That it struck Mahler as problematic illuminates the propensity for parody or irony, often explicitly indicated in directions in the score, which contributes to their authenticity as cultural documents, resounding the very contradictions that Mahler’s own inherited aesthetic ideals required to be resolved or transcended. There is often the juxtaposition of “high” and “low” forms of art (allusions to popular dances, tunes, children’s rhymes, etc.), along with the issue of the Austro-Germanic tradition and its potential trajectory in the twentieth century.
o Mahler’s music has been especially prized following his death, where it is often viewed in connection with a number of twentieth-century traditions, including post-Romanticism (particularly German) and the growing stretching of tonality (foreshadowing the work of Schoenberg).
Debussy (1862-1918)
French composer. One of the most important musicians of his time, his harmonic innovations had a profound influence on generations of composers. He made a decisive move away from Wagnerism in his only complete opera Pelléas et Mélisande, and in his works for piano and for orchestra he created new genres and revealed a range of timbre and colour which indicated a highly original musical aesthetic.
o He received no formal education until he entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1872. Piano lessons with Mme Mauté, who claimed to be Chopin’s pupil, led to early hopes of a virtuoso career, but Debussy decided in favor of composition with Ernest Guiraud in 1880 and won the Prix de Rome in 1884 with his cantata L’Enfant prodigue. Many of his earlier compositions were the products of his love-hate relationship with Wagner.
o The year 1893 proved a turning-point for Debussy: La Damoiselle élue at the Société Nationale on 8 April brought his music to public attention, and on 17 May he saw the premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande (1892) at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens.
o Pelléas et Mélisande:
In the shadowy, suggestive, and apparently simple world of Pelléas, Debussy realized he had found his ideal opera libretto, and he set the play directly, in prose (with only four scenes cut), between August 1893 and 17 August 1895. After Albert Carré finally agreed to produce Pelléas at the Opéra-Comique in May 1901, Debussy completed its orchestration, adding extra (Wagnerian) interludes at the last moment to facilitate the complex scene changes. Like Wagner, Debussy gave the orchestra a substantial commentatorial role and used recurring themes (a system of leitmotifs portraying characters, themes and symbols). But the latter were subtly adapted to the characters’ changing states of mind and feelings rather than being mere ‘visiting-cards’ announcing their entry – difference from Wagner’s use. The main influence was more Mussorgsky in the precise prosody and naturalness of the recitative-like vocal lines.
o Important Piano works (greatest piano works come after he left his first wife in 1904):
Children’s Corner Suite (1906-08): known for the Tristan parody in Golliwogg’s Cake-Walk.
Two books of Préludes (1909–10, 1911–13): they evoke a series of widely varied natural subjects from the antics of Christy ‘minstrels’ at Eastbourne in 1905 and the American acrobat ‘Général Lavine’ to dead leaves and the sounds and scents of the evening air. They are wrongly termed impressionistic, for Debussy’s inspiration owed far more to the painter J. M. W. Turner and to the literary symbolist movement.
o Orchestral works:
Debussy’s earlier orchestral music includes the Nocturnes (1897–9) – an orchestral triptych, with their exceptionally varied textures ranging from the Musorgskian start of Nuages, through the approaching brass band procession in Fêtes, to the wordless female chorus in Sirènes, whose study of ‘sea-textures’ is a kind of preparation for La Mer (1903–5). Here the ever-changing moods of the sea are fully explored and the three ‘symphonic sketches’ together make up a giant sonata-form movement with its own Franckian cyclic theme. The evocative central ‘Jeux de vagues’ is a sort of development section leading into the final ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’, a powerful essay in orchestral color and sonority.
o Style:
‘Music is made up of colors and barred rhythms’, Debussy told Durand in 1907, and in his experiments with timbre and his efforts to free music from formal convention he tried many different solutions—from proportional structures based on the Golden Section (La Mer; L’Isle joyeuse) to the cinematographic form of Jeux (a ‘poème dansé’ on a scenario by Nijinksy for the Ballet Russes, which was overshadowed by the premiere of the Rite of Spring two weeks later), with its constant motivic renewal in which undulating fragments gradually evolve into a scalar theme which is itself broken off at its violent climax. The climax is often put off until the last possible moment, preceded by many smaller climaxes.
It is important to remember his connection to the Symbolists, characterized by rejection of naturalism, of realism and of overly clearcut forms, hatred of emphasis, indifference to the public, and a taste for the indefinite, the mysterious, even the esoteric. Debussy felt as powerfully as the symbolists the impact of the ‘decadent’ novels of Huysmans, and shared their admiration of Baudelaire. They were also fascinated by Wagner’s notion of Gesamtkunstwerk.
He was greatly influenced by the visual arts. Louis Laloy, his first French biographer, revealed in 1909 that ‘He received his most profitable lessons from poets and painters, not from musicians’, while he himself told Varèse in 1911 ‘I love pictures almost as much as music’. Many of the titles of works come from the visual arts.
Debussy discovered the music of East Asia at the 1889 Exposition. For him the revelation was far removed from the attraction of the exotic or the picturesque that it meant for many French composers, and concerned essentially the use of musical scales obeying conventions other than those of the West. He listened spellbound to the ‘infinite arabesque’ of the Javanese gamelan with its percussion – the Western equivalent of which he likened to the ‘barbaric din of a fairground’ – and the counterpoint ‘beside which Palestrina’s is child’s play’, and he was equally fascinated by the Annamite theatre, which impressed him by its economy of means: ‘an angry little clarinet’ and a tam-tam. He himself never introduced any form of unmediated exoticism into his music, except arguably into Pagodes, but the gamelan has been suggested as one influence in the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, and in the Toccata of the suite Pour le piano, composed shortly after the 1900 Exposition.
Debussy and Impressionism
It was the members of the Institut de France who were the first to call his music ‘Impressionist’, in 1887, with reference to Printemps, his second ‘envoi’ from Rome. This was the first instance of a misunderstanding which has persisted to the present day. The term took hold in particular after La mer. Debussy himself was sometimes careless about its use, allowing the following to be written about La mer in the Concerts Colonne programme note: ‘It is, in a word, musical impressionism, following an exotic and refined art, the formula for which is the exclusive property of its composer’. When he tried to counteract the usage, for example by placing the titles in small type at the end of each of the Préludes for piano, it was too late. He wrote to his publisher in 1908: ‘I’m attempting “something different”, realities in some sense – what imbeciles call impressionism, just about the least appropriate term possible’.
Ravel (1875-1937)
French composer. He was one of the most original and sophisticated musicians of the early 20th century. His instrumental writing – whether for solo piano, for ensemble or for orchestra – explored new possibilities, which he developed at the same time as (or even before) his great contemporary Debussy, and his fascination with the past and with the exotic resulted in music of a distinctively French sensibility and refinement.
o He associated with a group of artistic firebrands known as the ‘apaches’ and including the composer Florent Schmitt, the pianist Ricardo Viñes, and the poets Tristan Klingsor and Léon-Paul Fargue. Of these, Viñes was responsible for the first performances of many of Ravel’s piano works, including the Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899), Jeux d’eau (1901), Miroirs (1904–5), and Gaspard de la nuit (1908), while verses by Klingsor served as texts for the orchestral song cycle Shéhérazade (1903) and one of Ravel’s last songs was a setting of Fargue’s Rêves (1927). What linked Les Apaches was a common belief in Debussy as a musical prophet and in indigenous folksong as a source of artistic renewal, as well as an interest in Russian music, Asian music and art, symbolism and children’s music.
o He was a prominent orchestrator, he was able to make a version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1922) which sounds like a fulfillment of the original, and he gave new, perfectly fitting orchestral dress to many of his own piano works, including the Pavane (orchestrated 1910), the suite Ma mère l’oye (1908/1911), the Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911/1912), and Le Tombeau de Couperin (orchestrated 1919).
Shéhérazade (1903): an example of his fascination with the exotic.
Bolero (1928): Ravel expressed an interest in Spanish music rooted in his mother’s Spanish origins. Rhythm plays a crucial role in the Spanish works, in short, repetitive and often syncopated patterns. Ravel took this to an extreme in Bolero, allowing only the changing instrumentation to colour the obsessive dance rhythm.
Daphnis et Chloé (1909–12): commissioned by Diaghilev for the Ballet Russes. In his ‘Autobiographical Sketch’ Ravel declared that Daphnis was ‘less concerned with archaism than with fidelity to the Greece of my dreams which is close to that imagined and painted by the French artists of the 18th century’
Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917): In Le tombeau de Couperin Ravel’s contemporary harmonic vocabulary, Romantic pianistic gestures (especially in the Prélude and Toccata), and prominent use of the major 7th (notably in the refrain of the Forlane) are superimposed onto 18th-century forms, rhythms, cadences and ornamentation. In preparation for composing the suite, Ravel transcribed a forlane from Couperin’s Concerts royaux in the spring of 1914, and there are clear musical parallels between it and the corresponding movement in Le tombeau. This perhaps weakens the claim that the work is more of a homage to 18th-century French music in general than to any particular work of Couperin, though no specific models have been found for the other movements. In celebrating Couperin, Ravel was responding to a more general resurgence of interest in the golden age of Louis XIV.
L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1925, text by Colette): Ravel revealed his sensitivity to the world of childhood, capturing the imagination, frustration and need for love which are so fundamental to childhood. The work also contains examples of his experiments with bitonality. It incorporates 18th-century pastiche, mock-oriental writing and ragtime, alongside American music hall and operetta styles. Ravel told his friend Hélène Jourdan-Morhange that L’enfant contained everything: Massenet, Puccini, Monteverdi and American musical comedy. This, together with his earlier admission that he was ‘transported by the idea of having two negroes singing ragtime at the Paris Opéra’, has sometimes led critics to miss the profoundly serious feeling at the heart of this vivid and entertaining work. In answer to those who complained that his music was artificial, Ravel said: ‘Does it not occur to these people that I may be artificial by nature?’
La valse: the work was only completed because of a commission from Diaghilev, although the impresario subsequently rejected it as unsuitable for a ballet. The work was rejected by a number of contemporary composers as aesthetically outmoded.
Two piano concertos in his last decade (left hand and the G major): In 1929–30, at the request of the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein, Ravel composed his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, without allowing Wittgenstein’s physical limitations to restrict the work’s technical demands and expressivity. In the Piano Concerto in G, the classicism of Mozart and Saint-Saëns is offset by jazz in a striking juxtaposition of past and present.
Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
English composer. He was a leading figure in the so-called renaissance of English musical life—creative, executive, and musicological—which began in the last years of the 19th century coincident with Elgar’s rise to fame.
o His compositions at the turn of the century were mainly chamber music (later withdrawn) and songs, including Linden Lea (1901). He edited the Welcome Songs for the Purcell Society, wrote articles for periodicals, and contributed to the second edition (1904) of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In 1904 his Songs of Travel, settings of R. L. Stevenson, were sung in London. A significant event in 1902 was his introduction by Lucy Broadwood to the systematic collecting of folksongs; further impetus was given to this activity in December 1903 when he heard Bushes and Briars sung by an old shepherd in Essex. During the next nine years he collected tunes in Norfolk, Herefordshire, Surrey, and Sussex, publishing many of them in various arrangements. In 1904 he accepted an invitation to be music editor of a new hymnbook, The English Hymnal (1906).
o Vaughan Williams’s principal work around the turn of the century was a short choral setting of Walt Whitman, Toward the Unknown Region (1905). Although this was a success at the 1907 Leeds Festival, he was dissatisfied with his compositions generally and went to Paris early in 1908 for three months’ intensive study with Ravel. This released his creative energies. He rapidly produced the String Quartet no. 1 in G minor (1908), the Housman song cycle On Wenlock Edge for tenor, piano, and string quartet (of which Gervase Elwes gave the first performance in 1909), and incidental music for the 1909 Cambridge Greek Play, The Wasps. In the same year he completed a choral symphony on which he had been at work since 1903: as A Sea Symphony (also to a Whitman text) it had an enthusiastic reception at the 1910 Leeds Festival and established Vaughan Williams in the front rank of English composers. The Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for strings (1910) eventually became one of his best-known works.
o After 1922, he entered a new phase of his career, producing ambitious and enterprising works in several genres, these included A Pastoral Symphony (1922), the Mass in G minor (1921), and Flos campi, a suite for solo viola, small chorus, and orchestra (1925).
o His nationalist creed was that a composer must reach his fellow countrymen before he can hope to reach a universal audience. His symphonies, choral works, and songs are the core of his output.
o Vaughan Williams demonstrated a commitment to reinvent rather than reject the achievements of his 19th-century predecessors. This continuity with the past has frequently been obscured in the critical literature, which has tended to exaggerate the profound but by no means exclusive influence of pre-18th-century music and folksong on his style; the concept of the passionate and transcendent climax, and the confrontational dynamism of the Beethovenian symphonic tradition; however, were also important to Vaughan Williams. He was also influenced by continental composers - Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky and Verdi among others – and from Parry, Stanford and Elgar; he was one of the first British composers to assimilate successfully the influence of Ravel and Debussy; and later he responded to Bartók, Stravinsky and Sibelius, and even, at the end of his life, to the young Britten (opposed to the common view of Vaughan Williams as cut off from the continent).
Holst (1874-1934)
English composer. His prominent position among 20th-century English composers owes a great deal to the immense popularity of his orchestral work The Planets. The only pieces to have achieved comparable success are on a much smaller scale, yet equally idiosyncratic. His wholly individual blend of Hindu philosophy and English folksong set him on a path far from the mainstream of European tradition, although his early works reveal a thorough grounding in conventional forms.
o Early education and influence:
In 1893, he gained admission to the RCM where, after further study of counterpoint, he was accepted into Stanford’s composition class; his other teachers included Parry. He was awarded a scholarship in composition in 1895, relieving his father of the increasingly difficult burden of supporting him. In the same year he met Vaughan Williams, who was to become his closest friend and a profound influence (more so than his teachers), although the first performance in modern times of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, under Stanford, left a lasting impression. Until then Holst’s major obsession had been with Wagner (he had heard Mahler conducting Götterdämmerung at Covent Garden in 1892), and he was to remain under Wagner’s shadow until well into the 1900s. Holst’s other enthusiasms were for the idealistic philosophies of Walt Whitman and William Morris. He also studied trombone at the RCM (an instrument that he picked up as a child as a cure for asthma), his early career as an orchestral musician provided him with an insider education of the orchestra.
o The English folksong revival, in which his friend Vaughan Williams was one of the pioneers, became instead the catalyst which enabled Holst to fuse together the disparate formative elements that were to make the mature composer. He also became interested in Sanskrit, writing operas and symphonic poems based on the literature.
o Hymn of Jesus (1917): The key to the work is to be found in the phrase ‘Divine Grace is dancing’ (the words are taken from the apocryphal Acts of John), which Holst sets as part of a central, almost ritualistic, dance: the ecstatic quality of the music, mirroring a gnostic philosophy.
o The Planets (1914-16): There are few precedents for a seven-movement orchestral work on this scale. The character studies of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition or Elgar’s Enigma Variations are individually on a much smaller scale; perhaps closer in concept as abstract pictures in sound are Debussy’s La Mer or Nocturnes. Holst was also influenced in form, though only marginally in content, by Schoenberg’s Fünf Orchesterstücke, which he heard in 1914 – the original title of The Planets was Seven Pieces for Large Orchestra. He encountered Stravinsky’s music as well for the first time in 1914, and though the influence may not seem direct, he himself admitted its importance to him. The work is often referred to as a ‘symphonic suite’, but this is not appropriate: the music’s originality does not lie in a symphonic treatment of its subject matter, but in the diversity of form and spontaneity of invention which Holst employs in each movement. Holst is inevitably identified with The Planets above the rest of his music: its deserved but disproportionately huge popularity has overshadowed not only his own status as a composer of genuine originality, but also the freshness and resource of the work itself.
o Egdon Heath (1927): inspired by Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Its three main elements are set out at the beginning – a pulseless wandering melody, first for double basses and then all the strings, a sad brass processional and restless music for strings and oboe. All three intertwine and transmute, eventually coming to rest with music of desolation, out of which emerges a ghostly dance, after this comes a resolution of sorts, and the ending, though hardly conclusive, gives the impression of an immense journey achieved.
Janacek (1854-1928)
Czech composer. His reputation outside Czechoslovakia and German-speaking countries was first made as an instrumental composer, with a small number of chamber and orchestral pieces written between his operas, which he considered his main work. The balance has now been largely redressed and he is regarded not only as a Czech composer worthy to be ranked with Smetana and Dvořák, but also as one of the most substantial, original and immediately appealing opera composers of the 20th century.
o Gradually, his music began to be infused with Moravian folksong, which he had started to collect in 1885, moving away from a more Dvorak-inspired style. He was also noting down the pitch inflections and rhythms of speech in his native region, preparing to emulate Mussorgsky in finding a vocal style to suit the particular qualities of his language. All these studies bore fruit in his opera Jenůfa (1904), a passionate tale of love and jealousy set in a Moravian village.
o Style: Although Janáček was born before the last wave of Romantic composers – Mahler, Wolf, Strauss and Reger – his most characteristic music was written at the end of his life, in the 1920s, and belongs in sound and spirit with the music of the younger generation around him. This is not to deny that his musical language was grounded in the 19th century. Despite some modal tendencies from Moravian folk music and the whole-tone inflected passages which began to appear in his music after his flirtation with French music around 1900, his harmony operates functionally, and the dissonance reinforces rather than negates the tonal framework.
o “Speech melody”: During the writing of Jenůfa, Janáček began to formulate the ideas about ‘speech melody’ which were to influence his approach to the voice line and indeed his whole musical idiom for the rest of his life. He frequently stressed how important such work was to an opera composer. Speech melodies were in no sense potential thematic material for Janáček but, rather, study material to help him produce sung stylizations of the irregular patterns of everyday speech. The result was a gradual move away from regular metrical structure in the voice parts of his operas (regular phraseology generally remains in the orchestra) to a more varied and irregular approach using a greater variety of rhythms. Characteristically, the voice parts begin after the beat and end before it, the notes increasingly bunched over the phrase climax.
o His most popular operas:
Jenufa (1904): established his career, made his name. The violent, verismo aspects have been emphasized, along with the Moravian folk aspects; however, a paramount importance is the spiritual development of the two main characters.
The Excursions of Mr Brouček (1920): based on novels by Cech, the opera includes the plots of his first two novels, including Mr. Brouček’s trip to the moon and the 15th century Hussite wars, portrayed in the two parts of the opera. It was his only comic opera (if you ignore his early and unrepresentative ‘The Beginning of a Romance’), and it was the last opera in which Janáček employed a librettist. This work marks an important transition between his earlier operas and the beginning of his last great phase as an opera composer (his four late operas).
The Cunning Little Vixen (1924): Based on Těsnohlídek’s novel, which came about as a text which the Brno newspaper Lidové noviny commissioned to go with a collection of drawings made many years earlier by the painter Stanislav Lolek. These told the story of a clever vixen reared as a cub by a forester but who escapes and raises a family. Janáček wrote The Vixen on the eve of his 70th birthday and in this, his sunniest work, he came to terms with his years and his inevitable death. Thus he boldly introduced the death of the Vixen into the opera, but without fuss or pathos, and ended the opera with an evocation of its beginning and a strong message of renewal into which death is subsumed. The images emphasized in his libretto and in his music are cyclical; the seasons come and go, and though the humans get older, they are juxtaposed against images of youth.
The Makropulos Affair (1926): Čapek’s play, which Janacek adapted into the opera, is essentially a thriller: the gradual uncovering of the mystery surrounding the opera singer Emilia Marty, who is in possession of detailed information about events long past, and who exerts a strange fascination on all who meet her. Her arrival in Prague coincides with the final stages of the protracted lawsuit between Albert Gregor and Jaroslav Prus. The complex lawsuit has proved a hindrance to the opera’s popularity.
From the House of the Dead: technically unfinished, but posthumously produced in 1930. Based on Dostoyevsky’s novel. There is virtually no plot (the arrival and departure of Alexandr Petrovič provides its slender narrative frame), and except for the tiny part of the Prostitute and the trouser role of Aljeja, there are no women in this opera. There are also no main characters: instead it is a ‘collective’ opera in which soloists emerge from the chorus and then blend back into anonymity.
Sibelius (1865-1957)
Finnish composer.
o He was the central figure in creating a Finnish voice in music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His most significant output was orchestral: seven symphonies, one violin concerto, several sets of incidental music and numerous tone poems, often based on incidents taken from the Kalevala, the Finnish-language folk epic.
o His work is distinguished by startlingly original adaptations of familiar elements: unorthodox treatments of triadic harmony, orchestral color and musical process and structure. His music evokes a range of characteristic moods and topics, from celebratory nationalism and political struggle to cold despair and separatist isolation; from brooding contemplations of ‘neo-primitive’ musical ideas or slowly transforming sound textures to meditations on the mysteries, grandeurs and occasionally lurking terrors of archetypal folk myths or natural landscapes. A master of symphonic continuity and compressed, ‘logical’ musical structure, he grounded much of his music in his own conception of the Finnish national temperament.
o Throughout the 20th century Finland regarded him as a national hero and its most renowned artist. Works like Finlandia have been upheld as symbols of Finnish nationalism. Outside Finland, Sibelius’s reputation has been volatile, with passionate claims made both by advocates and detractors.
Rachmaninov (1873-1943)
Russian composer, pianist and conductor. He was one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, the last great representative of Russian late Romanticism. The influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russian composers soon gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom, with a pronounced lyrical quality, expressive breadth, structural ingenuity and a palette of rich, distinctive orchestral colors.
o The piano figures prominently in much of his music, both as a solo instrument and ensemble member.
o He was the last of the Russian masters of the late 19th cent., an extension of the Romantic tradition, with their characteristic gift for long and broad melodies imbued with a resigned melancholy which is never long absent. His operas have failed to hold the stage, mainly because of defects in their librettos, but recordings have given them a new life. Three of the 4 piano concertos are an essential part of the romantic repertory, and the symphonies, though long overshadowed by the piano works, have gained esteem and popularity. The songs are recently being reevaluated.
o Products of his “Indian Summer” - The Fourth Piano Concerto (1926, rev. 1941), the Three Russian Songs (1926), the ‘Corelli’ Variations for solo piano (1931), the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934), the Third Symphony (1935–6, rev. 1938), the Symphonic Dances (1940).
Scriabin (1871/72 – 1915)
Russian composer and pianist. One of the most extraordinary figures musical culture has ever witnessed, Scriabin has remained for a century a figure of cultish idolatry, reactionary yet modernist disapproval, analytical fascination and, finally, aesthetic re-evaluation and renewal. The transformation of his musical language from one that was affirmatively Romantic to one that was highly singular in its thematism and gesture and had transcended usual tonality – but was not atonal – could perhaps have occurred only in Russia where Western harmonic mores, although respected in most circles, were less fully entrenched than in Europe. While his major orchestral works have fallen out of and subsequently into vogue, his piano compositions inspired the greatest of Russian pianists to give their most noteworthy performances. Scriabin himself was an exceptionally gifted pianist, but as an adult he performed only his own works in public. The cycle of ten sonatas is arguably of the most consistent high quality since that of Beethoven and acquired growing numbers of champions throughout the 20th century.
o He rejected conventional harmony by basing many of his apparently unresolvable chords on intervals alien to much of Western music up to that point—chiefly the augmented 4th or tritone.
o The Mystic Chord: The name given to the chord c – f# -b flat – e ′– a ′– d′′; it forms the harmonic basis of his tone-poem Prometheus (1909–10), from which work the chord takes its alternative name.
o Critics have cited the famous ‘mystic chord’ of superimposed 4ths in ‘Prometheus, the Poem of Fire’ (1909–10) as if it were the basis of all his music from that point onwards, yet in each of the astonishing late sonatas which followed in the wake of Prometheus he started afresh. Each draws its material from an ever-denser cluster of notes in procedures that were thought unanalysable until a Soviet critic charted, chord for chord, Skryabin’s daunting journey of self-renewal towards a new music which might eventually have taken its place beside Schoenberg’s evolution of the dodecaphonic or 12-note system. Prometheus has achieved an even wider measure of notoriety for the role played in the score by a tastiera per luce (‘light-keyboard’ or ‘color organ’), designed to project a play of colour, dictated by the harmonic scheme, on to a screen. He is often associated with the ideas of synaesthesia.
o He has been associated with the ideas of mysticism, popular at the time. His absorption of Indian yogic principles and Eastern religions—adding the principle of eternal recurrence and dissolution to his egotistical cosmos—though admirable enough in itself, was intended to serve his projected Misteriya, an apocalyptic multi-media conception mapped out to embrace whole swathes of India, which was unrealized.
Satie (1866-1925)
French composer. He was an iconoclast, a man of ideas who looked constantly towards the future. Debussy christened him ‘the precursor’ because of his early harmonic innovations, though he surpassed his friend's conception of him by anticipating most of the ‘advances’ of 20th-century music – from organized total chromaticism to minimalism. To some extent he made a virtue of his technical limitations, but his painstaking quest for perfection in simplicity, coupled with his ironic wit and his shrewd awareness of developments in other fields of contemporary art, made him the personification of the wartime esprit nouveau in France. o His music: There are so many conflicting interpretations of Satie's career that it may best be viewed as a single span – one whose unconventional direction was determined by a continual rethinking of the aims and aesthetics of music in reaction to 19th-century practice and excesses. Dance, theatre and cabaret music (Satie earned a living as a cabaret pianist in Montmartre for awhile) run as virtually continuous threads through this span, as do the cardinal French virtues of simplicity, brevity and precision. He often integrates popular tunes into his “serious” pieces. In many pieces, there is an element of humor, including the written directions to the performers, eccentric titles, and experimentation. o Satie: “Do not forget that the melody is the Idea, the outline; as much as it is the form and the subject matter of a work. The harmony is an illumination, an exhibition of the object, its reflection … If there is form and a new style of writing, there is a new craft … Great Masters are brilliant through their ideas, their craft is a simple means to an end, nothing more. It is their ideas which endure … The Idea can do without Art.” o Gymnopédies: Satie claimed that they were inspired by Flaubert's Salammbô. Another of the fin de siècle Salome stories. o Vexations (1893) is both the first organized piece of total chromaticism, on a hexachordal basis, and the first minimalist piece, with a period of silent meditation before the 840 repetitions of the short, self-repeating chordal chain that follow. o Parade (1917) Altogether he collaborated on five theatre works with Cocteau, three with Picasso and three with the choreographer Massine, and from Parade onwards he worked mainly for Dyaghilev's Ballets Russes, devising no fewer than six ballet projects for them, four of these with the painter Derain. His attraction to analytical cubism surely inspired the block-like orchestral juxtapositions of Parade, just as its noise-making instruments (typewriters, revolvers, etc.) can be compared to the use of everyday objects in synthetic cubism. This epoch-making ballet, whose unchanging pulse is that of the human heartbeat, put Satie into the forefront of the avant garde and from then on his primary aim was to make his music chic, Parisian and shocking. o Socrate (1919): It is the ultimate example of Apollinaire's ‘cult of restraint’ and, in contrast to Parade, displays a linear logic in the succession of motifs and a more horizontal, continuous approach. Satie aimed to make Socrate ‘white and pure like antiquity’, and its complete absence of rhetoric and almost monochrome simplicity invite the sensitive listener to enter its interiorized world, where the slightest nuance is significant.
Schola Cantorum
An educational institution founded in Paris in 1894 by d’Indy, Charles Bordes, and the organist Alexandre Guilmant to foster the continuation of the church music tradition. The curriculum had a strong antiquarian and musicological bias, encouraging the study of late Baroque and early Classical works, Gregorian chant, and Renaissance polyphony. A solid grounding in technique was encouraged, rather than originality, and the only graduates who could stand comparison with the best Conservatoire students were Magnard, Roussel, Déodat de Séverac, and Pierre de Bréville.
Futurism
o An artistic movement that saw the 20th century as a new age, a future it vigorously embraced. It was specially prominent in Italy and Russia, and was at its height in the second and third decades of the century. In Italy, Futurist artists were stimulated by the speed and energy of mechanized technology and of 20th-century city life. Their principal spokesman was the writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), who delivered the classic statement of Futurist aesthetics: ‘A roaring motor car … is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’ (1909). Debussy, no Futurist in practice, wrote that ‘the century of the aeroplane will require its own music’, indicating that Futurist ideals were widely shared.
o In Russia, during the same period, Futurists were concerned more with spiritual regeneration: Skryabin’s example was crucial for such Futurist composers as Arthur Lourié and Nikolay Roslavets. The Revolution then prompted a Futurist movement more akin to the Italian one, joined by composers who identified themselves with the country’s technological and social change: Aleksandr Mosolov’s orchestral piece The Iron Foundry (1926–8) is a classic example of Soviet Futurism. Shostakovich, too, was involved in the movement, before it was officially suppressed at the beginning of the 1930s.
o The principal musicians of the Italian movement were Francesco Balilla Pratella, whose Musica futurista for orchestra (1912) was one of the few Futurist scores to be published, and Luigi Russolo, who designed mechanical percussion instruments which he called intonarumori (‘noise makers’). Concerts he gave in London (1914) and Paris (1921) excited the interest of Stravinsky, Varèse, Antheil, and others, and thereby contributed to the development of the percussion ensemble as a musical force. The original Futurist group was in decline by the time of the Paris concert, but their musical means and ideals, transmitted through the scores of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, had a strong influence on the Russian futurists of the 1920s. The term also entered popular journalism of the 1920s and 30s, used of composers as unalike as Varèse and Bartók, generally with opprobrious intent. Since then it has normally been reserved for the original Italian and Russian movements.
Neo-classicism
o The conscious use of techniques, gestures, styles, forms, or media from an earlier period. In the history of art and literature, the term is most commonly used for the appeal to models from ancient Greece and Rome made by painters and poets towards the close of the 18th century. In music history, however, that was the period not of neo-classicism but of the Classical style. Neo-classicism therefore has to be a return to that style (or others), and the term is particularly associated with the works Stravinsky wrote between the early 1920s and the early 50s. These include dislocated arrangements of 18th-century Neapolitan music (Pulcinella, after pieces attributed to Pergolesi, 1920), concertos somewhat in the manner of Bach (‘Dumbarton Oaks’ Concerto, 1937–8) or of early Romantic music (Capriccio for piano and orchestra, 1928–9), ballets suggestive of the French Baroque era (Apollo, 1928), and even a full-scale opera with numerous echoes of Mozart (The Rake’s Progress, 1951).
Stravinsky – neo-tonality: the establishment of a single pitch as the tonal center but not via the traditional rules of tonality.
o The influence of Stravinsky’s neo-classical scores was felt by many composers who worked in or visited Paris between the wars, including Poulenc, Prokofiev, Milhaud, Honegger, Martinů, Szymanowski, Copland, and Carter. Their works, like those of Stravinsky himself, reflect earlier music in ways that are often ironic and occasionally downright humorous. One of their concerns, as voiced by Jean Cocteau, was to recapture wit and lightness in music. Often that would mean devaluing the great Austro-German tradition—a devaluing for which World War I had provided encouragement—and an openness to new mentors. In that way neo-classicism proved itself adaptable to the reforming of national styles—French, Russian, Czech, Polish, American—since models could be taken from earlier composers (Gounod, Chopin) or from folk music and jazz.
o Neo-classicism in Austria and Germany tended to be less brisk and carefree, if only because there the central musical tradition could not be so easily subverted or forgotten. It also started earlier, and for different reasons. At a time when Mahler and Strauss were enlarging and extending the language of Romanticism, Reger, Busoni, and Schoenberg began interesting themselves in the clearer outlines and smaller forces of Bach and Mozart. Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony no. 1 (1906), a symphony for just 15 instruments, is neo-classical in its compactness and also in its use of counterpoint as a means to impose order on advanced tonal harmony. Busoni, like Reger, was deeply attached to Bach, though in propounding his notion of ‘young classicity’ he also elevated Mozart as an example of pure musicality, and thereby had some influence on such emerging composers as Kurt Weill, his pupil. However, the leading neo-classicist of the Austro-German world was Hindemith, whose concertos and chamber works of the 1920s, in particular, are full of Bachian forms and textures, often conducted with a boisterous vigour.
o Like Stravinsky and other contemporaries, Hindemith moved from 18th- to 19th-century models in the later 1920s and 30s, and so from neo-classicism to what has sometimes been called ‘neo-romanticism’. Such a move could be made for reasons of political necessity or social idealism: in the USSR a kind of neo-romanticism became the state-approved norm for music, while composers like Copland took very much the same route out of a desire to democratize music and embrace the widest possible audience.
o Schoenberg openly disapproved of neo-classicism, especially Stravinsky’s, on the grounds that it represented an abdication from the composer’s duty to give musical history a responsible, responsive continuation. However, in his own works of the 1920s and 30s he reinstated Classical elements of form, thematic development, dance metres, and so on; he also occasionally made arrangements or recompositions of Baroque pieces. One such work—his Cello Concerto, after M. G. Monn—is close cousin to Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, and there is a neo-classical element, too, in the music written after 1920 by his pupils Berg and Webern.
o Webern’s music shows the clear influence of Bach in its forms and in its persistent counterpoint: his String Quartet (1936–8), for instance, is largely canonic and includes the B–A–C–H motif, while his two late cantatas (1938–9, 1941–3) resemble Bach’s in their chains of arias and choruses. But his music avoids any recourse to tonal harmony and—perhaps thereby—any open irony. Rather as in works of the same period by Bartók, such as Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936), Bachian features are thoroughly absorbed, so that ‘neo-classical’ seems a less appropriate term for the music than simply ‘classical’.
Schoenberg (1874-1951)
Austro-Hungarian composer. One of the greatest and most influential figures of 20th-century music, Schoenberg was a reluctant revolutionary, and his pioneering work in atonality and serialism has to be understood within the context of a lifelong commitment to the Austro-German tradition, particularly to the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. This commitment was not the product of education, for Schoenberg had no formal training in theory or composition; only when he was in his 20s did he benefit from some instruction from his friend and later brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky. His feeling for tradition was, rather, the natural allegiance of a man who had grown up playing the violin and cello in string quartets, and who always strove to emulate the quality of musical thought he found in the chamber music of the past.
o Early tonal (post-Romantic) period: In two of his earliest published works, Verklärte Nacht for string sextet (1899) and Pelleas und Melisande for orchestra (1902–3), he brought the harmonic innovations of Wagner and Richard Strauss into thoroughly worked forms. Both are narrative symphonic poems, but both are also consistent musical arguments. In the case of Pelleas, which tells the story of Debussy’s roughly contemporary opera, the music takes the form of a single-movement symphony, rich in thematic connection and contrapuntal development, deriving as much from Brahms and Reger as from Strauss.
o Expressionist period (atonal) period: In 1908, Schoenberg made the break into atonality, abandoning the attempt to fit atonal harmonies into tonal forms. In this he may have been encouraged by the two gifted young pupils he had recently acquired, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, though it is important to note that he rarely based his teaching on his own new compositional ideas. His early atonal works, particularly the Five Orchestral Pieces (1909) and the ‘monodrama’ Erwartung (also 1909; staged 1924), sound like products of the subconscious. They use a fantastic variety of harmony, rhythm, and color, and they take place at an intense emotional level which justifies the term ‘expressionist.’
Erwartung, for instance, is a one-act opera with a single soprano role which explores the innermost sensations of terror, regret, and hope felt by a woman searching a dark forest for the lover who has abandoned her.
Pierrot lunaire (1912), whose theatrical use of a reciter with small ensemble makes it one of Schoenberg’s most accessible works, inhabits a nocturnal world of the macabre and ironic, its strangeness heightened by the reciter’s use of Sprechstimme—a kind of vocal production lying between speech and song.
Die Jakobsleiter (1917), which deals with the characteristic theme of moral steadfastness as the stony but unavoidable route to perfection of the soul. Its composition was interrupted when Schoenberg was called up for war service and, like many later projects, it was never completed.
o Serial (late) period: Schoenberg began to work out the technique of serial composition as a means of bringing order into atonality. The lack of any coherent harmonic framework had, since 1908, prevented him from writing fully developed music; his atonal works are either short (the Six Little Piano Pieces of 1911 particularly so) or else rely on a text to provide continuity. But with serialism he was able to return to thematic forms in the old manner, as in the Piano Suite (1921–3), which looks back to keyboard suites of the Baroque period, or the Wind Quintet (1923–4), which has the usual four movements of a Classical chamber work. The possibilities of the technique were extended in a succession of major abstract works: the Variations for orchestra (1926–8), the Third and Fourth string quartets (1927, 1936), the concertos for violin (1935–6) and piano (1942). In many cases, he turned to older formal models and lighter modes of expression (like serenades and suites).
Von heute auf morgen (Frankfurt, 1930): comic opera.
Moses und Aron (1930–2; staged Zürich, 1957): the problem of communicating a vision of God. This is often read as a depiction of Schoenberg’s own situation with 12-tone and his pupil Berg’s success.
A Survivor from Warsaw for reciter, male chorus, and orchestra (1947) was another impassioned response to events of WWII.
o Some major writings are compiled in Style and Idea. Harmonielehre is a major work on theory.
Pitch-class system
In Set theory, pitch classes are defined by both these equivalence relations, so that there are just 12 pitch classes, corresponding to the notes of the chromatic scale, often numbered from 0 to 11 (all ‘c,’ regardless of octave, would be zero). The choice of which pitch class to call 0 is a matter of convention or expedience. The commonest conventional choice is C, in which case C# is 1, D is 2 and so on. Or, if the music under consideration is a 12-note serial piece, 0 could stand for the first pitch of the row in its prime or initial statement. Thus each pitch class in a 12-note row denotes one of many possible pitches, related by octave or enharmonic equivalence, all of which are equally appropriate as far as the identity of the row is concerned.
o Set theory is not the same as serialism, but the two share many of the same methods and ideas. Set theory encompasses the notion of defining sets of pitches and organizing music around those sets and their various manipulations. A Pitch Class Set is simply an unordered collection of pitches. The 12 unique pitches on the keyboard, or pitch classes, are numbered from 0 to 11, starting with ‘C’. For example, the pitch class set consisting of the notes C, E, and G would be written as (0,4,7). Composers treat sets with varying amounts of freedom when applying the set-class method to their atonal music.
o Allen Forte, perhaps the most important music theorist of our time, catalogued every possible prime form for sets with 3-9 members and ordered them according to their interval content. He gave each of these prime forms a name, like “5-35.” The first number is an index of how many pitches are in the set, the second number was assigned by Dr. Forte.
o The complement of a set consists of all notes not in the set. Complement sets share the same catalog number in Forte’s classification system (e.g., the complement of 5-35 is 7-35).
o Here is a brief list of just a few popular forte numbers:
Prime Form Forte Number
Viennese trichord (0,1,6) 3-5
Major and minor triads (0,3,7) 3-11
Major and minor scales (0,1,3,5,6,8,10) 7-35
The octatonic scale (0,1,3,4,6,7,9,10) 8-28
Expressionism
o An artistic movement concerned with the ruthless expression of disturbing or distasteful emotions, often with a stylistic violence that may involve pushing ideas to their extremes or treating the subject matter with incisive parody. The term is especially associated with the ‘Blaue Reiter’ group of painters, including Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, who worked in Munich in the years before World War I, but it has been extended to cover also, for example, the poetry of Georg Trakl and some of the music of Schoenberg and his pupils, particularly the atonal, non-serial works they composed from 1908 to c.1920.
o This is a not inappropriate extension of meaning, for Schoenberg took a close interest in the work of the ‘Blaue Reiter’ group. He was influenced by Kandinsky’s thinking; he took up painting in an Expressionist manner, producing numerous vivid if amateurish self-portraits; and he published an article in the yearbook Der blaue Reiter (1912), which also included songs by him and his pupils Berg and Webern. Moreover, a work such as Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces (1909) bears comparison with Expressionist painting in its lack of conventional logic, its emotional turbulence, and its bewildering variety of colors and shapes. Schoenberg here allies himself with Kandinsky in a mistrust of rules, a belief that the artist must begin afresh with each work, allowing it to take a form concordant with his inner vision, unrestricted by anything external.
o Kandinsky’s influence on Schoenberg’s work is evident in practical terms in the case of Die glückliche Hand (1910–13; staged 1924), which follows the painter’s requirements for ‘stage composition’ in music, words, and light. Following the Expressionist belief that the artist must be true to his vision in its wholeness, Schoenberg not only composed the text and music of Die glückliche Hand but also designed the costumes, the setting, and an elaborate lighting scheme.
o The portrayal of characters in extreme or psychotic states, a feature of Expressionist drama, is to be found not only in Die glückliche Hand but also in Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909; staged 1924), a musical ‘monodrama’ for a woman seeking her lover in a forest at night. The crazed figures and menacing situations of Berg’s Wozzeck (1917–22; staged 1925) are also typically Expressionist, as is the opera’s reliance on such ominous symbols as the blood-red moon. Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1912), though often satirical and ironic in tone, is no less characteristic of Expressionist art in the violence of its gestures and in its deep psychological penetration, exposing feelings of longing, abandonment, and murderousness that border on insanity.
Strauss’s Salome and Elektra are often cited as early examples of Expressionism.
o Since Expressionism demanded such intense self-examination, it is not surprising that, in the raw state, it was a short-lived movement. Schoenberg, again like Kandinsky, began to codify his language in the early 1920s, developing serialism just as Kandinsky was moving into geometric purity. However, some later composers, for example Peter Maxwell Davies, have sometimes been seen as perpetuating the Expressionism of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern.
Twelve-tone method
Music in which all 12 notes of the chromatic scale have equal importance—that is, music which is not in any key or mode and thus may be described as ‘atonal’. The term has also been used for all serial music, or alternatively for serial music that follows the principles established by Schoenberg rather than those of later composers such as Boulez or Babbitt. There are occasional examples in 18th- and 19th-century music of themes that contain all 12 chromatic notes: that of Bach’s Musical Offering is one such, and Liszt’s Faust Symphony provides at its opening a striking instance of a theme using each of the 12 notes once only. However, these works should not be described as ‘12-note music’, since the context in both cases is tonal. A few of Liszt’s last piano pieces show him coming very close to atonality, but the first true 12-note compositions were probably Schoenberg’s Five Piano Pieces op. 23 (1920–23). Charles Ives came to atonality at about the same time quite independently. Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern continued to write 12-note music from 1908 onwards, though Schoenberg made some returns to diatonic procedures. After his development of serialism in the early 1920s, the three composers concentrated on that method.
Berg (1885-1935)
Austrian composer. Along with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg and fellow pupil Anton Webern in the years before and immediately after World War I, he moved away from tonality to write free atonal and then 12-note music. At once a modernist and a Romantic, a formalist and a sensualist, he produced one of the richest bodies of music in the 20th century, and in opera, especially, he had few equals. o His formal studies with Schoenberg came to an end in 1910, yet for the rest of his life he revered his teacher as a musical father, and dedicated to him four of his small output of 12 major works. His music is also deeply influenced by Mahler and Debussy. o Altenberglieder (1912): a set of five songs for soprano and orchestra. o Three Orchestral Pieces (1914-15): comprising a prelude (in which melodic-harmonic music arises from the noise of percussion and subsides back), a waltz-rondeau, and an immense, fateful march. This exhibit Mahler’s influence, particularly his 6th Symphony. o Wozzeck: Berg began Wozzeck while serving in the Austrian army during World War I. The opera is based on Büchner's drama. Berg himself characterized the large-scale dramatic and musical planning of Wozzeck as a ternary ABA structure in which the highly wrought ‘symphonic’ central act was flanked by the more loosely constructed outer acts. But the self-contained musical structure of each scene is precisely tied to its dramatic function. Thus the five scenes of Act 1, an exposition that introduces the five main characters in turn and delineates Wozzeck’s relationship to them, are designated as a series of five character-pieces; Act 2, the opera’s dramatic development, is a symphony in five movements, while the five scenes and final orchestral interlude of Act 3 (‘catastrophe and epilogue’) are a sequence of six inventions on single musical ideas. o Chamber Concerto for piano, violin, and 13 wind instruments (1923–5): written for Schoenberg's 50th birthday and designed to celebrate the fellowship of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. It is filled with triple ideas: there are three movements and three main motifs (based on translating the composers' names into notes)—the number symbolism extends even to the bar-counts of sections within movements. o Lyric Suite (1925-26): for string quartet, interleaved serial with non-serial movements. o Lulu: In 1928, Berg began work on his second opera, Lulu, constructing his own libretto from two plays by Frank Wedekind. The final act of Lulu was left unfinished (it was completed by Friedrich Cerha for the first performance of the whole opera in 1979). Lulu is about the classic operatic subjects—love, death, and sexual power—treated in a manner that is typically at once sumptuous and sardonic. The central character is a force of nature, whose chief features are a violent attractiveness to men and an equally violent independence. Through the first half of the work she rises through society; then, with numerous correspondences in the dramatic and musical substance, she falls, to reach her nadir as a prostitute, murdered at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Although Lulu lacks the easily comprehended musical symmetry of Wozzeck, its large-scale structure is completely reliant on closed forms in a way that invokes the ‘number opera’, even though those formal divisions do not always coincide with the dramatic divisions into acts and scenes. Each scene is built up from more or less self-contained units, carefully defined in the score; Berg’s terminology is not wholly consistent, and the unfinished Act 3 left some of the forms untitled. The first two acts are dominated by the sonata and rondo structures respectively, the third by the theme and variations that first appear in its orchestral interlude; the entire structure is unified further by the increasing tendency of the music to recapitulate earlier material, until the final scene contains little that has not been heard earlier in widely differing dramatic contexts. Berg’s use of 12-note technique in Lulu is very much tailored to his own dramatic ends, and differs from classical Schoenbergian method in several respects. Although all its note rows are ultimately derived by permutation from the single basic set that represents Lulu’s innate sexuality, in practice the score is based on a collection of interrelated rows used both as ordered pitch sets and as tropes, and whose distinct melodic shapes function as character motifs throughout the opera: they portray Lulu’s protean nature (indicating how each of her admirers has a different concept of her), Schön’s conformist inflexibility, Alwa’s lyrical idealism, Geschwitz’s selfless love and so on. Material derived from several rows may be combined in harmonic complexes with strong tonal tendencies.
Webern (1883-1945)
Austrian composer and conductor. Webern, who was probably Schoenberg’s first private pupil, and Alban Berg, who came to him a few weeks later, were the most famous of Schoenberg’s students and became, with him, the major exponents of 12-note technique in the second quarter of the 20th century. Webern applied the new technique more rigorously than either Schoenberg, who took many liberties, or Berg, who never used it exclusively; Webern’s strictness, and his innovative organization of rhythm and dynamics, were seized upon eagerly by Boulez and Stockhausen and other integral serialists of the Darmstadt School in the 1950s and were a significant influence on music in the second half of the century.
o Webern’s style changed three times: in 1908, when he abandoned tonality altogether and began to write the very brief, pointillistically disposed pieces of opp.3–11; in 1914, when he took up songwriting again and began to connect the scattered parts of his ensembles to form continuities; and in 1926, when he became secure in the 12-note technique and for the first time began to compose successfully in extended instrumental forms. His style emphatically did not change with his adoption of 12-note technique, though it did change as the result of the stability the technique offered him.
o His first efforts in atonality came, like Schoenberg’s, in songs to poems by Stefan George, 14 settings dating from 1907–9. The George songs were followed by several sets of instrumental pieces, all atonal and increasingly concise. The somewhat Mahlerian Six Orchestral Pieces of 1909, for instance, were succeeded by a group of Five Pieces for smaller forces (1911–13), the shortest of which lasts 14 seconds. Similar in scale are Webern’s other works of this period, which include his Six Bagatelles for string quartet and Three Little Pieces for cello and piano, as well as several songs.
o Symphony for small orchestra (1928): he realized the potentialities of the technique for creating music in strictly symmetrical forms: the first of the two movements is a double canon in sonata form, the second a palindromic set of variations.
o All his later instrumental works—the Quartet for violin, clarinet, tenor saxophone, and piano (1930), the Concerto for nine instruments (1931–4), the Piano Variations (1936), the String Quartet (1936–8), and the Orchestral Variations (1940)—are similarly tightly structured. Often the series itself is symmetrical, most extremely so in the Concerto, where a single three-note idea is perpetually shown in new lights. This delight in all-pervasive unity reflected Webern’s aim to emulate the perfection of the natural world; the flowers and mineral crystals of the Alps were a particular joy to him.
o Became extremely influential following his death: Within a few years of his death, however, young composers had proclaimed him ‘THE threshold’ (Boulez) to the new music and his influence was being felt by Stravinsky.
Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Russian composer, later of French (1934) and American (1945) nationality. One of the most widely performed and influential composers of the 20th century, he remains also one of its most multi-faceted. A study of his work automatically touches on almost every important tendency in the century’s music, from the neo-nationalism of the early ballets, through the more abrasive, experimental nationalism of the World War I years, the neo-classicism of the period 1920–51 and the studies of old music which underlay the proto-serial works of the 1950s, to the highly personal interpretation of serial method in his final decade. To some extent the mobile geography of his life is reflected in his work, with its complex patterns of influence and allusion. In another sense, however, he never lost contact with his Russian origins and, even after he ceased to compose with recognizably Russian materials or in a perceptibly Slavonic idiom, his music maintained an unbroken continuity of technique and thought.
o Early Years (Paris ballets): From 1903 to 1906 he was a private composition pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov.
The Firebird (1910): Ballet in two scenes by Stravinsky to a scenario by Mikhail Fokine, who also choreographed it for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Paris, 1910). The original score was in 19 sections but Stravinsky wrote a five-movement suite from the ballet in 1911 and revised it in 1919; he composed a ten-movement version in 1945. Indebted to Rimsky (human characterized by diatonic music, while supernatural creatures and places are cast in octatonic or chromatic realms).
Petrushka (1911): Ballet in four scenes by Stravinsky to a scenario by Alexandre Benois; it was choreographed by Mikhail Fokine for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Paris, 1911). Stravinsky made an orchestral suite from the ballet (1914); it was reorchestrated in 1947 as a suite in four parts with 15 movements. Stravinsky arranged three movements for piano (1921) and made a four-hand piano reduction of the score.
The Rite of Spring (1913): Ballet (‘scenes of pagan Russia’) in two parts by Stravinsky to a scenario by Nicholas Roerich; it was choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Paris, 1913). It is in two parts, ‘The Adoration of the Earth’ and ‘The Sacrifice’. Stravinsky made a four-hand piano reduction of the score. Premiere on 29 May 1913 at Théâtre des Champs‐Elysées was occasion of celebrated riot, often cited as one of the starting points of modernism.
Pulcinella (1920): Ballet with song in one act by Stravinsky to a scenario by Leonid Massine, who choreographed it for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes with designs by Pablo Picasso (Paris, 1920); for soprano, tenor, bass, and chamber orchestra, it is an adaptation of works by Pergolesi or formerly attributed to him. Stravinsky made a suite from it for chamber orchestra (c.1922, revised 1947). His Suite italienne (1932) is also arranged from Pulcinella; he collaborated with Piatigorsky in a five-movement version for cello and piano and with Samuel Dushkin in a six-movement one for violin and piano.
Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920): composed in memory of Debussy.
o Neo-classical Works: Stravinsky’s neo-classicism takes the form of borrowing forms, ideas, and styles from throughout Western music, not just (in fact, least of all) from the Classical period. For instance,
Oedipus rex (1926–7; Vienna, 1928): can be given as an opera or as an oratorio, looks back to Handel in its general shaping and in its massive choruses, while the arias have something of Verdi’s passion.
The ‘Dumbarton Oaks’ Concerto (1937–8): a modern Brandenburg.
Concerto for piano and wind (1923–4): reminiscences of Bach.
Capriccio for piano and orchestra (1928–9): sprinkles Weber-like playfulness on a concerto grosso format.
Violin Concerto in D (1931): written ‘against’ the great 19th-century works in the same key (by Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky), it exemplifies the anti-Romantic tendency in Stravinsky’s neo-classical music. As he wrote in his Chroniques de ma vie of 1935: ‘I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all … The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things.’
o American Years: following the outbreak of World War II, Stravinsky moved from Paris to Los Angeles, which was his home for the rest of his life.
Symphony of Psalms for chorus and orchestra (1930): his first important religious work. Work for chorus and orchestra (without violins and violas) by Stravinsky to a Latin text from Psalms 38, 39, and 150; it was composed in 1930 and revised in 1948.
Symphony in C (1938–40): ‘composed to the Glory of God’.
Symphony in Three Movements (1942–5)
The Rake’s Progress (Venice, 1951): Opera in three acts (nine scenes and an epilogue) to a libretto by Auden and Kallman after William Hogarth’s series of paintings (1732–3). The plot, ostensibly a device to link Hogarth’s painted scenes, makes explicit or implicit reference (and sometimes both at once) to the myths of Venus and Adonis as well as Orpheus (on which Stravinsky had just completed a ballet), to the Faust legend and to the Don Juan tradition, while at the same time embodying the distinctive structure of a fairy-tale.
• Stravinsky confessed the late Mozart operas to have been his sources not only of inspiration (particularly Don Giovanni) but of style, even specific figurations. Later, more boldly, he was to declare himself ‘Mozart’s continuer’, even though the opera’s musical structure is actually far less ambitious than Mozart’s, relying to a great extent on the simple verse and refrain of the ballad opera. The list of additional creditors cited by critics would include – at a minimum, and in chronological order – Handel, Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Rossini, Donizetti (Don Pasquale) and Verdi. Nor will anyone approaching The Rake from a Russian perspective miss the resonances from Tchaikovsky’s Pushkin operas (Yevgeny Onegin and The Queen of Spades). It resurrects stilted 18th-century convention right down to harpsichord-accompanied secco.
• The overt display of precedents has been deplored as reactionary, but it issues from what Auden identified, in an essay on Yeats, as the central ‘modern problem’: that of being ‘no longer supported by tradition without being aware of it’.
In his works from the Three Shakespeare Songs (1953) to the cantata Threni (1957–8), he came to a full adoption of 12-note serial methods.
Serialism
A method of composition in which a fixed permutation, or series, of elements is referential (i.e. the handling of those elements in the composition is governed, to some extent and in some manner, by the series). Most commonly the elements arranged in the series are the 12 notes of the equal-tempered scale. This was so in the technique introduced by Schoenberg in the early 1920s and employed by him in most of his subsequent compositions. Serialism was quickly taken up by his pupils, including Berg and Webern, and then by their pupils, but not at first by many outside this circle, the most important exceptions being Dallapiccola and Krenek. The method spread more widely and rapidly in the decade after World War II, when Babbitt, Boulez, Nono and Stockhausen produced their first acknowledged works. These composers and their colleagues sometimes extended serialism to elements other than pitch, notably duration, dynamics and timbre. At the same time serial techniques began to be used by already established composers; here the outstanding example was Stravinsky. The diverse range of composers so far mentioned should indicate that serialism cannot be described as constituting by itself a system of composition, still less a style. Nor is serialism of some sort incompatible with tonality, as is demonstrated in works by Berg and Stravinsky, for example, though it has most usually been employed as a means of erecting pitch structures in atonal music. o In 12-note serialism (sometimes referred to as ‘dodecaphony’, a term which is ambiguous in that it can refer to non-serial atonal music) the series is an ordering of the 12 notes of the equal-tempered chromatic scale (i.e. the 12 pitch classes) so that each appears once. Such a series can exist at 12 transpositional levels, all of which Schoenberg considered to be forms of the same series, and he also included the inversion, the retrograde and the retrograde inversion at each transpositional level in the complex, so that the series may be used in any of 48 forms. Thus the constant reference is a series of 11 interval classes in any of four shapes – prime, retrograde, inversion and retrograde inversion – at any of 12 transpositional levels. This is the understanding of the series that later composers have accepted. o Rhythmic Serialism: The use of ordered patterns of durations appears in Berg (Lyric Suite, third movement) and Webern (notably in the Variations op.30 for orchestra, 1940). Berg’s rhythmic series is made up of 12 durations, each of one, two or three units; Webern employed two four-item series. Both used the series in exact retrogrades, varied them by filling in parts of durations with rests, and ‘transposed’ them by multiplying all values by the same integer. Babbitt also used rhythmic orderings which are formally analogous with pitch-class serialism. o “Total Serialism”: rhythmic serialism raises difficulties of perceptibility (and performability), these are still more acute when serial procedures are applied to other sound aspects (dynamics, tempo, timbre/attack/instrumentation etc.). In the early 1950s several European composers, notably Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono, adhered more or less firmly to such extensions of serialism; the term ‘total serialism’ was coined for these endeavours. Boulez’s Structures I contains not only the rhythmic serialism described above but also quasi-serial composition using sets of 12 dynamic markings and 12 indications of attack. The sort of heterogeneity that issued from such practices is illustrated in the opening of Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte (1952), though music constructed so consistently in isolated ‘points’ is rare in this composition and, indeed, in Stockhausen’s work as a whole. Note that the first five bars announce a 12-note set, but the pitch-class serialism of the work is far from orthodox. Few compositions apart from Boulez’s Structures I attempt to follow ‘total serialism’ with any degree of thoroughness, but the notion did give rise to ideas that remained important in the work of those composers most closely associated with it, notably Boulez himself, Stockhausen, Nono and Pousseur. Principal among these ideas were the avoidance of repetition at all levels and in all domains, and the pre-compositional creation of ‘scales’ determining features that had not been so determined previously, even if the choice made from those ‘scales’ was not always in accordance with any serial procedure.
Bartok (1881-1945)
Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and pianist. Although he earned his living mainly from teaching and playing the piano and was a relentless collector and analyst of folk music, Bartók is recognized today principally as a composer. His mature works were, however, highly influenced by his ethnomusicological studies, particularly those of Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak peasant musics. Throughout his life he was also receptive to a wide variety of Western musical influences, both contemporary (notably Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg) and historic; he acknowledged a change from a more Beethovenian to a more Bachian aesthetic stance in his works from 1926 onwards. He is now considered, along with Liszt, to be his country’s greatest composer, and, with Kodály and Dohnányi, a founding figure of 20th-century Hungarian musical culture.
o First Quartet (1909): is typical of this period of Bartok’s compositional career in combining features from Hungarian folk music with others taken from contemporaries in the West (particularly Debussy). He ultimately wrote six quartets, considered some of his greatest pieces.
o The Wooden Prince (1917): Ballet in one act, its successful production led to the production of Bluebeard’s Castle.
o Bluebeard’s Castle (1911; Budapest, 1918): a Hungarian opera. He follows Debussy and Mussorgsky in finding a vocal style to suit the particular qualities of his language. The orchestration still leans in the direction of Strauss, and also Debussy. Libretto by Balázs, whose immediate source was Maeterlinck’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue, set by Dukas, but he changed the story significantly. Where Ariane’s quest is for independence and escape from the castle/prison, Judith wants a relationship with Bluebeard which will make the castle a prison no longer. And where Ariane is by far the most important character, with Bluebeard present for only two brief, if critical, moments, Balázs’s libretto is cast throughout for Judith and Bluebeard together, and alone. Moreover, the opening of the doors, which in Maeterlinck occupies only about a half of the first of the three acts, is now the main dramatic business. Bluebeard’s part is centred on this plainest sort of declamation, while Judith’s hazards more triple time and more rhythmic variety, seeming to want to loosen the rigidity in which she is contained; there is a parallel in the modal construction of the opera, Bluebeard preferring pentatonic expressions whereas Judith sings in richer modes.
o Dance Suite (1923): composed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the merging of Buda and Pest.
o Concerto for Orchestra (1943)
Kodaly (1882-1967)
Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and educationist. With Bartók, he was one of the creators of a new Hungarian art music based on folk sources, and he laid the foundation for the development of a broadbased and musically literate culture.
o In 1900 he went to Budapest to study modern languages at the university and composition, with Hans Koessler, at the Academy of Music. He took the D.Phil. in 1906 with a dissertation on Hungarian folk music, and from that time he began to collaborate with his friend Bartók, both in collecting folksong and in pressing for a new vitality in Hungarian musical life. Like Bartók he was appointed to a professorship at the Budapest Academy in 1907, and he remained in the city for the rest of his life.
o Kodály’s early works, for example the sonatas for cello and piano (1909–10) and for unaccompanied cello (1915), can be compared to Bartók’s of the same period in their successful attempt to create a style on the basis of Hungarian folk music. However, Kodály was the more conservative musician; he did not share Bartók’s rigorousness, and he was content to develop at a slower pace. His style changed little after he had established himself in Hungary and abroad with the Psalmus hungaricus for tenor, chorus, and orchestra (1923)—a powerful work composed, like Bartók’s Dance Suite, for the 50th anniversary of Budapest as a unified city—and the witty, brilliant score for his opera Háry János (1926), from which he extracted a popular orchestral suite.
o The experience of preparing the Psalmus hungaricus, which includes a boys’ choir, led Kodály to concern himself with musical education. He was instrumental in developing a school music curriculum which ensured that every child learnt to sing at sight, and he wrote an enormous quantity of choral music and exercises for children and amateurs. In other fields he became much less prolific. All of his important chamber works, including two quartets (1908–9, 1916–18), were composed before 1920, and he wrote only a few orchestral pieces after Háry János. Of these few, the colourful and dynamic works founded in folk music—Dances of Marosszék (1930, after the piano version of 1927), Dances of Galánta (1933), and ‘Peacock’ Variations (1938–9)—have proved more lasting than the more ambitious but long-winded Concerto for Orchestra (1939) and Symphony (1961).
Modernism
current of compositional thought and practice characterized by innovation.
o Modernism first took shape as a historical phenomenon between 1883 and 1914. Before the death of Wagner, the term ‘modern’ was used interchangeably with ‘new’, ‘recent’ and ‘contemporary’ (following Baudelaire’s defence of Wagner in 1861 and use of the word ‘modern’ in 1863 (The Painter of Modern Life), the term came to signify, in a positive sense, a revolutionary avant garde that rejected historical models and confronted directly the overwhelming character of the new in contemporary life). In its Wagnerian usage it also denoted an embrace of a wide palette of music as a means of conveying narrative and extra-musical content, as opposed to ‘absolute’ music.
o Modernism, throughout the 20th century, retained its initial intellectual debt to Wagnerian ideas and conceits regarding the link between music and history. The art of music was perceived to need to anticipate and ultimately to reflect the logic of history. In Wagner’s view, the imperative of art was a dynamic originality rooted in the past but transcending it.
o Modernism was in evidence as an idea and as a term by the second decade of the 20th century, in association with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913), with Schoenberg’s move into atonality (in about 1908), with the music of the Italian Futurists and Russian followers of Skryabin, and with Busoni’s Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music (1907). But although so many new hopes and endeavors were born at the same time, there was no unanimity of motivation or outlook. For some composers, for instance Varèse and the Futurists, new musical means were necessary at a time when human life was being revolutionized by electricity, by motor transport, and indeed by Revolution, for there was a strong belief in artistic modernism in some quarters in the new USSR. For others, new techniques were needed for expressive purposes, to intensify and characterize images more sharply (Schoenberg), or to venture into transcendence (Skryabin). The new might also be a means of rediscovering the primitive (Stravinsky) or a necessary advance, part of the progress inherent in the great tradition (as was Schoenberg’s stated view).
o In the later 1920s, and especially in the 30s, modernism seemed a spent force. That changed, however, after World War II, when a new generation of composers—Boulez, Barraqué, Babbitt, Nono, Stockhausen, Xenakis—began making new starts on the basis of the most forward-looking music of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Webern, and Varèse. Again, the period of rapid change was quite brief, lasting no more than a decade or so, and again the rationales and results were various, though this time there was a lasting effect, in the work of composers taking their bearings from the modernists of the 1910s and 50s.
