Nationalism Flashcards
New York Composers’ Collective - early
- Reactionary, communist. Parody of American tunes, complicated music
- New York Composers’ Collective:
Explicitly trying to compose for common workers - Collective composition (communist ethos) but could never agree how complex music ought to be (speaking down or bring up)
- ‘Symphony for Organ and Orchestra’ (1924) - octatonic, polyrhythmic, inaccessible
New York Composer’s Collective - style change
- Michael Gold, literary critic and communist. Wrote in New Masses magazine, ‘there are no workers’ songs and music written in this country’ (1931).
- In combination with onset of Great Depression, musical shift was away from radicalism to popular musical idiom, in which to hide revolutionary message.
- Great depression political side and money since not viable to write modernist music.
- POPULAR FRONT DIRECTIVE: boost in American songbooks, rural folklore in concert repertoire.
Copland Popular Front Music
- The Second Hurricane, 1936. School opera, didactic, teaching children solidarity. Climax when they sing ‘The Capture of Burgoyne’, song in Old American Songbook.
- Music For Radio 1937 (became Prairie Journal as listeners chose) - clarinet solo reminded competition winner of early settlers. Clarinet marked ‘simply, in the manner of a folk song’
Led to Prairie Nationalism
Socialist realism
- Soviet term reflected in American early post-war music because of friendship policy with Soviet Union.
Aims: - Realism/concrete mindedness
- Ideology/party-mindedness
- Nationalism
Composers decided to use folk music to assuage these issues. - Text-based or programmatic music
- Appropriate subject matter (revolution, civil war, peaceful labour)
- Folk roots
- Optimistic endings – still aspirational (so more idealism than realism)
Influence of Socialist Realism to Copland’s work
- Obvious national character of music
- Popular/folk song used
- Ideologocial
- Accessible
e.g. Fanfare for the Common Man (1942)/Symphony no. 3 (1946)
- Fanfare written for entry into war; symphony written after war success
- Inspired by speech by VP Wallace proclaiming ‘dawning of the century of the common man’.
- 3 trumpet ‘wide’ pan-diatonic theme - theme of openness.
- Trumpet theme used in 4th mvt of symphony
- Addressing public, humanist.
e.g. Lincoln Portrait (1942)
- Camptown Races used and speakers who quote Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
- Lincoln as radical left’s way of being generally accepted
Billy the Kid and Rodeo
Prairie Nationalism
Billy the Kid (1938)
- about New Mexico cattle rustler and his violent death which leads him to become a martyr.
- White key pan diatonic opening. Standard for prairie style
Rodeo (1942)
- For Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (successor to Diaghilev ballet)
- More use of folk, less political agenda.
- Traditional folk songs used entirely.
- Even ‘Corral Nocturne’ section which doesn’t quote folk is in same folk style (infusion of folk style). His style of almost wholly C major diatonicism in this section.
- Accessible music
Appalachian Spring
- 1944 for Martha Graham
- Shaker tune variations, ‘Tis the gift to be simple’
- Shaker aesthetic of simplicity with simple music (but sophisticated intergration of melodic ideas)
Harmonic language of openness: superimposed thirds and gentle dissonance of second. - Stravinskian rhythms in sections
how did Copland stay popular?
- Prairie style accessible and not obviously political/communist
- Breakdown of USA/USSR relationship - had to remove communist affiliations from work but was easy to rebrand.
- Popularity in concert genre allowed it to be accepted
Issues with American Nationalism
- Diversity: to what extent is prairie nationalism nationalist for all americans?
- Dvorak late 19th century brought in to design American style of music - European centric musical dominance
- White settlers trying to create music for country which isn’t theirs.
Issues with trying to create Hungarian Nationalism
- Hungarian nationalism difficult because they did not have own identity for a long time: spent a long time as an occupied territory, or part of Austro-Hungary, then after WWI they lost 70% of territory as a result of Treaty of Trianon.
- Musical result was to cling to folk tunes, but combine with modernism: a new musical style was developed, more successfully than in any other country (Taruskin).
- Idealised Hungarian music, conceived abstractly. Not just Hungarian, but Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian - more pluralistic. Bartok eventually left Hungary when Nazis invaded (they were most strictly nationalist)
Social implications of Bartok’s use of folk
- Modernist ethos immediately not for the people
- Folk music as social basis to justify it
- Western European idiom for composition, influenced at first by Strauss then Schoenberg school.
- Issues of class: saw folk music as ‘peasant music’
Examples of Bartok Folk Music
Four Dirges, no.2 (1912)
- Changed a folk melody by removing all tones which did not adhere to pentatonic scale, then developed it with enharmonic modulations
- Created a modernist sound, not dissimilar to the symmetrical development of ideas in Schoenberg, but Bartok kept it in folk tonal idiom.
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1934)
- Large-scale modernist work, but using folk melodies and features of the style e.g. Bulgarian rhythm (7/8 split into 2, 2, 3) especially in 4th movement.
String Quartet no.4 (1928)
- Modernist but infused with folk idiom e.g. pentatonicism
- Importance of symmetry: arch form overall (1st mvt=last; 2nd=4th). Fibonacci sequence also.
- Symmetry of harmony and form
Bartok relationship with folk music
- Used character of folk music to fully assimilate into his work
- ‘A composer in search of new ways cannot be led by a better master’
- Radical, modernist, experimental - opposite of Copland’s use of folk.
- Bartok appropriating music from people who wouldn’t then be able to understand what he did with it.
