Reading: Expressionism Flashcards
Expressionism
A musical movement that pressed forward with music that is increasingly emotional and complex. Extreme emotional states, extending to hysteria, nightmare, and insanity.
Who led the emancipation of dissonance and the breakdown of tonality?
Schoenberg.
Who developed serialism?
Schoenberg.
Who is the Second Viennese School?
Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg.
Sprechstimme
A vocal style developed by Schoenberg, in between singing and speaking.
What are the prominent musical features in Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg?
- Sprechstimme.
- Disorganized pitches.
What are the prominent musical features in Pierrot Lunaire No. 8 “Night” by Schoenberg?
- Passacaglia (ostinato).
- Soprano asked to sing at bottom of range.
- Nightmarish aspect.
What are the prominent musical features in Pierrot Lunaire No. 18 “The Moonfleck” by Schoenberg?
- Dense, dissonant, atonal, and alarmingly intense.
- Loud, scary.
- Quicksilver motives.
- Obsession.
Influences for Wozzeck by Berg include…
Wagner for the general plan (musical continuity carried by orchestra, uses leitmotivs and contains no arias). Schoenberg for musical style.
What is the plot of Wozzeck by Berg?
A soldier murders his lover, who had been cheating on him with the regimental major. The captain and regimental doctor torment Wozzeck, and Wozzeck murders his lover, then goes mad and drowns himself.
Twelve-Tone System
Method of composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg in which the twelve pitches of the octave are ordered and strictly manipulated.
Serialism
The technique of composing with a series, generally a twelve tone series.
Twelve-Tone Row
Also known as twelve-tone series, an ordering of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, used in composing serial music.
Series
A fixed arrangement of pitches (or rhythms) held to throughout a serial composition.
Transposed
Same note ordering can start from any note in the chromatic scale.
