Terms for Final Flashcards
Formalist filmmaking
Filmmaker’s task is to create an experience separate from reality
Realist filmmaking
Filmmaker’s job is to distort reality (French New Wave Cinema, Mis-en-scene)
Non-diagetic music
Music heard outside of the frame of the visual story space, otherwise known as background music. This is the music that the characters in the film cannot hear (usually)
Diagetic music
Music produced within the visual story space of the film, otherwise known as source music. This is the music that the characters in the film can hear (usually)
Meta-diagetic
Music that is dreamed, hallucinated, or imagined by one or more of the characters in the film
Displaced-diagetic
Music produced within the visual story space of the film, but that becomes displaced in time
Example: Teutonic Knights from Alexander Nevsky (1938))
Voix acousmatique
A term coined by Michel Chion (film composer and theorist)
Sounds or voices that float without anchor between the diagetic and non-diagetic realms
Example: Schoolhouse scene from The Birds (1963)
Minimalism
dates to 1960s
minimal harmonic and melodic shifts, subtle gradations in rhythm, meter, texture, phase shifting, feedback-genearting looping, “process music”
John Adams, Philip Glass, Steve Rich
Parallelism in scenes
Chief formal device in musics - hero and heroine will unite even when they are apart/haven’t even met, “fated to be mated”
Types of numbers found in musicals
Irrelevent to plot, spirit or ambience of plot, existence relevent ot plot but content not, advance the plot but not with content, enrich the plot but don’t advance it, numbers that advance the plot by content
Imposed Simplicity
A term associated with Copland that allowed his work to become more and more accessible
Igor Stravinsky’s ballets for Ballets Russes
The Firebird (A Russian Fairytale in Two Scenes”) (1910), Petrushka (“A Burlesque in Four Scenes”) (1911), The Rite of Spring (“Scenes of Pagan Russia” (1913)
Leon Bakst (1866-1924)
Artist and set designer Ballet Russes
Alexander Benois (1870-1960)
Art historian and theatre designer, supremacy of ballet over opera, puppet theater
Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929)
Art exhibition organizer, theater impresario, exporting Russian opera and ballet ot Paris, produced three Stravinsky ballets
Michael Fokine (1880-1942)
Scenarist for Firbird, choreographer for Patrushka and Rite of Spring
Vaslav Nijinsk (1890-1950)
Dancer of title role in Petrushka, creator of choreo for Rite of Spring
Nikolai Roerich (874-1947)
Scholar of Russian pagan artwork, author of scenario of Rite of Spring
Ostinato
Short musical passage - often bass melody though sometimes a chord series
Ostinato chord
Heard in the first movement of Rite of Spring (Auguries of Spring)
Octatonic Scale
Stravinsky
Symbolizes the supernatural (pagan Russia in Rite of Spring),
Symmetrical scale made up of alternating whole tones and half tones
Whole Tone Scale
Debussy, Stravinsky
Made up of 6 notes
Comprised only of whole tones
Sense of stasis
Perfectly symmetrical - when transposed by any of its constituent intervals it remains the same
Ex: C D E F# G# A# (C)
Neoclassicism
Dominant in 1920s-40s, reaction against Impressionism and Expressionism in favor of forms associated with Baroque and Classical periods
Abstracts and estranges forms, may be largely consonant with them but it includes modern devices such as ostinato
Neoclassicism (applications)
Music for children (Peter and the Wolf), music performed by children (Let’s Build a Town), music that concerns childhood reminiscence and childhood expereince (The Child and the Enchanted Objects), childlike mindset (Rejoice in the Lamb
Gebrauchtsmusik
Utilitarian or “Workday” music, often bears socialist subtext, accessible and easy to play, Hindemeth (and somewhat Kurt Weil)
3 Distinct Periods of Stravinsky
- Neonationalism (Primitivism): earthy, folklore subject matter - exaggerate exotic features, primitive and raw
- Neoclassicism (Thomist philosophy): back to Mozart, back to Bach, rebuttal to Schoenberg
- 12-tone/serial composition (after death of Schoenberg)
Auger’s Chord
Eb-G-Bb-Db-Fb-Ab-Cb, 2 chords from 2 keys stuck together, sound comes from single octatonic scale but there is an element of chaos/violence/illogical, element of random and irrational, not one single point of consonance, ostinato pattern
Music for Children
An attempt to return to music’s childhood/innocence, metaphor for retreat to the past
3 qualities of Neoclassicism
- Radical simplification of musical materials, 2. Motionless, mechanical repetition (music doesn’t really go anywhere), 3. Block-like quality, the music isn’t organic, telling a story (block-like sum of parts)
Chromatic Displacement
Some notes sound like they are out of place but they feet into the secret theme beneath the surface of the work
2 trends in Germany in the 1920s
- neue sachlichkeit (new objectivity/matter-of-factness)
- Gebrauchtsmusik (everyday/functional music)
Impressionism
L19th/E20th c. France and Russia
Portray things as they appear to the artist at the moment, not as they are thought or known to be
Scientific analysis of nature of light defraction/diffusion w/ photography –> new, more natural light renderings
Symbolism
L19th/E20th c. France and Russia, use music and poetry to recall memories and stir premonitions in audience’s mind, no clear-cut structure - comprised of loosely organized and contrasting succession of images, a whole succession of images in different times and places, ex: depict cloudiness (all associations)
Expressionism
Direct communication/feeling of emotion is the main intention, Schoenberg, feelings of dispair and anxiety, images of real world transformed so they correspond with these ideas or feelings, era of Freud
Sprechstimme
Speech music, style of recitative in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire
Trying to recreate someone who had regressed to a childlike stage
Free atonality
Does not have a key or tonal center, reliedo n poetic texts to give works sense of form and structure
12-tone Composition
Method of composition developed by Schoenberg in 1923, manipuation of one or more 12-tone rows, combination of - standard (prime), retrograde (prime backwards), inverted (intervals in row reversed), retrograde inverted (intervals reversed and given backwards)
12-tone Row
An ordered sequence of 12 tones (pitches) found on the piano keyboard, chromatic scale most familiar example
Serialism
Often used as a synonym for 12-tone composition, but designates atonal composition not wit h12 tones but with subsets series of six
Tchaikovsky vs. Wagner
Apollonian vs. Dionysian
Leitmotif
An identification motif in Wagner’s music dramas. In an opera or music drama, it is a musical motif that is identified with some person, concept, or object
Music drama
Wagnerian opera
Tristan chord
The first chord in Tristan und Isolde. It belongs to no major or minor key, and thus expresses vaguenss and psychological unrest. Brings together two leitmotifs: yearning and fate
Total artwork
Wagner’s term for a dramatic work in which drama, music, poetry, song and painting should be united into a new and complete art form
Pas de deux
Dance for two, long and short forms
Two geometrical (Apollonian) shapes
Attitude and Arabesque
Program music
Instrumental music (usually for orchestra) that seeks to recreate in sound the events and emotions portrayed in a play, a story, a historical event, or even a painting
Program symphony
A symphony with the usual four or five movements in which the individual movements together tell a tale or depict a succession of individual events or scenes
Idee fixe
Literally, fixed idea, but more specifically the obsessive musical theme used to unify the movements in Berlioz’s Fantastic Symphony
Dies irae
Literally, day of wrath, a Gregorian chant sequence written circa 1250 and used as the second part of a Roman Catholic Mass of the Dead. The 5th movement of Berlioz’s Fantastic Symphony, the Dream of a Witches Sabbath, features a parody of the chant played by 2 ophicleides (forerunners to the tuba)
Mimesis
The representation of reality in art
