Test #3 Short answer

Question 1

3 musical characteristics helped define the American sound?

Answer 1

open pastoral harmonies and melodies, instrumentation that emphasized band music (more brass instruments and fewer strings), and clear and transparent textures.

Question 2

What is an example of a composer who uses these qualities in their compositions and what are two ways their music that reflects the American spirit?

Answer 2

Aaron Copland:
Open chords to show the vastness of the American west.
Spirituals and other folk heroes and myths in his ballets such as Appalachian Spring, which tells the tale of homesteaders beginning their lives in rural Pennsylvania

George Gershwin:
* Ragtime/jazz style piano concerto Rhapsody in Blue
* Pitch bends and untraditional playing styles

Question 3

What does he mean by “organized sound” or “the liberation of sound?” Identify a composer who represented this attitude and
at least 2 ways they incorporated this into their music.

Answer 3

“the right to make music with any and all sounds.”

Examples:
Singers are asked to use Sprechstimme,
whispering, shouting, or other sounds - Arnold Schoenberg - A Survivor from Warsaw

Electronic music may include environmental
sounds like thunder, or electronically
generated sounds -Edgar Varease - Poeme Electronique.

Question 4

What does the concept “emancipation of dissonance” mean in the context of twentieth-century music? Identify a composer who represented this attitude and at least 2 ways they incorporated this into their music.

Answer 4

Composers treated dissonances with increasing freedom. Distinction between consonance and dissonance blurre. Tones that before would have been used to generate instability and expectation might now be treated as a stable chord, or even a point of arrival. Without the tension-resolution effect of traditional
harmonies, composers sought new ways to organize
pitches and form

Stravinsky  polytonality and polyrhythms
Schoenberg  abandoned tonality and developed
the twelve-tone system

Question 5

Please list at least 3 specific examples, either three for the same composer or three different composers and a specific example of their musical reactions to the world.

Answer 5

• George Crumb’s Black Angels written in response to the Vietnam War
• Prokofiev writing in a more dissonant and personal style while living in the US, but then having to shift to what Stalin prescribed when he moved back to Russia
• Arnold Schoenberg composing in response to the Holocaust with A Survivor from Warsaw