Unit 4, Twentieth Century

Question 1

Schoenberg

Answer 1

moved the German classical tradition toward atonality.

developed the twelve-tone method

Question 2

twelve-tone method

Answer 2

the systematic ordering of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale.
pitches are related to each other, not to a tonic.
The basis is is a row or series.
The pitches of the row may sound successively or simultaneously.
The composer usually states all of the pitches in a row before going to another row.

Question 3

Webern

Answer 3

He began studying with Schoenberg in 1904, the same year as Berg.
He also studied musicology at the University of Vienna and received a Ph.D. in 1906.
His works were widely influential following World War II.
His music is extremely concentrated. Some of his works are only a few measures long. His entire mature output takes less than four hours to play.

Question 4

Klangfarbenmelodie

Answer 4

tone-color melody
Schoenberg’s concept
changes of tone color are perceived as parallel to changing pitches in a melody.

Question 5

L’histoire du soldat

Answer 5

Written by Stravinsky.
Wartime economy forced Stravinsky to turn to small musical ensembles.
This ballet is scored for six solo instruments and percussion.
Using dance movements, such as a tango, waltz, and ragtime, Stravinsky discovered ways to imitate familiar styles within his own musical style

Question 6

neoclassicism

Answer 6

It denotes a broad movement that took place from the 1910s to the 1950s.
Composers revived, imitated, or evoked styles, genres, and forms of pre-Romantic music, particularly from the eighteenth century.
It rejected the high emotions of Romanticism.
Stravinsky used this as a new avenue for his own distinctive style.
Stravinsky’s music has an emotional detachment and can be seen as anti-Romantic.

Question 7

Bartók

Answer 7

He maintained a single pitch center, using diatonic and other scales.
He built melodies from repeated and varied motives.
He retained elaborate contrapuntal procedures from the classical tradition, such as the fugue.
He drew upon complex rhythms and meters common in peasant traditions.
His harmonies, often dissonant, are frequently built from seconds and fourths.
He was fond of symmetry.

Question 8

Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta

Answer 8

Written by Bartók.
The work has four movements, similar to a classical symphony: Slow fugue, Fast, sonata form, Slow arch form, and Rondo finale.
The fugue theme appears in each of the other movements.
Each movement contains canon and imitation, often in inversion.
The outer movements are in A, and the inner movements center on notes a minor third above (C) and below (F-sharp).
The work is neotonal.
All of the movements center on tritone relationships.
The slow movement centers on F-sharp with C as a competing pole.
The themes, created by varying small motives, are often in diatonic modes.

Question 9

Ives

Answer 9

He composed in classical genres after 1902, but mixed in other styles and sounds that he knew.
The Second Symphony paraphrased American popular songs, borrowed passages from classic composers, and combined them in a symphonic idiom

Question 10

Les Six

Answer 10

This was a group of six young composers who drew inspiration from Satie.
They adopted neoclassicism but avoided political dichotomies.
The group collaborated in several joint projects, but each went in an individual way.

Question 11

Shostakovich

Answer 11

He was trained within the Soviet system.
In the 1920s, he was aligned with the modernist composers.
Wrote Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and The Fifth Symphony
He was criticized in the newspaper Pravda for his dissonances and lack of melody, but the symphony can be seen as a response to the criticism of his opera; the work was described as “a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism.”

Question 12

Varèse

Answer 12

created a series of works that sought to liberate composition from musical conventions, such as Integrales (1924-25) and Ionisation (for percussion only, 1929-31).
He believed that sounds were the essential structural components of music, and he considered all sounds acceptable as raw material.
He imagined music as spatial, akin to an aural ballet.
Sound masses—bodies of sound characterized by a particular timbre, register, rhythm, and melodic gesture—moved through music space.
These sound masses change and interact.
A great variety of percussion instruments are treated as equals to strings and winds.

Question 13

Ionisation

Answer 13

Music for percussion only

Question 14

R. Seeger

Answer 14

She was the first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship in music.
She was most active as a composer between 1924 and 1933 in Chicago and New York.
She studied with musicologist Charles Seeger, and they married in 1932.
She developed theories about modern techniques that Crawford refined and applied to her music.
While in New York, she experimented with serial techniques, applying them to parameters other than pitch.
She later believed that preserving folk songs was a greater contribution to the nation’s musical life than writing more modernist works and began editing American folk songs from field recordings.

Question 15

Copland

Answer 15

Jazz and strong dissonance play a part in his early works
He developed a new style by reducing his modernist technique and combining it with simple textures and diatonic melodies and harmonies.
His style has been widely imitated and has become the quintessential musical sound of America, heard often in film and television.

Question 16

Barber

Answer 16

One of many composers who remained committed to tonality

The Adagio for Strings, originally written for string quartet in 1936, expresses his tonal romanticism.

Question 17

Adagio for Strings

Answer 17

Written by Samuel Barber.

Expresses tonal romanticism

Question 18

total serialism

Answer 18

Began to be explored in the late 1940s.
Composers applied the principles of Schoenberg’s tone rows to parameters other than pitch, such as durations, intensities, and timbres.
Other new serial techniques were explored as well.

Question 19

Boulez

Answer 19

…

Question 20

Le marteau sans maître

Answer 20

(The Hammer without a Master)
The work fuses the pointillist style and serial method with a sensitive musical rendition of the text.
The work has nine movements centering on verses by the surrealist poet René Char.
Each number has a different combination of instruments, as in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire.
The ensemble comprises alto flute, xylorimba, vibraphone, guitar, viola, and percussion instruments.
The translucent sound suggests Balinese gamelan music.
The contralto vocal line has wide leaps, glissandos, and some Sprechstimme.

Question 21

Elliot Carter

Answer 21

American composer. Also wrote for virtuoso performers.
He used a complex, nonserial style with innovative rhythms and forms.
Developed a technique known as metric modulation.
Transitions from one tempo and meter to another are through intermediary stages that share aspects of both.
The results are precise proportional changes in the value of a durational unit.
Cello Sonata (1948) is His first work with this procedure.

Question 22

metric modulation

Answer 22

Transitions from one tempo and meter to another are through intermediary stages that share aspects of both.
The results are precise proportional changes in the value of a durational unit.

Question 23

Crumb

Answer 23

He has masterfully created new sounds out of ordinary instruments and objects.

Question 24

Ligeti

Answer 24

This Hungarian composer achieved international fame when three of his compositions were used in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The music for all three works is in constant motion, but static harmonically and melodically, as heard in Atmospheres (1961).
At times he creates the effect of slowly moving masses of sound.

Question 25

Atmosphères

Answer 25

Piece begins with fifty-six muted strings and a variety of wind instruments playing all the chromatic notes through a five-octave range.
Instruments gradually drop out, leaving only the violas and cellos.
Later, clusters of instruments are pitted against each other.
At times he creates the effect of slowly moving masses of sound.

Question 26

minimalism

Answer 26

One of the most prominent trends of the late twentieth century.
Materials are reduced to a minimum and procedures are simplified.
The content of the music should be readily apparent.
Began as an avant-garde style but became a popular and expressive technique.
Influences for minimalism came from numerous sources: Rock music, African music, Asian music, Tonality, and Romanticism

Question 27

Reich

Answer 27

Along with Glass and Adams, brought minimalist procedures into art music with the intent of appealing to a wide audience.
He developed a quasi-canonic procedure in which musicians play the same material out of phase with each other.
He founded his own ensemble, and wrote percussive music in the 1970s.
He attracted a wide range of listeners from the classical and pop worlds.
He used minimalist techniques to create large-scale works with significant emotional content.

Question 28

phase music

Answer 28

Developed by Steve Reich.
A minimalist procedure.
Two parts. One part then pulls ahead slightly, creating new harmonic combinations.

Question 29

Zwilich

Answer 29

She combines continuous variation with older formal devices.
Her use of developing variation is similar to the procedure used by Schoenberg, but the idea is much simpler and more readily understood.

Question 30

Schnittke

Answer 30

He worked in the Soviet Union primarily as a film composer and moved to Germany in 1990.
As the Soviet government relaxed its cultural controls in the 1960s, he explored several modernist techniques.
He later turned to polystylism, a combination of new and old styles.
Symphony No. 1 (1969-72) incorporates passages from works by numerous classical composers that present conflicting styles and historical periods.
His later works, including eight more symphonies, focus more on a small number of ideas borrowed from or modeled on earlier music.

Question 31

World Beat

Answer 31

African popular music reached international audiences.
Musicians like Nigerian Fela Kuti (1938-1997) merged popular styles from the United States with local traditions.
It was assimilated by some Western artists, such as Paul Simon on his album Graceland (1986).
All of these works are quintessentially Western, representing the centuries-old capacity of European music to absorb regional and foreign elements.

Question 32

avant-garde

Answer 32

This term is best reserved for art that seeks to overthrow accepted aesthetics and start fresh.
The movement began in the years before World War I.
The music is not marked by a shared style, but by a shared attitude an unrelenting opposition to the status quo.

Question 33

atonality

Answer 33

Term for music that avoids establishing a central pitch or tonal center

Question 34

Stravinsky

Answer 34

He created an individual voice by developing several traits, most from Russian traditions.
Distinctive qualities: Undermining meter through unpredictable accents and rapid changes of meter, Frequent ostinatos, Static blocks of sound juxtaposed or layered, Discontinuity and interruption, Dissonance based on diatonic, octatonic, and other collections, and Dry, antilyrical, but colorful use of instruments.
He used neoclassicism as a new avenue for his own distinctive style.
His neoclassic music has an emotional detachment and can be seen as anti-Romantic.