The Enjoyment of Music 10th Shorter Edition

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The Enjoyment of Music 10th Shorter Edition
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Unit XXV The New Music
From Schoenberg I learned that tradition is a
home we must love and forgo. Lukas Foss
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75. New Directions

• innovations in the last half of the twentieth
  century have outstripped the most far-reaching
  changes of earlier times

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The Arts since the Mid-Twentieth Century

• Social turmoil reflected in the arts
• Movements in the arts
• Abstract Expressionism
• Pop Art
• Post-Modernism
• Feminist and ethnic art and literature
• Widespread experimentation in poetry, literature

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The Arts since the Mid-Twentieth Century

• Performance art
• John Cage
• Laurie Anderson
• National schools of filmmaking
• Germany
• China
• Poland

John Cage
As these two formshuman and machinebegin to
merge a little bit, were talking about
technology really as a kind of new nature,
something to measure against, to make rules from,
to investigate. Laurie Anderson
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Toward Greater Organization in Music
Arnold Schoenberg

• Application of Schoenbergs 12-tone method
• Total serialism

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Toward Greater Freedom in Music

• Counter to total serialism
• Chance determines portions of happening
• Indeterminate
• aleatoric music
• open form
• Collage
• Microtonal scales

My music liberates because I give people the
chance to change their minds in the way Ive
changed mine. John Cage
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The Postwar Internationalism

• United States
• Milton Babbitt
• John Cage
• Earle Brown
• Morton Feldman
• Italy
• Luciano Berio
• Greece
• Iannis Xenakis

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The Postwar Internationalism

• Poland
• Krzysztof Penderecki
• Germany
• Karlheinz Stockhausen
• France
• Pierre Boulez
• Russia
• Sofiya Gubaidulina

Pierre Boulez
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The Enjoyment of Music 10th Shorter Edition
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76. The New Virtuosity of the Modern Age

• Contemporary virtuosity
• Avant-garde specialists
• Cathy Berberian

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George Crumb (b. 1929) and Avant-Garde
Virtuosity

• American Composer
• Emotional, dramatic, expressive music
• University of Pennsylvania
• Federico García Lorca

Music is a system of proportions in the
service of a spiritual impulse. George Crumb
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Crumb Ancient Voices of Children (Listening
Guide)

• Cycle of songs
• Soprano, boy soprano, oboe, mandolin, harp,
  electric piano, percussion
• Voice is used like an instrument
• Vocalise
• Singing into amplified piano, singing microtones
• International percussion
• Dark intimations of poetry

Listening Guide PDF
I feel that the essential meaning of this poetry
is concerned with the most primary things Life,
death, love, the smell of the earth, the sounds
of the wind and the sea.
George Crumb
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The Enjoyment of Music 10th Shorter Edition
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77. Contemporary Composers Look to World Music

• Important Experimenters
• Henry Cowell (18971965)
• Music
• Japan, India, Iran, rural Ireland, America
• Foreign scales
• Tone clusters
• Harry Partch (19011974)
• Microtonal music

I believe composers must forge out of the many
influences that play upon them and never close
their ears to any part of the world of
sound. Henry Cowell
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John Cage (19121992)

• American Composer
• Prepared piano to simulate Javanese gamelan
• Items inserted in the piano strings
• East Asian philosophy
• Quest for tranquility
• Indeterminacy
• Role of silence 433

I thought I could never compose socially
important music. Only if I could invent something
new, then would I be useful to society. John
Cage
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Cage Sonata V, from Sonatas and Interludes
(Listening Guide)

• Written for prepared piano
• Percussive effects
• Non-Western timbre
• Seemingly without a clear meter

Listening Guide PDF
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The Javanese Gamelan
Indonesian music Music for ritual
ceremonies Court and shadow puppet theater Two
tunings sléndro pentatonic pélog
heptatonic Cyclical rhytmic structure (colotomic)
Simply said, gamelan music is the most beautiful
music in the world, and I for one see no reason
to do any other kind of music ever again.
- Lou Harrison
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Javanese Gamelan Music Patalon(Listening Guide)
Listening Guide PDF

• Central Javanese music
• Shadow-puppet theater piece
• Pentatonic melodies
• Colotomic rhythmic structure

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Bright Sheng and the Meeting of Musical Cultures

• Bright Sheng (b.1955)
• Innovative contemporary composer
• Blends Western and Asian ideas
• Artistic suffering during the Cultural Revolution
  (1966-1976)
• Arrived in US in 1982
• Teaches now at the University of Michigan

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Bright Shengs Music

• Integrates Western and Eastern elements
• Compositional style and instruments
• Pipa, sheng, erhu, yangqin, dizi, suona
• Evokes Chinese folk songs
• China Dreams is a nostalgic work
• Set in four movements
• Scored for large Western orchestra

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Sheng China Dreams, Prelude(Listening Guide)

• Prelude is the first of four movements
• Evocative of Chinese folk music
• Pentatonic melodies contrast dissonant chords
• Syncopation creates meter-free sound
• ABA structure

Listening Guide PDF
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An Introduction to Chinese Traditional Music
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Abing (18831950)

• Chinese composer, born Hua Yanjun,
• Orphaned, adopted by Daoist monk
• Expelled for playing Daoist music in secular
  setting
• His works are now standards at Chinese music
  schools
• Six works recorded before 1950

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Abing The Moon Reflected on the Second Springs
(Listening Guide)

• Solo erhu
• Modern version adds jangqin
• Based on a pentatonic scale (D-E-G-A-B)
• Melody played 3 times, with ornamentation

jangqin
Listening Guide PDF
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78. Music for Films
A film is a composition and the musical
composition is an integral part of the design.
H. G. Wells
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The Role of Music in Film

• Establishes mood, characters, creates a sense of
  place and time
• Irony (running counter to the action)
• Principal types of music in a film
• Underscoring
• Source music
• Leitmotifs

Nonsense. The idea originated with Richard
Wagner. Listen to the incidental scoring behind
the recitatives in his operas. If Wagner had
lived in this century, he would have been the
Number One film composer. Max Steiner
(responding to the idea that he had invented film
music)
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Music in the Silent-Film Era

• Accompanied by solo piano or organ
• Special organs produced effects
• Three types of music
• Classical
• Well-known tunes
• New music

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The Sound Era

• Late 1930s Golden Age of films and film music
• Max Steiner
• Eric Korngold
• Germany, France, and the Soviet Union also
  pursued filmmaking

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The Postwar Years

• Popular genres included with 20th-century art
  music
• Bernard Herrmann
• Miklós Rózsa
• Theremin included for eerie effects
• Later composers
• Aaron Copland
• Leonard Bernstein
• Post-1940s film music
• Elmer Bernstein
• Jerry Goldsmith

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Beyond Star Wars

• Revolutionary visual effects in Star Wars (1977)
• Score by John Williams
• Full symphony orchestra
• Use of leitmotifs

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John Williams

• Television in the 1950s and 1960s
• Turned to film in the 1960s
• 1970s successes
• Star Wars
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• Superman
• 80s, 90s, and currently
• Indiana Jones
• Jurassic Park
• Harry Potter films, Munich, etc.

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Williams Raiders March, from Raiders of the Lost
Ark (Listening Guide)

• Heard during closing credits of Raiders of the
  Lost Ark (1981)
• Fashioned from two leitmotifs
• Indiana Jones and Marion
• Three-part form
• Indiana Jones theme, Marion's theme, Indiana
  Jones theme
• Instrumentation and beat of a traditional march

Listening Guide PDF
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James Horner

• Los Angeles
• Studied at the University of Southern California,
  UCLA
• Successes
• Star Trek II and III
• Apollo 13
• Titanic, etc.

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Synthesizers in 1980s Film Scores

• Instrument of choice for popular musicians

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Danny Elfman

• Oingo Boingo
• Tim Burton
• Successes
• Beetlejuice
• Batman
• Men in Black
• Spiderman films
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Writing the melody is the easy part. But then,
its what you do with it. Thats the skill,
thats the art, thats what makes a great film
score. Danny
Elfman
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Hans Zimmer

• Popular music background
• Successes
• Rain Man
• The Lion King
• Madagascar
• Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Mans Chest, etc.

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Rachel Portman

• First woman to win an Academy Award for Best
  Music
• Successes
• Emma
• The Joy Luck Club
• The Cider House Rules
• Legally Blonde II
• Love Actually
• The Princess Diaries II

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The Enjoyment of Music 10th Shorter Edition
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79. Technology and Music

• Two technological trends in the late 1940s and
  early 50s
• Musique concrète
• Paris
• Pierre Schaeffer
• Tape music

I have been waiting a long time for electronics
to free music from the tempered scale and
limitations of musical instruments. Electronic
instruments are the portentous first step toward
the liberation of music. Edgard Varèse
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Electronische Musik

• Cologne
• Herbert Eimert
• Karlheinz Stockhausen
• Oscillator (electronic waveform generator)
• Waveform manipulation
• Synthesizer

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Evolution of the Synthesizer

• RCA 1955
• Columbia-Princetons Electronic Music Center in
  1959
• Robert Moog and Donald Buchla synthesizer in the
  1960s
• Morton Subotniks Silver Apples of the Moon
  (1967)
• Widespread popularity, Switched-On Bach (1968)
• Walter (later Wendy) Carlos

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Electronic Music cont

• Digital frequency modulation synthesis replaced
  analog systems
• John Chowning at Stanford University
• Yamaha DX7 (1983)
• Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI)
  adopted 1983
• Digital samplers

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Computer Music

• Computer savvy and musical inspiration
• Bell Laboratories in the 1950s
• Max Mathews
• Hiller and Issacsons software MUSIC (1956)

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Important Figures in Electronic Music

• Edgard Varèse (18831965)
• French composer
• Poème electronique (195658)
• Philips Pavilion at Brussels Worlds Fair
• Electronic and concrète sounds, multi-channel
  tape
• Colaborated with Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis
• Lighting effects and projected images
• 400-plus speakers
• 2 million people experienced the work

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Mario Davidovsky (b. 1934)

• American composer
• Electronic sounds with live music
• Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in
  New York
• Harvard University
• Synchronisms (196388)

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Tod Machover and Musical Interactivity

• Tod Machover (b.1952)
• A leader in the contemporary music scene
• Goal in music is to "make people pay attention
  and listen carefully"
• Creates "smart" computers that follow gestures
  and intentions of performers
• Dextrous Hand Master

The technique we invented is a fantastic way
not only to extend virtuosic instruments but to
break down boundaries and open doors to musical
experiences for ordinary music lovers. -Tod
Machover
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Machover Hyperstring Trilogy Begin Again Again
. . . , excerpts (Listening Guide)

• Piece for solo cello
• Inspired by J. S. Bach's Cello Suite No. 2
• Cellist controls live computer electronics
• Written for Yo-Yo Ma
• premiered at Tanglewood in 1991, recently revised
• Conceived as the first in a trilogy based on
  Dante's Divine Comedy
• Form two large parts
• each with a theme and four variations

Listening Guide PDF
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80. Some Current Trends

• Minimalism and New Romanticism

Now that things are so simple, theres so much
to do. Morton Feldman
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Minimalism and Post-Minimalism

• Barest essentials
• Features
• repetition
• very little variation
• Turns away from serialists
• Non-Western ideas
• Primary Composers
• Terry Riley
• Steve Reich
• Philip Glass

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Spiritual Minimalism

• European trend
• Nonpulsed music
• Chains of lush modal or tonal progressions
• Primary composers
• Arvo Pärt
• Henryk Górecki
• John Taverner

Arvo Pärts music accepts silence and death, and
thus reaffirms the basic truth of life, its
frailty compassionately realised, its sacred
beauty observed and celebrated. Paul Hiller
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Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)

• Estonian composer
• Concert, film, and stage composer
• Neoclassicism, serialism
• Religious convictions and Soviet Union
• West Berlin
• Latin and Orthodox church choral music

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Pärt Cantate Domino canticum novum (Listening
Guide)

• Inspired by medieval chant
• Latin text, based on Psalm 95
• Untraditional notation
• SATB chorus and organ
• Tintinnabular (bell) style
• Word painting
• Varied texture, use of counterpoint

Listening Guide PDF
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John Adams (b. 1947) and Post-Minimalism

• American composer
• Harvard-trained, wrote serial music
• Interest in rock
• Based in San Francisco
• Advocate for contemporary music
• Late Romanticism and minimalism
• Collaborations with Peter Sellars

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Adams Tromba lontana (Distant Trumpet)
(Listening Guide)

• 1986 fanfare commissioned by Houston Symphony
  Orchestra
• Repetitive accompaniment
• 2 solo trumpets at opposite sides of the stage
• Bell-like timbres in percussion
• Sustained harmonics in strings
• Repeated notes in woodwinds

Listening Guide PDF
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New Romanticism

• Reaction to the intellectual and alienating
  12-tone movement
• Favors a harmonic language from the late Romantic
  era
• Precursors Samuel Barber, Ned Rorem

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Libby Larsen and the Musical Voice of Women

• Libby Larsen (b.1950)
• One of few composers making a living with music
  alone (not an academic position)
• Born in Delaware and raised in Minneapolis
• Co-founded the Minnesota Composers' Forum
• Now the American Composers' Forum
• Inspired largely by nature and writings of women

Music exists in an infinity of sound. I think
of all music as existing in the substance of the
air itself. It is the composers task to order
and make sense of sound, in time and space, to
communicate something about being alive through
music.
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Larsen Sonnets from the Portuguese, Nos. 5 and
6 (Listening Guide)

• Worked closely with singer Arleen Auger
• Auger premiered the work the recording won a
  Grammy in 1994
• Set to poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Love poems secretly written during the courtship
  with Robert Browning
• Larsen describes the songs as "metaphors of
  resolved and unresolved harmonies"

Listening Guide PDF
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Larsen Songs from the Portuguese Nos. 5 and 6
(Listening Guide)

• No. 5 "Oh, yes!"
• Disjunct lines
• Alternation of speechlike quality with lyrical
  lines
• Dissonance and chromaticism with reference to
  Musselmans and Giaours
• No. 6 "How do I love thee?"
• Free-flowing, arched lines according to the text
• Expressive use of instruments
• Subtle text-painting

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Coda
Just listen with the vastness of the world in
mind. You cant fail to get the message. -
Pierre Boulez

• Perceptive listening is achieved gradually, with
  practice and effort
• Enjoy music!

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