Download Classical Music in Postwar Years

 New opportunities. New ideas. New
styles.
 Adopting this new style.
 Affect on Universities.
 Schoenberg.
 Émigré to seek these new
opportunities.
 Born June 17, 1882
 Composer, Pianist, and Conductor
 Traveled a lot due to his profession and ended up in US
 Didn’t care for American Culture except for Jazz and Ragtime
 Mixed blues notes and dissonant harmonies with Harmon mutes,
growls, and spiky rhythms.
 His music at the end of his career related to the type of
serialism being introduced.
 Stravinsky and Bernstein contributed to the new musical styles
being developed across America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGnsqTDY9Tw
 Born in Austria
 Was a musical theorist and composer while also painter
 1934 left Austria for America
 His approach was very influential throughout the 20th
century.
 European and American composers to his methods both
with open arms and very much against it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQHR_Z8XVvI
 New musical styles being developed and included in
education.
 Mathematicians started playing a bigger role in composition.
 Schoenberg’s twelve-tone row in serialism.
 Many composers approached it in many ways, agreeing with
Schoenberg.
 Stravinsky discovered the twelve-tone row and liked it,
composing a couple pieces with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud8zVcHPnuM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn7Ud_8-xk8
 Milton Babbitt
 Trained Mathematician
 Took composers like Schoenberg’s
ideas and extended his serialized
ideas.
 His extension of this featured complex
music with simple names.
 His love of these extended ideas
morphed into the beginning of
Electronic Music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d01f
wczBHp0
Elliott Carter
 Born in New York and went to Harvard
College
 Focused on Atonal Writing
 Slowly tested his atonal writing with
each new piece he wrote.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApcFw0r2tI
 Edgard Varese wanted to create music directly through
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machines.
First version was the magnetic tape recorder in the late 1940s
1952 featured the first American tape music concert
Only few musicians possessed the knowledge to create
electronic music.
Varese did this in his late seventies with tools now available
creating Poème électronique.
The synthesizer was then invented and made it easier to record.
The invention of the Synthesizer led to electronic music studios
spreading across the US.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-R3F3ZVbi8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9wzev494_k
 A pioneer of Electroacoustic music.
 The first to complete a tape composition
 Sound was influenced by Asian and Euopean styles of
music
 Used one player percussion or a “prepared piano”
 Influenced by Eighteenth century composer Domenico
Scarlatti
 Incorporated scale root form using durational proportion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r8YQ50OZ-o
 Name Borrowed from the visual arts
 Music based on a radically reduced amount of musical material and relying on static
harmony, patterned rhythms, and repetition
 Influences
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Terry Riley
La Monte Young
Steve Reich
Philip Glass
 Influences
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Improvisation
Technology
Overlook on life
 In C (1964)
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Considered the anthem of minimalism
Compiled of 53 short motives
Unfixed number of unspecified instruments
 Tape loops
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An effect used since the 1950’s
Lengths of magnetic tape spliced end to end in a circle
Recorded sounds repeat indefinitely
 Influences
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Jazz
West African Drumming and Balinese Gamelan
 Phase music
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Two or more identical parts played in slightly different tempos (It’s Gonna Rain)
Two Tape machines
Layering them upon one another for musical effect
 Come Out (1966)
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From an interview with a victim of a police beating in Harlem
“I has to, like, let some of the bruise blood come out to show them”
Tape Looped the last five words
Most widely recognized minimalist composer
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 Einstein on the Beach – Knee Play 3 (1976)
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Uses a basic formula to travel through the piece by using solfege and numbers
Uses different series of accents and orders to keep the piece moving while using all of the same
ideas.
 Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
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Series of Film Scores