Download Late Nineteenth-Century Developments after Beethoven

Late Nineteenth-Century Developments after Beethoven
Beethoven Symphonies 1, 2, 4, 7, 8
↓
Brahms, Bruckner, Verdi, Mahler
Example: Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), Symphony No. 4 in E minor (1885), fourth
movement
Beethoven Symphonies 3, 5, 6, 9
↓
Liszt, Wagner, Debussy, Schoenberg
Example: Franz Liszt (1811-1886), Nuage gris (1881)
Aspects of Twentieth-Century Style
Style Periods
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Schools, “-isms”, groups
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Personal Musical Languages
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Personal Musical Languages affected by such influences as:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Electronic media and mass communication
Rise of popular culture
Globalization (musics and other art, philosophies, religions, cultures in general)
Apparent exhaustion of traditional composition
Apparent exhaustion of traditional instruments and performance techniques
-ISMS
Nationalism
Applied to a movement in music, about the middle of the 19th century, in which
composers became eager for their music to embody elements that proclaimed its
nationality. Incorporation of folk melodies, folk dances, folk instruments, and other
aspects of a nation’s indigenous or traditional music.
Bedrich Smetana (1824-84), Czech
Modest Mussorgsky (1844-1908), Russia
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907), Norway
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), Finland
Enrique Granados (1867-1916), Spain
Ralph Vaugh William (1872-1958), England
Béla Bartók (1881-1945), Hungary
Charles Ives (1874-1954), USA
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), Russia
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-93)
Example: Symphony No. 4 (1893), second movement
Modest Mussorgsky (1839-81)
Example: Pictures at an Exhibition (1874)
Impressionism
First used in the 1870s in regard to the paintings of Monet, Renoir, Pissaro and others. In
music seen/heard as blurring of outlines of traditional tonal harmonic progressions, use of
modal and pentatonic harmonic language, static or ambiguous rhythm, metre and
harmony; finely graded instrumental colours; non-climactic melodies often circling
around a single pitch; continously evolving forms without clear structural divisions;
complex textures.
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Example: “Voiles”, Préludes, Bk I (1910)
[CD 5:4]
Expressionism
Term, applied originally to painting and literature, used for the intensely emotional
manner used in the arts from the second decade of the 20th century. Seen in the works of
Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Munch.
The term is applied to music ca. 1918. Represents the avoidance of traditional forms of
the beautiful in order to express feelings in the most powerful, personal, sometimes
violent and extremely intense way. Most often related to atonal and 12-tone composition
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
Atonality
Sprechstimme, Sprechgesang
Example: Arnold Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) (1899)
Example: Arnold Schoenberg, “Madonna”from Pierrot Lunaire (1912) [CD 5:11]
Second Viennese School
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
Alban Berg (1885-1935)
Anton Webern (1883-1945)
Serialism
A method of composition in which one or more musical elements is subject to ordering in
a fixed series. Most commonly the elements so arranged are the 12 chromatic pitches
within the octave — 12-tone music. First used by Schoenberg in the early 1920s, and
later applied to other elements of composition.
Example: Anton Webern, Five movements for String Quartet, Op. 5 (1928-29), Third
Movement
Primitivism
Example: Béla Bartók, String Quartet No. 4 (1928), fifth movement
Neoclassicism
Return to forms, genres and ideals of the 18th century and earlier — symphonies,
sonatas, etc. — though with modifications to stories (in opera), harmony, rhythm, etc.
Transparency, clarity, a degree of accessibility.
Example: Segey Prokofiev, Classical Symphony