Download 20th Century

20th Century
(Modern Classical music)
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Impressionist music
• Impressionism is a
term borrowed from
painting.
– vague and hazy
outlines.
• Debussy wrote
L'Apres-midi d'un
Faune in 1894 his first
“impressionist” work
• A reaction to the late
romantic German
style.
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Impressionist
• Chords are used for their
expressive “colour”
• The usual laws of
harmony are suspended
• Discords and sounds are
allowed to merge (e.g.
using the sustaining
pedal in piano pieces)
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Impressionist
•
Flowing streams of Parallel Chords 7ths,11ths, and 13ths
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Impressionist
• Debussy uses:
• Pentatonic scale
• MODES - Scales that are neither major or minor but
ancient or non western collections of notes with different
patterns of tones and semitones.
• Ostinato –repeated patterns (like riffs) in the
accompaniment
• Programme Music- “evokes” or “suggests” a picture or
a scene
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Impressionist
Genie Scale WHOLE New World
• Debussy uses:
• WHOLE TONE SCALE the intervals
between each of the notes is a tone,
whereas in major and minor scales the
intervals are a mixture of tones and
semitones
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Impressionism
• Debussy's Impressionist pieces include:
» La Mer
» Nocturnes
» Images
• Other composers wrote in an impressionist
style e.g.
• Respighi -Pines of Rome
• De Falla
-Gardens of Spain
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• Jazz influences
•
As well as folk influences some composers
experimented with jazz and Blues in their
compositions. They used:
• The blues Scale.
• Syncopation and complex rhythms to make the
music sound improvised.
• Jazz instruments added to the orchestra MUTED brass, saxophones etc.
• Jazz effects - GLISSANDO- sliding between
notes.
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• Examples of Jazz
influences in 20th
Century music
include:
•
George Gershwin
- Rhapsody in Blue
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Rhapsody in Blue
The Orchestra used borrowed certain Jazzy Features such as:
Syncopation
Clarinet Glissando
Jazz Chords
Banjo
Trumpets played with Wah wah mutes
Blues scale
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The prominence of the piano makes the piece more like a piano concerto
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Rhapsody in Blue
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20th Century features
• Irregular metre: changing time signatures
or unusual time signatures
• CROSS RHYTHMS playing conflicting
rhythms against each other to create
excitement
• Smaller orchestra using percussion and
wind instruments more than the more lush
and expressive strings.
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• What else makes the music sound like it
was written in the 20th Century?
• Abrupt modulations
• Deliberate wrong notes/ Discords and
note clusters (where the notes are close
together rather than evenly spaced as
they are in a chord)
• The music can often sound angry or
disturbing
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•
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•
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Piano used as part of the orchestra
lots of percussion
unusual instruments
Instruments played in unusual ways:
COL LEGNO
- string instruments played
with the back of the bow
•
FLUTTER TONGUING- rolled "rrr.." sound
while playing wind instruments.
•
MUTED on string instruments but particularly
on Brass instruments where the timbre is made
thinner and more metallic sounding.
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20th century Atonal music
• 20th Century ATONAL
•
Schoenberg and his pupils Webern and
Berg are a group of composers working in
Vienna at the turn of the Century who are
sometimes called the Second Viennese school
• In his early music Schoenberg wrote in the
expressive late romantic style.
• As the music became increasingly chromatic it
ultimately became ATONAL, rejecting key or
tonal centre
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20th century Atonal music
• the 12 notes of the chromatic scale are
laid out in a random order and called a
theme
– They can be developed by ;
• reversing them (retrograde)
• Turning them upside down (Inversion)
• Both, (Retrograde inversion)
• Any music that sounds deliberately ugly or
“random” is probably from the 20th century
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20th Century Atonal
• ALEATORIC or Chance-choice music
• Uses unpredictability as part of composition or
performing process
• improvisation
• eg players choose when and/or what to play
• All about experimenting (like performance art)
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More recent modern music
• MINIMALIST.
– many repeated patterns
– repeated sections,
– deceptively complicated,
• cross rhythms,
• polyrhythms
• polytonality.( two different keys at the same time)
• composers: Philip Glass and Steve
Reich
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