Transcript
Chapter 20
The Search for New Sounds,
1890–1945
A History of Music in Western Culture, 4e 20-1 © 2014 Education, Inc.
By Mark Evan Bonds Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
Impressionism
One of the earliest attempts to explore new approaches to music
Term first used in painting to designate style of painters who used accumulation of short brush strokes instead of continuous line to produce a sensation of an object
Color takes precedence over line
A History of Music in Western Culture, 4e 20-2 © 2014 Education, Inc.
By Mark Evan Bonds Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
Impressionism
Makes greater use of color (timbre) than any previous style of music
Composers: Claude Debussy (1862–1918) and Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)
A History of Music in Western Culture, 4e 20-3 © 2014 Education, Inc.
By Mark Evan Bonds Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
Impressionism
Form – avoids goal-oriented structures
Harmony – uses ninth, eleventh and thirteenth chords; and nondiatonic scales
Voice leading – individual voices often move without regard to traditional rules
Rhythm – tends to be fluid, avoiding definite sense of meter
Timbre – new sounds from piano and orchestra
A History of Music in Western Culture, 4e 20-4 © 2014 Education, Inc.
By Mark Evan Bonds Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
Impressionism
Debussy’s music resonated with French poetry of his day
Symbolist poets relished the sound of language for sound’s sake and were not constrained by syntax or logic
Poets: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud
Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune (1894)
A History of Music in Western Culture, 4e 20-5 © 2014 Education, Inc.
By Mark Evan Bonds Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
Challenges to Tonality
A number of composers in the early 20th century used scales beyond major and minor. These included: whole-tone, pentatonic, modal, octatonic
Also used quartal harmonies: chords built on interval of fourth rather than third (Alexander Scriabin, Charles Ives)
A History of Music in Western Culture, 4e 20-6 © 2014 Education, Inc.
By Mark Evan Bonds Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
Ives the Revolutionary: graduation portrait, Yale University, 1898. Beneath the conventional clothing and demeanor lay an undergraduate seething at the strictures of musical convention.
A History of Music in Western Culture, 4e 20-7 © 2014 Education, Inc.
By Mark Evan Bonds Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
Radical Primitivism
Impetus behind primitivism was rejection of self-imposed, arbitrary conventions of Western culture
Primitive was regarded as source of both beauty and strength, representing stage of civilization unthreatened by decadence and self-consciousness
In painting, primitivism manifested itself in work of artists known as the fauves – the “wild beasts” – who used a seemingly crude kind of draftsmanship coupled with bold, unrealistic colors (Gauguin, Rousseau)
A History of Music in Western Culture, 4e 20-8 © 2014 Education, Inc.
By Mark Evan Bonds Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
Radical Primitivism
Musical primitivism elevated rhythm to unprecedented importance
Composers associated with primitivism tended to abandon or substantially alter concepts such as voice leading, triadic harmony, major and minor forms of diatonic scale
Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps (“The Rite of Spring,” 1913)
A History of Music in Western Culture, 4e 20-9 © 2014 Education, Inc.
By Mark Evan Bonds Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
Nationalism
Musical nationalism was driven by desire to assert cultural identity through a musical idiom that was connected to the people
Growing political and cultural aspirations of ethnic groups throughout Europe and the Americas
A History of Music in Western Culture, 4e 20-10 © 2014 Education, Inc.
By Mark Evan Bonds Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
Nationalism
Folk music offered important stylistic alternatives to traditions of conventional melody and harmony
Béla Bartók and his colleague Zoltán Kodály found a different set of melodic possibilities in folk music of various ethnic groups they collected throughout central and eastern Europe
George Gershwin regarded jazz as “an American folk music”
A History of Music in Western Culture, 4e 20-11 © 2014 Education, Inc.
By Mark Evan Bonds Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
New Timbres
Novelty in timbre through new instruments or new ways of playing old instruments
Piano: direct contact with the strings rather than by striking the keys; tone clusters require adjacent keys be struck (Henry Cowell)
A History of Music in Western Culture, 4e 20-12 © 2014 Education, Inc.
By Mark Evan Bonds Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
New Timbres
Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation (1931) is first major composition written entirely for percussion; most of the 37 instruments have no definite pitch
Varèse developed the possibilities of electronic music with Poème électronique (1958)
A History of Music in Western Culture, 4e 20-13 © 2014 Education, Inc.
By Mark Evan Bonds Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
Edgard Varèse. Earlier composers had often portrayed themselves seated at the keyboard. For this photographic portrait from the 1950s, Varèse gave strategic prominence to the metronome – immediately identifying himself as a musician.
A History of Music in Western Culture, 4e 20-14 © 2014 Education, Inc.
By Mark Evan Bonds Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
