Music History Exam Flashcards
(39 cards)
The ring and the rings
Alex Ross
Wagner V.S Tolkien
A lovely couple
By Alex Ross
Musical review
The future of music
Charles rosin
1. Music evolves and adapts to survive
Everything can not be notated
2. A score is merely a set of directions to realize a work but there are so many different ways to realize something. Today we think of music as public. In the 19th century it was private though four handed works vs symphony even though it could be the same work It sounds different. Less people learn music now. There never has been a huge demand since it was private. But now people learn from CDs and such, altering our perspective on art.
3. Only so much can be notated. For much of history many things were not notated or not notated well.
Primary and secondary elements. Many secondary have become primary though. Ex- dynamics. Rhythm and generally pitch belong to the composer except in modern music perhaps.
4. Most of our musical history has not been recorded. And sometimes it can be hard to guess how it might have been preformed
5. People used to be proficient in higher music because it was a sign of social status
People now collect records
With records people can now hear the variations in classical music
But now people interpret less
Preface and acknowledgments of the classical style
Charles Rosin
The drama is contained within the work
What makes is possible to posses and convey this significance
A rant against chant
Tony Hendra
Chant should not be popular it should only be used in mass but even there it has faded.
The transmission of the classical legacy
treatise De institutione musica: the science of musical sounds as one of the seven liberal arts
part of the quadrivium
written by boethius.
the quadrivium: the higher forms of education: arithmetic,geometry,and astronomy and music.
The trivium: elementary curriculum (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric)
Three types of music: musica mudana- music of the universe: there must be somc fixed order of musical modulation in this celestial motion- everything is to perfect for there not to be.
music of the human being- musica humana “for what unites the incorporeal existence of reason with the body except a certain harmony
created bv certain instruments- musica instrumentis constitua
The Renaissance fount and origin
Early 15th century
Music is more consonant and euphonious the the old
- The Brandenburg Concertos
-1721- Bach began to look for a job in politically more important city of Berlin
- Concerto Grosso- three movement work involving a musical give-and-take between a full orchestra and a much smaller group of soloists (concertino)
- The soloists in the concertino play along with the tutti; when ritornello stops they do their own thing- mainly very technical.
- Bach chose to write these pieces, because he wanted to challenge every section of instruments
Ritornello: idiomatic for the violin, asymmetrical, driving Rythem.
Josquin des Prez in the eyes of his contemporaries
He was a great composer
Bach’s duties and obligations at Leipzig and bach remembered by his son
the servant- the reading, where he ran the music school. his rules. He thought of himself as a servant too. he’s there to serve the world.
the virtuoso- “understood the buildings of organs to the highest degree”. in his own day more of a performer then a composer. when you die as a performer your gifts die with the world. its different with a composer because you have the score.
The Rise of the Italian Comic Opera Style
- Italian comic opera style- pleasure by audiences everywhere because it gave musical expression to many of the new attitudes of the Enlightenment
- Italian troupe- brought these works to the Paris Opera- regular performances of French operas- between 1752 and 1754
From the Writings of Schumann
-Schumann was not inclined by temperament to organize his views on the aesthetics- ethics- of music into a formal system
- Schumann withdrew as editor of Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik in 1844
- Last front page he wrote – 1853 – split up a lot of things “music of the future” and he talked about a not-so-known composer Johannes Brahms
Aphorisms (a short phrase that expresses a true or wise idea)
I have no liking for those whose life is not in unison with their works – FL
Glimpses of Chopin
- Aura of mystery – magic surrounded the highly reserved personality of Chopin in his own day
- Music cast a spell on his listeners- compositions
- “Chopin played rarely and always unwilling in public; “exhibitions” of himself were totally repugnant to his nature.”
Charles Rosin: the romantic generation
- During the Renaissance the ruin was appreciated both for its moral significance and for its eccentricity as well as for its bearing witness to a sacred past.”
- “The fragment is no longer the introduction to Nature into Art, but the return of Art, of the artificial, to a natural state.”
- “The most responsible artist, in short, creates the work in terms of its inevitable ruin. It might be said that the ruin is now no longer an unhappy fatality but the ultimate goal of work.”
- Montaigne- French writer regarded as the originator of the modern essay
- “An apt reader often discovers, in the writing of something else, perfections other than those that the author had put in and perceived himself, and lends to the work richer meanings and appearances.”
- “The art of writing books is not yet invented.”
- “The Romantic fragment and the forms it inspired enabled the artist to face the chaos or the disorder of experience, not by reflecting it, but by leaving a place for it to make a momentary but suggestive appearance within the work.”
- Chaos- metaphor for the biological disorder of a non-mechanistic universe, the disorder of everyday experience.
- “The principle of Romantic prose exactly like that of verse- symmetry and chaos, quite according to the old rhetoric; in Boccaccio both are very clearly in synthesis.”
- Successful fragments- clearly defined symmetry
- “This prevision acts like the quills of the hedgehog, which both sharpen and blur the perfect definition of the animal’s shape.”
- “Fragment is symmetrical, well balanced, and closed in expression-but it invites and even forces the reader to crack it open by speculation and interpretation.”
- “Fragment was, for a brief time, an unstable, but successful solution to the problem of introducing the disorder of life into art without compromising the independence and integrity of the work.”
- “In music, the Romantic Fragment similarly leaves a place- ambiguous and disconcerting- for an unresolved detail which undermines the symmetry and the conventions of the form without never quite destroying them.”
Debussy and Musical Impressionism
- Claude-Achille Debussy (1862-1918)
- Innovations in harmony and in formal organization suggested new paths to musicians every, at a time when the prevailing musical mood: “Wagnerian revolution”
- Wagnerian formula- great collector of formulas
- “the dramatic melody has to be quite different from what is different from what is generally called melody”
- “The musicians hear only music written by practiced hands, never the music of Nature herself.”
The First Performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
-Beethoven was not always feeling the love of his fellow Austrians and germans. Raccini was feeling the love. He was not always satisfied with the political situation. He threatened to premiere his 9th else where. He did not want to be associated with the idea of the repression in Austria. when he threatened this people wrote him letters saying no.
pg 184 in course pack-account of the premier. because the emperor was not there there was an atmosphere of tension. police there. they thought that the love of the symphony was an attack on kings and emperors. Beethoven was happy that the public loved this and the empirical
family was chilled by that.
its the ode to joy and the use of the popular style was a way of defying the repression movement.
using a poem that had revolutionary ideas. revolutionary ideals being manifested in the popular style of the ode to joy.
February 1824- Beethoven was writing a new symphony- word got out
- “Past continued to withdraw himself more and more from public notice”
- 7th of May- a grand musical performance took place at the Karnthnerthor Theatre
- “Beethoven was unanimously called forward.”
- “He modesty saluted the audience and retired amidst the loudest expressions of enthusiasm.”
Performance practice and authenticity
the issue especially arises with early music
What does it mean to be faithful to a piece of music
its hard to answer this question
reading markings
Why does it matter
disgraceful to the composer
this idea we have that “thats not how it goes”
you could miss out on things in the piece.
basically it comes down to we don’t know exactly how it could have sounded. We could never mimic exactly what it sounded like because theres to many factors.
Bogus
just playing whats on the music. that we get rid of all our interpretations.
text as an object
performance as an object.
people became to focussed on trying to replicate it exactly.
a lot of this ends of objectifying the performance. its just something you did.
bad art critic
on this side of the argument though playing on period instruments is good because it changes your perspective.
difference between sound and music, when you get to caught up on for example the sound of cut strings vs steal. you are not just making music.
Good:
prefers the idea of performance as an action or a process.
preforming authentically is an incentive that drives the work we do
rather then saying after a performance “was a true to it”
pg 68. new York times, uses both meanings.
personal conviction
more philosophical
statements that are meaningful to an audience more personal, acknowledging our own interpretation.
accretions- “the gunk that stuff picks up” he’s talking about clearing away all the stuff that could be inaccurate and all the stuff we added. they are trying to just put down the most basic thing. performers also do this. they just do the bare thing just trying to replicate exactly where there. but then we are left with a hole.
individual response to individual pieces.
Historically informed performance, they’re not talking about history dictated exactly but more of an informed sense, use the ideas of the period but this still leaves it up to interpretation.
La Garang, Mahler
Mahler was scrutinized for his interpretation of Beethoven’s ninth because it was not authentic.
Even though he thought he was making it for the better because Beethoven was deaf
John Adams, Shaker Loops (1978)
we would all identify this as a minimalist work.
Minimalism as style vs. Technique.
is minimalism a technique or a style? it is both. power of minimalism. composers can do different things with it.
Ave Maria
By Josquin des Parez
Postmodernist Paradigms
-“Cultural historians also look for paradigms or what the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) called episteme: the assumptions, usually unspoken (but, when things become unsettled more likely to be articulated) that govern notions of what is self-evidently true. (ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE)
- “General state of the arts is defined by their most advanced practitioners, and so the artists using the most novel and esoteric techniques are the most significant and authentic artists at any given time.”
- Brahms-essay-1945-“Brahms the progressive”
Darwinian requirements:
1. Inheritance, in the style of music
2. Variation, from the personal expression of the musicians or composers
3. Differential success among the variants, from the assessment that we voted with our palms
Comprehensibility vs Value of a piece
1. Comprehension presupposes listening competence for the music in question
2. Comprehension pertains to the listening grammar rather than to the compositional grammar
3. We are talking about intuitive rather than analytic comprehension
Aesthetic Claims
1. The best music utilizes the full potential of our cognitive resources
2. The best music arises from an alliance of a compositional grammar with the listening grammar
Feminist Perspectives
- “The essentialist view locates the causes of dominance in the nature of the groups; the social constructivist view locates them in the social structures and relations that govern the contexts.”
- Male dominance-music composition-until 1970s
- Pauline Oliveros-composer-made her mark with realms of electro-acoustic music and group improvisation
- “Women have not completed successfully in realms of intellectual endeavor, this argument holds, not because of an inferior endowment but because of the way they have been socialized.”
- Women-taught to despise activity outside of domestic realm
- Men- taught to despise domestic duties
- 75% of those listed are composers of the present and twenty-four of these are women
1. That composers of our time are no longer ignored
2. That women could be emerging from musical subjugation - Violence of tonal procedures is that the actual reward- the cadence – can never be commensurate with the anticipation generated or the effort expended in achieving it.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony/
A clockwork orange
- One of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music
- Problem constructed- seems to begin before the subject of the symphony has managed to achieve its identity (witnessing the emergence of the initial theme- and its key- then hear a collapse back twice more into it.)
- Pushes mechanisms of frustration – violence
- This is a reason for him being known as serious, virile.
- Virile- characterized by energy and vigor
- “Beethoven resists that exigencies of formal necessity at the moment of recapitulation in the opening movement, embraces and perpetuates them and even raises them to a much higher level of violence.”
Esteban Buch Beethoven’s ninth a political history
Beethoven threatened to premier his ninth in Prussia
People wrote to him to tell him not to
Police presence at the premier
Emperor did not show up- political tension
Rossini had more sucess
Beethoven spent 30 years trying to out the ode to joy in
In a popular style. Also with german nationalistic ideas
Shows state presence in music. Continues to haunt us
