Call Girls New Ashok Nagar Delhi WhatsApp Number 9711199171
Classical Music and Human Values
1. +
Classical Music and
Human Values
An appreciation of western music and it’s
relationship to human values throughout history
and today.
2. +
The Medieval World
In Greek mythology music was thought to
have divine powers.
Performed by gods and demigods
Heal sickness, purify the body and
mind, and work miracles
A part of religious ceremonies
Ancient Greece
Judaism
Christianity
A part of education
Contained multiple ethnical/cultural elements
Byzantine
Celtic
Arabic
Hindu
Hebraic
And more…
Music in Ancient Greece and Rome
“Music, imitates the passions or
states of the soul, such as
gentleness, anger, courage,
temperance, and their opposites.
Music that imitates a certain
passion arouses that same
passion in the listener. Habitual
listening to music that rouses
ignoble passions distorts a
person’s character. In short, the
wrong kind of music makes the
wrong kind of person, and the
right kind tends to make the right
kind of person.”
-Aristotle
3. + Music in the Middle Ages
Chant
Tropes
Sequences
Liturgical Drama
Goliard Songs & Conductus
Chanson de geste
Pastoral Songs
SACRED SECULAR
Jongleurs
Troubadours & Trouvères
Minnesinger
Meistersinger
Musical prayer
Focus on text (phrase, punctuation
& syntax)
Biblical and varied in form for
Holidays
Wine, women and satire
Could straddle a vague line between sacred
and secular
Based on poetry
For dancing
Love was a major theme
4. +
Enlightenment - 18th Century Europe
Challenged established thought
and behavior
Religion
Valued individual faith
Practical morality over the
institution of the church
Philosophy and Science
Emphasis on reasoning
Study of the human mind,
emotions, social relations…
Social Behavior
Natural instead of artificial
Reason and knowledge could
solve social and practical
problems
Musical life reflected the
cosmopolitan culture
A “European” musical sound
Music not limited by national
boundaries
Comical opera
French-style ballet
The Classic period
Consistent high standard,
noble simplicity, form,
seriousness.
VALUES MUSIC
5. +
Nationalism
GERMANY
Bach Revival
Interest in folklore
Wagner and the supremacy
of German music
CENTRAL EUROPE
Again, a connection with
folklore and folksong
Nature and the landscape
of the region
Still influenced by other
European composers
RUSSIA
Often based in folksong
Full of national idioms
Musorgsky, Rimsky –
Korsakov
Still influenced by German
composers
ENGLAND
Edward Elgar (1857-1934) –
first nationally recognized
English composer in more
than 200 years
Not influenced by
folksong in the beginning
20th century nationalism
6. +The Calm Before the
Storm - Impressionism
“Bouquet de soleils”
Claude Monet
1881
•First applied to a school of
French painting – Monet
•Later used to describe the
art, literature, and music of
that period
•Claude Debussy
•No religious affiliations
•Aesthetics
•Based in social and political
values
•Working class vision
•An association with
women
•Escape
7. +Into a New Century-
Fauvism, Cubism,
Dadaism
“Vase of Sunflowers”
Henri Matisse
1898-99
•Anti – Impressionist
•Dadaism
•Anti-war
•Anti – Bourgeois
•Anarchist
•Eric Satie
•Worked with Picasso
•Set the stage for a Neo-
Classical movement
•Satirical in nature
•The music itself was
spare, dry, witty,
repetitive..
8. +
Igor Stravinsky
Highly controversial choreography by Nijinsky
Primitivism “A pastorale of the prehistoric world”
Rhythm and orchestral effects were new and totally novel
Subject matter – an adolescent girl who has been chosen to
sacrifice herself to death
The premiere in 1913 caused a riot
Riots at the Ballet
VIDEO LINK
9. +
John Cage
Raised the question about the purpose and nature of music
Complex musical relationships
Music is seemingly random – Serialism
Music is not expected to communicate feelings or meanings
Influenced by Eastern
philosophies and principals
Post-war avant-garde
VIDEO LINK
10. +
TODAY
Film
Television
Internet / Web 2.0
iTunes
Accessibility
TECHNOLOGY “CLASSICAL” MUSIC?IS
Do film scores represent late
20th/early 21st century
composition?
Exposure through TV
commercials
Met HD simulcasts – do we
need to go into the
opera/symphony hall anymore?
VIDEO 1 LINK
VIDEO 2 LINK
11. +
SOURCES
Grout, D. J. (1960). A history of Western music.
New York: Norton.
Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/m
usic/07353 (accessed November 5, 2010).
Editor's Notes
Western culture has undeniable ties to ancient Greece and Rome
Music of this time has gradually been rediscovered – it was suppressed by the early Christian church, whose values did not match with those of the Roman Empire.
Theatre, secular festivals, pagan ceremonies were all ignored and records were put away
Greece
Music had magical powers (read PowerPoint)
Used in religious ceremonies
Ceremony of Dionysus and to accompany poetry
Doctrine of Ethos
Greek writers believed that music possessed moral qualities and could affect character and behavior
Aristotle wrote “Music, imitates the passions or states of the soul, such as gentleness, anger, courage, temperance, and their opposites. Music that imitates a certain passion arouses that same passion in the listener. Habitual listening to music that rouses ignoble passions distorts a person’s character. In short, the wrong kind of music makes the wrong kind of person, and the right kind tends to make the right kind of person.”
ASK QUESTION
Education
Plato’s Republic (380 BCE)
Educational components should be balanced between gym and music
Too much music made a man effeminate or neurotic, too much gym made him uncivilized, violent, and ignorant
Argument that still goes on today.
Religion
Rome emulated music of ancient Greece and then the church took over…
Play piece: Based on Ancient Greek modes played on Lyre and Kithara – ancient string instruments.
End – Skipping many centuries where the church dominated a large part of Western Classical music
Mid to late 18th Century
Cosmopolitan age
Humanitarian
Rulers promoted social reform
Expanding middle class and a pursuit of learning
Modern audience
Opening of music halls – not just in the hands of the rich or the church
Music publishing that catered to amateurs
“The language of music should be universal, that is, not limited by national boundaries; music should be noble as well as entertaining; it should be expressive within the bounds of decorum; and it should be “natural” – free of needless technical complications and capable of immediately pleasing any sensitive listener”- A History of Western Music
Peer Gynt
Evokes thoughts of the region – highly influenced by nature, folk song, Norwegian nationalism
We’ve already touched on the subject of impressionism – but I want to now relate it to music at the time, because they were all incredibly interconnected – music, literature, art
Moving farther away from sacred and church based music – though liturgical text was still being used, it wasn’t in the same vain
Claude Debussy
Did not seek to express deeply felt emotion or tell a story but instead his music should evoke a mood, an aesthetic, an atmosphere
Anyone want to take a stab at what I mean when I’m talking about aesthetics?
is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty.[1] It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste.[2] More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical reflection on art, culture and nature."[3][4] Aesthetics is related to axiology, a branch of philosophy, and is closely associated with the philosophy of art.[5] Aesthetics studies new ways of seeing and of perceiving the world. (Wikipedia)
Globally influenced – not just from other countries in Europe, but from Japanese gamelon that he heard at the 1889 Paris exposition
Social and political values (Grove)
Two other meanings of Impressionism circulated in the late 19th century. One was an association with women. This came not only from the importance of nature, leisure, sensuality and idealism in the aesthetic
gradual acceptance of Impressionist art reflected the desire of the middle class to share in the old aristocracy’s way of life. This gave rise to the popular definition of Impressionism as an aesthetic of ‘dreaming and the far away’, of escape
MUSIC – Arabesque 1 Debussy
Going to focus heavily on this period in the early 2oth century both with Satie and Stravinsky
Anti- Impressionist but not necessarily anti – Debussy
Dadaism
As opposed to the “escape” of impressionism. Dadaism was much more political - It rejected the Bourgeois, government, war
Eric Satie
Associated with impressionism but moving in a totally different direction
“Perhaps only Satie, among French composers of the time, rejected Impressionism completely. With humour and irony he attempted to rid music of its literary and painterly associations, setting the stage for the neo-classicism of the 1920s.” (Grove Online)
Paris had arguably been the classical music capital of the world since the advent of musical Impressionism in the late 19th century. One of its practitioners, Erik Satie, collaborated with Picasso and Cocteau in a mad, scandalous ballet called Parade. First performed by the Ballets Russes in 1917, it succeeded in creating a scandal but in a different way than Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps had done almost 5 years earlier. This was a ballet that was clearly parodying itself, something traditional ballet patrons would obviously have serious issues with (Wikipedia)
Neo- Classicism leaving the lushness of the impressionist world and going back to the simplistic qualities of the classical form
MUSIC – Gnossienne no 1 [gŋ no si En]
Diaghilev (a Russian art critic as well as the ballet's impresario) commented that the scandal was "just what I wanted
Was it intended? Did Stravinsky and Nijinsky know that this would happen?
Authenticity was questionable:
Some scholars have questioned the traditional account, particularly concerning the extent to which the riot was caused by the music, rather than by the choreography and/or the social and political circumstances. Stravinsky scholar Richard Taruskin has written an article about the premiere, entitled "A Myth of the Twentieth Century," in which he attempts to demonstrate that the traditional story of the music provoking unrest was largely concocted by Stravinsky himself in the 1920s after he had published the score. At that later date, Stravinsky was constructing an image of himself as an innovative composer to promote his music, and he revised his accounts of the composition and performances of The Rite of Spring to place a greater emphasis on a break with musical traditions and to encourage a focus on the music itself in concert performances (Wikipedia)
Further performances were greeted with total acceptance…
Social and political happenings at the time “One can see the implosion of industrialization and expansion of world power of the thirties echoed in the creative innovations of period artists. “ (T. Reynolds, http://www.impetustoanalysis.com/2010/04/509/)
Great depression
WWII
Globalism
Multi (Trans) Media Artist
Worked in multiple mediums
Performance Art
VIDEO
4’33”
the piece actually consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed
Zen Buddhism
In 1951, Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than reflecting them as echoes. Such a chamber is also externally sound-proofed. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, "I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation."[13] Cage had gone to a place where he expected total silence, and yet heard sound. "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."[14] The realization as he saw it of the impossibility of silence led to the composition of 4′33″.
QUESTION – Thoughts? Is this Music?
In discussing the musical movements of the past – it was relatively easy to define the religious, social, political, etc… movements that defined the art and music being made at the time. In the late 20th century/ early 21st century – those issues are all less defined, especially in America. Maybe now do we look more to technology as a defining idiom?
While classical music CD sales continue to fall dramatically, the on-line environment trades at markedly higher levels. As The New York Times (Midgette, 2006) reported
“By conventional wisdom, classical music accounts for 3 to 4 percent of overall recording industry sales. But on Apple iTunes, the leading site for music downloads, classical music represents 12 percent of all sales”
Are systems like this working better because of the age of the music, easier copyright laws?
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design,[1] and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site gives its users the free choice to interact or collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumer) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumer) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social-networking sites, blogs, wikis, video-sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.
Is this an environment though that fosters new compositions or just the creative re-use of old?
Loss of patronage – government funding
MUSIC – John Adams Dr. Atomic premiered at SFO 2005 –about “the bomb” and matter
Video 1
