MUS 3032 Music History III Dr. Alicia Wallace Southeastern Oklahoma State University

1. Chapter 33
Lecture Slides
A History of
Western Music
TENTH EDITION
by
J. PETER BURKHOLDER
DONALD JAY GROUT
CLAUDE V. PALISCA
© 2019 W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.

2. • Younger Modernists before
and after World War I
• Sought to challenge our
perceptions and capacities
• creating experiences impossible
through traditional means
• work as continuing what path-
breaking classical composers
had started
• Second Viennese School –
group of composers including
Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern
who followed Schoenberg in
atonal music and ideas of
expressionism
RADICAL MODERNISTS

3. • Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)
• Austrian Composer best known for atonal and 12-tone music
• born in Vienna, Jewish
• self-taught composer, minimal instruction
• Faculty of composition Stern Conservatory Berlin (1901)
• taught Alban Berg and Anton Webern privately
• 1908, atonality; works met stormy reception
• 1933, Nazis came to power
• moved first to France, then emigrated to United States; professor at
UCLA
• major works: 4 operas, numerous songs and choral works; 2
chamber symphonies, Five Orchestral Pieces, Variations for
Orchestra and other orchestral works; 5 string quartets, and other
chamber works; Piano Suite and several sets of piano pieces
RADICAL MODERNISTS

4. • Schoenberg’s Tonal works
• began by writing tonal music, late Romantic style
• Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night, Op. 4, 1899),
Wagner’s chromatic idiom
• Pelleas und Melisande, Op. 5 (1902–3), draws on Mahler
and Strauss
• turn toward chamber music
• applied developing variation of Brahms
• String Quartet No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 7 (1904–5)
• nonrepetition
• each work should not simply repeat but build on the
past
• required the same idea of nonrepetition within each
piece
RADICAL MODERNISTS

5. • Schoenberg’s Atonal music
• 1908, pieces avoided tonal center
• Schoenberg disliked term “atonal”
• “emancipation of dissonance,” atonality inevitable
• coherence in atonal music
• three methods gestures from tonal music
• developing variation
• integration of harmony and melody
• chromatic saturation
• Saget mir, auf welchem Pfade (Tell me on which path, 1908)
• first entirely atonal piece, fifth from a song cycle
• symbolist poetry by Stefan George (Op. 15, 1908–9)
• music suited vague eroticism of the poetry
• familiar aspects from earlier German Lieder
• developing variation in voice and accompaniment
RADICAL MODERNISTS

6. • Schoenberg’s pitch-class sets
• “composing with the tones of a motive”
• manipulated notes, intervals of a motive: new chords, melodies
• use of limited number of sets, consistent sound
• changing order of intervals, variety; unity and contrast
• Schoenberg used sets with strong dissonances
RADICAL MODERNISTS

7. • atonal works, as logical as tonal music
• Erwartung (Expectation), monodrama for soprano
• Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21 (Moonstruck Pierrot, 1912),
song cycle
• return to form - use of motives, themes, long-
range repetition
• twenty-one songs with text by Belgian
symbolist poet Albert Giraud
• woman’s voice, chamber ensemble, five
performers, nine instruments
• expressionist elements
• nonrepetition, combination of instruments
unique in each movement
• voice declaims in Sprechstimme (“speaking
voice”) - eerie atmosphere, gruesome
visions
RADICAL MODERNISTS

8. • Schoenberg’s Twelve-tone method
• row forms and usage, 1920s
• twelve tones related only to one another
• row or series, twelve pitch-classes arranged in chosen order by
composer
• tones used successively and simultaneously
• any desired rhythm, any octave
• prime: original form of row
• other forms of the row
• inversion
• Retrograde
• retrograde inversion
• twelve possible transpositions
RADICAL MODERNISTS

9. RADICAL MODERNISTS

10. • Alban Berg (1885–1935)
• Austrian Composer
• Began studies with Schoenberg, 1904
• adopted atonal, twelve-tone
methods
• music more approachable
• infused post-tonal idiom with
expressive gestures
RADICAL MODERNISTS

11. • Wozzeck (1925) – Berg’s atonal, expressionist opera
• from fragmentary play by Georg Büchner (1813–1837), libretto
by Berg
• includes Sprechstimme
• three acts of continuous music
• scenes linked by orchestral interludes
• leitmotivs comment on characters, situation, traditional forms
• Act I: elements of a Baroque suite, a rhapsody, a march and
lullaby, a passacaglia, and a rondo
• Act II: symphony in five movements - sonata form, fantasia and
fugue, ternary slow movement, scherzo, rondo
• Act III: six inventions, each on a single idea, which reflect
Wozzeck’s growing obsessions
• Act III, Scene 3
• onstage, out-of-tune tavern piano; wild polka
• (Diegetic Music – Music the audience and the
characters in the opera hear)
• music is atonal, triadic accompaniment
• atonality heightens dramatic impact
RADICAL MODERNISTS

12. • Anton Webern (1883–1945)
• Began lessons with Schoenberg, 1904
• studied musicology at University of Vienna, Ph.D. in 1906
• view of music history
• music involves presentation of ideas expressed in no
other way
• evolution in art is necessary
• history, musical idioms, can only move forward
• The Path to the New Music, published posthumously
• combined advanced approaches to pitch, musical
space, presentation of musical ideas
• composer as artist and researcher
• Symphony, Op. 21, first movement
• entire movement is double canon in inversion
• deliberately integrates the two canons
• frequent changing of timbres
• applies Schoenberg’s concept of Klangfarbenmelodie
RADICAL MODERNISTS

13. CHAPTER 33
Lecture Slides
A History of
Western Music
TENTH EDITION
by
J. PETER BURKHOLDER
DONALD JAY GROUT
CLAUDE V. PALISCA
© 2019 W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.

14. • Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
• Russian Composer
• In the foreground of every major stylistic trend of the century during
his lifetime
• born near St. Petersburg, Russia
• never attended the Conservatory
• Rimsky-Korsakov, most important teacher (one of the Mighty
Five)
• Wrote commissioned works for Ballets Russes
• ballets made him famous, still most popular
• collaborated with Vaslav Nijinsky (dancer/choreographer)
• Lived in Paris, Switzerland, and was stranded in the West during
Russian Revolution, ended up in Hollywood, then New York
• major works: The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, L’histoire du soldat,
Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Les noces, Octet for Wind
Instruments, Oedipus rex, Symphony of Psalms, Symphony in C,
Symphony in Three Movements, The Rake’s Progress, Agon,
Requiem Canticles
RADICAL MODERNISTS

15. • Stravinsky’s style traits derived mostly from Russian traditions
• undermining meter, unpredictable accents, rests, rapid changes of meter
• layering and juxtaposition of static blocks of sound
• discontinuity and interruption
• dissonance based on diatonic, octatonic, other note collections
• dry, anti-lyrical, colorful use of instruments
• Stravinsky’s Russian period
• most popular works: ballets commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev for Ballets
Russes
• The Firebird (1910) - based on Russian folk tales, exoticism of Rimsky-
Korsakov
• humans characterized by diatonic music
• supernatural creatures, places in octatonic, chromatic realms
• Petrushka (1910–11) - blocks of static harmony, Octatonic scales, borrows
Russian folk tunes, popular French song, Viennese waltzes
RADICAL MODERNISTS

16. • The Rite of Spring (1911-1913)
• A riot broke out in Paris after the premiere of this ballet in 1913
• fertility ritual set in prehistoric Russia
• marked by primitivism: deliberate representation of elemental, crude, uncultured
• undermining meter, negated hierarchy of beats and offbeats,
• accented chords, unpredictable patterns
RADICAL MODERNISTS

17. • Stravinsky’s Neoclassical period
• 1919 to 1951, turn toward earlier Western art music
• neoclassicism - composers revived, imitated, evoked styles, genres, forms of pre-
Romantic music
• broad movement late 1910s to 1950s
• in part, rejection of German Romanticism
• emphasis on absolute music, melody, counterpoint, incisive timbres, clear forms
• fresh links to western European classical tradition
• emotional detachment, anti-Romantic tone
• preference for balance, coolness, objectivity, absolute music
• Octet for Wind Instruments (1922–23)
• Classic-era forms, Baroque figuration, Bach-like counterpoint
• mixed with modern dissonance, octatonic melodies, meter changes, interruptions
RADICAL MODERNISTS

18. Béla Bartók (1881–1945)
• Hungarian Composer, virtuoso pianist, piano teacher,
ethnomusicologist
• major works: Bluebeard’s Castle, The Miraculous Mandarin,
Dance Suite, Concerto for Orchestra, Music for String, Percussion
and Celesta, 3 piano concertos, 2 violin concertos, 6 string
quartets, 2 violin sonatas, 1 piano sonata, Mikrokosmos,
numerous other works for piano, songs, choral works, folk song
arrangements
• individual modernist idiom
• elements of Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, Bulgarian peasant
music with German, French classical tradition
• peasant music
• collected and studied peasant music with Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967)
• published nearly 2,000 song, dance tunes
• used new technology of audio recording
• used techniques developed in new discipline of ethnomusicology
• wrote books, articles; established him as leading scholar
RADICAL MODERNISTS

19. RADICAL MODERNISTS

20. • Bartók’s musical style - synthesized peasant music with classical music, mixing
concepts of traditions
• use of dissonance, love of symmetry
• synthesis preserves integrity of both traditions
• Staccato and Legato, from Mikrokosmos - like a Bach two-part invention
• canon between the hands
• tonal structure reminiscent of Bach
• folk elements - melody adapts structure of a Hungarian song
• Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
• use of neotonality - avoids common-practice harmony
• strong similarities to peasant music
• Bulgarian dance meters, long and short beats
• Western notation, irregular groupings of twos and threes
• heavily ornamented, partly chromatic type of Serbo-Croatian song (parlando-rubato)
• melodies over drones
RADICAL MODERNISTS

21. • Charles Ives (1874–1954)
• American Composer
• Worked in obscurity for most of his career, late
recognition
• born in Danbury, Connecticut
• New York 1898, worked in insurance business
• composed evenings and weekends
• premieres and publications in last three decades of his life
• regarded as first to create distinctly American body of art
music
• major works: 4 symphonies, Holidays Symphony, Three
Places in New England, The Unanswered Question, 2
string quartets, piano trio, 4 violin sonatas, 2 piano
sonatas, about 200 songs
RADICAL MODERNISTS

22. • Ives - Fluent composer in four distinct spheres
• vernacular music - wrote numerous marches and parlor songs in his teens
• composed march played at President McKinley’s inauguration in 1897
• Protestant church music - professional church organist, improvised organ preludes,
postludes
• composed solo songs, sacred choral works
• experimental works
• preserved most of the traditional rules
• first composer to use polytonality systematically
• The Alcotts, third movement from the Concord Sonata
• hymn-like melody and harmonization; polytonal
• layered with diatonic chords, whole-tone accompaniment
• melody and accompaniment, style of Stephen Foster parlor song
• pounding chords
• octatonic, modernist counterpoint passages; styles of Scottish songs, marches,
minstrel songs
RADICAL MODERNISTS