MUS115 art, music & ideas

20th Century and beyond! 

 

The Cubists retained the three-dimensional space . . . their way of seeing remains deeply materialistic; my thinking on abstraction, on the other hand, rests on the belief that such a space must be destroyed; to achieve the destruction of the object I have reached the point of using surfaces.  -- Mondrian

 

We look ahead to a time of pure painting and the time when we shall construct the intellectual form, the concrete realization of the creative mind.  We want concrete not abstract painting, for nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface.  Once they are liberated as a means of expression they are on their way towards the real goal of art: to create a universal language.  (1930) -- Theo Van Doesburg, a painter similar to Mondrian

 

KEY IMAGES (know artist & title)

Expressionism, figure 14.15, p. 396, Nolde

Abstraction, Mondrian, figure 14.12, p. 394

Picasso, primitivism & cubism, figure 14.4, p. 389

Duchamp, Surrealism, Da-Da, p. 395

ism” list in box p. 398

 

MUSIC: Impressionism to Modernism to Post-Modernism

 

[1] Claude Debussy (1862-1918) -- Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune) (1894)  similar piece on textbook CD

-- inspired by a poem inspired by a painting of a Classical mythical story

-- exoticism, mythical pastoral

-- ambiguous (vague?) harmony

-- very little, if any, recognizable conventional or traditional form

-- very well received at its premiere by the public; it baffled the musical establishment

-- Debussy influenced by gamelan

-- Impressionist, although Debussy hated the term

 

[2,3] Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) -- opening two sections of Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) (1913; for very large orchestra)  ON TEXTBOOK CD

-- a ballet with a story line written in part by an anthropologist

-- interested in primitive or exotic materials; what is behind the mask of civilization?

-- radically new: non-tonal, harsh unresolved dissonance, percussive, brilliant orchestral effects, extreme ranges, rhythmically and metrically very irregular and quite innovative

-- a riot (somewhat staged) at its premiere; much publicity ensues

-- Modernist:  Inner order, outer chaos.

 

[4] Anton Webern (1883-1945) -- first movement of Symphony, Opus 21 (1928)

-- serialism (composing with an ordered series of pitches, usually the full set of 12) at its most elegant and refined

-- very intellectual in orientation (very influenced by Machaut and Medieval and Renaissance music in general)

-- emotionally concentrated, like feelings frozen into a crystal

-- very short (only two movements)

-- very small orchestra (can be played by as few as 9 instruments)

-- Webern was a student of Schoenberg (a Modernist, but also known as an Expressionist); Webern, Berg and Schoenberg came to be known as “The Second Viennese School,” the “First Viennese School” being Haydn, Mozart & Beethoven

-- premiere at a society for private performances of music in Vienna

-- Modernist; very influential in the European avant-garde and among American academic composers, particularly in the 1950s; virtually unknown to the general public.  Inner order to an extreme.

 

[5] John Cage (1912-1992), Sonata II from Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (19 pieces composed 1946-1948)

-- invented prepared piano (1935).  The classic American crazy tinkerer (Cage loved to say, "My father was an inventor.")  EXPERIMENTATION a key value in 20th Century music.

-- the unpredictability of the prepared piano and his study of Zen and Indian aesthetics lead him to develop chance (random) procedures as a compositional method or process

-- viewed by some as a charlatan or as important only because of his philosophy

-- many value his music and thought today (although many misinterpret his disciplined openness as a philosophy of "anything goes")

-- influenced by gamelan and other non-Western music

-- eventually came to be viewed as Post-Modernist because of his relinquishing of compositional control;

 

[6] Luciano Berio (b. 1925), 3rd (of 5) movement of Sinfonia, 1968-69   NOT COVERING THIS

-- for large orchestra with 8 amplified vocalists (who sing and speak)

-- a stew of works by Stravinsky (including the Rite of Spring), Ravel, Stockhausen, Berio himself, and other contemporary composers, all served on a pilaf of Mahler's Symphony No. 2, 3rd movement. Fragments of text, from anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked and Samuel Beckett's absurdist play The Unnameable, provide seasoning.

-- Berio is generally a modernist in approach, yet this work certainly qualifies as post-modern in its use of collage and appropriation

-- Berio taught at Mills in the early 1960s.

 

[7] Steve Reich, (b. 1936) – brief excerpt from Music for 18 Musicians (1976)

-- steady pulse a welcome break from the rhythmic complexity of Post-World War II concert music

-- diatonic but not tonal; sort of a return to modal music (Reich claims to be influenced by the music of Perotin)

-- process-oriented; the process should be audible

-- influenced by gamelan and polyrhythmic West African music (he studied in Ghana)

-- had to form his own ensemble to play his music because it requires an entirely different set of skills than those of conventionally trained "Classical" musicians

-- many early performances took place in art galleries, not concert halls

-- briefly lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late '60s/early '70s; part of the "Downtown" scene in New York City

-- Minimalist (although Reich hates the term) and therefore considered Post-Modern, but some modernist characteristics in his music (it is about its “materials”)

 

[8] John Adams (b. 1947), The Chairman Dances (“Foxtrot for Orchestra,” 1987)

-- musically related to his opera Nixon in China

-- lush orchestration

-- lots of meter changes

-- stylistic references to film music, Swing, minimalism, etc.

 

John Adams -- currently the living American composer most performed by orchestras

-- raised in New England, but most of adult life lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area

-- initially a Minimalist composer but now very eclectic, incorporating elements of Neo-Romanticism, American popular music from Swing to the present, polyrhythmic complexities of music from a variety of world cultures, and some thorny moments (harsh unresolved dissonances and complex rhythms) of the 'traditional' avant-garde;  perfectly Post-Modern

-- Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for a work commissioned by the New York Philharmonic commemorating 9/11

-- San Francisco Opera commissioned a new Adams opera, Doctor Atomic, about Robert Oppenheimer

-- San Francisco Symphony has a 10-year commissioning agreement with Adams

 

Also know Schoenberg example ON TEXTBOOK CD.

 

May 2007

David Meckler