Chapter 20The Search for New Sounds

1890-1945

Thursday, February 7, 13

Impressionism

• one of the earliest attempts to explore new approaches to music

• term first used in painting to designate style painters who used accumulation of short brush strokes instead of continuous line to produce a suggestion of an object

• color takes precedence over line

Thursday, February 7, 13

Impressionism

• music is based on a blurring of distinct harmonies, rhythms, forms

• makes greater use of color (timbre) than any previous style of music

• composers:

- Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

- Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Thursday, February 7, 13

Impressionism

• form: avoids goal-oriented structures

• harmony: use ninth, eleventh and thirteenth chords; and non-diatonic scales

• voice leading: individual voices often move independently of one another

• rhythm: tends to be fluid avoiding definite sense of meter

• timbre: new sounds from piano and orchestra

Thursday, February 7, 13

Impressionism

• Debussy’s music resonates with French poetry of his day (Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune, 1894)

• Symbolist poets relished the sound of language for sound’s sake and were not constrained by syntax or logic

• poets: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud

Thursday, February 7, 13

Impressionism• Debussy Prelude à l’Après-midi d’un faune (1894)

- inspired by a Mallarmé poem

- Debussy said the piece conveyed “a general impression of the poem...” (Bonds p. 520)

- unclear why Debussy called it a “Prelude”

- the flute seems to represent the Faun, his traditional instrument

- traditional minded listeners found this piece “primitive” in the worst sense of the word (Bonds p. 520)

• lack of clearly defined musical themes

• parallel fifths and parallel dominant seventh chords (which do not function)

Thursday, February 7, 13

Impressionism

• Debussy “Voiles” from Preludes Book I (1910)

- music moves beyond traditional tonality

- ABA form

- uses whole-tone and pentatonic scales to articulate the form

- see Bonds p. 521 for scale details

Thursday, February 7, 13

Challenges to Tonality• number of composers in the early 20th century used

scales beyond major and minor including: whole-tone, pentatonic, modal, octatonic

• octatonic scale

- used for coloristic effect by Liszt, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsokov

- used in a more structural way by Bartók

• also used quartal harmonies: chords built on interval of fourth rather than thirds (Alexander Scriabin, Charles Ives)

- Scriabin’s mystic chord (see Bonds p. 524)

Thursday, February 7, 13

Challenges to Tonality

• Bartók Diminished Fifth

- from book 4 or Mikrokosmos

- octatonic scale used to generate the surface of this piece

- juxtaposes two tetrachords which combine to make an octatonic scale

Thursday, February 7, 13

Charles IvesIves the Revolutionary:

graduation portrait, Yale University, 1898.

Beneath the conventional clothing and demeanor lay an

undergraduate seething at the strictures of musical convention.

Thursday, February 7, 13

Challenges to Tonality

• Charles Ives “The Cage”

- uses quartal harmony

- not in a key

• Charles Ives “The Things Our Fathers Loved”

- patchwork of preexisting American tunes

- like the “stream of consciousness” techniques used by the modernist writer James Joyce

Thursday, February 7, 13

Challenges to Tonality

• Charles Ives The Unanswered Question (1908)

- conflict between traditional and non-traditional harmony

- two groups

• flutes + trumpet (represent a dissonant sound world)

• strings (represent more traditional harmony)

- Ives’ forward to the score is in Bonds p. 525

- Ives was disturbed by music that takes the ear on the “easy path”

Thursday, February 7, 13

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)

Thursday, February 7, 13

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)

Thursday, February 7, 13

Radical Primitivism• Stravinsky The Rite of Spring

- associated with primitivism

- rhythm very important

- avoids functional tonality

- Introduction

• use of modes, pentatonic scales, and octatonic scales and scale fragments

• rhythm complex (meter changes, layering of distinct rhythms)

- Dance of the Adolescents

• blends regular pulse and irregular accents

• polytonal harmony: Eb7 + FbM are played simultaneously (see Bonds p. 529-530)

Thursday, February 7, 13

Radical Primitivism

• composers who emphasized motoric rhythm (speed, extreme dynamics, repetitive patterns and dissonant harmony) including Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Henry Cowell, Leo Ornsteing, George Antheil

• Prokofiev Piano Sonata No. 7 in B (1939-42)

- uses motoric rhythm

- creates a kind of rhythmic dissonance by using regular and irregular metric elements

Thursday, February 7, 13

Nationalism

• musical nationalism was driven by desire to return to cultural roots through musical idiom connected to the people

• growing political and cultural aspirations of ethnic groups throughout Europe and the Americas

Thursday, February 7, 13

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”

• composers freely adapted music cultures not their own

Thursday, February 7, 13

Nationalism

• Bartók Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm

- from book 6 of Mikrokosmos

- use of folk elements in modern music

- 4 + 2 + 3 rhythmic pattern derived from Bulgarian folk music

Thursday, February 7, 13

Nationalism

• Darius Milhaud Saudades do Brasil (1921)

- title: Nostalgia for Brazil

- uses the dance rhythms of Brazilian music

- the harmonies are far more complex that one would find in folk music

Thursday, February 7, 13

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)

Thursday, February 7, 13

New Timbres

• Henry Cowell The Banshee (1925)

- use of new timbres

- extended techniques

- two players needed

• one holds down the sustain pedal

• the other plays directly on the strings

- Cowell wrote out detailed instructions on how to perform the piece

Thursday, February 7, 13

Edgard VarèseEarlier 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.

Thursday, February 7, 13

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)

Thursday, February 7, 13