LINKS and DEFINITIONS
TONALITY
The main concept of tonality is the idea of the tonic, which is the central
key of a work. Tonal music has a key, and all the harmonic modulation in the
work can be related back to that key and can be said to function within that
key. In C major, the tonic is C. The next most important degree of the scale
is called the Dominant, or the fifth degree of the scale. In the key of C major,
the Dominant would be G, because you ascend the scale from C to D, E, F and
then G. The dominant, in so much of Western tonal music, is the best signifier
of the tonic. It has an irresistible pull toward the tonic. It is that second-to-last
chord in a piece of music that wants, desperately, to be resolved. Most of music
consists of the “journey” from tonic to dominant and back to tonic.
This is the one of the poetic struggles of harmony.
Tonality is also based on the relationship between Consonance and Dissonance.
Consonance is typically defined as chords or intervals (combinations of notes)
that sound harmonious and pleasant to our ears, based on the laws of acoustics,
whereas Dissonance consists of those unpleasant to our ears, in need of resolution
to a consonance. Another struggle of harmony is that between Consonance and
Dissonance. This creates much of the tension in a work of music.
Tonality is a system that is based on natural laws of sound and physics. Music
composed within the rules of tonality sounds naturally harmonious and satisfying
to our ears, as opposed to Serial and Twelve-Tone music, which treats all relationships
between notes as equal, and thus utilizes dissonance and consonance in the same
way.
http://www.andymilne.dial.pipex.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonality
http://music.theory.home.att.net/tonality.htm
RICHARD WAGNER
Born in Leipzig in 1813, the son of a policeman and a baker’s daughter.
He studied with Theodor Weinlig at the Thomaskirche. In 1843 he was named Hofkapellmeister
in Dresden, and in the next few years he wrote his operas Rienzi, Der fliegende
Hollander (The Flying Dutchman), Tannhauser, and Lohengrin. In 1848 he began
working on his greatest work, the Ring cycle, and wrote several essays on his
philosophy of art, which led his opponents to call his work “music of
the future” and admirers gesamtkunstwerk, or “complete art work,”
in which all the arts were interconnected and reached their greatest expression.
In 1859 he completed Tristan und Isolde, a drama that is a classic tale of love
and death. The Ring, completed in 1876, is composed of four operas, Das Rheingold,
Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung. The music is united by a catalogue
of approximately ninety leitmotivs or “leading motifs” that identify
personages, ideas and objects throughout the four works, and provide the unifying
structure of the works, which have continuous action as opposed to most operas
which are composed of arias and musical interludes. Other significant operas
include Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, a comic opera, and Parsifal. In 1872
the cornerstone was laid for the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, the realization
of a dream of Wagner’s to build a festival for the performance of his
Ring.
Wagner’s contributions to music are immense. He introduced the idea of
endless melody, a continuous flow of CHROMATIC
harmony, and he reformed operatic form and worked on massively heroic scale.
Wagner was at first idolized by Nietzsche, who believed he was the savior of
German music and culture. In 1888 Nietzsche denounced him for his excesses.
He was also denounced because of his connection with Nazi Germany due to Hitler’s
admiration for him and Wagner’s own anti-Semitism. In his own time, however,
Wagner was widely revered. Even those against his work admitted that he was
a true innovator.
http://users.utu.fi/hansalmi/wagner.spml
http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/wagner.html
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born in Hamburg in 1833, the son of a double-bassist who taught him the rudiments
of music, also studies with Eduard Marxsen. Made his living by playing piano
in taverns, and met Eduard Remenyi, a Hungarian violinist who taught him the
Hungarian “gypsy” style. He also became friends with Joseph Joachim,
who was the influence and dedicatee of all his violin works, and met Liszt and
Robert and Clara Schumann. Schumann gave him a very positive review in his Neue
Zeitschrift fur Musik in 1853. After Robert’s death in 1856, he assumed
a deep spiritual friendship with Clara, 14 years older than he. For the remainder
of his life, however, Brahms lived as a bourgeois bachelor, consumed with composition.
His Piano Concerto No. 1, German Requiem, and the Hungarian Dances are great
works of his early period, characterized by a great usage of COUNTERPOINT,
thick textures, continuous variation, and an innate and unique lyricism. These
years were also characterized by a great individuality yet a deep feeling that
he was in the shadow of Beethoven. He finally wrote his Symphony No. 1 in 1876,
which lived up to the almost insurmountable challenge, acknowledging little
debt to Beethoven. Unlike Wagner, Brahms’ music has little to no departures
from the formal design, is perfectly structured in thematic configuration, and
did not use intense and roving CHROMATICISM.
For many at the end of the nineteenth century, Brahms was the “Classical
Romantic.” To the Wagnerites he was a reactionary; for his own people,
he was the upholder of a beloved faith.
http://www.johannesbrahms.org/
PROGRESSIVE
Refers to WAGNER’s innovative compositional
style. In terms of harmony, he used a wandering CHROMATICISM
in his compositions at a time when almost all music was being composed within
rigid confines of diatonic TONALITY. He also
made important and influential innovations in operatic form with his use of
continuous dramatic action and recurring leitmotivs or “leading motives,”
thematic material used to identify characters, ideas or objects through an entire
opera or series of operas (most importantly throughout his “Ring”
cycle.)
Most importantly, Wagner represented innovation and the future of music for
many in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
CLASSICIST
Refers to several aspects of Brahms’ compositional style:
Firstly, his formality of structure and utilization of Classical forms. He used
Classical forms such as the sonata and symphony, but did not adapt or update
them in any way, sticking to age-old schemes of design.
Secondly, his rejection of programmatic music. Whereas other Romantic composers,
such as Liszt, Wagner and Schumann composed programmatic music, or music based
on a descriptive literary “program.” In other words, Brahms would
never call a symphony “Faust Symphony” as Liszt did or call a piano
piece a “Forest Scene” as Schumann did. He never provided works
(other than songs, of course) with extra-musical connotations.
Thirdly, his use of a brand of tonal harmony based on strictly tonal chord progressions.
Brahms’ music is very sonorous and rich, very Romantic, but he does not
stray from tonality or utilize CHROMATICISM
like Wagner. All his works are strictly within a key.
Overall, Brahms represented the logical continuation of music after Beethoven
for those who had faith in traditional musical forms.
GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN MUSIC FROM 1890 TO 1905
With a few notable exceptions, including Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler,
the music of this period is characterized by dense CHROMATICISM
and general lack of musical direction that had been provided by TONALITY.
The Post-Romantics, those trying to expand on the style of Wagner, include Max
Bruch, Hans Pfitzner, Max Reger, Ferruccio Busoni, and others. These composers
utilized Wagner’s harmonies without his superb compositional architecture,
taste and use of leitmotivs as “connective tissue.” It is important
to note that Wagner also wrote great themes. These composers were all filler,
so to speak – the chromaticism without the great themes.
CHROMATIC
Tonal harmony (TONALITY) is based on the
relationship between chromaticism and diatonicism. A diatonic step would be
from C to D, and a chromatic step would be from C to C-sharp. Chromaticism is
characterized by the frequent use of progressions based on the chromatic scale.
[A chromatic scale (with audio sample): http://www.teoria.com/reference/scales/13.htm.]
Wagner’s music, on a scientific level, increased the ratio of chromatic
steps to diatonic steps. Diatonicism promotes a strong feeling of tonality and
the pull of the tonic, whereas chromaticism gives the music a wandering, restless
quality often far removed from the tonal center. Indeed, many of the composers
of the post-Wagnerian era did away with key signatures altogether because the
tonal center of the works occurred infrequently.
The significance of chromaticism is that it represents the beginning of the
decay of traditional tonality. It was also one of the main reasons Wagner’s
music was considered so forward-looking and progressive; his use of chromaticism
distanced him from the predominantly diatonic Classicism of his precursors and
of his main musical rival, Brahms.
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG
Born in 1874 to a family of non-musicians in Vienna, Schoenberg began studying
violin at age 8 and composing shortly thereafter. In his late teens he became
acquainted with three men he said influenced him profoundly. Oscar Adler, who
directed his early study of music theory, poetry and philosophy, David Bach,
who “greatly influenced the development of my character by furnishing
it with the ethical and moral power needed to withstand vulgarity and commonplace
popularity,” and Alexander von Zemlinsky, who taught the young Schoenberg
composition, and whose sister Mathilde he later married. Zemlinsky was a lover
of Brahms and Wagner, and he taught Schoenberg, previously more of a ‘Brahmsian’,
to love both. He was also inspired, to a lesser degree, by the music of Liszt,
Bruckner and Hugo Wolf.
In 1899 he wrote the post-Romantic string sextet Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured
Night) based on a poem by Dehmel. The poem is about a woman’s confession
to her lover that she is pregnant by another man; he replies with love and affection
and proclaims that through their love, the child will be born their own. It
is a work of great originality which Schoenberg claimed to be derivative of
both Wagner, in its roving, CHROMATIC harmony,
and of Brahms, in its technique of developing variation. He does admit that
“there were also some Schoenbergian elements to be found in the length
of some of the melodies, in the SONORITY,
in the CONTRAPUNTAL and motival combinations,
and in the semi-contrapuntal movement of the harmony and its basses against
the melody.” Verklarte Nacht was strictly within the bounds of tonality,
as was his next major work, the Gurrelieder (Songs of Gurre) of 1900. Gurrelieder
is a vast symphonic CANTATA based on the writing
of Jens Peter Jacobsen. Wagnerian in scope, it depicts the tragic love of King
Waldemar and Tove, Waldemar’s defiance of God after Tove’s death,
and the King’s ultimate damnation. His next major work, a one-act opera
on Maeterlinck’s Pelleas et Melisande “suggests a more rapid advance
in the direction of extended tonality…but most important are sections
of undetermined tonality” . In the String Quartet No. 2 (1905), “a
powerful sense of direction is maintained through the composer’s exceptional
capacity to shape his material in relation to its formal purpose, a capacity
that after his abandonment of tonality was to prove strong enough to carry a
far heavier structural burden.” In the Chamber Symphony (1906), “progress
is brought about…by the postponement of the resolution of PASSING
DISSONANCES to a remote point where, finally, the preceding harshness becomes
justified.” The opening theme of the work can be interpreted alternately
as MELODIC or HARMONIC,
the distinction becoming blurred, “a process closely bound up with the
loss of tonality in Schoenberg’s music.”
Of the so-called EXPRESSIONIST works,
written in the years 1908 to 1914, Charles Rosen writes, “the ambience
in which these works were created and which they still evoke has an old-fashioned
air today. In their intense and morbid expressivity they seem to breathe the
stuffy atmosphere of that enclosed nightmare world of expressionist German art
in the decade before 1914. Even the wit and gaiety are macabre; against a background
of controlled hysteria, the moments of repose take on an air of death.”
In Schoenberg’s next works, dating from 1908, tonality all but disappears.
In The Book of the Hanging Gardens based on poems by George, tonality all but
dissolves. “The poems by George that led Schoenberg to explore the untried
expressive possibilities of free dissonance describe in rather indirect language
the growth of a passion in an exotic setting and the subsequent parting.”
His next work, the String Quartet No. 2, is perhaps the exact spot at which
tonality dissolves; the crisis of tonality coincided with a personal crisis
– Schoenberg’s wife’s liaison with the painter Richard Gerstl
and the artist’s subsequent suicide. The next works, the 3 Piano Pieces
Op. 11 and the 5 Orchestra Pieces Op. 16, were written in a flurry of inspiration
in 1909. They are short works, and “the disintegration of functional harmony
appeared at the time to have destroyed the conditions for large-scale form.”
In these works, however, traditional tonality is the only thing discarded; motivic
structure and thematic development survive. Next, Schoenberg sought to discard
these elements, believing “that now music could renounce motivic features
and remain coherent and comprehensible nevertheless.” A case in point
in the third Piano Piece from Op. 11, where dynamics and texture are as important
to the coherence of the work as the recurrence of musical material.
The next step that Schoenberg took to create coherence in his increasingly chaotic
atonal works was the adoption of a literary text for his monodramas Erwartung
and Der Gluckliche Hand composed in 1909 and 1910, respectively. The terrifying
monologue of Erwartung, that of a woman wandering through a forest at night
in search of a lover she soon finds murdered, and then a recollection of their
love, “falls into several lengthy paragraphs which provide the clearest
structural feature.” But “beyond a certain point nothing can impinge
upon the dreamlike continuum of musical images.” Indeed, though Schoenberg
was meticulous in his following of the literary text, he was basically acting
as an Expressionist conjurer, using atonality to represent actions beyond conscious
control and understanding, a bizarre co-existing of the past and present, and
almost psychotic changes of emotion from terror to desire to jealousy to tenderness.
But “the intense relentless expressivity of each moment…is a formal
device as well as an extra-musical significance. There is, in short, no definable
difference between the emotional significance of a chord and the formal relationship
of the chord to the other notes in the work of music. The ambiguous nightmare
symbolism of Erwartung is as much a form of expression as its dissonant harmonic
structure: the dissonance and the symbolism are related (indeed, often identical),
and it is a mistake to think that one means or signifies the other.” Despite
this, there is a unity: as Theodor Adorno writes, “the unity becomes a
unity of extremes.”
And as Carl Schorske notes, “the more radical [Schoenberg’s] music
became in giving voice to derangement, the more his social isolation and inability
to reach the public increased. Thus, his very achievement in finding a form
of aesthetic expression adequate to the full range of psychotic possibilities
brought desocialization of the artist as its consequence.” Schoenberg’s
music was truly expressionist; none of its emotion was in the least bit faked.
Pierrot Lunaire, composed in 1912, 21 poems for speaker and chamber ensemble
by turns horrifying, sentimental, and grotesque, shifts as in a dream between
the bizarre actions of a clown, the poet, and the self-absorbed artist. The
verses “provide the occasion for the presenting, with the detachment that
the protagonist in Die Gluckliche Hand failed to achieve, human activity as
a shadow play in which menace and absurdity are on a level.” The writing
is very different from Schoenberg’s more maniacal works of the past few
years; irony, parody and even direct reference are used to a startling effect.
Most startling is the sentimentality and nostalgia pervasive in the work: Pierrot’s
“final illusion, very Viennese, is intoxication with the ‘the old
fragrance of once-upon-a-time’.” Indeed, as Rosen notes, “most
styles have a much wider range than is sometimes realized, and expressionism
is not always so lurid and so tormented as it often appears; there are parts
of Pierrot Lunaire that have lightness and charm” although “the
concentrated expressive force of Schoenberg’s atonal style is more at
ease with the nightmare of the woman in Erwartung…than with the idealist
symbolism of Die Gluckliche Hand,” a work that is more of a morality play.
Schoenberg had reached a standstill in his composition. The First World War
had broken out, and atonality was becoming more confusing and formless for Schoenberg.
In the early 1920’s he began working at a system he called TWELVE-TONE
COMPOSITION to legitimize and provide structure for the sagging atonality.
His work during this time was predominantly in Classical forms. Why? Perhaps
it is because he needed “to find new scope for his inherently developmental
cast of thought.” Even with his revolutions of tonality, Schoenberg was
deeply rooted in the past. Indeed, after several years of SERIAL
composition, he returned to tonality because he felt there was more to be said
after all: a fitting close for the ultimate modernist.
Arnold Schoenberg Center
www.schoenberg.at/default_e.htm
Arnold Schoenberg Archives
www.usc.edu/isd/archives/schoenberg/
ATONALITY
The absence of TONALITY, or a lack of a distinct
tonal center. In 1908, Schoenberg began dispensing with key signatures in his
EXPRESSIONISTIC works in order to convey
feelings of disorder, chaos and terror. Atonal music favors dissonance and avoids
traditional tonal chords. For unification it relies upon the recurrence of rhythmic
and structural motives rather than on harmony. Atonality gives utter freedom
of expression to the composer.
It was the open-endedness of atonality that led Schoenberg to create his Twelve-Tone
system in 1923 in order to legitimize the craft of composition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atonality
TWELVE-TONE COMPOSITION
A system created in 1923 by Schoenberg. In order to legitimize the craft of
atonal composition, which had become too open-ended for him, he developed a
system by which the series of twelve notes in the CHROMATIC
scale were arranged into an order before the composition of a work of music.
This set, called a Tone Row, provided the musical material for the whole work.
Schoenberg gave himself freedom when it came to dynamics, rhythm and scoring;
the only rule was that no tone could be repeated until all the others in the
row had been played.
There are three variations of the basic Tone Row that also constitute the musical
material of a work, at the composer’s own discretion:
a) Retrograde: the basic row, in reverse direction.
b) Inversion: The mirror image of the basic row. Beginning on the first note
of the basic row, if the next note was a minor third up, in the inversion it
would be a minor third down.
c) Retrograde-Inversion: The inversion of the retrograde, or the mirror-image
of the retrograde.
Schoenberg’s initial system was expanded upon with the advent of SERIALISM
and TOTAL SERIALISM.
http://www.fact-index.com/t/tw/twelve_tone_technique_1.html
ALBAN BERG
Born in Vienna in 1885 to a comfortable bourgeois family with servants, a governess,
and a country estate in Carinthia. Berg’s parents were supporters of the
arts, and encouraged cultural exposure; they were friends with some of Vienna’s
musical figures, including the pianist Grunfeld and the composer Bruckner. Berg’s
sister Smaragda (b. 1886) was a piano prodigy, a student of Leschetizky, and
later an outspoken lesbian and member of the coffeehouse circles of Kraus, Klimt,
Altenberg and others. He met Schoenberg in 1904, and the older composer became
his mentor, friend, and teacher for six years. After a long courtship, Berg
married Helene Nahowski, the daughter of a court official, in 1911.
Berg’s first compositions were several dozen songs, approximately eighty
of which are now published, which he wrote between the ages of 16 and 23. They
show an amazing affinity for Romantic and Impressionistic lied (song) composition
as well as “an apparently effortless facility for the synthesis of words
and music.” But he had very little gift for instrumental composition,
having had next to no formal music training before meeting Schoenberg. Indeed,
upon meeting him, Schoenberg wrote, “…his imagination apparently
could not work on anything but lieder. Even the piano accompaniments to them
were song-like in style. He was absolutely incapable of writing an instrumental
movement or inventing and instrumental theme.” Tonally, they are post-Wagnerian,
and “the overall sense of tonal direction is hair-raising rather than
secure.” But these were still student works, and they are more generic
than original. His first great work was the Piano Sonata op. 1 (1908), a work
of fluid “developing variation” of a few motivic units where “chords
from a rich harmonic vocabulary seem to be linked in sequence more by the chromatic
motion of prominent voices, such as the melody and the bass, than by concepts
of root progression.”
The first work that Berg wrote entirely outside of Schoenberg’s guidance
was the scandalously EXPRESSIONISTIC
Altenberg-Lieder, which was premiered with other works by Schoenberg and Webern,
with Schoenberg conducting, on March 31, 1913. The audience rioted, forcing
the concert to end prematurely. Berg was crushed, and Schoenberg did nothing
to reassure him; in fact, according to Berg biographer Willi Reich he sided
with the audience in the belief that, due to the APHORISTIC
nature of the works, “they were so brief as to exclude any possibility
of thematic development.” In a letter to Berg, however, he does admit
that “I find some things disturbing at first; namely the rather too obvious
desire to use new means…” Perhaps his criticisms stemmed from a
selfish desire, as “grand innovator,” to contain Berg’s creativity.
Composer George Perle believes that the Altenberg-Lieder “have little
in common with the aphoristic statements of Webern. They are miniatures rather,”
and their “effect is that of a heavy curtain of sound that opens to reveal
and frame what is central to the work, articulate song.” “The texture
is at times exceedingly dense…the structures are traditional ones…the
pieces are cyclically related.”
In May 1914, Berg saw the Vienna premiere of Buchner’s Woyzeck, a fragmentary,
proto-modernist play (stemming from the 1830’s) about a poor soldier who
is persecuted and broken by the social order. The play was to have a huge impact
on him. He immediately began working on scenes for an opera based on Buchner’s
tragedy, but he was interrupted by the “war fever’ in 1915, and
like “so many other persons of learning, culture, and refinement, on every
side, he assumed that the material sacrifices demanded by the war would ennoble
and purify society.” But Berg’s views wavered over the course of
his life, referring to “the filthy war” and calling himself “a
fierce antimilitarist,” pledging his support to the ideas and writings
of the unwavering pacifist Karl Kraus.
After being placed on guard duty in Vienna in 1918 due to chronic asthma, Berg
was able to continue work on his opera. He wrote to Webern, “it is not
only the fate of this poor man, exploited and tormented by all the world, that
touches me so closely, but also the unheard-of intensity of mood of the individual
scenes.” As George Perle writes, “his self-identification with the
protagonist…has made the composition of the opera a spiritual necessity.”
The opera was completed in the spring of 1922, and it is a brilliant synthesis
of Classical forms and modern atonal techniques, consisting of three acts each
of five scenes. Each act has a feeling of increasing despair. Its first performance
brought fierce protests, but the work became gradually accepted throughout the
world, especially after a successful performance in Philadelphia in 1931 under
Stokowski.
Berg’s next major work was the Lyric Suite for string quartet, which was
not “contrived” or structured around a mechanical usage of 12-Tone
technique. Instead, according to Berg, it is built by “the large unfolding
(the continuing intensification of mood) within the whole composition.”
Adorno called the work a “latent opera.” The only twelve-tone movements
in the work are the first, third, and sixth, but when the composer’s annotated
copy of the score was discovered in 1977, it was proven that the work is unified
by a series of leitmotivs. The annotated copy details a secret passion Berg
had for the married woman Hanna Fuchs-Robettin; indeed, her initials and Berg’s
combine to form the basic motive of the work (H-F-A-B; H in German notation
is B-flat). It also contains a previously unknown last movement for soprano,
based on George’s translation of a poem of Baudelaire: “to you my
sole dear one, my cry rises out of the deepest abyss in which my heart has fallen
– that gradually dies away in love, yearning and grief.”
Berg’s last great work, left unfinished at his death of an abscess in
1935, was the opera Lulu. It was based on the two Lulu tragedies of Franz Wedekind,
especially the second, Die Buchse der Pandora, which he had seen in May 1905,
as well as Hauptmann’s Und Pippa Tanzt!. The play is about “the
inevitable and irresolvable clash between the instincts and civilization”
and it also “exposes the artificiality of class distinctions” because
of the class-transcending nature of sexual desire. It tells the tragic story
of Lulu, saved from the gutter only to undergo another fall from grace: she
dies, as a London prostitute, at the hands of Jack the Ripper.
http://www.geocities.com/al6an6erg/albanberg.html
ANTON WEBERN
Born in Vienna in 1883, Webern’s childhood was spent between Vienna, Klagenfurt
and his family’s country estate in the mountains of Carinthia. There he
gained a love of nature he would retain for the rest of his life. He studied
piano and cello with Edwin Komauer. In 1902 he graduated from gymnasium and
began studying in Vienna with Adler, Graedener, Navratil, and, in 1904, with
Schoenberg.
Most of Webern’s pre-Schoenberg works are undeveloped, and show the influence
of Brahms and Reger. His first major work is the Passacaglia Op. 1 for orchestra
(1908). It exemplifies the technique of developing variation as had Berg’s
Sonata of the same year. In terms of orchestration, it draws on Mahler and early
Schoenberg; he was shocked at the CHROMATICISM
of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony of 1906, and “he held back from
the harmonic adventurousness of that work, keeping about five years behind his
teacher.” His next works, a series of Dehmel songs, however, “show
him abreast of Schoenberg’s tentatives towards tonality” with his
use of whole-tone figurations and diminished triads. He jumped headlong into
Expressionism in a series of songs from Stefan George poems, and “George’s
invocations to leave behind a world of appearances for that of dream and fantasy
were an obvious parallel for new musical departures…the music is pulseless,
flexible in tempo and irregular in phrase length, meter and rhythmic pattern.”
Webern went along with Schoenberg in his next desire: to create not only atonal
but athematic music. His opp. 5-7, written in the years 1909-1910, are purely
instrumental works, ranging from the Six Pieces for Orchestra op. 6 (which are
scored for a giant orchestra where for the most part smaller, varied groupings
of instruments are used) to the Four Pieces for Violin and Piano, op. 7. However
the unifying factor of the works is not size but the maniacal quality of moment-to-moment
contrasts in the works: “perpetual change is indeed almost a principle
at all surface levels.”
Webern’s next works are his first truly APHORISTIC
compositions. They are works of incredible shortness, and Webern once said that
of the Bagatelles, op. 9 for orchestra (1909) “while working on them I
had the feeling that once the 12 notes had run out, the piece was finished…It
sounds grotesque, incomprehensible, and it was immensely difficult.” This
is an amazing foreshadowing of TWELVE-TONE
technique and it perhaps suggests that it came most naturally to Webern, who
felt that compression was crucial and that redundancy (even in terms of playing
the same note more than once!) needed to be avoided at all costs. Indeed, the
fundamental principle is the intrinsic motivic value of each of the 12 notes
of the chromatic scale. Webern, in using these tones as the basis for the structure
of a work, was the first to anticipate Schoenberg’s later innovation.
Anton Webern
http://www.antonwebern.com
SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL
Refers to the collective group of composers of the first half of the twentieth
century who worked with ARNOLD SCHOENBERG.
The most important of these were ALBAN BERG and
ANTON WEBERN. The three traded stylistic ideas
and were at the forefront of modernism, utilizing ATONAL
and SERIAL techniques.
It is often called the “Second” Viennese School to distinguish it
from the vaguely associated composers Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven who worked
in Vienna in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The Second Viennese School – a Pathfinder
http://www.albany.edu/~ak9063/isp605/texts.html
EXPRESSIONISM
A modern artistic movement (art, theater, music, etc.) beginning around 1910
that gave expression to the inner state of the artist’s mind. Expressionism
is generally characterized by extremes of emotion – anxiety, restlessness,
even horror and terror – in order to convey the harsh realities of modern
life for many artists. Expressionism can be said to be the opposite of Impressionism,
which attempts to depict the external world, whereas Expressionism deals solely
with the effect of the external world on the artist’s inner life. In music,
Expressionism was often linked with the advent of ATONALITY,
because Expressionist composers felt that atonality alone could successfully
convey the fragmented, incoherent and often brutal nature of modern life.
For a Fictionalized Account of the Life
of Expressionist Painter Egon Schiele, click here.
For a Website on Expressionist Painter Gustav
Klimt, click here.
SERIALISM
Refers to the compositional process by which the thematic aspects of a piece
are arranged in pre-ordered sets that provide the musical material for the work
and provide varying degrees of guidance for the composer. Schoenberg’s
TWELVE-TONE method was a form of serialism
but it only dealt with the ordering of tones. Schoenberg (and other practitioners
of his method) had free reign over the organization of the other compositional
aspects of the work of music.
Serial Music Lesson
http://www.sci.wsu.edu/math/Lessons/Music
TOTAL SERIALISM
Refers to the pre-arrangement into sets of all musical aspects of a piece, such
as tone, rhythm, dynamics and SONORITY, so
that no aspect of the piece is “arbitrarily” composed. The composer
has very little free reign over the composition of the work after he has made
the initial orderings of its musical elements.
Total serialism developed from the experiments of Olivier Messiaen in his Mode
de valeurs et d’intensites (Mode of Values and Intensities), a work he
composed in 1949, at which time the method became extremely popular among some
younger composers. Practitioners of this method (to varying degrees, and in
different styles) include Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Dallapiccola
and Luciano Berio; these composers are often referred to as the European Avant-garde.
COUNTERPOINT
From the Latin punctum contra punctum or “point against point,”
counterpoint refers to the art of polyphonic composition, by which several independent
musical lines are juxtaposed with one another to create an extremely varied
musical “fabric.” In counterpoint there is no melody or accompaniment,
there are only musical lines of equal value and structural importance. The best
examples of counterpoint are in J.S. Bach’s Art of the Fugue and Well-Tempered
Clavier.
SONORITY
A term describing the texture, richness or amount of resonance of sound –
the “quality” of sound produced by an instrument or, on a grander
scale, by a work of music.
CANTATA
A generally secular vocal work with instrumental accompaniment usually scored
for solo voices, chorus and orchestra. The form developed parallel to the emergence
of opera and oratorio in the seventeenth century; the most representative works
of this form are those written by Johann Sebastian Bach.
PASSING DISSONANCE
Notes or tones foreign to the chord they accompany (dissonant) and passing from
one chord to another by step.
MELODIC
Generally distinguished from the harmony: the line that could be sung, the melody,
the tune.
HARMONIC
The chord or accompaniment supporting the melody.
APHORISTIC
An aphorism is an adage or concise statement of a principle. In music it refers
primarily to Webern’s compositional style of extremely concise yet complete
structures. There are some aphoristic works by Berg (Altenberg-Lieder) and Schoenberg
(Piano Pieces, Op. 19), as well.