Classical Modernism
Claude Debussy (French) Impressionist
Piano
L’Isle Joyeuse
Estampes
Two sets of Images
A set of 24 preludes
Suite bergamasque and Pour le piano
Orchestral
Prélude à “L’Après-midi d’un faune”
Nocturnes
La Mer (The Sea)
Only Opera
Pelléas et Mélisande
Maurice Ravel (French) Impressionist
• Excellent craftsmanship Traditional forms Diatonic melodies
Complex harmonies within an essentially tonal language
Jeux d’eau (piano piece)
Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit
The orchestral suite Rapsodie espagnole
The ballet Daphnis et Chloé
Le Tombeau de Couperin (Piano, orchestrated later)
Bolero
Rachmaninoff (Russia) impressionist
• melodious method of composing, similar to Tchaikovsky
• traditionists
Isle of the Dead (symphonic poem)
The Bells (choral symphony)
Prelude in G Minor, Op. 23, No. 5
Scriabin (Russia) impressionist
• Began by writing nocturnes, preludes, études, and mazurkas
like Chopin, then absorbed techniques from other composers
• chromaticism
Vers la Flamme (Piano)
orchestral works: Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus
Asked for coloured stage light
Manuel de Falla (Spanish)
• Combine Spanish traditions and neoclassical against French
La vida breve (Opera)
El amor brujo and El sombrero de tres picos (Ballets)
El retablo de maese Pedro (puppet opera)
Vaughan Williams (England)
• Folk songs English hymns
• Earlier English composers such as Thomas Tallis and
Henry Purcell
• He studied with Ravel and influenced by Debussy, Bach,
and Handel
• musical editor of the English Hymnal
Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis (double string orchestra)
Leos Janácek (Czechoslovakia)
• rhythms and inflections of peasant speech and song
Jenufa (Opera)
Kát’a Kabanová (Opera)
The Cunning Little Vixen (Opera)
The Makropulos Affair (Opera)
From the House of the Dead (Opera)
Jean Sibelius (Finland)
• career demonstrates many of the divisions in 20th
century music.
Kullervo (symphonic poems)
The Swan of Tuonela (symphonic poems)
Finlandia (symphonic poems)
Erik Satie (French) avant-garde
• modal and unresolved chords
• Funny perform directions
• Satire other composers
Gymnopedes (piano)
Automatic Descriptions (piano)
Parade and Relâche (Ballet)
Radical Modernism: challenge audience perceptions
Schoenberg (Austrian)
• continuing German classical tradition moved to atonality
• twelve-tone method
• pantonality, pitches and dissonances are treated
independently
• Emotional
Tonal:
Verklärte Nacht (Tone Poems)
Pelleas und Mélisande (Symphonic poem)
Gurrelieder (huge cantata)
Atonal:
Book of the Hanging Gardens
Erwartung (Opera)
Pierrot lunaire (Cycle of songs)
Berg
• Student of Schoenberg
• Music more approachable
Wozzeck (Opera)
Lyric Suite (String quartet)
Lulu (Opera)
Webern
• Student of Schoenberg
• Lecturer: The Path to the New Music
Stravinsky (Russian) Cosmopolitan
• Most important composer
• Made Russian musical elements became international
• Emotionally detached
The Firebird (Ballets)
Petrushka (Ballets)
Le Sacre du printemps (Ballets)
L’Histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale)
Pulcinella
In memoriam Dylan Thomas (song cycle)
Threni (voice and orch)
Movements (piano and orch)
Bartók (Hungarian)
• combining elements of Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, and
Bulgarian peasant music with elements of the Austro-
German and French classical traditions.
• inspired by Strauss’s tone poems Debussy, Schoenberg, and
Stravinsky
Bluebeard’s Castle (Opera)
The Miraculous Mandarin
Mikrokosmos (153 piano pieces in 6 books with graded difficulties)
Ives (American) Modernist
• first American modernist and Experimental music
• First Polytonality
• Programmatic, celebrate America
• influenced by Strauss, Debussy, and Scriabin
The Unanswered Question
Three Places in New England
General William Booth Enters into Heaven (art song)
Music between the Two World Wars: bring back to audience
Les Six (Group of composers France)
Honegger Les Six
Pacific 231 (symphonic movement)
King David (oratorio. Chant jazz)
Milhaud Les Six
Le Boeuf sur le toit (ballet)
Christophe Colomb and Sacred Service (Opera)
La Création du monde
Krenek (German)
• ‘Neue Sachlichkeit,’ New Objectivity
• use of familiar elements
• Moved to US, adopted the twelve-tone method
Johnny spielt auf (Johnny Strikes Up the Band)
attacked by the Nazis the use of African-American elements.
Weill (German)
• ‘Neue Sachlichkeit,’ New Objectivity
• Seek to entertain everyday people
• Moved to US due to nazi, Broadway musicals
Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny and Die Dreigroschenoper (Opera)
Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (Ballad)
Knickerbocker Holiday (Musicals)
Lady in the Dark( Musicals)
Lost in the Stars (Musicals)
Hindemith (German)
• New Objectivity
• Performance experience
• Gebrauchsmusik (“music for use”)
• harmonic fluctuation: consonant chords progress toward
dissonance then resolved either suddenly or by slowly till
consonance is reached again.
Wir bauen eine Stadt (musical for children)
Mathis der Maler (Opera)
Ludus tonalis (piano)
Symphonic Metamorphosis after Themes of Carl Maria von Weber
Orff (German)
• Stayed in nazi Germany, politics music can separate
Carmina burana
Prokofiev (Russian)
• Left for tour and returned Soviet Union in 1936
• Restricted by Soviet Union
The Love for Three Oranges (an opera)
Russes in Paris (Ballet)
Lieutenant Kijé (film score, later suite)
Romeo and Juliet (ballet)
Peter and the Wolf (fairy tale)
Alexander Nevsky (film score)
Shostakovich (Russian)
• Studied and live in Soviet system
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (Opera) attacked by Soviet Union
Fifth Symphony (response to criticism)
Claude Champagne (Canadian)
• First international Canadian composer
• influenced by Russian composers such as Mussorgsky and
Scriabin.
Suite canadienne (Canadian Suite)
Danse villageoise (Village Dance)
Hector Villa-Lobos (Brazil)
• First international Brazilian composer
Bachianas Brasileiras
Silvestre Revueltas (Mexican)
• First international Maxican composer
• Studied in Mexico and US
• Don’t use folk songs
Homenaje a Frederico García Lorca
Varèse (French)
• Moved to US in 1915
• Influenced by Schoenberg, Stravinsky
• All sound can be material for compose
Amériques
Hyperprism
Déserts (for winds, percussion, and tape)
Poème électronique (for tape)
Henry Cowell (American) Experimentalist
• Interested in non-Western musics
Crawford Seeger(American)
• first woman to win the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in
music
• works published by Cowell
String Quartet 1931
Gershwin (American)
• See no clear boundary between classical and popular music
• popular songs and Broadway shows
Rhapsody in Blue
Porgy and Bess (folk opera)
Aaron Copland (American)
• the most important American composer
• first of many American composers to study in France
• combined modernism with simplicity
Appalachian Spring (ballet, then suite)
William Grant Still (American)
• Studied George Whitefield Chadwick and Edgard Varèse
• Afro-American broke many racial barriers
Afro-American Symphony
The Changing World of Postwar Music: Everything diverse
Oliver Messiaen (French) classical tradition
• Most important French in 20th century
Quatuor pour la fin du temps (for violin, clarinet, cello, and piano)
Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (for piano)
St. Francis of Assisi (opera)
Turangalíla-symphonie and Catalogue d’oiseaux (Piano)
Benjamin Britten (English) classical tradition
• combined modernism with simplicity
• Peace and no war
• Peter Grimes first opera after Purcell enter
international repertory
Peter Grimes (opera)
War Requiem
Samuel Barber (American) classical tradition
• Remain committed to tonality.
• tonal romanticism
Dover Beach (voice and quartet)
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (voice and orch)
John Cage(American) avant-garde
• leader of the postwar avant-garde
• Studied under Henry Cowell
• Prepared piano : new diverse percussive sounds in
piano
• Indeterminacy: decisions made by performers or
audience
Sonatas and Interludes (prepared piano)
4’33”
Musicircus
Morton Feldman(American) avant-garde
• Inspired John Cage
• Trust instinct, reject compose system and traditions
Projection I (solo cello)
Earle Brown avant-garde
• Inspired John Cage and Feldman
• Indeterminacy
Total serialism: If the twelve notes of the chromatic scale could be
serialized, so could durations, intensities, timbres, and other
elements
Babbitt : music more complex, went beyond Schoenberg to realize
potentials of serialism.
Stockhausen
• Inspired by Messiaen’s repeating cycles
• Kreuzspiel, instruments all cross at exactly the same
point
• One of pioneers of electronic music.
Boulez
• Inspired by Messiaen
• relax the rigidity of total serialism
Structures (two pianos)
Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master)
New virtuosity: challenge the skills of these new virtuosos players
Luciano Berio (Italian) New virtuosity
Sequenza (solo flute)
Elliott Carter New virtuosity
• metric modulation: tempo changes at different layers of
the music create rhythmic polyphony
Caténaires (piano)
Harry Partch
• Abandoned equal temperament and Western harmony
counterpoint
• a new scale with 43 notes, new instruments to play the
scale
Oedipus – A Music-Dance Drama
Revelation in the Courthouse Park
George Crumb
• imaginative ways to get new sounds out of ordinary
instruments and objects
Ancient Voices of Children (cycle of four songs, unconventional sound
sources)
Black Angels (string quartet, electronically amplified)
Non-Western styles and instruments
• Bahli: Colin McPhee (Tabuh-Tabuhan)
• Iran, India, Japan: Henry Cowell (Persian Set, Ongaku)
• Korea and Taiwan: Lou Harrison (Pacifika Rondo, La
Koro Sutro)
Pierre Schaeffer pioneered electronic music, musique concrète
• first major work of musique concrète, Symphonie pour
un homme seul
Stockhausen
• one of the pioneers of electronic music composition
Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) a boy’s voice.
Varèse
• combined electronic sounds with recorded ones
Poème électronique
