Outlines:

1. Central Europe
   
   
   1. Ethnic styles became available to composers through recording technology and systematic study
      
      
   2. Béla Bartók (1881–1945), pianist, composer, ethnologist
      1. He was one of the first musical ethnologists.
         1. He published nearly two thousand traditional tunes.
         2. He wrote books and articles on the music he collected.
         3. He arranged folksongs and used them as the basis for original works.
         4. His study of folk music influenced his compositional style.
      2. By 1908 he had developed a personal style that merged folk influences and turn-of-thecentury art music styles.
         1. He used the piano as a percussion instrument.
         2. He pushed the limits of dissonance and tonal ambiguity, climaxing with the two violin sonatas of the 1920s.
         3. His later works are his most well known, such as the Concerto for Orchestra.
      3. Elements of his style that come from eastern European traditional music:
         1. Melodic lines derived from traditional melodies or styles
         2. Powerful motoric rhythms with irregular meters or accents
         3. Chords resulting from contrapuntal treatment of pentatonic, whole-tone, or other traditional scales
         4. There is usually a primary tonal center, and sometimes there are two or more simultaneous harmonic planes (polytonality), or chords with added tones.
      4. Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (NAWM 130), (see etude, p. 489, in CHWM)
         1. The tritone relationship replaces the tonic-dominant relationship.
         2. The formal scheme is a mirror form: Prologue, ABCDCBA, Epilogue.
         3. The A sections use the parlando-rubato idiom of Serbo-Croation song.
         4. Later passages use Bulgarian techniques, including an irregular dance rhythm (2+3+3).
            
            
   3. Zoltán Kodály
      1. His style integrates folk and art styles.
      2. He was more influential in his solfège system of music education.
         
         
2. The Soviet Orbit
   
   
   1. Sergey Prokofiev (1891–1953)
      1. He lived outside Russia from 1918 to 1934 and cultivated an international style.
      2. After he resettled in the Soviet Union the government criticized his "formalism," that is, music that did not celebrate revolutionary ideology or working-class experience.
      3. His Fifth and Seventh Symphonies combine his fondness for the lyricism (see vignette in CHWM) with structural clarity and refinement.
         
         
   2. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)
      1. He spent his entire training and career in the Soviet system.
      2. Some of his works were condemned by the Soviet authorities but he was generally treated well.
      3. His opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (NAWM 131)
         1. Enjoyed success in St. Petersburg and New York before being withdrawn due to official criticism.
         2. Its realistic and often satirical portrayal of violence offended Soviet leaders.
      4. His Fifth Symphony is one of his most popular and is considered a masterpiece (see etude, p. 493, in CHWM)
         1. Its architecture is true to the symphonic genre.
         2. The opening uses a double canon in the strings.
         3. A second theme is related to the first.
         4. There is a closing theme, which leads to a development section.
            
            
   3. Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998)
      1. Combined several historical styles, popular music, and a modern harmonic idiom to create what he called a polystylistic approach.
      2. His Concerto Grosso No. 1(1976–77) juxtaposes tango episodes against a Corelliinspired main theme.
         
         
   4. Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931)
      1. Studied at the national conservatory in Moscow.
      2. Most of her works have spiritual titles or Christian inspiration.
      3. NAWM 132, Rejoice! (1988)
         1. Quotations from spiritual lessons head each movement.
         2. The program's subject is reaching for joy, which occurs at the end with high harmonics.
            
            
3. England
   
   
   1. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) was the foremost English composer of the early twentieth century.
      1. His works include nine symphonies, operas, songs, and many choral works.
      2. He was nationalistic in his use of English literature, English folksongs, and earlier English composers as inspiration.
      3. He worked on the new English Hymnal and composed some hymns for it.
      4. He often quoted or imitated British folk music and used the sixteenth-century modality of Elizabethan composers.
      5. His works use effects such as triads in parallel motion and pentatonic scales for programmatic atmosphere.
         
         
   2. Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) was the bestknown English composer of the mid-twentieth century.
      1. His choral works include A Ceremony of Carols (1942).
      2. His most celebrated operas are Peter Grimes (1942) and The Turn of the Screw (1954).
      3. NAWM 133, Peter Grimes, uses tonal and bitonal passages and diatonic harmonies colored with chromatic elements.
      4. His War Requiem (1962) is a large work alternating the text of the Requiem Mass with verses by an English soldier who was killed in France in 1918.
         
         
4. Germany
   
   
   1. Many musicians left Germany to escape Nazi attempts to create a national purity in German culture.
      
      
   2. Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) was a practicing musician, teacher, theorist, and composer.
      1. He wrote The Craft of Musical Composition, a textbook on composition and an analytical system.
      2. He taught at the Berlin School of Music and at Yale.
      3. He was an accomplished violinist and violist and played other instruments as well.
      4. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he began composing Gebrauchsmusik (Music for Use) to close the gap between composers and the public.
      5. Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter, 1934).
         1. Opera based on the life of the painter Matthias Grünewald
         2. In the 1930s Hindemith was under attack from the Nazi government, and Grünewald's story of an artist under stress appealed to him.
            
            
   3. Kurt Weill (1900–1950)
      1. His first career was as an opera composer in Berlin, where he embraced Gebrauchsmusik.
         1. His aim was to promote social programs and ideologies.
         2. He was more interested in entertaining common people than in pleasing the intellectual elite.
         3. He collaborated with playwright Bertolt Brecht.
      2. Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928) is based on the text of Gay's opera (NAWM 87)
         1. The cast included his wife, Lotte Lenya, who championed his music.
         2. It was enormously popular and was banned by the Nazis in 1933.
      3. His second career was in New York composing operetta and musical theater meant for a popular audience.
         
         
5. Neo-Classicism in France
   
   
   1. Neo-Classicism
      1. A broad movement from the 1910s to the 1950s in which composers revived, imitated, or evoked styles, genres, and forms of pre- Romantic music, especially Baroque and Classical.
      2. Some works by Prokofiev and Stravinsky follow Classic models.
      3. Using a tonal center within a modern harmonic idiom is also considered Neo-Classic.
         
         
   2. Arthur Honegger (1892–1955)
      1. His Pacific 231 is a "symphonic movement" that portrays the physical and visual impression of a locomotive rather than its sound.
      2. His oratorio King David (1923) combined oratorio and opera. Its choruses were written for amateurs and its style is accessible.
         
         
   3. Darius Milhaud (1892–1974)
      1. He was a prolific composer who wrote in every major genre.
      2. His works incorporate styles and techniques of the programs they portray, such as Saudades do Brasil (Souvenirs of Brazil), which uses Brazilian folk melodies and rhythms.
      3. He often employed polytonality (CHWM, ex. 20.7).
      4. His music is lyrical yet personal.
         
         
   4. Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) worked in small forms with a witty and graceful style but also composed large-scale works, including his opera Dialogues des Carmelites (Dialogues of the Carmelites, 1956).