The Early Twentieth Century
Composer Biographies
Scott Joplin
Born: 1867 or 1868, near Texarkana, Texas
Died: April 1, 1917, New York
Return to Just Listen: Era : Composer
In his own words....
"What is scurrilously called ragtime is an invention that is here to stay. That is now conceded by all classes of musicians...All publications masquerading under the name of ragtime are not the genuine article...That real ragtime of the higher class is rather difficult to play is a painful truth which most pianists have discovered. Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music...Joplin ragtime is destroyed by careless or imperfect rendering, and very often players lost the effect entirely by playing too fast."
African-American composer. Generally considered the most important and influential ragtime composer.
In 1908, Scott Joplin published a short book of studies to teach the style of ragtime to amateur pianists. These were to aid them, he stated, "in giving the 'Joplin Rags' that weird and intoxicating effect intended by the composer." Joplin fought throughout his lifetime to convince the musical world that the ragtime music he wrote was on a level with the great classical works of the European tradition. He even used this style to write in that most European of forms, opera. But while he succeeded in the popular market with his piano works, he never received the recognition he so richly deserved.
Joplin was the son of a former slave, and grew up in a musical family. He received some formal training, and at an early age was playing and teaching locally. He soon left home to begin life as a traveling musician along the Mississippi. In 1893 he was in Chicago, where he led a band at the World's Columbian Exhibition. By 1896 he had published a few songs and piano pieces. Around this time he settled in Sedalia, Missouri, though he often traveled. In Sedalia he studied at George R. Smith College, a small school founded for the education of African Americans. He supported himself by teaching, and playing piano and cornet. One of the places he often played was the Maple Leaf Club (from which his most famous piece derived its name). It was also in Sedalia that Joplin met the publisher John Stark, who published about a third of his music.
In 1899, Joplin published his first rags (one of which was the
Maple Leaf Rag). With the help of a lawyer he managed to work out a royalty arrangement (unusual for the time) that turned out to be profitable. In 1901, he moved to St. Louis, where he founded the Scott Joplin Opera Company in an attempt to produce operatic works based on the "syncopated style." By 1907 he settled in New York (it has been held that he traveled to Europe in the intervening years, but no evidence exists to confirm this). While continuing to publish his ragtime pieces, he also finished his major work, the opera
Treemonisha. He published the work in 1911 (and the score received a favorable review), but he was never able to get more than portions of it performed. Early in 1917, Joplin suffered a mental collapse, and he destroyed a number of his unpublished pieces. He was committed to an asylum and died a short time later.
Joplin's music soon fell out of style with the development of the newer styles of jazz. It began to receive more notice in the 1940s, but it really entered into the public's consciousness in the 1970s when Joshua Rifkin (a classically-trained pianist and musicologist) made a very successful recording of a number of Joplin's works. It reached an even larger audience as music for the popular film The Sting. In 1972, Treemonisha was successfully produced, and in 1976 he was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Today, Joplin's music has finally taken its well-deserved place among the great works of American Music.
Works
- Piano music, including over 40 piano rags (Maple Leaf Rag, 1899; The Entertainer, 1901), and other dances
- Stage works, including A Guest of Honor (1903) and Treemonisha (1911)
Back to top
Musical Examples
Back to top
Links
Gustav Mahler
Born: July 7, 1860, Kaliste, The Czech Republic
Died: May 18, 1911, Vienna
Return to Just Listen: Era : Composer
Czech-born Austrian composer and conductor. Mahler's music stands at the point of transition between nineteenth-century romanticism and twentieth-century modernism.
Gustav Mahler's career reflects the artistic ambivalence of the end of the nineteenth century. As a conductor, Mahler's aim was to preserve the tradition of composers of the past, and he was a tireless champion of Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner. In his composition, on the other hand, he embodied many of the new ideas of modernism and fostered the music of his more radical contemporaries, such as Arnold Schoenberg. In the end, his music was overshadowed by these new currents, but has been revived and reevaluated in the last three decades.
Mahler was born in a small Bohemian town, where he studied music with local teachers. In 1875 he went to Vienna to study at the conservatory, where he remained until 1878. Upon finishing his studies, he took a series of conducting posts throughout Central and Eastern Europe, including Budapest, Hamburg, and Leipzig. It was in Leipzig that he first attracted notice with his interpretation of Wagner's Ring cycle. He ultimately ended up in Vienna, conducting the state opera orchestra. His success in transforming the repertory and performance standards of the opera house was nothing short of remarkable, but it came at high personal cost. The constant work forced him to confine his composing to the summer months, and probably contributed to the health problems that would end his life at an early age. In addition, in order to obtain a post in Vienna—a city with deep undercurrents of anti-Semitism—Mahler had to renounce Judaism and convert to Catholicism. In the end it did him no good, and these same anti-Semitic forces compelled him to leave the city. He emigrated to the United States.
In New York, he was engaged as conductor for the Metropolitan Opera, and later the New York Philharmonic. When he died at the age of fifty, he was working on his tenth symphony, a work he had postponed thinking it something of a curse (pointing to Beethoven, Schubert, and Bruckner). His "real" tenth symphony, Das Lied von der Erde (a setting of six poems by the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po) serves as a fitting summary of his symphonic style, and one of his true masterpieces.
Mahler's music reflects the same ambiguities as his life. He was intensely tied to the past in many ways, following in the footsteps of the great Austrian symphonists. At the same time, he expanded the forms he inherited to a point that it seemed impossible to go beyond. His works are enormous, both in size and in forces. His late symphonies are often more than ninety minutes in length, and call for huge instrumental (and often choral) forces. His Symphony No. 8 (called the "Symphony of a Thousand"), for example, calls for five vocal soloists, a boy choir, and an adult choir, along with a gigantic orchestra. He also departed from tradition in his use of tonality. His larger works often ended in a different tonality than they began in, weakening the structural role of tonality at the same time that Schoenberg and his contemporaries were moving toward a purely atonal style. The final element we can note in Mahler's music is its wit, often tinged with irony and parody. This often occurs by means of the juxtaposition of incongruous elements to create a jarring, often seemingly banal mix.
Works
- Orchestral music, including 10 symphonies
- Song cycles with orchestra, including Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer, 1885), Das knaben Wunderhorn
(The Youth's Magic Horn, 1888), Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children, 1904), and Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth, 1908); Lieder
Back to top
Musical Examples
Back to top
Links
- A Basic Biography
This site, from the Classical Music Pages, provides a biographical essay taken from
The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music. It also includes a picture gallery and more detailed information about Mahler's symphonies and song cycles.
- Mahler and His Symphonies
The English Classical CD On Line site includes a brief biography and overviews (with audio clips) of Mahler's First, Second, and Fifth Symphonies.
- Mahler's Works
This site includes a list of Mahler's works with links to other sites that offer more detailed information. A rich source for learning more about Mahler's music.
- Gustav Mahler—Song Symphonist
An electronic transcription of Gabriel Engel's biography, based on the letters of Gustav Mahler.
Claude Debussy
Born: August 22, 1862, St. Germaine-en-Laye, France
Died: March 5, 1918, Paris
Return to Just Listen: Era : Composer
In his own words....
"A symphony is usually built on a melody heard by the composer as a child. The first section is the customary presentation of a theme on which the composer proposes to work; then begins the necessary dismemberment; the second section seems to take place in an experimental laboratory; the third section cheers up a little in a quite childish way, interspersed with deep sentimental phrases during which the melody recedes, as is more seemly; but it reappears and the dismemberment goes on...I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing which can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms."
French composer and critic. Debussy's music is often associated with the contemporary impressionist movement in painting, and his approach shares some characteristics of this style.
"The primary aim of French music," Claude Debussy wrote in 1904, "is to give pleasure." Debussy, more than anything, was interested in the sensuous quality of music. Even as a student he let his concept of sound override many of the rules he was so assiduously taught by his teachers (much to their consternation). From this he developed a style that was wholly his own, but that also owed much to a wide variety of disparate influences. He also was a passionate champion of a purely French style, and he proudly referred to himself as "Claude Debussy, musicien français."
Debussy was educated at the Paris Conservatory, and in 1885 he won the coveted Prix de Rome. His period in Rome, however, was not pleasant for Debussy and he longed to return to Paris. His early works show his desire to break the constraints of Western harmony and form (he especially disliked sonata-allegro form, which he came to see as overly Germanic and not fitting for a French composer). His Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun" departs from any sense of development, relying instead on a series of free repetitions and variations of the basic themes.
As a student and a young composer, Debussy was also an ardent Wagnerite, seeing in the German composer the future of music, specifically musical drama. He later turned away from Wagner, describing him as "a beautiful sunset mistaken for a dawn." Yet his one completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande , owes much of its conception to this influence, even if the musical language is markedly different. The other strong influences on Debussy at this time were the symbolist and decadent movements in poetry, with their concern for sound and abstract meaning. While Pelléas was his only opera, he worked on various subjects by Edgar Allan Poe, one of his favorite writers and a strong influence on the symbolist writers.
Debussy's interest in the exquisite and sensual also led him to an appreciation of the music of other cultures, and his use of various scales beyond the traditional major and minor ones shows the influence of Oriental and Russian music. A decisive influence was the Paris Exhibition of 1889, where he first encountered the music of the Indonesian gamelan orchestra. The different scales, as well as the floating qualities of form and rhythm, would find their way into his work, especially his piano music.
Late in his life, Debussy turned his interests to abstract forms, producing three remarkable sonatas (he had originally conceived of six for various instruments, with the final one planned for all the instruments of the previous five). In these works, Debussy's rich melodic and harmonic language found a new and intriguing expression. Sadly, this endeavor was cut short by the composer's death at the height of World War I. The conflict of German and French civilization was for him a violent reflection of the musical conflict he dealt with his entire life.
Works
- Orchestral music, including Prelude à "L'après-midi d'un faune" ( Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun ," 1894), Nocturnes (1899), La mer ( The Sea , 1905), Images (1912), incidental music
- Dramatic works, including the opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and the ballet Jeux (Games, 1913)
- Chamber music, including a string quartet (1893) and various sonatas (cello, 1915; violin, 1917; flute, viola, and harp, 1915)
- Piano music, including Pour le piano ( For the Piano , 1901), Estampes ( Prints , 1903), 2 books of preludes (1909–10, 1912–13)
- Songs and choral music; cantatas, including L'enfant prodigue (The Prodigal Son , 1884)
Back to top
Musical Examples
Back to top
Links
- A Basic Biography
This site, from the Classical Music Pages, provides a biographical essay taken from The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music . It also includes a picture gallery, bibliography, works list, and sound clips of a number of Debussy's piano works.
- Biography and Recommended Recordings
From Classical Insites. A brief biography and links to sound files from recommended recordings of some of Debussy's best-known works.
- An Introduction to Impressionism
Debussy is often tied to the Impressionist painters. While there is not a true link between them, the style of the Impressionists tells us much about France and French thought in Debussy's time. This exhibit, from the National Gallery in Washington, provides a virtual tour of seven paintings in their collection, complete with background and audio commentary on the paintings. For more detailed information on one of the most important painters of this school, visit the Monet Web Page.
- The Afternoon of a Faun
Debussy's most famous piece was inspired by this poem by the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. This site features the poem in French and a modern English translation, along with an essay on music and poetry in Mallarmé's works.
- A Symbolist Painter
Odilon Redon was a contemporary of the Impressionists, but with a style approaching that of the later Surrealists. This site presents a good introduction to his work.