Chapter 24: The Changing World of Art Music Since 1945

• Prelude
• The tradition of performing classical music became stronger during postwar years
1. Audiences grew.
2. Government support increased.
3. Schools of music expanded.
4. Music education in public schools improved.
• Living composers shared fewer commonalities.
1. Some tried to preserve particular aspects of tradition.
2. Others focused on the new.
3. Nationalism and neoclassicism were rejected.
4. Every nation was subject to a wide diversity of styles and approaches.
• Heirs to the Classical Tradition
• Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) (see Figure 24.1)
1. The most important French composer born in the twentieth century
2. An organist, he became professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire in 1941.
3. His students after the war included:
• Pierre Boulez (b. 1925), France
• Karlheinz Stockhausen (b. 1928), Germany
• Luigi Nono (b. 1924), Italy
• Ton de Leeuw (1926-1996), the Netherlands
4. Messiaen sought to embody an aesthetic of ecstatic contemplation.
• He presented concentrated meditation on a few materials.
• He juxtaposed static ideas rather than developing themes.
5. Messiaen composed a variety of works, many on religious subjects.
• Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jesus (Twenty Looks at the infant Jesus, 1944) for piano
• Saint Francis of Assisi (1975-83), an opera
• Numerous works for organ
• Turangalîla-symphonie (1946-48)
• Catalogue d'oiseaux (Catalogue of Birds, 1956-58), for piano
• Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time, 1941) by Messiaen
1. Chamber work for violin, clarinet, cello and piano
2. Written at a German military prison camp for performance by the composer and fellow prisoners
3. Liturgie de cristal (Crystal Liturgy), first movement (see NAWM 160 and Example 24.1)
• The violin and clarinet play figures that suggest birdcalls.
• The cello constantly repeats a five-note sequence.
• Messiaen avoids movement toward resolution by repeating harmonies to create a sense of stasis or meditation.
• The piano plays a succession of twenty-nine chords six times.
4. Rhythmic stasis
• Rhythms create a sense of duration, not meter.
• The piano and cello play a repeating series of durations that resemble the talea of medieval isorhythm.
• The piano has seventeen durations played ten times.
5. Messiaen preferred beautiful timbres, as heard in the high harmonics of the cello augmented by gentle birdcalls in the violin and clarinet set over soft dissonances in the piano.
• Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
1. One of England's foremost composers
2. Britten studied at the Royal College of Music.
3. Tempering modernism with simplicity, he created a widely appealing idiom.
4. He was deeply influenced by humanitarian concerns, which is reflected in his later music.
5. Most of Britten's choral works were created for amateur ensembles.
6. Britten was homosexual, and his life partner was the tenor Peter Pears (1910-1986) (see Figure 24.2).
• Britten wrote most of his tenor roles for Pears.
• Several of his operas have themes that relate to homosexuality, including Billy Budd (1950-51) and Death in Venice (1971-74).
7. Peter Grimes (1944-45)
• This opera established Britten's reputation and became the first English opera since Purcell to achieve international recognition.
• The story of a fisherman who is driven to suicide by mobs can be seen as an allegory for the condition of homosexuals (see Figure 24.3).
8. Peter Grimes, final scene (NAWM 161)
• The chorus of townspeople repeatedly calls out Peter's name.
• Peter answers in a meandering recitative.
• The end depicts the uncaring scene and townsfolk with bitonality.
• Music representing the sea is in C major.
• In A major, the townspeople sing a hymn-like song.
9. War Requem (1961-62)
• Britten expresses his pacifism in this choral masterpiece.
• The work interweaves traditional Latin texts with poems by Wilfred Owen.
• The English poems comment upon the Latin text.
• Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
1. One of many composers who remained committed to tonality
2. The Adagio for Strings, originally written for String Quartet in 1936, expresses his tonal romanticism.
3. He incorporates modernist resources, as in the twelve-tone rows within the tonal framework of his Piano Sonata (1949).
4. He is renowned for his vocal works.
5. The Monk and His Cat from Hermit Songs (1952-53) (see NAWM 162 and Example 24.2)
• The song cycle Hermit Songs is based on texts of Irish monks and hermits.
• This song is solidly in F major, although it features almost no consonant harmonies.
• Open fifths in the bass create the medieval atmosphere of the monk.
• Dissonant augmented unisons suggest the cat, either walking on the piano keys or pouncing on a mouse.
• Barber freely alters the meter to follow the accents of the text.
• Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983)
1. From Argentina, Ginastera is the most popular Latin American composer after Villa-Lobos.
2. His career can be divided into three phases.
• "Objective nationalism" (to 1947): tonal music infused with traditional Argentine folk elements
• "Subjective nationalism" (1947-57): synthesis of native and international elements
• "Neo-expressionism" (after 1957): earlier traits combined with twelve-tone and avant-garde techniques
3. His turn from nationalism toward more abstract music is typical of the era.
• Gunther Schuller (b. 1925)
1. Some American composers were versed in both jazz and classical music and sought to merge the two in the 1950s and 1960s.
2. Schuller, one of the most successful, called the combination "third stream."
3. Transformation (1957) transforms a pointillistic twelve-tone context into a full-blown modern jazz piece.
• Michael Tippett (1905-1998)
1. Englishman Tipett synthesized historical, ethnic, and non-Western styles.
2. The rhythmic and metric independence is derived from Renaissance music.
3. Javanese influences can be seen in several works.
• Piano Concerto (1953-55)
• Triple Concerto for violin, viola, and cello (1979)
• Serial and Nonserial Complexity
• Many composers adopted twelve-tone methods after the war.
1. Established composers, such as Stravinsky, Copland, and Ginastera, took up serialism.
2. The system had its biggest impact on younger composers.
3. In Germany, some composers adopted the system as a political rejection of Nazi and communist ideologies.
4. The West German government encouraged these developments and sponsored courses in new music at Darmstadt.
• The ideas fostered at Darmstadt inspired musical experiments.
• Boulez and Stockhausen became the two principal composers.
5. In the United States, university composers, free from the necessity of appealing to audiences, embraced serialism.
6. Milton Babbitt became the leading serial composer in the United States.
7. Total serialism began to be explored in the late 1940s.
• Composers applied the principles of Schoenberg's tone rows to parameters other than pitch, such as duration, intensity, and timbre.
• Other new serial techniques were explored as well.
• Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) (see Figure 24.4)
1. Inspired by Messiaen, Boulez wrote the first European work of total serialism, Structures for two pianos (1952).
2. Le marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master, 1954, revised 1957)
• Fuses the pointillist style and serial method with sensitive musical rendition of the text
• The work has nine movements set from verses by the surrealist poet René Char.
• Each movement has a different combination of instruments, as in Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire.
• The ensemble comprises alto flute, xylorimba, vibraphone, guitar, viola, and percussion instruments.
• The translucent sound suggests Balinese gamelan music.
• The contralto vocal line has wide leaps, glissandos, and Sprechstimme.
• Despite the logic, the audience's perception is of randomness.
• A new generation of performers responded to musical complexities.
1. Championing new music, they were capable of playing with accuracy the subtle nuances and technical virtuosity of new music.
2. Their abilities inspired composers to use complex systems other than serialism.
• Luciano Berio (1925-2003)
1. Italian composer Berio created a series of works titled Sequenza, each for an unaccompanied solo instrument from flute to accordion.
2. Each work was composed for a specific performer.
3. Sequenza IV for piano (1965-1966) (see Example 24.3)
• The rapid gestures and sudden changes are typical of the work.
• The atonality, figurations, and textures resemble those of Berio's earlier serial music.
• The sustain pedal allows open strings to continue sounding and to catch harmonics from other notes.
• Elliot Carter (b. 1908)
1. This American composer also wrote for virtuoso performers.
2. He used a complex, nonserial style with innovative rhythms and forms.
3. Carter developed a technique known as metric modulation.
• Transitions from one tempo and meter to another comprise intermediary stages that share aspects of both.
• Precise proportional changes in the value of a durational unit result.
4. The String Quartet No. 2 (1959)
• Each instrumental part has a distinct personality.
• The instruments are differentiated by their most prominent intervals.
• They are also distinguished by rhythms.
• The first violin effects the metric modulation.
• The result is a counterpoint of sharply differentiated lines.
• New Sounds and Textures
• In the postwar years, the search for new musical resources intensified, and composers turned to four avenues of exploration.
1. New instruments, sounds, and scales
2. Non-Western sounds and instruments
3. Electronic music
4. Music of texture and process
• Harry Partch (1901-1974)
1. Partch sought out a wholly new system inspired by Chinese, Native American, Jewish, Christian, African, and rural American music.
2. He developed a new scale with forty-three notes to the octave.
3. He built new instruments that could play in this scale, including a gourd tree (see Figure 24.5).
4. He created a number of multimedia works in which these instruments accompanied speaking and chanting voices and dancing.
• George Crumb (b. 1929)
1. Crumb masterfully created new sounds out of ordinary instruments and objects.
2. Ancient Voices of Children (1970)
• Four songs on poems of Federico García Lorca with two instrumental interludes
• Unusual sound sources: toy piano, musical saw, harmonica, mandolin, Tibetan prayer stones, Japanese temple bells, and electric piano
• Special effects are also obtained from the traditional instruments.
3. Black Angels (1970) (NAWM 163)
• Written as a protest to the horror of the Vietnam War
• A surrealistic character is created through the imaginative use of color.
• The string quartet is amplified electronically.
• Innovative string techniques are explored.
• Quartet members play a variety of percussion instruments and make vocal sounds, including ritualistic counting in several different languages.
• Crumb quotes music of the past, such as the chant Dies irae and Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet.
• Asian influences
• Canadian composer Colin McPhee (1900-1964)
1. Transcribed gamelan music for Western instruments
2. Tabuh-tabuhan (1936) for orchestra draws upon Balinese materials.
• Henry Cowell (1897-1965)
1. His travels to Iran, India, and Japan led to works blending Asian and Western elements.
2. His works include two concertos for the Japanese koto.
• Lou Harrison (1917-2003)
1. He combined Asian and Western instruments.
2. Harrison also wrote numerous works for traditional Javanese gamelan.
• Electronic music
• Musique concrète
1. Musique concrète works with recorded sound.
• The entire world of sound is potential material for music.
• The chosen sounds are manipulated and assembled into collages.
2. Tape recorders, which had recently been developed, made it possible to record, amplify, transform, and arrange sounds.
3. Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995)
• He created the first major work using this technique, Symphonie pour un home seul (Symphony for One Man).
• Schaeffer premiered the work in a 1950 radio broadcast.
• Electronic sounds
1. Most electronic sounds are created by oscillators, invented in 1915.
2. Early electronic instruments
• Theremin: invented around 1920 by Lev Termen
• Ondes Martenot: invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot
• Both instruments produced one pitch at a time and project voice-like sounds capable of glissandos.
• They were featured in some orchestral works and film scores.
• Electronic studios
1. Between 1951 and 1953, a number of major electronic studios were created.
• Columbia University, New York
• Cologne, Germany
• Milan, Italy
• Tokyo, Japan
2. Most composers at these studios focused on producing and manipulating electronic sounds.
• Karlheinz Stockhausen (b. 1928)
1. Pioneered electronic music using electronic and recorded sounds
2. Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths, 1955-56)
• This work incorporates electronic sounds and a boy's voice.
• It is the first major electronic piece to use multiple tracks.
• In concert, the various tracks were projected with loudspeakers placed around the audience.
3. Stockhausen incorporates borrowed material in several works.
• Edgard Varèse
1. He combined electric sounds with recorded ones.
2. Poème electronique (Electronic Poem, 1957-58)
• This eight-minute piece was composed for the 1958 Brussels Exposition.
• The music was played through 425 loudspeakers in a pavilion designed by Le Corbusier (see Figure 24.6).
• Fifteen thousand people a day experienced this multimedia piece over a six-month period.
• Synthesizers
1. Electronic sound synthesizers enabled composers to call on pitches from a music keyboard.
2. Composers could control harmonics, waveform, resonance, and location of sound sources with switches and knobs.
3. The RCA Mark II Synthesizer was developed at the joint Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in the late 1950s (see Figure 24.7).
4. Robert Moog and Donald Buchla each developed simpler and more compact synthesizers in the mid-1960s.
5. After becoming commercially available in 1966, they were adopted by studios and composers around the world.
6. Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) by Morton Subotnick (b. 1933)
• Created with the Buchla synthesizer, this was the first electronic piece to be commissioned by a record company.
• It was designed to fill two sides of an LP.
7. The Beatles and other pop musicians adopted the new synthesizers.
• Electronic music and performance
1. The electronic medium gave composers total control of the music, bypassing human performers.
2. The absence of performers hindered the acceptance of the medium by audiences.
3. A number of works were created that combined prerecorded tape with live performers.
• Milton Babbitt (b. 1916)
1. Philomel (1964) (NAWM 164)
• Combines live performance with prerecorded tape and synthesized sounds
• The tape alters recorded fragments of the singer and uses electronic sounds.
• The text is derived from an Ovid fable taken from Metamorphoses.
• Philomel is the sister of Procne, Queen of Thrace.
• Tereus, Procne's husband and King of Thrace, rapes Philomel and cuts out her tongue so that she cannot tell what happened.
• Philomel, transformed into a nightingale, regains her voice just as this work begins.
2. Milton Babbitt became the leading serial composer and theorist in the United States (see Vignette: Babbitt, p. 643).
3. Three Compositions for Piano (1947) is the first piece to apply serial principles to duration.
• Music of Texture and Process
• Varèse's concept of sound masses moving through musical space influenced several composers.
1. The emphasis was on sound itself.
2. Electronic sounds stimulated the invention of new sounds from conventional instruments and voices.
3. Works contained striking sound combinations that created novel textures.
• Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)
1. Greek composer; spent most of his life in France
2. An engineer and architect, he saw mathematics as fundamental to music.
3. Metastaseis for orchestra (1953-54)
• Each string player has a unique part.
• At times, each has a glissando, moving slowly or quickly.
• Xenakis plotted the glissandos on a graph and transferred the lines to music notation (see Figure 24.8).
• Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933)
1. Polish composer
2. Major works
• Threnody: To the Victims of Hiroshima (1960)
• St. Luke Passion (1963-66)
• The Devils of London (1968), an opera
3. In the mid-1970s, he turned toward neoromanticism.
• Threnody: To the Victims of Hiroshima by Penderecki (NAWM 165)
1. Scored for fifty-two string instruments
• Each instrument has a unique part and is required to use unusual performance techniques.
• The unusual timbres delineate five sections.
2. Section 1 has each instrument playing as high as possible.
3. Section 2 (beginning in measure 6) features a variety of unusual sounds played as quickly as possible.
4. Section 3 (beginning in measure 10) introduces sustained tones and quarter-tone clusters linked by glissandos (see Example 24.4).
5. Section 4 (beginning in measure 26) presents isolated pitches and various sound effects in canon.
6. Section 5 (beginning in measure 56) reintroduces earlier sound effects and clusters that lead to a climactic fifty-two-note chord.
7. Penderecki originally wrote this as an abstract work, but his added title and dedication helped make this his most famous piece.
• György Ligeti (b. 1923)
1. This Polish composer achieved international fame when three of his works were used in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
2. The music for all three is in constant motion, but static harmonically and melodically, as heard in Atmosphères (1961).
• Atmosphères begins with fifty-six muted strings and a variety of wind instruments playing all the chromatic notes through a five-octave range.
• Instruments gradually drop out, leaving only the violas and cellos.
• Later, clusters of instruments are pitted against each other.
• At times he creates the effect of slowly moving masses of sound.
• In the wide spectrum of choices that composers have made, listeners are required to forego traditional expectations and engage each work as an experience of sound.
• The Avant-Garde
• The previously discussed composers are not strictly avant-garde.
1. The composers intended for their works to be placed in the classical repertoire.
2. They often drew upon the art music tradition, but with a new and distinctive personality.
3. They continued the goals of modernism.
4. Avant-garde composers, like Satie, challenged the concept of permanent classics and wrote music only for the present.
5. This distinction lies in the purpose of the music, not the technique.
• John Cage (1912-1992)
1. The leading avant-garde composer of the postwar years (see Figure 24.9)
2. Cage's long and influential career is characterized by a continuous effort to bring to music sounds that have been traditionally excluded.
3. In the 1930s and 1940s he wrote numerous works for percussion ensemble that included instruments such as tin cans and an electric buzzer.
4. He invented the prepared piano.
• Various objects, such as pennies, screws, and plastic, are inserted between the strings of a piano.
• When the keyboard plays, a variety of percussive sounds are projected.
5. Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48)
• The work contains twenty-six "sonatas" and four interludes.
• The sonatas are single movements in two repeated parts, as in Scarlatti sonatas, but without thematic returns.
• The pianist follows detailed instructions in preparing the piano in advance.
• Each movement explores a different set of timbres and figurations.
6. Cage argued against the museum-like preservation of music from the past.
7. He did not seek to write works that expressed emotions, developed material, or had a logical unfolding of events.
8. Influenced by Zen Buddhism, he created opportunities for experiencing sounds as themselves, not as vehicles for the composer's intentions.
9. Three strategies for achieving this goal
• Chance
• Indeterminacy
• Blurring boundaries between music, art, and life
• Chance music
1. Some of the decisions normally made by a composer are left to chance.
• Such pieces do not convey the composer's intentions.
• His approach varied from work to work.
2. Music of Changes for piano (1951) (see NAWM 166 and Example 24.5)
• The title is taken from the ancient Chinese book of prophecy I-Ching (Book of Changes), which offers a method of divination by tossing coins.
• Cage devised charts for possible sounds, dynamics, durations, and tempos.
• The methods described in I-Ching were used to select the sounds of a given performance.
• As a result, sounds occur randomly (see In Performance, p. 648).
• Indeterminacy
1. Certain aspects of the music are unspecified.
• The exact sound for Concert for piano and orchestra (1957-58) will vary from performance to performance.
• 4'33" (Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds, 1952) has the performer sit in silence for this amount of time, thereby allowing the environmental noises to constitute the music (see Figure 24.10).
2. In both, the listener is invited to hear sounds as music.
3. Value judgments are irrelevant; there can be no mistakes.
• Blurring boundries (see Vignette: Cage, p. 650)
1. Variations IV (1963) uses both indeterminacy and chance and can be combined with other activities, including those of daily life.
2. Musicircus (1967) has any number of musicians performing different music all at once, while the audience wanders freely.
• Other composers adopted indeterminacy.
1. Earle Brown (b. 1926), Available Forms I (1961) and II (1962)
2. Penderecki, Threnody
• Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994)
1. This Polish composer used indeterminacy selectively while maintaining ties to modernism.
2. String Quartet (1964) specifies pitches and rhythms, but not the coordination of the parts.
3. Symphony No. 3 (1983) applies this method with great subtlety.
• Significance of indeterminacy
1. New kinds of notation were developed.
2. No two performances were exactly alike.
3. It made listeners understand that earlier music was not a rigidly defined, unchanging work.
• Digital Technologies (see A Closer Look, p. 652 and Figure 24.11)
• Sampling
1. This new process allows one to create a new composition by patching together digital portions of previously recorded music.
2. Sampling has been used extensively in rap, other forms of popular music, avant-garde, and classical concert music.
• Computer music
1. Charles Dodge (b. 1942)
• Speech Songs (1972) features computer-synthesized vocal sounds.
• Manipulations of lifelike imitations of speech create a word-based music.
2. Paul Lansky (b. 1944)
• Developed his own software to create music
• Smalltalk (1988) manipulates speech.
• Night Traffic (1990) manipulates traffic noises, transforming them beyond immediate recognition.
• He also draws upon pop traditions, including tonal harmonies and a regular meter.
3. Jean-Claude Risset (b. 1938)
• Served as director of the Institute for Acoustic and Musical Research and Coordination in Paris
• Inharmonique (1977): the computer mediates between live musical sounds and synthesized sounds
• He continues to design new sounds through the interaction of sound waves, harmonics, timber, and other elements.
• Minimalism
• One of the most prominent new trends since the 1960s
1. Materials are reduced to a minimum and procedures are simplified.
2. The content of the music should be readily apparent.
3. Minimalism began as an avant-garde style but became a popular and expressive technique.
4. Influences for minimalism came from numerous sources.
• Rock music
• African music
• Asian music
• Tonality
• Romanticism
• Minimalism in art
1. The term, first coined by an art critic in 1965, was applied to art that reduced materials and form to fundamentals.
2. The works were not intended to express feelings or states of mind.
3. Minimalist works often feature repetition of simple elements (see Figure 24.12).
• Early minimalism in music
1. Musicians in New York and California created a parallel movement.
2. La Monte Young (b. 1935) used improvisation over a fundamental drone on synthesizer in The Tortoise: His Dreams and Journeys (1964).
• Terry Riley (b. 1935)
1. Riley was a member of La Monte Young's ensemble.
2. He experimented with tape loops that played the same material repeatedly.
3. In C (1964) applied similar procedures with live instruments.
• Any number of instruments can play; each has the same series of brief repeated figures over a pulsing octave C.
• The number of repetitions in each part and the coordination of parts are left to the performers in the tradition of indeterminacy.
• These elements create a steady pulse with a slow change of consonance to dissonance and back.
• Steve Reich (b. 1936) (see Figure 24.13)
1. He developed a quasi-canonic procedure in which musicians play the same material out of phase with each other.
2. Piano Phase (1967), for two pianos (see Example 24.6)
• The same figure is repeated several times.
• One pianist pulls ahead slightly creating new harmonic combinations,
3. Reich founded his own ensemble, and wrote percussive music in the 1970s.
4. He attracted a wide range of listeners from the classical and pop worlds.
5. Reich used minimalist techniques to create large-scale works with significant emotional content in the 1980s, such as Tehillim (1981), a setting of psalm texts in Hebrew.
• Philip Glass (b. 1937) (see Figure 24.14)
1. Glass studied at Juilliard with Nadia Boulanger.
2. In Paris he met and worked with Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar.
3. In the mid-1960s he composed music that combined the rhythmic organization of Indian music with simple harmonic progressions and the amplification of rock music.
4. Einstein on the Beach (1976) is a one act, four-hour opera.
• There is no text other than solfege syllables; the staging is nonsensical.
• The music consists primarily of repeated arpeggiations.
5. The orchestra includes electronic keyboard instruments, woodwinds, and a solo violinist.
6. Other operas followed, including The Voyage (1992).
• John Adams (b. 1947) (see Figure 24.15)
1. Phrygian Gates for piano (1977-78) represents minimalism in its early transitional phase.
2. Adams later combined minimalism with other techniques and styles.
3. Harmonielehre (1985), a symphonic poem, recalls Mahler or Berg.
4. Nixon in China (1987) is an opera dealing with Nixon's visit to China (see Figure 24.16).
• Minimalist techniques are combined with formal Baroque opera.
• Short driving ideas constantly evolve.
5. Later works rely less on minimalism and more on traditional harmonic and contrapuntal means.
• Phrygian Gates by Adams (see NAWM 168 and Example 24.7)
1. This twenty-four minute piano work relies predominantly on rapid repetitive figuration or alternating chords.
2. The pitch content goes through a number of changes, called "gates."
3. He explores seven tonal centers moving through the circle of fifths: A, E, B, F-sharp, C-sharp, G-sharp, and D-sharp.
4. Each key center begins with the pitch content of the Lydian mode and then changes to that of the Phrygian mode.
• Interactions with Non-Western Music
• Influence of non-Western music
1. Minimalism was inspired in part by music from Asia and Africa.
2. Some composers drew from Asian and African music more directly.
• Bright Sheng (b. 1955) (see Figure 24.17)
1. Born and trained in China, he moved to New York in 1982.
2. His music integrates elements of Asian and Western music.
3. Seven Tunes Heard in China, No. 1: Spring (1995) (NAWM 172)
• This work for solo cello can be linked to the cello suites of Bach.
• Sheng calls upon the style of Chinese music and imitates the sound of Chinese string, wind, and percussion instruments.
• The predominantly pentatonic Chinese tune is fragmented and spun out using Baroque and modernist techniques.
• The New Accessibility and Other Trends
• Audiences and the classic tradition
1. Composers in the classical tradition faced a new reality in the late twentieth century.
2. Despite the support of universities, they found it difficult to get their works performed after the premiere.
3. Few compositions entered the classical repertory.
4. Some composers sought wider audience appeal through minimalism and other techniques.
5. Some composers used modernist ideas and procedures that were simple and easy to grasp.
• Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b. 1939) (see Figure 24.18)
1. Zwilich combines continuous variation with older formal devices.
2. Her use of developing variation is similar to the procedure used by Schoenberg, but the idea is much simpler and more readily understood.
3. Symphony No. 1 (1982) by Zwilich (NAWM 169)
• Received the first Pulitzer Prize in Music awarded to a woman
• All of the melodic material evolves through variation from the first fifteen measures.
• The opening threefold rising third serves as a motto and establishes A as the tonal center.
• The movement builds in tempo, dynamics, and density to a central allegro and then slows and thins to a quiet close.
• Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)
1. This Estonian composer began with neoclassical and serial works and juxtaposed modernist and Baroque styles.
2. He later studied Gregorian chant and early polyphony.
3. Tintinnabuli
• The term is derived from the bell-like sonorities that it can produce.
• The method features counterpoint between a mostly stepwise diatonic melody and voices sounding notes of the tonic triad determined by a preset system.
• Pärt developed this method in the 1970s.
4. Seven Magnificat Antiphons (1988, rev. 1991), O König aller Völker (see NAWM 170b and Example 24.8)
• The second tenor has a modal tune centered on A.
• The second soprano forms an augmentation canon with the tenor.
• The altos recite the text on D.
• The other parts sound notes of the D minor triad.
• The texture alternates between consonance and diatonic dissonance.
• Quotation, collage, and polystylism
1. A number of composers quoted existing music, sometimes even creating a collage of multiple quotations.
2. Modernist composers like Schoenberg and Stravinsky borrowed previously-composed material.
3. Postwar composers used older music to carry meanings that were not available by other means.
4. Quotation and collage could include past and present styles.
5. This style is similar to postmodernism, which treats all epochs and cultures as equally available as source material (see Figure 24.19).
• Peter Maxwell Davies (b. 1934)
1. This British composer borrowed from chant and English Renaissance music.
2. By distorting the source material, he emphasized the gulf between modern times and the distant past.
3. Taverner (1962-70), an opera on the life of the Renaissance composer, reworks his In Nomine.
• George Rochberg (b. 1918)
1. The American composer wrote mostly serial music.
2. After the death of his son he turned to writing works based on borrowed material.
3. Nach Bach (After Bach, 1966) for harpsichord is a "commentary" on Bach's Keyboard Partita No. 6 in E Minor, BWV 830.
• Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998)
1. Schnittke worked in the Soviet Union primarily as a film composer, and he moved to Germany in 1990.
2. As the Soviet government relaxed its cultural controls in the 1960s, he explored several modernist techniques.
3. Schnittke later turned to polystylism, a combination of new and old styles.
4. Symphony No. 1 (1969-72) incorporates passages from works by numerous classical composers that present conflicting styles and historical periods.
5. His later works, including eight more symphonies, focus on a small number of ideas borrowed or modeled on earlier music.
• John Corigliano (b. 1938)
1. This American composer often draws upon styles from the Baroque and Classical to avant-garde.
2. The opera The Ghosts of Versailles (1987) uses serial and other modern techniques to portray the ghosts, while the play is set in a Mozart opera style.
3. Symphony No. 1 (1989) is a memorial to friends who died of AIDS and incorporates quotations of some of their favorite pieces.
• Peter Schickele (b. 1935)
1. His early works are mostly tonal and draw upon a variety of styles.
2. He is best known for creating music under the guise of P. D. Q. Bach, the supposed youngest and least of J. S. Bach's sons.
3. With this persona, Schickele spoofed classic traditions, performers, and musicologists, as in the cantata Iphigenia in Brooklyn (1964)
• Neo-Romanticism
1. Some composers adopted the familiar tonal idiom of nineteenth-century Romanticism, a trend known as neo-Romanticism.
2. Krzysztof Penderecki (see Figure 24.20)
• Following his earlier works, Penderecki turned to a style that focused on melody and drew upon neo-Romantic features.
• Polish Requiem (1980-84) combines neo-Romanticism with elements from Renaissance and Baroque styles and his textures from the 1960s.
3. George Rochberg
• After working in serialism and quotation, Rochberg embraced neo-Romanticism in the 1970s.
• In String Quartet No. 5 (1978), three of five movements are neo-Romantic; the styles and forms evoke a wide range of composers and periods.
• His mixture of styles challenged the notion of stylistic uniformity.
• David Del Tredici (b. 1937)
1. His early works are serial and atonal.
2. He changed styles when he set excerpts from Lewis Carroll's stories for children.
3. Final Alice (1975) (see Example 24.9)
• Based on the text from the final chapters of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Scored for amplified soprano, who narrates and sings several arias, and orchestra, including banjo, mandolin, accordion, and two soprano saxophones
• A rising major sixth is the central motive of "The Accusation," sung by the White Rabbit.
• Most of the music is tonal, ranging from folklike to the style of Richard Strauss.
• The "strange occurrence" is set with atonal music and the sounds of the theremin.
• Del Tredici renounced the modernist idea of progress (see Vignette: Reviews of Final Alice, p. 664).
• Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931) (see Figure 24.21)
1. Composers using various styles sometimes invoked extramusical meanings to give unusual sounds clear meanings.
2. Gubaidulina gave many of her works a spiritual dimension, despite the official atheism of her native Soviet Union.
3. Rejoice! (1981) is a five-movement sonata for violin and cello inspired by devotional texts.
• The sonata expresses the transcendence from ordinary reality to joy.
• The passage from a fundamental note to its harmonics represents this journey.
• The fifth movement, Listen to the still small voice within (NAWM 171), is a study in chromatics, tremolos, and harmonics.
• R. Murray Schafer (b. 1933)
1. The leading Canadian composer of this era
2. He has worked in a variety of styles.
3. Several orchestral works reflect the culture of the Inuits, natives of Canada.
4. He developed environmental music, which moves musical performance out of the concert hall.
5. Wilderness Lake (1979)
• This work is to be performed at sunrise and sunset at a lake away from human settlements.
• Twelve trombonists, positioned around the shores, play meditative melodies cued by a conductor in a raft.
• Animal sounds are also added.
• Joan Tower (b. 1938)
1. Many works by this American composer are based on images.
2. Silver Ladders (1986), for orchestra, has rising lines representing ladders and other imagery.