{"id":426,"date":"2020-06-02T19:36:24","date_gmt":"2020-06-02T19:36:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-hum140\/?post_type=chapter&p=426"},"modified":"2022-11-21T17:47:42","modified_gmt":"2022-11-21T17:47:42","slug":"4-8-modern-symphonic-music","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-hum140\/chapter\/4-8-modern-symphonic-music\/","title":{"raw":"4.8: Modern Symphonic Music","rendered":"4.8: Modern Symphonic Music"},"content":{"raw":"At the turn of the century, music was characteristically late Romantic in style. Composers such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Jean Sibelius were pushing the bounds of Post-Romantic Symphonic writing. At the same time, the Impressionist movement, spearheaded by Claude Debussy, was being developed in France. The term was actually loathed by Debussy: \u201cI am trying to do \u2018something different\u2014in a way realities\u2014what the imbeciles call \u2018impressionism\u2019 is a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by art critics\u201d\u2014and Maurice Ravel\u2019s music, also often labelled with this term, explores music in many styles not always related to it (see the discussion on Neoclassicism, below).\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=BubaEmJg4so&feature=emb_logo\r\n
\r\n\r\n\"Figure\r\n

Figure 1. Arnold Schoenberg, Los Angeles, 1948<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nMany composers reacted to the Post-Romantic and Impressionist styles and moved in quite different directions. The single most important moment in defining the course of music throughout the century was the widespread break with traditional tonality, effected in diverse ways by different composers in the first decade of the century. From this sprang an unprecedented \u201clinguistic plurality\u201d of styles, techniques, and expression. In Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg developed atonality, out of the expressionism that arose in the early part of the 20th century. He later developed the twelve-tone technique which was developed further by his disciples Alban Berg and Anton Webern; later composers (including Pierre Boulez) developed it further still. Stravinsky (in his last works) explored twelve-tone technique, too, as did many other composers; indeed, even Scott Bradley used the technique in his scores for the Tom and Jerry cartoons.\r\n\r\n[embed]https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/a\/a9\/Webern_-_Sehr_langsam.ogg[\/embed]\r\n

An example of the twelve-tone technique of \"I Sehr langsam\" from String Trio Op. 20 by\u00a0Anton Webern<\/span><\/h4>\r\n

After the First World War, many composers started returning to the past for inspiration and wrote works that draw elements (form, harmony, melody, structure) from it. This type of music thus became labelled neoclassicism. Igor Stravinsky (Pulcinella<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Symphony of Psalms<\/i>), Sergei Prokofiev (Classical Symphony<\/i>), Ravel (Le tombeau de Couperin<\/i>) and Paul Hindemith (Symphony: Mathis der Maler<\/i>) all produced neoclassical works.\"\"<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/8\/84\/Maurice_Ravel_-_azuma_-_Le_Tombeau_de_Couperin._III._Forlane_%28live%29.opus<\/a>\r\n

Le Tombeau de Couperin<\/em>. III. Forlane by\u00a0Maurice Ravel<\/span><\/h4>\r\n

Italian composers such as Francesco Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo developed musical Futurism. This style often tried to recreate everyday sounds and place them in a \u201cFuturist\u201d context. The \u201cMachine Music\u201d of George Antheil (starting with his Second Sonata, \u201cThe Airplane\u201d) and Alexander Mosolov (most notoriously his\u00a0Iron Foundry) developed out of this. The process of extending musical vocabulary by exploring all available tones was pushed further by the use of Microtones in works by Charles Ives, Juli\u00e1n Carrillo, Alois H\u00e1ba, John Foulds, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, and Mildred Couper among many others. Microtones are those intervals that are smaller than a semitone; human voices and unfretted strings can easily produce them by going in between the \u201cnormal\u201d notes, but other instruments will have more difficulty\u2014the piano and organ have no way of producing them at all, aside from retuning and\/or major reconstruction.<\/p>\r\n[embed]https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/9\/9c\/Mosolov_Iron_Foundry.ogg[\/embed]\r\n

Iron Foundry<\/em> by\u00a0Alexander Mosolov\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\r\nIn the 1940s and 50s composers, notably Pierre Schaeffer, started to explore the application of technology to music in musique concr\u00e8te. The term electroacoustic music was later coined to include all forms of music involving magnetic tape, computers, synthesizers, multimedia, and other electronic devices and techniques. Live electronic music uses live electronic sounds within a performance (as opposed to preprocessed sounds that are overdubbed during a performance), Cage\u2019s\u00a0Cartridge Music<\/i>\u00a0being an early example. Spectral music (G\u00e9rard Grisey and Tristan Murail) is a further development of electroacoustic music that uses analyses of sound spectra to create music. Cage, Berio, Boulez, Milton Babbitt, Luigi Nono and Edgard Var\u00e8se all wrote electroacoustic music.\r\n\r\n[embed]https:\/\/youtu.be\/Xws4B1M4JXU[\/embed]\r\n\r\nFrom the early 1950s onwards, Cage introduced elements of chance into his music. Process music (Karlheinz Stockhausen\u00a0Prozession<\/i>,\u00a0Aus den sieben Tagen<\/i>; and Steve Reich\u00a0Piano Phase<\/i>,\u00a0Clapping Music<\/i>) explores a particular process which is essentially laid bare in the work.\u00a0The term experimental music was coined by Cage to describe works that produce unpredictable results, according to the definition \u201can experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen.\u201d\u00a0The term is also used to describe music within specific genres that pushes against their boundaries or definitions, or else whose approach is a hybrid of disparate styles, or incorporates unorthodox, new, distinctly unique ingredients.\r\n\r\nImportant cultural trends often informed music of this period, romantic, modernist, neoclassical, postmodernist or otherwise. Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev were particularly drawn to primitivism in their early careers, as explored in works such as\u00a0The Rite of Spring<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Chout<\/i>. Other Russians, notably\u00a0Dmitri Shostakovich, reflected the social impact of communism and subsequently had to work within the strictures of socialist realism in their music. Other composers, such as Benjamin Britten (War Requiem<\/i>), explored political themes in their works, albeit entirely at their own volition. Nationalism was also an important means of expression in the early part of the century. The culture of the United States of America, especially, began informing an American vernacular style of classical music, notably in the works of Charles Ives, John Alden Carpenter, and (later) George Gershwin. Folk music (Vaughan Williams\u2019\u00a0Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus<\/i>, Gustav Holst\u2019s\u00a0A Somerset Rhapsody<\/i>) and Jazz (Gershwin,\u00a0Leonard Bernstein, and\u00a0Darius Milhaud\u2019s\u00a0La cr\u00e9ation du monde<\/i>) were also influential.\r\n\r\n[embed]https:\/\/youtu.be\/7P_9hDzG1i0[\/embed]","rendered":"

At the turn of the century, music was characteristically late Romantic in style. Composers such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Jean Sibelius were pushing the bounds of Post-Romantic Symphonic writing. At the same time, the Impressionist movement, spearheaded by Claude Debussy, was being developed in France. The term was actually loathed by Debussy: \u201cI am trying to do \u2018something different\u2014in a way realities\u2014what the imbeciles call \u2018impressionism\u2019 is a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by art critics\u201d\u2014and Maurice Ravel\u2019s music, also often labelled with this term, explores music in many styles not always related to it (see the discussion on Neoclassicism, below).<\/p>\n