• Major phase of avant-garde music took place in Paris and Vienna around 1890-1914

• Leading figures were Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg

• Rapid development in all arts

• 19th century musical ideas were “under attack”

• Large revolution especially in tonality, also melody and harmony

Debussy and Impressionism

• Claude Debussy is right in between late 19th century and early 20th century styles

  • New tone colors and rich harmonies are similar to Romanticism

  • Tone colors avoid “heavy sonorities” (different from romantic) and are “subtle” and “mysterious”

  • Fragmentary/tentative melodies/motives

  • Vague harmonies

  • Tonality often clouded

• Gustav Mahler had more contrapuntal orchestra

Clouds, from Three Nocturnes (1899)

• Debussy’s Three Nocturnes is reminiscent of impressionist symphonic poems

• Clouds is the least “nocturnal” of the collection

  • Others are Festivals and Sirens

• Begins w/ quiet woodwind chords (suggesting clouds), then an English horn motive (octatonic scale), then parallel chords (same structure in chords, parallel pitches)

• Approximate ABA’ form

Stravinsky: The Primacy of Rhythm

• Igor Stravinsky was taught by Russian nationalist composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

• Wrote 3 ballet scores for the Ballets Russes (Russian Ballet) in Paris

  • Stravinsky used his quickly developed “powerful, hard-edged” avant-garde style

  • More abstract use of folk tunes

• First ballet is The Firebird (1910)

  • Romantic fairy tale

  • Magical Firebird, ogre Kastchei, and Prince Ivan Tsarevitch

  • Half-Asian setting

  • “Beautifully colored” folk music

• Next is Petrushka (1911)

  • Mardi Gras in St. Petersburg

  • About a carnival baker and his puppet

  • Satirical?

• The Rite of Spring (1913)

  • “Bold” and “brutal”

  • Uses Russian folk music

    • Repeated, fragmentary motives

  • Imagines fertility cults of prehistoric Slavic tribes

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) Biography

• Debussy entered the strict Paris Conservatory of Music at 10

  • Great in theory and composition

  • Not so great in piano

  • Awarded the coveted Grand Prix (top prize; 3-year fellowship to study in Rome)

• Worked with Madame von Meck (“eccentric” patron of Tchaikovsky)

• Influenced by Russian music and the Indonesian gamelan

• Rejected previous influence of French symbolist poets and impressionist painters

• Also rejected Wagner and German music despite their influence due to his time in Bayreuth

• Famous for innovations in orchestration and piano writing

• Impressive preludes and etudes for piano (miniatures)

• Wrote music criticism for a short time

• Hated Germans

• Died of cancer in Paris during WWI

The Rite of Spring, Part I, “The Adoration of the Earth” (1913)

• First performance caused riots

• Violent and dissonant sounding, w/ “provocative choreography”

• Suggests rape and ritual murder

• Ballet has no real story

  • Stravinsky thought of this as an “abstract concert piece”

• Second part (“The Sacrifice”) involves a virgin being danced to death

• Structure:

  • Introduction

  • Omens of Spring and Dance of the Adolescents

  • The Game of Abduction

  • Round Dances of Spring

Expressionism

• Austrian and German composers still had emotional and complex music

  • Exploited extreme states

  • Expressionism

• Sigmund Freund

• Influenced by psychoanalytic theory

  • Erwartung (Anticipation) is a monologue written by Schoenberg for soprano and orchestra

    • Reasonably dark (dead bodies)

    • Sense of hysteria

• Schoenberg was the leading expressionist in music

  • Pioneered the “emancipation of dissonance,” “breakdown of tonality,” and serialism

• Second Viennese school was Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg

  • First was Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) Biography

• Son of important opera singer

• Studied law until age 19

• Studied w/ Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (kuchka member; nationalist)

  • Helped him write his 3 Ballets Russes ballet scores

• Composed more ballets and other things after WWI

  • Also modeled his music on that of Bach, Handel, and Mozart, transforming it w/ his “unique rhythmic and harmonic style” (This style was called Neoclassism)

• Advocate of “objectivity” in music

  • Rejected Romantic emotionality

• Died in NYC, buried in Venice

Schoenberg, Pierrot lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot) (1912)

• Most famous/influential 20th century song cycle

• Poems are by symbolist Albert Giraud

• Pierrot is the “eternal sad clown”

• Sprechstimme (speech-song) is an invention of Schoenberg in which sound is not fully organized into pitches

  • “Extreme example” of avant-garde

  • In this case, soprano doesn’t quite sing, doesn’t quite speak (somewhere in between)

• Soprano and 5 instrumentalists

  • 8 instruments

    • 1 person switches between flute and piccolo

    • 1 person switches between clarinet and bass clarinet

    • 1 person switches between violin and viola

    • Cello

    • Piano

  • Not all player in every song (unique accompaniment in each)

• No. 8: “Night”

  • Voice, piano, bass clarinet, cello

  • “Nightmarish”

  • Vision of “ominous insects”

  • Schoenberg called it a passacaglia (type of Baroque ostinato piece)

  • Mostly Sprechstimme

• No. 18: “The Moonfleck”

  • Voice, piano, piccolo, clarinet, violin, cello

  • “Dense, dissonant, atonal, and alarmingly intense” introductory piano passage

  • “Nagging bother of an obsession”

  • High-pitched scattered motives

Alban Berg, Wozzeck (1923)

• Berg was a student of Schoenberg

• Berg began working on Wozzeck during WWI, and completed it in 1923

• Wagnerian, but also similar to Pierrot lunaire

• Highly intense

• About Franz Wozzeck, a “low cog” soldier

  • Tormented by his captain, the regimental doctor, and visions

  • His lover Marie sleeps w/ a drum major and then beats Wozzeck up when he objects, so he murders her and then drowns himself

• Act III, Scene ii is the murder scene

  • Followed by a blackout and 2 crescendos

• Act III, Scene iii

  • Wozzeck drinks w/ Marie’s friend Margret in a tavern

  • Distorted, dissonant ragtime

  • Disjoined, confused, shocking

  • People see blood on his hands and turn on him, he escapes

  • Built on a “master rhythm” w/ slight modifications in different tempos

  • More ostinato

• Act III, Scene iv

  • Wozzeck returns to the pond (scene of the crime)- he sees blood and goes in the water to wash himself, drowns

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) Biography

• Grew up in Vienna

• Self taught before Alexander von Zemlinsky trained him

• Wrote music theory books and literary texts for his compositions, also painted in expressionist style (versatile)

• Early music was similar to late Romantic

• Increased chromaticism and atonality

  • Met w/ hostility from the public

  • Attracted interest of Mahler and Richard Strauss (students flocked too)

  • His music became more and more atonal

• Developed twelve-tone (serial) system

  • Radical and fruitful

• Jew forced to leave Germany when the Nazis came to power

  • Moved to LA, become a US citizen

• Strange personality

• “First great teacher since Bach”

Schoenberg and Serialism

• Twelve-tone system was a “method of composing with the twelve tones solely in relation to one another” (according to Schoenberg)

  • Known as serialism

  • “Ultimate systematizing of [Romantic] chromaticism”

• Twelve-tone row or series was an ordered sequence of the 12 pitches

  • Schoenberg stuck to using the 12 pitches in a fixed order, w/o repetitions or backtracking before starting over again

  • Any octave

  • Sequence can be presented inverted (backwards, retrograde)

• Each piece has its own “sound world”

The First American Modernist

The first major modernist composer in the US, Charles Ives, amazingly worked in isolation (composed in his spare time). He used mostly American subjects (nationalist). He wrote highly experimental, dissonant music (some was for piano tuned to 1/4 tones instead of 1/2)

Charles Ives (1874-1954) Biography

• Son of a Civil War military bandmaster and music teacher

  • His dad liked to play 2 tunes simultaneously in different keys for fun? Unconventional guy

• Church organist as a teenager

• Went to Yale

  • He thought his professor Horatio Parker had tame, traditional, and unmasculine

  • He wanted to make more experimental and vigorous music

• After graduation, worked in insurance and as a church organist, then later just in business

  • Didn’t try to get his works published or performed

• He thought that communal joy in music making mattered much more than how a piece sounded

• Almost gave up music completely later in life

• He did get to see his music admired by the public at large :)

Second Orchestral Set, Second Movement, “The Rockstrewn Hills Join in the People’s Outdoor Meeting” (1909)

• Ives wrote 4 symphonies

• Has false starts, parts of hymns, irregular rhythms, etc.

The Unanswered Question (1906)

• Needs 2 conductors

• Three distinct, independent levels of music

  • Choir w/ consonant harmonies

  • Dissonant woodwinds

  • Trumpet which sounds “like a voice”

  • Strings are also playing ppp throughout w/ no change in tempo

  • NOT traditional polyphony (they don’t fit together at all)