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В МИРЕ МУЗЫКИ
КНИГА ДЛЯ ЧТЕНИЯ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ
Москва 'Высшая школа' 1991
ББК 81.2 Англ-923 В 11
Допущено Государственным комитетом СССР по
народному образованию в качестве учебного пособия для студентов музыкальных
вузов и вузов искусств
Рецензенты: кафедра иностранных языков
Московской государственной кон-серватории им. П.И. Чайковского (зав. кафедрой
проф. Г.Б. Рабино-вич); канд. филол. наук И.Н. Воробьева (Московский
государственный институт культуры)
4602040000(4309000000) - 206
В--------------- 266-91
001 (01)-91
ISBN 5-06-000822-3
© Составление, комментарий, задания Е.П.
Прошкиной, 1991
WESTERN MUSIC OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (GENERAL SURVEY)
SOME TWENTIETH-CENTURY COMPOSERS ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874-1951)
THE COMPOSER SPEAKS: ARNOLD SCHOENBERG
PAUL HINDEMITH: HIS LIFE AND WORK (1895-1963)
THE COMPOSER SPEAKS: PAUL HINDEMITH
STRAVINSKY. THE RITE OF SPRING
THE COMPOSER SPEAKS: BENJAMIN BROTEN
THE COMPOSER SPEAKS: GIAN CARLO MENOTTI
Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
MICHAEL TIPPETT: A CHILD OF OUR TIME
EXPERIMENTAL (AVANT-GARDE) MUSIC
Questions on the
Text about Ligeti
About Stockhausen and Experimental Composers
Questions about Western Music of the 20th Century
Points for Discussion and Written Compositions
Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
ELVIS PRESLEY - STORY OF A SUPERSTAR
Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
English and American Musical
History
ENGLISH MUSIC (GENERAL SURVEY)
Virginal music composers. William
Byrd (1542-1623)
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
AMERICAN MUSIC (GENERAL SURVEY)
CHARLES IVES, THE
FIRST TRULY AMERICAN
COMPOSER (1874-1954)
CHARLES IVES AND AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
JAZZ: ITS ROOTS AND MUSICAL DEVELOPMENT
THE RELATION OF JAZZ TO AMERICAN MUSIC
THE SWING ERA (DUKE ELLINGTON)
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
The Art of Musical Interpretation
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
INTERVIEW WITH HERBERT VON KARAJAN
THE ART OF PIANO PLAYING: GLENN GOULD
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
THE ART OF VIOLIN PLAYING: EUGENE YSAYE
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI: THE ROMANTIC REALIST
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
PETER PEARS: RONALD CRICHTON SPEAKS
Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
ПРЕДИСЛОВИЕ
Данное пособие предназначено для студентов
высших музыкальных учебных заведений и вузов искусств. Цель пособия - развить у
студентов второго и третьего этапов обучения навыки, необходимые для чтения
литературы по спе-циальности в подлиннике, а также способствовать развитию
навыка устной речи в сфере профессионального общения. Пособие может быть
использовано студен-тами языковых вузов в качестве страноведческого материала
для внеаудиторного чтения, оно также представляет интерес и для широких кругов
читателей, инте-ресующихся западноевропейской и американской музыкальной
культурой.
Пособие состоит из трех тематических
разделов: 1. Музыка XX
века на За-паде. 2. История развития музыкальной культуры в Великобритании и
США. 3. Исполнительское мастерство в мире музыки.
В конце пособия приводится комментарий, в
котором поясняются отдельные искусствоведческие термины и реалии, а также
дается перевод на русский язык наиболее сложных словосочетаний. Комментарий
расширяет тематический мате-риал пособия и может быть использован при
проведении бесед и дискуссий на английском языке. В текстах сохраняется
правописание источника.
Тексты подобраны из оригинальных английских
и американских источников (хотя в ряде случаев несколько сокращены). В них
хорошо отражены лексико-грамматические и стилистические особенности языка
современного музыкознания.
С тематической точки зрения каждый раздел
представляет собой единое це-лое: он открывается текстом обобщающего характера,
в котором ставится про-блема или освещаются закономерности развития того или
иного процесса, затем следуют тексты, в которых раскрываются частные вопросы
или явления. В кон-це большинства текстов и каждого раздела приводятся вопросы
и задания, про-веряющие уровень понимания текста, а также темы для сообщений,
что стиму-лирует высказывание студентов в сфере профессионального общения и
способст-вует переходу от чтения к устной речи и дискуссии. Чтение как вид
речевой деятельности приобретает тем самым значение коммуникативно
направленного процесса, оно рассматривается как практика в речевой
деятельности.
Как известно, одним из признаков зрелого
чтения является умение изменять характер чтения в зависимости от его цели и
сложности текста при сохранении соответствующего темпа. Совершенствование
навыков чтения на иностранном языке предполагает овладение всеми его видами с
различной степенью полноты и точности понимания. Требования к пониманию текста
при разных видах чте-ния различны. Тем не менее, есть общие моменты, которые
выступают в каче-
3
стве объектов контроля: выделение основной
темы (идеи), нахождение, смысло-вых вех (опорных пунктов), установление
причинно-следственных связей, опре-деление значения смыслового куска (блока)
для понимания текста в целом, со-отношение таких блоков между собой,
установление явно или имплицитно выра-женного отношения автора статьи к
сообщению.
Понимание текста предполагает оценку его
содержания, поэтому очень важно развить у студентов навык критического
осмысления прочитанного текста на иностранном языке. С этой целью вопросы и
темы для сообщений по форме и содержанию увязаны с общей проблематикой раздела,
что позволяет студен-там творчески и профессионально оценивать полученную из
текстов информа-цию, соотносить ее с собственным опытом и знаниями из
лекционных курсов по специальности. Подобный подход развивает познавательную
деятельность студен-тов, усиливает их заинтересованность и делает занятия более
интересными и жи-выми.
В зависимости от уровня лингвистической
подготовки студентов предподаватель может варьировать задания в аудитории и для
самостоятельной работы сту-дентов.
Автор выражает благодарность рецензентам -
канд. филол. наук И.Н. Во-робьевой (Московский государственный институт
культуры), а также зав. кафед-рой иностранных языков Московской государственной
консерватории имени П.И. Чайковского проф. Рабиновичу Г.Б. и преподавателю
кафедры Масловой О. Л.
Автор также признателен преподавателям,
аспирантам и студентам Ленин-градской консерватории, в беседах и дискуссиях с
которыми создавалась эта книга.
Е.П. Прошкина
Music in the Modern World
WESTERN
MUSIC OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (GENERAL SURVEY)
Perhaps
the single most dominant characteristic of 20th-century Western music is its
variety and eclecticism and thus its resistance to easy categorization and
generalized stylistic descriptions.
The
music of the 20th century has developed along two general lines: 1) the
expansion and final working out of trends established in the 19th century (Romanticism, Impressionism*), 2)
the more or less novel practices distinctive of the 20th century, which are
essentially anti-Romantic. Some of the more radical of these practices are
often distinguished from the others by the designation of New Music. On the
whole, the musical development during the first half of the cen-tury can be
divided into three periods: Impressionism and post-Ro-manticism* (c.
1900-1915); experimentation along the lines of Expres-sionism,* Dynamism,* etc. (c. 1910-1925); and Neoclassicism* (c. 1920-present).
The
second decade of the century, dominated by World War I, saw the most widespread
and daring experimentation. Of basic im-portance was the activity of Schoenberg
who, casting away the har-monic system and the formal methods of the past,
arrived, about 1910, at a radically novel style, the most distinctive feature
of which was atonality.* (To
this he added, in 1923, his equally revolutionary method of composition, the twelve-tone technique.*)
Simultaneously, new possibilities in rhythm were exploited, e.g. by Bartok in bis Allegro barbaro* (1911),
inspired by the fanatical drum-beating of primitive African tribes, and by
Stravinsky in the folkloristic ballet Petrushka (1911) and the
primordial Rite of Spring (1913). The French writer, Cocteau,* aptly
expressed the spirit of this period in the words, "After the music with
the silk brush, the music with the axe." Provocative slogans such as bruitlsme
(noise music), futurism,*
motorism, and machine music appeared without leaving a lasting im-print on the
future evolution. Experimentation in the field of tonal material led to quarter-tone* music. Aside from the
above-mentioned leaders, composers such as Kodaly, Malipiero,* Casella,* Honegger, Milhaud,* and
Berg contributed to the developments of the experi-mental period.
The
neoclassical movement, which began in the early 1920's,
5
fostered
a return to the aesthetic ideals and formal methods of the 17th and 18th
centuries, recast in a modern musical language. Once more, Stravinsky took the
lead with such compositions as the Octet for Wind Instruments (1923). Bartok
and Hindemith, who were des-tined to become the major composers of the half
century (along with Schoenberg and Stravinsky), began to receive international
recognition. Hindemith was active in the development of Gebrauchsmusik* and
also provided a useful theoretical explanation of the new harmonic and tonal
concepts. Bartok represents another main development of the period since 1920:
the assimilation and synthesis into a colorful and expressive musical language
of most of the experimental techniques of the second decade. One other
noteworthy feature of the period around 1920 is the impact of American jazz on
serious music, resulting in such works as Stravinsky's Ragtime (1918),
Hindemith's Suite (1922), and Krenek's jazz opera Johnny
Spielt Auf (1926).*
The
materialistic trend of our century is reflected particularly in the numerous
attempts to expand the materials of music, often at the expense of (or without
concern for) its spiritual and expressive values. Many new instruments (chiefly
electrophonic instruments) have been invented, and even typewriters and
motorcycle engines have been given musical status. Unusual coloristic effects
on string and wind instruments have become common practice in modern scores,
and the piano has been "prepared"* to
produce new tonal effects. Recently, a school of French composers led by Pierre
Boulez has been experimenting in what they call musique concrete (concrete music),* i.e. music which
uses recordings of assorted sounds and noises rather than musical tones as its
basic material. Other com-posers, notably Karlheinz Stockhausen, have used
electric resonators to produce compositions recorded on tape.
The
period following World War II saw the emergence of two widespread tendencies
that seemed diametrically opposed: serial mu-sic,* which
reflected a highly conscious and rational approach to composition, and aleatory music,* which reflected
an essentially intu-itive one. The principal composers of serial music included
Babbitt,* Stockhausen, and Boulez; the
leaders of the aleatory movements were John Cage,* Morton Feldman,* and Earle Brown.* By the later 1950s, however, many
composers came to see these two approaches as simply the extremes of a single
continuum of virtually unlimited compositional possibilities. This attitude
fostered a number of new developments: music conceived primarily in terms of
texture and color* (Krzysztof Penderecki, Gyorgy Ligeti),
music that reinterpreted earlier music through quotation and distortion (Luciano Berio,* Lukas
Foss*), microtonal music* (Ben Johnston*), new approaches to music theater
(Cage, Mauricio Kagel*),
improvised music with audience participation (Frederic
Rzewskl,* Cornelius Cardew*), etc.
Electro-acoustic music* has
played an especially important role during the latter half of the century.
Although the sources of this
6
music
go back to the turn of the century, it flourished only after the tape recorder
became generally available following World War II. Many recent compositional
concerns, such as the widespread interest in timbral and acoustical effects and
in mixed media,* are directly attributable to this medium.
Indeed, the general explosion of technol-ogy in the 20th century, resulting in
such critical inventions as the radio, phonograph, and computer, has had a
profound impact on 20th-century music and musical attitudes.
Throughout
the century, there has been a constant cross-fertiliza-tion between Western art
music and popular music.*
Indeed, the borderlines between contemporary idioms of jazz
and rock* and certain types of recent concert
music, such as that of the minimalist school* (Steve
Reich, Philip Glass), often seem quite unclear. The music of other, often
remote, cultures is also becoming increasingly influential on Western music.
Another significant development has been the return in recent years to more
traditional conceptions of tonality, melody, harmony, and form (George Rochberg*). Such references
to earlier musical conventions have an unavoidable "quotational"
quality when heard within today's musical context (especially since most
composers tend to juxtapose them with post-tonal techniques)*.
Nevertheless, at the present time one of the pervasive trends in composition
appears to be away from more experimental and innovative approaches toward more
traditional ones.
From: The
Harvard Brief Dictionary of Music; The New Harvard Dictionary of Music
Discussion Activities
Questions
on the Text
1.
Along what general lines did Western music develop in the period from about
1890 to about 1915? And between the two world wars?
2. What
are the most important styles and trends in Western music since 1900?
3. When
did Schoenberg produce his first atonal works? Name some of them.
4. When
did Schoenberg apply the twelve-tone (dodecaphonic) system in practice?
5. What
major trend is exemplified by Stravinsky's compositions of the 1920s? How would
you define its main characteristics?
6. In
what way did composers seek to expand the materials of music to produce new
tonal effects?
7. What
is musique concrete? Who is its main exponent in France?
8. What
changes did the technological revolution cause in the de-velopment of musical
culture in the post-war years?
7
9. Who
contributed to the development of serial and aleatory music in the post-war
period?
Discussion
Points
1. What
does the term "Impressionism in music" imply? De-scribe some of the
most characteristic technical devices of impressionist music. Why, in your
opinion, did Debussy object to being called an impressionist? Do you agree that
there is a close relationship between musical Impressionism and Impressionism
in art?
2. What
orchestral composition by Debussy can be regarded as the first full and
convincing realization of musical Impres-sionism? Describe some of the most
important technical de-vices of impressionist style.
3. How
do you understand the following statement: "Debussy's harmony, which was
influenced by both Wagner's chromat-icism and Mussorgsky's modal harmony, had
an immediate impact on musical tradition"?
4. What
composers in Europe and Russia were influenced by Debussy's impressionist
style?
5. The
term "New Music" is often used of the various radical and
experimental trends in 20th century music, beginning about 1910. Do you
remember what similar names for somewhat parallel movements in music history were
used 300 and 600 years ago?
6. Find
in the text the passage about experimentation in the early 20th century. What
other experimental composers do you know? Consult reference books if necessary.
7. What
were the effects of the dissolution of tonality on sequent music?
8. What
European composers may be regarded as belonging to the expressionist school in
music? Define the distinguishing features of expressionist style in music. What
other represen-tatives of Expressionism in Western art do you know? Name some
masterpieces of expressionist music.
9. What
composers besides Stravinsky contributed to the develop-ment of the
neoclassical style in Europe and in the Soviet Union? What symphony by
Prokofiev is regarded as one of the earliest examples of neoclassicism? In what
way was music of the past treated?
10.
Describe some of John Cage's innovations. What compositions by him do you know?
In your opinion, do they require spe-cially-trained performers? Explain.
11. How
would you interpret Cage's paradoxical approach to composition? "My
purpose is to eliminate purpose"? Do you accept his point of view? Give
reasons for your answer.
8
12.
What are the distinguishing features of Boulez's style? Have you heard any of
his compositions performed live? What do you think of his music?
13. Do
you agree with the classification proposed by the author of the passage
"Western music of the twentieth century"? If not, give your reasons.
14. In
what direction do you think music will develop in future?
Additional
Assignments
Give a
short talk or write a composition on one of the following subjects:
a)
Debussy's music may be considered a bridge between Roman-ticism and Modernism.
b) The
decline and disappearance of the major-minor tonal sys-tem, along with
traditional concepts of melody, harmony, and form.
c)
Evolution of the elements of musical language in the first half of the 20th
century.
SOME
TWENTIETH-CENTURY COMPOSERS ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874-1951)
Vienna,
cradle of some of the most eventful movements in music history, witnessed the
inception of Schoenberg's twelve tone technique. The father of this theory and
practice began his career as a romantic at the tail end of the Wagnerian hegemony.* His
most frequently played piece, Verklarte Nacht* (1899),
carries Tristan* to its
ultimate conclusions.
After
passing through Atonalism, Impressionism, and Expression-ism (Pierrot lunatre* (1912)
is the high point of the last), Schoenberg evolved his twelve tone technique.
His innovations were at-tacked at the time as making music unintelligible or
"mathematical", but Schoenberg himself said: "In the formula,
the method of compo-sition with twelve tones, the accent is not so much on the
twelve tones as on the art of composing". In fact he was very much an in-stinctive
composer who usually wrote very quickly, if he could not finish a work at once
he often abandoned it altogether.
Practically
an autodidact except for some formal lessons in counter-point with Alexander von Zemlinsky,*
Schoenberg was a great teacher; consequently his enlightening exposition of
twelve tone technique is of paramount importance. His essays on Brahms and
Mahler, whom he greatly admired, are novel and penetrating, and his Harmonielehre* (1911)
is one of the definitive textbooks on mod-ern music theory.
9
Schoenberg's
innovations have influenced a whole epoch and have spread all over the world,
so that he can truly be regarded as the father of modern music. His numerous
books and articles were highly stimulating, and many of his pupils have carried
on his work.
From: Composers
on Music; The Dictionary of Composers
THE
COMPOSER SPEAKS: ARNOLD SCHOENBERG
Form in
the arts, and especially in music, aims primarily at comprehensibility. The
relaxation which a satisfied listener experiences when he can follow an idea,
its development, and the reasons for such development is closely related,
psychologically speaking, to a feeling of beauty. Thus, artistic value demands
comprehensibility, not only for intellectual but also for emotional
satisfaction. However, the creator's idea has to be presented, whatever
the mood he is impelled to evoke.
Composition
with twelve tones has no other aim than compre-hensibility. In view of certain
events in recent musical history, this might seem astonishing, for works
written in this style have failed to gain understanding in spite of the new
medium of organization. (...)
The
method of composing with twelve tones grew out of neces-sity.
In the
last hundred years the concept of harmony has changed tremendously through the
development of chromaticism. The idea that one basic tone, the root,*
dominated the construction of chords and regulated their succession - the
concept of tonality - had to de-velop first into the concept of extended
tonality. Very soon it became doubtful whether such a root still remained
the center to which every harmony and harmonic succession must be referred.* Furthermore,
it became doubtful whether a tonic appearing at the beginning, at the end, or
at any other point really had a constructive meaning. Richard Wagner's harmony
had promoted a change in the logic and constructive power of harmony. One of
its consequences was the so-called impressionistic use of harmonies, especially
practiced by Debussy. His harmonies, without constructive meaning, often served
the coloristic purpose of expressing moods and pictures. Moods and pictures,
though extra-musical, thus became constructive elements, incorporated in the
musical functions; they produced a sort of emotional comprehensibility. In this
way, tonality was already dethroned in practice, if not in theory. This alone
would perhaps not have caused a radical change in compositional technique.
However, such a change became necessary when there occurred simultaneously a
development which ended in what I call the emancipation of the dissonance. (...)
What
distinguishes dissonances from consonances is not a greater or lesser degree of
beauty, but a greater or lesser degree of compre-hensibility. In my Harmontelehre
I presented the theory that disso-
10
nant
tones appear later among the overtones, for which reason the ear is less
intimately acquainted with them. (...)
The term
emancipation of the dissonance refers to its compre-hensibility, which
is considered equivalent to the consonance's com-prehensibility. A style based
on this premise treats dissonances like consonances and renounces a total
center. By avoiding the establish-ment of a key, modulation is excluded, since
modulation means leaving an established tonality and establishing another tonality.
The
first compositions in this new style were written by me around 1908 and, soon
afterwards, by my pupils, Anton yon Webern and Alban Berg. From the very
beginning such compositions differed from all preceding music, not only
harmonically but also melodically, thematically and motivally. But the foremost
characteristics of these in statu nascendi* were
their extreme expressiveness and their ex-traordinary brevity. (...)
After
many unsuccessful attempts during a period of approxi-mately twelve years, I
laid the foundations for a new procedure in musical construction which seemed
fitted to replace those structural differentiations provided by tonal
harmonies.
I
called this procedure Method of Composing with Twelve Tones Which Are
Related Only With One Another.
This
method consists primarily of the constant and exclusive use of a set of twelve
different tones. This means, of course, that no tone is repeated within the
series and that it uses all twelve tones in the chromatic scale, though in a
different order (...)
From: The
Composition with Twelve Tones
by A.
Schoenberg // Composers on Music
Discussion Activities
Questions
on the Text
1.
Which of Schoenberg's compositions were written in a post-Wagnerian manner?
2.
Through what phases had Schoenberg's musical language evolved before he worked
out his twelve-tone method of composition?
3. Did
Schoenberg's innovative method make an immediate im-pact on most of his
contemporaries? When was it fully ap-preciated?
4. What
theoretical works did Schoenberg write?
5. What
questions are discussed in his essay The Composition with Twelve Tones?
6. Find
in this essay the passage in which Schoenberg explains his view on the artistic
value of music. How did Schoenberg understand it?
7. Find
in the essay the passage in which Schoenberg gives his views on the harmony of
Debussy and Wagner. What made Schoenberg revise the traditional concept of tonality?
8. What
does Schoenberg mean by "emancipation of the disso-nance"?
9.
What, according to Schoenberg, are the main advantages of using the twelve-tone
method?
Discussion
Points
1. How
would you interpret the following statement by Schoen-berg: "What
distinguishes dissonances from consonances is not a greater or lesser degree of
beauty, but a greater or lesser degree of comprehensibility"?
2. What
do you think Schoenberg meant when he wrote that "the accent was not so
much on the twelve tones as on the art of composing"?
3. What
modifications were introduced into the twelve-tone method by Webern?
4. What
are the most characteristic features of dodecaphonic mu-sic?
5. What
composition did Schoenberg conduct in St. Petersburg in the 1912-13 season?
6. Why
is Schoenberg regarded as the father of modern music? Why is his twelve-tone
technique (also called sertalism) con-sidered one of the landmarks in
the Western musical tradi-tion?
7.
Which Soviet composers have used the twelve-tone technique in their works? Give
examples.
8.
Comment on the following statement about the composer and his audience:
"In his rejection of traditional melody, harmony, rhythm, and tonality
Schoenberg abandoned the basic lan-guage long shared by composer and audience.
Compared with music of the previous era, Schoenberg's style reflects a new
emphasis on intellectual-analytical qualities."
9. Why,
in your opinion, does it sometimes happen that a mu-sician who was not
appreciated in his own time gets the recognition of the following generations?
BELA
BARTOK (1881-1945)
Bela
Bartok (1881-1945) was born the son of a director of an agricultural school in
the southern region of the Hungarian plain, and the countryside of his native
land was to be an inspiration to him as a composer. He was trained at the
Conservatory in Budapest and his early music shows a natural inclination to the
style of Brahms and Dohnanyi,* and
then of Liszt. During these years he wrote the Kossuth Overture, first
performed under Hans Richter at Manchester in 1904, and a rhapsody for piano
and orchestra. Then, in 1905, he undertook with his friend Zoltan Kodaly a
profound and scientific study of the true folk music of Hungary, Slovakia and
Rumania.
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The two
musicians travelled through the villages with a phono-graph, complete with a
stock of waxed cylinders, to record not only the music but the performances of
peasant musicians. The result of this, the first great exercise in folk
musicology in the field, was 16,000 recordings. The outcome of his discoveries
decided Bartok to break away from the confines of tonality. He became
interested in a form of melody derived from the most ancient pentatonic Magyar airs* and with rhythms both firm and
complex like those of folk songs, and he also experimented with popular
Hungarian instruments, among which percussion plays a major role. However,
Bartok was by no means in the general run of "folklore" composers. It
is relatively rare for him to borrow textually from popular folk music, nor
does he compose in a "folk" idiom, as did Liszt, the Russians, Grieg
and many others. Rather, he was inspired by his fundamental studies of the
creative principles of folk art to write profoundly original music. In 1908 he
himself became teacher of the piano at the Academy, Budapest. During the
inter-war years Bartok found himself increas-ingly out of sympathy with the
rightist Horthy regime, and this was possibly a factor that led him to resign
his teaching post in 1934 to devote himself exclusively to research into folk
music. Then, in 1940, disgusted by Hungary's rapprochement with Nazi Germany
and the increasingly extreme tendencies of the government, the sixty-year-old
composer left his native country for the United States. There he was given an
honorary professorship at Columbia University and sup-ported himself as a
pianist. When he died in 1945 he was a poor man and his funeral was attended by
only a few friends.
Throughout
his life Bartok, whose research took him not only through Hungary and the
neighbouring territories but also to Bul-garia, Turkey and North Africa, tried
to prove scientifically that these traditions had common roots. As a composer
he soon realised that to use this new material he would have to invent a new
musical language, free from the traditional rules of harmony and from the
limitations imposed on rhythms by the use of bars. Liszt had antici-pated much
of this, but Bartok's final liberation from tradition was stimulated by
Debussy, whose work he first heard in 1905. Bartok's resultant synthesis was a
minutely elaborated, coherent and original language.
From: The Larousse
Encyclopedia of Music
Discussion Activities
Questions
on the Text
1. Say
what you know about Bartok's musical education and en-vironment. What were the
main sources of his inspiration? Name his first major compositions.
2. When
did Bartok begin his systematic exploration of Hungar-ian folk music? Who
accompanied him on his early expedi-tions? What was the outcome of these trips?
13
3. What
other folk music, besides Hungarian, did Bartok study? What conclusion did he
arrive at?
4. What
is Bartok's significance as a "folk" composer?
5. Find
in the text the passage describing how Bartok's musical language was formed.
What impact did folk music make on Bartok's concept of tonality, harmony, and
rhythm?
Questions about Bartok
1. What
other "folklore" composers do you know? Make a comparison between
Bartok's approach to Hungarian folk mu-sic and that of Kodaly. Say in what
respects they differ.
2.
Compare Bartok with Schoenberg and say how Bartok ex-panded the traditional
notions of tonality.
3. Why
do you think Bartok's musical language is considered to be new and highly
individual? How do you understand the following: "Bartok's music is a
highly individual blend of ele-ments transformed from his own admirations:
Liszt, Strauss, Debussy, folk music, and Stravinsky"?
4. Say
what you know about Bartok as a pianist.
5. What
do you know about Bartok's visits to Russia?
6. Name
Bartok's most important works. Why, in your opinion, are the six string
quartets regarded as his greatest achieve-ments?
Discussion
Points
1. Do
you agree with the following statement: "Bartok, not Schoenberg, is the
true revolutionary of the early 20th cen-tury"? Give your reasons.
2. Bartok's
role as founder of the Hungarian national school of the 20th century.
PAUL
HINDEMITH: HIS LIFE AND WORK (1895-1963)
Those
writers who enjoy finding a spiritual kinship between one famous composer and
another have described Hindemith (1895-1963) as "a twentieth-century
Bach". The relationship between these two composers is not difficult to
trace. Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis* has a
strong similarity in purpose and method to the Well-Tempered Clavier; and
the works grouped under the title of Kammermusik (Chamber Music), can be
described as contemporary Brandenburg Concertos. The bond that ties
Hindemith to Bach is counterpoint. With both composers, polyphony is the basis
of their thinking; with both, polyphony serves as the material out of which
mighty archi-tectural structures are built. Yet one might say of Hindemith what
was once said so well of Bach: "The best way to listen to Bach's music is
to forget the word counterpoint and to listen just for the music."
14
With
Hindemith, counterpoint is not the end, but the starting point. He is no
neo-classicist living in the past, but a very modern composer belonging to our
times. Though counterpoint is his method, there is independence in his
thinking. His music is linear, by which we mean that the voices move with
complete freedom of harmonic relationships. It has intensity, concentration, en-ergy
- qualities that we associate with contemporary expression rather than with
Bach. It is sometimes dissonant, sometimes atonal.
In his
treatise, The Craft of Musical Composition - which some writers consider
to be the most important theoretical work on music since Rameau's* -
Hindemith has given us a clue to his technique by analyzing the techniques of
contemporary composers. All tone combi-nations are possible as an altogether
new conception of "key" is re-alised; melody is freed from its
dependence of harmony.
Strange
to say of a composer whose method is so complex and whose language is so
remote, Hindemith did not keep himself alto-gether aloof from his public. As a
matter of fact, he strongly felt the responsibility of the composer to society.
Consequently, he produced a great number of works for mechanical organ, radio,
pianola, the-ater, etc. This music has often been described as Gebrauchsmusik* - functional
music - a term invented for Hindemith.
Hindemith
was born in Hanau, Germany, on November 16, 1895, and studied at the Frankfurt
Conservatory. In Frankfurt, Hindemith distinguished himself as a violinist (he
was concertmaster of the Frankfurt Opera House Orchestra), conductor, founder
and violinist of the Amar String Quartet (which specialized in contemporary
chamber music), and, finally, as a composer. His early works, intro-duced at
the Donaueschingen Festivals of contemporary music in Baden-Baden between 1921
and 1923, attracted attention. In the half-dozen years that followed, Hindemith
became one of the major cre-ative figures in Germany, particularly after the
successful premieres of his operas Cardillac (1926) and Neues vom Tage* (1929).
In
1927, he was appointed professor of composition at the
Berlin Hochschule,* a post he held up to the time of
Hitler. Soon after the Nazis took over Germany, Hindemith became the center of
a cele-brated political and musical controversy. The Nazis did not look with
favor on Hindemith, despite his international fame. His music was banned on all
German concert programs.
In 1935
Hindemith left Germany, and went to Turkey, on the invitation of that
government, to help reorganize its musical life. Af-ter that, Hindemith came to
the United States and taught at Yale.*
When
the war ended, Hindemith's music was again played in Germany. He returned to
Europe in 1947, visiting Italy, England, Germany, and other countries. In 1953
he settled in Switzerland. In 1949-50 he spent a year at Harvard University,
giving lectures, later published as A Composer's World.
In 1951 he accepted a teaching post at Zurich
University, divid-ing his time with his duties at Yale, but in 1953 resigned
from Yale
15
and
returned to Europe. In the last decade of his creative life Hindemith
concentrated on introspective and spiritual compositions. He also devoted much
time to conducting. In 1957 he completed the opera Die Harmonie der Welt (The
Harmony of the World), which was staged in Munich in August of that year, with
only moderate success.
The
best of his music occupies an important place in the history of 20th century
compositions.
Based
on: The Complete Book of Twentieth-Century Music; The Concise Oxford
Dictionary of Music
THE
COMPOSER SPEAKS: PAUL HINDEMITH
In
earlier times composition was hardly taught at all. If a boy was found to be
gifted for music, he was given as an apprentice into the care of a practical
musician. With him he had to get acquainted with many branches of music.
Singing was the foundation of all musical work. Thus singing, mostly in the
form of group singing, was one of the most important fields of instruction. The
practical knowledge of more or less instruments was a sine
qua поп.* Specialization
was almost unknown. Frequently a musician may have been better on the keyboard
than with the bow and with woodwinds or brass, but that would not have absolved
him from playing as many other instruments as possible. And all this playing
was done with one aim in mind: to prepare the musician for collective work; it
was always the community that came first. Soloistic training was nothing but a
preliminary and preparatory exercise for this purpose. Hand in hand with this
daily all-round routine in instrumental training went a solid instruction in
the theory of music-not only what we call theory in our modern curricula,
namely harmony, counterpoint, and other branches of practical instruction, but
true theory, or if you prefer another name, the scientific background of music.
The
vast stock of general musical knowledge was the hotbed in which the germs of
composing grew. If a musician had any talent for composition, he could always
draw on this tremendous accumula-tion of practical experience, once he wanted
to convert his ideas into audible structures. Composing was not a special
branch of knowledge that had to be taught to those gifted or interested enough.
It simply was the logical outgrowth of a healthy and stable system of educa-tion,
the ideal of which was not an instrumental, vocal, or tone-ar-ranging
specialist, but a musician with a universal musical knowl-edge - a knowledge
which, if necessary, could easily be used as a basis for more specialized
development of peculiar talents. This sys-tem, although it provided for the
composer the best preparation pos-sible, did not guarantee him any success.
Only posterity decided whether he was to be counted among the few extraordinary
creative
16
musical
figures each country had produced throughout the world. (...)
Today
the situation is quite different.
First
of all, it is almost never the gift of composing that sends young people into
this field of musical activity. Musical creative gift cannot, in my opinion, be
recognized until after a rather well devel-oped general knowledge of practical
music has been acquired. If there is no such evidence, the sole evidence of
that gift can be af-forded by written-down attempts at building musical
structures. Usu-ally such attempts are not at ail a sign of creative talent.
The mini-mum requirements for entering the creative field, such as a good ear
for musical facts and perhaps even a feeling for absolute pitch, are too common
among all people, musical or non-musical, to be taken for the foundation upon
which to build a composer's career. (...)
From: A
Composer's World: Its Horizons and Limitations by Paul Hindemith. Ch. 9.
Education
Discussion Activities
Questions
on the Text
1.
Briefly outline Hindemith's career as a composer, conductor, and teacher. What
did Hindemith think about the social value of music?
2. Name
his most important theoretical works. Have you read them? What ideas are
discussed in them?
3. What
is meant by Gebrauchsmusik?
4.
Comment on the comparison between Hindemith's polyphony and that of Bach. Is it
valid?
5. What
composition did Hindemith design as a 20th century Well-Tempered Clavier?
6. In
what way did Hindemith use traditional contrapuntal technique?
7. Find
in the extract the evidence Hindemith gives to support his point of view. What,
in his opinion, is the ideal musical training for a composer?
Discussion
Points
1. Why
do you think Hindemith rejected the concept of atonality and twelve-tone
composition?
2. What
is the central theme of his best opera Mauds der Maler?
3. See
whether you can answer the following question: Hin-demith's book A
Composer's World is a publication of his course of lectures delivered at
Harvard University in 1949/50. What book by Stravinsky is also based on his
lectures given at Harvard?
4.
Express your opinion on the following statement: "We cannot
17
teach
people to compose. All we can teach is the technique of composition."
Additional
Assignments
1. Give
a summary of the extract from Hindemith's book.
2. Do
you share Hindemith's views on a composer's education? What are your views on
present-day musical education, its merits and demerits? Can the ideal be achieved
nowadays? Give examples and write a short essay on the subject.
STRAVINSKY.
THE RITE OF SPRING
Stravinsky's
life was a varied one, and his music went through several changes, often
startling at the time but revealing an inner consistency when viewed with hindsight.* His early years, from 1882 to
1910, found Stravinsky in Russia, absorbing influences from his el-der
compatriots and others. The years 1910-14 saw the beginning of his
international career, with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris, and the
premieres of The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. Then,
between 1914 and 1920, he made his home in Switzerland, his exile becoming
permanent after the Russian Revolution, though the connection with his homeland
continued in his works. The period from 1920 to 1939, which he spent in France,
was that of the great neoclassical compositions, reactivating the modes and
manners of the 18th century. This stylistic inclination persisted in the
earlier part of his American residence (1939-52), gradually giving way to a
highly individual use of serial techniques* in his
last years.
* * *
Throughout
history, there have been intermittent attempts to tame what many have called
"primitive" and "uninhibited" rhythm. Nowhere has this been
more evident than in the Western world. As Christianity turned away from the
rites of ancient religions, European culture festered the negative image of
rhythmic intoxication through music and dance. An interesting long-term
phenomenon is the way this suppressed rhythmic impulse seems to erupt
periodically into the social fabric. One example is the dance of death craze
in the Mid-dle Ages. The sight of a wild, delirious mob dancing in the streets
for days in an attempt to ward off the plague is not an image that sits well
with traditional notions of civilization.
Although
it adapted many dance rhythms, "serious" European music virtually
abandoned the uninhibited body rhythms of the ar-chaic past. European composers
sought more restrained, "refined" rhythmic styles. One might consider
the minuet the ultimate example of this more "refined" rhythm and
movement. (Here we encounter the word "refined" in a socio-cultural
context where subdued, styl-ized, and controlled body movements are primary
components.) It is
18
not
until the Romantic era that some of this primitive rhythmic im-pulse returns to
"serious" music, perhaps taking its cue from the cultural pounding
that Beethoven's rhythms had released into the world. The twentieth century is
the era in which this impulse has reasserted itself, full-bodied and in many
guises. In 1913, it reap-peared in all its shocking glory in Igor Stravinsky's
ballet music The Rite of Spring.
Composed
for a Russian ballet company active in Paris early in the century, it was an
exotic expression of Russian nationalism through music, dance, and primitive
theme. Stravinsky described his vision later in these words:
"I
saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle,
watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to
propitiate the god of spring."
In The
Rite of Spring, Stravinsky expanded the traditional sense of harmony,
rhythm, melody, and tonality into a distinctive musical language that sounds
simultaneously modern and archaic. The man-ner in which this is done defies
simple description, but we may cite a few of the elements that reflect
Stravinsky's genius:
Texture: As in
Debussy's music, texture plays a vital role in the Stravinsky sound. His textures,
like Debussy's, are continuously changing. Melodies appear and disappear.
Deceptively simple chord patterns* begin
suddenly, as do melodic fragments and phrases, only to end unexpectedly. A
basically homophonic texture may be trans-formed quickly into a dense
contrapuntal display. All of these pro-cedures are given life by a dazzling use
of orchestral sound. Instru-ments often play in their most extreme registers to
obtain new and exotic effects. Although we are describing elements of the
texture as isolated entities, any of these considered separately from the com-plete
sound mass rarely retains any essential quality of the work. To illustrate this
point, we have only to compare The Rite with a typi-cal Classical
symphony. If you sing or hum the main theme of Mozart's Fortieth Symphony, something
quite essential of the spirit and meaning of the work will survive. This is not
true of The Rite. Any isolated theme from the piece (with the notable
exception of the opening solo) conveys little by itself. This speaks to one of
the essential trends of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the growing position of texture and timbre* as a
primary focus of the compositional process.
Rhythm:
At the basis of a Stravinsky texture are unique combi-nations of rhythms.
Perhaps the most startling rhythmic textures of The Rite are the jagged
synchronizations of irregular patterns* which
repeat incessantly, starting and ending with abrupt precision. These rhythms,
both primitive in their forcefulness and modern in their so-phisticated logical
interplay, encode a special moment of musical-cultural history that has never
been duplicated.
Harmony:
The Rite of Spring is legendary for its "emancipation
19
of
dissonance", especially those famous chords that begin the Dance of
Adolescents. However, the real impact of this dissonance is de-rived from
the rhythmic setting, which suggests once again that no musical element may be
isolated from its rhythmic identity.* It is
the forceful repetition of Stravinsky's dissonance that creates this powerful
impact. Dissonance not only remains unresolved, it often merges into a sort of megaconsonance* through continued
imprinting
into
the senses.
In The
Rite, Stravinsky did not abandon tonality, he redefined and enlarged its
potential. In fact, he returned to one of the most ancient tonal practices:
tonality by assertion. Throughout the work, tonal centers are often created
through obstinate repetition of ostinatos and melodies. Another harmonic
characteristic of The Rite is polytonality - simply, the sounding
of melodies in two or more tonalities at the same time.
Melody: The
melodic material of The Rite is either drawn from actual folk songs or
deliberately created in folk style. In addition to these melodies, which
comprise the main threads of the work, there are many thematic fragments
typically twentieth-century in style, with their complex rhythms and jagged
intervals. The two types of melodies complement each other in a remarkable
synthesis.
While
texture, rhythm, harmony and melody have been discussed as if they were
separate entities, it must be pointed out, as always, that these elements are
not isolated from one another; they grow organically from one potent impulse
that bonds them together in a powerful union.
From: Music: A Living Language
by T. Manoff
ELECTRONIC
MUSIC
Conversations
with Igor Stravinsky
ROBERT CRAFT*. Do
you have an opinion about electronic music?
IGOR
STRAVINSKY. I think that the matiere* is
limited; more exactly, the composers have demonstrated but a very limited matiere
in all the examples of "electronic music" I have heard. This is
surprising because the possibilities as we know are astronomical. An-other
criticism I have is that the shortest pieces of "electronic mu-sic"
seem endless and within those pieces we feel no time control.
Therefore
the amount of repetition, imaginary or real, is exces-sive.
Electronic
composers are making a mistake, in my opinion, when they continue to employ
significative noises in the manner of musique concrete.* In
Stockhausen's Gesang der Junglinge,* a work
manifesting a strong personality and an indigenous feeling for the medium, I
like the way the sound descends as though from auras, but the burbling fade-out
noises and especially the organ are, I find,
20
incongruous
elements. Noises can be music of course, but they ought not to be
singificative; music itself does not signify anything.
What
interests me most in "electronic music" so far is the nota-tion, the
"score".
R.C. In
the music of Stockhausen and others of his generation the elements of pitch,
density, dynamics, duration, frequency (register), rhythm, timbre have been
subjected to the serial variation principle. How will the non-serial element of
"surprise" be intro-duced in the fight planning of this music?
I.S.
The problem that now besets the totalitarian serialist is how to compose
"surprise" since by electronic computer it doesn't exist (though in
fact it does, even if every case is computable; even at its worst, we listen to
music as music and not as a computing game). Some composers are inclined to
turn the problem over to the per-former - as Stockhausen does in his Piano
Piece No. XI. I myself am inclined to leave very little to the
performers. I would not give them margin to play only half or selected fragments
of my pieces. Also, I think it inconsistent to have controlled everything so
minutely and then leave the ultimate shape of the piece to a performer (while
pretending that all possible shapes have been allowed for).
R.C. Do
you think there is a danger at present of novelty for its own sake?
I.S.
Not really. Nevertheless, certain festivals of contemporary music by their very
nature cannot help but encourage mere novelty. And, by a curious reversal of
tradition, some critics encourage it too. The classic situation in which
conservative and academic critics de-ride the composer's innovations is no
more. Now composers can hardly keep up with the demands of some critics to
"make it new". Novelties sometimes result that could not interest
anyone twice. I am more cautious of the power of the acclaimers than of the dis-claimers,
of those critics who hail on principle what they cannot pos-sibly contact
directly with their own ears or understanding.* This
is musical politics, not music. Critics, likе composers, must know what they love. Anything else is
pose and propaganda, or what D.H. Lawrence called "would-be".
September-December 1957
From: Conversations
with Igor Stravinsky
Discussion Activities
Questions
on the Text
1. What
are the main periods into which Stravinsky's stylistic evolution may be
conveniently divided?
2. How
did Stravinsky use Russian folk music in his ballet The Rite of Spring? Why
does his musical language sound mod-ern and at the same time archaic?
21
3. Find
in the text the passages in which Stravinsky's use of rhythm is compared with
that of other European composers. What innovations did Stravinsky bring to the
traditional rhythmic patterns? In what way did he expand the traditional
concept of tonality?
4. Find
in the text the passage where Stravinsky's texture is an-alyzed. In what way
does the texture in The Rite reflect one of the basic trends of the late
19th and 20th centuries: the growing importance of texture in the compositional
process?
5. What
is the topic of Conversations with Stravinsky? What par-ticular subjects
are discussed?
6. What
was Stravinsky's attitude towards electronic music?
7. What
are his views on the role of the performer and contem-porary performance
practice?
Questions
about Stravinsky
1. When
and how did Stravinsky's collaboration with Diaghilev begin? When and where was
The Firebird produced?
2. In
what circumstances was The Rite of Spring conceived by Stravinsky? Who
helped him with the libretto? Who chore-ographed the first version of The
Rite?
3. When
was The Rite of Spring first performed in Paris? Who was the conductor?
What do you know about the scandal on the first night? Did Debussy and Ravel
appreciate the ballet?
4. How
many of Stravinsky's ballets and operas were produced during the twenty years
of the Russian seasons in Paris?
5. What
other composers were engaged in Diaghilev's Ballets Russes? Name the most
outstanding ballet dancers and artists who worked with Diaghilev's Ballets
Russes.
6. What
do you know about Stravinsky's visit to the Soviet Union?
Additional
Assignments
1. Give
the main points of the dialogue between Stravinsky and Craft. Make a written
summary.
2. How
would you answer the questions which were put to Stravinsky? Build up a similar
dialogue around the same points.
3. Discuss
the role of ostinato in The Rite of Spring.
4.
Write a composition or give a short talk explaining the fol-lowing phenomenon:
The
Rite of Spring is now considered one of the major land-marks in the
evolution of 20th-century music. Nonetheless it is a well known fact that its
harsh sounds and barbaric rhythms willingly accepted and admired today, caused
a riot of indignation among the audience at the first performance in Paris. How
would you account
22
for
this? What is your opinion of changing musical tastes and interests?
BRITTEN'S
OPERAS
Throughout his career, Britten showed a special
feeling for the voice and poured forth in profusion songs, song cycles, part
songs, and every kind of choral work and cantata. The choice of words to set -
whether English, French, Italian, German, or Latin - was always a matter of
serious importance to him, for he realized that syllables, words, phrases, and
sentences can serve as a vital point of a musical structure and enjoyed trying
to reconcile the meaning that lies be-hind the literal facade with the musical
idea behind the notational facade.
Britten's predilection for vocal music would not
necessarily have led him to opera unless he also had a natural feeling for the
stage and the dramatic potentialities of music. His interest was quickened by
the incidental music he wrote for films in his early years, which led to
commissions for incidental music for plays and radio-feature programs as well. His first operatic experiment was a choral opera, Paul
Bunyan (1941), with libretto by Auden*; but this was
not a success when produced at Columbia University, New York. His real chance
came with Peter Crimes (1945), which was commissioned by the
Koussevitzky Music Foundation and produced at Sadler's Wells Theater, London,
on June 7, 1945. Its impact was decisive. It was an immediate artistic and
popular success, not only in England but also abroad, for in the course of the
next few years it was produced in nearly twenty countries in different parts of
the world.
After this, it was natural that he should continue to
exploit the operatic vein. Partly because of personal preference and partly be-cause
of operatic conditions in England he decided to write some of his subsequent
operas - e.g. The Rape of Lucretia (1946), Albert Herring (1947),
and The Turn of the Screw (1954)-for a small chamber-music combination,
i.e., a group of solo singers and an instrumental ensemble of about a dozen
soloists.
Britten showed great virtuosity in the way he tackled
problems of operatic structure. Like Verdi in his last two operas, he moves
rapidly and easily between the various degrees of intensity needed for
recitative, airs, arioso passages, and concerted ensembles; and his operas tend
to be most satisfactory when the musical flow is contin-uous within the acts,
sometimes with the assistance of interludes joining the different scenes. Peter
Crimes, The Rape of Lucretia, The Turn of the Screw, and A Midsummer
Night's Dream (I960) are specially successful examples of this gift for
formal organization. The sixteen scenes into which the two acts of The Turn
of the Screw are divided combine the salient features of the variations and
the cycle in a particularly brilliant way. A looser and possibly less
23
successful
musical organization is to be found in Gloriana (1953), in which each of
the eight individual scenes is a self-contained tableau.* In his
operas as in his other compositions, Britten's style is eclectic, his idiom modal;* and his musical metrics often echo
the familiar structure of English prosody. This should make it compara-tively
easy for the public to appreciate his operas, were it not for the fact that
frequently some kind of dichotomy seems to occur. An example of this can be
seen in his choice of characters with split or imperfectly integrated
personalities. Peter Grimes is a case in point - also the eponymous hero of the
comic opera Albert Herring, and Captain Vere and Claggart in Billy
Budd (1951). A favorite de-vice is the combination, not necessarily the
reconciliation, of two completely different musical streams; and in this
connection he fre-quently uses enharmony.
Psychological
problems appeal to him as operatic subjects - the psychopath earns his sympathy
and understanding; manifestations of violence and cruelty arouse his deep
compassion; the theme of mal-treated youth is almost obsessional. In Peter
Grimes, the fisherman's sadistic outbursts against the boy apprentice form
the mainspring of the tragedy, and the boy's situation is made all the more
poignant because the part is mute and his feelings can only be expressed in-directly.
There is a similar problem in me children's opera The Little Sweep (1949),
where the boy hero is also exploited and maltreated by his master; but on this
occasion the ending is a happy one. The dominant scene of The Turn of the
Screw is that of innocence be-trayed.
In this
last opera, the composer has no difficulty in conducting the action on three
different levels: a normal level on which the adults live and communicate with
each other; an abnormal level on which the adults become aware of the ghosts
but fail to establish communication with them; and a supernatural level on
which the ghosts communicate with the children in a secret understanding that
leads inevitably to corruption. In A Midsummer Nights Dream he shows a
similar ability to deal with the three different groups of characters - the
fairies, the lovers, and the mechanicals - preserving their musical identity,
while subordinating their development to the plan of the opera as a musical
whole.
From: The New
Book of Modern Composers
THE
COMPOSER SPEAKS: BENJAMIN BROTEN
For
most of my life I have lived closely in touch with the sea. My parents' house
in Lowestoft directly faced the sea, and my life as a child was colored by the
fierce storms that sometimes drove ships onto our coast and ate away whole
stretches of the neighbor-ing cliffs. In writing Peter Grimes, I wanted
to express my aware-ness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose
livelihood
24
depends
on the sea - difficult though it is to treat such a universal subject in
theatrical form.
I am
especially interested in the general architectural and formal problems of
opera, and decided to reject the Wagnerian theory of "permanent
melody"* for the classical practice of separate
numbers that crystalize and hold the emotion of a dramatic situation at cho-sen
moments. One of my chief aims is to try to restore to the mu-sical setting of
the English language a brilliance, freedom, and vitality that have been
curiously rare since the death of Purcell. In the past hundred years, English
writing for the voice has been dominated by strict subservience to logical
speech rhythms, despite the fact that ac-centuation according to sense often
contradicts the accentuation de-manded by emotional content. Good recitative
should transform the natural intonations and rhythms of everyday speech into
memorable musical phrases (as with Purcell), but in more stylized music the
composer should not deliberately avoid unnatural stresses if the prosody of the
poem and the emotional situation demand them, nor be afraid of a high-minded
treatment of words, which may need prolongation far beyond their common speech
length or a speed of delivery that would be impossible in conversation.
The
scarcity of modern British operas is due to the limited op-portunities that are
' offered for their performance. Theater managers will not present original
works without a reasonable hope of recov-ering their costs of production;
composers and writers cannot thrive without the experience of seeing their
operas adequately staged and sung; the conservatism of audiences hinders
experimental departures from the accepted repertory.
From: The New
Book of Modern Composers
Discussion Activities
Questions
on the Text
1. What
kinds of vocal work did Britten compose?
2. Name
his principal operas. What opera made Britten world-famous? When and where was
it first performed?
3.
Whose poem did Britten choose as a source for the Peter Grimes libretto?
4. What
is the main theme of the opera Peter Grimes? What was Britten's aim? Why
did he choose to set his opera on the East coast of England?
5. How
did Britten develop Purcell's tradition in vocal music? Why did he reject the
Wagnerian theory of "permanent melody"? What are his arguments?
6. What
psychological problems are treated in his operas? Why do you think many of
Britten's stage works are regarded as masterly psychological studies?
7. How
did Britten tackle problems of operatic structure? Give
25
examples.
Comment on the comparison between Britten and Verdi.
Questions
about Britten
1. What
literary sources did Britten use for his opera librettos and other vocal
compositions?
2. Find
in the extract on p. ... the passage in which Britten ac-counts for the
scarcity of modern British operas. What opera company was founded by Britten?
For what purpose?
3.
Whose singing inspired many of Britten's finest works?
4. What
festival was founded by Britten?
5. What
do you know about Britten's visits to the Soviet Union? With whom did he form a
firm friendship?
6. What
symphony did Shostakovich dedicate to Britten? And what work did Britten
dedicate to Shostakovich?
7.
Which of Britten's song cycles is based on poetry by Pushkin?
8. What
operas by Britten have been staged in the Soviet Union?
Additional
Assignments
1. List
the main points of the above extracts.
2.
Write a composition or give a short talk describing Britten's approach to the
libretto and its literary and dramatic sources.
MENOTTI.
THE OPERA COMPOSER
Gian
Carlo Menotti was born in Cadegliano, Italy, 1911. He studied at the Verdo
Conservatoire in Milan, 1924-27, and then, on Toscanini's advice, continued his
studies at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, 1928-34. Since 1927 Menotti
has been a permanent resi-dent in the United States. His tendency as composer
was always to-wards opera and his first adult essay, Amelia Goes to the
Ball, was conducted by Reiner in 1937 and later
at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. As with all his operas, he wrote his own
librettos. His first outstanding success was in 1946 with The Medium, but
this was eclipsed in 1950 by The Consul, dealing with the plight of
refugees at the mercy of heartless bureaucracy. Amahl and the Night Visitors
was the first opera to be written for television. His works have achieved
considerable popularity and his intention to bring opera nearer to the Broadway
theatre goer has been achieved if at some cost in originality of expression.
But of his dramatic effectiveness and melodic gist there can be no doubt.
His
musical roots are clearly Italian, while at the same time his outlook has been
influenced by the American theatre.
26
Menotti,
who supplied the libretto for Samuel Barber's Vanessa, has
also composed a number of non-operatic works.
From: The
Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music
THE
COMPOSER SPEAKS: GIAN CARLO MENOTTI
Opera
is the very basis of theater. In all civilizations, people sang their dramas
before they spoke them. I am convinced that the prose theater is an offspring
of these earlier musicodramatic forms and not vice versa. The need for music
accompanying dramatic action is still so strongly felt that in our most popular
dramatic form, the cinema, background music is used to underline even the most
prosaic and realistic situations.
It is
unfair t.o accuse opera of being an old-fashioned and un-gainly dramatic form.
Actually, what people put forth as examples is largely the operatic output of
the nineteenth century. Considering the length of time that has gone by since
then, it is quite amazing what life there still is in those old pieces. How
many plays of that same period have survived this test as well? Wouldn't most
of us prefer hearing a Verdi opera to sitting through a Victor Hugo's play? I
may even venture to say that many of the so-called "great plays" of
this century will be forgotten when dear old Traviata is still holding
the boards. All of this cannot be explained away simply by con-demning as
foolish or gullible millions of music lovers.
To
criticize a theater piece as too theatrical is as senseless as to criticize a
piece of music for being too musical. There is only one kind of bad theater:
when the author's imagination steps outside the very area of illusion he has
created. But as long as the dramatic creates within that area, almost no action
on the stage is too violent or implausible. As a matter of fact, the skill of
the dramatist is almost measurable by his ability to make even the most daring
and unpredictable seem inevitable. (...)
Nothing
in the theater can be as exciting as the amazing quick-ness with which music
can express a situation or describe a mood. Whereas, in the prose theater, it
often requires many words to es-tablish a single effect, in an opera one note
on the horn will illumi-nate the audience. It is this very power of music to
express feelings so much more quickly than words that make librettos, when read
out of the musical context, appear rather brutal and unconvincing.
There
is no such thing as a good or bad libretto per se.* A good
libretto is nothing but one that inspires a composer to write good music. Götterdämmerung* would
have been a bad libretto indeed for Puccini, and I can imagine nothing more
disastrous than Wagner deciding to set Madame Butterfly
to music.
Top
many people think that only exotic subjects from the past are suitable for an
opera. That is nothing but a romantic inheritance
27
from
the last century. Just as modern poets have been moved to examine and interpret
the uniquely contemporary life, there is no reason why the composer should not
do the same. That is not to say that modern opera must have a contemporary
subject. As Lorca, Eliot, or Dylan Thomas have found
inspiration in sources as varied as folklore, remote historical events, or
newspaper headlines, so should the composer permit himself that same freedom.
One may
ask why, if opera is a valid and vital form, it hasn't stimulated more
successful contemporary contributions to the theater. Most modern composers
blame their failures on the librettos, but I am afraid that the fault more
often lies with the music. Opera is, after all, essentially music, and such is
the ennobling or transfiguring power of music that we have numerous examples of
what safely could be labeled awkward plays transformed into inspiring operas.
We have, however, no single example of a successful opera whose main strength
is the libretto. I have often been accused of writing good librettos and
mediocre music, but I maintain that my librettos become alive or illuminated
only through my music. Let anyone read one of my texts divorced from its
musical setting to discover the truth of what I say. My operas are either good
or bad; but if their librettos seem alive or powerful in performance, then the
musie must share this distinction.
One of
the reasons for the failure of so much contemporary opera is that its music
lacks immediacy of communication. Theater music must make its point and
communicate Us emotion at the same moment the action develops. It cannot wait
to be understood until after the curtain comes down. Mozart understood this,
and there is a noticeable difference in immediacy between some of his symphonic
or chamber-music styles on the one hand and his operatic style on the other.
From: The New Book of Modern
Composers
Discussion Activities
Comprehension
Questions and Points for Discussion
1.
Briefly describe Menotti's career. Under what influence was Menotti's operatic
style formed?
2. What
ideas are discussed in Menotti's essay about opera?
3. Why
does Menotti think that opera is superior to drama? What evidence does he give
to support his view?
4. Find
in the essay the passage in which Menotti speaks about theatricality. What
qualities does he value in a dramatist?
5. In
Menotti's view, what decides an operatic composer to choose a certain libretto?
6. Find
in Menotti's essay the passage describing the choice of subjects for operas.
What are Menotti's views on the freedom of the composer?
28
7. How
does Menotti account for the failure of some contempo-rary operas?
8. Have
you heard any of his operas? In your opinion, what place in Western music does
he occupy?
Additional
Assignments
1.
Write a summary of the essay on Menotti.
2. Have
you ever heard any of Menotti's operas? In your opin-ion, what place in Western
music does Menotti occupy?
3. Do
you share Menotti's views on opera? If not, give your rea-sons.
MICHAEL
TIPPETT: A CHILD OF OUR TIME
Michael
Tippett (b. 1905) has become a dominant figure in con-temporary English music
as a result of his concern, projected through composing, writing, and teaching,
with present-day social and artistic problems. His reputation, like that of
most of his contempo-raries, is based on comparatively few works. The concerto
for double string orchestra and the string quartets are examples of polyphonic
method combined with symphonic structure that has proved a germi-nating
principle for many modern English composers. The oratorio A Child of Our
Time was an impassioned protest against oppression and persecution, and
further aspects of Tippett's uncompromising in-tegrity and continual struggle
to express his "inner life" through words and music can be found in
the operas The Midsummer Mar-riage, King Priam (for which he wrote his
own libretti) and the cantata The Vision of St. Augustine for baritone
solo, chorus and orchestra.
From The Larousse Encyclopedia of Music
* * *
Most
composers today are eclectics who, since they no longer inherit a tradition
automatically from their immediate predecessors, must forge their own links
with the past as best they can. With the enormous increase in our knowledge of
the past, "tradition" is now the whole history of music. Composers
will choose their ancestry from whatever means most to them; consequently there
is not just one contemporary language but a plurality. Those who find tradition
a burden may decide to ignore it altogether, just as others are tempted to seek
refuge in the simpler, safer world of the past. But knowledge of the past need
not be inhibiting; it can and should be a rich stimulus to the creative
imagination. Michael Tippett has always found this to be so; his music is a
continuous and fertile dialogue
29
with
the past. When Tippett alludes to the music of his predecessors - and his
allusions are almost always conscious - it is both a gesture of the kinship he
feels with them and at the same time a desire and a need to give his music
great resonance, to
enlarge
its range of meaning.
Michael
Tippett's long apprenticeship as a composer came to an end finally in 1939 with
the creation of his first masterpiece, the Concerto for Double String
Orchestra. However, it was not until the appearance of A Child of Our
Time that he at last achieved na-tional recognition. Though conceived in
1938 and completed in 1941, it was not performed until March 1944 when Tippett
was 39.
The
composer himself has provided a full account of the genesis of the work. It
grew out of Tippett's desire to give some kind of artistic expression to his
social and political preoccupations during the 1930s, embracing his reactions
to the First World War, social depri-vation, unemployment and the aggressive
postures of the Nazi gov-ernment in Germany from 1933.
An
incident which seemed symptomatic of the self-defeating, vio-lent forces at
work in Europe at the time eventually formed the ba-sis of his work. In
November 1938, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew from a family long settled in
Germany, entered the German Embassy in Paris and shot a diplomat - an act of
desperation arising directly from the harsh anti-semitic policies of the Nazis.
(...)
Though
in his libretto Tippett deliberately adopts a style derived from the
"folk-language" of the Negro spirituals incorporated into it, he also
draws on poetic images from T.S. Eliot,* Wilfred Owen* and W.B. Yeats.* Above
all, the text is concerned to embody Tip-pett's Jungian
philosophy.* Its overall organisation was inspired by
Charles Jennens' libretto for Handel's Messiah (1742). Thus Part 1
established the general state of oppression in society, progressing from the
cosmic to the human dimension; Part 2 focuses on the effects of this situation
on an individual and the disastrous consequences of seeking justice through
violence; Part 3 reflects on the preceding drama and considers its
implications.
The
musical structures of Tippett's oratorio are adopted from J.S. Bach's Passions.
Recitative is used for narrative purposes, dramatic choruses participate in
the action and the emotional responses of the protagonists are given
expressions in contemplative arias. In place of Bach's Lutheran chorales,
Tippett decided to use Negro spirituals to symbolize the agony of the Jews in
Hitler's Europe, just as they earlier had reflected the suffering of the
American Negroes in slav-ery. Moreover, their jazz-related musical language
would, Tippett felt, evoke a universal response. Musical elements derived from
the spirituals are also utilised throughout the work as a means of unification.
From: Music
and Musicians, 1985; Music Teacher, 1986
30
Questions
on the Text
1. Name
the most important compositions by Tippett.
2.
Discuss Tippett's treatment of musical tradition.
3. When
was the oratorio A Child of Our Time written? When was it first'
performed?
4. What
are the literary and philosophical sources of the libretto?
5. What
message does the oratorio convey?
6.
Briefly outline the plot of the oratorio.
7. Find
in the text the passage which describes the resemblance between Tippett's
oratorio and Bach's Passions. What features are characteristic of Tippett's
style?
8. Make
a summary of the texts and use it to reproduce the main points orally.
EXPERIMENTAL (AVANT-GARDE) MUSIC
Debussy,
Schoenberg, and Stravinsky opened up certain pathways to modern music. Although
we have discovered that each had important connections to the European notated
tradition, their musical languages represented a distinct break with long-established
practices. Their music exemplified the single most important trait of
modernism: Anything is possible. No tradition is sacred; it is the
composer (or artist, or writer) who makes his or her own rules. As trailblazers,* they may be
considered first-generation moderns (although both Stravinsky and Schoenberg
continued to compose and influence the musical culture for some time). But what
happens with the second and third generations, for whom the music of Debussy, Stravinsky,
and Schoenberg represents the traditional? It is in these composers' works that
the full impact of modernism is felt. We will consider three later moderns -
Messiaen, Ligeti, and Stockhausen - chosen from a field of many possibilities.
From: Music: A
Living Language by T. Manoff
OLIVIER MESSIAEN
Messiaen
(b. 1908) à French composer,
organist, and teacher, was born into a literary family: his father was a
professor of literature and translator of Shakespeare, and his mother a poet, Cécile
Sauvage. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Dukas* (composition) and Dupré* (organ) and himself became a
teacher at the Ecole Normale de Musique and the Schola
Cantorum. Since 1931 he has been organist at La Trinité, Paris.
In 1936 with Bau-drier,* Lesur* and Jolivet* he
formed the group known as La Jeune France.* In 1940
he was imprisoned by the Nazis (his Quartet for the End of Time reflects
his period in a concentration camp) but he was subsequently repatriated and in
1942 he became a teacher of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire (later he taught
analysis and composition). His pupils have included Boulez, Stockhausen,
Xenakis, and Goehr. Though his musical roots seem to lie in César
Franck
31
and to
some extent in Berlioz, Messiaen is one of the most original of modern
composers, and one of the most influential. His musical language makes use of
diverse but (in his case) surprisingly compati-ble sound sources - birdsong,
Indian music, plainsong, the timbres of oriental percussion, Franckian harmony,
Bartokian night-music - which he employs to immensely spacious and powerful
effects. A lifelong Catholic, he uses nature (birds, mountains, etc.) as
symbols of divinity in works such as Oiseaux exotiques* (1956)
for piano and wind instruments, the vast Catalogue d'oiseaux* (1956-58)
for piano and Et expecto resurrectionem
mortuorem (1964) for woodwind, brass and percussion - a work
designed to be performed in the open air, on mountain slopes, where its great
gong-strokes and silences would surely find the surroundings they deserve.
Messiaen gave a new di-mension of colour and intensity to organ music, making
special use of acoustic reverberations and contrasts of timbres. His harmony,
rich and chromatic, derives from Debussy's use of the 7ths and 9ths and modal progressions of chords.* In his
orchestral works he makes use of the ondes Martenot* in the
vast Turangalila-symphonie* and
exotic percussion instruments, giving an oriental effect. Birdsong is also a
major feature of his music. His treatment of rhythm is novel, involving
irregular metres, some of them originating in ancient Greek procedures.
From: Collins
Encyclopedia of Music; The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music
Discussion Activities
Questions
on the Text
1. What
does the author take to be the principal feature of modernism? Which composers
opened up certain pathways to modern music?
2.
Briefly outline Messiaen's career as a composer, organist, and teacher. Which
composers influenced the young Messiaen?
3. Who
belonged to the Young France group? What united the
musicians?
4. What
are the most important elements of Messiaen's musical language? Comment on his use of
ancient Greek rhythms anal scales, Hindu rhythms, and bird songs. What symbolic
meaning did the use of bird song have in Messiaen's works?
5. Name
Messiaen's principal works for solo piano. What are his most important
orchestral works? Did he write operas?
6. What
prominent composers studied under Messiaen?
Discussion
Points
1.
Which of Messiaen's piano compositions have you heard?
32
What do
you think of them? What effect did they have on you, if any?
2. What
books about Messiaen have been published in the Soviet Union? Have you read any
of them? What have you learnt from them?
3. What
do you know about Messiaen's books on the theory of music?
4. Do
you agree or disagree with the author who listed Messiaen among avant-garde
composers? Give your reasons?
Additional
Assignments
1.
Write a composition or give a short talk characterizing Messi-aen's treatment
of melody and rhythm. Give examples showing his innovations in these areas.
2.
Comment on the use of serial technique in Messiaen's music.
3. How
do you understand the following statement in connection with Messiaen: Musical
style may be a blending of many in-fluences?
GEORGE
LIGETI (b. 1923)
The two
areas in which Ligeti's music is especially inventive are texture and time.
In some of his compositions, there are no melodies, no short-range rhythms,
and no harmonic progressions in the traditional sense, only blocks of dense
musical textures drawn out in slowly changing patterns. The effect on the
willing listener is to produce a very different state of time-perception - one
that is somehow contemporary, meditative, and primal. Perhaps it is these
qualities that caused director Stanley Kubrick to use Ligeti's Atmosphères* and Lux aeterna* in the
movie 2001.
Despite
its very modern sound, Lux aeterna is one of Ligeti's more traditional
works. At the "outer layer" of the listening experi-ence, we hear
very little melody in the traditional sense. For the most part, we respond to
long, drawn-out textures that seem to be slowly changing. One of the
interesting ways that the textures change is by being "thin" or
"thick". The "thinnest" texture is created by the voices
singing one pitch; the "thicker" textures result when they sing many
pitches close to one another. Interestingly, these effects are produced by one
of the oldest polyphonic techniques, which is hidden inside the dense sound:
The piece is a canon.
In
recent years Ligeti has considerably extended his range. From his earliest
works (Atmosphères, for example) he has always created the
most subtle sound-pictures of any textural composer. He has also written a
series of "pianissimo-pieces": Etude No. 1 - Harmonies for organ (1967),
Lux aeterna (1966) for 16-part choir and Lontano* for
33
orchestra,
in which shifts of pitch and colour occur almost impercep-tibly.
From: Music A
Living Language by T. Manoff; The Larousse Encyclopedia of
Music
KARLHEINZ
STOCKHAUSEN
K.
Stockhausen (b. 1928), a German composer and theorist, is regarded as the
leader of electronic avant-garde. He has pioneered electronic music, new
uses of physical space in music, open forms,*
live-electronic performance, "intuitive music" and many other
important developments in music after 1950. In his music and in his writings,
he has evolved a uniquely coherent system of generalizations from the premises
of total serialism, paying attention to aesthetic and philosophical conse-quences
as well as matters of technique and music theory. Each of his discoveries is
compellingly demonstrated in his music. He has also been widely active as a
teacher, and has taken part - as either conductor or performer-in many perfor-mances
of his own music, forming his own performing group in 1964.
Stockhausen
was born near Cologne in 1928. His education was interrupted by World War II.
From 1947 to 1951 he studied piano and theory at the Cologne Music-Hochschule.
He then worked for a time with Frank Martin, before going to Paris, where
Milhaud and, more significantly, Messiàen were his main
teachers. His earliest sur-viving works, which date from this period, already
show the influ-ence of Messiaen's music. But Stockhausen was already under the
spell of Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of musique
concrete,* and an
authority of the as yet primitive techniques of electronic composition.
Stockhausen undertook a close study of these techniques, and soon composed some
of the earliest works using exclusively synthesised, or electronically
generated sound.
In his
music electronics proved to be of great importance. Not only did he pioneer the
use of electronics in live performed music (Kontakte* 1959, Mikrophonie
I and II, 1964-65) but he also intro-duced related techniques into
music for conventional instruments, no-tably in "spatial works", such
as Gruppen* for
three orchestras (1957) and Carre for four orchestras (1960). In all
these works sonority is of supreme importance. But in some other works of the
1950s, Stockhausen experimented with chance, or aleatoric, techniques (notably
the Piano Piece No. 11, of 1956).
1957
was the year in which Stockhausen was first invited to teach composition at the
Darmstadt summer courses, where he had been giving lectures since 1953. In the
course of a few years he de-veloped highly individual teaching methods which
resulted in an un-usual degree of collective work within the groups of
composers who came to him. His renown as a teacher soon began to rival that of
his own teacher Messiaen. In 1963 he founded the Cologne Courses
34
for New
Music, later to become the Cologne Institute for New Music. And at the end of
1958 Stockhausen embarked on the first of his concert and lecture tours of the
USA.
As part
of his work for Darmstadt, Stockhausen composed a test piece for percussion
players in 1959.
In the
concept of the "moment" Stockhausen sought a resolution of listeners'
difficulties in experiencing form in serial music. Each in-dividually
characterized passage in a work is regarded as an experi-ential unit, a
"moment", which can potentially engage the listener's full attention
and can do so in exactly the same measure as its neighbours. No single
"moment" claims priority, even as a beginning or ending; hence the
nature of such a work is essentially "unending" (and, indeed,
"unbeginning"). Significantly, each "moment" is, in
Stockhausen's view, equally dispensable, rather than equally indispensable, to
the listener: his unending forms are the outcome not only of his pursuit of
equality among all constituents of a work, but also of his leanings towards
indeterminacy, which he accurately enough attributes to the durations and
intensities of his listeners' attentiveness. The listener's unpredictable
ecstatic involvement with the "now" of one "moment" can be
bought only at the risk of his equally unpredictable withdrawal from some
other. Such "moments", grouped in succession to make up a
"moment form", formed the structural constituents of Kontakte (1959-60),
a work which appeared both as a purely electronic composition and as "Kontakte
for electronic sounds, piano and percussion". Another example of
"music in space", with four loudspeaker groups placed around the
auditorium, Kontakte presents an encounter between
electronic music and instrumental music with the emphasis on shared
characteristics of timbre.
His
major work using open form, on which he began work in 1961, is Momente for
soprano solo, four choral groups and 13 in-strumentalists. The work is designed
as a sequence of "moments" some of which may be omitted as occasion
demands. The general structure is such that additional moments have been
inserted freely in subsequent versions without necessitating any alteration to
the ex-isting music. In this work, Stockhausen's imaginative range in com-bining
words with music reaches perhaps its fullest expression; the texts are taken
from many sources (the Song of Songs, Malinowski's The Sexual Life of
Savages, passages from letters and personal names, onomatopoeic
words* and samples of audience reaction), but the role of the chorus is not
restricted to singing - it also makes clicking, stamping and clapping noises
and performs on small percus-sion instruments.
From: The
Dictionary of Composers; The New Grove Dictionary
35
Discussion Activities
Questions
on the Text about Ligeti
1. In
what areas is Ligeti's music especially inventive?
2. What
effect does it have on the receptive listener?
3. How
does Ligeti use the traditional technique of composition? Give examples.
4. To
what school does Ligeti belong, in your opinion?
About
Stockhausen and Experimental Composers
1.
Briefly outline Stockhausen's career as a composer and teacher. Name his main
works. Why is he regarded as the leader of the electronic avant-garde? What
innovations did he bring into music?
2.
Speak about his work Momente. What does the word
Moment imply for Stockhausen?
3. What
is the "open form" in Stockhausen's concept? How does he use it? What
is the role of improvisation in the perfor-mance of his works?
4.
Which composers contributed to the development of the tech-niques of new music
after World War II? Comment on the most daring experiments in music.
5. What
new information have you found in this part of the book? Will it be useful to
you in your work?
Questions
about Western Music of the 20th Century
1.
Since 1900 we have seen more drastic changes in our way of life than man has
yet known. But somehow we have ex-pected our musicians to continue as they did
in previous times, producing a music of romantic feeling and sentiment while we
live in a mechanical world. Music of the 20th cen-tury held no future if it was
only to become more national-istic, more romantic, or more realistic - it must
in some way reflect the age in which it is created. How far, in your opinion,
is this a true statement?
2. Can
it be that some day the instruments familiar to us will be banished to museums
and our orchestras abolished? Or perhaps a wonderful and undiscovered world of
sound lies ahead of us? What is your opinion?
3. How
do you understand Varese's statement that "the elec-tronic medium has
added an unbelievable variety of new tim-bres to our musical store and has
freed music from tempered system, which has prevented music from keeping pace
with other arts and science"?
4.
Would Mozart have composed The Magic Flute in a machine age? Would Felix
Mendelssohn have composed the Overture
36
to a Midsummer
Nights Dream in 1826 if a railroad had run near his family's private estate
in Berlin? How would Stock-hausen's Momente sound in
Mendelssohn's garden? Give your opinion on the influence of industrialization
on the listener.
5. How
would you interpret the following statement by Robert Schumann: "If Mozart
were alive today he would write piano concertos not of the type Mozart wrote
but of the type Chopin wrote"?
6. Did
you go to any of the concerts at The Third International
Festival
of Contemporary Music held in Leningrad in 1988? What compositions made the
strongest impression on you? Why?
7. Do
you agree that modern music, as we have come to know it, appears less unique
and strange, that today's musical audience is coming to know this music with
increasing sympathy? Give arguments to support your view.
Points
for Discussion and Written Compositions
1. Make
a written summary of the principal features of the styles we have discussed in
this chapter in terms of quality of sound, expressive values, and technical
resources.
2.
Write a composition or give a short talk describing and illus-trating the
changes in musical language since 1900. Note the following basic trends:
- growing stylistic diversity.
- exploration and decline of the major-minor tonal system.
- growth of complex rhythms.
- exploration and rejection of large-scale forms.
- development of the large orchestra and new timbres.
- growing importance of texture and timbre in composition.
- innovations of genre and form.
POPULAR MUSIC
ROCK
Popular music in the
United States has been far from, monolithic. Its many versions have included minstrel songs,* operetta, Broadway ballads, ragtime, blues, jazz,
folk, country and western,*
and most recently, rock and roll. Bom in the 1950s, rock was an unpromising
infant, was many times pronounced dying, and is now a teenage giant whose
influence is being felt not only in popular music but throughout all areas of
music. It has entered the conceit hall sponsored by such scholarly groups as the Pro Musica Antiqua;* the musical theatre with Hair,* the
second-longest-running show currently on Broadway, and the church.
If jazz began the
removal of the barrier between popular and art music, rock has now also taken
up the work. But the interchange has been reciprocal. Not only has the musical
world been affected by rock, but rock has become serious both in
37
its
lyrics and in some of its techniques which it seems to have taken from art
music.
Arnold
Shaw, author, lecturer, composer, and performer, has worked successfully in
both popular and serious music. He has lectured at Juilliard* and at
the New School and has worked in music publishing. He has written the book The
Rock Revolution (1969) to which the following article is the introductory
chapter.
POINTS
ABOUT ROCK
The
phrase Rock Revolution may sound like a metaphor or hyperbole. It is
neither a figure of speech nor a rhetorical exaggeration. It quite literally
characterizes what has happened to American music in the 1960s-a complete
upending of the pop music scene.*
When it
first manifested itself in the mid-50s, rock was dismissed as an aberration and
an abomination.* Before
the Presley rockabilly*
movement subsided, there was a rising tide of Negro
rhythm-and-blues.* Then came Bob
Dylan* and folk rock.*
Beatlemania took England and Europe by storm and proceeded to inundate American
teenagers.* Today, we have soul,* raga* rock, psychedelic rock* and an influx of
exotic instruments, electronic sounds and magnetic-tape music that is rattling
the rafters of the entire music world, art as well as pop.
The
year of Dylan's embrace of the electric guitar and the Big Beat, 1965, was the
year in which the teenage rebellion matured into full-scale musical revolution.
By then it was clear that the old days of so-called good music were not coming
back. The era of the Big Bands, the Big Ballads and the Big Baritones was gone,
along with crewcuts. Rock was not just a passing fad, but the sonic expression
of the Now, the Turned-On, the Hair Generation. Literature had the antinovel
and antihero. The stage had its Theater of the Absurd. In painting, there were mixed media,* op,* pop* and ob
art.* And in
pop, it was rock.
The
main features of the overthrow of the older generation's popular music culture
may be listed as follows:
1. The
guitar and other plucked, picked and strummed string instruments have
superseded bowed instruments (violin), blown instruments (reeds and brass) and
the piano as vocal accompaniment.
2.
Control of pop has been taken out of the hands of major record companies, staff
Artist and Repertoire (A & R) executives and Broadway-Hollywood publishing
companies. The choice and character of material are now dictated by
under-thirty artist-writers and independent record producers, and no major
record company is today without a "house hippie"* in
search of rock artists.
3.
Established song forms, like the 32-bar chorus-cum-bridge, have given way to
new forms characterized by odd-numbered
38
formations,
shifting meters, radical stanza patterns and changing time
signatures.*
4. The
traditional division of labor among performer, writer and record producer has
broken down. Instrumentalists sing and singers play instruments. Originators of
material tend to account for the total product. "The medium is the
message", and the record is the song.
5. Just
as blues singers treated their voices as musical instruments, and balladeers of the
1940s handled the microphone as if it were an instrument, rock artists have
made the recording studio their instrument and the amplifier their tool.
6. We
are in the midst of an electrical explosion of sound. Magnetic tape and
electronics have made the 1960s an era of echo chambers, variable speeds, and
aleatory (chance) and programmed (computer) composition. New procedures include
manipulation of texture as a development technique, "wall-of-sound"
density* and total enveloping sound. Philosophical
as well as esthetic concepts underlie these developments: a concern with
sensory overload as a means of liberating the self, expanding consciousness and
rediscovering the world.
7. New
subject matter includes an exploration of the cosmos of strange experiences,
from the psychedelic expansion of the mind back into the world of medievalism
and beyond time into transcendental meditation. We are in an era of meaningful
lyrics, protesting, probing and poetic.
8. But
we are also in a period when sound itself, as in jazz but in a more complex
way, frequently is theme and content. If the folk orientation of rock
emphasizes meaning, the psychedelic stresses tone color, texture,
density and volume. (...)
9. Superalbums represent
a new driving force, with outrageous sums of money being lavished not only on
recording but on packaging.
10.
Rock groups are concerned not merely with uniqueness of sound, long for a
requirement of singing and instrumental success, but with total image. Hair
styles, wardrobe, LP* liners,* and even the styling of promotion
matter are no longer left to professionals but are the subject of personal and
group expression. (...)
11. The
discotheque, a melange of vibrating colors, blinding images and deafening sound,* has superseded
the night club, cocktail lounge and jazz club as after-hour
pads for teenagers.*
12. For
the first time in the history of popular music, we are developing canons of
criticism. Just as there has long been a phalanx of concert and jazz critics,
we now have an under-thirty group of reviewers whose work appears regularly in
rock publications like Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone, Cheetah and Eye and
is beginning to find space in The New Yorker, Esquire, Life, Vogue and
other periodicals.
13.
Rock has brought a renaissance of the bardic tradition. Like
39
the
medieval troubadours, Celtic bards and epic Homers, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon* and John Lennon are
poets, singing rather than reciting or just printing their verses.
14 Rock
is a collage, capable of absorbing the most diverse styles and influences:
folk, blues, bluegrass,* jazz,
soul, country-and-western, rhythm-and-blues, motion picture themes, Broadway
show tunes, Indian ragas, baroque, tape, computer and chance music. There is an
increasing crossover between popular songwnting and serious composition. . .
15. In
the outlook of the under-thirty generation, as reflected in rock, romanticism
is dead. Realism, naturalism, mysticism and activism are the new acceptable and
conflicting ideologies. Young people appear restless, tough, alienated, hostile,
defiant, aggressive, frustrated, and vaccilating between the hippie*
withdrawal from society and the yippie*
assault on it.
From: Twentieth-Century
Views of Music History. Abridged
Discussion Activities
Comprehension
Questions and Points for Discussion
1. What
is the background to rock music?
2. What
are the distinctive stylistic traits of rock? What forms does it have?
3. On
what instruments do rock musicians most frequently perform?
4. How
has rock influenced other musical genres? Do you think its influence as
revolutionary as the author thinks it to be?
5. In
your opinion, what are the most popular rock musicians and groups in the Soviet
Union and abroad? Name current rock recordings which you like.
6. What
major rock compositions do you know?
7.
Which Soviet composers use rock elements in their work?
8.
Discuss the social consequences of rock.
9.
Speak about the impact of electronic technology on musical culture, the
interdependence of live and recorded music, the growth of a new audience
brought up on recorded music.
Additional
Assignments
1.
Write a composition of 150-250 words in which you explain why you like,
or do not like, rock.
2. Give
your opinion on current rock hits.
ELVIS
PRESLEY - STORY OF A SUPERSTAR
When
Elvis Presley died on 16th August, 1977, radio and television programmes all
over the world were interrupted to give the news of his death. Eighty thousand
people attended his funeral.
40
The
streets were jammed with cars, and Elvis Presley films were shown on
television, and his records were played on the radio all day. In the year after
his death, 100 million Presley LPs were sold.
Elvis
Presley was the first real rock and roll star. A white Southerner singing blues
laced with country and country tinged with gospel,* he
brought together American music from both sides of the color line and performed
it with natural hip-swiveling sexuality that made him a teen idol and a role
model for generations of cool rebels. He was repeatedly dismissed as vulgar,
Incompetent and a bad influence, but the force of his music and his image was
no mere merchandising feat. Presley signaled to mainstream culture that it was
time to let go.
Elvis
Presley was born on January 8th, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi. His twin
brother, Jesse Garon, died at birth. His parents were very poor and Elvis never
had music lessons, but he was surrounded by music from an early age. His
parents were very religious, and Elvis regularly sang at church services. In
1948, when he was thirteen, his family moved to Memphis, Tennessee. He left
school in 1953 and got a job as a truck driver.
In the
summer of 1953 Elvis paid $ 4 and recorded two songs for his mother's birthday
at Sam Phillips' Sun Records studio. Sam Phillips heard Elvis and asked him to
record That's All Right in July 1954. 20,000 copies were sold mainly in
and around Memphis. He made five more records for Sun, and in July 1955 he met
Colonel Tom Parker, who became his manager in November. Parker sold Elvis's
contract to RCA Records. On January 10th, 1956, Elvis recorded Heartbreak
Hotel, and a million copies were sold. In the next fourteen months he made
another fourteen records, and they were all big hits. In 1956 he also made his
first film in Hollywood.
In
March, 1958, Elvis had to join the army. He wanted to be an ordinary soldier.
When his hak was cut thousands of women cried. He spent the next two
years in Germany, where he met Priscilla Beaulieu, who became his wife eight
years later. In 1960 he left the army and went to Hollywood where he made
several films during the next few years.
After a
live performance on March 25, 1961, Presley left the concert stage and spent
the next eight years making movies. With a few exceptions, the soundtrack music was
indisputably poor. But by the mid-Sixties Presley was earning $1 million per
movie plus a large percentage of the gross. Each of the movies had a
concurrently released soundtrack LP, nine of which went gold.*
Meanwhile, the younger rock audience heard Presley disciples like the Beatles
more often than they heard Presley himself.
By 1968
many people had become tired of Elvis. He hadn't performed live since 1960. But
he recorded a new LP From Elvis in Memphis and appeared in a special
television programme. He became popular again, and went to Los Vegas where
he was paid $750,000 for four weeks.
41
In 1972
his wife left him, and they were divorced in October, 1973. He died from a
heart attack. He had been working too hard, and eating and drinking too much
for several years. He left all his money to his only daughter, Lisa Marie
Presley. She became one of the richest people in the world when she was only
nine years old.
With
the exception of three dates in Canada in 1957 and an impromptu performance
while on leave in Paris in 1959 Presley never performed outside the U.S.
Through it all, his records continued to sell. During his career, Presley
earned 94 gold singles,* three gold EPs* and over forty gold
LPs.*
Based
on: The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia; Streamline English
Discussion Activities
Comprehension
Questions and Points for Discussion
1. What
are the distinctive features of rock'n'roll?
2. Tell
the story of Elvis Presley. What was his background?
3. In
what films did Presley appear? Have you seen any of them?
4. Why
is Elvis Presley sometimes called The King of Rock'n' Roll? What was his
contribution to the development of this type of music?
5. What
accounts for the popularity of this singer during his life-time and later?
6. What
recordings by Presley have you heard? What do you like or dislike about his
singing?
THE
BEATLES
The
impact of the Beatles - not only on rock and roll but on all of Western culture
- is simply incalculable. As musicians, they proved that rock and roll could
embrace a limitless variety of harmonies, structures and sounds; virtually
every rock experiment has some precedent on Beatles records. As a unit, they
were a musically synergistic combination: Paul McCartney's melodic bass lines,
Ringo Stair's slaphappy no-rolls drumming, George Harrison's rocabilly-style
guitar leads, John Lennon's assertive rhythm guitar - and their four fervent
voices. One of the first rock groups to write most of their material, they
inaugurated the era of self-contained bands, and forever centralized pop. And
as personalities, they defined and incarnated Sixties style: smart, idealistic,
playful, irreverent, eclectic. Their music, from the not-so-simple love songs
they started with to their later perfectionistic studio extravaganzas, set new
standards for both commercial and artistic success in pop. Although many of
their
42
sales
and attendance records have since been surpassed, no group has so radically
transformed the sound and meaning of rock and roll.
The
Beatles became nationally famous in England in October 1962, when their first
single record, Love Me Do, entered the Hit Parade at number 27. The
famous four who recorded that song were, of course, John Lennon, Paul
McCartney, George Harrison and drummer Ringo Starr. This
was the original line-up of the band.
Three
years before, when John Lennon was 19 and George
Harrison approaching his seventeenth birthday, the group was offered its first
"big job" - playing at the famous Star Club in Hamburg. In those days
there were five Beatles: Pete Best on drums, Lennon, McCartney,
Harrison and the mysterious fifth Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe.
The
Beatles returned to England penniless and exhausted. Stuart Sutcliffe left the
group and stayed in Germany, where he died a few months later. The Beatles
began a series of lunchtime concerts at Liverpool's Cavern Club. They were now
playing better than ever.
The
lunchtime concerts were a great success. The road outside the club was always
crowded with girls who worked in nearby shops and offices. They came to see the
Beatles during their lunch-break. Local shopkeepers often complained about the
crowds and the noise. The man who ran the local record shop went to see what
all the fuss was about. His name was Brian Epstein, the man who became the
Beatles manager.
The
first thing that Epstein did as manager was to sack Pete Best. There are many
different stories about how this happened. Probably it was because there was a
serious clash of personalities between Lennon and Best. Lennon said:
"He goes, or I go." In Best's place came Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr), the
drummer they met in Hamburg.
The job
of producing the Beatles' records went to George Martin, an extremely nice and
remarkably old-fashioned man who worked at the EMI studios in Abbey Road, North
London. George Martin became the brains behind the recording successes of the
Beatles ("although John Lennon never agreed with
that).
Martin
had some unusual and immensely successful ideas. He persuaded the group to have
instruments on some of their songs that they didn't want to begin with: the
cello on Yesterday, the violins of Eleanor Rigby, the oboe on You've
Got To Hide Your Love Away.
During
the sixties, it seemed that the Beatles were always in the news headlines. They
made successful records and interesting films. Lennon caused
anti-Beatle demonstrations in America by saying that the Beatles were more
popular than Jesus Christ. Beatlemania was the word used to describe the
reaction of fans all over the world.
When
Epstein died in 1967, things began to be wrong for the Beatles' industry. The
relationship between Lennon and McCartney became very difficult; they
disagreed about music, they disliked each
43
other's
wife, and they disagreed about who should be the new manager of their affairs.
Eventually,
an American called Alien Klein bought a controlling interest in the group. This
was the beginning of the end, as McCartney couldn't stand Klein.
During
the seventies, the Beatles went off in their different directions. Lennon became
a solo performer and then property speculator in New York, buying and selling
expensive apartments. McCartney formed a middle-of-the-road pop group called
"Wings" with his wife, Linda. George Harrison was rarely seen, but
spent time raising money for charity. Ringo Starr began a
surprisingly successful career as a film star. John Lennon was murdered
in New York in December 1980.
In
October 1982, 20 years after Love Me Do entered the British Hit Parade,
a Beatles song was again in the Top Ten. The song was ... Love Me Do.
From: Modem English International
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
1. Tell
the story of The Beatles.
2. What
were the sources of The Beatles music?
3. How
many times did The Beatles visit Hamburg in the early years of their career?
4. Who
was the first bass guitarist in the group?
5. What
films with The Beatles were made?
6. What
single made by The Beatles first became a hit?
7. Did
the group visit India? What was the purpose of their visits? What was the first
song written under the influence of Indian music?
8. When
did The Beatles split up?
9. Have
you got any Beatles records in your collection? Which of them are your
favourites?
10. What
accounts for the world-wide popularity of The Beatles, in your opinion?
11.
Give your opinion on the influence of The Beatles' music in other countries,
including the Soviet Union.
English and American Musical
History
ENGLISH
MUSIC (GENERAL SURVEY)
Contemporary musical life and related institutions. Much of English musical life is centered in London,
but there is considerable activity outside the capital as well.
Decentralization is encouraged by the Arts Council of Great Britain, which,
since 1946, has been the agency that distributes government subsidies to the
arts.
1. Opera.
The two principal opera companies in London are the
Royal Opera at Covent Garden and the English National Opera (formerly Sadler's Wells*), which performs in English, at lower prices, and
usually without the great international stars, at the Coliseum. There are also
more modest companies, such as the English Music Theatre Company, some of which
mostly tour outside London.
Opera is a feature of several English festivals,
including Camden,* Aldeburgh,* and, most
notably, Glyndebourne.* Occasional productions at English
universities have helped awaken interest in works outside the standard
repertory. Those at Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s were of particular
historical importance in this respect.
2. Performing groups.
Orchestras. London is remarkable for its four major
symphony orchestras, the London Symphony (founded in 1904), London Philharmonic
(1932), Philharmonia (1945), and Royal Philharmonic (1946). The London
Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic are the result of the activities of Sir
Thomas Beecham (1879-1961). The BBC Symphony (1930) is based in London and gives
public concerts. There are several excellent symphony orchestras outside
London, including the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (1840), and the Halle Orchestra of Manchester* (1858).
Chamber orchestras became an important part of London
musical life through such groups as the London Chamber Orchestra (1921) and the
Boyd Neel Orchestra (1932). The tradition they began has been carried on by
several excellent newer ones, including the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields
(1959), the English Chamber Orchestra (1960), the London Sinfonietta (1968),
which specializes in 20th-century music.
Choruses. Choral performance has been traditional in
England for several centuries and remains popular today, although the
45
tendency
to have mammoth choruses singing Handel oratorios so much favored in thé 19th
century, has been somewhat tempered by the changing taste and greater
historical consciousness of the 20th. Amateur choral societies are common
throughout the country. Among the many in London are the Royal Choral Society
(1871), the Bach Choir (1875), and the London Bach Society (1946). London
also has several excellent chamber choruses, including the Monteverdi Choir
(1964). Cathedral choirs and such well-known bodies as the choir of King's
College, Cambridge, are also important elements in English choral music.
Early
music. An interest in performing and listening to old music is something of an
English tradition, as evidenced by the concerts of the Academy of Ancient Music
in 18th-century London, which had hardly a parallel elsewhere in Europe at the
time. Arnold Dolmetsch* (1858-1940),
the central figure in the beginning of the modern revival of early-music
performance, spent most of his career in England and firmly planted the
movement there. The work of English musicians, such as David Munrow (1942-76)
and his Early Music Consort (1967), was important in arousing audience interest
in early music beginning in the 1960s. English activity in this field flourishes
at present, with many groups of varied scope, such as the Academy of Ancient
Music (1973), which recreates the mid-18th-century orchestra with authentic
instruments.
3. Festivals.
Music
festivals have constituted a flourishing tradition in England since the 18th
century, and they are at present almost innumerable. The Three Choirs Festival,
begun around 1715 and almost certainly one of the oldest in Europe, represents
the traditional type of choral festivals, of which several others also survive.
Its site alternates among the homes of its choirs, Hereford, Gloucester, and
Worcester. Among older English festivals, that at Haslemere was founded by Dolmetsch in 1925 to
feature early music, and the Glyndebourne Festival, founded in 1934, early
achieved and maintains an international reputation for its production of operas
as integrated dramatic works.
Many
British festivals began after World War II. They include the Alderburgh
Festival (1948), long dominated by the personality of its founder, Benjamin
Britten; the Bath Festival (1948), since 1959 similarly associated with Yehudi
Menuhin; the English Bach Festival (1963); and the Tilford Bach Festival (1952)
and others.
A
festival of sorts and long a central feature of London summers are the Henry Wood* Promenade Concerts
("Proms") (1895), mostly given at the Royal Albert Hall.
4. Education.
Many
aspects of musical activity in England were dominated by foreigners in the 18th
and early 19th centuries, and the idea of conservatories and music schools to
train native musicians developed slowly. The leading schools are the Royal
Academy of Music (1822), the Royal College of Music (1883), both in London, and
the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester
46
(1792).
Other important schools include Trinity College of Music (1872) of the
University of London and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (1880),
London.
The
first degrees in music known to have been conferred by a university were
awarded at Cambridge in the 15th century, and a professorship of music was
created there in the 17th. Oxford awarded music degrees from the early 16th
century and in the 17th instituted a lectureship that grew into a
professorship, but the establishment of music in anything like a regular,
systematic, and modern way as part of the university curriculum at any
university in England was almost entirely a 20th-century development. About a
dozen English universities now have full music programs.
History.
England was an important musical center in the Middle Ages. The
Sarum rite,* a dialect of the Roman rite originating
at Salisbury Cathedral and widely influential throughout the country, gave a
local favor to the chant. Sacred polyphony was well established by the early
11th century, and by the 13th, English polyphony had taken on traits
distinguishing it from Continental styles. In the early 15th century, John
Dunstable (ca. 1390-1453) achieved the widest reputation among several
important composers. English music of that tune is usually held to have had a
decisive influence on the development of Continental musical style and
compositional procedures. Thereafter, although works of high quality were
written, English music was of mainly local importance, and influences tended to
run in the other direction, from Italy and France, producing such English
versions of Continental developments as the English madrigal, the lute ayre,* and the semi-opera.*
The
Puritan Commonwealth of the mid-17th century greatly disrupted the English
musical tradition; however, the late 17th century produced several
distinguished figures, including Henry Purcell (1659-95), one of England's
greatest composers. The 18th and 19th centuries were in general a low point in
the vitality of native English music, unless Handel is considered to have
become an English composer, a not untenable assertion, so completely was his
music absorbed into the native tradition. Much of English musical life,
particularly that of London, was dominated in this period by foreign musicians
attracted by the country's wealth and the large public provided by its sizeable
middle class. The native tradition survived in church music and in local genres
such as the catch,* the glee,* and the ballad
opera,* which developed in the late 18th century into the English comic opera
and eventually led in the latter part of the 19th century to the operettas of
Gilbert and Sullivan, which constitute almost the only part of English
19th-century music surviving in the repertory.
With
Edward Elgar (1857-1934), England produced its first native composer of
international importance since Purcell, and in the early 20th century an
English nationalist school flowered with Ralph
47
Vaughan
Williams (1872-1958), Gustav Holst (1874-1934), and others. William Walton (1902-83),
Michael Tippett (b. 1905), and Benjamin Britten (1913-76) dominated their
generation. Younger composers of achievement include Richard Rodney Bennett (b.
1936), Harrison Birtwhistle (b. 1934), Peter Maxwell Davies (b. 1934).
Folk
music. Most English folk music is closely related to the songs of the dance.
Folk songs are generally syllabic and strophic,*
frequently with a refrain. Notable types include the ballad, love songs of
various sorts, and songs attached to particular occasions or activities, such
as carols,* sea shanties,* children's singing games, and
street cries. Two general varieties of folk dance exist: ritual or ceremonial
dances, associated with certain seasons of the year and most often performed by
costumed groups of men; and country dances, performed at social occasions by
both men and women. Ritual dances include sword, morris,* and
processional dances. Dance tunes usually come from folk song and are almost
always in duple meter. Instruments used in folk music are the pipe and tabor,* the small-pipes (a sort of
bagpipe), and, especially today, the fiddle, concertina, or melodeon.*
From: The New
Harvard Dictionary of Music
Discussion Activities
Questions
on the Text
1. What
are the main opera companies in England? Where are operas performed?
2. Name
the major symphony orchestras of England. Who founded the London Philharmonie and
Royal Philharmonic?
3. What
music festivals are held in Britain? Which of them is associated with the name
of Benjamin Britten?
4. Find
in the text the passage where the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts are mentioned.
What does the word Prom mean? What kind of concerts are Proms? Where are
they held?
5. What
are the main musical educational institutions in England?
6.
Briefly outline the main stages of English music history. When did the modern
renaissance of British music begin? Who took an active part in its development?
7. Name
some prominent composers of the younger generation.
8.
Write a summary of the text about music in England.
THE
GOLDEN AGE IN ENGLAND
The
period from the defeat of the Spanish Armada* (1588)
to the death of James I (1625) represents one of Europe's most brilliant
"golden ages". In less than forty years England gave the
48
world
Marlowe, Webster* and
Bacon, the prose of Sir Walter Raleigh,* the
scientific researches of Gilbert* and Harvey* and the music of Byrd, Gibbons,
Morley, Weelkes, Wilbye, Bull and Dowland, all geniuses of the first rank, and
a host of richly talented followers.
Elizabethan
civilization was the fruit of an exceptionally favourable political and social
union. The year 1588, which saw the defeat of the "Invincible
Armada", ushered in an age inspired by a new sense of self-confidence and
optimism. It was really from this moment that music and theatre began to spread
their wings. In the theatre for which Shakespeare wrote, music held an
important place, and composers actively collaborated in plays, which they
enriched with numerous ayres accompanied on the lute or viols. Unfortunately,
owing to the essentially ephemeral nature of the occasion, much of this music
is now lost.
But
perhaps one of the most remarkable features of the Eliza-bethan age was the
popularity of music making. In a period when public concerts were still
unknown, the abundance of musical publications is explained by the great demand
for music by amateurs. Everyone sang madrigals, most sizeable households
possessed a chest of viols,* and
the virginal, for which the keyboard composers poured out such flood of fine
music, was still more popular - the queen, herself a devoted virginalist,
setting the example. As for the lute, such was its popularity that it was even
to be found in barbers' shops, so that customers might pluck a few chords while
awaiting their turn. Any young man unable to take his proper place in a vocal
or instrumental consort became the laughing-stock of the society. If the people
had opportunities to shave to the joys of music, popular music also greatly
inspired composers, and the intimate fusion of art music with popular and folk
elements remains one of the imperishable charms of the music of this golden
age. Excepting large choral and orchestral works, Elizabethan music embraces
every style and genre. But although it cannot offer us anything comparable to
the large-scale splendour of the Venetians, the beauties of the keyboard and
chamber music may be regarded as ample compensation.
Religious
music plays a definitely lesser role compared with the preceding period, even
though it is represented by the masterpieces of Byrd and Gibbons, not to mention
those of Morley, Weelkes, Tomkins and Peter Philips. Apart from Philips, Byrd
was the only composer in England to write music for Latin texts.
From: The Larousse Encyclopedia
of Music
THE
ENGLISH VIRGINAL SCHOOL
England
was the first country to liberate harpsichord music from organ music and to
form a distinct harpsichord style independent of
49
organ
technique. For fifty years, approximately the latter half of the sixteenth
century, English composers avidly produced secular pieces for keyboard instruments.
There are various but not always verifiable reasons for the popularity of
virginal music at this time.
The
virginal was a great favourite of the English monarchs. Following the royal
fashion, English society took up the virginal; William Shakespeare immortalized
the instrument in his "Sonnet to a Lady Playing the Virginal" (Sonnet
128).
How oft,
when thou, my music, music play'st Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway'st The wiry concord that mine ear
confounds, Do I envy those jacks, that nimble leap ' To kiss the tender inward
of thy hand,
Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap,
At the wood's boldness by thee blushing stand!
To be so tickled, they would change their state
And situation with those dancing chips,
O'er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,
Making dead wood more bless'd that living lips.
Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.
Едва лишь ты, о музыка моя,
Займешься музыкой, встревожив
строй
Ладов и струн искусною игрой,
-
Ревнивой завистью терзаюсь я.
Обидно мне, что ласки нежных
рук
Ты отдаешь танцующим ладам,
Срывая краткий, мимолетный
звук,-
А не моим томящимся устам.
Я весь хотел бы клавишами
стать,
Чтоб только пальцы легкие твои
Прошлись по мне, заставив
трепетать,
Когда ты струн коснешься в
забытьи.
Но если счастье выпало струне
Отдай ты руки ей, а губы -
мне!
(Перевод.С. Маршака)
Virginal
music collections. The most important manuscripts and collections of English
virginal music known to date are listed below.
1. My
Lady Nevells Booke. This manuscript is dated 1591. It has forty three
compositions by William Byrd, who was probably Lady Nevell's music teacher.
2. Parthenia
or the Maydenhead of the first musicke that ever was printed for the Virginalls
(London: G. Lowe, 1611). This
50
published
collection contains twenty-one pieces by John Bull, William Byrd, and Orlando
Gibbons.
3. Fitzwilliam Virginal
Book. All the important composers of the period contributed
to this manuscript, dating from about 1621.
4. Parthenia
In-Violata or Mayden-Musicke for the Virginalls and Bass-Viol It was
probably published in 1625. It contains seventeen pieces by Bull, Edmund
Hooper, John Coprario, and others.
Virginal music composers. William Byrd (1542-1623)
dominated
the first-generation English keyboard composers. He was not only organist at
the Chapel Royal, but also a lyric poet expert at writing descriptive music,
such as The Bells. Byrd's talents as a musician had many facets, one of
which, bis ability to compose superb choral music, earned him the title
of the English Palestrina. Thomas Tallis (ca. 1505-1585), co-organist at
the Chapel Royal, and William Blitheman (d. 1591) belong to Byrd's generation.
Perhaps
the most famous names in the English virginal school are counted among the
second-generation composers: Peter Philips, John Bull, and Giles Farnaby.
Philip's
own compositions are a synthesis of the severity of the ricercar, the
chromaticism of the madrigal school, and the ornamental Une typical
of Italian music.
John
Bull (1562-1628), onetime organist at the Chapel Royal,
left England for religious reasons. He lived in Brussels, then Antwerp. A
master of contrapuntal devices, yet endowed with innate musical sensitivity,
Bull exercised the full range of his skill and talent to create virginal music.
He excelled in the variation, and his reputation in this field is well
substantiated by the thirty variations on the theme of Walsingham, in
which he subjects the melody and its framework to most keyboard devices known
at the time.
Giles
Farnaby (ca. 1560-1640), a more spontaneous composer than
either Philips or Bull, endowed his music with a grace and verve that make it
seem to the twentieth-century ear more "modern" than the music of his
contemporaries.
The
outstanding spokesman for the third-generation composers was Orlando Gibbons
(1583-1625), court virginalist and a musician sincerely respected by his
colleagues. Gibbons possessed a competent technical apparatus, but his keyboard
works often appear somewhat rigid and artificial.
From: Five
Centuries of Keyboard Music by J. Gillespie
BYRD
IN HIS TIME AND OURS
Byrd
retained a fondness for the jog-trot "plain style" poetry of the
1560s all through his life, from the earliest consort songs up to the pieces he
wrote for Leighton. This may serve as a reminder that, although he composed
steadily throughout Elizabeth's reign
51
and
well into James's, he was essentially an early Elizabethan figure. Decorum,
solidity and a certain reticence of expression were qualities that were prized
in his formative years, qualities that came to him
naturally.
He
belonged to the pioneer generation that built Elizabethan culture. In music,
Byrd did this alone, for unlike Tallis before him and Morley after, he had no
immediate contemporaries of any stature (except of course Ferrabosco). The
essential work was completed by the time of the Armada, as he himself seems to
have acknowledged by his retrospective anthologizing at that time. He lived to
write some of his greatest music later, but his younger contemporaries could
not learn from this in the same way that they had from the earlier
path-breaking compositions.
In
recording his death, the ordinarily laconic Cheque Book of the Chapel Royal
described him as "a Father of Musick". To another contemporary
admirer he was "Brittanicae Musicae Parens". While Byrd's versatility
as a composer is often mentioned, and quite rightly, it is less often pointed
out how much he indeed fathered for English music. With his motets, first of
all, he achieved nothing less than the naturalization of the high Renaissance
church style. The true power and expressiveness of imitative counterpoint had
never been channelled in native composition before his motets of the 1575 Cantiones.* As has
been remarked, he rather stood back from the madrigal; but he was the first
English composer who employed word illustration extensively - in motets of the
1580s. He found the English song in the 1560s in a dishevelled
state* and pulled it together to produce a rich and extensive repertory of
consort songs, a form that was very personal to Byrd and found no serious
imitators. Its influence on the lute air, however, was palpable, and an
offshoot of the consort song, the verse anthem,* might
be said to constitute Byrd's most lasting legacy to English music, in the sense
that other composers could and did follow his lead and the music was sung
widely during his lifetime and after it. He kindled English virginal music from
the dryest of dry wood to a splendid blaze which crackled on under Bull and
Gibbons and even set off some sparks on the Continent. Even his later music for
consort, which was overshadowed at the turn of the century by the new fantasias
of Coprario and Alfonso Ferrabosco, provided a seminal idea of considerable
importance. The crystallization of dance movements out of the sections of
Byrd's two six-part fantasias looks forward to the fantasy suites of the 1620s
and beyond.
Byrd's
earlier music for consort represents a culmination of an older tradition.
Brought up during the reign of Queen Mary, perhaps even in her Chapel Royal, he
had live roots in Tudor soil. Traditional elements live on in his music along
with innovatory ones. There are pieces in which these features have to a large
extent been filtered put, such as Siderum rector from the 1575 Cantiones
and the four-part mass, but Byrd deliberately returned to a more archaic,
52
rougher
technique as better suited to the grain of his musical personality. Sometimes
he turned archaic features to exquisite effect.
Byrd's
musical mind is as hard to characterize in a few words as that of any other of
the great composers. He is probably to be regarded as one of the most
intellectual of composers, and yet he also had a magic touch with sonority. One
admires, perhaps, the manifold ways he had of moulding a phrase, a period or a
total piece. Line, motif, counterpoint, harmony, texture, figuration can all be
brought into play, and they are brought not singly but in ever new
combinations. Form was expression for Byrd, and the extraordinary variety of
effect that he obtained in his pieces stemmed from his fertile instinct for
shape, for musical construction.
In the
six-part fantasia, and in another similar work in manuscript, Byrd worked out a
remarkable large-scale form consisting of what are in essence linked movements,
contrasting with one another and culminating in a galliard*
followed by a coda. The manuscript fantasia also includes snatches of
pre-existing melodies - Greensleeves* and
perhaps others - as also happens in several other of the consort and keyboard
pieces. This phenomenon should be considered along with Byrd's celebration of
popular songs in his variation sets. He was closer to "folksong", it
would seem, than any of the other great composers of early times.
Byrd's
late keyboard music is full of new fantasy and new subtlety. He turned to
writing mostly pavans* and
galliards, though three of the most imaginative variations also appear to date
from after 1590. When at last he found occasion to have some keyboard music published,
in Parthenia, c. 1612/13, jointly with Bull and Gibbons, he included
only pavans and galliards and some short matching preludes.
The
linear and contrapuntal articulation of this superb dance pair is no less
cogent than in earlier works, but beyond this keyboard texture is now used in a
more integral fashion. Keyboard figuration, too, became more flexible in the
late years, no doubt under the impetus of younger members of the English
virginal school which Byrd had founded. Two of the greatest pavans refer to
specific works by Morley and Bull respectively.
Morley
and Tomkins were his pupils. If, as seems likely, Philips, Weelkes and Bull
should be added to this list, Byrd's direct impact on English composition can
be seen to have assumed almost Schoenbergian proportions. Much of his teaching
must surely be preserved in Morley's Plaine and Easie
Introduction to Practicall Musicke, 1597, which also
contains some of the many remarkable tributes to Byrd known from the period.
His contemporary reputation was not as commanding as, say, that of Sidney* in another artistic field or Josquin* in another century. But it was
still something new in English music, and there can be little doubt that it
went along with a sense of artistic mission on Byrd's part that was also new.
The modern revival of this music dates essentially from 1901-24.
53
A
complete edition was undertaken by Fellowes* late
in life (1937-50): at last virtually all of Byrd's music was made available in
one place, in a form designed to encourage performance.
From: The New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
ENGLISH
MADRIGALISTS
The
all-conquering vogue of the madrigal during the last twenty years of Elizabeth's
reign and the early years of the next had precedents - the native tradition of
part-song writing and the occasional traces of Italian influence from the 1550s
which had prepared the ground for the English passion for the madrigal-but it
suddenly gathered momentum after 1588, following Nicholas Yonge's Musica
Transalpina published in that year. In his preface Yonge indicates that he
had been led to edit and publish the collection because the group of amateur
singers to which he belonged were regular and enthusiastic performers of
Italian madrigals. There is plenty of evidence that Italian madrigals had been
circulating in England in increasing numbers for at least the last fifteen
years. Almost immediately the English composers began to produce their own madrigals.
But these were by no means slavish imitations of their models. The English
madrigal was generally lighter and gayer in mood than the Italian; despite the
magnificent riches of contemporary English poetry the composers either
preferred to use Italian madrigal texts or turned to minor English writers,
whereas one of the distinguishing features of the Italian school had been its
preference for texts of great literary merit. Unlike the Italians, however, the
English composers were writing for an almost entirely amateur public, for whom
the generally undemanding sentiments and comparatively simple technical demands
were ideally suited. As Gustave Reese has said in his
monumental Music in the Renaissance: "In every way the English
madrigal was a less esoteric and more popular movement" (than the
Italian). Of more than thirty talented composers the great names are Morley,
Weelkes, Wilbye, Tomkins and Gibbons, while Byrd also produced notable if few
examples.
From: The Larousse Encyclopedia
of Music
"THE
BRITISH ORPHEUS"
Henry
Purcell, England's greatest composer, was born in the year 1659. Despite the
most recent and intensive research, little is known of his life. He was for a
time in the choir of the Chapel Royal. He received lessons from John Blow, who
in 1680 surrendered his position of organist at Westminster Abbey to his
brilliant young pupil. Although little is known of this "British
Orpheus", perhaps no English composer before or since enjoyed such acclaim
and admiration from his contemporaries. At the age of eighteen he had
54
been
engaged as a composer at the court of Charles II, and five years later he
became organist in the Chapel Royal and keeper of the king's instruments.
Throughout his life Purcell devoted his immense talents to commissions which
would now be regarded as beneath the notice of a serious composer: mediocre
theatrical productions, royal birthdays, and official celebrations of all
kinds. Yet it is obvious that he himself found nothing untoward in such work,
and although we may regret that the society he served gave no scope for the
full genius of a composer obviously capable of the finest flights of operatic
composition, we have no cause to be discontented with the superb body of music
that he left us. It is typical of the man that Dido and Aeneas, which
despite its brevity is the first major English opera, was written to the
commission of a friend for performance by his pupils at a school for girls in
Chelsea. The grace, gaiety and humour of much of the score is well suited to
its occasion, but the great dramatic moments are not avoided or rendered with a
conventional pathos. The lament of Dido, written to that most typically
Purcellian device is one of the most deeply felt and moving moments in opera.
His instrumental compositions also include the magnificent fantasies for viols
and the sonatas for three and four parts for violins, bass viol and continuo,
with which Purcell proclaimed his intention of introducing the Italian style to
the English. All these works reveal a unique and poignant sense of harmony
which, if it derives in part from the English tradition of the golden age and
perhaps also from the Italian madrigalists at the beginning of the 17th
century, is nevertheless unmistakably his own. His chamber compositions for
instruments include, besides, a number of fine keyboard pieces.
In
addition to his one true opera Dido and Aeneas (1689), Purcell wrote
five semi-operas which, like the earlier masque, employ spoken as well as sung
passages. All these works contain much fine music. They are: Dioclesian, with
a text by the actor Thomas Betterton after Beaumont and
Fletcher; King Arthur, by John Dryden; The Tempest, adapted from
Shakespeare; The Fairy Queen, a reworking of his Midsummer Nights
Dream; and the Indian Queen, to which Dryden also contributed.
Purcell
excels in every sphere - operas, music for plays, cantatas, church and chamber
music, and keyboard music. His vocal works far exceed his instrumental
compositions in number, although the quality of his instrumental music is equally
high. His premature death, as much as the ungrateful period in which he lived,
have prevented him from being recognized at his true worth as one of the
greatest composers of all time. Purcell, like many a great artists, was not a
creator of musical form and had to content himself with the scanty resources
which England at the close of the 17th century offered him, from the hybrid
semi-opera to the trio sonata in its early stages.
His
receptive genius enabled him to fuse the most diverse and
55
contradictory
influences in the crucible of his feverish personality. His fantasies for
strings, his full anthems, and a thousand details in the writing of his other
compositions, reveal his attachment to the great English masters of the past.
But at the same time, he was open to the new trends from the continent. From
the French he learned the art of the overture à la
française, the chaconne, the colour of his
orchestration and his conception of theatrical ensembles; from the Italians his
use of concertato style, the trio sonata, his expressive use of
chromatics (he had studied Monteverdi) and his dramatic recitatives and da
capo arias. Yet all unite in a style full of grace, power and poetry, in
which unpredictable gaiety, akin to traditional folk music, rubs shoulders with
poignant melancholy. An interpreter of every human passion, Purcell could write
with great power while at other times his music is imbued with a profound
sadness.
From: The Larousse Encyclopedia
of Music
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
1. What
are the distinguishing features of The Golden Age in
England?
2.
Describe the English virginal school and name its main representatives. What
collections of English virginal music do
you
know?
3. How
did Byrd contribute to the development of English
virginal
music?
4. Why
was William Byrd named the "father of musick"?
5. In
what branches of music did he excel?
6. What
characterizes the school of English madrigalists? Compare English and Italian
madrigals and say in what ways they differ.
7.
Characterize Henry Purcell's role as the founder of English opera. What
composer has revived Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas in our time?
8. Have
you heard much virginal music? Who, in your opinion, is the best performer of
such music?
9. What
ensembles performing early music do you know? What tradition do they follow?
10.
What genres of 17th century dance music do you know?
11.
What is the difference between the virginal and the
harpsichord?
12.
Which instruments were generally used for accompaniment in home music making
and at concerts in the 16th - 17th
centuries?
13. Do
you agree with those critics who argue that Handel belonged to Germany much
more than to England and there-fore he cannot be regarded as an English
composer? Give your reasons.
56
AMERICAN MUSIC (GENERAL SURVEY)
The
most characteristic American music combines elements of the cultures of two or
more national or ethnic groups that have come to the New
World.*
The
history of American music may be divided into two major periods, (1) music
written before America achieved artistic and aesthetic parity with the rest of
the West (c. 1607 - c. 1929), and (2) the internationally important music of
the recent past (1929 to present). Two factors determined the development of
American music: immigration within a relatively short time to a largely empty
continent and the predominance of the English settlers in the new land. The
virtually unopposed tenure of the English thoroughly defined America's
politics, religion, and language during the first two centuries, so that all
succeeding ethnic groups had to choose between assimilation with or isolation
from the Anglo-Saxon mainstream. Unequivocal evidence of English influence is
found in traditional religious and folk or popular music, but there are
indications of other influences, less easily traced to their origins. Although
the precise process is difficult to determine, it would seem that various
melodic inflections and rhythms of later ethnic groups were grafted onto the Anglo-Saxon
stock. Thus, though the immigrants' native languages were abandoned for
English, those elements of language, accent, and inflection that are
essentially musical were integrated into the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture as
music.
Also
important was the importation of European art music and of professional
European musicians. For example, the English version of Weber's Der Freischutz* (Berlin, 1821),
performed in London in 1824, was brought to New York in 1825. Performances by
traveling companies could not help but influence musical taste. Just as
significant was the influx of professional musicians, many of whom left Europe
because of political upheavals ranging from the French Revolution to the
present. They transmitted European standards of musical excellence and
craftmanship, without them American music would have remained provincial.
The
development of American music took place in four stages: 1607-1790, the period
of English influence; 1790-1865, the period of European professional influence;
1865-1929, the period of the second school of New England*
composers; 1929 to the present, the arrival of American music on the
international scene.
1607-1790.
Presumably many of the early colonists at Jamestown (1607), Plymouth
(1620), and Massachusetts Bay (1629) brought with them their native English
music, sacred and secular; but only in the case of the northern settlements is
the record clear.
Until
1700, however, the smallness of the population, the hard pioneer life, and the
Puritan attitude of disapproval toward the lively arts inhibited more active
musical development. However, although there are references in contemporary
records to a few musical
57
instruments
and even indications of musical scholarship, the Puritan colonists seem to have
viewed secular amusements and excessive pleasures with suspicion and distrust.
Concerts
in American colonial cities began to be held in the 18th century and apparently
followed closely the advent of professional musicians who played for church,
chamber, and theater. Organs were used in Episcopal services from an early date
(King's Chapel,
Boston,
after 1713).
Such
musical amateurs as Benjamin Franklin and Francis Hopkinson (1737-91), a signer
of the Declaration of Independence* and
the first native-born American composer, stand out, Hopkinson for his songs in
the simple and tuneful style of the contemporary London stage and Franklin for
his "armonica,"* a
species of mechanically spun musical glasses.
1790-1865.
The American Revolution*
interrupted musical activities, but afterward they were resumed, this time more
intensively. In the last decade of the 18th century, a large-scale immigration
from Europe brought musicians from England and, after the French Revolution,
from France. Attracted by opportunities arising from the growing urban culture
of the East Coast, singing actors, instrumentalists, and dancing masters immigrated,
many of them equally at home in choirloft and theater. They had a lasting
effect on American music. They molded musical taste, and through their
publishing firms and music shops they satisfied the demand for the new music,
instruments, and instruction books. As teachers, they trained almost two
generations of amateurs.
The
impact of the professionals began to be felt after the War of 1812. Once
exposed to the sophisticated sounds of Handel, Haydn, Grétry, and
J.W.A. Stamitz, church music committees and musical societies began to publish
and perform only the music they considered "scientifically" correct,
which was an inevitable result of the quest for cultural parity with Europe.
Whether or not motivated by intellectual and aesthetic needs or merely by fashion,
the establishment of such organizations for the performance of European
masterworks as the Handel and Haydn Society (Boston, 1815), the Musical Fund
Society (Philadelphia, 1820), and the Philharmonic Society (New York, 1842) -
all of which survive today - laid the foundation for serious American art
music.
1865-1929.
Between the end of the Civil War* and
the Great Depression of the 1920's, a spectacular growth took place in American
music, fostered by rapid industrialization and an almost fourfold increase in
population. After 1848, the arrival of German musicians with technical skills
and aesthetic concepts of music far superior to any known in America influenced
the quality of the development. By the 1920's American music had achieved an
independence.
Many
immigrant groups brought their music to the New World. Families and small
communities of various European extractions
58
clung
to their Old World*
traditions, including music, in America, but this music was isolated from the
mainstream of American life. In the end, Africans, rather than
European-Americans, made the greatest contributions to a distinctive American
style.
African
slaves were first brought to the Colonies* in
1619, to Jamestown.* The
growth of a plantation economy in the South increased the demand for slaves
greatly: more than 300,000 blacks had been brought to America by the mid-18th
century; and by the time the slave trade was abolished in the 19th century, as
many as 15,000,000 Africans had come to the New World. They brought their own
music with them, constructing drums and other instruments similar to ones they
had known in Africa and continuing traditional rituals and ceremonies. But
slave owners soon suppressed all obvious manifestations of African cultural
heritage, and at the same time, slaves began assimilating some of the music of
their European masters. Black fiddlers accompanied white social dancing and took
some of this music to their own people; the 18th century brought . Christianity
to many slaves and with it the psalms and hymns as set to music by British
composers.
By the
early 19th century, black Americans had developed their own dialect of
Christian song, with fragments of European times sung in call-and-response*
patterns accompanied by hand-clapping or simple percussion instruments and with
voices interacting in African-style polyphony. These shouts (or spirituals)* came to the attention of white
main-stream culture in the years following the Civil War, through printed
descriptions and transcriptions and through public performances of triadic,
tonal arrangements of black melodies by the Fisk Jubilee Singers* and
other black choirs.
Elements
from Afro-American music began infiltrating several popular genres. Songwriters
of the generation after Stephen Foster*
produced verse-chorus songs*
supposedly reflecting the life of Southern blacks in their texts and drawing on
the style and mood of arranged spirituals in their choruses. By century's end,
these pieces were drawing on rhythms associated with the cake-walk,* ragtime,* and other black syncopated dances.
Military and community bands were popular throughout the 19th century, playing
a repertory of European marches, dances, and arrangements of classical pieces.
But by the 1890s, the band organized and led by John Philip
Sousa* (1854-1932) had inspired a growing indigenous literature, much of it
using rhythms of American syncopated dances. The popular piano repertory contained
similar pieces also, culminating with the first published ragtime pieces by
white composers (William Krell, Mississippi Rag, 1897) and black (Scott Joplin* Maple Leaf Rag, 1899).
In
contrast, classical music remained firmly rooted in European practice and
style. American orchestras were dominated by Germanic conductors, players, and
repertory.
Around
the turn of the century, many American composers did
59
begin
to address the problem of making their music reflect the unique culture of
their own country. At first this took the form of a belated imitation of the
wave of nationalism that had swept various European countries earlier. Tunes
taken from traditional music were incorporated into classical forms clinging to
the harmonic, instrumental, and expressive practice of the late Romantic era.
Indian melodies were drawn upon, as in Suite No. 2 ("Indian") by
Edward MacDowell (1860-1908). Tunes taken from Negro spirituals and folk songs
were used in the same way in The Dance in Place Congo by Henry F.
Gilbert (1868-1918). Still other writers drew on elements of ragtime and early
jazz, on the assumption that this was the most characteristic American
"folk" music. A remarkable series of symphonies, songs, chamber and
piano pieces, and choral works by Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954) were the most
successful compositions of the period, making use of indigenous melodic
material and also developing compositional techniques unlike those of European
Music. But the Ives pieces remained virtually unknown until later, when
American composers were concerned with other
aesthetic
matters.
The
second quarter of the 20th century brought a new generation of highly talented
composers, who created a succession of distinctive large-scale pieces refining
the notion of musical nationalism so well that, for the first time, performers
and audiences responded with enthusiasm to classical works by American writers.
Typical of this period are the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian
Spring by Aaron Copland* (b.
1900); Rhapsody in Blue and the opera Porgy and Bess by George
Gershwin (1898-1937); the film score for The River and the opera Four
Saints in Three Acts by Virgil Thomson* (b.
1896); and Symphony No. 3 by Roy Harris*
(1898-1979). But following a pattern that had become firmly established in
American music, even these pieces were seen in Europe as less distinctive and
less representative of American culture than were various genres of popular and
vernacular music of the day.
Several
generations of popular songwriters, based mostly in New York City and led by Irvin Berlin* (b. 1888), Jerome
Kern* (1885-1945), George Gershwin, Cole Porter*
(1891-1964), and Richard Rodgers*
(1902-79), blended elements of European melody and harmony with the syncopated
rhythms of American dance music. Texts were brash and sentimental. The best of
these Tin Pan Alley* songs
were disseminated throughout the Western world. At the same time, black
Americans were producing a unique series of interlocking musical genres - jazz,
blues, gospel music, popular songs - each of which used Western instruments and
harmony, overlaid with African-derived performance styles, rhythmic vitality
and complexity, and intensity of expression. Traditional Anglo-American styles
developed into hillbilly,* country and western,* and bluegrass music,* genres that
likewise had no precedent elsewhere in the world.
Two
opposing trends dominated the composition of classical
60
music
in the United States in the decades surrounding World War II. Many composers,
most of them connected with academic institutions, turned away from musical
nationalism and toward contemporary European music, which was dominated by
neoclassicism and serialism. Walter Piston*
(1894-1976), Wallingford Riegger* (1885-1961), and Roger Sessions* (1896-1985) were
among the many talented Americans producing symphonies, chamber music, and
pieces of keyboard music and voice in an abstract, international style that is
fully comparable in technique and expression with the best compositions of this
sort written elsewhere. This trend reached a climax with a succession of highly
complex serialized works by Milton Babbitt* (b.
1916), George Rochberg* (b.
1918), and many of their peers, pieces expanding the concept of totally
organized music pioneered by Webern and a generation of postwar Europeans
including Messiaen, Stockhausen, and Boulez. Other American composers chose to
follow paths laid out most effectively by the French-born Edgard Varèse,
who sought both aesthetic guidance and sound sources from the
contemporary world and the products of the European avant-garde. John Cage (b.
1912) created experimental works of an unmistakably American character. He had
the greatest impact, with both his compositions and writings, on any American
composer of the 20th century - with the possible exception of Ives. Henry Cowell* (1897-1965) drew in part on
non-Western music in creating idiosyncratic styles, and some of the most
original and successful products of recent decades have been based to some
extent on the sounds, techniques, and aesthetic of Asian and African music.
Although
these two schools of composition - the academic and the avant-garde - proceeded
from quite different premises their products resembled one another from the
perspective of most performers and audiences in their inaccessibility and their
increasing remoteness from common-practice harmonic and melodic materials. A
younger generation of composers had managed to integrate elements from both
streams while making use of electronic technology in both studio composition
and live performance - often in ways suggesting a common ground with the more
experimental rock music of the era.
Meanwhile,
the United States has reaffirmed its leadership in popular music, with the
emergence of rock'n'roll in the 1950s and a variety of rock styles in the
following decades.
For
more than a century and a half, popular music in the United States has absorbed
elements of the cultures of many of the immigrant groups coming to the New
World in large numbers and has blended these into a succession of styles unlike
those found elsewhere. This music has been regarded abroad as the most
distinctive and influential artistic product created by the unique culture of
this country.
From: The New
Harvard Dictionary of Music
61
CHARLES
IVES, THE FIRST TRULY AMERICAN
COMPOSER (1874-1954)
Charles Ives (1874-1954)
is one of the most extraordinary and individual figures in the history of
Western music. American music owes its existence as a separate phenomenon to
his work.
In his
music, many of innovatory and radical procedures adopted by younger avant-garde
composers are anticipated or foreshadowed in
some
degree.
Ives
was born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1874. Throughout his life
he cleaved to* New England: its countryside colours his
music, and its characteristic philosophy (that of Emerson* and Thoreau*) seems to have influenced his
technique. His father, a town bandmaster, experimented with tone clusters,
polytonality, quartertones, and acoustics, inspiring similar interests in his
son. George Ives, the father, exerted an important musical influence on his
son. Naturally experimental himself, he constantly encouraged Charles to tinker
with unfamiliar sounds, to investigate, as it were, what music could do rather
than what it merely had done. He would make Charles sing in a key different
from the accompaniment "to stretch our ears".
Ives
later maintained that many of the more startling effects in his music were
aural memories from his childhood: memories of hymn-tunes wrongly harmonized,
or of accidental coincidences of sound in a small-town environment. Ives's
earliest musical training was almost entirely unconventional. When he entered
Yale University, in 1894, he tried hard to absorb an academic training, but
failed. In 1898 he graduated and moved to New York as a clerk in an ensurance
company, taking up several organist posts.
Ives's
First Symphony, a student work, and his Second Symphony (1901) mix European
influences (notably Beethoven and Dvorak). Ives divided his time between
business and music knowing that his music had no hope of commercial success, or
even performance. While working daily in an insurance office, Ives was
composing some of the most extraordinary music ever written. From this period
(1901-28) date the Third and Fourth Symphonies, the Concord Sonata for
piano, Three Places in New England, the Holidays Symphony, the four
violin sonatas, the Tone Roads for small orchestra, and various smaller
orchestral works. In 1928 Ives was forced by illness to give up composition,
and in 1930 he retired from insurance and thereafter spent all his time at his
farm in Connecticut. He died in 1954.
Even
after his retirement his music made its way very slowly. The earliest
publications were at his own expense: of the Concord Sonata in 1919 and
of the 114 Songs in 1922. Later, in the 1920s and 1930s a few scattered
performances were put on. But the major works remained practically known until
the 1950s. The Third Symphony won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, but the Fourth
Symphony
62
was not
played at all until 1965 (when Stokowski conducted it), the Second Symphony not
until 1951.
The
modernisms in Ives's style are impressive precisely because they arise from
philosophy rather than aesthetic theory. His potentiality and polyrhythms* gave a genuine and infectious
exuberance which springs from a real contact with life.
Ives's
true importance lies in having given American music self-respect. In this he
represents young America as against old Europe to whom the United States were
still a cultural province. And this has been the source of his strength and
powers of renewal since his death.
Based
on: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music; The Dictionary of Composers
CHARLES
IVES AND AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC
by H. Cowell*
Charles
Ives is the father of indigenous American art-music, and at the same time is in
the vanguard of the most forward-looking and experimental composers of today.
Many
composers before Ives tried to utilize American folk-material; (...) But some
of their music yielded to banal European influence, because they invariably
altered the original rhythms (often fascinating irregular) so as to fit the
current European mode. Also, all the slight deviations of pitch in the musical
scale of the American village folk, wrought in deepest musical ecstasy, were
altered so as to suit the conventional European mode of tuning of the major or
minor scales.
Ives
was born in 1874 in a small Connecticut town where native music lived. His
father, a musician, conductor of the band and experimental enough to be
interested in acoustics, was evidently a splendid influence. He did not try to
narrow down or standardize the views of his son, but allowed him to hear all
the native music in its charming and naive entirety, and encouraged him to
think for himself. This led into a scientific-musical understanding, and to the
ability to sort and utilize his many impressions and to build from them a new
musical structure. Such a structure is what Ives has created.
As a
child, Ives heard the village band. Not all the members played exactly
together; there was always a player or so a fraction either ahead or behind the
rest. The pitch of the notes was not always the same with all the instruments;
some played a bit sharp, some a bit flat. Sometimes the bass tuba would be an
indistinguish-able pitch, almost a percussion noise. Perhaps the trumpet, or
rather the cornet, would feel jolly enough to play his addition to the whole
quite independently, so that bis part would be altogether different from
the rest of the orchestra; yet he would eventually find a way to get in with
"the bunch".
63
Or
perhaps Ives heard the fiddling to a dance. The fiddler not only did not play
in tune with the conventional notion - he did not want to, and it would have
been wrong if he had. His idea of music was quite different, and through slips
and slides, and slightly off-pitch tones, which could go loosely under the
title of "quarter-tones", he created the right and proper music for
the village dance...
Ives
was also influenced by the village church music. With a wheezy and often
out-of-tune-to-the-point-of-discord harmonium playing simple hymn concords as a
base, the congregation sang soulfully and
nebulously around the supposed tones of the tune. The so-called unmusical of
the congregation sang along behind the tune is both rhythm and pitch, either a
bit flat or those with great self-assurance over-aiming at the note and
sharping on the high pitches!
Such
native characteristics exist all through American village and country music.
They are typically American and are the distinctions between American
folk-music and the folk-music of the Europeans from which we spring. Yet the
"cultivated" musicians who collected and published these songs of our
people unconsciously and without question weeded out all such irregularities
and the result was that there is not the slightest suspicion of an original,
indigenous, or truly American feeling left in the published versions of these
songs...
All the
elements of back-country New England music were assimilated by Ives, on whom
they made a deep impression. Working with musical feeling deeply rooted in the
spirit of the music rather than from a purely intellectual point of view, he
found that it was necessary to build his whole musical structure from the
ground up. It was impossible for him to confine himself to the known scale,
harmony, and rhythm systems brought from Europe.
He
therefore found it essential to form a new and broader musical architecture, a
scheme of things which, founded on American folk-music, permitted the use of
all the elements to be found in it. He did not discard any elements of known
musical culture; all of them are present in his work; but he also included the
extra-European elements of the folk-music as actually performed, and made a new
solid foundation on this music, which permits infinite development and
cultivation.
From American
Composers on American Music. Abridged
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
1.
Briefly outline the most important stages in the development of American music.
2. What
are the sources of American music?
3. How
did the music of black Americans influence American art music?
4. What
composers were active in the post-war period?
5.
Briefly outline the main aspects of Charles Ives's musical career. Under whose
influence did his style develop?
64
6.
Comment on the educational views of Charles Ives's father. Do you share his
views? If not, give your reasons.
7. What
innovations did Ives bring to the music of his time?
8. Why
was Ives's music not appreciated by his contemporaries?
9.
Which compositions by Ives have you heard? Do you like or dislike his music?
Explain why.
10.
Summarize the text about American music in writing.
JAZZ: ITS ROOTS AND MUSICAL DEVELOPMENT
The
origin of the word jazz is obscure. The term came into general use c.
1913-1915. It is used to designate a type of music which developed in the
Southern States of USA in the late 19th century and came into prominence at the
turn of the century in New Orleans, chiefly (but not exclusively) among black
musicians. Elements which contributed to jazz were the rhythms of Western
Africa, European harmony, and American "gospel"
singing.* Before the term jazz was used, ragtime
was the popular name for this genre. Ragtime lasted from c. 1890 to c.
1917. It was an instrumental style, highly syncopated, with the pianoforte
predominant (though a few rags had words and were sung). Among the leading
exponents of the pianoforte rag were Scott Joplin, Jelly
Roll Morton,* and J.P. Johnson,* with
the cornettists Buddy Bolden* and King Oliver.* Some rags were notated (e.g.
Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag) but the majority were improvised. About 1900
also, the "blues" craze began. "Blues" implies a largely
vocal form and a repressed frame of mind on the part of the performer. The form
originated from Negro spirituals, and made use of a blend of major and minor
harmony, and non-tempered scale intervals. In instrumental blues the prominent
instruments were trumpet, cornet, clarinet, saxophone or trombone. A leading figure
of the blues era was the black composer W.C. Handy* whose Memphis
Blues (1909) and St Louis Blues (1914) are jazz classics.
Outstanding blues singers have been Bessie Smith and, later, Billie Holiday.
The
subsequent history of jazz has embraced a diversity of styles, e.g. Dixieland,
from c. 1912, which borrowed elements from both ragtime and blues and made
a feature of group improvization led by the trumpeter. The principal Dixieland
musicians included the trumpeters King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, the pianists
Jelly Roll Morton and Earl Hines. In the 1920, jazz became more sophisticated
as it spread to New York, Paris, and London and became a social
"rage". The jazz arranger emerged and with him the bigger band:
harmony became more conventional, melodies were played by a full instrumental
section with the solos as central display-pieces, like cadenzas. These
"big bands" had marked individual styles. Paul Whiteman popularized
"symphonic jazz" using violins and elaborate arrangements. At the
other extreme was the Negro style of Duke Ellington, the
first great jazz composer. A "Chicago" style revived
65
smaller
bands and more improvisation (its star was the trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke).
The
1930s coincided with the style known as "swing".* The
swing bands - led by such virtuoso instrumentalists as Benny
Goodman* (clarinet), Jimmy Dorsey (alto
saxophone), Gene Krupa (drums), Glenn Miller (trombone), Tommy Rorsey (trombone),
Artie Shaw (clarinet) - concentrated on precision, arrangement, and good
ensemble work. Though Ellington's band was influenced by swing, its members
were such superb players and such strong individualists that improvisation
still played a large part in his compositions. Swing yielded in the 1940s to
"be-bop",*
principally for smaller groups of perhaps 7 players. Rhythm was the prime
feature of be-bop, allied to scat singing (vocalizing to nonsense syllables).
Tempi were fast and great virtuosity was needed. The dominant player was the
alto saxophonist Charlie Parker*
(1920-55). Also important were Dizzy Gillespie (trumpeter), Stan Getz (alto
saxophonist), and Kenny Clarke and Max Roach (drummers). "Be-bop" was
later re-christened "modern jazz". Among its derivatives were
"cool" jazz,* led by
Getz and Miles Davis, and by Shorty Rogers (trumpet) and Lennie Tristano
(pianoforte). In the 1960s "free jazz" was pioneered but the jazz
scene was overshadowed by the emergence of "pop" and the pop groups,
e.g. the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and many others, these comprising usually
a vocalist, guitarist(s), and percussionist.
The
influence of jazz on so-called "serious music" had been widespread
and beneficial. Ives composed ragtime pieces for theater orchestra as early as
1902; Debussy in 1908 wrote the Golliwogs Cakewalk; Ravel used the blues
in his, violin sonata, and both his pianoforte concertos are
jazz-influenced; Stravinsky wrote ragtime pieces and composed the Ebony
Concerto (1945) for Woody Herman; Hindemith, Poulenc, Weill,
Krenek, Lambert, and Copland all used jazz features, as did Berg in Lulu. Duke
Ellington and Bill Russo are among the leading composers of
jazz, while those who have written works throwing a bridge between jazz and
symphonic forms include Gershwin, Rolf Liebermann, Leonard Bernstein,
Günther Schuller, Richard Rodney Bennett, and John
Dankworth.
From: The
Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music
THE
RELATION OF JAZZ TO AMERICAN MUSIC
by George
Gershwin
The
great music of the past in other countries has always been built on folk-music.
This is the strongest source of musical fecundity. America is no exception
among the countries. The best music being written today is music which comes
from folk-sources. It is not always recognized that America has folk-music; yet
it really has not only one but many different folk-musics. It is a vast land,
and different sorts of folk-music have sprung up in different parts, all 66
having
validity and all being a possible foundation for development into an art-music.
For this reason, I believe that it is possible for a number of distinctive
styles to develop in America, all legitimately born of folk-song from different
localities. Jazz, ragtime, Negro spirituals and blues, Southern mountain songs,
country fiddling, and cowboy songs can all be employed in the creation of
American art-music, and are actually used by many composers now. These
composers are certain to produce something worth while if they have the innate
feeling and talent to develop the rich material offered to them. There are also
other composers who can be classed as legitimately American who do not make use
of folk-music as a base, but who personally, working in America, developed
highly individualized styles and methods. Their new-found materials should be
called American, just as an invention is called American if it is made by an
American!
Jazz I
regard as an American folk-music; not the only one, but a very powerful one
which is probably in the blood and feeling of the American people more than any
other style of folk-music. I believe that it can be made the basis of serious
symphonic works of lasting value, in the hands of a composer with talent for
both jazz and symphonic music.
From: American
Composers on American Music
LOUIS
ARMSTRONG
The
black man with the wonderful smile finished singing, mopped his forehead
with a huge white handkerchief, raised the gleaming trumpet to his lips
and played. The music was jazz. It was exciting and happy music, and soon
everyone was smiling and feeling good, clapping and swaying to the rhythm. He
finished playing and the crowd roared and applauded.
That
was Louis Armstrong, one of the most famous and best-loved jazz musicians of
all the time. Armstrong did a great deal to popularize this type of music. Jazz
was created by black Americans from African drumbeats, work songs, blues,
spirituals, and especially the lively marchingband tunes so popular right after
the Civil War.
The
cradle city of jazz was New Orleans. Louis Armstrong was born there on July 4,
1900. His family was very poor. He loved music from a very early age and would
follow street bands at parades and even funerals just to hear the music.
On New
Year's Eve, when he was twelve, he and his friends were having fun with
shooting a small gun. Louis had brought his own gun and shot it off. It made
such a big noise that it scared everybody and suddenly Louis found himself in
the arms of a tall policeman. He was sent to the colored Waifs' Home, a place
for black children who go into trouble. One of the teachers that Louis liked a
lot was a music teacher named Mr. Davis, who had formed
67
a band
in the school. Louis behaved himself very well and soon was asked to join the
band. Mr. Davis gave him bugle and cornet lessons, and the boy had never been
happier. He learned quickly and was soon made the leader. Louis finally left
the Home after a year and a half and went to live with his father. Because his
family was so poor, he had to go right out and earn some money, doing odd jobs
like helping a junkman and shovelling coal. He managed to save enough money to
buy a battered old cornet. He began to practise and listen to music every
chance he got. Louis got his first real job playing when he was sixteen,
working for whatever money the customers threw him.
He also
began to play with Fate Marble on the riverboats that went up and down the
Mississippi. With the Marble band he first learned how to read music well and
also got the chance to play jazz for many who had never heard it before. Louis
was becoming known as the best player around New Orleans.
In 1924
he got his own band, and some of the best music he ever played was recorded
during this period. Louis did all sorts of new musical things. He began
travelling all over with his band. Music was his whole life.
On his
seventieth birthday a great tribute was paid to Louis. A number of jazz clubs
had birthday celebrations. Many famous singers and musicians came and performed
in his honour. Everyone acknowledged that he was truly the "King of
Jazz".
Louis
Armstrong died one year later, but the world will never forget the musician who
did so much to make people happy and bring the people of the world closer
together.
From: "Moscow
News", No. 21, 1979
THE
SWING ERA (DUKE ELLINGTON)
In 1932
Duke Ellington (1899-1974) wrote a song, It Don't Mean a Thing If
It Ain't Got That Swing, that provided a label for a new style of jazz
developing among big bands during the 1930s. Duke was no newcomer to the field
of jazz, having written his first song, Soda Fountain Rag, at the
age of fourteen and having organized his first band not too many years later.
He had
little formal training in music other than piano lessons. As a pianist he came
in contact with Harlem's active pianists during the time and was particularly
influenced by the playing of James P. Johnson, Willie-the-Lion Smith, Luckey Roberts,
and Fats Waller. But Ellington's ideas were his own and his genius led him to
create an orchestra style marked by rich and daring harmonies, by subtle
contrasting of colors and timbres, and by an ingenious handling of solo
and ensemble relationships. The orchestra became the vehicle through which Ellington expressed
his creativity; it came to represent the ideal big "swinging band".
68
When
Ellington's band began its memorable engagement in 1927 at the famed Cotton
Club in Harlem, it included two trumpets, trombone, alto saxophone, baritone
saxophone, tenor saxophone (doubling with clarinet), guitar (doubling with
banjo), bass, drums, and piano. Later it was enlarged to include three trumpets
and two trombones, and in 1932 a third trombone and a fourth saxophone were
added. It was during the Cotton Club years that Duke's orchestra began to win
distinctions for its thorough musicianship and
homogeneity.
Duke,
as the leader, could accept the credit for it, but the contributions of his
sidemen were significant. They were brilliant soloists in their own rights;
they fitted in well with Duke's temperament; and they remained with him over
long periods of
time.
Many of
Duke's arrangements were worked out with his sidemen in the true tradition of
collective improvisation. Duke would bring to the meeting his musical ideas,
and one or another of the bandsmen would make suggestions for changes or
additions. Things were tried out on the spot in order to find out whether they
worked. Often a composition was changed after it had been performed three or
four times, sometimes resulting in an entirely new work. Duke's constantly reiterated
statement was, "Good music is music that sounds good". Sometimes
other musicians of the orchestra would bring their compositions to
"creating sessions" to be worked out by the entire group. In 1939
Billy Strayhorn (1915-67), pianist-composer, joined Duke's orchestra as an
arranger ana over the years developed into Duke's musical alter
ego.* The collaboration
between the two men was so close that often neither could identify which part
of a musical work was his.
Ellington left
more than 2,000 compositions, an impressive record equaled by few composers in
the history of American music. His best known works included the symphonic
suites Creole Rhapsody (1931), Black, Brown, and Beige (1943), Deep
South Suite (1947), Liberian Suite (1947), Such Sweet Thunder (1957),
and Far East Suite (1970); the ballet The River (1970); the
pageant My People (1963); the television musical A Drum Is a Woman (CBS,* 1957); and the musicals Jump
for Joy (1941; 1959) and Beggar's Holiday (1946). Best known of the
hundreds of songs he wrote were Sophisticated Lady, In a Sentimental Mood, I
Let a Song Go Out of My Heart, Mood Indigo, and / Got It Bad and That
Ain't
Good.
Ellington made
enormous contributions to the development of jazz and, indeed, to American
music in general. His innovations, unusual at the time introduced, passed into
the sounds of jazz so quickly that the jazz world accepted them as if always
there; for example, the use of the voice as an instrument in Adelaide Hall's
wordless solo on Creole Love Call (1928), or the employment of Cuban
elements in Caravan (1937), or the use of concerto form in
69
Concerto for
Cootie (1939). He was the first jazzman to write concert jazz
in extended forms, and for seven years (1943-50) he presented annual concerts
at Carnegie Hall in New York. He also was among the first to present jazz in
the church.
From: The
Music of Black Americans by E. Southern
SPIRITUALS
The
largest number of Negro folk-songs collected thus far are spirituals. They were
first presented to the world at large by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who toured
America and Europe from 1871 to 1878. The story of these singers - their
organization and tours - is a fascinating and heroic one, and is so closely connected
with the development of America's interest in the spirituals that it seems
appropriate to relate a part of it.
Fisk
University was established in 1866 for freed men by northern educational
interests, as were so many of the schools for Negroes which were established in
the South after the Civil War. Shortly after its founding many unforeseen
problems arose to perplex the administration. The gravest of these was the
problem of funds to carry forward the work of the school. The lack of money
produced such a precarious situation that it seemed inevitable that Fisk must
close its doors.
The
treasurer of the school, Mr. George L. White, had listened with keen interest
to the singing of the students, and in a moment of inspiration stated his
belief that if the world could hear these strange songs it would experience the
same exaltation which he felt when listening to them, and somehow, out of this,
sufficient interest could be aroused to help the new educational experiment. He
gained the reluctant permission of the authorities to undertake the
organization of a group of students into a chorus, with the purpose of making a
concert tour.
Excellent
voices were abundant among the students. From these Mr. White selected twelve
and began more than two years of intensive training.
The
type of program to be offered presented several problems of large proportions.
America had seen Negroes on the stage before - but they were minstrels. Was
America prepared to receive Negroes on the stage in a serious role? What could
these young people offer that would interest America and at the same time be
worthy of a college? By what name should they be known?
Mr.
White decided on a style of singing the spiritual which eliminated every
element that detracted from the pure emotion of the song. Harmony was diatonic
and limited very largely to the primary triads and the dominant seventh.
Dialect was not stressed but was used only where it was vital to the spirit of
the song. Finish, precision, and sincerety were demanded by this leader. While
70
the
program featured the spirituals, variety was given it by the use of numbers of
classical standard. Mr. White strove for an art presentation, not a caricature
of atmosphere.
At last
the singers were ready. They left Nashville on October 6th, 1871. During the
first part of the tour Mr. White gave the group the inspired name, The
Jubilee Singers, and called their music Jubilee Songs.
At
first America did not know how to receive the Jubilee Singers. Its first
attitude was one of indifference and derision. There soon developed, however,
an enthusiasm which led the singers to heights of success far beyond their
hopes.
After a
successful tour of America, a smaller company of eight singers were taken to
Europe where they scored a triumph. They sang before the crowned heads and were
entertained by Gladstone.
In 1878
the Singers returned to Fisk with more than one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars. Just as important as this money, however, was the interest the Jubilee
Singers had created over the world in Negro education and in the spirituals,
known until recently by the name they gave them-Jubilee Songs.
Frequently
today, but quite generally before and during the Reconstruction Period, the
spiritual functioned in two ways other than religious expression. It served as
the work song and as the social song. However, any spiritual which was used
generally as a work song or a social song soon lost its religious significance.
Many
grand songs have been eschewed by the church because they had been used too
commonly in non-religious activities. One typical example of this is the
spiritual Wasn't That a Mighty Day when Jesus Christ was Bom, majestic
in melodic Une as well as in word. It was used and still is used by
minstrel quartets who feature it with some ridiculous cadenzas for the bass
singer.
So
strong were the demands of the Negro church upon a member that he was forced to
refrain from singing all songs of a secular nature. But, the Negro, compelled
by nature to sing as he worked, had to sing religious songs. Frequently, in my
search for songs I have found it impossible to persuade church members to sing
a work song or a social song for me, because it was "sinful". The
church placed the same ban on secular songs in entertainments and suppers that
it sponsored.
From
the standpoint of form, melodic variety, and emotional expressiveness, the
spiritual is the most highly developed of the Negro folk-songs. There are many
types of spirituals, but they can be classed in three groups: the "call
and response chant"; the slow, sustained, long-phrase melody, and the
syncopated, segmented
melody.
In the
first main type we find such songs as Great Camp Meeting, Shout for Joy,
Good Morning Everybody, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, and Sittin' Down
beside the Lamb. The largest number of spirituals, and
possibly the most interesting ones,
71
embrace this form. These songs are sung in a rapid
tempo, and are characterized by fiery spirit. The calmness of Swing Low
Sweet Chariot is an exception.
The
second type of spiritual includes such songs as Deep River, Nobody Knows the
Trouble I see, My Lord What a Morning, and Were You There? Several
noteworthy characteristics are discernible from an analysis of these
sprirituals. The tempo of songs in this class is slow and the phrase line long
and sustained. Usually the words make long phrases or complete sentences. Fewer
songs are known in this mold than in the others. In the spirituals created
today this type is rare.
In the
third class of spiritual we find the songs which probably are the most popular,
such as Shout All over God's Heab'n, Little David Play on Yo' Harp, Ain't
Going to Study War No Mo. The tempo of these songs is usually fast and the
rhythm features a swing which stimulates bodily movement. The musical line
instead of being a complete, sustained phrase is often made up of segments or
rhythmic patterns with a syncopated figure. As is to be expected the words are
usually in short phrase length, or one repeated word, rather than in complete
lines as are found in Were You There? and songs of its class.
A
prominent characteristic of this type of spiritual is a repeated, short
rhythmic-pattern usually syncopated, but if not syncopated, featuring an
important pulse note. There is frequently an unusual distribution of notes
within the pattern.
There
is a certain elusive quality heard in the native singing of the melodies that
defies musical notation. For lack of suitable symbols, it is impossible to
record on paper many of these songs as they are sung in their native
environment. Extravagant postamenta, slurs, and free use of extra notes serve
to mystify the collector of these songs who strives for accuracy.
Of much
interest are the scales of the Negro employed in the spirituals. He
unconsciously avoided the fourth and seventh major scale steps in many songs,
thereby using the pentatonic scale. But there were employed notes foreign to
the conventional major and minor scales with such frequency as to justify their
being regarded as distinct. The most common of these are the "flatted
third" (the feature note of the blues) and the "flatted
seventh".
The
latter note is seen prominently in the songs Roll Jordan Roll, Soon-a Will
Be Done (second tune), Great Camp Meeting, and Wish I's in Heab'n
Settin' Down. The scale employed in You May Bury me in the East corresponds
closely to the Dorian mode. Several songs make use of the Phrygian mode. Lord
Help the Po' and Needy is one.
Although
the spirituals usually lend themselves readily to four-part harmony, and
concert singers have sung them with varied tempos and dynamics quite
effectively, nevertheless, in the rural churches from where they mostly spring
they are sung with a
72
minimum
of such modifications. There are few contrasting passages such as loud and
soft; no notes are held for effect longer than the pulse indicates; and
strangest of all, there are no retards to anticipate the closing cadence. The
leader establishes his tempo and maintains it throughout the song. Harmony
occasionally is in two parts, rarely in three. I have never encountered four-part
harmony.
The
leader is a most important factor in the singing of spirituals. It is he who
sets the pitch and tempo, and it is he who sings the verses. The leader
sometimes must sing his refrain through several times before the group will
join him. He must have at his disposal many verses for each song.
Many
churches have spirituals which are led exclusively by special singers. Thus,
within a church a spiritual may be designated as Brother Jones' Song, or
Sister Mary's Song. Such songs may have been composed, or merely
introduced into the church singing by the leader. The "ownership" of
such a song carried with it the indisputable ability to sing it effectively. In
this manner traditions of singing grew around certain spirituals. It was not unusual
that a song ceased to be sung in a church after a famous leader of it had died.
From: American
Negro Songs and Spirituals Ed. by John Work
BLUES
The
spirituals are the manifestation of Afro-American folk music in choral singing.
The blues are the manifestation of Afro-American folk music in solo singing.
The
blues probably took shape gradually after the Civil War. They were widely sung
throughout the rural South in the final decades of the nineteenth century, and
soon emerged as a (normally) twelve-bar song form with instrumental
accompaniment, basically antiphonal in structure. Taken up by the Negro
musicians who con-verged on the cities of the South and Middle West in the
1890s in search of employment, the urbanized blues branched off from the
archaic or folk blues (which continued on their own course) and took a Une of
development that in turn branched off into two dis-tinct channels: the blues as
popular song and the blues as jazz.
Often the verses of the blues, likе those of the spirituals, were made up of current tag Unes strung together
in the moment of im-provisation.
Since the singer was giving relief to his feelings -
of lonesome-ness, or longing, or resentment, or sorrow - there was consolation
in repeating the sentiment that he wanted to express. He began by telling what
was on his mind, repeated it once for emphasis, and finished it off with a
second repetition for good measure. This pattern was certainly no strain upon
the singer's powers of improvisation. When the latter sought more scope, a
variation in the
third line resulted:
73
I've never seen such real hard times before
I've never seen such real hard times before
The wolf keeps walkin' all 'round my door.
This
three-line stanza, consisting of statement, repetition, and
"response", is the classic verse form of the blues.
Although
most blues have the burden of lament associated with the expression
"Feeling blue", they have an undertone of humour, not so much
stressed as implied, that gives them a character utterly different from that of
the ordinary sentimental song.
Besides
being a type of folk song in their own right, and later a form of American
popular music, the blues were a means of effecting the transition of
Afro-American "hot" music from the vocal to the instrumental realm
through the medium of piano blues and the jazz band. The blues are therefore of
far-reaching significance in the development of American music.
The
usual structure of the blues consists of a twelve-bar pattern. Each line of the
verse corresponds to four measures of the music. To express it in another way,
there are two complete melodic state-ments (corresponding to the verse
statement and its repetition), each ending on the tonic (or the third or fifth
of the tonic chord), fol-lowed by the melodic "response"
(corresponding to the third line of the verse), which also ends on the tonic.
Many of
the folk blues use the pentatonic scale, but this scale, so wide spread in folk
music, is not what gives to the blues their peculiar melodic quality. The
characteristic trait is rather the flatting of the third and seventh degrees of
the diatonic scale. These are the so-called "blue notes" that have
been of such significance in modern music. I
The
blues scale (diatonic, with microtonally flatted third and sev-enth) lies at
the very core of Afro-American folk song, and its influ-ence has
permeated large sectors of American music, both in the popular and in the
fine-art idioms.
All the
evidence indicates that the blues scale, and the blues intonation that goes
with it, are an original and unique contribution of the Negro race to America's
music.
Many
musicians and many singers, some anonymous, some leg-endary, some obscure, some
famous, many now dead, some still living, were responsible for the transition
of the blues from a folk song of one region and one group to a type of song
known throughout the land, widely imitated, often changed, frequently dis-torted,
occasionally cheapened, but generally asserting its essential integrity and
individuality as a musical form and as a nonsentimental expression
of feeling. Among these musicians, there is one whose name has been
particularly associated with the rise of the blues as a type of popular music:
W.C. Handy, known above all as the com-poser of St. Louis Blues.
From: America's Music From the
Pilgrims to the Present by G. Chase
74
When
Africans sang, they slid into and around notes instead of hitting them
straight. They didn't stay on pitch. Their voices played around it; and the
slides and swoops gave their songs a strange haunting quality quite unlike
anything known in Western music. American Negroes, in slave days, sang with the
same changes of pitch and the same subtle gliding from note to note.
It
seems likely that the blues sound - so important in jazz - goes back to the
African way of singing between and around notes. In blues, the third and
seventh notes of the scale are flatted - not by half tone, to which we are
accustomed, but by a fraction close to a
quarter
tone.
These
slurred notes occur through Negro folk music and jazz. The great blue singer,
Bessie Smith, could slide lazily into tones that can't be placed exactly on the
scale. So could Billie Holiday. Ella Fitzgerald and Mahalia Jackson, among
present-day singers, swoop and glide into notes in a way impossible to put down
on paper. This is the opposite of the European musical tradition. A classically
trained singer is taught to hit notes in a straightforward, precise way. To
such a singer a deviation from pitch is a catastrophe. This differ-ence in
training may explain why opera singers do not make good
blues
singers.
West
Africans used vibrato in their songs, and this, too, was adopted in jazz.
Vibrato is a slightly tremulous or pulsating effect. African singers used this
device to make certain parts of the songs more important or to give them
emotional intensity. In jazz, vibrato serves much the same purpose and also
sets up a rhythmic pulsation within the larger system rhythm of the piece - a
beat within a beat.
From: What
Jazz is All About? by L. Erlich
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
1. How
did jazz originate? What elements contributed to the de-velopment of jazz?
2. What
are the main stylistic features of jazz?
3. Who
were the legendary figures of the early generation of jazz musicians?
Characterize the role which each of them played in the development of jazz.
4.
Comment on the role of improvisations in jazz.
5. What
are the principal sources of the blues? When were they
introduced?
6. What
are the characteristic features of spirituals and blues?
7. How
do spirituals differ from blues?
8. Name
the most distinguished blues singers.
The Art of Musical Interpretation
THE
PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION
Music
lives through interpretation. Between a musical work and the world stands the
interpreter who brings the score to life by his performance. The relationship
between the performing and the cre-ative artist, however, has changed
profoundly in the history of music and continues to do so. This situation in
music, as compared with the other arts, is unique. Paintings in the gallery
speak to the visitor without the help of a mediator; this is true similarly of
the works of sculpture and architecture. In reading poetry or prose, we act, as
it were, as our own interpreters. But in music, the score of the St. Matthew
Passion, as such, has meaning only for the intellect of the trained
musician. The large mass of music lovers, in order to hear masterworks, is
dependent upon actual performance of them. Thus it becomes obvious that in
music, in contrast to the other arts, the in-terpreter is of paramount
importance-a factor sine qua non.*
Our
musical life has become more and more a cult of the inter-preter. The present
over-emphasis on the interpreter's role is sharply contrasted by the disregard
of it in former periods. The ecclesiastical spirit of the Middle Ages did not
acknowledge interpretation in our modern sense, as the individualized
expression of the performer. The picture has gradually changed in the last four
hundred years, so that the interpreter, who was formerly very much in the
background, has now become the star of the performance. Small wonder, then,
that the musical world is disturbed by heated arguments over the rights and
limits of interpretation. What are the interpreter's rights? Where are these
limits?
Interpretation:
Objective or Subjective? The subjective approach reflects the
interpreter's individuality more than it does the world of the masterwork - not
only in details, but also in the delineation of the composition as a whole.
In
opposition to such a subjective reading stands the objective treatment,
where the interpreter's principal attitude is that of uncon-ditional loyalty to
the script. Setting aside his personal opinion and detaching himself from his
individual feelings, the objective inter-preter has but one goal in mind: to
interpret the music in the way the author conceived it. For instance, the
objective interpreter of
76
Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony will perform the opening measures ac-cording to
metronomic and other objective determinations, as indi-cated by the score and
not by his personal feelings.
If we
turn from the particular case of the Fifth Symphony to any classical
score, in fact to a score of any period, the inevitable question arises as to
whether the score could be interpreted literally or whether the performer
should have carte blanche* in
general in-terpretation, on the ground that, besides the script of the score,
its background must also be freely taken into consideration. If all this could
be answered by a simple formula, the continual argument about interpretation
would not exist.
However,
this problem of objectivity or subjectivity in musical interpretation is one of
great complexity. First of all, interpreters are all different human beings.
Each one's natural impulse toward one and the same score is bound to differ.
Each one's personal back-ground, education, culture, and human and artistic
experiences, are likewise different. In spite of this, it would still be
conceivable to in-sure what we call authenticity of interpretation, namely, the
objective realization of the author's wishes, if the score as such were
explicit enough to protect the composer's intentions against any misinterpre-tation
on the performer's part.
Notation
Cannot Express Intangibles. Even the modem score, however, frequently admired
as one of the highest achievements of the human spirit, is far from perfection.
Of course, great composers have superbly transformed their ideas into scores,
making the best possible use of musical notation. But it is this very notation
that is imperfect and may remain so forever, notwithstanding remarkable
contributions to its improvement. There are certain intangibles that cannot be expressed
by our method of writing music-vital musical elements incapable of being fixed
by the marks and symbols of no-tation. Consequently, score scripts are
incomplete in representing the composers' intentions. No score, as written in
manuscript and pub-lished in print, can offer complete information for its
interpreter.
The
performer's first task, that of setting the main tempo, be-comes mere guesswork
unless he is thoroughly acquainted with cer-tain fundamental facts concerning
the style of the period concerned. After all, time is relative in music, as
elsewhere, and so the purport of the different designations, from adagio to
presto, has to be ad-justed according to the peculiarities of the composer and
his work. And there are still numerous other questions confronting the inter-preter.
In the scores written since the end of the eighteenth century, these are partly
answered by the marks of dynamics or phrasing.
Interpretation
Lives Through Style. Sketchy as the old score may seem to the modern performer,
it fulfilled its function by of-fering the necessary information in its own
day, when the composer and the interpreter were so often one and the same
person. Palestrina conducted his own Masses, Handel his own oratorios, Mozart
77
his own
operas, and Bach himself sat on the organ bench of the St. Thomas Church in
Leipzig, playing his fugues and chorales.
The
composer knew what he wanted. He could not afford to write the score according
to his fancies and to design the pictures of his own script in lines that
appear vague to us. Should we infer from facts like these that the old master
had greater trust in the capacity of his fellow-interpreter to read and render
his works? After all, the composer could not have expected to be his own
interpreter forever. One thing is certain: modern composers do not have such
faith in their interpreters. This becomes clear by comparing the manuscripts of
the scores of old and modern times. Today, the. in-terpreter of contemporary
works frequently has little or no personal choice, as he is forced to follow
the very strict directions of the composer.
Starting
with the instructions of the Classicists, and increasing with those of the
Romanticists, we reach the height of direction in the modern score. In a work
like Mahler's Second Symphony, written at the turn of our century, the composer
has given instructions complete enough for a scenario. Players in the finale
are told exactly when to enter and when to leave the podium for the backstage
mu-sic; they are also told in which position to hold their instruments for
better tone production. Again, in significant contemporary scores, particularly
in those of Schoenberg, letters help the performer to un-derstand the
polyphonic texture by pointing out the relationship be-tween principal part and
accompanying part.
Stravinsky
does not hesitate to compare a good conductor with a sergeant whose duty it is
to see that every order is obeyed by his player-soldiers. The question arises
whether through such a point of view the interpreter is not demoted to the role
or nothing more nor less than a musical traffic policeman. He might find solace
in this statement of Sibelius: "The right tempo is the one the artist
feels!" This dictum of Sibelius again opens the door to subjective interpretation.
What the artist feels becomes the decisive factor in the rendition. Obviously,
one cannot expect to set an inflexible, mathematical standard in art; if ideas
of composers are subjective and their directions relative (in spite of such
mechanical aids as the metronome), the interpreter's knowledge is likewise
subjective, and therefore his ways of performance are subjective too. We
conclude, then, that the ego of the interpreter and the score of the composer
provide the very combination through which creative inspiration may be
translated into musical reality.
Nothing
is more difficult than the task of rethinking the old works, on the basis of
the original elastic score script, in terms of the great masters who wrote
them. There are three paths that will lead the interpreter out of this
labyrinth. First, he must learn how to read the script and to understand its
language. Second, his fantasy must discover the musical essence, the inner
language behind the written symbols. Finally, the interpreter should be fully acquainted
78
with
the background and the tradition of a work - with all the cus-toms surrounding
the score at the time of its creation.
This
end can be accomplished only if the interpreter leans on the accumulated
knowledge of the trained historian as the true guardian of the authentic style.
Of course, style is not the only requisite for fidelity of performance, but it
is certainly the framework. If music lives through interpretation, then true
interpretation can live only through the genuine style.
From: The History of Music in
Performance by F. Dorian
Discussion Activities
Questions
on the Text
1. What
is the role of interpretation in music as compared with the other arts? What is
musical interpretation in a modern
sense?
2. Find
in the text a passage describing the difference between the subjective and
objective approach in a musical perfor-mance. Why does the argument about
interpretation continue? What are the interpreter's rights and where are their
limits?
3. What
evidence does the author provide to show that modern musical notation is
imperfect?
4. Find
in the text passages describing the relationship between the composer and the
performer. What was the performing practice in Palestrina's time? How has it
changed since then? Why is it so difficult to perform old works?
5. How
have theories of interpretation changed throughout the history of music? Give
examples of how twentieth-century composers have tried to limit the freedom of
the performer.
6. What
are the three recommendations which the author makes to the performer?
7. Give
a summary of the text in writing.
Questions
for Discussion
1.
Music for the public has always been dependent upon the performer. His role in
the present organisation of concert-giving is so emphasized that he often
overshadows the com-poser himself. What do you think of this? Do you agree? If
not, give your reasons.
2.
What, besides inborn, instinct and good taste, is to set the limits beyond
which the performer may not go? Tradition, handed down from one generation of
musicians to another, is often distorted in the process; yet how else, after
the com-poser's death, are his wishes to be translated into sound? By what
standard can one reading of composer's work be con-sidered better than another?
3. What
Soviet musicologists have dealt with questions of musical
79
interpretation?
Have you read their books? What is your opinion of them?
4. What
do you think makes a performance convincing and in-teresting? In your opinion,
what is truth in musical interpre-tation?
Additional
Assignments
1.
Write a short critical review of a performance. Discuss the art of the
performer in all its aspects - historical, technical and spiritual. Give
examples.
2.
Write an essay about your favourite performer. What qualities do you value in
him/her most of all? In what music does he/she excel? How does he/she tackle
the problems of in-terpretation?
3.
Write a composition or give a short talk explaining and illus-trating the
following statement: "The comprehension of for-mer style sharpens the
senses for modern styles."
CONDUCTING
Conducting
involves not only precise indication of speed, dynam-ics and phrasing, but also
careful preparation to ensure that the bal-ance is correct and that the
intentions of the composer are ade-quately represented. These requirements are
not always observed, but a good performance is impossible without them. Unlike
the singer or instrumentalist, the conductor has to persuade others to accept
his view of the music and so help him to shape it into a unified and convincing
whole. The method by which this is achieved varies ac-cording to the
individual. Some conductors make detailed annotations in the orchestral parts
or vocal scores, indicating details of bowing to the string-players or of
breathing to the singers. Others rely on verbal instructions at rehearsals and
on the impress of a strong per-sonality.
The use
of a baton, though at least as old as the 15th century, did not become the
almost universal method of directing a perfor-mance until the second half of
the 19th century. Other methods be-fore that time included the hand, a roll of
paper, or a violin bow. When a stick was employed it was sometimes used to beat
time au-dibly, e.g. at the Paris Opera in the 17th and 18th centuries. Else-where
in the 18th century it was normal for opera to be directed from the
harpsichord, which was in any case necessary for playing the recitative, and
for symphonies to be directed by the principal first violin (still
known in Britain as "leader" of the orchestra). When the baton was
introduced to London by Spohr in 1820 and to Leipzig by Mendelssohn in 1835, it
was regarded as a novelty. The increasing complication of orchestral writing
and the growth of the forces employed made a clear and visible direction
indispensable, and 80
the use
of the baton soon became general. Even today, however, there are a few
conductors - e.g. Boulez - who prefer to dispense with it and use their hands.
The
original purpose of conducting was simply to keep the per-formers together, and
hence it was very necessary when large forces were employed for church or court
festivals. By the latter part of the 18th century, however, the growing
subtlety of orchestral expression called for something more than the mere
indication of time. By the middle of the 19th century the conductor had become
an interpreter. Berlioz, Wagner, von Bülow and Richter showed
that a conductor needed to be a consummate*
musician, with an intimate understanding of every detail of the score and the
power to communicate his understanding to others. Hence the rise in the 20th
century of the "star" conductor, who is worshipped as intensely as
the operatic singer in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The
only satisfactory training for conducting is continual practice, which naturally
depends to some extent on opportunity. Among the other indispensable
requirements are practical familiarity with orches-tral instruments and a
knowledge of their capabilities and limitations, ability to read a full score
and to hear it mentally, and an intimate knowledge of the style of widely
different composers and periods.
From: Collins
Encyclopaedia of Music
THE
ART OF CONDUCTING
by Leonard
Bernstein
One of
the first to recognize the artistic mission of the conductor was Felix
Mendelssohn, who dedicated himself to an exact realization of the score he was
conducting, through manipulation of the baton. There soon arrived, however, a
great dissenter named Richard Wagner who declared that everything Mendelssohn
was doing was wrong and that a conductor should personalize the score he was
conducting by coloring it with his own emotions and his own cre-ative impulse.
And so out of the clash of these two points of view the history of conducting
was born; and there arose all those great names in conducting, as well as all
the fights that go on about them right up to our own time. Mendelssohn fathered
the "elegant" school, whereas Wagner inspired the
"passionate" school of con-ducting. Actually, both attitudes are
necessary, and neither one is completely satisfactory without the other.
The
ideal modern conductor is a synthesis of the two attitudes, and this synthesis
is rarely achieved. In fact, it's practically impossi-ble. Almost any musician
can be a conductor, even a pretty good one; but only a rare musician can be a
great one. This is not only because it is so hard to achieve the
Mendelssohn-Wagner combina-tion, but also because the conductor's work
encompasses such a tremendous range. Unlike an instrumentalist or a singer, he
has to
81
play on
an orchestra. His instrument is one hundred human instru-ments, each one a
thorough musician, each with a will of his own; and he must cause them to play
like one instrument with a single will. Therefore, he must have enormous
authority, to say nothing of psychological insight in dealing with this large
group - and all this is just the beginning. He must be a master of the
mechanics of con-ducting. He must have an inconceivable amount of knowledge. He
must have a profound perception of the inner meanings of music, and he must
have uncanny powers of communication. (...)
The
qualities that distinguish great conductors lie far beyond and above what we
have spoken of. We now begin to deal with the in-tangibles, the deep magical
aspect of conducting. It is the mystery of relationships - conductor and
orchestra bound together by the tiny but powerful split second. How can I
describe to you the magic of the moment of beginning a piece of music? There is
only one pos-sible fraction of a second that feels exactly right for starting.
(...)
This
psychological timing is constantly in play throughout the performance of music.
It means that a great conductor is one who has great sensitivity to the flow of
time; who makes one note move to the next in exactly the right way and at the
right instant. For music exists in the medium of time. It is time itself that
must be carved up, molded and remolded until it becomes, like a statue, an
existing shape and form. This is the hardest to do. (...)
These
are the intangibles of conducting, the mysteries that no conductor can learn or
acquire. If he has a natural faculty for deep perception, it will increase and
deepen as he matures. If he hasn't he will always remain a pretty good
conductor. But even the pretty good conductor must have one more attribute in
his personality, without which all the mechanics and knowledge and perception
are useless; and that is the power to communicate all this to his orches-tra -
through his arms, face, eyes, fingers, and whatever vibrations may flow from
him.
But the
conductor must not only make his orchestra play, he must make them
want to play. He must exalt them, lift them, either through cajoling or
demanding or raging. But however he does it, he must make the orchestra love
the music as he loves it. It is not so much imposing his will on them like a
dictator; it is more like pro-jecting his feelings around him so that they
reach the last man in the second violin section. And when this happens - when
one hun-dred men share his feelings, exactly, simultaneously, responding as one
to each rise and fall of the music, to each point of arrival and departure, to
each little inner pulse - then there is a human identity of feeling that has no
equal elsewhere. It is the closest thing I know to love itself. On this current
of love the conductor can communi-cate at the deepest levels with his players,
and ultimately with his audience.
And
perhaps the chief requirement of all is that the conductor be humble before the
composer; that he never interpose himself 82
between
the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or
glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself,
which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence.
From: The Joy
of Music by L. Bernstein
Questions
on the Text
1.
Describe the main functions of the conductor of a great or-chestra nowadays.
Why is a conductor necessary?
2. What
was the original purpose of conducting? How has the practice of conducting
changed since the 17-18th centuries?
How has the role of the conductor changed
through the centuries? Give examples.
3. Why
cannot a modern orchestra of highly-trained professional musicians perform
without a conductor? Why do they need a person beating time for them? Cannot
the concertmaster, the principal violin, indicate the movement of the work with
his bow?
4. Who
was the first to recognize the artistic mission of the conductor?
5. What
distinguishes great conductors from mere time-beaters? What makes a conductor
great?
6.
Speak about the relationship between the conductor and the orchestra. By what
means can a conductor persuade the members of the orchestra to accept his
interpretation?
7. What
qualities does Bernstein especially value in a conductor? Do you share his view
on the ideal modern conductor?
8. What
is meant by "true musicianship", "interpretative gifts"
with reference to a conductor?
SOME
MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS
Until
its fateful third decade, Berlin was the music capital of the twentieth century.
Any aspiring composer or performer who hap-pened to grow up there was, as a
matter of course, exposed to the highest standards, the busiest, most exciting
of musical scenes.
There
were, among others, composers like Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schreker (who was
my own teacher of composition), Ferruccio Busoni, and Paul Hindemith. The great
conductors included Wilhelm Fürtwängler, Bruno Walter,
Erich Kleiber, and Otto Klemperer, and there were three
full-time opera houses, each with its own public and its own particular
viewpoint.
The
chief advantage for a young musician in such a scene was, of course, the chance
to attend the unforgettable performances of
83
these
great conductors. Moreover, there were the occasions to ob-serve them in
rehearsal and in various personal encounters. (...)
At the
N.Y. Philharmonic. Some years later, the course
of events took me again to New York. At Klemperer's invitation I joined the New
York Philharmonic as official pianist, and later on as assistant conductor
(Klemperer at that time shared the season with the music director, Toscanini).
This
post in the new world-center of music proved to be another ideal spot to
witness and absorb the practical application in day-to-day work of top-level
artistic standards. One could closely observe the various demands conductors
make, the manner and technique employed, and the resulting interaction with the
orchestra.
Toscanini,
who actually came to the concert podium relatively late in his career, was in
all he conducted the servant of the score, as he personally saw it. In
historical context, this was of course to his everlasting credit. As a
dedicated Italian, he restored to Verdi's work the original intent, dignity,
and integrity - all of which had been routinely violated by mediocre conductors
and singers alike. The quintessential dictator, Toscanini could be rough with
the orchestra. Yet the men sensed that he was toughest with himself, deep down
humble and sincere. So they forgave and really played for him. No need to
mention the Toscanini temper tantrums,* were
it not for the notable exception to the rule I once witnessed. At a rehearsal
of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, his gorge rising, Toscanini suddenly
grabbed the big score with both hands, ready to fling it to the floor as was
his custom. But then he hesitated, meekly putting it back on. the stand. It had
all his markings!
Klemperer
and Walter. When it came to guest conductors, this same orchestra's responses
varied considerably. The eminent Otto Klemperer, whose rather bizarre behavior
became a trademark, nevertheless imposed his conceptions by meticulous,
consistent rehearsing, step by step. Eventually and without fail he did get
what he wanted. But along that arduous road there were some confrontations.
(...)
Another
frequent guest was Bruno Walter, whose artistic profile differed
sharply from both Toscanini's and Klemperer's. The most amiable of conductors,
he was basically a lyricist, favoring delicate shadings and flexibility of
rhythm. This was not easy to achieve for an orchestra primarily drilled for
accuracy to the ultimate degree. Particularly since Walter was so conciliatory,
virtually pleading with them. "I am not happy," he would exclaim. (In
his Memoirs Bruno Walter writes about this tendency of his,
which at times impaired his authority over an orchestra.) In the end, of
course, he succeeded, but not without a costly struggle. His style of
conducting was not conducive to orchestral precision nor was that his aim. I
recall his revealing remark: "When one conducts for precision, one does in-deed
get precision. Period!" Wisdom from a great musician.
84
As is
by now rather evident, guest conducting, like every good thing, has its
drawbacks, particularly when it comes to the bread-and-butter*
repertory. The orchestra knows all these pieces. "What can you
teach us? "Perhaps the primary element here is in the mat-ter of tempo.
Any conductor worth his salt has his own built-in con-cept of tempo, his own
life-pulse, as it were. And within artistic limits, everyone is so entitled. As
William Steinberg, in a moment of Olympic detachment, once said to me:
"I don't care. I still prefer my own wrong tempi to the wrong tempi of my
colleagues." Amen!
Stokowski,
noted guest. One noted guest, legendary Stokowski, when confronting the New
York Philharmonic, encountered some problems of his own. Fresh from
Philadelphia, where he had built that fabulous orchestra in bis own
image, he brought with him some strong convictions. A pioneer in orchestra
seating, free bowing, acoustical innovations,* and a
very personal style of conducting with-out baton, he faced some recalcitrance.* The Philharmonic
musicians, traditional in orientation, resented his "improvements."
And the famed Stokowski sound failed to materialize, even when it came to
concert time.
Only
once, during his Philharmonic engagement, was there a sin-gle light moment.
Rehearsing a work of the Romantic period, Stokowski stopped with the
admonition: "Gentlemen, don't play so mechanically." A burst of
laughter from the orchestra. Stoki was taken aback, until there came the
explanation. Evidently a short time before, the Mexican conductor/composer Carlos
Chavez, at a re-hearsal, had demanded of the Philharmonic: "Please,
genltemen, play more mechanically!"
Sir
Thomas Beecham's appearances with the New York Philhar-monic were rather
unique. His programs consisted almost entirely of works by English composers,
most of which the orchestra had never played. From a high stack of scores he
would grab the first piece, conduct a run-through,* not
stopping for corrections, then throw the score to the floor and go on to the
next number, at times singing the tune lustily. He paused only for
intermission, and for one single time when the orchestra sightreading, simply
broke down. He was perfectly content to let matters rest, until concert time.
The aston-ishing thing was that the concerts went off very well, and certainly
very much to the public's liking! Either he did not care to rehearse, or he
simply did not know how. In any case his sound musical in-stinct and enthusiasm
always seemed to carry the day.
Stravinsky's
tempos. The scene now shifts to the Metropolitan Opera, which I joined early in
the Bing* regime as assistant con-ductor,
later moving on to full conductor after my successful debut directing Eugene
Onegin and Vanessa. One of the important mile-stones
was the new production of Stravinsky's Rake's Progress con-ducted by the
brilliant Fritz Reiner.* Soon the musical staff got into full
action. We were armed with pocket metronomes to impose the composer's very own
metronome markings as printed in the score.
85
Thus we
coached the entire cast according to Stravinsky's wishes, while certainly our
conductor, Reiner, was a most exacting, precise music director.
After a
week of intense music ensemble rehearsals, Stravinsky was invited to a run-through
of the music with piano. He seemed very pleased - with a single exception. Most
of the tempos - of course, his own from the printed score - he found too slow!
The re-quired adjustments were duly undertaken.
Here,
again, the eternal question: what is the right tempo? It was evident that only
when confronted with hearing his music played, and - more important - sung, did
Stravinsky feel what the tempo giusto* should
be. In the abstract he had no real perspective. (And so it has gone with
numberless examples of nineteenth-century composers and their own music.
Beethoven, Wagner, and Verdi, among others, later on in their lives gave up
putting in metronome marks altogether, learning from practical experience how
misleading they could be.)
The
single aim. In their individual, different ways, conductors of quality share
the single aim: to bring music to life. Theirs is the in-sight to discern the
essence of each piece, its style, structure, and prevailing mood. As they tend
to be men of strong convictions, much has been made of their rivalries and
disagreements.
The
fact is that every artist in his quest for truth can use the stimulation of
opposing views, and periodic self-examination can be revitalizing. In art, as
in life, the one thing to fear is stifling con-formity.
From: High
Fidelity, 1983. Abridged
Questions on the Text
1. What
have you learnt from the essay "Some Musical En-counters"? How are
the personalities of such great conductors as Toscanini and Stokowsky described
in the memoirs of their contemporary?
2. Find
in the text a passage describing Klemperer's and Walter's methods of working
with the orchestra. In what aspects did they differ?
3. How
is Stravinsky's musical personality described in the mem-oirs?
4. Find
in the text passages in which the problem of tempo is discussed. How do you
understand Steinberg's statement: "I still prefer my own wrong tempi to
the wrong tempi of my colleagues"? Do you share his views? Who, in your
opinion, is to establish criteria?
5. What
innovations did Stokowsky introduce?
6. What
were Beecham's ways of dealing with the orchestra? What do you know about
Beecham's contribution to the de-velopment of orchestral playing in England?
86
LEONARD
BERNSTEIN
Versatility
in an artist can be a disadvantage, for it tends to blur the general public
appreciation of his work and delays a proper evaluation. For some people, such
versatility implies a lack of depth. If the artist also does not possess a
clear notion of what he has to achieve, the many facets of his work can
dissipate his energy.
That
Bernstein is versatile is not disputed: as a conductor his repertoire is wider
than that of any of comparable stature; as a pi-anist he is certainly of
virtuoso standard and as a composer he has made significant contributions to
the myriad genres he has essayed, from serious concert pieces to works for the
"music theatre". In ad-dition, Bernstein is a noted communicator and
propagator for the arts in general and music in particular.
Bernstein
was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts on August 25th 1918 and took his first
piano lessons at the comparatively late age of ten. His progress was remarkable
for he entered the New England Conservatoire at thirteen, continuing his piano
studies with three teachers. In 1935 he entered Harvard University. His most
famous teacher, for counterpoint and fugue was Walter Piston - indeed there was
no finer in the USA. Bernstein graduated from Harvard in 1939 having already
made his debut there as a conductor and pianist and in 1940 became a student of
Serge Koussevitsky. He also did post-graduate work at the Curtis Institute of
Music, studying conducting under Fritz Reiner and in 1942 he was
appointed assistant to Kous-sevitsky at Tanglewood.* In
1942/3 Bernstein led a varied eighteen months: pursuing his ambition to be a
conductor, he also composed his magnificent Clarinet Sonata and Symphony No. 1
(Jeremiah) for soprano and orchestra. On August 25th 1943 Bernstein was
appointed Assistant Conductor of the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New
York. On November 14th 1943 Bernstein made his sensational debut with the New
York Philharmonic (as it became) deputising at less than twenty four hours
notice for an ailing Bruno Walter. In one sense the rest is history,
for few conducting debuts can ever have been so triumphant or given under such
fraught circumstances. Had Bernstein merely acquitted himself well it is most
unlikely that his subsequent career would have developed at the pace it did,
but such was his total command of the orchestra, so clearly did he stamp his
own personality on the performances, so assuredly did he demon-strate his grasp
of the essential features of bis task, and so vividly show his
considerable interpretative rifts that it was clear to every-one in the
Carnegie Hall audience that they had witnessed a wholly remarkable and indeed
historic event. Within a very short while Bernstein's name was on everyone's
lips, not only as a conductor but also as a composer. In this last capacity 1944
was a most im-portant year for in January he conducted the première
of the First Symphony in Pittsburg, in May that of the ballet Fancy
Free in
87
New
York and towards the end of the year his first great musical On The Town also
in New York.
In 1945
he was appointed music director of the New York Sym-phony Orchestra, his
programmes being notable for their wide catholicity* of
taste and the following year made his first foreign tour as a conductor,
appearing with the Czech Philharmonic in Prague (in two concerts of
all-American music) and the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert
Hall, conducting Fancy Free at Covent Garden during the same visit. A
month later back in the USA he conducted the American première of Britten's
Peter Grimes (commissioned by Koussevitsky, and of which Bernstein was
to have conducted the world première in the USA).
His
compositions at this time climaxed with the Symphony No. 2 The Age of
Anxiety for piano and orchestra which Bernstein premiered under
Koussevitsky with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in April 1949. In 1965
Bernstein revised the Symphony, particularly the finale, which was improved by
this attention. Bernstein conducted another important world première
with the Boston Symphony Or-chestra at the end of 1949, Messiaen's Turangalila-Symphonie.
In 1952
his magnificent one-act chamber opera Trouble in Tahiti appeared. Trouble
in Tahiti is an utterly unique work and is, in its own way, a masterpiece.
Bernstein wrote his own libretto. In 1953 he became the first American to
conduct at La Scala in a perfor-mance of Cherubini's Medea with Callas which
the diva regarded as one of the high artistic achievements of her career.
In 1955
Bernstein returned to La Scala for La Somnambula and La Boheme, and his
operetta Candide was premiered the following year.
By this time he had moved record labels from RCA (when his first recording of
Schumann's Second Symphony, still the greatest interpretation ever committed to
disc, showed his qualities to the widest international audience) to CBS, and
during the best part of the next twenty years he made hundreds of records with
the New York Philharmonic for that company, of which orchestra he became
musical director in 1958. Bernstein was forty, widely experienced and a
charismatic personality. Like Stokowski forty five years before he instituted
some daring experiments, not all of them successful, but each one guaranteered
to keep the affairs of the New York Phil-harmonic of interest to all sections
of the media. Almost exactly a year before, in September 1957, Bernstein
conducted the opening night of his greatest stage work West Side Story, quite
clearly a work of genius.
Whatever
one may think of Bernstein's ability, and only the non-musical would deny his great
gifts, he has fearlessly used his position and influence to promote much music
which had been neglected. Of all the composers Bernstein promoted in this way,
above all his championship of Mahler must take pride of place.
For
many people, Bernstein is Mahler, possessing rare qualities which place
his interpretation of this composer's music out of the
88
ordinary.
Both were great conductors who were men of the theatre; both conducted the same
orchestra and those musicians who saw both conduct attested to their remarkable
similarities in matters of technique; both were composer-conductors and both
were of Jewish background. In addition, Bernstein was the same age when he
recorded the Mahler symphonies that Mahler was when they were written: no other
conductor possessed this unique combination of qualities with regard to the
interpretation of Mahler's music. It should also be remembered that Bernstein
was the first conductor to record a complete Mahler symphony cycle; he has
recorded a second cycle on video with the Vienna Philharmonic.
Like
all great conductors, there are several composers in whose music Bernstein
excels, Mahler of course, but his Beethoven is exceptional as indeed is his Haydn.
From the romantic repertoire, Berlioz's Symphonie
Fantastique, Brahms' Fourth Symphony and Liszt's Faust
Symphony (which he has recorded twice) have always been outstanding
interpretations. Bernstein's range of sympathy with twentieth century music is
wholly remarkable, having given thirty six world premieres with the New York
Philharmonic, and having be-come world famous for his performance of music by
Stravinsky, Hindemith and Bartok.
His
championship of American music has always been consider-able, and his
performances of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue which he directs from the
keyboard is another famous item in his reper-toire, one of about ten piano
concertos Bernstein has played and recorded. It is a pity that he has not
developed this aspect of his art for he is a pianist of considerable calibre,
early in his career having given a first performance of Copland's Piano Sonata.
Since 1963, the year of his Third Symphony (not really in the same class as its
predecessors) he has devoted less time to composition.
In 1971
his remarkable Mass opened the John F. Kennedy Cen-ter of Performing Arts in
Washington, D.C. This is a controversial work, but a genuine one, which
contains Bernstein's finest music and shows his power at creating compelling
music over long time-spans. This was followed by several major works during the
next half dozen years: the big ballet Dybbuk, the musical 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue, Songfest (a cycle for six
singers and orchestra, and Three Meditations for cello and orchestra (for
Rostropovitch) based on ma-terial from Mass. Of late Bernstein has spent much
time in Vienna, where he is greatly admired. His recent complete Beethoven
cycle (his second complete cycle - some individual symphonies he has recorded
as many as four times) with the Vienna Philharmonic is, likе most of his recordings nowadays,
taken from live performances.
But
recently we have had possibly this most prolific of all recording conductors
greatest performance on disc: the complete recording of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde,
worthy to take its place alongside the two previous greatest recordings
of the music-drama by
89
Furtwängler and
Böhm. Bernstein's genius is here demonstrated at its most
profound.1
From: Music
& Musicians, 1986. Abridged
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
1.
Briefly outline Bernstein's conducting career. Which world's premières
did he conduct? With what leading orchestras did he appear?
2. Find
in the text a passage describing Bernstein's début with
the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. What was it about Bernstein's performance
that so pleased the audience?
3. Find
in the text passages describing Bernstein's repertoire. In what music did he
excel? What were his tastes in opera?
4. What
performance did he conduct at La Scala in 1953? Who sang the main part?
5.
Briefly outline the creative career of Bernstein - the composer. In what
branches of music did he excel?
6.
Which of Bernstein's compositions have you heard? What do you think of them?
7.
Which of Mahler's works did Bernstein record? Compare Bernstein's interpretation
of Mahler's symphonies with that of Karajan. In what way do
they differ? Which of them do you likе better? Explain your preference.
8.
Describe Bernstein's musical personality. Characterize his activ-ity in the
field of musical appreciation and musical education.
9. What
evidence does the author provide to support his view that Bernstein belongs to
the select handful of major inter-national conductors?
HERBERT
VON KARAJAN
Herbert
von Karajan's influence on the make-up of the European musical scene
is almost incalculable.2 His contribution
to music on record has been vast; indeed, there can be few record collectors
who are without at least one of his discs. In some repertoires he is peerless,* in a good many more he achieves a
level of performance large number of his colleagues must envy. Even his
detractors can often begrudgingly be persuaded to nominate one of his
recordings as truly outstanding. One of the last great maestros who
have achieved their status the old way - a long, arduous but invaluable
apprenticeship - Karajan has in his time led and shaped many of the
great European orchestras. But it is the Berlin Philharmonic with whom his name
is inextricably linked. This almost unique situation -only the Vienna
Philharmonic shares his attention - has produced an
1 L. Bernstein
died in 1990.
2 H. von
Karajan died in 1989
90
endless
stream of recordings that are characterized by a remarkable level of
musicianship and mutual understanding. It is an extraordinary tribute to single-minded
ambition achieved through tenacious hardwork and great technical prowess.
Whether one man should exercise the sheer power Karajan wields
throughout Europe is debatable - careers can literally be made overnight by
sharing the platform with him. However, in an age in which young conductors
learn their repertoires on the podia of the great concert halls of the world
(no Ulms or Aachens for them) the phenomenon of Karajan and his
orchestra remains unsurpassed; it is a unique relationship, not always untroubled,
but ever astounding.
Placido Domingo
Speaks:
I shall
never forget the rehearsals for the Salzburg Don Carlos in
1975, which marked my debut at the festival. When, during a stage rehearsal, I
began acting energetically, stretching out my arms, he interrupted me with the
words: "Stay completely motionless, arms are there for conducting."
With Karajan, you suddenly experience music with new ears; you hear
unfamiliar things in the orchestra, things you have never heard before, even if
you think you know the piece well.
Claudio
Abbado Speaks:
I
recall my performances under Herbert von Karajan's
direction which have touched and moved me profoundly. Among these were concerts
during my student years in Vienna, in which I sang in the chorus in Brahms's German
Requiem and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.
I remember,
with fondness and gratitude, how, in my early days as a conductor, Herbert von Karajan stood
by me like a father, in both word and deed. He gave me lots of useful advice,
and I owe him my thanks for my first invitations to Berlin and Salzburg. For my
debut at the Salzburg Festival in 1965 he suggested I conduct a mass by
Cherubim; I expressed a preference for Mahler's Second Symphony and he accepted
this.
From: Gramophone,
1988
INTERVIEW
WITH HERBERT VON KARAJAN
Richard Osborne talks to Herbert von Karajan at his home near Salzburg.
RICHARD
OSBORNE: You had already conducted major orches-tras like the Berlin
Philharmonic and the Concertgebouw* with
great success. How did you tolerate bad orchestras which were obviously not
producing what you wanted?
HERBERT
VON KARAJAN: I can tell you frankly, I heard in
91
my
inner ear what I wanted to hear and the rest... well, it went down! But, you
know, then comes one moment when your inner ear is astonished what comes out.
With a big orchestra after a certain time and if they are used to you and
really play as they can, they will sometimes rive you something more beautiful
than what you thought you could hear; and then the real work begins to work it
up to a higher and higher level, and this surely cannot be done until you have
15 or 20 years working with the one orchestra. This is the reason why I said I
will have the orchestra for my lifetime, otherwise I do not sign the contract. And
this pays in the results you get after a very long time.
R.O. We
have had many proofs of that but I remember espe-cially the performances you
gave in 1982 of Mahler's Ninth with the Berlin Philharmonic. You had made a
very fine LP set and then you asked for the 1982 live Berlin performance to be
issued separately on CD. Why was this?
H.K. We
had a feeling that if there was no noise in the hall we could have an even
better result. And I know I was madly, madly involved with the symphony to the
extent that when it was done -and it is one of the few works I say this of - I
would not dare to touch it again.
R.O.
You had exhausted the piece.
H.K.
Yes, completely.
R.O.
Why did you turn to this music at this time in your life?
H.K.
This I can answer exactly. I spent three years in Vienna as a student. We heard
this music - Mahler, Webern, Schoenberg - a great deal; it was our daily bread.
Then the war came and after the war concert managers offered me the chance to
do all the Mahler symphonies. I asked them, how much rehearsal do I get?
"Two re-hearsals for each concert." I said, "Gentlemen, please
forget it." Mahler is very difficult for an orchestra. First, you must, as
a painter would say, make your palette. The difficulty is great and the
greatest danger is when the music becomes banal. I conduct a lot of light music
and it can be very difficult for an orchestra to realize it properly. I once
spent a whole rehearsal on the Barcarolle from Les
contes d'Hoffmann,* which is to me one
of the most tragic things in opera; it is not joyful; a man goes from life to
death. And in Mahler there is much of this.
R.O.
The Ninth seemed to be a work to which you are musi-cally close.
H.K. It
is especially difficult to come to the end of the sym-phony. It is one of the
hardest tasks in all conducting.
R.O. I
remember an interview you gave to Austrian Television in 1977 in which the
interviewer said, "Mr von Karajan, you don't con-duct
enough twentieth-century music." But you have conducted an enormous amount
of twentieth-century music right up to Ligeti, Pen-derecki: but you don't make
a fuss about it?
H.K.
Yes, but I can only do it if I am convinced. It is very easy
92
sometimes,
but with other works it is difficult if you get a score and you don't know what
he is thinking.
R.O.
One thing I have sensed with the great records you have made of
twentieth-century music - the Berg Three Orchestral Pieces, the
Prokofiev Fifth, the Honegger Liturgique,* the
Shostakovich Tenth - they are works which somehow express the tragedy of our
century. You were six years old when the First World War started. Is this
something which is in your consciousness, this sense of the tragedy of our
times and music's healing capacity?
H.K.
Yes, yes, certainly. I had very good relations with Shostakovich. When I was
the last time in Moscow I played the Tenth Symphony. He was so nervous and at
the same time so im-pressed... he said, I can't speak but... he was a very
great composer.
R.O. I
heard once that you wanted to conduct his Sixth Sym-phony but you said that
Mravinsky had done it so well that you wouldn't touch it.
H.K.
Yes, I did.
R.O.
You said that?
H.K.
That's true.
R.O. He
was a great conductor.
H.K. I
am a great admirer of him. He was the representative of this older generation
in perfection.
R.O.
Did you ever conduct the Leningrad orchestra?
H.K.
No, but I would gladly if I had the time; but they always say if you
come,.bring your own orchestra. (...)
R.O.
You have made two memorable recordings of Tosca. It's a thrilling piece,
but the characters are not exactly pleasant; Tosca, Scarpia...
H.K.
No, not at all pleasant! But Tosca has always fascinated me. Goethe once said
"I was able in my life to commit all crimes if I did not have the possibility
to express them." Sometimes you must conduct it, otherwise one day you may
kill someone! I am fas-cinated by every single bar.
R.O.
John Culshaw who produced your RCA recording of Tosca with Leontyne Price* said you were not
afraid of the melodrama in Puccini.
H.K.
That's true.
R.O. He
also told a touching story of your listening to part of the Victor
de Sabata* recording
and saying this is genius but I can-not do it the way he does. He was a conductor
you greatly ad-mired?
H.K. He
was probably the only person who never said one word against another conductor.
He lived at a very difficult time; they wanted him back at La Scala but there
was always the possibility that Toscanini would return. I asked him once,
"What do you feel when you conduct?" and he said "I have in my
mind a million notes, and every one which is not perfect makes me mad." He
suf-fered in conducting. And that, I must say, I have passed.
93
R.O.
And we have just had reissued by EMI the Madama But-terfly which you
recorded with Callas. Do you have any memories of working with
her? She must have been a very extraordinary artist.
H.K. If
she was rightly handled she was very easy. She was al-ways prepared to the
utmost and if she felt she had been given good advice, immediately, she took
it. But she could sometimes be the diva. I remember I was once experimenting
with a gauze,* it had been in La
Scala 100 years and was full of dust and she was very short-sighted and could
not see into the hall. She came to the rehearsal and came down to the bridge
over the orchestra where I was directing and she said to the manager "If
this veil remains, I do not sing." So I let her just pass, and I said
"Oh, darling, I am looking for a new 'element' ..." and after half an
hour the manager came back to me and says she sits up there, weeping. So I said
"Maria, I was experimenting and when I say 'experiment' I mean I want to
see how it presents itself. But I don't know if I will take it." Of
course, we took it, but then she saw the reason. But I never would wish to
upset anyone unless there was some very positive idea: which we must try.
R.O. In
her Juilliard classes she advised her pupils to work within the rubato
available to the conductor. But she herself had a very remarkable rhythmic
sense?
H.K.
Incredible. When she had the piece within her I said "Maria, you can turn
away from me and sing, I know you will never be one tiny part of a bar
out." She heard so well and sang always with the orchestra. I regret
deeply, deeply that I could not persuade her to make a film of Tosca. I told
her that we already had the tape and she would have nothing to do but be there
and
play
the role. Onassis invited me - I didn't know him at the time ut later we became
great friends - and we talked. But then Maria began to get mad and she insisted
on seeing everything before. And he said "Maria, I am not rich enough to
pay for all this!" But still I asked her but she was afraid, she was
afraid; she had left the thing and felt out of it...
R.O. We
are very excited that you are going to conduct and record Un ballo in
maschera* soon.
Have you conducted it be-fore?
H.K.
Yes, 40 years ago! John Schlesinger is going to direct it; he is a very
well-known film director and has only directed a few op-eras but I was
fascinated by the one I saw, so we got together. When I played Un ballo in
maschera it came back to me as things do when you are young:
they stay in your mind all the time. So I knew exactly why I wanted to conduct
it. It has one special interest for me because - just to take one aspect - it
has an enormous num-ber of long ensembles: a bit like Figaro. I said to
Schlesinger we must find ways of dealing with this and the complex interplay of
the characters.
94
R.O. It
has a lot of black comedy in it as well as high drama?
H.K.
Certainly!
R.O.
And which version will you use?
H.K.
The Swedish one, of course.
R.O.
And your cast is...
H.K.
Domingo, and the English girl who sang here in The Black Mask - the
Penderecki - Josephine Barstow. I once asked her to sing the aria from Fidelio
which I very much wanted to do. She came to sing - she has a wonderful
figure, she moves well, and she sings with taste and expression; so when it
came to Un ballo in maschera I said...
R.O.
She is the one! And your baritone?
H.K.
Nucci. So I am very contented to do it. Sometimes things pass by and you don't
catch them but here I saw there was a chance to do it with a beautiful cast.
(...)
From: Gramophone,
1988. Abridged
Discussion
Activities Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
1. What
points are discussed in the Interview with Herbert von Karajan?
2. What
do you know about his conducting career? How long did he direct the Berlin Philharmonic?
With what other ma-jor orchestras did Karajan work?
3. Give
examples of long collaboration between a conductor and an orchestra, e.g. the
Berlin Philharmonic (Furtwangler, Karajan), the NBC Symphony
Orchestra (Toscanini), the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Koussevitsky).
4. What
sort of repertoire did Karajan conduct? What were his tastes in opera?
What festival did he found?
5. How
did Karajan describe his work with Maria Callas?
6. What
were his concepts of musical interpretation?
7. What
was his attitude to contemporary music? Which works did he perform?
8. When
did Karajan visit the Soviet Union? What concerts did he give?
9.
Which of Karajan's recordings have you heard? What do you think of them? In
your opinion, what qualities make Karajan an outstanding
conductor of our time?
Optional
Activity
1. Give
your opinion of the following statements:
"There
are no bad orchestras; there are only bad conductors"
(Mahler).
"There
is no such thing as tradition, only genius and
stupidity"
(Mahler).
95
"In
every performance a work must be reborn" (Mahler). "Conductors are
born, not made" (Stokowsky). "Without a magnetic personality no
conductor can achieve greatness. Genius has not only the capacity for creating
great art; it is often capable of producing great art in others. A minor
orchestra will sound likе a
major one; and a major or-chestra will outdo itself in the presence of
genius" (Eugene Ormandi).
2. Do
you agree that a great conductor is a great personality? Explain. Give a talk
on your favourite conductor.
3. Do
you agree that complicated modern music calls for a con-ductor of the highest
skill? Explain.
4.
Write a composition of 150-250 words describing your ideal conductor.
THE
ART OF PIANO PLAYING: GLENN GOULD
Glenn
Gould (1932-1982), a Canadian pianist, trained at the Toronto Royal Con-servatory,
sprang into prominence in the 1950s. He made his European tour in 1957, first
appearing as soloist with Karajan and the Berlin
Philharmonic Orchestra. He also toured the USSR. Gould had an exceptionally
wide repertory, from 16th-century keyboard works to jazz. He specialized in
Bach on the concert grand.
Glenn
Gould was an extraordinary pianist, at the height of his powers, and he will of
course be missed for that reason alone; we can never have enough such
performers. But he was something rarer as well, a musician who took nothing for
granted, from the funda-mentals of piano technique and sound, through the
generally accepted concepts of style and interpretation, to the whole idea of
performing public concerts. One doesn't have to have agreed with Gould's
conclusions about any of these matters to recognize the value of the questions
he asked, and to regret deeply that he is no longer around to ask further
questions.
From: High
Fidelity, 1983
INTERVIEW
WITH GLENN GOULD
Just
about everything concerning Glenn Gould is, to say the least, unconventional.
He is practically self-taught; he gave public, live concerts for a very brief
time, yet his records and tapes are heard constantly wherever classical piano
music is broadcast His life style is unconventional He defies tradition in his
views toward his instrument, classical music, and the whole aura that surrounds
the usual concept of the world of the classical pianist
It was
very natural, then, to begin the conversation with the comment that no one had
heard Glenn Gould play a live concert in the United States for a number of
years. His reply was typical
96
Nobody
else has either because I haven't given concerts since 1964. In the first
place, I toured for only eight years, which is really not very long. In the 1956-57
season, I began touring Europe as well as the United States, and that continued
to '64. Before I began touring in '56, I had not in my whole life played more
than may be thirty or forty concerts; and that's incredibly few. But I did a
lot of broadcasting at that time and I found even in my early teens that for me
the most comfortable situation was the studio environment and not the concert
environment (...).
From
the moment I began broadcasting, that medium seemed like another world,
as indeed it is. The moment I began to experi-ence the studio environment, my
whole reaction to what I could do with music under the proper circumstances
changed totally. From then on, concerts were less than second best; they were
merely something to be gotten through. They were a very poor substitute for a
real artistic experience.
Now, I
obviously couldn't imagine how many effects this view was going to have on my
life, but I was immediately attracted to the whole electronic experience (...).
After a time, about 1956 or '57, I became
profoundly dissatisfied with the whole experience of giving concerts because
not only did I not enjoy them per se, but my then-new
experience with recording now put what I was going to do in concert in direct
competition with what I could do in the studio; and I knew there was no way
those two things could properly be reconciled. The recording, for me, is not a
picture postcard of a concert. The attempt to record as though one is trying to
capture a mystical moment in time - so-and-so at the Royal Albert Hall on a
particular night with eighty-five de-gree temperature and ninety percent
humidity - is a form of neoromanticism. Trying to capture such a mood, I think,
is against the nature of the recording process because, first of all,
recordings are to be a certain degree timeless. Recordings are something
outside of history, outside of a particular environment context (.,.).
As long
as we're on the subject of recordings, which would you say are your finest
recording accomplishments? Is there any one or two or three, or any group of
things that you've done that stand out as especially good to you?
My
favorite record from my catalogue, I think, is a recording of music by Byrd and
Gibbons which, first of all, as music, is very close to my heart. I have
always been very fond of music for the virginals - indeed, all of the music of
the English Tudor com-posers-and, fortunately, I have a piano which can be made
to sound rather harpsichordistic, if not clavichordistic.
It is
strange you should choose that recording. Ordinarily when one thinks of Glenn
Gould, one thinks of Schoenberg and Bach. Would you say you're a specialist in
those two areas, or would you not, want to be labeled in any such way?
97
I don't
mind being labeled as a specialist that way, but I think it's necessary
occasionally to remind people that I have also recorded all the Mozart sonatas,
most of the Beethoven sonatas, and of course all the Beethoven concertos, as well as
a lot of things by Hindemith, and pieces by Prokofieff, and Grieg, and Bizet,
and Scriabin, and so on. As a matter of fact, not long ago I recorded an album
of Sibelius (...).
What is
it about Schoenbergs music that attracts you?
I think
I was first attracted to it because some of my teachers hated it... . Actually
I've always been attracted to music that is in one way or another contrapuntal,
whereas I'm essentially bored by homophonic music. Indeed, I've often said that
I have something like a century-long blind spot with regard to music. It's
roughly demar-cated by The Art of Fugue on one side and Tristan on
the other, and almost everything in between is, at best, the subject of admira-tion
rather than love. I'd have to exclude Beethoven from that gen-eralization and
certain works of Haydn and Mendelssohn, but there's a great deal of music
written during that time that I don't play at all - Schubert, Chopin, Schumann,
for example. (...).
And my
tastes in contemporary music, similarly, are really very limited. I cannot bear
Stravinsky, for example; I've never been able to tolerate his music. And his
music certainly is vertically oriented to a very high degree, and only
minimally interesting from the hori-zontal perspective. By comparison, the
integration between line and harmonic balance is very apparent in the best of
Schoenberg's works; in fact, one could say that the pursuit of that kind of
integration is one of Schoenberg's tradesmarks, and I'm not just speaking of
the twelve-tone works. But as far as what attracts me is concerned, I guess I'd
have to say that I'm attracted to different aspects of his art at different
periods of his life. (...). Experiments aside, I find the mood of those early
twelve-tone pieces remarkable. They have a charm and freshness of approach
which is quite extraordinary (...).
What
about Bach?
Well,
you know, the only pianist who had any kind of influence on me when I was
growing up-vis-à-vis the Bach repertoire - was Rosalyn Tureck.* I have a great
admiration for her principally be-cause, back in the forties when I was a
student, one was told one must look for guidance regarding Bach interpretation
to figures like Edwin Fisher, Landowska, Casals, and so on. And these were
late-romantic figures who certainly played in a very mesmeric way - no question
about it. But what they did, for the most part, didn't seem to me to have a
great deal to do with Bach. And then I heard Tureck. By the time I heard her
recordings, I was, I think, about sixteen (...) By that time, my own style was
quite formed - spare,
98
unpedaled;
and then I heard somebody else who was doing some-thing essentially similar...
And so my exposure to her recordings was not so much a question of influence as
of reinforcement; it was nice to know that somebody else was working in
essentially the same di-rection. I must say that I found her tempi then, as I
do now, un-necessarily slow most of the time; but that didn't really matter be-cause
the relationship between the parts, both in terms of architec-tural parts, and
linear parts, was so well thought out that tempo be-came a relative,
essentially unimportant matter, subservient to some-thing else.
What
about the format, the represantation, for example, of the recital? There are
rumors that the recital format is out, or at least is on way out.
Well, I
don't go to concerts - I rarely did, even when I was giv-ing them... so I can't
honestly tell you that such a format has no validity in today's scheme of
things. But it doesn't for me, certainly, as far as I'm concerned, music is
something that ought to be lis-tened to in private. I do not believe that it
should be treated as group therapy or any kind of communal experience. I think
that mu-sic ought to lead the listener - and, indeed, the performer - to a
state of contemplation, and I don't think it's really possible to attain that
condition with 2,999 other souls sitting all around. So my strongest objections
to the concert are primarily moral rather than musical (...).
From: Great Pianists Speak for
Themselves by E. Mach
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
1.
Briefly outline Gould's career, describe his repertoire.
2. What
points are discussed in the Interview with Gould? What did the recording
process mean to Glenn Gould?
3. Why
does the interpreter of Bach's keyboard music have to solve the problems of
tempo, dynamics, and articulation? What is it that makes Gould's interpretation
an authentic performance?
4. Do
you agree with Glenn Gould that music must be listened to in private? Give your
reasons.
5. What
do you know about Gould's visit to the Soviet Union?
6.
Which do you prefer: to hear Bach's keyboard music played on the harpsichord or
on the piano? Why? Who, in your opinion, is the best harpsichordist of our
time?
7. Why,
in your opinion, do some performers differ vastly in their artistic approach to
the recording studio and the concert hall?
THE
ART OF VIOLIN PLAYING: EUGENE YSAYE
Ysaye, Eugene
(1858-1931), Belgian violinist, conductor, and composer. He studied at the
Liege Conservatoire with Joseph Massait, and later with Wieniawsky
99
(from 1873) and
Vleuxtemps (from 1876). From 1879 to 1882 Ysaye was first violin in Belse's
orchestra (Berlin). In the early 1880s he gave some successful concerts in
Leipzig and Paris. From 1886 to 1898 Eugène Ysaye held a professorship at the Brussels Conservatoire,
training a whole galaxy of excellent violinists. He founded and conducted the
Ysaye concerts in Brussels. His American début was in 1894. Ysaye made many tours
from 1899. His appearances on the leading concert plat-forms of the world,
which lasted for nearly forty years, comprise an epoch in the history of
musical interpretation at the turn of the century. Ysaye was considered - one
of the most remarkable virtuosi of his day, with powerful tone. He wrote six
violin concertos, several solo violin sonatas. He conducted the Cincinnati
Symphony Orchestra from 1918 to 1922.
Eugène Ysaye's
artistic personality should be studied in its unity of performer and composer.
It cannot be denied that his aesthetic views underwent certain modifications in
the course of his life.
While
speaking of his many-sided musical gifts and noting the artistic value of some
of his compositions, we should, nevertheless, accord first place to Ysaye's art
as an interpreter, for it was this art that for decades used to attract vast audiences
in all parts of the world and excite their unbounded admiration. Eugène
Ysaye was nicknamed "the king of violinists", "the artist of
the bow", "the king of the violin", and his concerts were
invariably his triumphs.
In the
first place, it was the artist's rich gifts, his vivid creative personality.
His listeners were captivated by the romantic fervor, poetry, lyricism and
improvisatory nature of his interpretation, and they enjoyed the artist's
original and perfect mastery of all the ex-pressive potentialities of his
instrument.
Eugène Ysaye
is often spoken of as the last representative of the romantic trend in violin
playing, a trend initiated by Paganini, whose exponents - in a greater or less
degree - were Joseph Slavik, Henryk Wieniawski, Henry Vieuxtemps,
Pablo de Sarasate and some other virtuosi of the past
century.
At the
same time much in Ysaye's playing was determined by realistic principles.
Ysaye's
art was truthful and sincere, deeply felt and thought out. He used to say that
art was the result of perfect harmony between thought and feeling.
His
vivid artistic personality, rich imagination, unity of emotion and intellect,
subjective and lyrical, and the objective and the no-tional; his ability to
bend his artistic impulses to the logic of the phrase and of the entire work,
are qualities which put Ysaye in the same rank with such outstanding performers
as Joachim, Casals, Enesco, Rachmaninov - to name but a few.
As in
the case of these artists-instrumentalists, the originality of Ysaye's performing
style was determined by his own creative person-ality and by the national
cultural idiosyncrasies. Like these artists, the Belgian musician fully
understood the creative nature of the in-terpretative art. He highly valued the
ability of the artist to create visions, to express good and bad, joy and
sorrow.
100
An
entry in Ysaye's notebook reads: "Without the interpreter the composition
is a voice crying in the wilderness... The interpretative artist is the
life-blood of music."
Eugene
Ysaye possessed a rare gift of penetrating the spirit of the music he was
playing. He could bring it to life likе none other. The means he employed for this purpose
were his astonishingly pure and expressive tone, warm vibration, virtuoso
technique that was perfectly natural and spontaneous, exceedingly wide range of
dynam-ics and highly original and poetic rubato.
This
last device enabled the artist, for all his rhythmic precision, to
overcome the purely metronomic regularity and attain a living declamatory
phrasing, which was always noted by his contemporaries.
His
rubato was not a matter of chance - it was called forth by the logic of the
phrase, while its duration was determined by the artist's feeling, thinking and
sense of style, of the spirit, of the work performed. Deeply thought out in the
course of preliminary work and brought in conformity with the musical phrase,
Ysaye's rubato during the performance was the result of his artistic
intuition and in-spiration of the moment. It was simple and natural and usually
k did not go beyond a musical phrase and contained no hint at premeditated
effect.
"You
must phrase as you breathe," Eugene Ysaye used to say. ;
Ysaye's
style of interpretation combined the subjective and the objective; he knew how
to convey the essence of the work per-formed and do it not in a detached and
passionless way but to im-bue his performance with his own artistic
understanding and creative feeling. The interpretative artist "must be at
once subjective and ob-jective, he must be able to penetrate even deeper than
the author himself into the aesthetics of the work. It is for him to bring into
relief all those evanescent details which the author does not underline or even
write, details which do not become apparent when the work is merely read. The
interpretative artist is a sculptor whose work may well become permanent, for
once a character has been created and has been brought into being by a model
interpretation, it becomes a tradition. It remains an example to be followed,
and is an integral part of the work itself," wrote Ysaye in his notebook.
Ysaye's beautiful and expressive tone was particularly
impressive: now powerful and manly and again tender and lyrical, it was invari-ably
pure and singing.
In everything he plays, Ysaye appears before us as a
sincere and inspired artist who seems to share with the listeners his own emo-tions
and moods, which cannot but reach the very heart of his audi-ence,
From: Eugene Ysaye by L. Ginsburg
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
1. Speak about Ysaye's career as a concert violinist
and a com-poser. What compositions did he write?
101
2. Give
the distinguishing features of his style of performance. In what lies the
explanation of the tremendous impact of Ysaye's playing?
3. How
do you understand Ysaye's statement: "You must phrase as you
breathe"?
4. What
do you know about Ysaye's tours of Russia, his pro-grammes? What were the
reviews likе?
5. What
do you know about the Queen Elizabeth Competitions? When was the competition
founded and what was it origi-nally called? How often does the competition take
place? Which outstanding Soviet violinists won prizes in this compe-tition?
6.
Divide the text into logical parts, give a title to each of them and summarize
the text in writing.
THE WORLD OF OPERA
HANDEL
IN PERFORMANCE
To mark
the Handel tercentenary SIR CHARLES MACKERRAS, eminent practitioner of Handel
on stage, discusses the practical problems of performing his operas in
conversation with HAROLD ROSENTHAL.
HAROLD ROSENTHAL: How
were you first attracted to Han-del opera?
CHARLES
MACKERRAS: The way that so many people with English musical backgrounds were -
through the oratorios, and then through the instrumental music. Only much later
did it become clear to me that Handelian opera séria could
be viable as a dramatic en-tertainment rather than just as music. I'd conducted
a great deal of Handel but I'd never worked on an opera on stage before doing Julius
Caesar for the ENO.*
H.R.:
Did you have doubts as to whether Handel opera was fea-sible in dramatic terms?
C.M.:
I'd never thought that it could be staged until I'd seen performances in which
they did Handel as I imagine the composer himself thought of it - without
trying to send it up, or do it as if it were a play within a play, or change
the order of the sequences, or generally dramatise it in a way different from that
which the com-poser intended. The operas are of course intensely naive: the
good people very, very good and the bad people very, very bad. But Han-del,
being a greater composer than all the other opera composers of the time,
manages through his music to portray deeper characters than the librettists
ever imagined, just as Mozart did two generations later.
H.R.:
Are the conventions readily acceptable to an audience in the 1980s, or do you
have to compromise?
C.M.: I
don't see that they are any more difficult to accept than any other form of
non-realistic opera. The exaggerated good, the ex-
102
aggerated
evil of the characters and the way they react are no more unacceptable than
many of the characters in a Verdi or Donizetti opera: it all depends oh the way
it's put over as to whether it's dramatically effective or not. If you have
theatrical animals perform-ing the various roles it will be a dramatic entity,
if you have mere puppets just singing the notes and not acting out the words,
then it will not impinge upon the audience as drama.
H.R.:
How do you get singers today who, after all, have not been brought up in the
Handel tradition unless they happen to be British oratorio singers, to acquire
Handelian discipline, and how do they react to this kind of formal music?
C.M.:
There are now large numbers of English and English-speaking singers who take
very readily to the Handelian style and to the style of the "aria"
opera.* You said "the discipline" - I think the discipline is something
they have to do for themselves. The arias are tremendously taxing whether or
not you add ornamentations - they are difficult enough to sing as written.
People who try to reconstruct the original performance conditions know that the
singers used to improvise freely, particularly in da-capo
arias,* and they tend to write out ornaments that often don't sound natural.
You've got to have a singer who is adept at ornamentation and able to make it
sound as though it is improvised, even though it is not. Perfor-mances of
Handel in the early 18th century or of Mozart in the late 18th century were
much more informal affairs than they are now, the singers would frequently talk
to people in the audience, particu-larly aristocrats - they had much more
personal contact and were less concerned with building character than they are
today. It's difficult dealing with the "aria" opera today, because
modern producers ex-pect singers to perform the same actions exactly in every
perfor-mance, while the musicians tend to lay down exactly what kind of
ornaments will be sung, what appoggiatura* on
which note, and the singers perform them the same way every time. It wasn't
done that way in Handel's time.
H.R.:
Do you believe in performing the scores in full, or are there times when they
should be cut?
C.M.:
Many of the long operas can be cut. In festival perfor-mances, of course, there
is a stronger case for doing them complete than in a run of performances in a
repertory house. (...)
H.R.: I
don't know whether you heard Handel performances in the immediate post-war
period in Germany, but in your experience how does the German Handelian
tradition differ from our own?
C.M.:
Where does one start? It is so different. Not to speak of production, but just
musically... The idea has always been that the opera-seria style needed
an interpretation.
H.R.:
With a capital "I"?
C.M.:
Yes, and in inverted commas. It needed bringing up to date to make it
acceptable. All those words in inverted commas! Ac-ceptable to audiences. The
whole opera-seria style, even as applied
103
by
Mozart to works like Idomeneo, Remember the version that Richard Strauss
did of Idomeneo: he thought that it needed to be altered, bearbeitet* in order
to make it acceptable to a modern audi-ence.
H.R.:
As also with Gluck - Strauss and Gluck. C.M.:
Exactly, and Wagner too. They saw that whole style of opera through the style
of their own music and their own period. The big difference today is that we
are at least trying to imagine how Handel might have seen his own works and how
audiences might have reacted to them, and to create similar circumstances in
which we can try and make our audiences see the drama in Han-del's operas as people
in the 18th century also felt the greatness of his music. That's the difference
between performances of ancient music in the first half of the 20th century and
the second. In the first half they were constantly trying to make works such as
Han-del's acceptable; they realised that the music was great and felt they had
to change it about. In the second half we're trying to see the music as it
might have been seen by its composer and the people of his time. There's still
plenty of scope. There are many different styles of performing Handel's music
all of which claim to be either authentic or in the spirit of the period, and
the same is true of the production side. Producers claim that they are
interpreting Handel in a way that he might have approved of, getting down to
the roots of the music and the drama. Each generation produces a new kind of
so-called authentic interpretation. The word "authentic" is bandied
about too much these days, I think. What does it mean? There are endless
varieties of authenticity. I myself, although I take my role very seriously as
a person who tries to create the atmosphere of original performances, to delve
into the minds of Handel and Mozart, I'm terribly wary of using the word
"authentic" because, just as in fads in medicine, in three years'
time there'll be a new authentic way of doing the music. We strive to get
nearer and nearer to the sound that Mozart and Handel would have heard, but
often I feel that when we get near to it we don't really like it. I've recently
heard several performances of Mozart operas by various people, all of them
claiming to be more or less authentic, and I must say that although I'm a
stickler for authenticity myself, I didn't like the sound that was produced. So
just as there are infinite varieties of interpreting the works of the great
masters in an unauthentic way, then even within the framework of so-called
authenticity there is still a virtually infinite variety of interpretation.
That is one of the fascinating things about the great masterpieces: they still
emerge as masterpieces however you perform them.
H.R:
I'm very glad you're wary about using the word "authenticity". What
is authentic in one age is not considered au-thentic in another. What Beecham
might have considered an authen-tic version, for example, we don't today.
C.M.:
They used the word in a very different sense. I don't
104
think
Beecham cared about authenticity - it's a relatively new con-cept. So is
"interpretation". People didn't talk about interpretation 100 years
ago. They performed the music as best they could with their own virtuosity.
They didn't interpret music as a modern con-ductor does. The old conductor was
just a time-beater. The differ-ence between a good and a bad conductor was
whether he set the right tempo, whether he could train an orchestra to play the
work correctly. Nowadays we take it for granted that the music is played
correctly and we expect interpretation into the bargain. A very new thing!
H.R.:
Have you ever heard Toscanini's definition of tradition? "Some fool's
memory of the last bad performance."
C.M.:
Yes, that marries up with Mahler's "Tradition is slovenli-ness." It's
a similar concept, isn't it?
From: Opera,
1985 Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
1. What
points about the production of Handel's operas are dis-cussed in the interview?
2. What
is Mackerras' view on Handel's music and the librettos?
3. How
does Mackerras characterize great Handelian singers? What special vocal
training and qualities do Handelian operas require from the singers?
4. What
problems confront the present-day producer in staging Handel's operas? How have
Handel's operas been made ac-ceptable to the present day public? How has the
problem of authentic performance been tackled?
5.
Which of Handel's operas have been staged in the Soviet Un-ion? Have you heard
any of them, live or recorded? Express your opinion. Do you think Handel's
operas suitable for staging nowadays?
6. What
are your views on authenticity of performance? Do you share Mackerras' view?
How would you answer those ques-tions which were put to Mackerras?
FRANCO
ZEFFIRELLI: THE ROMANTIC REALIST
by Lanfranco
Rasponi
Franco
Zeffirelli has left his mark in stage direction as well as set and costume
designs for opera, theater, television and cinema. He goes from one to the
other with skill, assurance and ease. Watching him rehearse an opera is an
engrossing experience. He is never prejudiced and will listen to advice if he
deems it sensible. He never asks the impossible of singers, knowing
instinctively their limitations, working his way around them with a firm yet
elastic hand.
105
Between
making Endless Love and the delicate, long task of cutting it, he
managed to squeeze in a new Cavalleria and Pagliaccl at La Scala
in January 1981, even filming it for television with a few changes in cast
(Teresa Stratas taking on Nedda, Renato Bruson as Alfio). (...) After launching
his new Bohème at the Metropolitan, he has a new Traviata
coming up at London's Covent Garden, which he will also film. These opera
motion pictures are intended not for television but for regular audiences.
Zeffirelli feels they now have a far bigger opportunity to succeed than
previously, not only because of the greater thirst of the public for this
formula but also because of advanced techniques in the medium. (...)
Since
long before Zeffirelli became an international celebrity, he has gone at a
furious pace, though he no longer needs to prove himself. His hair is now
silvery, but he still maintains the same youthful face on which are mirrored
the frequent changes of his state of mind. It is difficult to keep him on one
subject for long: his interests are so varied, his thinking so agile, that he
jumps away from the discussion.
How and
when he finds time to read has always been a mys-tery, but somehow he does. Not
only is he highly cultivated on artistic and humanistic levels, he is generally
well-informed as to what is going on everywhere. (...)
Asked
to define his continued success, he replied, "We have no guarantee for the
present or the future. Therefore the only choice is to go back to the past and
respect traditions. I have been a pioneer in this line of thinking, and the
results have proven me right. People who think they can do better than
previously, interpreting works of art in a new key, are very foolish. The
reason I am box-office ev-erywhere is that I am. an enlightened conservative
continuing the dis-course of our grandfathers and fathers, renovating the texts
but never betraying them. The road has been irrevocably lost, and there must be
a seath as to why and where this new breed of destructive thinking came into
being, often encouraged by the press. (...)
In
regard to Wagner, it has been said I'm not interested in di-recting his operas,
but nothing would please me more, and Carlos Kleiber wants
me to collaborate with him on Tristan. The problem is, how can one do
this glorious work without the proper voices? Kleiber is
unhappy about the recent recording he made - he had hoped, with the miracles of
recent sound technique, the vocalists would appear more heroic. I'm not a
director who worries only about the stage. The
music is an essential part of the package, and I'm stunned by the shortage of
first-rate singers. I can always find solutions for great singers who are not
gifted actors, but there's nothing to be done about those who have a sense of
theater and no voices. While acting is important in opera, the voice comes
first, in no uncertain terms. Pathos or comedy is just as much vocal as vi-sual."
As for
his new production of La Bohème at the
Metropolitan, he
106
related,
"Strangely, it's only the second time I've agreed to do this opera. The
first, with Karajan in 1963 at La Scala, was such a suc-cess
that for a long time I didn't see how I could improve it. It is still being
given, with another series of performances last May, and it went on loan to the
Salzburg Easter Festival and Vienna State Opera. I accepted the Met's
invitation when I realized, with such an imposing revolving stage, I could
fulfil ideas that had been circulating in my head for some time. This new
conception brings out the fragility of the Bohemian group as against the large,
gray French capital. (...)"
Discussing
Zeffirelli's career, it is difficult to stick to opera. So many other elements
have entered into it, starting with architecture studies at the University of
Florence and going on to his long ap-prenticeship in various phases of the
entertainment world, leading eventually to his explosion into orbit. Though he
really began as an actor, he also got started early in opera at the famous
Academia Chigiana in Siena. Here his mother's first cousin, the former
La Scala soprano Ines Alfani Tellini, not only
taught interpretation in the summer courses but also put on productions of
forgotten mas-terpieces to give experience to her students. She asked Franco to
help with sets and costumes, and he turned out delightful, inexpen-sive décor for the
revivals of La Zingara by Rinaldo di Capua, Il Giocatore by
Orlandini and Le Serve Rivait by
Traetta. He knew he could deal with opera, a form he had loved since childhood.
But fur-ther work had to wait a while, because he was involved in other
projects.
His
first meeting with Visconti was in 1947. The great innovator of the
Italian legitimate theater had come to rehearse Tobacco Road at the
Pergola in Florence with Vittorio Gassman and Massimo Girotti. (...) The
following year Visconti engaged Zeffirelli to act in Anouilh's Eurydice and an
adaptation of Dostoevsk's Crime and Punishment, alongside some of
Italy's most highly reputed actors. From then on, all Visconti's productions
credited the name of Zef-firelli in some capacity. (...)
For
several years Zeffirelli worked as Visconti's assistant director, and he also
designed the décor and costumes for most of Visconti's
theatrical ventures.
"I
was contracted to design a new Italiana in Algerl in 1953 with Giulietta
Simionato and Giulini conducting," he said. "It was a hit, and when
they offered me Cenerentola for the next season, with more or less the
same principals and conductor, I accepted, providing they also let me do the
directing. That same year I went on to L'Elisir d'Amore, with Giulini
again, Di Stefano at the top of his form and Rosanna Carteri.
"In
1955 came my first experience with Maria Callas, in the only comic opera
she ever really scored in, Il Turco in Italia. My inter-national
career began the following year with a production of Falstaff, again
with Giulini, at the Holland Festival. My association
107
with
Covent Garden started in 1959 with Lucia di Lammermoor at the
suggestion of Tullio Serafin - a real event, which established Joan Sutherland
as a star. (...)"
Asked
who was the most complete singing actor or actress he had worked with, without
a moment's hesitation, Franco answered, "Maria - a genius in every role
she approached. (...) I worked with her on La Traviata, Lucia, Norma and
Tosca in Dallas, London and Paris. There were some really glorious
moments, but then I lived through the nightmare when she became more and more
un-sure of herself and the voice began to decline. At moments she was
courageous, at others terribly afraid. Sometimes she made me feel I was very
close to her, then suddenly there existed a wall. In the end she withdrew from
everyone. I have known many complex human beings in my life but none more than
she." (...)
At
fifty-eight, Zeffirelli has more than fifty opera productions be-hind him. The
works that fascinate him most are Falstaff and Don Giovanni. One he
hates with a passion is the late Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, which
opened the new Met in 1966. "I didn't really believe in it from the
beginning, but Mr. Bing had made his decision, commissioned the score and felt
that it should be the work of an American composer. I liked Vanessa well
enough and hoped this would even be better. At the orchestra rehearsals I kept
waiting for some real music to emerge, but there is more meat in II Segreto
di Susanna. When I tried to tell Sam that he must reinforce the score, he
was adamant. I kept sensing a precipice facing us and did all I could to
compensate with a lavish spectacle. We headed toward disaster, the score
redeemed by a lovely finale, superbly sung by Leontyne Price."
Franco
has seven productions of Falstaff to his credit, including the one that
marked his bow at the Met in 1964. Now he would like to do another, with Carlos
Kleiber, whom he finds the kind of perfectionist that is
disappearing from the musical scene. (...)
What
opera heroine does he consider the most complete? "Undoubtedly
Violetta," he declared. "There's not one superfluous note. Then there
are Carmen and Tosca, and it's interesting that all three existed as literary
figures before being put to music. (...)"
"Opera
is far more stable than the legitimate stage," ne went
on. "The same works appeal to totally different publics, but with plays,
one never knows. Two De Filippo comedies I directed in London with Sir
Laurence and Lady Olivier were a tremendous suc-cess, but in the
U.S. this Italian playwright is not appreciated, de-spite the huge
Italo-American audience."
While
he serves his art, he leads his profession. As he says, "Let's respect the
geniuses responsible for these supreme works of art and realize we're here only
to serve them."
From: Opera
News, 1982
108
Comprehension
Questions and Points for Discussion
1. What
is Zeffirelli's artistic approach to the score?
2.
Briefly outline his career as an opera and film director.
3. Find
in the text the passage describing Zeffirelli's principles of casting the
singers for his productions. Do you agree with him? Explain.
4. When
and how did his collaboration with Maria Callas begin?
In what productions did she appear?
5. What
was Zeffirelli's contribution to the art of opera produc-tion? Name some of his
world-famous productions.
6.
Summarize the text.
7. Have
you seen Zeffirelli's film La Traviata with Teresa Stratas as Violetta?
What do you think of the film? What other films were produced by Zeffirelli?
LA
DIVINA: MARIA CALLAS
Maria Callas (1923-1977),
American-born soprano of Greek parentage. Studied at the Athens National
Conservatory from 1936 with the Spanish coloratura soprano Elvira di Hidalgo.
Her Italian debut was in Verona, in 1947, in La Ciaconda. Her
potentialities were recognized by the conductor Tullio Serafin when, in 1948,
she was singing Brunnhilde in Venice. With Serafin and de Sabata,
Callas revived operas wholly or relatively neglected in Italy for over a
century, including Rossini's Armida and Il Turco in Italia, Cherubini's
Medea, Donizetti's Anna Bolena, and Bellini's // Pirata, thereby
changing the face of the post-1945 opera repertory. Maria Callas made her
La Scala début in 1951. From then until 1959 she reigned supreme
there, earning the title La divina in her vivid portrayals of Norma,
Violetta, and Tosca, working with de Sabata, Giulini, Bernstein, and Karajan as conductors,
and the pro-ducers Visconti and Zeffirelli. Her musicianship was
impeccable, her insight remark-able, and her acting ability exceptional, so
that she presented her roles as organic wholes. Her Norma, Tosca, and Violetta
were unforgettable examples of dramatic opera singing-acting. Callas sang at
Covent Garden in 1952-53 (Norma), 1957-59, and 1964, and at the Metropolitan
Opera in 1956 (Norma). She retired from the stage in 1965 (her last performance
was as Tosca at Covent Garden), but she continued to record and gave some
concerts in 1973 and 1974.
From: The
Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music
It has
been suggested, and not without reason, that Callas' "voice
had less going for it than any other voice that has achieved interna-tional
celebrity via the phonograph - a medium that necessarily puts a premium on
timbral endowment, since it cannot directly transmit physical and dramatic
qualities." Yet it was a voice that was better than beautiful, for it was
a voice which once heard could not be easily forgotten. It haunted and
disturbed as many as it thrilled and inspired, and it was the very personal
colours of her voice, combined with its deficiencies, which made her sound so
strikingly individual.
Her
manner of singing was equally arresting. Callas had a stern bel canto upbringing
from her teacher Elvira di Hidalgo, a musical
109
outlook
later reinforced by her mentor Tullio Serafin. This sort of vocal
strait-jacketing was ideally suited to Callas' nature. She was a
committed traditionalist, a musical puritan, who eagerly sought stylis-tic
boundaries and flourished within them. The greater the confines, the greater
was the challenge and, ultimately, the freedom. A score set forth the
limitations of a given problem for her. The mastering of a problem was the
incentive which spurred Callas on to conquer, and
to set and meet new demands on her voice and her abilities. This, in turn, led
to a prodigious grasp of such challenges as the trill, the acciaccatura,*
scales, gruppetti and other abbellimenti.* These,
combined with her open throat, an inborn sense of legato, and diction rooted in
vowels, all predestined her prominence in the bel canto repertory,
though her voice was basically that of a dra-matic soprano.
In the
long run, however, Callas' distinct sound and her technical
achievements would have been less influential if she had not em-ployed both to
shape music to creative and expressive ends. All the resources open to a singer
- breath, tempo, dynamic and agogic ac-cents,*
embellishments, rubato,* even silences* - were used to their fullest to
communicate impressions and moods. Indeed, Callas seemed
incapable of being inexpressive; even a simple scale sung by her implied a
dramatic attitude or feeling. This capacity to communi-cate is something she
was born with. It was her capacity for hard work and her equally great
curiosity which led her to question re-lentlessly what score demanded of her,
and what she in turn de-manded of herself. Little by little she mastered the
art of filling a phrase to exactly the right level of expression and producing
unerringly the right stress to underline or highlight a thought. At her finest,
Callas' voice became a mirror held up to human emotion. At her
best, tone and intent were wonderously interlocked. She never offered a string
of high points in performance mixed in with indif-ferent or unfinished patches,
as many do. With Callas, a recitative was as integrated and
thoughtful as an aria. Perhaps you could not agree with this or that aspect of
her singing, and you might feel that she was as wrong for this role as she was
right for that one, but Callas was usually able to
force one to accept or reject her con-cept as a whole, so clear-eyed and
consistent was her approach to a past. This was her ultimate justification as
an artist.
From: The Callas Legacy by
J. Aidoin
CALLAS REMEMBERED
by Herbert
Von Karajan
She was
born with the instinct of the true prima donna, and that, I think,
is something one cannot learn. I don't know if this was really the case, but
certainly before an audience she displayed remarkable assurance, and enthusiasm
quite out of the ordinary: she really believed in opera. 110
Her
roots were in bel canto, of which she was an admirable ex-ponent.
It should also be said that she was marvellously guided by that master and
great connoisseur of bel canto style Tullio Serafin.
One
very characteristic aspect of her personality was the im-mense care she took
with preparation. She would already have mastered a work by the time she
arrived for the first rehearsal, which meant of course that we could then work
on those details that lent her performances such authenticity. She grasped
everything immediately. It was unthinkable that she would ever bring a score,* as so many singers do. She was
sure of herself, and she understood things straight away, without the slightest
prompting - hence my great admiration for her. We always worked happily
together. She didn't have very good eyesight - I doubt she could even see the
conduc-tor-but she was guided by an inner sense. She would turn her back to you
and sing perfectly in tempo. With her, making music was the simplest thing in
the world.
From: Gramophone,
1987
Comprehension Questions and Points
for Discussion
1.
Briefly describe Callas' career.
2. What
kind of voice did she have? Characterize her style of performance.
3. Which
tenor was her almost constant partner?
4. What
was Callas' approach to the score? How did she work on it?
5. In
what roles did she excel?
6.
Which of Callas' qualities did Karajan point out in his
mem-oirs?
7. What
makes Maria Callas a great opera singer?
8. Have
you heard any of her records? What do you think of them?
PETER
PEARS: RONALD CRICHTON SPEAKS
It is
hard to think of any British male singer who has had so long, versatile and
influential a career.
Pears
was born in 1910 at Farnham, Surrey. He won a scholar-ship to the Royal College
of Music in London, sang in the BBC Chorus, and, in 1938, the Glyndebourne
Festival Chorus. By now he had met the young Britten, whose lifelong companion
and chosen interpreter he became. They had already given the first of what was
to become a long and outstandingly distinguished series of recitals in which
the song-cycles which Britten wrote for them featured with other English songs
of many styles and periods and - most notably - with the Lieder* of
Schubert and Schumann.
With
Britten he went to the USA in 1939 for three years. On their return Pears
started his operatic career, mainly, in those days,
111
at
Sadler's Wells. Here, in 1945, he sang the title-role in the memo-rable first performance
of Peter Crimes, the first of many leading roles composed by Britten
"on" the voice of Pears, culminating nearly 30 years later in Aschenbach in Death
in Venice (1973).
Profound
musicianship, intelligence and theatrical flair enabled Pears to be convincing
in characters one might have thought outside his natural scope - for example
the rough, half-crazed fisherman Grimes, the grocer's boy Albert Herring, the
Madwoman in Curlew River.* It was
less surprising (though the degree of success was re-markable) that he should
shine as the introspective Vere in Billy Budd, as the sinister Quint in The
Turn of the Screw, the impetu-ous Essex in Gloriana, and the
military grandfather in Owen Win-grave. He excelled in the principal
tenor roles of Mozart, coming to Idomeneo at about the same age as Raaff, the
original singer of the
role.
Of
equal importance was Sir Peter's Protean concert work, not only in recital with
Britten and other eminent partners but in spe-cially-written works by Berkeley,
Tippett, Henze and many other composers. He was pre-eminent in oratorio - Schütz, the
Bach Pas-sions (as Evangelist), Elgar's Gerontius,* Britten's
War Requiem. These no less than his operatic roles made him a widely
admired figure in Europe and further afield.
Pears
was a founder-member of the English Opera Group, a re-sourceful, tireless,
active director of the Aldeburgh Festival, a pillar of the Britten-Pears School
at nearby Snape. Through these and kindred activities he left his mark on the
succeeding generation of British singers. He was not inimitable. Many singers
could and did imitate, even unconsciously mimic, him. But his influence went
deeper than the surface mannerisms. Numerous gramophone records will perpetuate
as well as peculiarities of timbre and diction his acutely musical style, and
his wide culture, gift for languages and his unassailable musical integrity.
He was
made a CBE* in 1957 and knighted* in 1977.
From opera,
1986. Abridged
Discussion Activities
Comprehension
Questions and Points for Discussion
1. What
have you learnt about Pears' career, his personality, his style of performance?
2.
Which operatic roles did Britten compose for Peter Pears?
3. What
was Peter Pears' contribution to operatic art?
4. Have
you heard Pears' recordings? What do you think of his style of performance?
112
Questions
on the Topic about the World of Opera
1.
Which, in your opinion, is more important in opera: a good director or good
opera singers? What makes a good opera production? What do you think of the
Wagnerian ideal of production?
2. What
are some of the problems in producing historically-accu-rate scores for opera
production? What are some of the problems in adapting historical subjects for
modern opera or-chestras and singers?
3. What
is the status of opera nowadays? Will it survive?
4.
What, in your opinion, are the functions of music critics? Do you find their
reviews useful? Can we have an absolute scale for judging works of art? Who
could establish it and how?
5.
Write a composition or give a short talk on your ideal opera production.
6.
Write a favourable (or unfavourable) review of a recent opera performance.
NOTES
Page 5
Impressionism - an artistic
movement of the late 19th and early 20th c., represented in music chiefly by
Claude Debussy (1862-1918).
Impressionism
was first fully realized in Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun (1892) and
later in his Nocturns for Orchestra (1893-99), the orchestral suite La Mer (1903-1905),
the opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902),
and the collections for pianoforte, Images (1905, 1907), Préludes
(1910-1913). Many other composers were strongly in-fluenced by Debussy's
innovations, e.g., Ravel, Dukas, Roussel, de Séverac in
France; Delhis, Bax, Scott in England; Réspighi in Italy; Falla in Spain;
Carpenter and Griffes in America. Among important technical devices
of impressionistic style are parallel chords and the whole-tone scale.
post-Romanticism
(or late Romanticism) - a term sometimes used in reference to
composers such as Mahler, R. Strauss, and others, who continued the essential
Romantic expression in music after its high period in the mid-19th century.
Expressionism - a
term denoting a certain trend in music begin-ning during the second decade of
the 20th c., particularly in Austria and Germany. The term was taken over from
the graphic arts (Nolde, Kirchnek) and used, more or less metaphorically, for
music written in a deeply subjective and introspective style, conveying a
typical "expressionistic" expression of tortuous emotions and psycho-analytical
complexes.
The
composers most often identified as "expressionists" are Arnold
Schoenberg (who was also a talented painter), Alban Berg and to some extent Anton von Webern.
Dynamism - a
term sometimes used in reference to the style of Stravinsky about 1910. It is
characterized by a large, brilliantly colourful orchestra, by strongly
percussive rhythms in irregular metric patterns, and by harshly dissonant
harmonies.
Neoclassicism
- a movement of the 20th c., which is essentially a reaction against the
subjectivity and unrestrained emotionalism of late
114
Romanticism. It is
characterized by the adoption of aesthetic ideal and of forms or methods
derived from the music of earlier masters, especially those of the 18th c. such
as Bach, Handel, Mozart, etc. Neoclassicism became the most widespread and most
important trend in music about 1920. Stravinsky's Sonata for Pianoforte (1922)
and Octet for Wind Instruments (1923) are among the definitive exam-ples
of neoclassical style.
atonality
(literally, the absence of tonality, of a definite tonal centre) - the
abandonment of key as a system of organization. At first it was used to
describe characteristics of certain pioneering works by Schoenberg, Webern, and
Berg.
twelve-tone
technique (Am. E.), twelve-note technique (Br.
E.) - a 20th-century method of composition devised (c. 1920) by A.
Schoenberg. (See also Serial music, note to p. 6). Others, e.g. J.M. Hauer, had
invented similar systems prior to Schoenberg. A system of composition in which
all twelve tones within the octave are treated as "equal", in an
ordered relationship where no group of tones predominates as in major/minor
system.
Allegro
barbaro ('Варварское аллегро') - work for solo
piano by Bela Bartok (1921), orchestral transcription by Kenessy (1946)
Cocteau, Jean
(1889-1963) - French poet, novelist, and playwright, often
associated with music as librettist or propagandist. Wrote sce-nario for
Satie's Parade (1917) and librettos for Honegger's Antigone, Stravinsky's
Oedipus Rex, Milhaud's Le Pauvre Matelot (The
Poor Sailor), among others.
futurism
- a movement in literature and the arts founded in 1909 by the Italian writer
Filippo Marinetti (1876-1944). It emphasized the machine age and the dynamic
character of the industrial society. Musically this meant all kinds of noise,
and special instruments were invented, such as thunderers, whistlers, etc.
quarter-tone
- an interval equal to one half of half tone (one quarter of the whole tone.
Some 20th c. composers who have written in quarter tones have built special
pianos, e.g. Hans Barth and Alois Hâba. Quarter-tones
have been often used since World War II by serial composers such as Boulez,
Stockhausen, and others.
Malipiero,
Gian (1882-1973) - Italian composer. He discovered and transcribed the
almost forgotten works of Monteverdi, Tartini, Stradella, etc. This determined
him to rebel against the "operatic tyranny" of Italian musical life.
In 1913 he met Casella, who became his colleague in the struggle. He published
complete edition of Monteverdi in 1926 - 42 which stimulated present revival of
interest. Also edited many volumes of Vivaldi's complete works. Author of books
on Vivaldi, Monteverdi, and Stravinsky.
Casella,
Alfredo (1883-1947) - Italian composer, conductor, pianist,
115
and
author. Studied with Fauré at the Paris Conservatoire. A cham-pion
of all that was new in the arts. Anticipated tastes of a later epoch by
interest in Italian baroque music, particularly Vivaldi.
Milhaud,
Darius (1892-1974) - French composer and pianist, member of Les Six (The
Six). In his early works he showed a con-siderable interest in polytonality. He
experimented with many instru-mental combinations and also with tape.
Page 6
Gebrauchsmusik
(Germ.). A term
originated in the 1920's mean-ing "music for use", i.e. music
intended for practical use by ama-teurs, in the home or at informal gatherings
as distinguished from music intended for concert performance. Paul Hindemith
was closely identified with this type of music.
Johnny Spielt Auf
(Germ.) - Johnny Strikes up the Band ('Джони наигрывает'), opera in 2 acts by Ernst Krenek to his
own libretto (1927).
prepared
piano - a piano whose sound is artificially altered by various devices, e.g.,
metal clips or metal bolts attached to the strings; strips of paper, rubber,
felt, etc., inserted across the strings. The prepared piano was introduced by
John Cage (b. 1912).
concrete
music (Fr. musique concrete) - a
historical source of electro-acoustic music and a continuing genre in which
sonic material is derived from recorded sound. The first examples were music
for radio plays composed by Pierre Schaeffer at the
studios of French Radio in Paris (1948). In 1951 an experimental studio under
Schaeffer's direction was established, the first to be devoted to electronic
music (Groupe de Recherches de Musique concrete). Between
1948 and 1980, 935 works were composed in the studios, including pieces by Varèse,
Berio, Stockhausen, Cage and Boulez. See also note to p. 6 Electro-acoustic
music.
serial
music - music constructed according to permutations of a group of elements
placed in a certain order of series (tone row). These elements may include
pitches, durations, or any other musical values. Strictly speaking, serial
music encompasses twelve-tone music as well as music employing other types of
pitch series. Normally, however, the term is reserved for music that extends
classical Schoenbergian twelve-tone pitch technique and, especially, applies se-rial
control to other musical elements, such as duration. Such music, mainly
developed after World War II is often distinguished from twelve-tone serialism
as "integral" or "total" serialism.
aleatory
music - music in which the composer introduces ele-ments of
chance or unpredictability with regard to either the compo-sition or its
performance. The terms aleatoric, chance music, music of indeterminacy have
been applied to many works created since
116
1945 by
composers who differ widely as to the concepts, methods, and rigor with which
they employ procedures of random selection. The first well-known example of
20th-c. aleatory composition was John Cage's Music of Changes for piano
(1951).
Babbitt,
Milton (b. 1916) - American composer and mathemati-cian. His compositions
developed from the twelve-tone system of Schoenberg and Webern, later employing
electronic devices such as synthesizers and tape. Author of articles and
monographs on Bartok, Varèse, and Schoenberg. One of the most
influential composers and teachers in the USA since World War II.
Cage,
John (b. 1912) - American composer, pianist, and writer. Studied
with Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg. In 1938 he in-vented the
"prepared piano". Study of oriental philosophies led to his
utilization of "chance" in his music, as in Music of Changes (1951).
In 1952 he produced his first piece involving tape, Imaginary Landscape No.
5, and in the same year came 4'33" in which the performer makes
no sound. He also used a wide range of electroni-cal and visual techniques.
Feldman,
Morton (b. 1926) - American composer. His music was influenced by the
theories and ideas of John Cage and Earle Brown. He has used indeterminacy and
graphic notation in his music since Projections (1950-51).
Brown,
Earle (b. 1926) - American composer. Worked with Cage in New York
(1952-55) on a project for music for magnetic tape. Influenced by visual arts.
His Twenty-five Pages (1953) for 1-25 pi-anofortes uses
"open form" and space-time notation, e.g. pitches and durations are
specified but, clefs being absent, the pages can be played either way up. The
score consists of 25 pages to be arranged in any order. In open-form
composition the ordering and combina-tion of the written-out material is left
to the choice of the performer or conductor.
in terms of texture and color - в понятиях (категориях) фак-туры и
тембра (окраски звука)
Berio,
Luciano (b. 1925) - Italian composer. His compositions are
influenced by serialism, electronic devices and indeterminacy. He has developed
individually the "collage" technique, borrowing extracts from other
composers or imitating stylistic characteristics. Examples are Simphonia and
Laborintos II.
Foss,
Lukas (b. 1922) - German-born American composer and conductor.
Studied with Hindemith and Koussevitsky. Foss's music is both traditional and
experimental, the latter employing indeterminacy though scores are wholly
notated.
microtone - an
interval smaller than a half tone, e.g. quarter tone (see note to p. 5).
117
Johnston,
Benjamin (b. 1926) - American composer, pupil of John Cage.
Compositions which use microtones, serialism and inde-terminacy, include 3
string quarters, dance-opera, sonata for micro-tonal piano, and 2 Oboes and
2 Tables and 2 Banyas.
Kagel,
Mauricio (b. 1932) - Argentinian-born composer, conductor,
and teacher. He has worked in theatre as composer and director of his own works
since 1963. His music uses tape and electronic proce-dures. In his later works,
visual and theatrical elements ("mixed me-dia") have predominated.
Many of the scores involve indeterminacy.
Rzewsky,
Frederic (b. 1938) - American composer and pianist, pupil of
Cage and Stockhausen. He has written works involving dances, film, tape, etc.
Cardew,
Cornelius (b. 1936) - English composer and guitarist. Studied
electronic music in Cologne 1957-58, becoming an assistant to Stockhausen
1958-60. His early piano works are in the style of the early Boulez and
Stockhausen, but later compositions follow a Cage-like indeterminacy, e.g. Treatise
(1963-67).
electro-acoustic
music - music that is produced, changed, or re-produced by electronic means and
that makes creative use of elec-tronic equipment. Since 1948 several genres
have emerged that are usually related to the artistic potential of specific
electronic devices. Musique concrète (concrete music)
uses the phonograph and tape recorder to combine, modify, or store
"natural sounds". Electronic music consists either wholly or
partially of sounds produced by elec-tronic oscillators and modifying devices
such as synthesizers and then stored on magnetic tape. Tape music (USA) and
electrophonic music (Great Britain) combine concrete and
electronic sounds and tape. Computer music is either composed or generated by a
digital com-puter. Live/electronic music uses any of the equipment above for
live performance. Text-sound compositions take spoken language as their
literary and musical source.
Page 7
mixed
media - the merging of elements from different arts into a
single, composite expression, usually as in recent works in which live sound
(including music) and movement (including dance and dra-matic action), film,
tape, and setting are combined, often incorporat-ing indeterminate elements
(see note to p. 6, aleatory music) and audience participation there has
been a constant cross-fertilization between Western art music and popular music
- в западной музыкальной культуре шел непрерывный процесс взаимообогащения серьезной музы-ки и музыки массовых бытовых жанров
rock - the
dominant type of American popular music since 1955. The term, strictly defined,
refers to a musical style that emerged in
118
the
mid-1960s; in a broader sense it encompasses both this and rock-and-roll, which
prevailed in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
minimalist
school - a term applied from the early 1970s to vari-ous
compositional practices, current from the early 1960s, the features of which
(harmonic stasis, the use of rhythmic patterns, and repetition) have as their
underlying impulse the radical réduction at compositional
materials. The best-known composers of minimalist music are Le Monte
Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip
Glass.
Rochberg,
George (b. 1918) - American composer Influenced by Schoenberg Mahler,
his music developed an individual type of serialism but later returned to
tonality. Author of many critical articles.
(especially
since most composers tend to juxtapose them with post-tonal techniques) - (особенно поскольку большинство компо-зиторов стремится использовать их (т.е. классические тради-ции) наряду с пост-тональными техническими приемами)
Page 9
at the
tail end of the Wagnerian hegemony - на исходе гос-подства вагнеровской традиции
Verklärte
Nacht (Germ.) - Transfigured Night, a work
in one movement for 2 violins, 2 violas, and 2 cellos by Schoenberg, op 4
(1899) inspired by a poem of Richard Dehmel. It was later arranged for string
orchestra (1917, revised in 1943), and it has served as the basis for many
ballets, including Pillar of Fire (1942).
Tristan - Tristan
and Isolde, musical drama in 3 acts by Wagner to his own libretto (based on
G. von Strassbourg's Tristan c. 1210, and ultimately
on Arthurian legend), produced in Munich, 1865.
Pierrot
lunaire (Fr.) - Pierro in the Moonlight,
a cycle of 12 short pieces, for a "singing narrator" and chamber
orchestra by Schoenberg (1912), based on poems by A. Giraud.
Zemlinsky,
Alexander von (1872-1942) - Australian-born
composer and conductor. Studied at the Vienna Conservatory (1884-90). Be-friended
Schoenberg in Vienna, gave him counterpoint lessons. Friend of Mahler.
Harmonielehre (Germ.)
- Treatise on Harmony by Schoenberg (1911); complete English
translation by R.E. Carter, 1978.
Page 10
root - (муз.) основной тон аккорда
to which every harmony and harmonic succession must be referred - с которым должна быть соотнесена каждая
гармония или гармоническая последовательность
119
Page
11
in statu nascendi (Laù) - в состоянии зарождения
Page 12
Dohnânyi,
Erno (1877-1960) - Hungarian composer, pianist,
and conductor. Concert pianist, international repute 1897-1908.
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ancient
pentatonic Magyar airs - старинные пентатонические венгерские песни
Page 14
Ludus Tonalls (Lat) -
Tonal Play ('Игра тонов'), a work for
pianoforte (1942)
Page 15
Rameau,
Jean-Philippe (1683-1764) - French
composer, harpsi-chordist, and organist, author of the famous Treatise on
Harmony (1722)
Gebrauchsmusik (Germ.)
- see note to p. 6
Neues vom
Tage (Germ.) - News of the Day,
comic opera in 3 parts by Hindemith to the libretto by М. Schiffer
Berlin Hochschule (in
full the Staatliche Akademische Hochschule für Musik) - formerly
the Royal High School for Music. Founded in 1869, with Joachim as director.
Yale - Yale
University (USA)
Page 16
sine
qua non (Lat) - necessary
requirement
Page 18
when viewed with hindsight - когда воспринимается ретро-спективно
serial
techniques - see note to p. 6, serial music
Page 19
chord
patterns - сочетания аккордов
the
growing position of texture and timbre - усиливающееся внимание к фактуре и тембру
the
jagged synchronizations of irregular patterns - остро вос-принимаемые одновременные столкновения нерегулярных рит-мов
120
Page 20
no
musical element may be isolated from its rhythmic iden-tity - ни один элемент в музыке не может рассматриваться вне его ритмических характеристик
a sort of megaconsonance - своего рода гигантский консонанс
Craft,
Robert (b. 1923) - American conductor, musicologist, and author.
Skilled interpreter of music of Webern, Shoenberg, Berg, and especially of
Stravinsky, with whom he was on terms of intimate friendship, collaborating
with him on seven books.
mauere (Fr.) - материал musique
concrète (Fr.)-see note to p. 6
Gesang der
Junglinge (Germ.) - Song of the
Young Boys, elec-tronic composition (on tape) by Stockhausen
(1955-56)
Page
21
what
they cannot possibly contact directly with their own ears or understanding - то, что они, по-видимому, не, могут воспри-нимать непосредственно с помощью слуха или разума
Page 23
Auden,
Wystan Hugh (1907-1974) - English-born poet (later American
citizen) and librettist. Wrote libretto for Britten's first opera Paul
Bunyan (1941) and, with Chester Kallman, for Stravinsky's The Rake's
Progress (1951).
Page 24
is a self-contained tableau - представляет собой самостоятель-ную
зарисовку
his
idiom modal. Имеется
в виду, что композитор использу-ет смешанную технику с обращением к старинным
ладам.
Page 25
"permanent
melody" - (зд.) лейтмотив
Page 27
libretto per
se (Lat) - либретто как таковое
Götterdämmerung (Germ.) - 'Сумерки богов', музыкальная драма Р. Вагнера (1869-74)
Page 30
Eliot, Thomas
(1888-1965) - American-born English poet, critic, and
playwright, a major figure in English literature
121
Owen,
Wilfred (1893-1918) - poet of World War I, killed just before
the Armistice and before he was able to complete the book of poetry he had
planned, of which he said in the preface "the subject of it is War and the
pity of War". His Collected Poems were published in 1920 by his
friend Sassoon. Britten's War Requiem uses the Latin Mass interspersed
with the poems by Wilfred Owen.
Yeats,
William (1865-1939) - Irish poet and playwright
Jung, Carl
Gustav (1875-1961) - Swiss
psychologist. The terms extrovert and introvert which he
introduced into his study of psycho-logical types have become part of everyday
language.
Page 31
trailblazer - (зд.) первопроходчик, новатор
Dukas,
Paul (1865-1935) - French composer, music critic and teacher. His
finest work is his opera Ariadne and Bluebeard. He was professor of
composition at the Paris Conservatoire from 1909 to 1935.
Dupre,
Marcel (1886-1971) - French organist and composer;
noteworthy improviser
Baudrier,
Yves (1906) - French composer; founder of the
group Young France
Daniel-Lesur
(b. 1908) - French composer and organist, professor of
counterpoint at the Scholar Cantorum (1935-1962)
Jolivet,
André (1905-1974) - French
composer; one of the founders of the Jeune France group;
conductor and later music director of Comédie Française (1943-59)
La Jeune
France (Fr.) - Young
France, a group of French com-posers formed in Paris
in 1936 to re-establish then unfashionable idea of "a personal
message" in composition (members were Baudrier, Jolivet,
Lesur, and Messiaen)
Page 32
Oiseaux
exotiques (Fr.)-Exotic Birds
Catalogue
d'oiseaux (Fr.) -
Catalogue of the Birds, work by Messiaen for solo piano in 7 books
(1956-58), based on birdsong as noted and remembered by the composer
modal progressions of chords - последовательности аккордов, соответствующие логике
закономерностей старинных ладов
ondes
Martenot -
'волны Мартено'
(электроинструмент, созданный Морисом Мартино в 1928 г.)
122
Turangalîla-symphonie
(Sanskrit) - symphony in 10 movements by Messiaen for
large orchestra including ondes Martenot, piano,
and section of pitched and unpitched percussion. Largest of 3 works in-spired
by the Tristan and Isolde legend. Written between 1946-1948.
Page 33
Atmospheres -
Atmosphere, work for orchestra by Ligeti, compo-sed in 1961, first
performed at Donaueschingen
Lux
aeterna - Eternal Light, work for 16-part
choir by Ligeti, composed in 1966. The text is from Agnus Dei of the
Requiem Mass.
Lontano - In
the Distance, work for orchestra by Ligeti, com-posed in 1967, first
performed at Donaueschingen
Page 34
open
form - a musical design with no fixed beginning or end. First employed by
Charles Ives, and Henry Cowell, but developed as indeterminacy by Cage and
Earle Brown. In Boulez's Third Piano Sonata, for example, the 5
movements may be played in any order except the third which must stay central.
musique concrete - see
note to p. 6
Kontakte (Germ.)
- Contacts, composition by Stockhausen for pi-ano, percussion and
electronic sounds on 4-track tape (1959-60)
Gruppen (Germ.)
- Groups, composition for 3 orchestras by Stock-hausen
(1955-57), each placed in a different part of the hall and each playing
different music
Page 35
onomatopoeic
words - звукоподражательные слова
Page 37
Minstrel
songs, Minstrels - in modern usage, the term is loosely applied to all
sorts of musical entertainers, ancient and modern, es-pecially for comedians
appearing in the guise of Negroes. The Negro minstrel shows became a popular
national institution in the US in the 1830s.
country
and western music - a mass-disseminated product of the present century in
America, derived from traditional oral music brought by non-literate immigrants
from the British Isles. Singing styles retain the nazal,
"high-country" sound of older music; instru-mentation consists of one
or two fiddles, a banjo, guitars, and usu-ally a bass; texts are often
concerned with such harsh realities as death, alcoholism, desertion, crime,
etc.; and both melody and ac-companiment reflect a solid harmonic foundation.
In the 1960s and
123
1970s
songs by Jim Reeves, Don Williams, and Slim Whitman at-tracted many listeners
in Europe and then in other parts of the world.
Pro
Musica Antiqua - name under which the New York Pro
Musica ensemble was founded by Noah Greenberg in 1952
Hair - a popular
American musical composed by Galt MacDermot (1968)
Page 38
Juilliard - The
Juilliard School, American musical college established in New York in 1924
a
complete upending of the pop music scene - совершенный переворот в популярной музыке
rock
was dismissed as an aberration and an abomination - рок отвергли как заблуждение и нечто отвратительное
rockabilly - a
form of American popular music that combined the plucked string sounds of
country and western music with song-forms and lyrics of rock'n'roll. The genre
flourished from about 1954 to 1960 in the southern US and for somewhat longer
in England. Its essential representatives include Jene Vincent,
Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and the young Elvis Presley.
rhythm-and-blues (also
rhythm'n'blues, R'n'B) - Black American popular music from the late 1940s
through the early 1960s. Rhythm-and-blues continued to be a general term for
many styles of black popular music throughout the 1960s, but the classic
rhythm-and-blues style was supplanted in popularity in the late 1950s by
rock-and-roll (essentially a blend of rhythm-and-blues and country, which was
pio-neered by Elvis Presley and became part of white youth culture), and
slightly later by soul music (which resulted from the application of gospel
singing styles to rhythm-and-blues, as developed by Ray Charles and Sam Cooke,
and quickly became the most popular style among black teenagers).
Bob
Dylan (Zimmerman, Robert, b. 1941) - folk and rock singer and
songwriter. He was the most influential figure in the urban folk
music revival of the 1960s and 1970s.
folk
rock - a combination of folk music with the amplified in-strumentation of
rock usually including drums and electric stringed instruments
proceeded
to inundate American teenagers - (зд.) захлестнуло также и американских подростков
soul - a
type of black American popular music that appeared in the mid-1960s. Popular
vocalists are Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and
124
James
Brown. They brought to secular singing the impassioned im-provisatory
vocal devices of black gospel music (sudden shouts, falsetto cries, moans,
etc.) and a collection of church-derived, id-iomatic formulas. See also rhythm'n'blues
above.
raga - a
traditional form in Hindu music, consisting of a theme that expresses some
aspect of religious feeling and sets forth a tonal system on which variations
are improvised within a prescribed framework of typical progressions, melodic
formulas, and rhythmic patterns.
psychedelic
rock (also acid rock) - a style of rock, played chiefly by bands in
the San Francisco area in the 1960s. It is char-acterized by extended,
blues-inspired improvisations and surrealistic lyrics, and sometimes uses
exotic (especially Indian) instruments; the music is intended to evoke or
accompany a drug-induced state. The performances took place in large "rock
palaces" and were accompa-nied by lavish light shows.
mixed
media - see note to p. 7
op art -
optical art which is based on the idea that the painter or sculptor can create
optical effects that persuade the spectator to see visual illusions
pop art - a
form of ' art that depicts objects of everyday life and adapts techniques of
commercial art, such as comic strips
ob art -
object art ('искусство объекта')
"house
hippie" - (here) hippie (see note to p. 40) on the staff of the firm
Page 39
Established
song forms, like the 32-bar chorus-cum-bridge, have given way to new forms
characterized by odd-numbered formations, shifting meters, radical stanza
patterns and changing time signatures. - Устоявшиеся песенные формы, подобные 32-тактовому куплету со связкой, уступили место новым формам, которые характеризуются построениями из нечетного числа тактов с метрическими смещениями, радикальными строфиче-скими схемами и меняющимися обозначениями метра.
"wall-of-sound"
density - плотность 'стены звучания'
LP -
long-playing record (33 1/3)
liner - (here)
removable plastic lining on records
a
melange of vibrating colors, blinding images and deafening sound - смесь вибрирующих цветов, слепящих бликов и оглу-шающих звуков
125
as after-hour pads for teenagers - в качестве
мест для сбо-рищ подростков после занятий или работы
Page 40
Simon,
Paul (b. 1941) - singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Formed with
Garfunkel a popular duo.
bluegrass - a
style of country music that grew in the 1940s from the music of Bill Monroe and
his group, the Blue Grass Boys
hippie -
person who rejects organized society and established so-cial habits. Hippies
adopt an unconventional way of life, style of dress, etc.
yippie-youth
movement, popular in the 1960s, known for their aggressiveness (stands
for Young International Party)
Page 41
gospel -
religious music of black American origin in a popular or folk style
went gold - (зд.) были распроданы в количестве более мил-лиона
копий; в этом случае фирмы звукозаписи выпускают зо-лотую пластинку
Page 42
single - a
record with only one short song on each side
EP - extended play
record (45)
LP - see note to
p. 39
Page 45
Sadler's Wells Opera Company (also English National Opera) dates from 1931.
It took its name from the theatre in which it was originally housed. In 1968
the much-expanded company moved to the London Coliseum, leaving the Sadler's
Wells Theatre available to house visiting companies for short seasons. In 1974
the company's name was changed from Sadler's Wells Opera to English National
Opera.
Camden Festival (London) - performances of all kinds, concerts, recitals, chamber' music, solo,
choral, dance; poetry readings, exhibi-tions, lectures, but most especially,
rarities from the operatic archives, and the choicest repertory in all of Great
Britain.
Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts (Suffolk) - a festival started in 1948 by B. Britten and Peter
Pears with fellow musicians, writers, and artists. They have turned the fishing
village of Aldeburgh on the North Sea into an international centre for music
and musical theatre. The English Opera Group is the performing organization for
theatrical presentations. The names of Rostropovich,
126
Richter, and Dietrich-Fischer-Dieskau are often
associated with this festival.
Glyndebourne Festival Opera (Sussex) - founded in 1934 as a private venture by John
Christie and his wife, the opera singer Au-drey Mildmay. They built an opera
house in the grounds of their Sussex manor house in which they could give opera
performances of a standard that was unknown at that time in England.
Glyndebourne remains the prestige opera festival of Europe, and a social event.
the Halle Orchestra of Manchester - one of the finest professional orchestras in the
world, which achieved international recognition under the direction of Charles
Halle and John Barbirolli. Charles Halle (1819-1895), German-born pianist and
conductor, settled in England in 1848; champion of new works, especially those
of Berlioz.
Page 46
Dolmetsch, Arnold (1858-1940) - Swiss
musician and maker of old instruments. Settled in England in 1914, establishing
workshop for manufacture and repair of clavichords, harpsichords, viols, lutes,
etc., and founding annual festival at which old music was performed by himself
and his family on authentic instruments.
Henry Wood (1869-1944) - English conductor and organist, tireless champion of contemporary
music. List of works of which he gave first performances and first performances
in England is long and honourable. In 1895 Henry Wood was engaged by Robert
Newman as conductor of his new series of Promenade concerts in London. These he
built from rudimentary beginnings to be a premier feature of English musical
life. The "Proms" (Promenade Concerts) are held in the Royal Albert
Hall for 8 weeks from mid-July each year. (Literally, Promenade Concerts are
concerts at which the audience can walk about, but in modern usage concerts at
which a section of the audience stands.)
Page 47
Sarum rite (also Sarum use) - the ritual used in the Cathedral of
Salisbury, England, which differed in certain details from the Ro-man liturgy.
It prevailed during the later Middle Ages throughout much of England, until it was
abolished by decree in 1547.
lute ауrе-арии (песни) в сопровождении лютни. Этот жанр в английской музыке
увековечил Дауленд (Dowland).
semi-opera - Музыка к
драматическим спектаклям. Перселл внес в нее принцип оперной драматургии.
Имеются в виду 'Диоклезиан', 'Королева индейцев', 'Король Артур'.
127
catch - a kind of
English round for three unaccompanied male voices, usually with lighthearted
words. It was popular from the late 16th into the 19th c.
glee - an
18th-century type of unaccompanied choral composition for three or more men's
voices (flourished c. 1750 - c. 1830)
ballad
opera - a popular type of 18th-c. English stage entertain-ment,
consisting of spoken dialogue and simple songs adapted from folk tunes or from
operas of the period. The most famous of all, was The Beggar's Opera (1728)
with text by John Gay and music arranged by John Pepusch (1667-1752). The style
of the ballad opera has been imitated in Vaughan Williams' Hugh the Drover (1944)
and in Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera of 1928 (Brecht's
lyrics).
Page 48
syllabic and strophic (folk songs) - силлабические (безраспев-ные) и куплетные (народные песни)
carol - in
medieval times a round dance with music accompani-ment, which soon developed
into a song for 2 or 3 voices usually (but not necessary) to a text dealing
with the birth of Christ. One of the oldest printed English Christmas carols is
the Boat's Head Carol (1521). Vaughan Williams wrote a Fantasia on
Christmas Carols and Britten a Ceremony of Carols.
shanty - a
work song sung by sailors, especially one that rhyth-mically coordinates
strenuous effort
morris
dance - a type of English folk. dance danced by six men, in
two groups of three, with bells attached to their legs and each holding a white
handkerchief or a stick. There are numerous morris dances, and the term is
sometimes extended to include the sword dance as well.
pipe
and tabor - a duct flute with three finger holes and a small
snare drum, both played by a single player who holds the pipe in the left hand
and beats the tabor with a stick held in the right
melodeon - a
small, suction-operated reed organ of the first half of the 19th c.
Spanish
Armada (also the Armada) - a fleet sent against Eng-land by
Philip II of Spain in 1588, considered invincible but defeated and subsequently
destroyed by storms
Page 49
Webster,
John (1580?-1625?) - English dramatist. Collaborated with
Dekker and other dramatists in a number of comedies. His tragedies show that he
approached in tragic power nearest of his
128
contemporaries
Shakespeare; they arc The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfl
Raleigh,
Sir Walter (1552?-1618) - English courtier, navigator, col-onizer,
and writer. Author of History of the World (1614) and many essays on
political subjects.
Gilbert,
William (1540-1603) - English physicist and court physi-cian;
hypothesized that the earth is a magnet
Harvey,
William (1578-1657) - English physician; discovered blood
circulation ' .,
chest
of viols - any complete set of 6 viols of different sizes (so called because
they were usually stored in a specially built chest or cupboard)
Page 52
Cantiones - песнопения
in a
dishevelled state - (зд.) в хаотичном состоянии
verse
anthem - an anthem in which solo voice and full chorus are
contrasted
Page 53
galliard -
lively dance, from the 15th c. or earlier, in simple triple time. Often paired
and contrasted with the slower pavan (see below)
Greensleeves - old
English tune twice mentioned by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor and
by other writers of this and later periods
pavan - a
dance of Italian origin, popular in the 16th and 17th c., in simple duple time.
Usually paired with the galliard and their as-sociation was the origin of the
suite. Some 19th and 20th c. com-posers have written works to which they gave
the name Pavan, e.g. Fauré's Pavane, Ravel's Pavane pour
une enfante défunte (i.e. "for a dead Princess")
Sidney,
Philip (1554-1586) - English poet, statesman and soldier
Desprès,
Josquin (c. 1440-1521) - Flemish composer, pupil of Okeghem.
Wrote 3 volumes of masses, over 100 motets, and many chansons.
Page 54
Fellowes,
E.H. (1870-1951) - English musicologist and editor. Edited the
complete works of Byrd in 20 volumes.
Page 57
New
World - North and South America
129
Der
Freischütz (Germ.) - The Freeshooter,
opera in 3 acts by Weber (libretto by F. Kind),
produced in Berlin in 1821
New
England - the northeastern United States, comprising the
states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Con-necticut, and Rhode
Island
Page 58
Declaration
of Independence - a proclamation by the Second Continental Congress
declaring the 13 American colonies politically independent from Great Britain,
formally adopted July 4, 1776
"armonica" -
glass harmonica, an instrument invented (or perhaps only improved) by Benjamin
Franklin in 1763, in which a series of graded glass disks, shaped like saucers,
are fixed on a horizontal spindle which is made to revolve by foot action. The
sound is pro-duced by a delicate friction of the fingers against the glass
rims, which are kept wet. The instrument was extraordinarily popular, par-ticularly
in Germany and Austria.
The
American Revolution - the war fought between Great Britain
and her colonies in North America (1775-83) by which the colonies won
independence
Civil
War - in the US, the war between The Union (the North) and the Confederacy
(the South) from 1861 to 1865
Page 59
Old
World - the Eastern Hemisphere, especially Europe
Colonies - the
thirteen British colonies that became the original United States of America
Jamestown - the
first permanent English settlement in the New World, founded in 1607
call-and-response - a
performance style widely practised by black Americans. In churches, response
given by the congregation to the reading of each psalm, and singing of the
psalms in alternation by the men and the women.
spiritual - a
type of folksong which originated in American re-vivalist activity between 1740
and the close of the 19th c. The term is derived from the biblical
"spiritual songs", a name used in early publications to distinguish
the texts from metrical psalms and hymns of traditional church usage.
Fisk
Jubilee Singers - eleven young Negro singers who made the first
significant contribution to the popular dissemination of the Negro spiritual
(see above)
Foster,
Stephen (1826-1864) - American composer of songs.
130
Wrote
200 songs, several of which have come to be regarded as American folk-songs.
verse-chorus
song - a typical African musical form based on the alteration of stanza and
chorus, with the quite common feature of the reappearance of the stanza refrain
as part of the chorus
cake-walk. 1)
Formerly, a promenade or walk in which those performing the most complex and
unusual steps won cakes as prizes. 2) A strutting dance based on this
promenade.
ragtime - type
of popular 1920's jazz music first played by Blacks in the US, in which the
beat of the melody just precedes the beat of the accompaniment
Sousa,
John (1854-1932) - American composer and bandmaster best known for his
superb marches, of which he composed nearly 100, among them The Stars and
Stripes
Joplin,
Scott (1868-1917) - Black American composer and ragtime
pianist. Pianoforte rags include Maple Leaf Rag, The Entertainer., and Wall
Street Rag.
Page 60
Copland,
Aaron (b. 1900) - American composer, pianist, and con-ductor
who has worked hard on the promotional side of the Ameri-can music as lecturer
and teacher
Thomson,
Virgil (b. 1896) - American composer, critic, and or-ganist.
He lived in Paris in 1925-32, associating with "Les Six". He has
written much incidental music.
Harris,
Roy (1898-1979) - American composer, one of the most important figures in
the establishment of an American symphonic music. He dedicated his Fifth
Symphony, first performed in Boston in 1943, to "The heroic and
freedom-loving people of the USSR".
Berlin,
Irvin (b. 1888) - perhaps the most versatile and successful
American popular songwriter of the 20th c. He wrote the words (lyrics) for
almost all his songs.
Kern,
Jerome (1885-1945) - American composer; wrote several
popular musicals between 1917 and 1933
Porter,
Cole (1893-1964) - American composer and lyricist, suc-cessful in a long
series of Broadway musicals and films
Rodgers,
Richard (1902-1979) - American composer of highly suc-cessful
Broadway musicals. His most popular musicals Oklahoma (1943), South
Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951) and The Sound of Music (1959)
were written with Oscar Hammerstein II (lyrics).
131
Tin Pan
Alley - popular music business in the US from the late 19th
c. through the 1950s; a district in New York City associated with musicians,
composers, and publishers of popular music; also the style of US popular song
of the period. Often sentimental in char-acter, such songs were at first
usually in verse-and-chorus form.
hillbilly - a
term used for country music until at least World War II. The term encompasses
traditional songs, non-electric instruments, and rural imagery.
country
and western - see note to p. 37
bluegrass
music - see note to p. 40
Page 61
Piston,
Walter (1894-1976) - American composer of
instrumental music and teacher. Professor of music at Harvard 1944-1960. Author
of three important textbooks: Harmony (1941), Counterpoint (1947),
Orchestration (1955).
Riegger,
Wallingford (1885-1961) - American composer and con-ductor,
influenced by the Schoenberg 12-tone method
Sessions,
Roger (1896-1985) - principal exponent of the interna-tionalist
approach to composition in the generation that became prominent in the 1920s.
Leading American composition teacher be-tween 1935 and 1980.
Babbitt,
Milton (b. 1916) - see note to p. 6
Rochberg,
George (b. 1918) - see note to p. 7
Cowell,
Henry (1897-1965) - American composer, pianist, teacher,
and scholar. Friend, companion, and biographer of Charles Ives. Among his
pupils were Gershwin and Cage.
Page 62
cleave
to - remain attached or faithful to
Emerson,
Ralph (1803-1882) - American essayist, philosopher, and
poet. For him and his fellow transcendentalists music, which occu-pied a
central place in their philosophy, was the pure and abstract language of
feeling.
Thoreau,
Henry (1817-1862) - American writer. Charles Ives in-cluded
an impressionistic picture of Emerson and Thoreau in bis Second Piano
Sonata.
Page 63
polyrhythm - a
simultaneous use of conflicting rhythms and ac-cents, often as a result of
combining different meters
132
Cowell, Henry - see
note to p. 61
Page 65
"gospel"
singing - see note to p. 41
Morton,
Jelly Roll (1885-1941) - composer, pianist, bandmaster and
singer of early jazz. He was an early composer of the blues and one of the
first jazz recording stars.
Johnson,
James Price (1891-1955) - jazz pianist and composer
Bolden,
Charles ("Buddy") (1877-1931) - famous
cornettist gener-ally regarded as the patriarch of jazz. He was as celebrated
for his "sweet" music as for his "driving, ragging music".
He became "King Bolden", the cornettist to be emulated by Joseph
Oliver, Louis Arm-strong, and others who came after him.
Oliver,
Joseph ("King") (1885-1938) - cornettist. He
invited Louis Armstrong to play a second cornet in his own band, the Oliver
Creole Jazz Band.
Handy,
William (1873-1958) - blues performer and composer. He was
the first to write a first blues composition and first to popular-ize it. He
created unprecedented vogue for blues when he published the Memphis Blues in
1912. Two years later he published the world-famous St Louis Blues, a
composition that has carried the blues all over the world.
Page 66
swing - a
term applied to the style that originated about 1935, particularly in the music
of the Benny Goodman orchestra. It seems to refer to 1) the increase in number
and variety of instruments; 2) a subtle rubato; 3) crispness of attack,
especially in the rhythm sec-tion.
Goodman,
Benny (1909-1986) - American clarnettist and jazz mu-sician;
formed his own band in 1934
be-bop (also
bop) - a term coined about 1945 to describe jazz
characterized by improvised solo performances in a dissonant idiom with complex
rhythmic patterns and continuous, highly florid melodic lines. It became
popular after World War II under the leadership of trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie
and Miles Davis and alto saxophonist Charlie ("Bird") Parker.
Parker,
Charles ("Bird") (1920-1955) - leading jazz
musician. Parker's saxophone style is derived from the blues.
"cool"
jazz - a subdued adaptation of be-bop. Players suppressed highly emotional
elements in favor of medium volume, gentle tone colors, legato phrasing, dense
harmonies, moderate tempos, and mid-
133
dle registers of instruments. It
emerged in the Miles Davis nonet's Birth of the Cool recordings of
1949-50.
Page 69
alter ego (Lat.)
- one's other self; very intimate friend
CBS -
Columbia Broadcasting System
Page 76
sine qua non (Lat.) - see
note to p. 16
Page 77
carte blanche (Fr.)
- complete freedom to act as one thinks best
Page 81
consummate -
perfect, accomplished
Page 83
Strasfogel, Ignace -
Polish-born conductor. Commenced his US career in 1933 when, , after serving as
assistant conductor of the Berlin State Opera, he became official pianist and
later assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic.
Page 84
tantrum - a
sudden uncontrolled attack of anger
Page 85
bread-and-butter adj
- (here) prosaic, commonplace
acoustical
innovations. Stokowsky constantly sought improved tonal quality
through unconventional orchestral seating arrangements, and his research into acoustics
and electronics - in the USA, Germany, and Netherlands - has been used to
improve techniques of recording arid radio transmission.
recalcitrant -
resisting authority or discipline, disobedient; recalci-trance - quality of
being recalcitrant
run-through -
rehearsal or practice ('прогон')
Bing, Rudolf (b.
1902) - Austrian-born impresario, manager of Glyndebourne
Opera (1936-39 and 1946-49). First artistic director of the Edinburgh Festival
(1947-49). General manager of the Metropolitan Opera, New York (1950-72). Had a
great influence on both toe company and American opera in the 1950s and 1960s
par-ticularly because of his autocratic attitudes, hence the Bing regime.
Reiner, Fritz
(1888-1963) - Hungarian-born conductor, famed in-terpreter of
Richard Strauss, Wagner, Bartok
134
Page 86
tempo glusto (It.)-in exact
time, or at speed the style of the music demands
Page 87
Tanglewood -
estate near Lenox, Massachusetts, site of an inter-national festival of music
and the Tanglewood Music Center (since 1985)
Page 88
catholicity -
freedom from narrowness, liberality
Page 90
peerless -
superior to all others; without equal
Page 91
Concertgebouw -
literally "concert hall" in Dutch. The word is most commonly known as
the name of Holland's oldest and fore-most orchestra. The permanent home of the
orchestra is the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.
Page 92
Les contes d'Hoffmann (Fr.) - The Tales of Hoffmann,
Opéra fantastique in three acts with prologue and
epilogue by J. Offenbach (libretto by J. Barbier and M.
Carré, based on stories by E.TA. Hoffmann), produced
in Paris, 1881. Offenbach died during toe rehearsals and E. Guiraud
orchestrated the piece for its Opéra-Comique première.
Page 93
the Honegger Liturgique - the
Third Symphony by Honegger
Price, Leontyne
(b. 1927) - American soprano, one of the finest Verdi sopranos
of her day
De Sabata, Victor
(1892-1967) - Italian conductor and composer. Conductor at La
Scala 1929-1953. Frequent guest conductor of con-certs and opera throughout toe
world.
Page 94
gauze - a
very thin, light cloth
Un ballo
in maschera (It) - 'Бал-маскарад', опера Дж. Верди
Page 98
Tureck, Rosalyn
(b. 1914) - American pianist and conductor who specialized in
playing Bach on toe modern pianoforte. Formed toe
135
Tureck Bach Players in London (1959). Professor at the Juilliard School
from 1972. Author of several books.
Page 102
ENO - English
National Opera
Page 103
"aria" opera = opera séria (It), the chief
operatic genre in the 17th and 18th c., formal and complex, with elaborate
display arias. The last and greatest examples of the form were Mozart's Idomeneo
(1781) and La clemenza di Tito (1791).
da-capo aria - aria in which the first part is repeated (da capo (It) - from
the beginning)
appoggiatura (It.) - a grace note or species of ornament
of which the exact interpretation has differed in various periods
Page 104
it needed to be altered, bearbeitet - ее необходимо изменить, обработать
Page 110
acciaccatura (It) -
lit crushing, a decorative technique. In old key-board music, a grace in
which the principal note is sustained while adjacent notes are struck for an
instant or held as a sustained dissonance
abbellimenü (It) - embellishments
('украшения')
dynamic
and agogic accents - accent of movement and accent of force
which form the normal and regular rhythmic accentuation of a piece of music
rubato (It) -
(lit robbed time), a feature of performance in which strict
time is for a while disregarded
silence -
pause
Page 111
score - партитура
Lied (Lieder) (Germ.)
- song (songs). The word is applied to a distinctive type of German solo
vocal composition that came into being at an outcome of the late 18th and early
19th c. Some great names in the history of the Lied are Schubert, Schumann,
Franz, Brahms, Wolf, Mahler, and Richard Strauss.
Page 112
Curlew River-parable for church
performance by Britten to the
136
text by W. Plomer after a Japanese Noh play Sumidagawa
(parable - story, esp. in the Bible told to illustrate a moral or spiritual
truth ('притча')
Elgar's Gerontius
- The Dream of Gerontius, an oratorio by El-gar, first performed in 1900.
The text is a poem of Cardinal Newman.
CBE -
Commander (of the order) of the British Empire (кавалер ордена Британской империи 2-й степени)
knight - рыцарь, личное дворянское звание,
обычно присваи-вается за особые заслуги (перед именем ставится титул 'сэр' - sir)
SOURCES
1.
American Negro Songs and Spirituals/Ed, by John Work. N.Y., 1974.
2.
American Composers on American Music (A Symposium)/Ed. By Henry Cowell. N.Y.,
1933.
3. Apel
W., Daniel R. The Harvard Brief Dictionary of Music. N.Y., 19th printing.
4. Ardoin,
John. The Callas Legacy. G. Duckworth & Co Ltd. 1977.
5. Bernstein,
Leonard. The Joy of Music. N.Y., 1959.
6. Boroff E. Music
in Europe and the United States: A History. New Jersey, 1971.
7. The
Complete Book of Twentieth-Century Music/Ed, by David Ewen, 1959.
8.
Collins Encyclopedia of Music/Ed, by J. Westrup, 1978.
9. Chase,
Gilbert America's Music: From the Piligrims to the Present. N.Y., Toronto,
London, 1955.
10.
Composers on Music (An Anthology of Composer's Writings)/Ed. by S.
Morgenstern. N.Y., 1956.
11.
Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (by I. Stravinsky and Robert Caft). Faber, L., 1979.
12. Dorian,
Frederick. The History of Music in Performance (The Art of Musical
Interpretation from the Renaissance to Our Day). N.Y., 1942.
13. The
Dictionary of Composers/Ed, by Ch. Osborne. N.Y., 1978.
14. Ertich,
Lilian. What Jazz Is All About? N.Y., 1972.
15. Ginsburg, Lev. Ysaye/Ed.
by Dr. H.R. Axelrod. Paganiniana Publications, 1980.
16. The
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London, N.Y., 1980.
17. Gillespie,
John. Five Centuries of Keyboard Music. Belmont, California, 1966.
18. Hindemith,
Paul. A Composer's World. N.Y., 1952.
19. Kennedy,
Michael. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music. Oxford Univ. Press, 1980.
20. The
Larousse Encyclopedia of Music/Ed, by Geoffrey Hindley, 1977.
138
21. Mach, Elyse. Great
Pianists Speak for Themselves. N.Y., 1980.
22. Manoff,
Tom. Music: A Living Language. N.Y., 1982.
23. The
New Harvard Dictionary of Music/Ed, by D.M. Randel. Cambridge, Mass., L., 1986.
24. The
New Book of Modern Composers/Ed, by D. Ewen. N.Y., 1961.
25. The
Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, 1983.
26. Southern,
Eileen. The Music of Black Americans (A History). N.Y., 1983.
27.
Streamline English, Oxford, 1979.
28.
Twentieth-Century Views of Music History/Ed, by W. Hay. N.Y., 1972.
29. The
New Grove Dictionary of American Music. I-IV vls./Ed. by H.W. Hitchcock and S.
Sadie. Macmillan Publ, 1986.
Журналы: High Fidelity
(1983), Gramophone (1987, 1988), Music Teacher (1986), Opera
(1986), Opera News (1982).
CONTENTS
MUSIC IN
THE MODERN WORLD
Western Music of the
Twentieth Century (General Survey).................. 5
Some Twentieth-Century
Composers.............................................................. 9
Arnold
Schoenberg...........................................................................................
9
The Composer Speaks:
Arnold Schoenberg.................................................... 10
Bêla Bartok.........................................................................................................
12
Paul Hindemith: His Life
and Work................................................................. 14
The Composer Speaks:
Paul Hindemith............................................................ 16
Stravinsky. The Rite
of Spring....................................................... 18
Electronic
Music........................................................................................................
20
Britten's
Operas.........................................................................................................
23
The Composer Speaks:
Benjamin Britten......................................................... 24
Menotti: the Opera
Composer..............................................................................
26
The Composer Speaks:
Gian Carlo Menotti.................................................... 27
Michael Tippett: A Child
of our Time............................................................. 29
Experimental
(Avant-garde)
Music...................................................................... 31
Olivier Messiaen........................................................................................................
31
George
Ligeti...................................................................................................
33
Karlheinz Stockhausen.............................................................................................
34
Popular
Music.................................................................................................................
37
Rock...............................................................................................................................
37
Points about
Rock....................................................................................................
38
Elvis Presley - Story of
a Superstar....................................................................
40
The
Beatles.................................................................................................................
42
ENGLISH AND AMERICAN
MUSICAL HISTORY
English Music (General
Survey).......................................................................
45
The Golden Age in
England................................................................................
48
The English Virginal
School..................................................................................
49
Byrd in His Time and
Ours.................................................................................
51
English
Madrigalists..........................................................................................
54
"The British
Orpheus"............................................................................................
54
American Music (General
Survey)........................................................................
57
Charles Ives, the First
Truly American Composer........................................ 62
Charles Ives and
American Folk Music............................................................
63
140
Jazz: Its Roots and
Musical Development.................. 65
The Relation of Jazz to
American Music............................................... 66
Louis
Armstrong....^....-............................................ 67
The
Swing Era (Duke Ellington)...................................................
68
Spirituals..........................................................................................
70
Blues..........................................................................................
73
THE ART
OF MUSICAL INTERPRETATION
The Problem of
Interpretation.................................................................
76
Conducting...............................................................................................................
80
The Art of
Conducting...........................................................................................
81
Some Musical
Encounters............................................................................
83
Leonard
Bernstein........................................................................
87
Herbert von Karajan ...............................................................................................
90
Interview with Herbert von Karajan...................................
91
The Art of Piano
Playing: Glenn Could..........................................................
96
Interview with Glenn
Gould.............................................................................96
The Art of Violin
Playing: Eugène
Ysaye.......................................................
99
The World of
Opera...............................................................................................
102
Handel in
Performance...........................................................................................
102
Franco Zeffirelli: The
Romantic Realist...................................................... 105
La Divina: Maria Callas..........................................................................................
109
Callas Remembered..................................................................................................
110
Peter Pears: Ronald
Crichton Speaks.................................................................111
Notes
.................................................................................
114
Sources
...............................................................................................................
138
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