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Berlioz  - Symphony Fantastique

Copland - Appalachian Spring

Copland - The Cat and the Mouse

Glenn Gould – JS Bach – Goldberg Variation

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons

Call of the Mockingbird – Mark O’Connor

Bartok – folk songs from the fields

 

Listening to Music

·        How? Requires preparation and discipline

·        What to listen for and what to expect

·        How do melodies unfold?

·        How do phrases work together?

·        How does a composer get from 1 section to the next?

·        Learn to recognize

o       The instruments

o       The melody from the harmony

o       The texture(s)

o       The rhythm and the meter

o       The sense of formal design

·        How much do you need to know to appreciate music?

·        Why do you want to listen to a piece of music?

·        The composer, the listener, the performer

 

Britten’s Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra – Variation and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell

 

The title and alternate tells us what the music is and what it is about

Was designed in 1946 for an educational film entitled Instruments for the orchestra

Based on a theme by Henry Purcell that is a dance tune from his incidental music to Abdelazar or The Moor’s Revenge written in 1695

6-fold statement of the theme that shows off the different orchestral departments

13 variations that are each devoted to a different instrument or group of instruments and a fugue in which the instruments make their entries in the same order as the variations.

What was Britten’s intent?

Britten is a true democrat in his approach to orchestration. Why?

 

Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire – Moonstruck Pierrot – Opus 21 – 1922

Pantonal

A set of 21 melodramas present in Sprechstimme – the vocalist-reciter against instrumental accompaniment that varies from piece to piece

5 instruments needs 3 double

                   Piano

                   Cello

                   Flute switching to piccolo

                   Clarinet to bass clarinet

                   Violin to viola

Poems are arranged in 3 groups of 7. Each poem has 13 lines arranged in Renaissance roundeau form but the musical settings do not follow roundeau form

 

The Sprechstimme is the use of normal notation that indicates precise pitch and duration of each note but with an X through each notes’ stem to indicate a special kind of delivery is required. He supplied written instructions for singing Sprechstimme in which he indicated that the rhythm must be absolutely strict but that the notated pitch is merely touched on at the outset of the note’s value. He cautions the reciter-singer to never really sing the pitches and never to “singsong” them.

For each of the 21 pieces, a short motive generates the music for the entire piece.

#8 – (Nacht) Night. This is a passacaglia, tenerative motive contains 10 notes. Though a 3-note ostinato figure is ever-presnet, its note values are modified much of the time. The song is dark in color, well suited to the gloomy text.

#18 – Der Mondfleck The Moonspot is the most contrapuntally complex piece of the entire cycle. A double canon—one between the strings, the orther between the winds—turns retrograde at the middle of the 10th measure. Simultaneously with the canon, the pianist plays a 3-voice fugue whose subject is an augmented version of the canonic melody between the winds.

 

After Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany, Schoenberg emigrated to the U and taught at CA universities. He wrote a tone work based on his faith – Psalms in Hebrew, A Survivor from Warsaw.

 

Mussorgsky – Pictures At an Exhibition.

 

Written after the death of a friend, Victor Hartmann in 1874. Hartmann was an architect and painter who designed some fine building for St. Petersburg, was an intimate friend of Mussorgsky. When he died, the composer said: “My dear friend, what a terrible blow! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, live on and creatures like Hartmann must die!” A mutual friend organized an exhibition of the works of Hartmann (watercolors, drawings, architectural, designs so he wrote a piano suite in memory of his friend. 

See program notes and score.

 

Some questions Roger Sessions raises about music

·        Is music to be judged on its own merits?

·        Is it a salable commodity? Does it matter?

·        What is the basic intent and responsibility of the music?

·        Is the composer, the listener a two way affair and why? Does that matter?

·        How do we gain an awareness of music?

·        Was music always intended for an audience?

 

Some convictions Sessions states about music

·        The value of art should not be about the degree of communicability it has to its listener or viewer.

·        Music is to be enjoyed and experienced.

·        A willing ear must be free of prejudice.

·        The ear is slow, the mind is slower and the heart is slower still.

·        Music described in metaphysical terms is a temporal art, not spatial and not static.