Part 6: Video Intro

 

Question:  What was the cause of World War II?

 

Answer: World War I

This is a common assertion of historians-- that the humiliation of World War I and the heavily punitive reparations imposed on Germany after the war made it impossible for Germany to heal and move on.  The tragedy of World War I-- not just the staggering loss of life but the blow to national morale-- festered in German society, sewing a desire for revenge and the seeds of World War II.

The German people had a long and illustrious lineage in music-- one which they had become possessively and obsessively proud of.  Although they had been divided over issues such as "program music" vs. "abstract music," they had still been united as Germans in their leadership of the Romantic movement and the musical world in general.  The war destroyed that leadership because Romanticism as a movement had lost its appeal-- it now felt arcane, outdated, decayed.

Many composers were eager to move on and find a new kind of "modern" language that would express the temper of the time more accurately.  But it was easier to move on if you were an American-- or at least not German.  As mentioned in the last lecture, Neo-Classicism was a potent lure for composers anxious to reject the German leadership and aesthetic sensibility, and pioneer something with a more austere emotional tone-- something more appropriate to the changing times.  This lecture will look at two composers who rejected the German musical tradition in favor of forging their own personal styles, and one composer who became the most famous exponent of post-war German composition.

IGOR STRAVINSKY

In Russia, many composers felt a tension-- a kind of split loyalty-- between allegiance to Western European models of music (for instance, German Romanticism) and the growing desire to establish an indigenous musical tradition.  Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) did not escape these conflicting pulls.  His early works reflect the influence of his teacher, the famous Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov, in that they are brilliantly, brightly orchestrated.  But Rimsky-Korsakov also encouraged Stravinsky to try using non-Western scales and to experiment. Three important pieces from this early period in Stravinsky's life are Fireworks , Scherzo Fantastique, and the Symphony in E-flat.  The premieres of Fireworks and Scherzo Fantastique on a single concert in 1909 changed the course of Stravinsky's life forever.  At this concert he was "discovered" by the Russian impresario Diaghilev, who at the time was in the process of forming the "Ballets Russes," a company which included dancers (like the famous Nijinsky), choreographers (such as Fokine), artists and designers (such as Leon Bakst), and musicians.  Stravinsky was asked to orchestrate some works of Chopin and Grieg for "Ballets Russes" and, for their second season, was commissioned to write a new work.  This new work was Firebird, which goes down in history as the first mature Stravinsky masterpiece.

Based on the success of Firebird, Stravinsky produced another ballet in 1911 called Petrushka, a story about a love triangle between three circus puppets.  The tone of the piece is rather sardonic and modern, in contrast to the sensuality and richness of romantic works.  But it is not just the emotional tone of the piece that is lean and modern, but the piece itself.  Just the opening measures alone are a perfect example of the new, lean aesthetic of economy, because they are entirely fashioned from just a handful of notes! Also, what is significant in this piece, and a characteristic that was to become important in Stravinsky's style was the more "static" approach to harmony.  The Romantics had travelled all over the map in their harmonies-- the very aesthetic of Romanticism was to keep modulating, keep moving.  Stravinsky, by contrast, elected to stay put, so to speak--  to take a few harmonies and use them fully before moving on, cultivating a more static sound.

Igor Stravinsky with Vaslav Nijinsky who danced the part of Petrushka

Static harmonies are a Stravinsky trademark. When Stravinsky does move on, however, he does so very abruptly, creating an almost kaleidoscopic effect.   One of the most famous traits of Petrushka is the "Petrushka chord," an unusual amalgam of a C Major chord crossed with an F# Major chord.  (In this example the chord is underneath the main melody.) Just this chord alone would be enough to tell a listener that this is modern music-- something new and distinctly different!

A funny story about Petrushka: Stravinsky got the inspiration for a tune in Petrushka from listening to an organ grinder playing outside of his window.  He thought nothing of appropriating the tune for his own use in Petrushka-- until some time later when the organ grinder sued Stravinsky for the use of his tune.  Stravinsky lost the battle and ended up having to pay up.

In 1913, Stravinsky wrote his most famous work of all, a ballet called  The Rite of Spring. This piece has became legendary not just for its pulsating rhythms and harsh dissonances --unheard of at the time--but for the riot that it provoked at the first performance.

In The Rite Stravinsky elevated rhythm to a position of great importance. In the atmosphere of re-evaluation which permeated the turn of the century period, composers were looking to change the old Romantic emphasis on melody.  Debussy had focussed on timbre, while Stravinsky chose to emphasize rhythm.  Here are a couple of examples to demonstrate this point:

Example No. 1= Here is the exact same chord repeated over and over again-- only the rhythmic accents change.  When listening to this passage the rhythm becomes very prominent and exciting.

Example No. 2= Even Stravinsky's melodies are so strongly rhythmic that the melodic profile tends to become secondary to the rhythmic interest. Here is an example of a melody which is really made up of three distinct little rhythmic units which are mixed and matched like little modular units.  Here are the three rhythmic patterns:

Another rhythmic practice of Stravinsky's was to have multiple rhythms going on at the same time, each in their own distinct pattern.  In this example see if you can hear the layers.

Example 3= The violence in this work was new in 1913.  Even today, however, the piece retains its aggressive quality. See if this doesn't strike you as a forerunner of some of our more scary movie scores.

These early works of Stravinsky are probably still his most frequently performed works, and best loved.  What is interesting about him is the way he changed musical styles so frequently throughout his life.  It's almost as if Stravinsky took the idea of plurality and appropriated it for his own ouevre.  He starts out working with a quasi-romantic style (in the early Russian works of his youth); then, in Paris, cultivates the deliberately provocative primitivist style; settles into Neo-Classicism during and after World War I, and later even tries the serial techniques of Arnold Schoenberg, all the while experimenting with elements of jazz and ragtime, too.  That is quite a mixture!  Interestingly enough, though, whatever style Stravinsky pursues he always sounds like-- Stravinsky. His individuality stands out no matter what influences or techniques he uses.

BELA BARTOK

When, at the age of 18, Bela Bartok (1881-1945) decided to enroll at the Budapest Academy of Music he was already bucking trends.  Other music students his age would most likely have gone to Vienna to complete their musical training, since Vienna offered such prestigious institutions.  But even as a young man Bartok was deeply aware and proud of his Hungarian heritage, and he was determined to use the folk roots of that heritage in his music.  Bartok took his lead from Franz Liszt, the most famous of Hungarian composers, who also had shown an interest in incorporating folk music into the "high art" tradition.

But Bartok went considerably further than Liszt.  He became the first true "ethnomusicologist," a term which refers to musicologists who study music outside of the Western European tradition, and who examine the relationship between culture and music, often looking at musical product from a sociological viewpoint.
	Bartok, (along with a friend, the Hungarian composer Kodaly) took a wax cylinder device into remote regions of Hungary, Rumania, Turkey, and North Africa, and recorded peasants performing their native music.  He then made complete catalogs of the melodies he heard and detailed studies of them. Because of this intensive, first-hand study of folk musics, Bartok was able to overturn many
misconceptions about traditional Hungarian music. (For instance, Bartok initially believed, as propounded in a book written by Liszt--The Gypsies and Their Music in Hungary-- that Hungarian peasant music was derived from gypsy music.  What he later discovered was that, to the contrary, gypsy music was an urban adaptation of Hungarian folk music.  Hungarian folk music was monophonic, for example, while the gypsies had harmonized it with simple triads.) "The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work," said Bartok later.

What could Bartok have learned from folk music that would have been useful to him in his own music?  Several things.  First, much of the folk music was based on different types of scales: pentatonic, chromatic, and modal scales.  You can go back to the first lecture to listen to examples of some of these scales. You may remember that in that first lecture I compared a scale to a bolt of fabric in the way it influences the final product; there was an analogy about making gardening pants from rough cloth and a wedding gown from lace. By extension, just the act of Bartok basing his music on these different scales was stacking the deck to produce a different kind of sound in a piece.

Also, the rhythms of the peasant music were rather angular, and one sees Bartok taking great inspiration from this kind of "liberated" rhythm. In Bartok one finds measures with 5 or 7 beats rather than four, and they are juxtaposed next to measures with 3 beats or 1 beat.  The overall effect is one of rhythmic vitality and irregularity.

Here's a quick taste of a Bartok piece that is inspired by Bulgarian rhythms and harmonies: Dance in Bulgarian Rhythm.

I always enjoy showing students Bartok's Minor Seconds, Major Sevenths  This simple piece turns the traditional ideas of harmony on their heads.  It takes intervals such as the minor second and major seventh-- until that time always regarded as unquestionably dissonant-- and makes it sound soft, poignant and almost consonant. Not only that, but Bartok even has the temerity to end the entire piece with the seventh, followed by the second! Imagine: the intervals we were always taught needed to be resolved, became a resolution.  Listen to the end of the piece.

There is a cornucopia of wonderful works by Bartok. For a strong folk-flavor try Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, op. 20.  Among my favorite works: The Piano Concerto No. 3 and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste.

Bartok also borrowed from older traditions such as sonata-form and fugue, but again, always with his particularly personal stamp on them. Take, for example, sonata form.  For the most part, Bartok did not use the old traditional chordal harmony ideas of starting in the tonic and modulating to the dominant-- if he did his music would have ended up sounding more like Mozart than Bartok. Instead he took the concept of sonata form and played with it from the thematic point of view, exposing themes at the beginning, working them out in a developmental way, and then returning to them again.

Another example of Bartok's approach to sonata form comes in the String Quartet No. 4.  In this piece, Bartok has taken the basic schematic outline of sonata form and expanded it so that it spreads across the five movements of the work, roughly crossing sonata form with an arch form:

The sonata form parallel can be seen if you regard movement I as the "A theme" and movement II as the "B theme."  Movement III is the development ("C"), while the last two movements constitute a recapitulation of the A + B material.

Try listening to Bartok's String Quartet No. 4.  However, don't expect to notice or be keenly aware of the formal principles we spoke of above.  In any case, they are not there to distract you from the music-- they are there to organize the music in a cohesive way so that you will enjoy it.  I should also point out that this music, upon first hearing, can seem very dissonant. Perhaps you won't like it.  But please don't write it off after just one hearing! Quite often repeated hearings will really change your "take" on a piece-- you might find that you get used to the dissonance and even begin to regard it as exciting and aesthetically beautiful.

Remember that Bartok, like Stravinsky, was able to incorporate other styles and influences into his music without ever losing his own distinctive voice.  His works have the feel of Hungarian soil in them, but they are also complex and dissonant in ways that are not evident in their models.

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG

One often hears the stereotype that young people are the "revolutionaries" while older people are more conservative.  Arnold Schoenberg  (1874-1951) may be one of the more celebrated examples of someone who reversed that cliche.  As a young man he wrote in a rather conservative style, following the examples of his German predecessors, Wagner and Brahms. You may remember that Wagner and Brahms regarded themselves as occupying opposing camps in the Romantic movement; however, Schoenberg's early works have elements of both composers: Wagner's programmatic content, his intense chromaticism and use of leitmotivs, and Brahms' use of traditional formal schemes such as sonata form.

	Verklaerte Nacht. (Transfigured Night). This work is probably the last piece of Schoenberg that everyone can agree upon. Few people seem to dislike it because it is a highly emotional work backed by a stunning text. But after that, Schoenberg's ouevre becomes extremely dissonant, to
a degree which many people--including trained musicians-- find distasteful. You be the judge. Listen to Verklaerte Nacht and then compare it to later works of Schoenberg.  Another work you might want to listen to is Pierrot Lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot), an expressionistic piece which, while not as strident as Schoenberg's later works, begins to approximate his later style.

In describing Schoenberg's general style, there are a couple of concepts which are valuable to understand:

1) You may remember from an earlier lecture that dissonances were defined as harmonies that needed to resolve. Dissonances were seen as tied to consonances-- incomplete without resolution. "The emancipation of the dissonance" is how Schoenberg referred to his view of dissonance, meaning that he was emancipating dissonance from having to resolve, and specifically from having to resolve to a consonance. In Schoenberg's music, as in Bartok's and many other 20th century composers, a "greater dissonance" can sometimes resolve to a "lesser dissonance" but the important point is that the notion of dissonance itself is being challenged. Now each note relates to every other note, rather than to a central note or set of notes.

2) Schoenberg also described his style as that of "Developing variation" or "Musical prose." In this style there is continual evolution and transformation of thematic material. There is an avoidance of repetition, symmetrical phrasing or thematic correspondences (hence the term, "Musical prose" as opposed to "poetry.")

Beyond these two overall style concepts lie the technicalities of Schoenberg's theoretical system which he evolved in the 1920s as a way to, as he put it, "assure the supremacy of German music for the next 100 years."  This highly intellectual, rule-driven system is called by various names: Serial music or Dodecaphonic music.  (Dodeca= 12 in Greek; phonic=sound).

Dodecaphonic music is based on a collection of 12 pitches which make up a "series," "set," or "row." These last three terms are usually used interchangeably, although "set" seems to be the preferred term of theorists. A "set," then, is an abstract, unordered group of pitches. ("Abstract" because it is not based on traditional harmony; "unordered" because the order of the pitches is an artistic decision of the composer.) The use of the term "set" is deliberate; it avoids any connection with "scale" or any other triadic associations. There is a whole branch of theoretical analysis called "set theory" which deals with music of the sort that Schoenberg and his followers wrote. In set theory, in fact, intervals are not generally referred to in the traditional way (i.e., a "third" or "sixth"). Instead, an interval such as a third is referred to numerically as "4", meaning that it is composed of 4 half-steps; a sixth is "8" because it is made up of 8 half-steps.

In very sketchy form, this is how the system works. The "series" is numbered with pitches 1 through 12. The composer uses these pitches either in original order (i.e., 1 through 12), in retrograde order (i.e., backwards, 12 through 1), in inversion (or upside down), or in retrograde inversion (meaning that the inverted version is used backwards.) Using these possibilities as the foundation of a work forces a composer to treat all pitches equally; it gets a composer away from staking out some kind of hierarchy of pitches.  In other words, the point of this system is to make all pitches the same in terms of their importance and function--to get rid of tonal centers.  In the 12-tone system there is no "dominant," and no "tonic," nor is there particularly a feeling of dissonance and consonance.

If a composer wants to, he or she can make a "grid" or "matrix" which lays out all the possibilities of the row clearly.  The "grid" below matches the possibilities for the row from Schoenberg's Suite for Piano, op. 25 (though Schoenberg himself did not use these grids). The first line of pitches read left to right is the original version of the row. Read it right to left and you get the retrograde. Read the columns top to bottom and you get the inversion; read them bottom to top and you get the retrograde inversion. Use each subsequent line across to generate the various transpositions of the row and, if read backwards, their retrogrades.

The Op. 23 piano pieces and Op. 24 Serenade experimented with 12-tone technique; the first fully 12-tone work is the Suite for Piano, Op. 25 of 1924.

Here is an example of a Schoenberg piece that employs his method: the Piano Concerto. Schoenberg was a famous teacher.  The two most prominent of his students were Berg (1885-1935) and Webern (1993-1945). Together these three composers have been known as the "Second Viennese School," in an attempt to draw an analogy with the "First Viennese School" of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Each of the three composers was distinctive in their use of the 12-tone method, although Berg and Schoenberg stand somewhat closer to each other than to Webern. What sets Webern apart is, perhaps more than anything else, the emotional tone of his music which has been described as antiseptic and rather more sterile than Schoenberg and Berg. His style is also described as pointillistic, because he often breaks up a line between instruments or different colors, lending a distilled, terse sound to the writing. Also contrary to Schoenberg and Berg, Webern avoided the large orchestrations of German Romanticism, preferring pared down ensembles or solo instruments. A dynamic marking of ppp is not uncommon in his work.

Perhaps the most adept use of Schoenberg's system came in Alban Berg's music, which sometimes forges a tenuous synthesis of German romanticism and 12-tone technique. His Violin Concerto was written in 1935 to honor the untimely death of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler Gropius (Alma Mahler was married to Gustave Mahler). The first movement is based upon a small row (not a full 12 notes) that was devised to have tonal implications.  The opening of the piece is famous for its ruminative melody, played on the open strings of the violin. The last movement is very moving also, because Berg weaves a Bach chorale ("Es ist genug") into it. This last movement is almost a reprise of musical history with its poignant crosscutting between the old chorale and modern compositional style.

In principle Schoenberg's compositional method allows composers to express any range of feelings or emotions they want to, and indeed, his system sounds different in the hands of a Stravinsky than it does with, say,  Alban Berg.  But the system has not really been used for portraying lighter, more joyous emotions-- it tends to occupy the darker side of the emotional spectrum and is almost unrelievedly bleak in its connotations, particularly fitting for having been designed by a Germanic composer during the post-war era.

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