M100: Music Appreciation Discussion Group

Ben Tibbetts, T.A.benjamintibbetts@yahoo.com

Welcome! Please sign the attendance at the front of the room.

Thursday April 25, 2013

Today’s Agenda

• Presentation Signups• Pass out tickets for the jazz concert tomorrow

at 8pm in Bowker Auditorium• Pages 366-382 and 455-460(Skipping discussion on pages 446-451 to 461-466)• Teaching Evaluations

Homework for weekend will be:• 20th Century Worksheet (on Moodle)• Listening Log Collection #2

Final Presentations

The sign up sheet is at the front of the room.

PerksDay #1: get it over with & don’t have to come in again @ 8:00am

Day #2: more time to prepare your presentation/paper

Pass back stuff (briefly)

Pass out tickets for the jazz concert tomorrow at 8pm in Bowker Auditorium

Concert report will be due on Presentation Day #2

(Not in on that day? Drop it in my mailbox: in the Fine Arts Center, Copy Room, East Wing)

Pages 366-382 and 455-460

Arnold Schoenberg

1874-1951Austrian composer/painter

serialism - "A style of writing in which notes are drawn not from a scale, but from a predetermined series of notes. Serial composition flourished between ca. 1920 and 1980." -page 518

twelve-tone composition - "A type of serial composition in which twentieth-century composers manipulated a series ('row') consisting of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, not repeating any one of these notes until all other eleven had been sounded, thereby effectively avoiding any sense of tonality." -page 519

atonal - "A style of writing that establishes no harmonic or melodic center of gravity; without a tonic, all notes are of equal weight and significance." -page 515

expressionism - "A broad artistic movement that flourished in music, painting, and literature in the early decades of the twentieth century, in which psychological truth took precedence over beauty, and inner emotion took precedence over any sense of external reality." -page 516

Sprechstimme - "In German, 'speech-voice'. A style of singing halfway between speech and lyrical song, in which the singer hits precise pitches and then allows them to tail off, rather than sustaining them, as in lyrical singing." -page 518

"Colombine" from Pierrot lunaire (English, Pierrot in the Moonlight)

“Pierrot” is a sad clown, pining for love of Colombine, who breaks his heart and leaves him

Text/translationon next slide

“Colombine” from Pierrot lunaire

Translation from http://www.lunanova.org/pierrot/text.html

Igor Stravinsky

1882-1971Russian composer

Ballet – “a theatrical entertainment in which ballet dancing and music, often with scenery and costumes, combine to tell a story, establish an emotional atmosphere, etc.”

-Dictionary.Com (definition 2)http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ballet

• polytonality - "The juxtaposition of two conventional harmonies in a way that creates a new dissonance." -page 517

• pentatonic [scale] - "A scale consisting of five tones." -page 517

• ostinato - "A short pattern of notes repeated over and over." -page 517

• through-composed - "A form in which each section has its own music, with very little or no repetition between sections." -page 518

Sergei Diaghilev was a Russian art critic and patron

Founded the “Russian Ballets”

Ballet: The Rite of Spring, Part One: The Adoration of the Earth (excerpt)

John Cage

1912-1992American composer/music theorist

aleatory music - "Music composed using elements of chance." -page 515

About Cage’s 4‘ 33“ or “Four minutes and thirty-three seconds”

Three movements, composed in 1952

Supplemental: Sam Harris on mindfulness meditation

Electronic music - "Music using sounds generated (and not merely amplified) either in whole or in part by electronic means." -page 516

Musique concrète - "French for 'concrete music.' Music using sounds generated by everyday, real ('concrete') objects not normally thought of as musical instruments and then manipulated electronically." -page 517

Indeterminacy (excerpt)

Text on following slides

One evening I was walking along Hollywood Boulevard, nothing much to do. I stopped and looked in the window of a stationary shop. A mechanized pen was suspended in space in such a way that, as a mechanized roll of paper passed by it, the pen went through the motions of the same penmanship exercises I had learned as a child in the third grade. Centrally placed in the window was an advertisement explaining the mechanical reasons for the perfection of the operation of the suspended mechanical pen. I was fascinated, for everything was going wrong. The pen was tearing the paper to shreds and splattering ink all over the window and on the advertisement, which, nevertheless, remained legible.

It was after I got to Boston that I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Anybody who knows me knows this story. I am constantly telling it. Anyway, in that silent room, I heard two sounds, one high and one low. Afterward I asked the engineer in charge why, if the room was so silent, I had heard the two sounds. He said, "Describe them." I did. He said, "The high one was your nervous system in operation. The low one was your blood in circulation."

Listening Log Collection #2• Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin• Terraplane Blues by Robert Johnson• Cotton Tail by Duke Ellington• Ornithology by Charlie Parker• Voiles by Claude Debussy• "Colombine" from Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire• Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Part One: The

Adoration of the Earth (excerpt)• John Cage’s Indeterminacy (excerpt)

Final Reminders / Homework• Need a volunteer to take the Teaching

Evaluations to the music office in the Fine Arts Center, Room 273 (East Wing)

• 20th Century Worksheet due next class (on Moodle)

• Listening Log Collection #2 due next class• Questions? Email:

benjamintibbetts@yahoo.com