BOARD NOTES WEEK 3
**WEEK 3 PART 1
LEVINE
--Dealing with the US, but making points applicable
elsewhere (like Europe) as well.
--In the late 19th century, a divide started to open up
between popular (or “lowbrow”) culture and high-art (or
“highbrow” culture).
--Why did this divide open?
--“Sacralization” of high culture: with this came the
exclusive attitude that art was for the initiated, the chosen,
or those who understood that it was meant to be so much
more than mere entertainment.
--This attitude led highbrow folks to discourage the
masses from even trying to appreciate art.
--Also, the modernist attitude (since Beethoven), that
great music must always go someplace new, inevitably
led to “difficult” music; thus, music that highbrow types
felt lowbrow types couldn’t understand, and that lowbrow
types increasingly didn’t want to have to understand.
--CONCLUSION FOR NOW:
--This divide was high-profile and everyone dealt with it;
composers especially.
**WEEK 3 PART 2: STRAVINSKY, RITE OF SPRING,
1913
--Primitivism:
--An artistic movement of the time, mainly in the visual
arts, associated with (among others) Picasso.
--Primitivism = fascination with so-called “primitive art”
from Africa and other places.
--Sometimes—not always—a form of racism and
indirectly a justification for colonialism (as in, “look at
these crude, primitive peoples”); also an expression of
exoticism, which is itself suspect.
--Stravinsky is pretty immune from that colonial view,
since he’s imagining ancient Russia here (and
specifically, the sacrifice of a virgin in an ancient spring
ritual).
MUSICAL TRAITS:
--RHYTHM:
--Irregular rhythms and meters.
--Unit pulse.
--Climaxes not rationally attained, but rather sudden
explosions.
--MELODY:
--Heterophony.
--Interesting unconventional scales (octatonic, pentatonic,
whole-tone).
--Very few pitches and narrow range, often descending
tetrachords; reminiscent of Slavic folksong.
--Note that Stravinsky never ‘fessed up that he borrowed
folk tunes for this; but he did.
--HARMONY:
--Dissonance.
--Bitonality; major and minor chords superimposed on
one another (as in Augurs of Spring).
--Pedal points, pedal chords, ostinatos, stacked thirds.
--FORMAL:
--Shifting static blocks of material.
(--Again, ostinatos.)
--Layered textures.
--ORCHESTRAL:
--Romantic-sized orchestra, yes, but used unromantically
(strings de-emphasized).
--Extreme registers, solo work, special techniques, new
groupings.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
--Ballets Russes in Paris.
--Note the curious situation of a Russian troupe coming to
the homeland of ballet to present….a ballet.
--If you were a Parisian, you probably would have
understood this situation in terms like these:
--"The Russians have a right to ballet, as they have
Tchaikovsky.”
--"But: they better bring something colorful/exotic to the
table.”
--If you were Stravinsky, you’d be particularly eager to
surprise them, as you would have already had two works
performed for them in previous years (Firebird and
Petrushka), and as a bona-fide modernist, you’d want to
“shock and awe.”
--THE RIOT:
--The premiere of this work is probably the most famous
in western music history; it did indeed cause a riot.
--Recent thinking is that it is the dancing that triggered
this riot, not the music;
--A concert version of this music (no dancing) went over
well the very next year in Paris.
--The dancing no doubt evoked a modern, scientific view
of culture, one at odds with the preferred exoticism;
--Specifically, it evoked “biologism,” or the
understanding of the human experience as a series of
biological urges.
--WAYS OF UNDERSTANDING THIS RIOT:
--One could think of it as the audience participating in
Primitivism; it is a Primitivist reception of a Primitivist
work, in other words!
--More Profoundly:
--This work came right before WWI; it is violent like
WWI, but with this added similarity:
--Both the Rite of Spring and WWI itself achieved its
brutality via sophisticated modernity.
**WEEK 3 PART 3: STRAVINSKY BETWEEN THE
WARS
--Les Noces (The Wedding), 1921:
--A ballet: solo singers, chorus, 4 pianos, percussion.
--Like Rite of Spring, this is somewhat Primitivist: it
looks at “timeless” Russian peasant culture.
--That circumstance, plus the fact that Stravinsky wrote
this only 8 years after the Rite, no doubt explains why the
musical style of the two works is similar.
--BUT:
--Stravinsky himself (and others) noted a detached, dryer,
less emotional quality to this music (i.e., dryer, etc. than
Rite of Spring).
--Stravinsky related this to the fact that he was observing
a traditional ritual (rituals can sometimes be more
symbolic than “actual”).
--In an effort to create a sense of distance from the event,
Stravinsky presented just fragments of the text (for
instance, bits of conversation as if overheard); and he had
a given soloist sing many parts (as a way of
depersonalizing those characters).
--This creates almost a clinical, objective look at the
wedding.
WHY THE CHANGE IN AESTHETICS?
--One theory: the horrors of WWI caused composers to
rethink their possible complicity: some like Stravinsky
had written violent, irrational music at a violent, irrational
time.
--Beginning in the 1920s, he and others seem to be
composing “disclaimers”; in other words, they write dryer
music while claiming that music is not actually able to
express anything beyond itself. Music is there to solve
purely musical problems. It is rational, not irrational, and
detached, not emotional.
--From this perspective, Les Noces is a transitional work
(for the reasons given above).
--Stravinsky’s ultimate realization of this dry, rational
aesthetic will be Neoclassicism, or music-about-music.
(--We listened to a little of the first movement of his
Symphony in C [late 1930s-1940] as an example of this.)
--Some have understood this shift as the triumph of the
19th-century ideal of “absolute music.”
**WEEK 3 PART 4: SCHOENBERG BEFORE WWI:
EWARTUNG, 1909
--Erwartung = a monodrama for soprano and orchestra.
--The title roughly means “expectation.”
--The story is very unclear, but seems to involve a woman
wandering in the dark, looking for her lover whom she
might have killed.
“DOES THIS MUSIC COHERE?”
--On one hand, people have analyzed it and have found
logical structures holding it together (motives—or cells—
that repeat, some harmonic consistency, the “glue” of
sliding chromaticism).
--On the other hand, the psychological portrait here is
definitely that of an irrational state, and Schoenberg
himself hinted that the music is—or should be—un-
analyzable. In other words, maybe it shouldn’t make
sense, given the subject matter.
EXPRESSIONISM
(--Briefly encountered already by us in Debussy’s
“Gigues” and “Jeux.”)
--Characteristics of Expressionist arts: Nightmarish,
distorted, irrational, nocturnal scenes, … not pretty!
(Insert ghoul-emoji)
--HOW TO UNDERSTAND EXPRESSIONISM
ARTISTICALLY?
--On the one hand, a “last-gasp” of romanticism (which—
remember—was about emotional extremes).
--On the other, this romanticism is overlaid with a 20th-
century scientific mindset; Erwartung is like an
exploration of a mental state.
--The woman in the story is nameless, thus making her
more like a “subject.”
--Schoenberg partly based this on a friend’s experience
with insanity.
--HOW TO UNDERSTAND THIS IN BROADER
TERMS?
--Musically: tonality broke down over the course of the
19th century as emotional expression called forth more
chromaticism and dissonance. If you keep that in mind,
then it makes perfect sense (ironically) that an
Expressionist work like Erwartung must convey
irrationality.
--Culturally: Like The Rite of Spring, Erwartung may
well participate in the move toward irrationality that
accompanied the slide into World War I.
CODA (UNRELATED TO THE ABOVE POINTS)
--Erwartung can be read as a parable for Schoenberg’s
plight upon the dissolution of tonality:
--The woman staggers through the night; she has probably
killed her lover and is looking for a path in the darkness.
--Schoenberg staggers through the early years of the 20th
century; he has killed the tonic and is looking for a
musical path (which he will find after WWI).
**WEEK 3 PART 5: CONCLUSION (SCHOENBERG
AFTER WWI)
--The stories unfolding here continue into next week; like
Stravinsky, Schoenberg is also going to “retreat into
rational music” after the horrors of WWI. In
Schoenberg’s case, that will mean 12-tone music.
--I will elaborate on this and include the Scherzinger
reading Week 4, before moving on to other topics.
