Getting Going...

Greetings, We'll move this blog over to Canvas this coming week, once I get the transmission. But I REALLY need to kick our little seminar into a higher gear in our quest to develop narratives of music history during the 20th century, so that we can settle into the 21st century and begin exploring. Newer music is a wonderful world to play in, and it strikes me that the more I look, the more I am delighted by the possibilities and fascinating things that are happening, pretty much all over, if you only begin to look in the right places. On the other hand, a lot of this will not make sense unless you understand where we came from. Hence the need to go back and consider the changing narratives (i.e., histories) of the past 120 years or so. And it is HARD to know just what to tell you to read and listen to, when we are doing this as something of a review for 60 percent of you (i.e., the three who have just finished MUS 505) and Kaitlin and Enrique have to sort of catch up (or are you already there, just needing a little tune up?)! I think the best thing to do is to listen to some of the pieces that I have listed on Blackboard, which will be review for those in MUS 505. If you know these pieces, find other ones. With Stravinsky and Ives, you can listen to the Stravinsky pieces on Bb in the Recordings folder, sections IV. VI. and VIII. This covers for Stravinsky, the Rite of Spring and some Neo-Classic works. Also pieces by Ives. Reading can come from the Morgan book, if you have it, or Grove online. Everyone should read the passages on Stravinsky and Ives from the Weiss-Taruskin anthology (Music in the Western World). Good to look at the Taruskin Outlines as well. Kaitlin, I think you and I were going to talk about Ives on Tuesday, so perhaps we can meet on Monday to plan. (I have a semester's worth of material on Ives, so the painful task is distilling it down to an hour or so!). Let me specify some of the readings for everyone by later this afternoon (Saturday). Same for Stravinsky. I think Beatriz and Enrique were going to lead the discussion on Stravinsky. More specifics on that in a little later. In the meantime don't abandon the contemporary scene and peek at blogs by Gann and Ross (as in "your free time!"). Not sure this helps at all, but it is a start. LB P.S. I've been reading John Adams's autobiography, Halleluia Junction. Wonderful to read his voice (and then to hear it on YouTube). So human and down to earth!

An Overview of Debussy

Hello all,

Sorry for the late post - better late than never, I suppose. While I won't be in class tomorrow due to not feeling well, I thought I would post some of the discussion notes on Debussy for everyone to ponder over.

Key Points from Debussy Readings

• Strong desire to shift away from Austro-German influence and to make French music stand out
• Debussy was prominent French composer at the time
• interest for Russian music (colorful sounds and textures) arose from working for patron of Tchaikovsky 
• considered a tonal "modifier" because he showed interest in Eastern musical influences
• Javanese gamelan
• pentatonic scale
• evocations of Spain, such as La soirée dans Grenade (The Evening in Granada) in 1903
• also used other nontraditional scales (whole-tone and octatonic) and church modes (i.e. Lydian)
• these types of scales were of basis of the "letting go of glue" - or tendency tones - as discussed in class; they contain less half steps that really serve as the foundations for the major and minor modes.
• was dubbed "Impressionist"
• didn't like this term
• term is somewhat synonymous with art style at the time; uses of tone colors and harmonies that often times lack resolution; music evokes particular feelings or ideas.
• Samson puts it best by saying Debussy's "reinterpretation of tonality" is best displayed by his "harmonic fingerprint"
• "planing" or harmonic parallelism 
• contrasting harmonic ideas such as the ones in Voiles (whole-tone + pentatonic + whole-tone) in 1909
• didn't "entirely eschew" from established tonal ideas, but did approach late 19th-early 20th century musical establishment in unique ways to create his own sound.

Welcome to our Class Blog: MUS690 Composers' Voices

Let's see how this works for this semester. We'll talk more about it in class, but after I invite you, please acknowledge that you are on! Thank you! LB