Hans Werner Henze as Post-Mahlerian: Anachronism, Freedom, and the Erotics of Intertextuality

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-207
Author(s):  
STEPHEN DOWNES
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Compositional Technique ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Poetic Expression ◽  
Intertextual Allusion

In the early 1960s Mahler’s music became a vital stimulus for Henze’s compositional technique and aesthetics. Particularly important were its exploration of formal crises, the incorporation of ‘old’ musical materials, and its apparently direct expression of love and beauty. These aspects confirmed Henze’s desire to break out of the restrictions of Darmstadt dogma, into an apparently anachronistic expressive and technical freedom. This article explores structural and hermeneutic relationships between two of Henze’s works of the period – Being Beauteous and The Bassarids– and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. In Being Beateous the expressive aspects of cadences in the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony are shown to be crucial models for Henze’s exploration of Rimbaud’s poetic expression of the destruction and revitalization of beautiful form. In The Bassarids an intertextual allusion to the second movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is taken as a signal of Mahlerian ‘breakthrough’ as Pentheus has a vision of Dionysian revelries. Henze’s fragmented, broken, allusive, and eclectic musical textures are interpreted as characteristic expressions of eroticism, as well as being more generally symptomatic of his understanding of Mahler’s importance for twentieth-century music.

"Rien de la tonalite usuelle": Edmond de Polignac and the Octatonic Scale in Nineteenth-Century France

2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 097-120
Author(s):  
Sylvia Kahan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Symphonic Poem ◽  
French Music ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Compositional Technique ◽  
Modes Of Limited Transposition ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Shed Light

The reification and theorization of the octatonic scale, arguably one of the principal organizational devices of twentieth-century music, have been long in coming. Rimsky-Korsakov was the first to describe the scale, in an 1867 letter, discussing its use as a Leitmotiv in the symphonic poem Sadko. Stravinsky used the collection as the basis for many of his groundbreaking works, especially The Rite of Spring, but never acknowledged the fundamental role that the "Rimsky-Korsakov scale" played in his compositional technique. It took another thirty years for Messiaen to identify the collection as one of the "modes of limited transposition." And another twenty years would pass before Arthur Berger, in a 1963 article, coined the name "octatonic scale."The post-Berger generation of scholars, beginning with van den Toorn and Taruskin, have continued to shed light on the functional and formal uses of the octatonic scale. Taruskin has traced the influence of Schubert's and Liszt's use of harmonic progressions based on mediant and diminished-seventh relations on Rimsky-Korsakov, who in turn influenced a whole generation of early modernist Russians. However, the fact that Rimsky-Korsakov never wrote down in any systematic way the theory underlying the scale that bore his name--in the same way that he codified his theories of orchestration--meant that its presence in early modernist compositions, although used frequently and conspicuously by his followers, remained obscure to those outside his circle. Therefore, the presence of the octatonic collection in the music of non-Russian early modernist composers cannot be easily explained, and the sources of influence are harder to trace. Interestingly, it appears that an important historical link between nineteenth- and twentieth-century octatonic composition--a link with particular implications for the presence of octatonicism in early modernist French music--is found in the music and theoretical writings of Prince Edmond de Polignac (1834--1901), an aristocrat and amateur French composer, who, in 1879, penned not only the first pervasively octatonic composition, but also what appears to be the first treatise on octatonic theory; he went on to write several other compositions based on the "gammes chromatico-diatoniques." In 1894 one of PolignacÕs contemporaries, musicologist Alexandre de Bertha, wrote and lectured extensively about his "discovery" of the "gammes enharmo-niques." In this article, I examine the reception of the works and ideas of Polignac and Bertha by contemporary critics and composers, and PolignacÕs role as an important precursor of modern octatonic theory.

The Doctor Faustus Dossier

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Daub
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Doctor Faustus ◽  
Public Lives ◽  
Nazi Era ◽  
The Impact

Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction that contextualizes the impact that these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.

Queering Musical Biography in the Writings of Edward Prime-Stevenson and Rosa Newmarch

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-118
Author(s):  
Kristin M. Franseen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Benjamin Britten ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Symphonic Music ◽  
Biographical Knowledge

Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.

Exploring Twentieth-Century Music

1971 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-123
Author(s):  
Henry Leland Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century Music

Regarding Electronic Music

Tempo ◽  
1966 ◽  
pp. 2-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelio de la Vega
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Electronic Medium ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Long Time

For a long time now—long when we consider the quick, changing time-scale of our days—electronic music has been with us. The public at large usually remains cold, confused or merely dazed when faced with any new aesthetic experience. Critics, musicologists and the like still seem, as usual, to be unable to predict what will happen to this peculiar, mysterious and often anathematized way of handling musical composition, while many traditionally-minded composers consider it a degrading destruction of the art of music. On the other hand, the electronic medium seems to attract a long, motley caravan of young, inexperienced and often unprepared ‘beatnik type’ self-titled composers, who believe that the world began yesterday and that you only have to push buttons and prepare IBM cards to obtain magical results. Probably not since Schoenberg proclaimed the equal value of the twelve semitones of our sacred but by now obsolete tempered scale has twentieth-century music been faced with such a bewilderment.

‘A magic science’: rock music as a recording art

Popular Music ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 195-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
Order And Disorder ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
And Control ◽  
Jimi Hendrix ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Jimi Hendrix once claimed ‘I'm working on music to be completely, utterly a magic science’ (Henderson 1981, p. 337). It is a description that fits not just the best of Hendrix's own music, but the best of all that late twentieth-century music in which the ability to capture and control sounds (on tape or disc) has become a means of extending old musical forms and traditions, and establishing new possibilities for them. Throughout his career, Hendrix drew nourishment from his musical roots in black traditions, but it was not until the summer of 1967 that he plugged himself fully into the new possibilities opened up by the technology of sound recording. Hendrix had already proved himself something of a musical ‘magician’ in the ancient sense in that he attempted, through music, to mediate between order and disorder, using his guitar as an expressive extension of himself to flirt with the danger and power of musical disintegration (for the parallel with non-Western musical practice see Shepherd 1977, p. 72; Mellers 1973, pp. 24–6; Clarke 1982, pp. 227–9).

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