scholarly journals Voices of earthmen (1995) by Vladan Radovanovic: A review

Muzikologija ◽  
2007 ◽  
pp. 295-302
Author(s):  
Marija Masnikosa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rigid System ◽  
Compositional Technique ◽  
Musical Modernism

This paper discusses the compositional technique and the poetic level of the composition Glasovi Zemljana (Voices of Earthmen) composed by Vladan Radovanovic in 1995. The work is based on the composer?s own musical principle, which he called hyperpoliphony, established in his early work Polyphony No. 9, and applied in his entire musical opus to date. The composition contains three movements, although the disposition of each section implies integration at a higher level of its structure, enabling us to interpret this work as an organic, textually unified three-part whole. Even though so-called hyperpolyphony creates and pervades the whole composition, this music is not the outcome of some rigid system. It breathes and it has its own ?warm? and even ?confessing? sections, especially in the unexpected instrumental and vocal ?solo-episodes?. Although this work was composed in an age of musical postmodernism, and shows a very strong imprint of musical expressionism, its atonality and very specific modernist musical technique define it as a modernist work, which places it in the huge trajectory of musical modernism of the second half of the twentieth century.

Dallapiccola, Luigi (1904–1975)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Roderick
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Society ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Luigi Dallapiccola ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
The City ◽  
Performed Music

Luigi Dallapiccola was the leading Italian composer of the middle half of the twentieth century, contributing much to the development of musical modernism in Italy as well as writing some of the most famous and widely performed music of his era. He was born in Pisino in modern-day Croatia; his Istrian background and the changing political ownership of his hometown are often cited as the root of many of his later musical and esthetic directions. However, it could be claimed that his more crucial relationship with place occurred in Florence, where he re-located in 1922 as a burgeoning compositional talent to study with Ernesto Consolo and later the modernist Vito Frazzi. He never left, finding the city of Dante, Botticelli, and Boccaccio to be a perpetual artistic muse. By the end of the 1930s, Dallapiccola had been firmly established as Italian music’s principal pioneer and was known overseas as a vocal supporter of musical internationalism through the International Society for Contemporary Music.

‘Britten Minor’: Constructing the Modernist Canon

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-290
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER CHOWRIMOOTOO
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Benjamin Britten ◽  
Canon Formation ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Musical Modernism

AbstractIn the last few decades, established narratives of twentieth-century music – with Schoenberg and his disciples at the centre and others on the periphery – have come under considerable fire: some have denounced the modernist canon itself as narrow and esoteric, while others have sought to restore marginalized ‘minor’ composers to a supposedly rightful centrality. In this article, I revisit the mid-century process of canon formation in order to excavate a deeper, less divisive understanding of its history. Using Benjamin Britten as a case study, I sketch a more ambivalent and reciprocal relationship between major and minor composers than has often been suggested. After illuminating key tropes in Britten's mid-century reception, I examine how the composer and his critics fashioned his canonical minority and, in the process, helped to construct the ‘majority’ of his modernist counterparts. I argue that, far from marginalizing his oeuvre, Britten's ambivalent, peripheral, and even diminutive relationship with the ‘major’ figures of musical modernism was central both to his mid-century appeal and his enduring place in the canon. Ultimately, I suggest that attending to Britten's complex and self-conscious canonical negotiations can teach us a lot not just about his own role in history, but also about the wider ways that twentieth-century canons are negotiated, mediated, transmitted, and performed.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Saylor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Disruption ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Broad Array ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Musical Modernism

The introduction lays out the paradoxical nature of early twentieth-century pastoral music, contrasting its large-scale popularity among listeners with its long-term critical dismissal. However, if considered as a manifestation of what Peter Stansky calls the “radical domestic”—the bringing about of significant cultural changes incrementally, so as to avoid political and social disruption—then pastoralism actually reflects an important facet of British musical modernism. Arising after 1920, this new idiom departed from more traditional evocations of the pastoral associated with the Romantic era, but still embraced a similarly broad array of topics even as the stylistic range began to narrow.

The Composer as ‘Good European’: Musical Modernism,Amor fatiand the Cosmopolitanism of Frederick Delius

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH COLLINS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Modernism

AbstractThis article argues that early twentieth-century debates about both musical modernism and the idea of Europe were conditioned by prevailing attitudes towards autonomy. It will challenge the current rendering of modernist autonomy as depoliticized by showing how the attribution of ‘cosmopolitan’ characteristics to the music and persona of Frederick Delius indicated both an absence of affiliation and a definitive marker of Englishness. Underpinning this argument is the idea that attending to the dialectical interplay between independence and cooperation in the notion of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ can offer a model for a renewed conception of autonomy and commitment in musical modernism. Delius’s devotion to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Nietzsche's own analysis of European nihilism, will act as the backdrop to this discussion and help to suggest how both ‘Europe’ and musical modernism can be understood – via the notion of cosmopolitanism – as dispositions extending beyond their conventional geographical and historical demarcations.

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.

Classical Metre and Modern Music

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 212-238
Author(s):  
Konstantine Panegyres
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Significant Development ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Musical Modernism

Abstract This article explores the influence of Greek metre on modern music. It begins by looking at how composers and theorists debated Greek metre from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, before focusing more extensively on twentieth century and contemporary material. The article seeks to show that Greek metre for a long time played an important role in the development of Western music theory, but that in more recent times its influence has diminished. One significant development discussed is the influence of Greek metrics on musical Modernism in the early twentieth century. The article is intended as a contribution to our understanding of the reception of ancient metrics in connection with musical developments.

Mapping Sound

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-67
Author(s):  
William O'Hara
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Music Analysis ◽  
Mobile Form ◽  
Environmental Sounds ◽  
Free Exploration ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
Graphic Scores ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
Complementary Actions

Each playthrough of Ed Key and David Kanaga's Proteus (2013) presents players with a new, randomly generated island to explore. This unstructured exploration is accompanied by a procedurally generated ambient soundtrack that incorporates both harmonic textures and melodic motives, and abstract musical representations of environmental sounds. In the absence of clearly defined goals—except to progress through four distinct “seasons” of the game—the player's relationship to the soundtrack becomes a core gameplay element, and a playthrough of Proteus becomes, among other things, a kind of improvised performance art. Viewed from this perspective, Proteus's combination of free exploration and chance strongly evokes ideas from mid-twentieth-century musical modernism, including the graphic scores of Cardew and Cage and the “mobile form” works of Stockhausen and Ligeti. Proteus further complicates analysis by concealing the mechanisms that produce particular musical fragments and by eliding the roles of listener and player/performer. This article examines the tensions inherent in the complementary actions of playing/performing Proteus and listening to/analyzing it, and argues that the game challenges the distinctions between creator, performer, and observer by vividly embodying the most deeply ingrained metaphors of music analysis.

Ives at Century’s Turn

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Paul
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scholarly Activity ◽  
Systematic Pattern ◽  
Musical Modernism

This chapter examines how Charles E. Ives has been affected by the transformations in American musicology over the last twenty-five years. It begins with a discussion of Maynard Solomon's accusation that Ives had engaged in a “systematic pattern of falsification” to safeguard his claims at the patent-house of musical modernism. It then considers how Solomon's criticisms served as the catalyst for an explosion of scholarly activity centered on Ives in the 1990s. In particular, it describes the approaches taken by musicologists to rebut Solomon, including those associated with “New Musicology.” It also explores the etiology of the myth that Ives was a patriarch of a lineage of composers known as the American Mavericks, along with the vicissitudes of Ives scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century.

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