Messiaen, Olivier (1908–1992)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Broad
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Compositional Style ◽  
Olivier Messiaen ◽  
Emotional Intensity ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Considerable Detail

Olivier Messiaen was one of the foremost composers of the twentieth century, with a distinctive compositional style of great emotional intensity. This style drew on a diverse array of rhythmic, harmonic, timbral, and formal influences that included the songs of birds, and expressed a deeply held Catholic faith. Messiaen was influential as a teacher and foresaw the concept of total serialism taken forward by his pupils Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. There are major works throughout his sixty-year career, including La Nativité du Seigneur (1935), the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time, completed 1941), Catalogue d’oiseaux (completed 1958), Couleurs de la Cité Céleste (1963), Des canyons aux étoiles (completed 1974) and St François d’Assise (completed 1983). In his treatises Technique de mon langage musical (1944) and Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie (1994–2002), he set out his musical inspirations and processes in considerable detail.

Tremblay, Gilles (1932--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Thérèse Lefebvre
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Music ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Olivier Messiaen ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Iannis Xenakis ◽  
Guillaume De Machaut ◽  
The Past ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
School Of Music

Composer and musical pedagogue Gilles Tremblay made significant contributions to the development of musical composition in Quebec in the second half of the twentieth century. After studying at the Montreal Conservatory (Conservatoire de Musique du Québec à Montréal), he attended workshops at the Marlboro School of Music (Vermont) in the summers of 1950, 1951, and 1953. He lived in Paris from 1954 to 1961, where he enrolled in the piano studio of Yvonne Loriod, took analysis courses with Olivier Messiaen, attended workshops on Ondes Martenot, and received counterpoint lessons with Andrée Vaurabourg-Honegger. Tremblay attended the Darmstadt International Summer Courses in 1957 and 1960, and worked at the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) led by Pierre Schaeffer. Involved at this time with the networks of French new music, he frequently met with Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xénakis. In 1961 Tremblay returned to Quebec and was appointed professor of analysis and composition at the Montreal Conservatory, a position he occupied until his retirement in 1997. His courses at the Conservatory were inspired by Messiaen’s famous analysis class in Paris. Tremblay found connections between master works of Western music that linked the past to the present, from Gregorian chants to the polyphony of Guillaume de Machaut, Monteverdi, and Mozart, through to the twentieth century. His courses were extremely influential to two or three generations of composers in Quebec.

scholarly journals “Reminisces of a Dead World”: Neoclassical Impulses in Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Faulkenberry
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Technical Innovation ◽  
World War ◽  
Strong Connection ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Musical Traditions

In the years following World War II, integral serialist composers declared their intent to defy all previous musical conventions and eradicate all “rem-inisces of a dead world” from their music. Karlheinz Stockhausen was no exception, asserting his desire “to avoid everything which is familiar, generally known or reminiscent of music already composed.” However, Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, de-spite its reputation for technical innovation, bears a strong connection to prior musical traditions. In this regard, Stockhausen resembled the neoclassical school of composers that sought to accommodate antiquated musical materials within a modern con-text.To demonstrate these similarities, I apply to Gesang a model of neoclassicism developed by Martha M. Hyde, a scholar on twentieth-century mu-sic. Hyde identifies two modes by which a neoclassi-cal piece “accommodates antiquity”: metamorphic anachronism and allegory. I argue both are present in Gesang. First, Stockhausen adopts elements of the sacred vocal tradition—including a child’s voice and antiphonal writing—and morphs them into something modern. Second, Stockhausen uses the Biblical story on which Gesang is based as an alle-gory for his own conflicted relationship with the mu-sical past. This analysis reframes Gesang’s signifi-cance and connects Stockhausen’s work to seem-ingly unrelated trends in twentieth-century musical thought.

Serialism

Artful Noise ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 82-96
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe
Keyword(s):  
Arnold Schoenberg ◽  
Anton Webern ◽  
Point System ◽  
Tonal Music ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
Compositional Approach ◽  
Alberto Ginastera ◽  
Percussion Instruments ◽  
German Composer

In the 1950s and 1960s, many composers, influenced by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, embraced serial compositional techniques. Tonal music became atonal and composers, such as Pierre Boulez from France and the German composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, championed this new compositional approach. This chapter defines serialism and how composers applied it to works for percussion instruments. Music examples include Stockhausen’s solo work, Zyklus, with its totally original notational system, and a setting of an E. E. Cummings poem, Circles, by the Italian composer Luciano Berio. American composer Charles Wuorinen’s use of Milton Babbitt’s “time point” system in both his solo work Janissary Music and his forty-five-minute Percussion Symphony is presented, as is the work of Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, who contributed to the literature one of the twentieth century’s largest percussion works, Cantata para América Mágica, for dramatic soprano and fifty-three percussion instruments. A discussion of percussion solo and ensemble works by the Greek composer, architect, and mathematician Iannis Xenakis completes the chapter.

Boulez, Pierre (1925-2016)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Going Public ◽  
Concert Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
History Of ◽  
Listening Habits

French composer Pierre Boulez was one of the most influential composers of the second half of the twentieth century. His personal development mirrored the history of Western concert music. An essential figure in the history of artistic modernism, he was perceived as a leader of the musical avant-garde since 1945. In addition, through his international career as a conductor, he sought to change the listening habits of the concert-going public by initiating them, through concerts and recordings, into the classics of modernism from the first half of the twentieth century (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartók, Berg, etc.). From serialism, open forms, the interface between instrument and machine, the concern with perceptibility, Boulez’s catalog forms a rich and varied corpus. Although Boulez dispensed with total serialism after a brief but decisive period, his concern with the formal unity of a work of art remained a central concern throughout his career.

The Royal Declaration Against Transubstantiation and the Struggle Against Religious Discrimination in the Early Twentieth Century

2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-572
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Fewster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Religious Discrimination ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
Catholic Faith

Historians have paid little attention to the controversy provoked when Edward VII, in conformity with the Bill of Rights (1689) and Act of Settlement (1701) made the ‘Declaration against Transubstantiation’ which grossly insulted the Roman Catholic faith. Angry protests by Catholics in England were replicated even more strongly throughout the empire and issues of constitutional importance were raised which remain alive to the present day. The records of the lengthy parliamentary debates on this matter between 1901 and 1910 show that despite lingering suspicion of the Roman Catholic Church, and determination that no one professing that faith should ever occupy the throne, most members of both houses regarded Catholics as loyal citizens who should no longer be affronted at the beginning of the sovereign's reign by language born of a bygone age. Even so, to devise a formula which while removing what gave offence could satisfy the diverse interests involved when the religious and political spheres impinged on each other proved extremely difficult. The difficulty was increased because a large proportion of the general public regarded the declaration as a vital safeguard to the Protestant succession to the throne which made politicians hesitant to tamper with what had become ‘woven into the very texture of religious belief and adhesion’ in the country. It is worthwhile, therefore, to examine the various attempts to deal with this ‘thorny and difficult question’, which finally led to a revised declaration being forced in great haste through the House of Commons amid loud protests at what was considered unprecedented procedure.

Donatoni, Franco (1927–2000)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Renaud
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
Music Program ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Mature Work ◽  
And Control

Composer and poet Franco Donatoni studied in Vienna before attending the Darmstadt summer music program, where he encountered Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, among others. Donatoni took to the serial practices of Darmstadt but attempted to join them with John Cage’s project of separating the composer’s ego from the work of art. These encounters eventually led him to apply what he referred to as codes to found or borrowed material. In any given mature work, codes operate on multiple levels and control all musical parameters. His early experiments with codes, such as EtwasRuhigerimAusdruck (1967), aim for the creation of a work completely autonomous from its maker; however, Donatoni’s thinking gradually changed to acknowledge his role in the deployment of codes. Works like La souris sans sourire (1988) for string quartet demonstrate his self-defined joyous period, where he employed a wider range of materials. One of the clearest examples of his use of codes is his final piece Esa (In Cauda V) (2000), written for his student Esa-Pekka Salonen, which uses the musical spelling of Esa’s name and material from The Rite of Spring.

‘Filming the invisible’: Barrie Gavin in conversation with John Wyver

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wyver
Keyword(s):  
Working Relationships ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
Music Television ◽  
Toru Takemitsu ◽  
Innovative Approaches ◽  
The Invisible

Barrie Gavin (b. 1935) is a celebrated producer, director and writer who is best known for numerous programmes about music and musicians made primarily for BBC Television from 1964 onwards. He worked on numerous occasions with the conductors Pierre Boulez and Simon Rattle, and with them and other collaborators he has directed more than 90 films. In this conversation recorded in Leeds in June 2018 Gavin discusses with the writer and producer John Wyver his ideas about making music television, his innovative approaches to filmmaking, his profiles of composers including Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Toru Takemitsu, and his working relationships with Boulez and Rattle.

The singer, not the song: women singers as composer-poets

Popular Music ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-199
Author(s):  
John Potter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Performance Analysis ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
New Synthesis ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Musical Evolution ◽  
Joni Mitchell ◽  
Considerable Detail ◽  
Point Of Departure

In his comprehensive celebration of women singers in the twentieth century, Wilfrid Mellers proposed a three-stage socio-musical evolution from the jazz, blues and gospel songs sung by black women, through the black-inspired white singers who followed them, to a new synthesis of singing poet-composers (Mellers 1986). Within this third category, very much the main point of the book, Mellers deals in considerable detail with a range of singer/song writers, from Joni Mitchell and Dory Previn to Rickie Lee Jones and Laurie Anderson. In this article I should like to take this concept of the woman singer/song writer as a point of departure from which to look at two very different kinds of singer: different, that is, both from each other and from any of the singers dealt with in the Mellers book. It has always seemed to me to be characteristic of much of Wilfrid Mellers' writing (and certainly of Angels of the Night) that he never lets his musicological agenda get in the way of his fundamental enjoyment of the music as a fan trying to make sense of his own taste. The reader can accept or reject his thoughts about the significance of it all, and not get so blinded by musicology that you cannot face listening to the songs: that, after all, is in the end what we are supposed to do. In what follows, I, too, write as a fan, but since performers do not often get the chance to bite back at musicologists, I should also like to take the opportunity to question from a singer's point of view a certain kind of performance analysis used by many musicologists. The subject is fraught with ideological booby-traps, so I should confess right away that I am a middle-class, middle-aged English married father.

Nono, Luigi (1924–90)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carola Nielinger-Vakil
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Music Theater ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Second Viennese School ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Music ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
Law Degree

Luigi Nono stands out as one of the most uncompromising modernist composers of the Italian avant-garde. Together with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Nono was one of the leading representatives of integral serialism in Europe after 1945. Nono is further known for his political music theater, his innovative spatial use of electronic music and live-electronics, avant-garde and microtonal instrumental writing, and an exceptionally lyric and communicative application of complex compositional procedures. Luigi Nono was born into a wealthy Venetian family just after Mussolini came to power. Toward the end of World War II, Nono began to study composition with G Fr Malipiero at the Venice conservatoire (1943–5) while completing a law degree at Padova University (1942–7). At the conservatoire, Bruno Maderna’s influential composition tutorials sparked a life-long interest in Renaissance polyphony and the works of the Second Viennese School. Equally fundamental was Hermann Scherchen’s conducting course (Venice, 1948). Luigi Dallapiccola’s lyric serialism was another formative influence at this time. Nono’s first major work, the Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell’op.41 di Arnold Schönberg, was premiered under Scherchen at the Darmstadt New Music Courses in 1950. Together with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Nono subsequently established himself as one of the leading composers of integral serialism.

Emerson’s Decomposition: Parnassus

2013 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 520-545
Author(s):  
Nikhil Bilwakesh
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Critical Value ◽  
Compositional Style ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
A Current

This essay offers a new reading of Emerson’s late redactorial and critical work that evinces a correspondence between bodily and literary decomposition. I argue that the critical value of Parnassus (1874) lies precisely in its demonstration of Emerson’s principles of composition, in particular a late compositional style that I define as Emerson’s “decomposition.” The very difficulty in “authorizing” such a text makes us attend to the role of citation and quotation in Emerson’s work, in larger proprietary questions of nineteenth-century authorship, in the twentieth-century discourse of the “death and rebirth” of the author, and in a current age when digital dissemination threatens copyright value and challenges writers to reconfigure conceptions of creative composition in formally innovative works. A revised formal appraisal of Parnassus, in its classificatory, literary, and biological contexts, is not only instrumental for Emerson scholars, but can also help bridge the ample body of theoretical work on the question of the author with the undertheorized critical study of the anthology as a genre.

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