The synthesis of tradition and avant-garde techniques in selected polish violin sonatas from the second half of the 20th century

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (12) ◽  
pp. 199-216
Author(s):  
Maryla Renat

The article presents four chamber violin sonatas for an instrument duo written in the 1970s and 1980s, which in their concept of form and shape combine the elements of the widely understood tradition with innovative means of composition technique. The subject for a closer analysis are the following works: • Witold Rudziński, Sonata pastorale per violino e piano forte, 1978 (PWM, Cracow 1983) • Sławomir Czarnecki, Sonate tragique für Violine und Klavier, 1982 (Tonos, Darmstadt 1988) • Jan Krenz, Sonatina for two violins, 1986 (Brevis, Poznań 1994) • Zbigniew Bargielski, Sonate für Violine und Klavier „The sonata of oblivion”,1987, autograph. Each sonata listed above renders an individual concept for combining paradigms adopted from the tradition (e.g. forms, use of quotation, expression idiom) with selected avant-garde means in sound technique, which mainly derives from the sonoristic trend. What Witold Rudziński’s Sonata pastorale per violino e piano forte draws from music tradition is the thematic character of musical thoughts, and in its sound sphere it introduces the means of mild sonoristic, maintaining a balance between them. Sławomir Czarnecki’s Sonate tragique für Violine und Klavier using the quotation from the sequence of Dies irae refers to the Late-Romantic expression to which it adds unusual methods of sound production and sonoristic middle episode. The function of these innovative means is to contrast it against dramatic expression of the piece’s outermost elements. The third discussed work, Sonatina for two violins by Jan Krenz corresponds with the neoclassical trend from the 20th century and brings out diverse elements of violin technique. It refers to the B-A-C-H sound symbol known from the past and to the variation form and combines them with more recent sound structures. The fourth composition, Sonate für Violine und Klavier by Zbigniew Bargielski, is the most innovative one in terms of its sound layer and formal concept. Its connection to the past is maintained thanks to a quotation from Chopin’s music transformed in an interesting way. The analysis of the sonatas leads to the following final conclusion: the tradition and the avant-garde in the discussed works from the postmodern period are not in opposition one against another in terms of style and aesthetics but they create complementary phenomena, in which the message drawn from tradition is given a new face.

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (15) ◽  
pp. 67-107
Author(s):  
Ines R. Artola

The aim of the present article is the analysis of Concerto for harpsichord and five instruments by Manuel de Falla – a piece which was dedicated by the composer to Wanda Landowska, an outstanding Polish harpsichord player. The piece was meant to commemorate the friendship these two artists shared as well as their collaboration. Written in the period of 1923-1926, the Concerto was the first composition in the history of 20th century music where harpsichord was the soloist instrument. The first element of the article is the context in which the piece was written. We shall look into the musical influences that shaped its form. On the one hand, it was the music of the past: from Cancionero Felipe Pedrell through mainly Bach’s polyphony to works by Scarlatti which preceded the Classicism (this influence is particularly noticeable in the third movement of the Concerto). On the other hand, it was music from the time of de Falla: first of all – Neo-Classicism and works by Stravinsky. The author refers to historical sources – critics’ reviews, testimonies of de Falla’s contemporaries and, obviously, his own remarks as to the interpretation of the piece. Next, Inés R. Artola analyses the score in the strict sense of the word “analysis”. In this part of the article, she quotes specific fragments of the composition, which reflect both traditional musical means (counterpoint, canon, Scarlatti-style sonata form, influence of old popular music) and the avant-garde ones (polytonality, orchestration, elements of neo-classical harmony).


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 329-343
Author(s):  
Liudmyla Shapovalova ◽  
Іryna Romaniuk ◽  
Marianna Chernyavska ◽  
Svitlana Shchelkanova

"In the article under consideration are the ways of symphony genre transformation in the early works of Valentin Silvestrov (Ukraine). For the first time, the First, Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies by the genius composers of the 20th century are analyzed as a certain stylistic system. These compositions are endowed with the features of avant-garde poetics, and as a subject of musicological reflection, they are associated with a rethinking of the semantic paradigm of the genre. V. Silvestrov's early symphonies stand out from the classical practice of European symphonies. Scientific awareness of their phenomenal nature necessitated a methodological choice aimed at the most accurate identification of the philosophical concept of the new sound universum of V. Silvestrov's music. Deep correlation of the image of a human being as a factor of the symphony poetics (the influence of philosophical concepts of human ontology in the 20th century with the transformation of the genre canon) is considered. This refers to the nonmusical dimension of the genre semantics. The study of V. Silvestrov's early symphonies reveal a new philosophy of music through gradual movement – modulation: from the neo-baroque First Symphony and ""cosmic pastorals"" Musica Mundana of the Second Symphony through the history anthropologisation in the Third Symphony ""Eschatology"" to the monodrama Musica Humana in the Fourth Symphony. The dichotomy of Musica Mundana – Musica Humana is not accidental: in V. Silvestrov's creative method, remains relevant, which is confirmed by the dramaturgy of his latest work – the Ninth symphony (2019). Keywords: V. Silvestrov's early symphonies, evolution of style, worldview, Musica Mundana, monodrama. "


2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (1 SELECTED PAPERS IN ENGLISH) ◽  
pp. 19-31
Author(s):  
Barbara Niebelska-Rajca

The Polish version of the article was published in “Roczniki Humanistyczne,” vol. 59 (2011), issue 1. Modern theoretical-literary treatises, defined as normative poetics, are usually connected with the dominance of the convention and normativism, with obligatory rules, canonical concepts and restrictive directives hampering originality. The present text tries to revise the conviction that convention is a dominant tendency in the development of the old theoretical thought; it tends to show the avant-garde aspects of modern poetics and to present the relations between what is conventional and what is innovative in the most original theoretical texts of late Renaissance and Baroque. Examples of two avant-garde modern poetics—Francesco Patrizi’s theory of wonder formed at the end of the 16th century and the 17th century Emanuele Tesauro’s conceptistic theory—show that tradition and convention are necessary elements of inventive theories. The avant-garde of poetics of the past, contrary to the avant-garde of the 20th century, is not born from the defiance of the earlier theories but is formed by way of modernizing and transforming them. Old inventive theories—despite all the departures from tradition—are still part of the classical paradigm. Hence, the avant-garde character of late-Renaissance and Baroque theoretical reflection consists in a peculiar synergy of convention and novelty.


1988 ◽  
Vol 4 (14) ◽  
pp. 120-121
Author(s):  
John Andreasen

In June 1985, a fortnight's discussions on ‘The Theatre in the Future’ were held as part of the Fools' Festival in Copenhagen. The seminars discussed the position of theatre and its possibilities in a rapidly changing society, often from deeply opposed positions – socially engaged versus wildly avant-garde, verbal versus imagistic, anthropological versus robotic, and so on. Participants were an exciting mix of professional performers of many kinds, plus theatre critics and ‘ordinary’ engaged people, who for two weeks exchanged experiences and visions of theatre in conjunction with other art forms, and with science and politics. The manifesto below was the contribution to these seminars of John Andreasen, a veteran of ‘sixties happenings, who has subsequently concentrated on street and environmental theatre, and for the past twelve years has taught and directed in the Drama Department of the University of Aarhus.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-179
Author(s):  
Gabriela Vlahopol

Abstract The great stylistic epochs of the past mostly had syntaxes and specific forms, escaping in the context of the application of polyphonic syntax to the tonal system. The twentieth century, characterized by a continuous mobility and search in the field of the musical language, does not intend to create new musical forms but takes preexisting patterns, which adapt to the creative contexts specific to the composers. Thus, despite the blurring of some of the fundamental elements, other factors of configuration and construction were maintained and amplified, as well as the particular phenomenon, the most significant phenomenon being the development of the thematic principle, which will have its particular manifestations in the fugue form, the diversity of its interpretations bearing the mark of some new directions.


2020 ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Zrinka Božić Blanuša

Thanks to the work of Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, David Damrosch and many others, over the past two decades, the concept of world literature has once again become the subject of thorough examination within the field of literary studies, especially in relation to cosmopolitanism and globalization. When it comes to the study of individual national literatures and specific regional contexts, as well as to the definition of comparative literature as a discipline, debates regarding its background, its reach and limitations could not be ignored. World literature thus appears as a heterogenous entity – always manifesting in different contexts in different forms – consistently in dialogical exchange with specificities of a particular literature and culture. Instead of discussing the problematic relation between centre and periphery or criticizing the idea of global literary and cultural canon, the avant-garde as an international and global phenomenon that appears even more radically on the so-called periphery is what is of primary interest to me. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that avant-garde (in its various forms and radical expressions) simultaneously challenges art as an institution and introduces the idea of a decentred geography of world literature.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (Extra-C) ◽  
pp. 75-85
Author(s):  
Elena V. Astashchenko

  The aim of the article is to analyze the multilevel manifestation of the text modality - from grammatical to aesthetic and build a general concept of unrealism as a peripheral, but permanent, constant of the modernist era. However, the ubiquity and dominant delimitation, necessary of structures with conjunctions of unreal comparison, with the predominance of those derived from future forms over those derived from the imperfect, also serves to strengthen the independence of the artwork from social pressure. Subsequently, the characteristic structures of modernity, analogous to the European "future in the past", building an alternative reality, are supplanted by the imperative mood of the second person, with the illocutionary act of calling for a change in the existing reality, in the primitive vanguard and the third person with the "pust" particle [let] in the middle of the 20th century, gradually degenerating into the imperative mood with the "puskai" particle [May], whose motivating pathos is extremely low.  


Author(s):  
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

While contemporary scholars question the existence of a cohesive “Chicago School” of architecture, there is no doubt that by the mid-1890s Chicago came to be recognized nationally and internationally for the technological and aesthetic innovation evident in a number of commercial buildings erected in the downtown business area known as the Loop. These buildings serviced the rapid growth of a city founded earlier in the century as a major trading hub linking the East Coast and the American “West.” Principally office buildings, some were erected for particular companies while others were built as speculative ventures. These innovations were known first as the “commercial style,” then simply as “tall office buildings”; the term “skycraper” came into popular use around 1895. In order to find the correct expression for this unprecedented building type, local architects adapted historical styles including the neo-Gothic, the Romanesque, the Venetian, and the neoclassical. In their published writings, they positioned their work as the development of an indigenous American style particular to the region. By the 1920s, critics described this style as the product of an identifiable “Chicago School.” The idea of such a school played, and continues to play, a significant role in histories of modern architecture. For much of the 20th century, the term referred to a select group of commercial buildings erected between roughly 1883 and 1910. During that period, the Chicago School was positioned as precursor to the modern or International style, prefiguring the functionalism and “new objectivity” of the early-20th-century European avant-garde. Since the 1980s, scholars have dismantled the narrow and monolithic view of the subject, placing its key monuments back within the specific social and economic concerns of the late 19th century, introducing a wider range of projects and typologies for consideration, and including projects constructed up until about 1920. There is less emphasis on aesthetic commonality, and more on the diversity of built responses to the forces of industrialization, urbanization, and capitalism that shaped the American city. The texts listed here survey the Chicago School as it was defined during the 20th century as well as more recent scholarship that questions the canonical view.


Author(s):  
Magdalena Kostova-Panayotova

The main Avant-garde trend in the first third of the 20th century, Futurism, through its various groups and creative personalities, upholds its own conception of art and creator, strives to give a contemporary image of the world, to reveal the hidden essence of things, the inner relation of the elements. According to Futurism, art is meant to change lives, but not as it seems in the writings of nineteenth-century realists: by influencing the rational and changing the mind of the reader. The development of a new artistic expression, in a new poetic language, the use of contemporary forms of artistic conditionality have become major tasks for the generation of poets and artists from the 1910s. Poet futurists reduce the language of literature to its traditional understandings, neglect its inherent rules and laws, because they accept it as something external to the subject, which impedes the expression of its essence. From the depiction of the object to its expression - this is how the break in the creative mind of the futuristic author can be characterized. The linguistic revolution, effected with poetic means by the futurists, is a desperate and utopian attempt to acquire the organic integrity of the world, thirsting for its transformation. Thanks to futurism, the register of poetic techniques was expanded in the 20th century and directions were created for the creation of new expressive means of writing poetic text.


2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (5) ◽  
pp. 772-775
Author(s):  
Rudolph C. Troike

Widely impugned by an uninformed public – and even by many of those who practice it – with such derogatory terms as “Spanglish” or “Chinglish,” or “Pocho” in Spanish, codeswitching (CS) has emerged from marginal obscurity to become a major topic of interest among linguists of a wide variety of persuasions in the past 30 years. Weinreich (1953) famously denied that a switch between languages within a sentence was possible; the MLA bibliography now lists 900 titles on the subject, half of which have appeared since 1995. The present volume – the third edited by the indefatigable Rodolfo Jacobson, a pioneer in the field since the 1970s – reflects both this growth and the increasing breadth of interest that has occurred along with increasing attention to bilingualism generally in its many aspects and implications.


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