Anthropological turn in the Music of the Twentieth Century

The purpose of the article is to determine the cultural and historical determinants of the anthropological turn in the music of the twentieth century when the civilizational desire to create an artificial environment led to the invention of new forms of compositional structures (twelve-tone system, aleatorics, etc.). The methodology consists of theoretical and interpretive models of analysis of mechanisms of cultural creation to determine their narrative orientation, systemic and comparative approaches to determine the specifics of the musical reality of modern culture to understand the interconnectedness with world social processes. The scientific novelty is to reveal the features of the interaction of social perceptual and artistic image in music at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries as a reality of musicological reflection, as well as to characterize the interaction of globalization processes and ethnic background in the music culture of late XX - early XXI centuries. Conclusions. The musical culture of Ukraine of the twentieth century is becoming one of the priority factors in the dialogue of cultures of both the post-totalitarian "Soviet" space and world music culture, due to the intensification of the search for new ways of human development. Expansion of spheres of interaction, integrative and globalization tendencies are not fixed as restoration of cultural-historical potential, on the contrary, polystylism as a general platform of formation is presented by appeals to Ukrainian baroque culture, the renaissance of sacred music, the revival of the ethnic component in art, search for new ones. Keywords: musical culture, anthropological turn, globalization, dialogue of cultures.

Tonality or Atonality in Bartók’s Sonata for Violin and Piano no. 2? From Folk Modalities to a Twelve-tone Language

External political circumstances as well as Bartók’s personal activities in the early 1920s were decisive in contributing to the expansion of the basic principles of his musical language. Bartók’s Second Sonata for Violin and Piano (1922) may be considered a focal point in his evolution toward ultramodernism. Concomitant with this tendency, both Sonatas for Violin and Piano of this period have become paradigmatic of the controversial notion set forth by certain scholars regarding the existence of an atonal Bartók idiom. Within the ultramodernist style of the Second Sonata, the essence of Eastern-European folk music is still very much in evidence. The intention of this article is to show how Bartók’s move toward synthesis of varied folk and art-music elements in this work produces a sense of an organic connection between atonality and tonality. The close connection between these two principles was suggested by Bartók in an essay of 1920. I intend to show how both contradictory principles are conjoined within a highly complex polymodal idiom based on the tendency toward equalization of the twelve tones. Within the stanzaic structure of the Romanian “long song,” stylistic elements of recitation, improvisation, and declamation are essential in the gradual unfolding between these two contrasting concepts of pitch organization. Despite tonal ambiguity on both local and large-scale levels, the sense of polymodal tonality is ultimately established as primary.

Դոդեկաֆոնիայի դրսևորումները Առնո Բաբաջանյանի ստեղծագործության մեջ

Dodecaphony, or twelve-tone system, which was one of the composers’ technical directions in the 20th century western music, was employed in Armenian music, too, particularly, in Arno Babajanyan’s work. The study of theoretical principles of dodecaphony in the composer’s works in accordance with the categorization, accepted in European and American researches, showed that when weapply the western model of analysis, the uniqueness of Babajanyan’s style becomes even more apparent.

Babbitt’s Gestural Dialectics

The array structures of Babbitt’s music, which present twelve-tone series fixed in narrow registers, seem abstract and impersonal. Nevertheless, numerous commentators on Babbitt’s music have celebrated the sense of motion the music inspires in its listeners. This chapter explores the tension between the music’s static contrapuntal structures and the dynamic experience that results, drawing from research on musical embodiment by Matthew Baileyshea and Seth Monahan, Candace Brower, Arnie Cox, Robert Hatten, Mariusz Kozak, Justin London, Patrick McCreless, and Andrew Mead. An exploration of these gestural dialectics sheds light on a variety of topics: virtuosity, text setting, the liminal periodicity of Babbitt’s later rhythmic practice, anomalous deviations from serial expectations, closing rhetoric, and partitioning. The chapter ends by discussing how scholars may navigate the distinction between Babbitt’s formalistic prose and the gestural experience of his music.

The Surface and the Series in Composition for Four Instruments

Composition for Four Instruments is among Babbitt’s best-known compositions and is frequently cited as an example of a piece with trichordal arrays. Nonetheless, the work’s hierarchical underpinnings—the means by which its arrays can be understood as outgrowths of its underlying twelve-tone series—remain undertheorized, a situation that has resulted in the publication of many different series for the work. A close examination clarifies the work’s series by considering surface elements such as simultaneities and the sequence of array materials. The significance of surface events in determining serial structure leads to comparison with Richard Cohn’s work on Schenkerian theory and motive. Furthermore, these surface elements are rhetorically significant: the sole surface trichord that confounds serial derivation is used to link the beginning and ending of the work, contributing to a rounded conclusion.

Construction, Cognition, and the Role of the Surface

What do Babbitt’s theoretical commitments tell us about how to listen to his music? This chapter excavates Babbitt’s reading in analytical philosophy (particularly of Rudolf Carnap) and cognitive psychology (particularly of George A. Miller) in an attempt to answer that question. Babbitt’s compositional techniques are reviewed in this light: array construction, interdimensional parallelism (e.g., the use of the time-point system to complement the twelve-tone system), and cross-references are shown to be motivated by a desire to write music amenable to rational reconstruction (in Carnap’s term) and sensitive to theories of memory and information processing. Babbitt’s views on Schenker are revisited: he found Schenkerian analysis to represent a model for musical memory. His understanding of language, too, is conditioned by his reading of philosophy and cognitive science. The chapter ends with a discussion of the limitations of Babbitt’s psychology as a guide to the analysis of his music.

Lulu

Berg had several early ideas for a text for his second opera, and his choice finally fell on Frank Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Berg adapted the plays into a single three-act structure and made other changes in the names of characters and their attributes, and he titled his opera Lulu, after the central figure. The subject matter of the opera was highly controversial, with a perverse eroticism and sordid violence. Given the political climate of the early 1930s, prospects for a performance of the work were dim. The chronology by which Berg created the libretto for Lulu and its music reveals many delays that suggest a struggle on the composer’s part in grappling with the subject and with his relatively new twelve-tone method of composing. Berg completed the basic compositional work for the opera in spring 1934, and he then created a concert suite from the work, much as he had done with Wozzeck, which he titled Symphonic Pieces from the Opera “Lulu.” The necessary revisions to the opera that Berg foresaw and most of the orchestration of Act 3 remained incomplete at the time of his death in December 1935, and the opera was performed in its entirety only in 1979. In Lulu Berg fully developed his own distinctive twelve-tone method of composing but continued to invoke traditional musical forms.

Secret Programs with Twelve Tones, 1925–27

Chapter 7 covers the years 1925–27, the period in which Berg first began composing with a version of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method. His first such work was the song “Schließe mir die Augen beide,” for which he reused the poetic text of an earlier song. Berg continued to apply and to refine his twelve-tone method in the Lyric Suite for string quartet and in all of his later works. The method ultimately became his alone, only remotely resembling that of Schoenberg. Berg also faced a midlife crisis during these years. In 1925 he fell in love with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the wife of a Prague industrialist and sister of the writer Franz Werfel. The “affair” was largely a fantasy on Berg’s part, although it inspired him to compose and to encode aspects of his encounter with Hanna Fuchs using ciphers and numbers. His Lyric Suite for string quartet made extensive use of such symbols.

International Acclaim, 1923–25

Shortly after completing the opera Wozzeck, Berg emerged from relative obscurity to international prominence through performances of his earlier music. The premiere of Wozzeck in Berlin in 1925 was a huge success, reported in newspapers throughout the world. But Berg still faced challenges in the development of his career. His health remained poor, and a new taste in modern music had appeared, often called “neoclassicism,” that was different from the type of music that he had until then composed. Following the end of World War I, Schoenberg and others began to develop twelve-tone methods of composing, later termed “dodecaphony,” to control and systematize the appearance of the full chromatic. Berg began to adapt aspects of Schoenberg’s new method in his Chamber Concerto, a programmatic work that celebrates the three leading figures in Schoenberg’s circle—Webern, Berg, and Schoenberg—in addition to using elements of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method.