MA SIZONG'S VIOLIN WORK IN CONTEXT ARTISTIC AND AESTHETIC TRENDS AND ARTISTIC DIRECTIONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The problem of synthesis of artistic and aesthetic directions of the XX century is considered in the violin music of the Chinese composer Ma Sitsong, whose creative path is outlined in the European, Chinese and American periods. Ma Sitsong was the first Chinese musician to study at the Paris Conservatory and adapt the modernist tendencies of Europe (Impressionism by C. Debussy; I. Stravinsky's search for the "Holy Spring", B. Bartok's neo-folklore). The principles of the latter resonated with Ma's intense reliance on the national Chinese firstborn. After returning to China, he admired the work of S. Prokofiev. Violin music (the first Chinese Concerto, Xinyan Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra, Suiyuan Suite, Rondo №№1-2) showed a bright national beginning combined with neo-romantic tone and impressionistic sound recording. The mystical-religious figurative conceptosphere of the Tibet Suite is full of symbolic features. After emigrating to the United States, the composer turned to the native music of Taiwanese aborigines (Amei and Gaoshan Suites). Reproducing archaic images, Ma tends to Fauvism, primitive naivety and minimalism, continuing the line of I. Stravinsky, corresponding with the search for his contemporaries: O. Messian, J. Cram, J. Cage, T. Takemitsu, M. Skoryk. In works of the American period (Concerto for 2 violins, Rondo №№3-4, Sonata №3, Sonata for 2 violins solo) neoclassical, expressionist, urban features, elements of Westernization, jazz are felt. Ma Sitsong, as one of the founders of the national violin school, organically combines the diversity of world trends with a lasting reliance on Chinese folk music.

Latviešu komponistu adaptācijas varianti pēckara Eiropā

Keywords: classical music, style, national romanticism, transformation of creative works, modernism, avant-garde This article discusses the stylistic and aesthetic transformation of the work of the most prominent Latvian composers, who, as refugees of the Second World War, arrived in Western Europe in 1944 and encountered a different, innovative musical environment there. For those whose creative work in Latvia had been focused on traditional national romanticism, the encounter with musical expressionism and the avant-garde caused a certain shock. The stark differences in style were not only a matter of compositional technique; they also revealed the contradiction between a positivistic worldview and a more adequate musical reflection of the common man during the era. Longīns Apkalns learned from the ideas and style of expressionism most radically, but Alberts Jērums was much more moderate in this respect—he had already approached expressionism during his studies at the Latvian Conservatory. In his studies at the Paris Conservatory (1945-1950), Tālivaldis Ķeniņš studied the traditions of French neoclassicism and constructivism. Volfgangs Dārziņš adapted neoclassical trends in combination with Béla Bartók’s interpretation of folklore. Jānis Mediņš radicalized his traditional language of music, but did not abandon the paradigm of the music of romanticism. Similarly, Jānis Kalniņš’ music, even in the pre-war period, was not unfamiliar with the border between romanticism and expressionism. The composers who, with their creative work, chose to serve only Latvian society in exile continued in the romantic style.

The Contest Piece as a Probe of Memory

At the end of the school year at the Paris Conservatory each class or studio held a contest. How a student did in the contests could determine whether or not he or she could continue in that class, advance to a higher class, or be dismissed. In the harmony contests, students would be unlikely to win any sort of prize if they could not reproduce the contrapuntal schemas suggested by patterns in the given basses or melodies. That is, a student was provided with just one of the four parts (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) and required to complete the rest of the parts. The test typically lasted six hours, with the student shut in a room without any keyboard instrument. By being sensitive to the cues in the given voice, students could retrieve from their memories the other voices of the appropriate marches harmoniques. These were descendants of the movimenti (bass motions) taught in the Naples conservatories.

Dispositions and the Mastery of Complexity

What today we might term “orchestration” or “arranging” would have fallen under the term “disposition” in Naples. The same counterpoint, for example, could be realized as a “disposition in three voices” or “in four voices.” Each voice or instrumental part would be written on its own staff. Unlike in partimento playing, where small errors in counterpoint could be ignored, dispositions made every interrelationship visible and open to inspection and evaluation. The French four-voice realizations (realisations) in open score that figured so prominently in the contests for harmony and fugue at the Paris Conservatory were direct descendants of Neapolitan dispositions.

A Beaux-Arts Framework for Music

The methods for composing taught at the Paris Conservatory were similar to the three-stage, sketch-draft-refinement model of the School of Fine Arts. The chapter describes how four masters translated this model into music lessons. François Bazin shows how to sketch and elaborate the harmonization of a given melody. Édouard Deldevez takes an unfigured partimento bass by Fenaroli and makes an elaborate analysis of it to determine how it should be realized. André Gedalge demonstrates how to first sketch and then refine an episode of a fugue. Lastly, Maurice Ravel creates a stage-by-stage analysis of a difficult passage from his own Noble and Sentimental Walzes.

A Sickly Young Woman Speaks Elegant Harmony to One of the Immortals

In the 1930s, the harmony classes at the Paris Conservatory were still segregated by gender. Jacques de La Presle was a teacher of “women’s harmony,” and in 1938 his student Colette Boyer won a first prize in the annual women’s harmony contest. The test bass had been composed by Henri Busser. Boyer’s realizations exhibit an elegance and refinement that must have impressed the judges. Henri Busser’s own realization of his bass is perhaps not quite as good as Boyer’s. Although the trauma of WWII led her to abandon music and seek refuge as a nun, her small artworks produced for the contests and classes in harmony remain testaments to her great talent. She knew nothing of the kind of harmony classes taught today in North America, but she was a minor master of the art of harmony as a living expression of a great European tradition.

The Beaux-Arts Framework

The Institute of France has for centuries controlled royal or public support for the arts in France. Under its wings it has both a School of Fine Arts for the visual arts and the Paris Conservatory for music, as well as many other institutions. The schools of fine arts and music were set up along the similar lines. The goal was to train the next generation of artists and musicians in the classic arts of a past golden age. For visual artists, sculptors, and architects, this meant the art of ancient Greece and Rome. For musicians, this meant the art of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Italy. For young artists outside the official School of Fine Arts, instructional lithographs could be purchased and copied. These lithographs showed how to make a sketch, then to refine the sketch into a set of contours, and then to add shading and texture.

Music Theory Pedagogy: What Paul Taught Nadia

The teaching of harmony in the United States, if judged objectively, has been a massive failure, even though a dedicated corps of fine musician-scholars labors to impart the curriculum to eager if not always adequately prepared students. These students are taught "about" harmony, as if the topic were really about tonality or the imaginary desires of chords. The only students who can perform and create harmony at a professional level are those who learned such skills outside the academy. The situation was not always so bleak. Nadia Boulanger, for example, learned the art of harmony from her teacher at the Paris Conservatory, Paul Vidal. Even though she was not taught roman numerals or chord functions, she learned harmony as a performative art, as something to express what was implicit in a given melody or bass. The article describes what Paul taught Nadia, and how the incredibly high standards for crafting harmonic-contrapuntal musical fabrics at the Paris Conservatory could be mastered by students willing to memorize the intricacies of a centuries-old art.

Nadia Boulanger: "In the midst of the stars"

Nadia Boulanger is the French performer/teacher who changed the landscape of American music. Under the mentorship of her father, Ernest Boulanger, and the tutelage of musical genius, Gabriel Fauré at the Paris Conservatory, Nadia Boulanger had an excellent education and earned high honors as a student of organ and composition. However, early in her life Boulanger decided to turn her full focus to teaching. Among her most outstanding American composition students are Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Philip Glass, and Virgil Thomson. Student testimonials and class notebooks shed light on her teaching. Nadia Boulanger taught with a combination of rigor and passion, successfully mentoring a generation of aspiring composers and performers. Her profound imprint on American music is recognizable in the fact that almost all American composers of note in the 20th century studied with Nadia Boulanger either in Paris or during her residency in Boston. It is possible to trace parallels between her education and compositional style, and her teaching of composition. This paper investigates how Nadia Boulanger taught, why she was successful, and how her early education affected her future as a composition teacher.

Musical Stained-glasses by Olivier Messian

Background. As it is well-known from the statements by O. Messiaen himself in conversations with K. Samuel [10; 7], the French composer had the phenomenon of “colored hearing” associated with the effect of synesthesia. A prerequisite in modern performing art, as in the work of a musicologistresearcher, is the introduction to the worldview of an author-composer. The study of Messiaen’s synesthetic associations helps the interpreter to expand his timbre range in connecting with emotional “immersion” in the essence of the work, and the researcher of his music – to interpret correctly (often – to “decipher”) and convey to the listener the author’s intention. That why consideration of the synesthetic aspect of the works of the French Master appears relevant. The purpose of this study is to reveal some features of the musical-visual ideas of O. Messiaen, the understanding of which is necessary for adequate perception and reproduction of his music. The material of the work is, mainly, the composer’s own statements, on which the generalizations made in the article based, and which the main conductors in the infinite multicolor spiritual world of the French composer are. The studies results. The child impressions, when Olivier together with his parents visited monuments, museums, churches – the Notre-Dame, the SaintChapel, the Chartres Cathedral, the Cathedral in Bourge – became the sources of the sound-color visions of the French genius. Magical colors of the MiddleAges stained glasses left an amazing feeling, an imprint, which did not disappear during his whole life. Stained-glasses as “the light, captured by the human” [7] are the constant awe and the love of O. Messiaen. In childhood, while reading W. Shakespeare, Olivier made stained glass-like scenery using transparent wrappers and packaging materials painted in different colors, then put the decorations to the windows. The sunshine, going through them, was lightening the little boy’s theater like the footlights. Later, the light, as something Divine, will become the main semantic emphasis in the works of the composer. Messiaen puts the color music above the church and religious, the color music, according him, does the same as medieval stained glass: “it brings us blinding admiration .... All sacred art ... should be, first of all, something like a rainbow of sounds and colors” [6]. Like a stained glass window consists of pieces of glass, so music consists of “pieces-cadres”, but, unlike cinematic montage, a stained glass has a mystical nature. From the inside, a stained glass shows one picture of the world, from the outside – another; it is a rosy view of the world and, at the same time, a prism, through which one can see the musical diversity. So, for O. Messiaen, the basis of the foundations is a religion related closely to philosophy; they serve music, and music serves the color music. A musicologist K. Zenkin defines the color music of O. Messiaen as the highest form of sacred music, as “the answer of human to God” [2, p. 171]. Being 11 and having become a student of Paris Conservatory, Olivier for the first time heard the opera by his teacher, Paul Dukas, “Ariadne and Bluebeard”. Messiaen was amazed by the episodes, where the main heroine consistently opens seven doors and finds herself in seven halls, filled with seven different kinds of precious stones; each one was characterized by different tone and timbre. Later, O. Messian continued the searches of his teacher in area of color-sound. About incredible enjoyment by the color the composer says in connection with painter-orphist Robert Delaunay, calling his paintings “colored dreams”. In the pictures of latter, he was most attracted by the principle of simultaneous contrast. The concept of “simultaneous contrast” refers to the phenomenon, in which our eyes, perceiving any color, involuntarily require a different color addition. For example, red requires green, yellow – purple, since these colors are diametrically opposed to each other on the color wheel, etc. If there is no such addition, the eye can simultaneously find (generate) it. As O. Messian had such rare natural quality as synesthesia, while listening to music, in his imagination different colors, corresponding to different sounds, appeared. Borrowing the painting principle of the simultaneous contrast, the composer applied it in his musical works, for example, in chord constructions. Messian’s “colour hearing” was connected not with tones, like to N. Rimsky-Korsakov or A. Skryabin, but with chords. Chords, in understanding of French composer, are the analogues of colors; changing of the chords leads to the changing of the colors and its patterns. The composer is characterized by the “vertical” perception of the sound-color range, but the “chord” factor does not exhaust his color perception, since O. Messiaen operates with the frets, which he calls “systems”. Each system is associated with a specific coloring of sounds. Colors and sounds are arranged for him on the principle of gamma. In the color scheme of O. Messiaen, there is no yellow color, instead of it an orange-golden one is introduced. Especially the composer likes violet or lilac color, belonging to the category of complex, which includes extremely cold blue and extremely warm red. This color has a lot of shades: with the dominance of red-scarlet, with the dominance of blue-hyacinth. In the Middle Ages, in the symbolism of stained glass windows, the first one identified Love to Truth, and the latter – Truth of Love. O. Messian perceived the laws of the universe through the prism of “infinite colors”. For the composer, painting becomes the basis of his artistic method and generates musical images. He felt the colors in the music by the “inner vision”. The subjective vision of sound colors was using by O. Messiaen in the process of creating musical canvases, called, in its turn, to affect the “inner vision” of the listeners.