[musicbloke]

I thought it would be quite an interesting experiment to start a little online course on TSR, and if it works, to encourage others to do something similar. I've chosen the subject of music in the long twentieth century as something that has traditionally not been hugely accessible to non-music students, but I believe there is lots to be gained across the disciplines in discussing these works. Pitching the level of a course like this is relatively difficult, but I will try to make it as accessible as possible. You don't need to be able to read music or know music theory – all you need is some working ears and a willingness to engage, consider, and discuss. That being said, if there are technical questions, I will generally able and willing to answer them. I'm hoping this thread will attract everyone from arts students who have never studied music, to A level students, to anyone with a bit of an interest who wants to explore some cool works of art.

It is actually a change in technology that is allowing me to start a course like this, as more and more music and performances are becoming available on youtube (whereas before we'd have to buy CDs or take out LPs from a library.) I will present the course in about 10-12 posts, and each will include some youtube vids. I actually find that having something to look at, whether or not it is relevant, helps people focus and listen to the music, so with any luck that will be good. I'll be trying to put up a post on a specific topic once a week, and each won't be more than a couple of thousand words. The provisional list looks something like this:

• The late 19th century; why we can talk about a 'long 20th century'
• Nationalism and the symphony, from 1890 to 1920
• German modernism, from expressionism to serialism
• French music and the theatre, from 1905 to 1925
• Music in Soviet Russia; a portrait of Shostakovich
• Folk Music in European art music
• Why English music is different
• American Modernism, from Ives to Elliot Carter
• European high modernism and postmodernism
• The French late century
• Directions in music today

Although this of course is subject to change, I'll do my best to stick to it.

In terms of participating in the course, it would be nice to get it quite interactive and have some discussion going. It would also be nice if people stuck around for the whole lot, which I understand may not always be possible. I just request that you subscribe to this thread (go into the thread tools and click "subscribe to thread" ) and that way it will pop up on your homepage every time something new is posted in it, so you don't forget about it. But yes, if you are reading, do please post questions and anything you find at all interesting for us to discuss. I know this is a rather experimental way of using the forum, but I'm keen to see if it works. I'll be trying to get the first part of the course up by this time next week. I hope you enjoy it.

A little about me and methods
Just so you know a bit about me before the course starts, my name is Jacob and I graduated from Cambridge in music just over a year ago. My main musicological interests are in 19th and 20th century opera, early modernism, and critical aesthetics. In terms of methodology, everything I like stems from a critique of interpretation, meaning, and understanding music. I doubt we'll go very deep into aesthetics here, but that should help you understand why I'm not keen to do large analytical readings of the works we'll consider here. Just one note: you probably don't need it if you've read this far, but this course will NOT be considering popular genres at all. Sorry.

MB

[Sanjetti]

Sounds interesting...I've never been good at music so it might be an interesting way to expand my horizons. You sure you have the time to do it?

And no homework I hope

[trm90]

I would love to participate in this course. I am off to university for the first time as of next week but I've always wanted to get myself involved in the history and analysis of music. Have always been a very musical person and I'm keen on listening skills.

How often will you post, musicbloke? (Or Jacob, I guess!)

Also, I will admit that I'm already feeling a little nervous about joining in discussion - I have somewhat limited knowledge of musical terminology and it's been eons since I've properly read music; TSR also has some pretty intelligent people I suppose. Will try my best regardless, though

[The_Lonely_Goatherd]

Great idea! I doubt I'll have anything useful/intelligent to add to any debates, but am looking forward to learning a lot!

[Franc Vouloir]

As somebody who often, out of ignorance, has to disregard the musical references in 20th c. theory, literature, &c., I'm very interested in this; thank you for taking the time & effort to do it. I imagine I'll be quite busy becoming a proper student in two weeks' time, but am otherwise free & look forward to your first post.

L.

[Angelil]

This looks great MB. Count me in!

[jismith1989]

Wonderful idea. Though I think it would be good to perhaps have a course with a greater historical scope, if this goes well.

[Glutamic Acid]

Yep, I'm interested. I've subscribed.

[Captain Biggles]

On a more general note, this course idea sounds like quite a good idea to expand peoples' horizons.

[sugar_cane]

*subscribes*
Great idea like I said on Friday

[alex_hk90]

Sounds interesting, I'll subscribe to the thread.

[Kater Murr]

Subscribed.

[ACDC]

Sounds insightful, I'm gonna subscribe.

I hope there won't be an examination

[Feefifofum]

Subscribing.

[Da Bachtopus]

This will be interesting! Will electroacoustic music get covered under European/French points?

[tinkerbellejess]

Subscribed!

[insparato]

Subscribed. Definitely interested.

[Hedgeman49]

Definitely up for a bit of this.

[musicbloke]

The late 19th century; why we can talk about a 'long 20th century'

The 'long 20th century'?

I suspect that quite a few people who have signed up for this thread have been wondering why the "long 20th century", what this means, and whether it has a basis in either the musical material itself or the history of music as an art form. The long twentieth century, as far as music is concerned, basically refers to the period from about 1880 to the present day. From the beginning of this period to about 1920 there were a series of revolutions in the production of musical material, alongside a breakdown of almost all of the elements that had become traditional in the production of music. For the first time, when a composer used these elements they became explicitly historically referential, rather than just a means to create musical material.

To expand on this point slightly, the history of the production of music is made complex by the fact that between about 1700 and 1850 we have a period we refer to as the "common practice period". Whilst there were significant changes in the styles of music produced in Western Europe during this period, there was also a significant effort to codify musical structures: rules were established for how chords should be used, and young musicians and composers were taught the "art of counterpoint" (writing two or more melodies to be played simultaneously), starting with learning to imitate Renaissance masters. Furthermore, this period saw the birth of what we now consider the classical forms of music: most importantly the sonata; but also the aria (for operas and oratorios); the rondo; and the theme and variations. The music of the common practice period is almost always based around these theoretical formations. Whilst I have little space here to describe these concepts in detail, it is important to note that the second half of the nineteenth century saw an overburdening of these structures, as composers felt less and less able to use them expressively, and the period that this course will look at is one in which the musical world had to deal with the loss or rejection of the structures and forms that had become established. It is this break that characterises the period of the long twentieth century, and which gives reason to the large number of artistic movements that I hope to describe in greater detail in the coming weeks.

What is clear, though, is that throughout the time since this radical break with tradition, there has been no established Western Music vernacular. There has been a diverse range of responses, from the most experimentally modernist works of art to attempts to re-embrace the lost traditions. Much of the first half of this course will engage with the idea of modernism: the notion that not only demanded something new, this break with the past, but in its actuality was the final nail in the coffin for common practice (although many would argue that by this time common practice was already dead and buried).

The Late 19th Century

Whilst this section is technically outside the bounds of this course, I feel that it's necessary that I at least try to cover the music of the late 19th century in order to give some background on the earliest music in our period. Here, I will also attempt to give a little background on the status of Western music in the 19th century as a whole, as its sociological and philosophical importance is significant to the development of the art form into the twentieth century. I realise that this account may be rather sketchy, but there is a lot of music in this period, and to cover it all in such a small amount of text is extremely difficult, but I hope that this will give you a bit of a flavour. Apologies if it's overly Teutonic.

In 1859 this happened:



The above video is of the prelude to Wagner's "music drama" Tristan und Isolde (This isn't the nicest video in the world but unfortunately the others on youtube are either butchered to make it a concert piece or have really lame images, whereas this one both shows the orchestra/conductor and makes it clear that this is music for the stage.) Wagner's music was more harmonically complex, and existed on a grander scale than anything that had ever preceded it. As you can hear the harmony is often unusual, and the form is not in any way straightforward. This is partly due to the fact that this is taken from a theatrical work, in which much of the structure is dictated by the text (Wagner does, in fact, make use of some traditional forms), but the musically radical element of Tristan is the fact that there is an over-arching musical form across the entire four hours of the drama. Furthermore, where opera before was divided into musical "numbers", such as arias, Wagner avoids throughout Tristan apart from at a couple of significant moments when such tableaux are used for effect (the love duet in Act II, and Isolde's "liebestod" at the end of Act III).

Consideration of Wagner also leads on to some of the most important points in understanding the relationship of music and philosophy in the 19th century. In many ways, music came to be seen as the supreme art, not least as a consequence of Schopenhauer's seminal work The World as Will and Representation and Nietzsche's early work The Birth of Tragedy, or; Hellenism and Pessimism (originally titled The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. Within German aesthetics, music was seen as the art that has the greatest propensity to direct itself towards an exposition of truth.

Alongside the new philosophical considerations of music came a new sociology of music. The 19th century saw the new sovereignty of the bourgeoisie across Europe, and where before music (or "classical music" at least) had been for the aristocratic classes, or for the court, music was indubitably democratised. Musical organisations sprung up throughout Europe and their became a trend for Gemeinschaftmusik (or community music), which not only was a trend that described the acts of the public who partook in the music, but in the content of the music itself. The key early example of this is the choral finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, in which the choir sings of freedom in the brotherhood of man, an extremely clear bourgeois message. These ideas are easily transferable to the following:



The above is the fourth movement from Brahms's Ein Deutches Requiem (A German Requiem), and in fact Brahms said that the reference to German was merely a reference to the language, and in fact this was a requiem for all of humanity. As you can probably hear, the harmonic language is far simpler than Wagner and there is a greater emphasis on counterpoint. In many ways, Brahms was writing within the classical tradition, even though the music remains of its time. Brahms was closely connected to a theorist named Hanslick, who argued that the value in music was derived from within the notes themselves, rather than in relation to any external truth. The point of music was simply to be beautiful and timeless. As such, there is a strong counterposition of Brahms and Wagner that is central to understanding German music of the late 19th century. This issue will be returned to in the third part of this course.

Ok, so that's Germany kind of dealt with, not in any real depth but hopefully you get the idea (a little at least). The other aspect of late 19th century music that I'd like to touch on is the concept of 'nationalism' and its opposite national otherness. As you may know from studies in history, both Italy and Germany became unified during this period, and alongside this came music that represented the nations. In Italy this was most prominently represented in Verdi's operas. A particularly interesting example is the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from his opera Nabucco, which again touches on the community aesthetic talked about earlier, as the Hebrews are often interpreted to be Italian, overcoming previous feudal structures:



Once again, this music is rather more simple than the Wagner, and in fact this is very close in structure to what one would expect from a choral number in an Italian opera at the turn of the 18th and 19th century.

Slightly away from the Western European mainstream was an emerging Russian tradition, which whilst related to Western music had slightly different tendencies in terms of style and structure. The tradition was borne from the composer Glinka, widely acknowledged as the father of Russian music, and was continued through Balakirev and 'The Five' (Balakirev, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and Mussorgsky). The musical tradition often used a device named 'repeating background variation', which modern musicologist Richard Taruskin has termed 'The Kamarinskaya Principle', after the first piece that used it, written by Glinka. This Russian tradition too was broadly nationalist, and this was chiefly expressed through the use of folk melodies in the compositions. A key example of this is Balakirev's Overture on Russian Themes (in which you will be able to hear the repeating background variations):



I will return to this Russian tradition in more detail later in the course, when discussing nationalism and the symphony, Stravinsky in Paris, and music in the Soviet Union.


The final issue that I'd like to consider in this all-too-brief description of music in the late 19th century is national otherness. From the 1870s onward there came a Europe-wide obsession with 'the orient', in its broadest terms, in music. This meant both the East in general and, for Northern Europe, the Mediterranean, regardless of the fact that it was more west than east. Nietzsche famously wrote in The Case of Wagner, "Il faut méditerraniser la musique" ("music should be mediterraneanised" ), and along with this new interest in national otherness came swathes of music. Faure wrote music with Spanish Themes, Hugo Wolf wrote Spanish and Italian songs, and probably most significantly Bizet wrote Carmen:



Ok, so the video is just a little bit silly, but hopefully you'll get the point here – this is not just a national other, but the forbidden other, the sexual, the seductive, and this too is built into the music through the chromatic inflections in the melody. This is everything that the Northern Wagnerian approach to sexuality in Tristan und Isolde isn't! Nothing here is cerebral, everything is carnal; the music is simple with straightforward harmonies, and yet it too finds a very real way to express its meaning in this historical context. For Nietzsche, this was the only way forward after the monolith of complexity that was Wagner, and in the rest of the course we'll be assessing whether or not he was correct, and what solutions were found to the problems of expression, form, and musical content after the late 19th century.

So, there you have it, the world's briefest tour of some of the most important music ever written, but hopefully it will have given you some background that will help you contextualise the works of art we look at in the rest of the course.

Finally…

I'll be posting up the next part this time next week. For the moment I'm happy to answer any questions anyone may have (either about what I mean, or about the content I've posted), and it would be great if we could get some discussion going.

Jacob

[musicbloke]

Just so you all know, I'm sorry that only the first video is embedded. The TSR permissions are set up like this, and I'm currently chatting to the mods about whether or not there's any way I can get it changed (although I'm not sure that's likely). For the moment, all of the links take you to the right places.

MB