Jan. 27

DAY I

Prelude

0. About the course

• Who's in the class ?
• How will the course be run:
  • presentations, analyses; sign up sheet
  • grades: the above plus a term paper on one of the topics discussed

• Any music conveys a world view; even if not intended by the author
  • Brun's self-appointed morons
  • The system/language reflects a world view
  • Marshall McLuhan : the media is the message
• Entertainment vs. reflection/intellectual pursuit
  • Xenakis:" expressing human intelligence through sounds"
  • the composer as a thinker
• Innovators and plagiators; Experimental vs. conservative
  • The need for originality
  • Soul searching can not be done by mimicking others
• Craftsmanship. Style and Idea, Form and content
  • False antinomy
  • The rhetoric as a necessary evil
  • The religious ritual as an example of attracting uneducated people to abstract thought.
• The role of personality; how that changed through centuries in the Western culture.
  • anonymous artists vs showmanship
• Oscillating between Structure - Indeterminacy. Complexity as a factor.

2. Template for discussion.

WHAT             frame of mind         world view
WHO              composer/author       personality
HOW              tools                 system/craft
WHICH            product               analysis of music
TO WHOM          usage                 intended audience

3. Franz Liszt

• WHO
  • virtuoso; the Pagannini example; showmanship - paying ladies to faint and to fight over his belongings.
  • Chopin and other virtuosi; Op. 106 performed for Berlioz vs. his usual performances.
  • love life: rebel/unconventional - the countess D'Agoult; Cosima sent to a monastery for education. Wagner's father in law. The movie Impromptu; other unconventional characters: George Sand.
  • more lovers: Marie Duplessis (La dame aux camellias), Marguerite Gauthier, Maria Pawlwna, grand duchess of Saxony, Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein (left husband and 30,000 serfs, cigar smoking, met in Kiev).
  • romantic "pilgrimages".
  • priesthood.
  • Italy/Renaissance and Switzerland as attractors; Lord Byron.
• HOW
  • Petrarca Sonnet 104 - analysis
  • Jeux d'eau a villa d'Este
  • Third relationships, modality, parallel motion as ways to surpass tonality - the powerful, acknowledged system.
• TO WHOM
  • salons; wealthy aristocrats and Parisian bourgeoisie. Berlioz. two kind of audiences.
• WHAT
  • tonal hierarchy falling apart; emotion as a way of rebelling against an ossified structure; the example of Beethoven. Visionary ?
  • the "square", accepted worlds (rational, hierarchical, causal) defeated through ambiguity = complexity.

4. Some significant trends in 19th. and 20th. centuries.

Romanticism

                      Symbolism                  Late Romanticism


         Impressionism (1864)
                                                  Expressionism

                             DADA

Neoclasicism   Constructivism

                                      Surrealism

                    Structuralism
Existentialism
       Integral Serialism

                                  INDETERMINACY


                 Aleatorism                  Chance Music
   Stochastic music

                                Pop Art/Dada revival

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