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Extensible Markup Language | 1995-08-14 | 17KB | 34 lines

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <!DOCTYPE card PUBLIC "-//Apple, Inc.//DTD card V 2.0//EN" "" > <card> <id>9331</id> <filler1>0</filler1> <cantDelete> <false /> </cantDelete> <showPict> <true /> </showPict> <dontSearch> <false /> </dontSearch> <owner>5472</owner> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="stylesheet_3106.css" /> <content> <layer>background</layer> <id>25</id> <text>usic Since 1945 (1 of 1)Music since 1945 has evolved in many different ways. For many composers - especially in the 1950s - the once revolutionary twelve-note techniques of Schoenberg became the new orthodoxy, while the avant-garde in the 1960s and 1970s enthusiastically embraced the novel sound possibilities offered by the development of electronic instruments. For a while it seemed as though conventional tonality had been banished from any music aspiring to be 'serious'; indeed tonality still tends to be the exception rather than the rule.However, the advent of Minimalism in the late 1960s - a movement that came to maturity in the 1980s - saw the restoration of tonality (and even of melody) to respectability, at the same time finding a wider audience for serious music, verging as it does on the fringes of certain developments in jazz and rock. There has also, in recent years, been a decline in interest in electronic music, as the sounds offered by the new medium have become commonplace, rather than strange and exciting. With the reversion to conventional instruments (and voices) there has often come an opening up to influences from further back in the Western musical tradition, and also to influences from non-Western traditions.To an extent standing aloof from these changes in fashion, certain composers stand out as having identifiably individual voices and styles - even though they themselves are often fathers of movements of one kind or another.ItalyThe Communist Luigi Nono (1924-90) maintained an austere position as Italy's leading guru, with an output uncompromising in its severity, from his opera Intolleranza 1960 onwards. However, it is in the music of Luciano Berio (1925- ) that listeners have recognized a more appealing Italian theatricality, lyricism and sharpness of observation, rooted in Italian musical history from Monteverdi onwards. Berio's works include his Mahler-inspired Sinfonia (1969), his 'recital' entitled Recital (1972) and his sequence of Sequenze for various soloists.BritainStanding center-stage in postwar Britain is the music - especially the operas - of Benjamin Britten. More idiosyncratic is the music of Michael Tippett (1905-), whose musical personality derives from a heady mixture of Elizabethan madrigals, Beethoven, Carl Jung and T.S. Eliot, shot through with elements of jazz and pop songs. The result is about as inimitable as Berlioz. In addition to orchestral and chamber works, Tippett has written several operas, including The Midsummer Marriage (1955) and The Knot Garden (1970), and his most recent opera, New Year (1989), has a story (written as always by the composer himself) set in 'Terror Town', where the heroine is a child psychologist, the Belfast Troubles are touched on, the action incorporates a time-traveling spaceship, and the music includes references to reggae.Tippett's younger compatriot Peter Maxwell Davies (1934- ) has proved similarly open-minded, using parody (of anything from plainsong to foxtrots) as an inspirational device in such audacious pieces of music theater as Vesalii Icones (1969), a darkly sardonic tour of the Stations of the Cross, and Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), a ferocious portrait of King George III. In recent years, through the influence of the Orkney landscapes and seascapes amid which he now works, Davies's music has grown more romantic and picturesque.AmericaSet somewhat apart from the mainstream is the music of Elliott Carter (1908- ), whose music combines romance and high intellectuality. Carter has concentrated on intricately wrought and beautifully fashioned orchestral and chamber music, not invariably abstract (his Symphony of Three Orchestras, written in 1977, was inspired by Hart Crane's poem The Bridge), but demanding the utmost concentration on the part of its performers and listeners. His third string quartet (1971) consists of two elaborate duos, geared to be performed simultaneously, yet independently and at different speeds.In comparison, John Cage (1912- 92) was a maverick whose musical anarchy had its roots in America's iconoclastic and exhilarating pioneer, Charles Ives.Cage, a pupil of Schoenberg and Henry Cowell, established the prepared piano, whereby foreign bodies were introduced to the instrument's interior in order to produce new sonorities. Like Ives in his vanguard orchestral piece, The Unanswered Question (1906), Cage was a champion of what was later to be called aleatory music, the performance of which involves a deliberate degree of indeterminacy, or elements of chance, with the result that no two performances are ever the same. Thus Music of Changes (1951), a seminal work, was created by Cage with the help of the I Ching and the tossing of coins. (Mozart and Haydn once made similar experiments, but only in a peripheral way, whereas in Cage's case they grew from a long study of oriental philosophy.) Cage's use of chance elements extended to his interest in electronics, his Imaginary Landscape No 4 (1951) requiring 12 radios to be manipulated by 24 players - each performance depending on what could be heard on local radio stations. But though his HPSCHD (1969) called for seven harpsichordists and 51 or more tape recorders, Cage had by then been succeeded by Stockhausen as the high priest of electronic music.GermanyWorking from West German Radio's studios in Cologne, Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-) brought to his art the same sort of single-minded devotion Wagner brought to The Ring. No task, whether involving electronics, conventional instruments or a combination of both, seemed too great for him. He formed his own ensemble, directing its sounds through synthesizers and amplifiers that he controlled himself; he studied phonetics and acoustics, evolving a theory of parameters, or dimensions in sound, and applied his researches to a series of monster compositions dominated by his seven-part opera cycle entitled Licht (one part for each day of the week), on which he has been at work since 1984. Though people have dismissed Stockhausen as a theorist whose output has been all hot air, he has demonstrated in such works as Gruppen for three orchestras (1957), Hymnen (1967), Prozession (1967), Stimmung (1968), Jubilaeum (1977) and a cycle of scores inspired by his son and other members of his closely integrated family that he remains one of the mostformidable figures of modern music, who tirelessly promotes his cause around the world.Hans Werner Henze (1926-), on the other hand, has been content to employ traditional musical forms, producing an imposing series of operas, six symphonies, and a massive, neo-romantic piano concerto. In Henze's music, his respect for German musical convention is shot through with an Italian lyricism - he prefers Italian life to that in his homeland. Henze's involvement with Communism has yielded such works as his oratorio The Raft of the Medusa (1968), whose Hamburg premiere was brutally broken up by the West German police, and his war opera (to a text by the English playwright Edward Bond) We Come to the River (1976).FranceOne of the most original and impressive composers to have emerged since World War II is Olivier Messiaen (1908-92). Messiaen has combined an indebtedness to the French tradition of Berlioz, Franck and Debussy - the latter notably in the piano work Catalogue d'oiseaux ('Bird Catalogue', 1958) - with influences as diverse as bird song, plainsong and oriental music. A devout Catholic, Messiaen wrote many of his works on religious themes, and produced the most powerful organ music since Bach.The earlier works of Messiaen's pupil Pierre Boulez (1925- ), such as Le Marteau sans ma├«tre ('The Hammer without a Master') for voice and chamber orchestra (1953-55) and Pli selon pli ('Fold upon Fold') for soprano and chamber orchestra (1957-62), employ twelve-note techniques, and Boulez has also experimented widely with electronic sounds. Although he has composed less in recent years, as a conductor Boulez has remained a tireless champion of new music.Another pupil of Messiaen, mainly active in France, is the Romanian-born Greek Iannis Xenakis (1922-), who is not only one of the most important composers of the 20th century, but also a mathematician, logician, poet and architect; in this last capacity he at one time worked with Le Corbusier. Mathematics (particularly probability theory) has played an important role in his music, which, although mostly scored for conventional instruments, he has often written with the aid of a computer.The Soviet UnionThe pressures put upon Shostakovich to produce 'people's music', and which resulted in some masterpieces quite extraordinary in their inner tension, were gradually relaxed after his death. Subsequent Soviet and post-Soviet composers have had access to all the latest trends, and have had brilliant ensembles to perform the fruits of this new musical freedom. From this more temperate climate two composers in particular, Edison Denisov (1929- ) and Alfred Shnitke (1934- ), appear to have benefited. Both have produced imaginative and original music, Shnitke's possessing sometimes a blackly humorous element of send-up, as in his violin concerto incorporating a 'silent' cadenza that the soloist has to go through the motions of playing, with Paganini-like frenzy.Eastern EuropeIn Poland this state of musical freedom was achieved somewhat sooner, thanks partly to the Warsaw Festival, an annual autumn ferment of new ideas. Thus Witold Lutoslawski (1913- ) was able to apply all the modern techniques at his disposal to works (such as his string quartet of 1964 and cello concerto of 1970) that were at the same time products of an exceptionally lucid and, for the listener, by no means daunting mind.His younger compatriot, Krzysztof Penderecki (1933- ), was prone to employ more sensational effects, such as dense note-clusters and huge orchestral and choral glissandi, yet in his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for 52 solo strings (1960), his St Luke Passion (1966) and his opera The Devils of Loudun (1969) he composed music that, for all its apparent complexity, proved shattering in its impact.To write with this sort of boldness, the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti (1923- ) had to move to the West before unleashing his requiem (1965) and his opera Le Grand Macabre (1978). Ligeti's music, like that of all the above composers, has traveled widely. Le Grand Macabre, an operatic equivalent of the Theater of the Absurd with Bosch, Bruegel, Kafka and Lewis Carroll among its influences, had its premiere in Stockholm but was soon seen in Britain, Germany, France, Spain and America. His San Francisco Polyphony (1974), a brilliant orchestral spider's web of sound, beat America's West Coast Minimalist composers at their own game, and showed how tiny repeated wisps of tune could be spun into a work of beauty, intricacy and substance.CWMINIMALISMMinimalism in music was first evolved by the American composer Terry Riley (1935- ) in the late 1960s. Minimalist music involves the extensive repetition of the simplest of melodies or rhythms over slowly changing harmonies, and the overall effect, for those with the patience to listen, can be compellingly hypnotic. The style continues to be vigorously exploited by such American composers as Steve Reich (1936- ) and Philip Glass (1937- ). The latter has worked with Ravi Shankar, and classical Indian music has been an important influence on his work. Glass has also brought Minimalism to the opera house, with pieces such as Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Akhnaten (1984). However, it has taken the 'post-Minimalist' political opera Nixon in China (1987) by John Adams (1947- ) to prove to some listeners that there is more to Minimalism than at first meets the ears.</text> </content> <content> <layer>background</layer> <id>26</id> <text>tockhausen at work in the electronic studios of West German Radio at Cologne in the 1950s. In some of Stockhausen's later pieces the performers are presented not with printed notes but with instructions such as the following:Think NOTHINGWait until it is absolutely still within youWhen you have attained thisBegin to play . . .</text> </content> <content> <layer>background</layer> <id>23</id> <text>ΓÇó MOVEMENTS IN ART SINCE 1945ΓÇó MODERNISTS AND OTHERSΓÇó OPERAΓÇó POPULAR MUSIC IN THE 20TH CENTURYΓÇó MUSIC FROM AROUND THE WORLDΓÇó MODERN DANCE</text> </content> <content> <layer>background</layer> <id>36</id> <text>554578584588590598</text> </content> <name>p580-1</name> <script></script> </card>