Music History 6

In jazz and blues, a blue note (also "worried" note[1]) is a note sung or played at a slightly lower pitch than that of the major scale for expressive purposes.

The blue notes are usually said to be flattened third, flattened fifth, and flattened seventh scale degrees

ex: Harold Arlen's Stormy Weather

music that lacks a tonal center or key

ususally describes music written after 1908 that does not focus around any certain central pitch and notes of the chromatic scale function independently of eachother

some use it to describe music of the Second Viennese School that is not tonal or Serial ( Webern, Schonberg, Berg)

• ex. Phase 1 (free atonality) Alban Berg, Wozzeck (1922) and Schoenberg Pierrot Lunnaire (1912)
• ex Phase 2 after WWI (twelve tone) attempt to organize music without tonality, Ensures all pitcvhes are used and ordered. Alban Berg, Lulu

later lead to serialism and used by many other 20thC composers like Stockhausen, Penderecki and Babbitt

was a cultural movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the start of the 20th century.

sought to express emotional experience rather than a physical reality. term often associated with amotional angst. (painting: Mumch, The Scream)

In music, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, the members of the Second Viennese School, wrote pieces described as expressionist (Schoenberg also made expressionist paintings). What distinguished these composers from their contemporaries such as Maurice Ravel, George Gershwin and Igor Stravinsky is that expressionist composers self-consciously used atonality to free their artform from the traditional tonality. They also sought to express the subconscious, the 'inner necessity' and suffering through their highly dissonant musical language. Erwartung and Die Glückliche Hand, by Schoenberg, and Wozzeck, an opera by Alban Berg are examples of expressionist works.

twentieth-century trend, particularly current in the period between the two World Wars, in which composers sought to return to aesthetic precepts associated with the broadly defined concept of "classicism", namely order, balance, clarity, economy, and emotional restraint.

reaction against the unrestrained emotionalism and perceived formlessness of late romanticism, as well as a "call to order" after the experimental ferment of the first two decades of the twentieth century.

• 2 lines of development:
• French (proceeding from the influence of Erik Satie and represented by Igor Stravinsky) ex. Stravinsky oepra, The Rake's Progress
• German (proceeding from the "New Objectivism" of Ferruccio Busoni and represented by Paul Hindemith.) ex Paul Hindemith's opera, Mathis der Maler
• .

an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic.

in America at time of Great Depression (1930's) focused on the ugly realities of contemporary life and sympathized with working-class people, particularly the poor

"spoken-voice"

sprechgesang and sprechstimme musical terms used to refer to an expressionist vocal technique between singing and speaking. Though sometimes used interchangeably, sprechgesang is a term directly related to the operatic recitative manner of singing (in which pitches are sung, but the articulation is rapid and loose like speech), whereas sprechstimme is closer to speech itself (because it does not emphasise any particular pitches).


Sprechgesang-late Romantic German operas or "music dramas" that were composed by Richard Wagner and others in the 19th century. Thus sprechgesang is often merely a German alternative to recitative.

Sprechstimme- associated with the composers of the Second Viennese School. Arnold Schoenberg asks for the technique in a number of pieces: the part of the Speaker in Gurre-Lieder (1911) is written in his notation for Sprechstimme, but it was Pierrot Lunaire (1912) where he used it throughout and left a note attempting to explain the technique. Alban Berg adopted the technique and asked for it in parts of his operas Wozzeck and Lulu.

• method or technique of composition (Griffiths 2001, 116) that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of post-tonal thinking (Whittall 2008, 1). Twelve-tone technique orders the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, forming a row or series and providing a unifying basis for a composition's melody, harmony, structural progressions, and variations. Other types of serialism also work with sets, collections of objects, but not necessarily with fixed-order series,
• and extend the technique to other musical dimensions (often called "parameters"), such as duration, dynamics, and timbre.

• 2 types:
• Twelve Tone Serialism (Schonberg) recurring series of ordered elements (normally a set—or row—of pitches or pitch classes), which are used in order
• Non Twelve Tone Serialism (Stockhausen) pitches might be reordered

used by Second Viennese School (Schoberg, Berg, and Webern), Stockhausen and others

Twelve Tone Technique invented by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in 1921

used during the next twenty years almost exclusively by the composers of the Second Viennese School – Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler and Schoenberg himself.

The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any[2] through the use of tone rows, an ordering of the 12 pitches. All 12 notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key.

a set of all pitches that are a whole number of octaves apart, e.g., the pitch class C consists of the Cs in all octaves.

pitch classes can be labeled with integer notation to avoid confusion of enharmonic spellings

developed in connection with atonal music by theorists such as Allen Forte (1973), drawing on the work in twelve-tone theory of Milton Babbitt.

The fundamental concept of musical set theory is the (musical) set, which is an unordered collection of pitch classes (Rahn 1980, 27). More exactly, a pitch-class set is a numerical representation consisting of distinct integers (i.e., without duplicates) (Forte 1973, 3). The elements of a set may be manifested in music as simultaneous chords, successive tones (as in a melody), or both.

basic operations: transposition (keeps same interval relationships), inversion, retrograde (reverses order), and rotation

mnemonic device was first described by Guido of Arezzo

Milton Babbitt's serial theory extends the term hexachord to refer to a six-note segment of a twelve-tone row.[c

style of 20th-century music composition. It is stylized in the same texture, in that different musical notes are done in seclusion rather than in a linear sequence.[4] This type of music is referred to as punctualism or klangfarbenmelodie.

Europe 1949-1955

• term was originally coined in German (punktuelle Musik), by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Herbert Eimert (who also used the expression "star music") to describe pieces such as Olivier Messiaen's
• "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités" (1949). However, it is most commonly associated with serial compositions such as Pierre Boulez's Structures, book 1 (1952), Karel Goeyvaerts's Sonata for Two Pianos and Nummer 2 for thirteen instruments (1951), and Luigi Nono's Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica, as well as some early compositions of Stockhausen, such as Kreuzspiel.

also series and set,[2] refers to a non-repetitive ordering of a set of pitch-classes, typically of the twelve notes in musical set theory of the chromatic scale, though both larger and smaller sets are sometimes found.

Tone rows are the basis of Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique and most types of serial music.

Tone rows are denoted by leters and subscript numbers

• A twelve-tone or serial composition will take one or more tone rows, called the prime form, as its basis plus their transformations (inversion, retrograde, retrograde inversion, as well as transposition; see twelve-tone technique
• for details). These forms may be used to construct a melody in a straightforward manner as in Schoenberg's Op. 25 Minuet Trio, where P-0 is used to construct the opening melody and later varied through transposition, as P-6, and also in articulation and dynamics. It is then varied again through inversion, untransposed, taking form I-0.

way to manipulate tones in Twelve Tone music (backwards)

used by Second Viennese School

way to manipulate tones in Twelve Tone music

turns interval "upside down" (pitch class of 2 becomes 10, 9 becomes 3, etc)

used by Second Viennese School

term first described by Milton Babbitt

using the twelve tone technique combinatoriality is a quality shared by some twelve-tone tone rows whereby the row and one of its transformations combine to form a pair of aggregates[1]. Schoenberg often combined P-0/I-5 to create, "two aggregates, between the first hexachords of each, and the second hexachords of each, respectively."[1] Combinatoriality is a side effect of derived rows where combining different segments or sets such that the pitch class content of the result fulfills certain criteria, usually the combination of hexachords which complete the full chromatic.

Integral serialism or total serialism is the use of series for aspects such as duration, dynamics, and register as well as pitch (Whittall 2008, 273). Other terms, used especially in Europe to distinguish post–World War II serial music from twelve-tone music and its American extensions, are general serialism and multiple serialism (Grant 2001, 5–6).

is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer(s).

American composer John Cage's Music of Changes (1951) is the first piece to be conceived largely through random procedures

is an originally American genre of experimental or Downtown music named in the 1960s based mostly in consonant harmony, steady pulse (if not immobile drones), stasis or gradual transformation, and often reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units such as figures, motifs, and cells. It may include features such as additive process and phase shifting. Starting in the early 1960s as a scruffy underground scene in San Francisco alternative spaces and New York lofts, minimalism spread to become the most popular experimental music style of the late 20th century. The movement originally involved dozens of composers, although only five—Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams and, less visibly if more seminally, La Monte Young—emerged to become publicly associated with it in America.

arose in the 1970s with the advent of musical minimalism. Composers such as Terry Riley, Bradley Joseph, John Adams, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Lou Harrison reacted to the perceived elitism and dissonant sound of atonal academic modernism by producing music with simple textures and relatively onsonant harmonies. Some composers have been openly influenced by popular music and world ethnic musical traditions. Though representing a general return to certain notions of music-making that are often considered to be classical or romanticarose in the 1970s with the advent of musical minimalism.