Thursday April 25, 2013

1. M100: Music Appreciation Discussion GroupBen Tibbetts, T.A.benjamintibbetts@yahoo.comWelcome! Please sign the attendance at the front of the room. Thursday April 25, 2013

2. Today’s Agenda • Presentation Signups • Pass out tickets for the jazz concert tomorrow at 8pm in Bowker Auditorium • Pages 366-382 and 455-460 (Skipping discussion on pages 446-451 to 461-466) • Teaching Evaluations Homework for weekend will be: • 20th Century Worksheet (on Moodle) • Listening Log Collection #2

3. Final Presentations The sign up sheet is at the front of the room. Perks Day #1: get it over with & don’t have to come in again @ 8:00am Day #2: more time to prepare your presentation/paper

4. Pass back stuff (briefly)

5. Pass out tickets for the jazz concert tomorrow at 8pm in Bowker Auditorium Concert report will be due on Presentation Day #2 (Not in on that day? Drop it in my mailbox: in the Fine Arts Center, Copy Room, East Wing)

6. Pages 366-382 and 455-460

7. Arnold Schoenberg 1874-1951 Austrian composer/painter

8. serialism - "A style of writing in which notes are drawn not from a scale, but from a predetermined series of notes. Serial composition flourished between ca. 1920 and 1980." -page 518

9. twelve-tone composition - "A type of serial composition in which twentieth-century composers manipulated a series ('row') consisting of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, not repeating any one of these notes until all other eleven had been sounded, thereby effectively avoiding any sense of tonality." -page 519

10. atonal - "A style of writing that establishes no harmonic or melodic center of gravity; without a tonic, all notes are of equal weight and significance." -page 515

11. expressionism - "A broad artistic movement that flourished in music, painting, and literature in the early decades of the twentieth century, in which psychological truth took precedence over beauty, and inner emotion took precedence over any sense of external reality." -page 516

12. Sprechstimme - "In German, 'speech-voice'. A style of singing halfway between speech and lyrical song, in which the singer hits precise pitches and then allows them to tail off, rather than sustaining them, as in lyrical singing." -page 518

13. "Colombine" from Pierrot lunaire (English, Pierrot in the Moonlight) “Pierrot” is a sad clown, pining for love of Colombine, who breaks his heart and leaves him Text/translation on next slide

14. “Colombine” from Pierrot lunaire Translation from http://www.lunanova.org/pierrot/text.html

15. Igor Stravinsky 1882-1971 Russian composer

16. Ballet – “a theatrical entertainment in which ballet dancing and music, often with scenery and costumes, combine to tell a story, establish an emotional atmosphere, etc.” -Dictionary.Com (definition 2) http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ballet

17. polytonality - "The juxtaposition of two conventional harmonies in a way that creates a new dissonance." -page 517 • pentatonic [scale] - "A scale consisting of five tones." -page 517 • ostinato - "A short pattern of notes repeated over and over." -page 517 • through-composed - "A form in which each section has its own music, with very little or no repetition between sections." -page 518

18. Sergei Diaghilev was a Russian art critic and patron Founded the “Russian Ballets”

19. Ballet: The Rite of Spring, Part One: The Adoration of the Earth (excerpt)

20. John Cage 1912-1992 American composer/music theorist

21. aleatory music - "Music composed using elements of chance." -page 515

22. About Cage’s 4‘ 33“ or “Four minutes and thirty-three seconds” Three movements, composed in 1952

23. Supplemental: Sam Harris on mindfulness meditation

24. Electronic music - "Music using sounds generated (and not merely amplified) either in whole or in part by electronic means." -page 516

25. Musique concrète - "French for 'concrete music.' Music using sounds generated by everyday, real ('concrete') objects not normally thought of as musical instruments and then manipulated electronically." -page 517

26. Indeterminacy (excerpt) Text on following slides

27. One evening I was walking along Hollywood Boulevard, nothing much to do. I stopped and looked in the window of a stationary shop. A mechanized pen was suspended in space in such a way that, as a mechanized roll of paper passed by it, the pen went through the motions of the same penmanship exercises I had learned as a child in the third grade. Centrally placed in the window was an advertisement explaining the mechanical reasons for the perfection of the operation of the suspended mechanical pen. I was fascinated, for everything was going wrong. The pen was tearing the paper to shreds and splattering ink all over the window and on the advertisement, which, nevertheless, remained legible.

28. It was after I got to Boston that I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Anybody who knows me knows this story. I am constantly telling it. Anyway, in that silent room, I heard two sounds, one high and one low. Afterward I asked the engineer in charge why, if the room was so silent, I had heard the two sounds. He said, "Describe them." I did. He said, "The high one was your nervous system in operation. The low one was your blood in circulation."

29. Listening Log Collection #2 • Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin • Terraplane Blues by Robert Johnson • Cotton Tail by Duke Ellington • Ornithology by Charlie Parker • Voiles by Claude Debussy • "Colombine" from Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire • Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Part One: The Adoration of the Earth (excerpt) • John Cage’s Indeterminacy (excerpt)

30. Final Reminders / Homework • Need a volunteer to take the Teaching Evaluations to the music office in the Fine Arts Center, Room 273 (East Wing) • 20th Century Worksheet due next class (on Moodle) • Listening Log Collection #2 due next class • Questions? Email: benjamintibbetts@yahoo.com