Test O'DOOM copyright Walter Bailey

[sanura]

Outline of 20th Century of DOOM
Disintegration of Tonality 1900-1920
New Systems of Organization in absence of Tonality 1920-1945
Rise of the Avant-Garde 1945-1970
New conservatism/Accessibility/Postmodernism 1970-Present


Listening
http://www.rice.edu/fondren/brown/soundreserves/MUSI421/Weeks1_5.html

Schubert "Kennst du das Land?"
Mahler, Symphony No. 10, Adagio (1910) viola section solo with embellishments and leading tones to obscure tonality
Chopin, Prelude in A Minor (indeterminate date) cadential 6/4 is where key first becomes apparent. (m. 15) First 14 measures are extended dominant triad; no statement of tonic at beginning
Schoenberg, "Lockung" op. 6 no. 7 (1905) Only tonally-disintegrating German song; bitonal in E flat and C. Never firmly establishes one, and transforms tonic-dominant axis beyond recognition. Traditional key not really perceptible
Wagner, Prelude to Act III of Parsifal (1877-82) strings open, similar to Mahler but with all sections; sequence elaborates on a diminished seventh chord, moves up until pattern is broken. Also pattern of dominant seventh followed by diminished seventh. Logic of pattern relies on pattern itself, not on function.
Liszt, "Nuage gris" (1881) no use of traditional key, no tonic despite key signature. Not common-practice tonality. Arpeggios and chords in right hand, tremolo in left hand, then switch. Then ascending.

Faure, "Dans la foret de septembre" (1902) half-diminished seventh used to prolong dominant harmony as bass moves slowly down by step in parallel tenths. Not its traditional function as the seventh of two.
Satie, Saraband No. 1 (1887) cadential passages that don't outline a key; motionless and repetitive. Unresolved seventh and ninth chords, on a large scale in A flat major but few chords actually are diatonically in A flat
Debussy, "Saraband" from Pour le piano (1894, 1901) chord planing (with sevenths) that makes more musical sense, no randomness, more rhythmic, more melodic
Debussy, "Placet futile" from Trois poemes de Stephane Mallarme (1913) piano, still more chord planing, not much melody in the voice, nebulous tonality, returning rhythmic motive; Debussy’s late style. Whole-tone collections and nondiatonic seventh and ninth chords
Debussy, Jeux, (1912) mellifluous, full of near-wholetone sonority, augmented chords for no tonal reason, timbre as important as melody and rhythm; undefined multidiatonicism. Whole-tone formations, seventh and ninth chords, pentatonic sets, bitriadic chords
Ravel, Jeux d'eau (1901) Virtuosic, pictorial, descriptively impressionistic piano cascade; regular rhythm; all tonic (E) triads have a D# added on. Bitriadic and whole tone and pentatonic all featured
Ravel, "Placet futile" from Trois poemes (1913) mezzo singing in French with chamber accompaniment, sharper dissonances, not homophonic, piano later with cascading arpeggiation, less melodious; tempo not rigid, little formal symmetry, accompaniment colors change a lot, harmonies are triadic then dissonant then triadic. All-interval tetrachord gives German flavor, little sense of tonality
Ravel, "Aoua! Meliez-vous des blancs" from Chansons madecasses (1926) Exclamatory beginning, very obscure tonal centers and associations; uneasy chamber ensemble, French lyrics; music traces emotions of narrator. Tension builds to war cries. Entirely atonal, with only passing reference to triadic harmonies. Unified by recurrent motives, key signatures exist but do not reflect tradition

Mussorgsky, "With Nurse" from Nursery (1872) Childlike, folklike irregular rhythmic alteration, very tonal, vocal-oriented accompaniment, Russian; spontaneous and realistic narration. Constantly changing meters, recitational, tonic not heard at beginning. Whole-tone appears with mention of wolf
Scriabin, Piano Sonata No. 10, op. 70 (1912-13) Ambiguous tonality, but harmonic function still present; trills are omnipresent, simultaneous and otherwise; whole-tone, octatonic, exotic and colorful embellishments to diatonic scales. In one movmt. Little feeling of stable meter, Prometheus chord used at pivotal moments
Stravinsky, Petrushka, scene 2 (1910-11) makes use of folk song, octatonic scale, pentatonic, modal and diatonic. The Bear is whole tone (animal=whole tone association in Russian tradition); bitriadic “Petrushka chord”- six-note subset of octatonic scale
Stravinsky, Rite of Spring (1913) Intro: bassoon solo is a Lithuanian folk song. Augurs: bitriadic- 7-note chord underlying and similar to octatonic. Sacrificial: rapidly pulsating small values in constantly changing metric groups. Percussive use of orchestra

Bartok, Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, op. 20 no. 7 (1920) Pastorally folklike to open, modal with modal harmonization; original Hungarian theme is inverted to continue; scratchy recording quality; harmonization largely independent of the melody. Mostly 4- and 5- not octatonic subsets, major-minor tetrachord. “Bimodality”: both major and minor—punctuates opening and closing statements of the melody
Bartok, Allegro Barbaro (1911) fast, irregularly rhythmic, harmonically comprehensible, if not traditionally tonal; accentuatedly chordal; in Ben's words, "going apeshit at the piano"
Bartok, Bagatelles, op. 6 no. 1(two voices), 2(chordal, modal, aeolian), 8(slow and chromatic), 14(fast waltz) (1908) tonality of folk song and atonality of new ideas. Brief and spare. Four sharps in right hand, four flats in left hand. Triadic tetrachords. Some include folk song quotes or imitations
Bartok, String Quartet No. 3 (1927) Only quartet besides Seeger; dissonant, modal, rhythmic and consciously barbaric; atypical string technique like sul ponticello, glissandos, pentatonic element of peasant music merged with art music. All in one mvmt. ABA’B’. modal chromaticism and pentatonicism. Devoid of the predictable and commonplace
Vaughan Williams, Finale from Symphony No. 3 (Pastoral) (1916-21 [2])timpani and soprano vocalise to open and close, modal/pentatonic and folk-inspired; pentatonic melodies in strings later; vocalise emphasizes A and E and the pentatonic segments. Modal. Simplicity, no clear major or minor. No defined key
Sibelius, Symphony No. 7 (1924) Dramatic, angstier than Vaughan Williams, still pastoral, very Late Romantically tonal, inside the box; long slow buildup; 3 main themes: stepwise, outlining triads, and w/turn figure. Modal lines

Ives, "Charlie Rutlage" (1920-21) folk-like, diatonic with atonal middle section
Ives, "From Paracelsus" (1922) music corresponds to Paracelsus’ enlightenment. Dissonant flurry settles into G Major, ends in dreamy and static atonality. 1) devoted to power 2) realizes its limitations 3) realizes love must come first
Ives, Central Park in the Dark in the Good Old Summertime (1906) Quotes American tunes, meant to be a “picture-in-sound”
Ives, The Unanswered Question, (1908) Chamber ensemble with flexible instrumentation, layers several loosely coordinated strata. Programmatic. See page 303. Strings are the continuation of time, flutes are mankind, trumpets are the question

Cowell, "The Banshee" (1925) performer manipulates strings inside the piano. 2 recurrent motives: Dies Irae and the short, plucked motive
Cage, Sonata No. 5 from Sonatas and Interludes (1951) AABB drum-like left hand with bell sounds in right hand. Reduces to 4:4:5:5
Varese, Octandre, mvt. 1 (1923) Very reminiscent of Stravinsky, esp. Rite of Spring, but in 8-instrument chamber format; Webern-style register setting; freely atonal and chromatic. Recurring descending chromatic theme. Blocks of sound (“tiling”)
Ruth Crawford Seeger, Quartet (1931) One part moves at a time, for the most part; very active, no distinguishable tonal center; third movement's dynamic counterpoint, rather than melodic; fourth movement has inversely decreasing/increasing numbers of pitches in a row and dynamics in the violin solo and the other parts

Terms and Names
Which we're coming up with by ourselves, because there's no list; feel free to add some

modality
pitch class- a general method of refering to all pitches which exist in an octave relationship. (ie C2, C4, and C7 are all pitch class "C")
sets: dyad, trichord (a collection of three pitch classes, often one of the four ordered trichords in a tone row or set form. Trichords may be used to create derived rows and invariance), tetrachord (A series or simultaneity of four notes), pentachord (five), hexachord (six)
harmonic equivalence
restatement
transposition- The notation or performance of music at a pitch different from that in which it was originally conceived, by raising or lowering all the notes by the same interval
reordering
inversion- (1) The rearrangement of the notes of a chord built in 3rds so that the lowest note is not the root of the chord. If the lowest note is the 3rd of the triad it is said to be a 'first inversion', if the 5th, a 'second inversion'.
(2) The complement of an interval within some fixed interval. Within an octave a 2nd inverts to a 7th, a 3rd to a 6th, a 4th to a 5th and vice versa.
(3) The mirroring of a succession of notes about a fixed note, usually the first note or interval in the succession. Composers of the Renaissance and Baroque often wrote imitative counterpoint in inversion; Bach composed several inverted fugues and canons. 12-note rows, in Schoenberg's system of composition with 12 notes, may be used in inversion, and retrograde inversion
distinctive harmonies: symmetric and quasi-symmetrical sets
whole-tone set (hexachord)- A scale that divides the octave into six equal-tempered whole tones. As all the intervals between adjacent degrees are the same, the scale is tonally unstable and it lacks the fundamental harmonic and melodic relationships of major-minor tonality (it has no dominant or leading note). It has therefore provided a means of suspending tonality, a characteristic exploited particularly by the French impressionists, notably Debussy
nearly-whole-tone set (Scriabin)- A series of six notes that proceeds by whole tones except between two notes, which are a semitone apart
octatonic- A scale of seven notes (that is, repeating after eight) with an interval structure differing from those of the standard major and minor scales; generally of alternating half- and whole-steps
major/minor tetrachord
all-interval tetrachords (c/c#/e/f#), (c/c#/e-flat//g)
quartal harmonies
pentatonic collections
Gesamtkuns(T)werk- don’t forget the T! 'Total art work': term used by Wagner to signify his music dramas in which all the arts (music, poetry, movement, design) should combine to the same artistic end. The concept was not original to Wagner, but the term was
impressionism (in art and music)- Term, first used in the 1870s of Monet, Pissarro and their circle of painters, and later applied to music. In 1882, Renoir mentioned 'musical impressionists' in discussion with Wagner. It was applied, as a criticism, to Debussy's Printemps in 1887, to signify that the writer thought the work lacking in structural precision and exaggeratedly occupied with colour. Although Debussy is still generally regarded as the prototype impressionist composer, it has been argued that analogies between him and the Monet school are misleading. But many critics regard it as a useful critical concept, particularly for music that blurs the outlines of traditional tonal progression with modal or chromatic features and conveys moods and emotions around a subject rather than presenting a detailed musical picture
Ravel (as opposed to Debussy) preferred sharper harmonies

Comments

[signorinakatina.livejournal.com]

Chopin, Prelude in A Minor: cadential 6/4 is where key first becomes apparent. (m. 15) First 14 measures are extended dominant triad; no statement of tonic at beginning.

Schoenberg, "Lockung" op. 6 no. 7 (1905) Only tonally-disintegrating German song. Two tonalities simultaneously: E flat and C. Never firmly establishes a key, and transforms ton-dominant axis beyond recognition. Traditional key not really perceptible.

Wagner, Prelude to Act III of Parsifal (1877-82) strings open, similar to Mahler but with all sections. Sequence used. Elaborates on a diminished seventh chord, moves up until pattern is broken. Also pattern of dominant seventh followed by diminished seventh. Logic of patter relies on pattern itself- not on function.


Liszt, "Nuage gris" (1881) no use of traditional key, no tonic despite key signature. Not common-practice tonality. Arpeggios and chords in right hand, tremolo in left hand, then switch. Then ascending.

Faure, "Dans la foret de septembre" (1902) half-diminished seventh used to prolong dominant harmony as bass moves slowly down by step in parallel tenths. Not its traditional function as the seventh of two.

Satie, Saraband No. 1 (1887) cadential passages that don't outline a key. Motionless and repetitive. Unresolved seventh and ninth chords, on a large scale in A flat major but few chords actually are diatonically in A flat.

Debussy, "Saraband" from Pour le piano (1894, 1901) chord planing (with sevenths) that makes more musical sense, no randomness, more rhythmic, more melodic.

Debussy, "Placet futile" from Trois poemes de Stephane Mallarme (1913) piano, still more chord planing, not much melody in the voice, nebulous tonality, returning rhythmic motive. Debussy’s late style. Whole-tone collections and nondiatonic seventh and ninth chords.

Debussy, Jeux, (1912) mellifluous, full of near-wholetone sonority, augmented chords for no tonal reason, timbre as important as melody and rhythm. Undefined key—diatonic but doesn’t stay in one key. Whole-tone formations, seventh and ninth chords, pentatonic sets, bitriadic chords.

Ravel, Jeux d'eau (1901) Virtuosic, pictorial, descriptively impressionistic piano cascade; regular rhythm. Ravel’s early style. “play of water” captured. All tonic (E) triads have a D# added on. Bitriadic and whole tone and pentatonic all featured. Regular rhythm.

Ravel, "Placet futile" from Trois poemes (1914) mezzo singing in French with chamber accompaniment, sharper dissonances, not homophonic, piano later with cascading arpeggiation, less melodious. Tempo not rigid, little formal symmetry, accompaniment colors change a lot, harmonies are triadic then dissonant then triadic. All-interval tetrachord gives German flavor, little sense of tonality.

Ravel, "Aoua! Meliez-vous des blancs" from Chansons madecasses (1926) Exclamatory beginning, very obscure tonal centers and associations; uneasy chamber ensemble, French lyrics. Music traces emotions of narrator. Tension builds to war cries. Entirely atonal, with only passing reference to triadic harmonies. Unified by recurrent motives, key signatures exist but do not reflect tradition.

Mussorgsky, "With Nurse" from Nursery (1872) Childlike, folklike irregular rhythmic alteration, very tonal, vocal-oriented accompaniment, Russian. Spontaneous and realistic narration. Constantly changing meters, recitational, tonic not heard at beginning. Whole-tone appears with mention of wolf.

[signorinakatina.livejournal.com]

Scriabin, Piano Sonata No. 10, op. 70 (1912-13) Ambiguous tonality, but harmonic function still present; trills are omnipresent, simultaneous and otherwise; rhythm flexible but not nebulous. Exotic instructions. Whole tone, octatonic, exotic and colorful embellishments to diatonic scales. In one movmt. Little feeling of stable meter, Prometheus chord used at pivotal moments.

Stravinsky, Petrushka, scene 2 (1910-11) makes use of folk song, octatonic scale, pentatonic, modal and diatonic. The Bear is whole tone. (animal=whole tone) Bitriadic “petrushka chord”- six-not subset of octatonic scale.

Stravinsky, Rite of Spring (1913) Intro: bassoon solo is a Lithuanean folk song. Augurs: bitriadic- 7-note chord underlying and similar to octatonic. Sacrificial: rapidly pulsating small values in constantly changing metric groups. Percussive use of orchestra.

Bartok, Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, op. 20 no. 7 (1920) harmonization largely independent of the melody. Mostly 4- and 5- not octatonic subsets, major-minor tetrachord. “Bimodality”: both major and minor—punctuates opening and closing statements of the melody.

Bartok, Allegro Barbaro (1911) fast, driving rhythms with shifting accents. Loud, fast, etc.

Bartok, Bagatelles, op. 6 no. 1, 2, 8, 14 (1908) tonality of folk song and atonality of new ideas. Brief and spar. 4 sharps in right hand, four flats in left hand. Triadic tetrachords. Some include folk song.

Bartok, String Quartet No. 3 (1927)pentatonic element of peasant music merged with art music. All in one mvmt. ABA’B’. modal chromaticism and pentatonicism. Devoid of the predictable and commonplace.

Vaughan Williames, Finale from Symphony No. 3 (Pastoral) (1922)timpani and soprano vocalise to open and close, modal/pentatonic and folk-inspired; pentatonic melodies in strings later. The vocalize emphasizes A and E and emphasizes the pentatonic segments. Modal. Simplicity, no clear major or minor. No defined key.

Sibelius, Symphony No. 7 (1924) Dramatic, angstier than Vaughan Williams, still pastoral, very Late Romantically tonal, inside the box; long slow buildup. 3 main themes: stepwise, outlining triads, and w/turn figure. Modal lines.

Ives, "Charlie Rutlage" (1920-21) this should be obvious by now. folk-lie, diatonic with atonal middle section.

Ives, "From Paracelsus" (1922) music corresponds to Paracelsus’ enlightenment. Dissonant flurry settles into G Major, ends in dreamy and static atonality. 1) devoted to power 2) realizes its limitations 3) realizes love must come first.

Ives, Central Park in the Dark in the Good Old Summertime (1906) you should know this by now. Quotes American tunes, meant to be a “picture-in-sound”

Ives, The Unanswered Question, (1908) Chamber ensemble with flexible instrumentation, layers several loosely coordinated strata. Programmatic. See page 303. Strings are the continuation of time, flutes are mankind, other funny things like that.

Cowell, "The Banshee" (1925) performer manipulates strings inside the piano. 2 recurrent motives: Dies Irae and the short, plucked motive.

Cage, Sonata No. 5 from Sonatas and Interludes (1951) AABB drum-like left hand with bell sounds in right hand. Reduces to 4:4:5:5 duration. Sounds like a party!

Varese, Octandre, mvt. 1 (1923)for an 8-instrument chamber ensemble. Freely atonal and chromatic. Recurring descending chromatic theme. Blocks of sound (“tiling”)

Ruth Crawford Seeger, Quartet (1931) “dynamic counterpoint”- creating counterpoint using dynamics alone (not pitch, not line).

[signorinakatina.livejournal.com]

Terms and Names
Which we're coming up with by ourselves, because there's no list

modality

pitch class- a general method of refering to all pitches which exist in an octave relationship. (ie C2, C4, and C7 are all pitch class "C").

sets: dyad

Trichord- a collection of three pitch classes, often one of the four ordered trichords in a tone row or set form. Trichords may be used to create derived rows and invariance.

Tetrachord- A series of four notes, contained within the limits of a perfect 4th

Pentachord

Hexachord- An ascending series of six notes that proceeds by whole tones except between the third and fourth notes, which are a semitone apart

harmonic equivalence

restatement

transposition- The notation or performance of music at a pitch different from that in which it was originally conceived, by raising or lowering all the notes by the same interval.

reordering

inversion- (1) The rearrangement of the notes of a chord built in 3rds so that the lowest note is not the root of the chord. If the lowest note is the 3rd of the triad it is said to be a 'first inversion', if the 5th, a 'second inversion'.
(2) The complement of an interval within some fixed interval. Within an octave a 2nd inverts to a 7th, a 3rd to a 6th, a 4th to a 5th and vice versa.
(3) The mirroring of a succession of notes about a fixed note, usually the first note or interval in the succession. Composers of the Renaissance and Baroque often wrote imitative counterpoint in inversion; Bach composed several inverted fugues and canons. 12-note rows, in Schoenberg's system of composition with 12 notes, may be used in inversion, and retrograde inversion.

distinctive harmonies: symmetric and quasi-symmetrical sets

whole-tone set (hexachord)- A scale that divides the octave into six equal-tempered whole tones: C-D-E-F♯-G♯-A♯(=B#)-C or its sole transposition, D#-E#-F-G-A-B-C♯(=D#). As all the intervals between adjacent degrees are the same, the scale is tonally unstable and it lacks the fundamental harmonic and melodic relationships of major-minor tonality (it has no dominant or leading note). It has therefore provided a means of suspending tonality, a characteristic exploited particularly by the French impressionists, notably Debussy.
nearly-whole-tone set (Scriabin)

octatonic - A scale of seven notes (that is, repeating after eight) with an interval structure differing from those of the standard major and minor scales.

major/minor tetrachord

all-interval tetrachords (c/c#/e/f#), (c/c#/e-flat//g)

quartal harmonies

pentatonic collections- A term applied to music, a mode or a scale based on a system of five different pitches to the octave.

Gesamtkuns(T)werk- don’t forget the T! Total art work': term used by Wagner to signify his music dramas in which all the arts (music, poetry, movement, design) should combine to the same artistic end. The concept was not original to Wagner, but the term was.

impressionism (in art and music) Term, first used in the 1870s of Monet, Pissarro and their circle of painters, and later applied to music. In 1882, Renoir mentioned 'musical impressionists' in discussion with Wagner. It was applied, as a criticism, to Debussy's Printemps in 1887, to signify that the writer thought the work lacking in structural precision and exaggeratedly occupied with colour. Although Debussy is still generally regarded as the prototype impressionist composer, it has been argued that analogies between him and the Monet school are misleading. But many critics regard it as a useful critical concept, particularly for music that blurs the outlines of traditional tonal progression with modal or chromatic features and conveys moods and emotions around a subject rather than presenting a detailed musical picture.

Ravel (as opposed to Debussy) preferred sharper harmonies

[sanura.livejournal.com]

Hexachord- An ascending series of six notes that proceeds by whole tones except between the third and fourth notes, which are a semitone apart
:
No. That definition belongs with near-whole-tone sets. A hexachord is any six notes.

whole-tone set (hexachord)- A scale that divides the octave into six equal-tempered whole tones: C-D-E-F♯-G♯-A♯(= B#)-C or its sole transposition, D#-E#-F-G-A-B-C♯(= D#). As all the intervals between adjacent degrees are the same, the scale is tonally unstable and it lacks the fundamental harmonic and melodic relationships of major-minor tonality (it has no dominant or leading note). It has therefore provided a means of suspending tonality, a characteristic exploited particularly by the French impressionists, notably Debussy.

:
Not exactly; A#=/=B#, and C#=/=D#.

[signorinakatina.livejournal.com]

I copied those from websites without checking, just to give them to you. Sorry. And thanks!