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Early Modern Art Music
Claude Debussy: "Nuages" from Trois Nocturnes [impressionist nocturne] 1899--[click here to see score excerpt]
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Debussy_Nuages.mp4
Performance Notes:
Impressionism was a direct reaction against the excessive Romanticism of Wagner and his followers. Debussy fostered subtlety, flowing moods and colors in this new impressionistic style (named after the slightly earlier style of French painting by Claude Monet and others). The sound features whole-tone scales, chromatic Japanese-influenced melodies, and the predominance of woodwind colors and harp (instead of strings, or Wagnerian brass).
Trois Nocturnes (Three Noctunes, 1899) is a 3-movement set of programmatic symphonic poems inspired by a series of impressionist paintings, also entitled "Nocturnes" by James Whisler:
1. Nuages (Clouds)
2. Fêtes (Festivals)
3. Sirènes (Sirens--as in the dangerous and beautiful creatures that lured sailors to their deaths in Greek mythology)
In his preface, Debussy says "The title Nocturnes is to be interpreted here in a decorative sense...[depicting] all the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests....Nuages' renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white." Debussy illusttates this musically with cloud-like melodic "planing" (lines moving up and down in parallel motion), whole tone scales, woodwind-predominated orchestral colors, and a usually subdued dynamic range with occasional swells.
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Igor Stravinsky: "Adoration of the Earth" from Part I of The Rite of Spring [primitivist ballet] 1913--[click here to see score excerpt]
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Stravinsky_RiteOfSpring.mp4
Performance Notes:
The Rite of Spring (a ballet focused on a ritual sacrifice in an ancient pagan society) was so shocking in its music and dance that there was a famous riot in the Paris concert hall the night it premiered in 1913. Stravinsky's musical scoe contains many novel features for its time including experiments in rhythm (pounding ostinatos with constantly shifting accents), melody, harmonic dissonance, and extended tonality (created by collage-layering of independent clashing melodies). His unusual orchestral scoring of instruments in extreme registers is also a hallmark of this style.
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Arnold Schoenberg: "Mondesdrunken" (Moondrunk) Song No. 1 from Pierrot lunaire [song cycle] 1912--[click here to see score excerpt]
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Schoenberg_Pierrot_Moondrunk.mp4
Performance Notes:
Pierrot lunaire (The Sick Moon) is a cycle of 20 German Lieder for voice (in Spreschstimme style) and chamber orchestra (flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano). It is an expressionist work that depicts the psychological inner thoughts of a lunatic (literally, someone controlled by the cycles of the moon).
As seen from the score excerpt and video clip, this is a highly-dissonant, intense and emotional atonal work, that uses excruciating instrumental ranges and sounds to depict its psychotic text, as in Song No. 1, "Mondestrunken" (Moondrunk), which is in ternary form [ABA]:
[Translation]
[A]--Quietly
At night the moon drenches thirsting eyes, and a flood swells up on their still horizon.
Tremulous sighs travel up through the swell.
Waves of "wine" for thirsting eyes gush forth from the moon at night.
[B]--Strong dynamic force and range
The poet, deep in devotion, grows drunk of the holy drink.
His head turns in ecstacy to the heavens,
And reeling, he slips and slurps the "wine" that slakes his thirsting eyes.
[A] Instrumental introduction returns
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Arnold Schoenberg: A Survivor from Warsaw [cantata] 1947https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Schoenberg_Survivor.mp4
A Survivor from Warsaw is an atonal and expressionist cantata for solo voice (in Sprechstimme style) and orchestra. It is similar in many ways to Pierrot lunaire (see example above), but it is even more highly structured by its use of 12-tone serialism--a compositional approach that Schoenberg developed in 1921 and used in various ways for the rest of his life. Much of the time, the music is also strictly contrapuntal, with rapid canonic echoing at the 16th-note.
Schoenberg wrote the text himself, based on direct reports from one of the few survivors of a 1943 Jewish rebellion in a Nazi concentration camp in Warsaw, Poland during World War II. After the German soldiers angrily retaliated by burning the ghetto to the ground--building by building, those who survived escaped by living in underground sewage canals.
[Translation]--from Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (Bible, Old Testament)
I cannot remember everything. I must have been unconscious most of the time. I remember only the grandiose moment when they all started to sing, as if prearranged, the old prayer they had neglected for so many years - the forgotten creed! But I have no recollection how I got underground to live in the sewers of Warsaw for so long a time. The day began as usual: Reveille when it still was dark. "Get out!" Whether you slept or whether worries kept you awake the whole night. You had been separated from your children, from your wife, from your parents. You don't know what happened to them... How could you sleep?
The trumpets again - "Get out! The sergeant will be furious!" They came out; some very slowly, the old ones, the sick ones; some with nervous agility. They fear the sergeant. They hurry as much as they can. In vain! Much too much noise, much too much commotion! And not fast enough! The Feldwebel shouts: "Achtung! Stilljestanden! Na wird's mal! Oder soll ich mit dem Jewehrkolben nachhelfen? Na jut; wenn ihrs durchaus haben wollt!" ("Attention! Stand still! How about it, or should I help you along with the butt of my rifle? Oh well, if you really want to have it!"). The sergeant and his subordinates hit (everyone): young or old, (strong or sick), quiet, guilty or innocent ...
It was painful to hear them groaning and moaning. I heard it though I had been hit very hard, so hard that I could not help falling down. We all on the (ground) who could not stand up were (then) beaten over the head...I must have been unconscious. The next thing I heard was a soldier saying: "They are all dead!" Whereupon the sergeant ordered to do away with us. There I lay aside half conscious. It had become very still - fear and pain. Then I heard the sergeant shouting: “Abzählen!” ("Count off!"). They start slowly and irregularly: one, two, three, four - "Achtung!" The sergeant shouted again, "Rascher! Nochmals von vorn anfange! In einer Minute will ich wissen, wieviele ich zur Gaskammer abliefere! Abzählen!“ ("Faster! Once more, start from the beginning! In one minute I want to know how many I am going to send off to the gas chamber! Count off!")
They began again, first slowly: one, two, three, four, became faster and faster, so fast that it finally sounded like a stampede of wild horses, and all of a sudden, in the middle of it, they began singing the Shema Yisroel.
[Translation of Shema Yisroel--a Hebrew prayer that is sung twice daily by observant Jews, who often teach their children to recite it before they go to sleep]: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them thoroughly to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign upon your arm, and they shall be for a reminder between your eyes. And you shall write them upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates.
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Alban Berg: Wozzeck [expressionist opera] 1925--[click here to see score excerpt]
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Berg_Wozzeck_ActIII.mp4
Performance Notes:
Wozzeck is the first opera by the Austrian composer Alban Berg. It was composed between 1914 and 1922 and first performed in 1925. The opera is based on the drama Woyzeck left incomplete by the German playwright Georg Büchner at his death. Although a typical performance takes only slightly over an hour and a half, it is nevertheless an intense experience. The subject matter—the inevitability of hardship and exploitation for the poor—is brutal and uncompromisingly presented.
Wozzeck is generally regarded as the first opera produced in the 20th century avant garde style and is also one of the most famous examples of employing free atonality to express emotions and even the thought processes of the characters on the stage. The expression of madness and alienation was amplified by atonal dissonance. Berg decided against the use of the traditional operatic forms such as aria or trio for this opera. Instead, each scene is given its own inner coherence by the use of forms more normally associated with abstract instrumental music. The second scene of Act II (during which the Doctor and Captain taunt Wozzeck about Marie’s infidelity), for instance, consists of a prelude and triple fugue.
Main characters in this scene:
Wozzeck (baritone)
Marie, his common-law wife (soprano)
Operatic Scenario:
In Act III, scene 2, Wozzeck and Marie are walking in the woods by a pond. Marie is anxious to leave, but Wozzeck restrains her, fixated on her infidelity. As a blood-red moon rises, Wozzeck becomes determined that if he can't have Marie, no one else can--out of his mind, he stabs her.
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Anton von Webern: Symphonie Op.21 [pointellist symphony] 1928--[click here to see score excerpt]
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Webern_SymphonieOp21mvt2.mp4
Performance Notes:
Webern was a student of Schoenberg, and like his teacher he used atonal and 12-tone serial processes, but did so in entirely different ways. Webern wrote very short works packed with intricate structure, and he promoted the concept of pointellism--in which the pitches of a melody are presented just a few at a time as "isolated points of sound" surrounded by silence. Pointellism is closely associated with one of Webern's other favored concepts which is Klangfarbenmelodie--(the multi-colored melody produced when these isolated pitches played by many successive instruments are taken as a whole).
Webern's Symphonie Op. 21 is a 12-tone serial composition in two movements. Movement 1 is in two sections, each repeated (as in traditional sonata form), and based on a complex canon. Movement 2 is an expressive Theme and Variations on an 11-measure theme.
Large-scale Design of Op.21:
Movement 1: Ruhig schreitend ("calmly walking")
Movement 2: Sehr lebhaft ("highly active")
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Henry Cowell: The Banshee [character piece] 1925--[click here to see score excerpt]
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Cowell_Banshee.mp4
Performance Notes:
The American composer Henry Cowell spent most of his life exploring the coloristic potential of the piano. He was the first composer to use tone clusters, and also one of the first to explore the possible sounds that can be made when the player is directly in touch with the strings.
The Banshee was written in 1925 [!], and its title refers to a spirit in Irish folklore that is sent to lead a dead soul to its afterlife; when the Banshee passes through our dimensional-wall, it screams in anguish while performing its task. At a time when there were no synthesizers, computers, or sophisticated microphones or recording technoogy to make such eerie sounds, Cowell used his imagination and vision to turn the most standard solo instrument of the day (the piano) into a completely new instrument. Cowell requires two performers for this work: one who plays directly on the strings, the other sitting as usual on the piano bench but only holding down the sustain pedal (he could have done this with a weight, but Cowell wanted to symbolically show the obsolecence of the traditional player).
Colorful and curious new sounds as the main player interprets the graphically-written score and manipulates the strings by fingernail, palm, etc.)
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Béla Bartók: String Quartet No. 5 [string quartet] 1934
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Bartok_QuartetNo5mvt1ex.mp4
Performance Notes:
The Hungarian composer, Béla Bartók, was one of the most innovative composers of the first half of the 20th century. He recorded and catalogued actual Hungarian folk music, and then used those melodies, harmonies, and rhythms as a starting point for a completely new, modern sound. He was particularly innovative in his six string quartets.
The String Quartet No. 5 in B-flat by Béla Bartók is a five-movement work written in 1934 that uses Hungarian-influenced rhythms and melodies:
1. Allegro
2.
Adagio molto
3.
Scherzo: alla bulgarese
4.
Andante
5.
Finale: Allegro vivace
Like the String Quartet No. 4 and several other works by Bartók, the entire work is in an arch form. Additionally, the first movement, which is in a sonata form with modern tonal centers, is itself in an arch form, in that each section of exposition is given in reverse order during the recapitulation - the melodies of each section are also inverted (played upside-down). Bartók himself pointed out that the keys used in the movement ascend in the steps of the whole tone scale: the exposition is in B flat, C and D; the development is in E; and the recapitulation is in F sharp, A flat and B flat.
The three middle movements are all in ternary form, of which the third is in time signatures typical of Bulgarian folk music: nine quavers in each bar in uneven groups of 4+2+3 for the main scherzo, and ten quavers in groups of 3+2+2+3 in the trio. The last movement is again arch-like: Bartók described it as being in the form ABCB'A' with a coda to round things off.
The two slow movements, the second Adagio molto and the fourth Andante are great examples of Bartók's Night music style: eerie dissonances, imitations of natural sounds, and lonely melodies.
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Mid-20th-century Art Music Composers
Samuel Barber: Adagio for Strings [symphonic poem] 1936--[click here to see score excerpt]
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Barber_AdagioForStrings.mp4
Performance Notes:
Barber was a leading American post-WWII composer, who wrote rich and expressive music in a neo-Romantic style. His most famous work, Adagio for Strings, was originally written as te second movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11 (1936), but the movement was so well-received that he immediately re-arranged it as a stand alone piece for string orchestra.
Though not specifically programmatic, the structure of the work sorrowfully depicts the relentless and ultimately fruitless struggle of the opening and repeated main motive to find its tonal home resting place, while battling with some unidentified opposing obstacle.
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Aaron Copland: "Variations on a Shaker Hymn" from Appalachian Spring [ballet] 1944--[click here to see score excerpt]
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Copland_AppalachianSpring.mp4
Performance Notes:
Copland was the first American composer to have an international reputation in his own lifetime. Copland's style heralded in a new "American" sound, and many of his works are based on traditional American folk or sacred melodies. Though he is generally considered conservative for a 20th-century composer, he was still quite innovative in his use of jazz/folk rhythms and colorful orchestration. This music is definitely tonal, but with extended harmonies and unusual voice-leading.
One of his most famous works is aa (1944), a ballet that depicts the daily activities of a humble Shaker bride and her farmer husband. This excerpt for the ballet is in theme and variations form, based on the famous Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts":
Theme: Played by solo clarinet over a simple accompaniment, with syncopated sparkling woodwind accents
Variation 1: Played by oboe in a higher register in a slightly faster tempo, in modern harmony
Variation 2: Violas play the theme at half speed, with syncopated woodwind sparkles; strings echo it in imitation
Variation 3: Trumpets and Trombones powerfully play the theme twice as fast, in a wide-open brass voicing
Variation 4: Slow and quiet woodwinds
Variation 5: Full orchestra plays a majestically rich version of the theme
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Heitor Villa-Lobos: Movement 4 from Bachianas Brasilieras No. 7 [orchestral suite] 1942
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/VillaLobos_BachianasNo7.mp4
Performance Notes:
The Bachianas Brasileiras are a series of nine suites by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, written for various combinations of instruments and voices between 1930 and 1945. They represent not so much a fusion between Brazilian folk/popular music and the style of Johann Sebastian Bach, as an attempt freely to adapt a number of Baroque harmonic and contrapuntal procedures to Brazilian music.
Bachianas Brasileiras No. 7 (1942) is scored for symphony orchestra, and has four movements—each with two titles: one "Bachian" (Preludio, Giga, Tocata, Fuga), the other Brazilian (Ponteio, Quadrilha caipira, Desafio, Conversa).
1. Preludio (Ponteio—“Pointer”)
2. Giga (Quadrilha caipira—“Local Gang”)
3. Tocata (Desafio—“Challenge”)
4. Fuga (Conversa—“Conversation”)
Movement 4 is a Baroque-style fugue, based on a fugal subject that is melodically,harmonically, and rhythmically derived from Brazilian materials.
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Later Modern Art Composers
John Cage: 4'33" [indeterminacy ("chance music")] 1952--[click here to see score excerpt]
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Cage_433.mp4
Performance Notes:
Cage made a career questioning the very essence of music, especially through his work in the realm of "chance music" (indeterminacy)--music that leaves some or perhaps all of its elements up to chance. The most famous (infamous?) example of indeterminacy is 4'33", a piece for "any instrument(s)--tacet [silent]." As Cage said so eloquently, "The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing. I have nothing to say, and I am saying it."
As seen from the score excerpt (this preface page is the complete score), the first performance by pianist John Tudor divided the composition into three movements of silence from the performer by use of a stopwatch and the lid of the piano keys (but during the premiere there was not silence from the audience or the environment--the piece is about ALL the sounds or silence you can hear in 4 minutes and 33 seconds):
Movement 1: 0 min 33 sec (fast)
Movement 2: 2 min 40 sec (slow)
Movement 3:
1 min 20 sec (fast)
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Edgard Varèse: Poème électronique [musique concrète, electronic music] 1958
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Varese_Poeme_Electronique.mp4
(this video shows a virtual reconstruction of the Philips Pavilion!)
Performance Notes:
Varèse spent his life exploring new sounds and colors from traditional and untraditional sources. In the 1950s, with the advent of early computer technology, he became one of the first to write "electronic music"--which at that time meant a work written entirely in a tape-recording studio with banks of monophonic electronic oscillators and filters. His 8-minute Poème électronique was written when he was 75 years old [!], and has many innovative sounds that were painstaking to achieve with the available technology. His source material included both electronically-manufactured sounds as well as natural sounds recorded from the real world such as sirens, bells etc. Using a procedure known as musique concrète, the natural sounds were manipulated via electronic oscillators and filters to create entirely new sounds, then transferred to reel-to-reel tape.
In its original context, Poème électronique also used spatial effects by strategically pacing sounds through some or all of the 425 individual speakers built into the architecturally-spectacular Philips Radio Corporation pavilion at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels.
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Milton Babbitt: Philomel [electro-acoustic music] 1964--[click here to see score excerpt]
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Babbitt_Philomel_ex.mp4
Performance Notes:
The American composer-mathematician Milton Babbitt studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA, then served on the mathematics and music faculties of Princeton University for many years. The mathematical complexities of his music are difficult for musicians and non-musicians to grasp; nevertheless, in the High Fidelity magazine article entitled "Who Cares If You Listen" (1957), Babbitt defended a composer's right to experiment even if the result is incomprehensible to the audience.
Babbitt was fascinated with blending synthesized and acoustic sounds, and using 12-tone serialism to control all aspects of his music [total serialism]. Philomel (1964) is one of his best examples of this. It combines a synthesizer with taped and live soprano voice. The three sections of the piece are based on Ovid’s myth of Philomela--a princess who was raped by her sister's husband (King Tereus of Thrace, who also cut out her tongue so she could tell no one), but then she escaped and gained revenge, and was transformed by the gods into a nightingale.
To produce the piece, Babbitt had to create the sounds from the synthesizer, then tape the soprano voice in sections. Babbitt wrote the synthesized, taped and live music in such a way that the piece could not have been rendered by live performers. According to Babbitt himself, "I could produce things faster than any pianist could play or any listener could hear. We were able to work with greater speeds. That was one of the things that interested me the most–the timbre, the rhythmic aspect."
From the score excerpt and the video clip, this rhythmic/timbral sophistication becomes readily apparent. (In the score excerpt, the electronically-controlled synthesizer is on a 3-stave system that plays a range of notes and ultra-fast rhythms that no single human keyboardist could play precisely. The taped voice (labeled "T-Vc" in the score) makes electro-manipulated sounds that would be impossible for the human voice to make, but which blend perfectly--sometimes amazingly--with the live singer (who also taped the recorded voice part).
[Text for the first part of Philomel]
(Ee…ee…ee…ee…ee!)
I
feel—Feel a million trees...And the heat of trees...Not true trees--
Feel a million tears...Not true tears—Not true trees—Is it Tereus I feel?
Not Tereus; not a true Tereus—Feel a million filaments;
Fear the tearing, the feeling...Trees, of ephemeral leaves
Trees tear, and I bear families of tears
I feel a million Philomels----trees filled with mellowing
Felonous fame-Is it Tereus I feel?
I feel trees in my hair and on the ground.
Honey melons fouling my knees and feet
Soundlessly in my flight through the forest; I founder in quiet.
Here I find only miles of felted silence
Unwinding behind me, lost, lost in the wooded night.
Pillowing melody honey unheard
My hooded voice, lost..lost as my first un-honeyed tongue;
Forced, as my last un-feathered defense
Fast-tangled in lust of these woods so dense.
Emptied, unfeeling and unfilled by trees here where no birds have trilled—
Feeling killed Philomel stilled, her honey unfulfilled.
Feeling killed, unfulfilled...
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Leonard Bernstein: "Tonight [ensemble]" from West Side Story [jazz-influenced musical theatre] 1957
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Bernstein_WestSideStory.mp4
Performance Notes:
The American composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein was one of the most talented and beloved musicians of the 20th century, and one of the few to successfully bridge the artistic gulf between art music and popular culture. His most famous composition is West Side Story--a modern adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet--set in the slums of New York City, with two rival gangs at odds: The Italian-American "Jets" and the Puerto Rican immigrant "Sharks." The story follows the effect of this gang violence on the love relationship of Tony (a former Jet) and Maria (the sister of the Shark's gang leader, Bernardo).
The "Tonight" ensemble is a Wagnerian-style layering of five different musical Leitmotifs, one for Tony, Maria, Anita (Bernardo's girlfriend), the gangs preparing to "rumble", and the police detective who is trying to find them to prevent the inter-gang battle.
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Philip Glass: "Floe" from Glassworks [minimalist composition] 1976
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Glass_Floe.mp4
Performance Notes:
The American minimalist composer Phlip Glass composed approximately 20 works by the time he graduated with degrees from the University of Chicago and the Juilliard School of Music. After working with the Hindu sitarist/guru Ravi Shankar on a film score, Glass disavowed all his previous work and techniques, and has since concentrated on writing avant garde chamber works and operas.
Glass, like most minimalists, uses repeated rhythmic cells of little harmonic or melodic substance to build mesmerizing phrases and larger sections. Within a work, he develops ideas over time, and has an unyielding reliance on arpeggios as the basic accompaniment or melodic figures.
"Floe" from Glassworks is a fascinating continuum of sound, including the amazingly vocal sounds of singer Dora Ohrenstein with the Philip Glass Ensemble.
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George Crumb: "Threnody II: Black Angels!" (mvt. 7) from Black Angels [electrified string quartet] 1970
--[click here to see score excerpt]
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Crumb_Black_Angels_mvt7.mp4
Performance Notes:
Black Angels, subtitled "Thirteen Images from the Dark Land," is a work for "electric string quartet" by the American avant-garde composer George Crumb. It was composed over the course of a year and is dated "Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970 (in tempore belli)" as written on the score, as a personal response to the Vietnam War. Black Angels is primarily written (in unusual and very detailed notation) for "electric string quartet."
The music uses the extremes of the instruments' registers as well as extended techniques such as bowing on the fingerboard above the fingers and tapping the strings with thimbles. At certain points in the music, the players are even required to make sounds with their mouths and to speak, whisper and shout in German, French, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese, and Swahili. Crumb is very interested in numerology and numerically structured the piece around 13 and 7:
Title and Numerological Structure of movements:
(as based on length of the section, its phrases, its note values, patterns of motifs, or pitch)
Part I. Departure
1. Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects (13 times 7 and 7 times 13)
2. Sounds of Bones and Flutes (7 in 13)
3. Lost Bells (13 over 7)
4. Devil-music (7 and 13)
5. Danse Macabre (13 times 7)
Part II. Absence
6. Pavana Lachrymae (13 under 13)
7. Threnody II: Black Angels! (7 times 7 and 13 times 13)
8. Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura (13 over 13)
9. Lost Bells [Echo] (7 times 13)
Part III. Return
10. God-music (13 and 7)
11. Ancient Voices (7 over 13)
12. Ancient Voices [echo] (13 in 7)
13. Threnody III: Night of the Electric Insects (7 times 13 and 13 times 7)
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Iannis Xenakis: Metastaseis [orchestral soundmass] 1954
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Xenakis_Metastaseis.mp4
Performance Notes:
Metastaseis was Xenakis’ first major work, written in 1953-54 after his studies with Olivier Messiaen. It is 8 minutes in length and requires an orchestra of 61 players (12 winds, 3 percussionists playing 7 instruments, 46 strings) with no two performers playing the same part. It was written using a soundmass technique in which each player is responsible for completing musical gestures and glissandi at different pitch levels and times. The piece is dominated by the strings, which open the piece in unison before their split into 46 separate parts.
Xenakis, an accomplished architect, saw the chief difference between music and architecture as that while space is viewable from all directions, music can only be experienced from one; thus, the title “Meta” (after or beyond) “-stasis” (immobility) refers to the dialectical contrast between movement/change and nondirectionality. The preliminary sketch for Metastaseis was in graphic notation looking more like a blueprint than a musical score, showing graphs of mass motion and glissandi like structural beams of the piece, with pitch on one axis and time on the other. As an example of stochastic music, it is a slowly-evolving mass of sound that gradually makes "a symptotic (based on probability theory) evolution towards a stable state."
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Gunther Schuller: Concertino [for jazz quartet and orchestra--Third Stream] 1959
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Schuller_Concertino.mp4
Performance Notes:
Schuller's Concertino is a good example of his "Third Stream" music, which combines elements of jazz with modern art music. It is not jazz with some classical elements, or jazz that quotes art music tunes, but it is a fusion of jazz and art music that fluidly combines the two realms into one. Concertino features a jazz quartet (piano, vibraphone, double bass, and drums).
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Elliot Carter: movement V from String Quartet No. 5 [string quartet] 1995
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Carter_QuartetNo5_mvt2.mp4
Performance Notes:
American composer Elliott Carter's String Quartet No. 5 was commissioned for the Arditti Quartet by several organizations including Lincoln Center in New York City.
It has 12 movements in all: six short contrasting even-numbered movements with an introductory movement and five interludes, in which the players "discuss in different ways what has been played and what will be played."
1. Introduction (quarter note = 72
2. Giocoso (quarter note = 96)
3. Interlude I
4. Lento espressivo (quarter note = 60)
5. Interlude II
6. Presto scorrevole
7. Interlude III
8. Allegro energico (quarter note = 72)
9. Interlude IV
10. Adagio sereno (quarter note = 48)
11. Interlude V (quarter note = 96)
12. Capriccioso (quarter note= 60)
The character and structure of the Fifth Quartet are determined by the repetition and development of a number of pitch and rhythmic groups described by Carter as "characters." The sense of tempo relies on a clearly established regular pulse that enables intricate and precise tempo changes through metric modulation. If you'd like to see how truly complex and intricately-constructed this work is, read J. Daniel Jenkin's web article, "After the Harvest: Carter’s Fifth String Quartet and the Late Late Style" in Music Theory Online, Vol. 16, No. 3 (August 2010).
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John Adams: Short Ride on a Fast Machine [post-minimalist composition] 1986
https://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/gradex/Adams_ShortRide.mp4
Performance Notes:
A Short Ride on a Fast Machine is a quick but exhilirating, pulsating,multi-colored journey through time and space that demonstrates all the main traits of musical post-minimalism.
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