Filipino Composer

*Antonio Molina

Electronic Music

Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound producing devices include the telharmonium, Hammond organ, and the electric guitar. Purely electronic sound production can be achieved using devices such as the Theremin, sound synthesizer, and computer.

Electronic music was once associated almost exclusively with Western art music but from the late 1960s on the availability of affordable music technology meant that music produced using electronic means became increasingly common in the popular domain. Today electronic music includes many varieties and ranges from experimental art music to popular forms such as electronic dance music.

• Late 19th Century to Early 20th Century

The ability to record sounds is often connected to the production of electronic music, but not absolutely necessary for it. The earliest known sound recording device was the phonautograph, patented in 1857 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. It could record sounds visually, but was not meant to play them back.

In 1876, engineer Elisha Gray filed a patent for the electromechanical oscillator. This "Musical Telegraph," evolved out of his experiments with telephone technology and is the earliest extant patent for producing electronic sound. This oscillator was expanded on by Alexander Graham Bell for the early telephone. By 1878, Thomas A. Edison further developed the oscillator for the phonograph, which also used cylinders similar to Scott's device. Although cylinders continued in use for some time, Emile Berliner developed the disc phonograph in 1887. Lee De Forest's 1906 invention, the triode audion tube, later had a profound effect on electronic music. It was the first thermionic valve, or vacuum tube, and led to circuits that could create and amplify audio signals, broadcast radio waves, compute values, and perform many other functions.

Before electronic music, there was a growing desire for composers to use emerging technologies for musical purposes. Several instruments were created that employed electromechanical designs and they paved the way for the later emergence of electronic instruments. An electromechanical instrument called the Telharmonium (sometimes Teleharmonium or Dynamophone) was developed by Thaddeus Cahill in the years 1898–1912. However, simple inconvenience hindered the adoption of the Telharmonium, due to its immense size. One early electronic instrument often mentioned may be the Theremin, invented by Professor Léon Theremin circa 1919–1920. Other early electronic instruments include the Audion Piano invented in 1915 by Lee De Forest who was inventor of triode audion as mentioned above, the Croix Sonore, invented in 1926 by Nikolai Obukhov, and the Ondes Martenot, which was most famously used in the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen as well as other works by him. The Ondes Martenot was also used by other, primarily French, composers such as Andre Jolivet.

For centuries, instrumental music had either been created by singing, drawing a bow across or plucking taught gut or metal strings (string instruments), constricting vibrating air (woodwinds and brass) or hitting or stroking something (percussion). In the early twentieth century, devices were invented that were capable of generating sound electronically, without an initial mechanical source of vibration.

As early as the 1930s, composers such as Olivier Messiaen incorporated electronic instruments into live performance. Recording technology was used to produce art music, as well. The musique concrète of the late 1940s and 1950s was produced by editing together natural and industrial sounds.

In the years following World War II, some composers were quick to adopt developing electronic technology. Electronic music was embraced by composers such as Edgard Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Herbert Brün, and Iannis Xenakis.

In the 1950s the film industry also began to make extensive use of electronic soundtracks. From the late 1960s onward, much popular music was developed on synthesizers by pioneering groups like Heaven 17, The Human League, Art of Noise, and New Order.

Chance/Aleatoric Music

Aleatoric music (also aleatory music or chance music; from the Latin word alea, meaning "dice") 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). The term is most often associated with procedures in which the chance element involves a relatively limited number of possibilities.

1. John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century.

Born: September 5, 1912, Los Angeles, California, United States

Died: August 12, 1992, New York City, New York, United States

Spouse: Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff (m. 1935–1945)

Compositions: 4′33″, As Slow as Possible,

Movies: At Land, John Cage: One 11 with 103

 *4"33'

4′33″ is a three-movement composition by American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992). It was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements (which, for the first performance, were divided into thirty seconds for the first, two minutes and twenty-three seconds for the second, and one minute and forty seconds for the third). The piece purports to consist of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, although it is commonly perceived as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence".

Expressionists

• Expressionists

1. Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer and painter, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. 

Born: September 13, 1874, Leopoldstadt, Austria

Died: July 13, 1951, Los Angeles, California, United States

Period: Der Blaue Reiter

Compositions: Pierrot Lunaire, Verklärte Nacht, Gurrelieder

Artwork: Denken, Der rote Blick, Blauer Blick, Gehendes Selbst-Portrait,Blue Self-Portrait, Christus, Hass

*Pierrot Lunaire

Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds 'Pierrot lunaire' ("Three times Seven Poems from Albert Giraud's 'Pierrot lunaire'"), commonly known simply as Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21("Moonstruck Pierrot" or "Pierrot in the Moonlight"), is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of twenty-one selected poems from Otto Erich Hartleben's German translation of Albert Giraud's cycle of French poems of the same name. The première of the work, which is between 35 and 40 minutes in length, was at the Berlin Choralion-Saal on October 16, 1912, with Albertine Zehme as the vocalist.

The narrator (voice-type unspecified in the score, but traditionally performed by a soprano) delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-Lieder, and it was a genre much in vogue at the end of the nineteenth century. The work is atonal but does not use the twelve-tone technique that Schoenberg would devise eight years later.

 2. Igor Stravinsky

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian, and later French and American composer, pianist and conductor. He is widely considered to be one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century. 

Born: June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Germany

Died: April 6, 1971, New York City, New York, United States

Buried: Isola di San Michele

Compositions: The Rite of Spring, The Firebird, Petrushka,

Children: Soulima Stravinsky, Ludmila Stravinsky, Maria Milena Stravinsky, Fyodor Stravinsky

Spouse: Vera de Bosset (m. 1940–1971), Yekaterina Gabrielovna Nossenko (m. 1906–1939)

*The Rite of Spring

The Rite of Spring (French: Le Sacre du printemps, Russian: «Весна священная», Vesna svyashchennaya) is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev'sBallets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky, with stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. When first performed, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a sensation and a near-riot in the audience. Although designed as a work for the stage, with specific passages accompanying characters and action, the music achieved equal if not greater recognition as a concert piece, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century. 

Expressionism

Expressionism as a musical genre is difficult to exactly define. It is, however, considered one of the most important movements of 20th Century music. The three central figures of musical expressionism are Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, the so-called Second Viennese School. 

Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical reality.

Expressionism was developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including painting, literature, theatre, dance, film, architecture and music.

The term is sometimes suggestive of angst. In a general sense, painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco are sometimes termed expressionist, though in practice the term is applied mainly to 20th-century works. The Expressionist emphasis on individual perspective has been characterized as a reaction to positivism and other artistic styles such as Naturalism and Impressionism.

Impressionists

• Impressionists

1. Claude Monet

Claude Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-airlandscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.

·      * Sunrise

Although it may seem that the sun is the brightest spot on the canvas, it is in fact, when measured with a photometer, the same brightness as the sky. Dr. Margaret Livingstone, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard University, said "If you make a black and white copy of mpression: Sunrise, the Sun disappears [almost] entirely.”

Livingstone said that this caused the painting to have a very realistic quality, as the older part—shared with the majority of other mammals—of the visual cortex in the brain registers only luminance and not colour, so that the sun in the painting would be invisible to it, while it is just the newer part of the visual cortex—only found in humans and primates—which perceives colour.

2. Claude Debussy

Achille-Claude Debussy ( 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures associated with Impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions. In France, he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1903. A crucial figure in the transition to the modern era in Western music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers.

His music is noted for its sensory component and frequent eschewing of tonality. Debussy's work usually reflected the activities or turbulence in his own life. In French literary circles, the style of this period was known as symbolism, a movement that directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant.

 *Clair de Lune

The third and most famous movement of Suite bergamasque is "Clair de lune," meaning "moonlight" in French. Its name comes from Paul Verlaine's poem of the same name which also refers to 'bergamasques' in its opening stanza: Votre âme est un paysage choisi / Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques / Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi / Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Impressionism

Impressionism in music is a vague term that is sometimes applied to various composers in European classical music, mainly during the late 19th century and continuing into the beginning of the 20th century, whose music focuses on suggestion and atmosphere.

Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists. Their independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s, in spite of harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France.

Impressionist painting characteristics include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. The development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media that became known as impressionist music and impressionist literature.