Sunday, July 28, 2013
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,
*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
Compositions: The Rite of Spring, The
Firebird, Petrushka,
Spouse: Vera de Bosset (m. 1940–1971), Yekaterina Gabrielovna Nossenko (m. 1906–1939)
Expressionism
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.
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