The Era and Its Music

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 31: pp. 755–63

Introduction to the 20^th Century

The 20^th century was an era of rapid, turbulent change — in technology, politics, social structures, and the arts. The music we will study cannot be separated from the upheavals that surrounded it.

In technology, the century brought electricity, the automobile, the airplane, and eventually the computer. For music specifically, the invention and proliferation of recording, radio, television, and magnetic tape fundamentally altered how music was created, distributed, and consumed. Film emerged as a powerful new medium that would develop its own musical traditions.

In politics, the century was defined by wars, revolutions, and ideology. The First World War (1914–18) introduced mechanized warfare on an unprecedented scale, leaving behind a generation scarred by disillusionment and what was then called “shell shock” (now recognized as PTSD). Meanwhile, Sigmund Freud’s development of psychoanalysis (from 1899 onward) — with its emphasis on repressed unconscious desires and internal conflicts — reshaped how people understood the human mind, and by extension, artistic expression.

In economic and social life, industrialization drove rapid urban migration, an abrupt shift from rural existence. Labour unions formed, economic expansion alternated with devastating crises, and the fabric of everyday life was transformed.

In the arts, the function of a work of art changed fundamentally. Art was increasingly made for its own sake, not to serve a patron or illustrate a narrative. Realistic representation was no longer the aim. New techniques and ideas proliferated — everything was questioned.

Art in a New Century

The visual arts offer a useful parallel. Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne had already begun challenging representational conventions in the late 19^th century.

Monet’s dabs of pure colour dissolved solid forms into shimmering impressions of light. Cézanne reduced landscapes and still lifes to their underlying geometric structures. By the early 20^th century, Pablo Picasso and the Cubists had shattered perspective altogether, presenting multiple viewpoints simultaneously on a single canvas. These developments in painting — the move away from realistic depiction toward abstraction, fragmentation, and new ways of organizing visual space — have direct parallels in the music of the same era.

The Era and Its Music

What do we mean by “Music Since 1900”? The time frame encompasses the 20^th century and extends into the 21^st, but should we define the era based on dates alone, or on other factors? One of the most striking features of this period is the absence of a single overriding style or structure. Unlike the Baroque or Classical periods, there is no dominant musical language that unifies the era. Instead, we find co-existing diversity — many contrasting trends, or “-isms,” existing simultaneously. Styles, forms, techniques, and even the fundamental nature of what counts as music vary enormously from one composer to another, and sometimes within a single composer’s output.

A Listening Experiment

To illustrate this diversity, consider five works composed within roughly fifteen years of one another:

1. Ralph Vaughan Williams (British, 1872–1958), The Lark Ascending (1914) — a pastoral rhapsody for violin and orchestra, serene and lyrical, rooted in English folk melody.

2. Igor Stravinsky (Russian, 1882–1971), The Rite of Spring (1913) — a visceral, rhythmically explosive ballet score that caused a riot at its Paris premiere.

3. Luigi Russolo (Italian Futurist, 1883–1947), The Art of Noise (1914) — a manifesto and musical experiment using mechanical noise-making instruments called intonarumori.

4. Jean Sibelius (Finnish, 1865–1957), Symphony No. 7 in C (1924) — a single-movement symphony of extraordinary organic unity, compressing the traditional four movements into one continuous arc.

5. Anton Webern (Austrian, 1883–1945), Symphony, Op. 21 (1928) — a twelve-tone symphony lasting barely ten minutes, crystalline in texture, where every note is precisely placed in a web of symmetrical relationships.

These five works could hardly be more different from one another, yet they all belong to the same era. This is the essential character of music since 1900: not a single style but a proliferation of styles, each one a response to the challenge of creating something new in a world where the old certainties had been shaken.

Relationship with the Past

Composers in this era had to compete for the concert stage with the established classics of the past — Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner. They were self-consciously “modern,” particularly in the period from about 1889 to 1918. Their music was founded on the past but driven by a need to break away from it. There was a quest for originality in which every work became an artistic statement. Composers challenged the fundamental building blocks of the Western tradition: functional tonality (the system of keys and chord progressions that had governed Western music for centuries) and the goal-driven structures that tonality enabled. Some made radical breaks with the past; others found subtler ways to transform inherited traditions. The story is not one of steady “development” toward a single goal but rather a series of decisive moments and events that opened up new possibilities.

19^th-Century Precedents

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 32: pp. 770–73

Two Paths of Revolution

The revolutionary developments that led to 20^th-century music can be traced along two paths. The first runs through the Austro-German tradition, where composers like Wagner pushed tonality to its breaking point from within. The second runs through the non-Germanic traditions — particularly the French and Russian schools — where composers found alternatives to German harmonic practice by drawing on different scale systems, folk traditions, and aesthetic priorities. These paths are not mutually exclusive; they intersect and influence each other repeatedly.

Richard Wagner (1813–1883)

The Tristan Chord

Wagner’s Prelude to the opera Tristan und Isolde (composed 1857–59, premiered 1865; NAWM 153a) represents what the musicologist Ernst Kurth called a “crisis in Romantic harmony.” It is one of the decisive historical “moments” in the story of Western music — a point after which nothing could be quite the same.

The very first chord of this five-hour opera has become one of the most analyzed sonorities in music history. The Tristan chord — spelled F–B–D♯–G♯ — is a dissonant harmony whose precise function is deliberately ambiguous. It does not behave like any conventional chord in the tonal system. What follows is even more extraordinary: four successive dissonant sonorities that “resolve” only into further dissonance, never arriving at a point of harmonic rest. The tonic chord of A minor and any clear cadences are studiously avoided.

Wagner, Prelude to Tristan und Isolde — opening

The Prelude is built from the conflation of two Leitmotifs — short musical themes that represent a person, place, concept, or object. Wagner described the yearning quality of this music as expressing “unfulfilled longing.” The Tristan chord is ubiquitous throughout the opera: it reappears at the moment when Tristan and Isolde drink the love potion in Act I, and again at Tristan’s death and transfiguration in Act III. Only at the very end of the opera — after five hours — does the harmony finally resolve.

Wagner deployed these techniques not for abstract harmonic effect but for dramatic necessity. The opera’s very plot demands this musical strategy: the love of Tristan and Isolde cannot be fulfilled in life, only through death and transfiguration. The dissonance and tension are musical embodiments of the characters’ yearning. For five hours, the audience is kept on tenterhooks as the harmony constantly evades resolution. Only at the final transfiguration — through death — does the Tristan chord resolve, providing both dramatic and musical closure simultaneously.

Wagner stretched the bounds of tonality through three principal means: increased chromaticism (using notes outside the prevailing key, moving through distant keys and stepwise melodic motion), prolonged dissonance (allowing dissonant harmonies to persist without resolution), and less dependence on supporting keys that would normally reinforce the central tonic. The cumulative effect is music that seems perpetually to be moving toward a resolution that it constantly evades.

Stephen Fry discusses the Tristan chord

Modest Musorgsky (1839–1881)

Sunless: Harmony as Colour

If Wagner undermined tonality through relentless chromaticism and prolonged dissonance, the Russian composer Modest Musorgsky found a different path: using chords not for their tonal function but purely for their colour — their sensory quality as isolated sonorities.

His song “The Idle, Noisy Day is Over” (No. 3 from the song cycle Sunless, 1874) is anchored in a strong key of C major, but it freely roams beyond that anchor. Musorgsky introduces “foreign” elements — B♭ and A♭ — and juxtaposes chords for their colouristic effect alone, without regard for traditional tonal function. The G♭ major triad, for instance, moves to a G dominant seventh chord and then to C (mm. 6–7, 14) — a progression that makes no sense in conventional harmony but creates a striking sonic effect.

The vocal melody is highly chromatic, moving by step in a way that blurs the sense of key. At measures 35–36, the voice outlines a whole-tone scale — a scale built entirely of whole steps, with no semitones, which creates an eerie, directionless quality quite unlike the major and minor scales of traditional Western music.

Musorgsky’s influence proved far-reaching. The oscillating pattern in the piano accompaniment (m. 16ff) was directly borrowed by Claude Debussy for his orchestral piece Nuages, which we will examine in the next lesson.

Franz Liszt (1811–1886)

Nuages gris: The Exhaustion of Tonality

Franz Liszt’s late piano piece Nuages gris (Grey Clouds, 1881) is a strikingly unconventional work — dark, sparse, and experimental. Written in August 1881 when Liszt was already quite elderly, the piece emerges from a period of personal crisis: he had recently fallen down the stairs, an accident that left him injured, depressed, and increasingly isolated as his eyesight failed. Rather than the virtuosic display one might expect from the keyboard wizard who invented the symphonic poem, Nuages gris is remarkably simple and open in texture — few gestures, little ornamentation. This very sparseness intensifies the darkness. The piece points to the exhaustion of tonality and anticipates the harmonic crisis that would define the early 20^th century.

The key signature and the tonic triad in measure 2 (G–B♭–D) suggest G minor, but the piece systematically rejects traditional harmonic functions. It is highly chromatic, with pervasive semitone movement. The augmented triad — a chord built from two major thirds, dividing the octave into three equal parts — serves as the central harmonic unit, replacing the major and minor triads of conventional tonality.

Rather than following conventional chord progressions, the harmonies move in parallel motion — sliding up or down together while maintaining their internal structure. The bass line is largely static, oscillating between B♭ and A. Most strikingly, the piece avoids cadence structures entirely — there is no moment of harmonic arrival or closure, even at the very end. The final chord is an augmented triad (E♭–G–B) with an added A, producing four notes from the six-note whole-tone collection (E♭–[F]–G–A–B–[C♯]). The piece simply stops, unresolved, pointing toward a harmonic world where the certainties of tonality no longer hold.

French Modernism I — Claude Debussy

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 32: pp. 781–89
• NAWM 172: Debussy, Nocturnes I, “Nuages”

Claude Debussy (1862–1918)

Claude Debussy charted a fundamentally different direction from the Austro-German tradition. Where Wagner pursued overwhelming intensity and relentless harmonic drive, Debussy sought what he described as « le plaisir dans le moment » — pleasure in the moment.

Debussy won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1884, which gave him time to develop his craft in Italy. In 1888 he made a pilgrimage to Bayreuth to hear Wagner’s operas, and the experience left him deeply ambivalent — captivated by Wagner’s power but determined to find an alternative path. He moved in the circles of Symbolist poets and avant-garde artists in Paris, making his living as a music critic and from income provided by his publisher.

Influences and Inspiration

Debussy drew on an extraordinarily wide range of influences in forging his distinctive voice. He sought independence from the Austro-German tradition, though Wagner’s shadow was inescapable — and Debussy’s relationship with Wagner remained complex and ambivalent throughout his career. He valued the French tradition of sensibility, taste, and restraint — qualities quite opposed to Wagnerian excess. The Russians, particularly Musorgsky, showed him how harmony could be used for colour rather than function. He was drawn to medieval music, early polyphony, and the old church modes — scale systems that predated the major-minor tonal system. Asian music made a profound impression, especially the Javanese gamelan he heard at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition, as well as Chinese and Japanese music. The Impressionist painters (Monet, Whistler) and Symbolist poets (particularly Mallarmé, whose poem inspired Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, 1891–94) shaped his aesthetic vision.

Debussy, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune — Detroit Symphony Orchestra

Keys to Debussy’s Style

Several characteristics define Debussy’s musical language:

Common-practice harmony is avoided or weakened. A tonal focus remains — Debussy’s music is not atonal — but the conventional functional relationships between chords are dissolved. Chords become quasi-independent sonorities, valued for their individual colour rather than for where they lead. The need to resolve dissonance is undermined: there is no urgency or drive toward an end goal.

Musical images are created and juxtaposed. Themes and motives are presented but not developed in the traditional sense — they do not undergo the kind of motivic working-out found in Beethoven or Brahms. Dissonances do not need to resolve. Sonorities and chords move in parallel motion, sliding together like blocks of colour. Instrumental timbres and colours are intrinsic to the musical content — not decoration but substance. And Debussy draws on contrasting scale types, including exotic scales unfamiliar to the Western tradition.

Scale Types

Three alternative scale systems are particularly important in Debussy’s music:

The whole-tone scale contains only whole steps (e.g., C–D–E–F♯–G♯–A♯), producing a shimmering, directionless quality with no leading tone to pull toward a resolution.

The pentatonic scale uses five notes (e.g., C–D–E–G–A) and is found in folk music traditions worldwide, from East Asian to Celtic. It sounds open and consonant.

The octatonic scale alternates whole and half steps (e.g., C–D–E♭–F–G♭–A♭–A–B), creating a symmetrical collection with a distinctive, slightly mysterious colour.

Impressionism

Impressionism in music evokes moods and visual imagery through colourful harmony and instrumental timbre, just as Impressionism in painting evokes atmosphere through colour and light. The parallel between Claude Monet’s Impression: Sunrise (1874) — with its pure dabs of colour, fluid brushwork, and focus on light rather than solid objects — and Debussy’s musical language is striking. Where Monet paints through colour and light, Debussy composes through harmony and tone colour.

Nocturnes (1897–1899): “Nuages” (NAWM 172)

Debussy’s Nocturnes is an orchestral work in three movements: I. Nuages (Clouds), with subdued instrumentation; II. Fêtes (Festivals), with the brilliance of the full ensemble; and III. Sirènes, for orchestra with a wordless female chorus. The title “Nocturnes” reflects Debussy’s focus on colour — not the Chopin-style piano nocturne, but something closer to the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s use of the term. Whistler titled his paintings as if they were musical works — Nocturne in Black and Gold, Symphony in White, No. 3, Arrangement in Grey and Black — emphasizing colour and mood over subject matter.

In an 1894 letter, Debussy described the Nocturnes as exploring “the different combinations that can be obtained from one colour — like a study of grey in painting.”

The orchestra is large, but it is deployed for tone colour rather than volume. Divided muted strings produce a characteristic “shimmer.” Brief motives of just two or three notes function as dabs of colour.

Oscillating Pattern and the Musorgsky Connection

The opening of “Nuages” features an oscillating pattern of fifths and thirds — a gently rocking figure that establishes an atmosphere of stillness and suspension. This pattern is modelled on the piano accompaniment in Musorgsky’s “The Idle, Noisy Day is Over” from Sunless. Each appearance of the oscillating pattern features different tone colours and pitches, maintaining the same gestural shape while constantly varying its surface.

Debussy, Nuages — opening

The English Horn Motive

At measure 5, the English horn introduces a haunting motive drawn from the octatonic scale: C♯–D–E–F–B. This motive is never developed, never transposed, and is always played by the English horn — a striking example of complete identification between timbre and motive. In the Western tradition, themes are typically passed between instruments and transformed through development. Debussy does the opposite: this motive is inseparable from its instrument.

The Gamelan Connection

The middle section (B) of “Nuages” reveals Debussy’s fascination with Indonesian music. At the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition, he encountered a small Javanese gamelan — a traditional Indonesian ensemble made up largely of bronze instruments and gongs. A larger, more complete ensemble appeared at the 1900 Exposition. Both experiences overwhelmed him. In a letter, he remarked that the gamelan made Palestrina “look like child’s play.” What was remarkable about Debussy’s response was his respect: he did not view gamelan as an exotic curiosity or anthropological artifact, but as a sophisticated art form in its own right — a resource for genuine musical thinking, not mere decoration.

In the B section, Debussy uses a pentatonic tune with a similar articulation in the harp and flute, evoking the sound of the gamelan. He was not imitating Indonesian music literally but incorporating its features — its scales, timbres, and rhythmic patterns — into his own musical language, seeking alternatives to the Classical European tradition.

Javanese gamelan performance

An Example: Voiles

Debussy’s piano prelude Voiles (Sails, from Préludes, Book 1, No. 2) illustrates his use of alternative scales with particular clarity. The piece is in ABA’ form. The A sections are built entirely on a whole-tone scale (B♭–C–D–E–F♯–G♯), with parallel thirds gliding through the shimmering collection. The middle section (B, beginning around 2:36) shifts entirely to the pentatonic scale (D♭–E♭–G♭–A♭–B♭), creating a contrasting colour. The return of A’ (around 3:12) brings back the whole-tone world.

Debussy, Voiles — Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli

Debussy, Nuages — complete performance

The form of “Nuages” is a typical three-part ABA’ structure, but the effect is nothing like a Classical ternary form. There is no dramatic contrast, no climax, no resolution — only the gentle shifting of clouds, evoked through colour, motive, and timbre.

French Modernism II — Maurice Ravel

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 32: pp. 787–89
• NAWM 173: Ravel, Rapsodie espagnole, I “Prélude à la nuit” and II “Malagueña”

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

Maurice Ravel is often grouped with Debussy as an Impressionist composer, but this label captures only one dimension of a remarkably versatile musical personality. Ravel was a superb assimilator who drew on an extraordinary variety of influences while maintaining his own distinctive voice. His music features traditional forms, diatonic melodies, complex harmonies, and a fundamentally tonal language — but deployed with a sophistication and inventiveness that are entirely his own.

An Outsider’s Independence

Ravel was something of an outsider. Born in the Basque region of France to a Swiss father and Basque mother, he brought an independent streak to everything he did. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire but resisted its conventions and was eventually dismissed — a scandal that led to the resignation of the Conservatoire’s director. His influences ranged widely: Russian and Asian music, contemporary French literature, and an eclectic array of Western traditions.

Characteristics of Ravel’s Style

Several strands run through Ravel’s output:

His impressionist works feature strong musical imagery and colourful harmonies. The early piano piece Jeux d’eau (Fountains, 1901) demonstrates his distinctive approach: Liszt’s virtuosic pianistic techniques combined with Debussy’s sense of colour, deployed in innovative textures that juxtapose whole-tone and diatonic writing.

He had a deep interest in Classical forms and genres: the Sonatine for piano (1903–05) and the String Quartet in F (1902–03) show a composer who valued formal clarity and structural balance.

He was devoted to the French tradition of stylized dances and the suite. Le tombeau de Couperin (Memorial for Couperin, 1914–17), written during the First World War, pays homage to the French Baroque keyboard tradition of François Couperin — but each movement is also a personal memorial to a friend killed in the war. The work marries reverence for the past with the grief of the present.

His influences were remarkably varied: French Symbolism, jazz and blues, the Viennese waltz, Spanish idioms (most famously in Boléro, 1928), and the orchestral colour of Debussy and Rimsky-Korsakov.

Ravel, Boléro — flash mob performance by Opera North musicians

Rapsodie espagnole (1907–08, NAWM 173)

The Rapsodie espagnole (Spanish Rhapsody) is an orchestral suite in four movements: I. “Prélude à la nuit,” II. “Malagueña,” III. “Habanera,” and IV. “Feria” (Market). All four movements are inspired by Spanish idioms, but they draw on multiple influences: evocations of Spain with authentic flavour (particularly in the Malagueña and Habanera, which imitate Spanish dances and guitar playing), alternations of triple and duple rhythms, hints of seguidilla melody, and the orchestral brilliance and use of ostinatos associated with Rimsky-Korsakov.

I. “Prélude à la nuit” (Night Prelude)

The movement is mostly quiet — a nocturnal atmosphere of stillness and magic. It opens with a descending four-note ostinato figure: F–E–D–C♯, played pianissimo by muted strings. This figure is notated in triple meter but heard in duple meter against it, creating a subtle metric ambiguity. It dominates almost every measure of the movement, evoking a Spanish guitar accompaniment pattern.

The ostinato is harmonically ambiguous — it could belong to a D minor scale or to an octatonic collection — and this ambiguity creates the nocturnal mood: a twilight realm between clarity and mystery.

At measure 14, the clarinets introduce seguidilla-like turning motions — sinuous, ornamental gestures drawn from Spanish dance. At measure 28, a diatonic string melody appears over lush diatonic ninth chords, and the repeating pattern is reduced to its last three notes.

The middle section (m. 44) brings clarinet flourishes drawn from a different octatonic collection, followed by a return of the opening gesture and seguidilla melody (m. 46) now scored for celesta and muted strings. A bassoon cadenza (m. 54) brings the movement to a close on the pitch A.

The orchestration is exquisitely evocative: flute and harp in bell-like combination with timpani roll (recalling Debussy’s Nuages), celesta borrowed from the palette of Rimsky-Korsakov, muted strings and brass, and many simultaneous layers in different timbres and rhythms — a shimmering nocturnal soundscape.

II. “Malagueña”

The Malagueña is a Spanish dance or song in flamenco style, characterized by triple meter and the Phrygian mode — a scale that descends with a distinctive semitone between the first and second degrees, giving it the characteristic “Spanish” sound. The traditional malagueña is usually in two parts.

The opening imitates a flamenco guitar: plucked low strings establish a repeating descending four-note pattern that echoes the guitar figuration of flamenco. A muted trumpet then introduces a new melody in F♯ minor, built on the same four-note pattern.

The second part (m. 73) shifts to a song in flamenco style, played by the English horn in a rhythmically free manner with the ornamental turns and florid gestures characteristic of the style.

The closing (m. 79) brings a return of the four-note pattern from the “Prélude à la nuit” — F–E–D–C♯ — now played on celesta, creating a link between the two movements. The movement ends on A, the same pitch that concluded the Prélude.

The Russian Revolution I — Scriabin

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 32: pp. 794–97
• NAWM 177: Scriabin, Vers la flamme

Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915)

Alexander Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist whose music traveled an extraordinary journey — from the Chopin-influenced Romanticism of his early works to a mystical, visionary late style that has no real parallel in music history. For Scriabin, music was not merely an art form but a means to transcend daily existence and glimpse the divine.

Scriabin was deeply philosophical and mystical in his outlook. He experienced synaesthesia — the neurological phenomenon of experiencing one sense as a result of stimulation in another, in his case perceiving specific colours when hearing specific musical keys. This led him to incorporate visual elements into his music: his orchestral work Prometheus: Poem of Fire (1911) includes a part for a colour organ (a clavier à lumières) that projects coloured light into the concert hall. A performance with actual lights took place in New York in 1915.

Scriabin, Prometheus: Poem of Fire — with light performance (Yale, 2010)

Harmony in the Late Works

In his late works — including his final piano sonatas and Vers la flamme — Scriabin dispensed entirely with key signatures and traditional tonality. In place of the tonal system, he built his music around a complex, referential chord that functions like a “tonic” — a home sonority to which the music returns, but without any of the functional relationships of traditional harmony. These chords typically feature tritones drawn from octatonic and whole-tone scales, and they evade conventional tonal resolution.

The effect is striking: the chords do not project the familiar yearning toward resolution that characterizes Romantic harmony. Instead, Scriabin’s late music creates a sense of ecstatic transcendence — a mystical quality of floating beyond desire, of enlightenment rather than longing.

Vers la flamme, Op. 72 (1914, NAWM 177)

Vers la flamme (Toward the Flame) is a one-movement tone poem for piano — a genre that would normally imply an orchestral work, but Scriabin conceives the piano in orchestral terms.

Form: Toward the Flame

The title describes the form itself: the entire piece is a gradual buildup from darkness to blazing intensity, a continuous increase that culminates in an ecstatic climax at the end. The music progresses through static blocks of sound that are juxtaposed rather than connected by traditional transitions. The range expands, the dynamics increase, the texture thickens, the figuration changes from section to section, and the density of attacks grows relentlessly. The conclusion is ecstatic — a blaze of sound across the full range of the instrument.

The piece unfolds in four large-scale sections, each defined by a different texture:

Thematic Material

The main thematic material (mm. 1–6) is built from two interlocking tritones: E–A♯ and G♯–D, decorated with C♯ and F♯. This creates a characteristic sound — tense, unresolved, and symmetrical.

Scriabin, Vers la flamme — performance

Harmony and Tonality

The harmonic language is unconventional and draws heavily on the octatonic scale (E–F–G–G♯–A♯–B–C♯–D). The opening “tonic” chord consists of two tritones (E–A♯ and G♯–D), decorated with C♯ and F♯. At measure 5, this chord is transposed up a minor third, completing the notes of the octatonic collection with the new chord G–C♯–B–F.

Harmonic relationships are organized by thirds rather than by fifths (as in traditional tonality). Theme A rises in sequence by minor third (at mm. 1, 6, and 11). At measure 27, a chord of stacked thirds appears (B–D–F♯–A♯–C♯). Chords typically contain four or more notes, valued for their colour — in the tradition of Musorgsky and Debussy. The last sonority (mm. 133 to the end) contains six notes, spanning the widest range and highest pitch of the piece (requiring three staves at m. 125). Static blocks of sound provide harmonic colour, as in Liszt and Debussy. Dissonances do not resolve — they simply are.

Horowitz playing Vers la flamme

The Russian Revolution II — Stravinsky

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 33: pp. 822–27
• NAWM 184: Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, “Dances of the Adolescent Girls” and “Sacrificial Dance”

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

Igor Stravinsky is one of the towering figures of 20^th-century music — a composer whose career spanned multiple stylistic periods and whose influence was felt by virtually every composer who came after him.

Context: The Silver Age

Stravinsky emerged during the Silver Age of Russian Culture, a period of extraordinary artistic creativity. His early career belongs to his “Russian” period (lasting until about 1918), during which he produced his most popular works: three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes in Paris:

• The Firebird (1910)
• Petrushka (1910–11)
• The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps, 1911–13)

These were thoroughly Russian productions: a Russian composer (Stravinsky), a Russian impresario (Diaghilev), a Russian choreographer (Vaslav Nijinsky, for The Rite), a Russian set and costume designer (Nicholas Roerich), and a Russian ballet company.

The Rite of Spring (NAWM 184)

Le Sacre du Printemps premiered in Paris on May 29, 1913, and it changed the course of music history. The work is subtitled “Pictures of Pagan Russia” — it depicts a fertility ritual set in prehistoric Russia, marked by primitivism: a deliberate representation of the elemental, crude, and uncultured that casts aside the sophistication and stylishness of modern life. It is a ritual, not a story. The ballet unfolds in two parts: Part I, “Adoration of the Earth,” and Part II, “The Sacrifice,” which culminates in the sacrificial dance of a chosen maiden who dances herself to death.

Orchestration

The orchestra is enormous — about 120 players — but the sound is deliberately “dry” rather than warm and lush. Standard orchestral instruments are used in unconventional ways. Solo passages exploit extreme registers, as in the famous opening bassoon solo, which places the instrument at the very top of its range to create a raw, folk-like quality. Strings are used percussively — with aggressive double stops and down-bowed accents. The winds produce an abstract, non-human voice. Drums and percussion provide rhythmic emphasis rather than colouristic interest.

Meter and Rhythm

Rhythm is the most revolutionary element of The Rite. The music pulsates rather than flowing in a regular meter — the effect is disorienting and primal. Accents are irregular and unpredictable. The famous opening of the “Dances of the Adolescent Girls” illustrates this vividly: the strings pound out a single dissonant chord in a pattern of accents that defies any regular metric grouping:

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 / 1-2 / 1-2-3-4-5-6 / 1-2-3 / 1-2-3-4 / 1-2-3-4-5 / 1-2-3 = 32 pulses

The meters shift frequently: the opening of the “Sacrificial Dance” changes time signature almost every bar. Chords and rests appear at unpredictable moments. In The Rite, tone colour and rhythm become equal to pitch and theme in determining musical form.

Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring — Dances of the Adolescent Girls

Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring — Sacrificial Dance

The Rite of Spring Clap-Along Challenge

Melody and Themes

The melodies in The Rite are anti-lyrical — they are short, repetitive fragments that are never developed in the traditional sense. Some are based on actual Russian folk tunes (the bassoon melody at m. 43 derives from a Lithuanian folk melody, around 0:45 in the opening; a solo horn and then flute present a folk-like tune at mm. 89–96). But these tunes are not treated as themes to be spun out and elaborated. Instead, they function as ostinato patterns — “obstinate” musical figures that repeat persistently throughout a section. These patterns shift abruptly and are interrupted without warning. Stravinsky increases intensity by layering, juxtaposing, and alternating ideas — building up layers of rhythmic and timbral activity.

Harmony and Tonality

The harmonic language is built on unresolved dissonance. The famous opening chord of the “Dances of the Adolescent Girls” is a superimposition of an F♭ major triad and an E♭ dominant seventh chord — together containing all seven notes of the A♭ harmonic minor scale. This chord does not resolve; it simply pounds away, a block of sound. Throughout The Rite, Stravinsky juxtaposes static blocks of sound rather than connecting chords through functional progressions. The sense of tonality is destroyed — or rather, replaced by a new kind of harmonic organization based on the superimposition and alternation of fixed sonorities.

Overall Effect and Legacy

The overall effect of The Rite of Spring is one of controlled violence — a return to something primal and elemental in human experience. The premiere famously provoked a riot in the audience at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées — some cheered, others booed, fistfights broke out, and the police were called. The American critic Carl Van Vechten, present that evening, reported that he was so transported by the music that he found himself — to his shock — pounding on the head of the man seated in front of him. Both men, he later wrote, had been “carried beyond themselves.” The chaos was so extreme that the choreographer Nijinsky had to stand on a chair in the wings, counting out the beat for his dancers because the audience’s noise drowned out the orchestra. Stravinsky himself stood nearby, gripping Nijinsky’s coattail to keep him from tumbling off the chair.

The historian Modris Eksteins drew a provocative parallel between The Rite and the First World War, which began just over a year after the premiere. In both, the individual takes a back seat to the masses. The primal human sacrifice depicted in the ballet seems to anticipate the mechanized slaughter of the trenches. In September 1914, the music critic Ernest Newman wrote:

“We can only hope that the result of the war will not be a perpetuation of old racial hatreds and distrusts, but a new sense of the emotional solidarity of mankind. From that sense alone can the real music of the future be born.”

Summary of Techniques

The techniques that contribute to the atmosphere of violence in The Rite of Spring include: unresolved dissonance, static sections that do not progress, ostinatos, meter and rhythm reduced to pulsation, changing meters, unpredictable rests and accents, juxtaposed blocks of sound, layering, and discontinuity.

The Viennese Revolution I — Arnold Schoenberg

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 33: pp. 804–16
• NAWM 180a: Schoenberg, Pierrot lunaire, No. 8, “Nacht”
• NAWM 181: Schoenberg, Piano Suite, Op. 25, Prelude and Minuet & Trio

The Second Viennese School

Vienna around 1900 was a city of extraordinary cultural intensity — and extraordinary contradictions. It was the city of Gustav Klimt and Gustav Mahler, of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the exploration of the unconscious. It harboured a severely conservative concert audience alongside revolutionary artists who were pushing every boundary.

The artistic movement known as Expressionism — exemplified by painters like Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, and Edvard Munch — sought to express “pure inwardness,” the raw, unmediated emotional life beneath the polished surface of bourgeois existence.

Out of this ferment emerged the so-called Second Viennese School — a designation coined later to link three composers to the “first” Viennese school of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven:

• Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), the teacher
• Alban Berg (1885–1935), student
• Anton Webern (1883–1945), student

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)

Born into a non-musical family that owned a shoe shop, Schoenberg learned violin and piano informally. When his father died around age sixteen, financial hardship forced him to leave school and find work. Yet he persevered as a largely self-taught composer — he never attended a conservatory — eventually becoming one of the most influential teachers of composition in the 20^th century. He began as a late-Romantic composer and remained devoted to the Austro-German tradition throughout his life. But his relentless exploration of that tradition led him to push it beyond its breaking point.

The Breakdown of Tonality

Think of tonality as an elastic band. Composers like Wagner pulled on it relentlessly — creating tension, prolonging dissonance — but always allowed it to snap back to its original position. Schoenberg kept pulling until the band broke entirely.

The path he traced can be described as a series of escalating steps: increasing chromaticism led to increasing dissonance, which led to the prolongation of dissonance (dissonances lasting longer and longer without resolution), which led to what Schoenberg called the “emancipation of the dissonance” — the idea that dissonant harmonies are just as valid as consonant ones and need not resolve. This process led, around 1908–09, to atonality: music in which no pitch serves as a tonal centre.

The pivotal work was Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 (1908). The first three movements are in identifiable keys (F♯ minor, D minor, E♭ minor), but the fourth movement abandons key entirely. Schoenberg later wrote: “The overwhelming multitude of dissonance cannot be counterbalanced any longer by occasional returns to such tonic triads as represent a key.” In a poignant touch, the second movement quotes the folk song “O du lieber Augustin, alles ist hin” — literally, “Oh dear Augustin, everything is lost.” The quotation is both literal and symbolic: a musical valediction to the tonal system that had defined Western music for centuries. The fourth movement adds a soprano voice singing the Stefan George poem “I feel the air of another planet…” — and the music enters that other planet.

Schoenberg, String Quartet No. 2 — Mvt. II, quoting “O du lieber Augustin”

Schoenberg, String Quartet No. 2 — Mvt. IV, “I feel the air of another planet…”

The Problem of Form

Without tonality to provide structure — the departure from and return to a home key — how does one organize a piece of music? This became Schoenberg’s central problem. His early atonal works tended to be brief, relying on text (in songs) or dramatic situation (in stage works) to provide formal scaffolding. The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op. 15 (1909), a song cycle setting poems by Stefan George, exemplifies this approach: each song is brief, and the text itself provides structure.

Schoenberg, Book of the Hanging Gardens, No. 14 — “Sprich nicht immer” (Glenn Gould, piano; Helen Vanni, soprano)

Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21 (1912): “Nacht” (NAWM 180a)

Pierrot lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot) is one of the defining works of musical Expressionism. It sets “Three Times Seven Poems from Albert Giraud’s Pierrot lunaire” (originally French, 1884; translated into German in 1892), commissioned by the actress Albertine Zehme. The work is scored for a speaker and a chamber ensemble of piano, flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin/viola, and cello — with a different combination of instruments used for each of the twenty-one songs.

The setting is cabaret-like: Pierrot is a commedia dell’arte figure, a masked clown who is by turns comic, satirical, ironic, and frightening — obsessed with the moon. Schoenberg used exaggerated, graphic musical gestures and techniques to express the feelings of the poetry.

“Nacht” (Night)

The text of “Nacht” — No. 8 in the cycle — paints a vision of darkness descending:

Finstre, schwarze Riesenfalter / töteten der Sonne Glanz. / Ein geschlossnes Zauberbuch, / ruht der Horizont — verschwiegen.

Black gigantic butterflies have blotted out the shining sun. Like a sorcerer’s sealed book, the horizon sleeps in silence.

The poem is in Rondeau form: 13 lines organized as two 4-line verses plus a 5-line verse, with the first two lines serving as a refrain (returning at lines 7–8 and at the end). The song is correspondingly brief — just 26 bars.

Schoenberg, Pierrot lunaire, “Nacht” — Jan DeGaetani

Creating Unity Without Tonality

Schoenberg uses several means to create unity and coherence in the absence of tonal structure:

The song is structured as a passacaglia — a set of variations over a repeated bass line. The ostinato consists of the basic three-note motive plus a chromatic descent (mm. 4–6), which recurs with frequent repetition: in canon between the instruments at mm. 4–7, in the piano left hand, and at prominent structural points in the poem (mm. 11, 16, 23, 24). The return of the opening notes at the end provides a sense of closure analogous to tonal return.

The three-note motive — ascending a minor third, then descending a major third — saturates the texture with obsessive thoroughness. Six intertwined statements appear in just the first three bars. The motive is presented forwards, backwards, and upside-down. The effect is claustrophobic, suggesting Pierrot’s moonlit obsession.

The entire song is set in a deep, dark register: the piano stays mostly in bass clef or descends, and the instruments are bass clarinet and cello — the darkest members of the ensemble.

Expressionism and Sprechstimme

The music exemplifies Expressionism in its distorted representation of reality — abstraction, nightmares, Freudian depths. Schoenberg himself was a respected Expressionist painter, and his visual art shares the same aesthetic as his music.

The vocal technique is Sprechstimme (“speaking voice”) — a manner of performance in which the voice follows the notated rhythm exactly but only approximates the written pitches, gliding in tones of speech. The notation uses an x on the note stem to indicate this technique. The result is something between speech and song — uncanny, theatrical, and deeply expressive.

This music is in free atonality: no system has been set up to replace functional tonality. There is no tonal centre, but neither is there yet a twelve-tone system. The coherence comes from motivic saturation, formal design, and textural control.

Schoenberg and “Composition with Twelve Tones”

After the crisis of free atonality — a period Schoenberg described as one of struggle — he developed, around 1921, the twelve-tone system: a method of “composition with twelve tones related only to one another.”

How It Works

The composer arranges the twelve pitch-classes of the chromatic scale in a particular order, creating a tone row or series. This row is a pattern of intervals with a distinctive character. The compositional process is governed by the principle of non-repetition and constant variation: no pitch is repeated until all twelve have been sounded.

The row can appear in four basic forms:

• Prime (P): the original row
• Retrograde (R): the row played backwards
• Inversion (I): the row with all intervals reversed (up becomes down)
• Retrograde Inversion (RI): the inversion played backwards

Each of these four forms can be transposed to begin on any of the twelve pitch-classes, yielding a maximum of 48 possible rows (4 forms × 12 transpositions). Transpositions are indicated by number: P5 means the prime row transposed up 5 semitones from P0; I8 means the inverted row transposed up 8 semitones.

Piano Suite, Op. 25 (1923, NAWM 181)

The Piano Suite uses traditional forms — the suite being a Baroque collection of dances, traditionally all in the same key. Schoenberg’s suite transposes this concept into the twelve-tone world.

Schoenberg’s Row

The row has special properties: each of its four usable forms begins and ends with the notes E and B♭ (or B♭ and E), and notes 3–4 are always G and D♭ (or D♭ and G). These tritone relationships (E–B♭ and G–D♭) create a kind of tonal anchoring. Remarkably, when certain forms of the row are read using German note nomenclature (where B = B♭ and H = B♮), they spell B-A-C-H — a homage to the great contrapuntalist whose work Schoenberg deeply revered and whose legacy he saw himself continuing. Schoenberg uses only four rows and their retrogrades: P0, I0, P6, I6 (and R0, RI0, R6, RI6) — establishing a consistency analogous to a “key” in the absence of tonality.

Prelude

The Prelude is Schoenberg’s first completed twelve-tone piece. It divides the row into tetrachords (four-note collections) that function both as melodic lines and as chords. Despite the rigorous system underlying it, the piece has a free, improvisational character.

Schoenberg, Piano Suite, Op. 25 — Prelude (Glenn Gould)

Minuet and Trio

The Minuet is structured in traditional binary form with two-measure phrases (one complete row every two measures) and dance rhythms in triple meter. The Trio has a lighter texture with two-part counterpoint: the right hand imitates the left hand in inverted canon (the right hand plays I6 as the left hand plays P0). The movement concludes with “Menuett da capo” — a return to the Minuet, just as in an 18^th-century suite.

Schoenberg, Piano Suite, Op. 25 — Minuet & Trio (Glenn Gould)

How Do We Listen to This Music?

Some have argued that twelve-tone music is only for the initiated elite. Schoenberg disagreed. There is much to perceive even without identifying tone rows: the distinctive properties of the row and its limited permutations, the play of sound and silence, dynamics, articulations, and instrumental colours. Webern put it simply: “Otherwise one composes as before.”

The charge that twelve-tone music is cerebral, mathematical, cold, and calculated misses the point. Schoenberg worked intuitively, following what he called an “inner compulsion.” There is a palpable spiritual dimension to his music — a sense of tapping into something beyond himself. As a teacher, he always emphasized trusting musical intuition. The twelve-tone system, he maintained, was no more mathematical than the counterpoint of Bach.

The Society for Private Musical Performances

In 1919, Schoenberg founded the Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna. The manifesto, written by Alban Berg, identified the central problem: public performances of new music lacked clarity and adequate rehearsal. The Society offered clear, well-rehearsed performances with frequent repetitions, no publicity, and no critics. It was semi-pedagogical in spirit, focusing on chamber works and piano arrangements of orchestral works. The most-performed composers were Debussy, Reger, Mahler, and Scriabin. The Society folded in 1921 due to severe inflation of the Austrian currency.

The implications were significant: the relationship between performer and audience was being rethought, and the isolation of new music from general concert life raised questions about the purpose of concerts — and of music itself.

The Viennese Revolution II — Berg and Webern

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 33: pp. 816–22
• NAWM 182: Berg, Wozzeck, Act III, scenes 2–3
• NAWM 183: Webern, Symphony, Op. 21, first movement

Alban Berg (1885–1935)

Alban Berg had a difficult childhood — his father died in 1900 — and he became a student of Schoenberg from 1904 to 1911, a relationship that was intense and at times thorny. Berg’s greatest success was the opera Wozzeck. His Lyric Suite (1925) conceals in its score a secret documentation of his love affair with Hanna Fuchs, with the initials A.B. and H.F. encoded in the music. Berg died on Christmas Eve, 1935, of blood poisoning from an insect bite, at the age of fifty.

Berg, Violin Concerto — Itzhak Perlman, Boston Symphony Orchestra

Wozzeck (NAWM 182)

Berg’s opera Wozzeck (composed 1917–22, first performed 1925) is based on the dramatic fragment Woyzeck by Georg Büchner (1837). Berg saw a performance of the play in 1914 and was deeply moved. There is no conventional libretto — Berg arranged the text directly from fragments of the play.

The story is Expressionist in the fullest sense: Wozzeck is a soldier, a victim — ridiculed, impoverished, subjected to medical experiments, and ultimately betrayed by his lover Marie. Driven to the edge of madness, he murders her and drowns himself.

The music is atonal — in free atonality, not twelve-tone.

How Do You Write an Atonal Opera?

Berg’s solution to the problem of creating large-scale form without tonality was ingenious. The opera is structured in three acts, each organized as a different large-scale form:

• Act I: Five character pieces (each scene portrays a different character)
• Act II: A symphony in five movements
• Act III: Six inventions (each scene built on a single musical element)

Each of the fifteen scenes functions as a traditional movement form. The music is continuous within each act — there are no arias, duets, or choruses in the conventional sense. Orchestral interludes connect the scenes. Leitmotifs identify the characters.

The vocal writing encompasses a spectrum from plain speech through three kinds of Sprechstimme to full singing.

Act III, Scene 2: “Invention on a Single Note” (NAWM 182a)

In this scene, Wozzeck and Marie walk in the woods by a pond. In a fit of jealousy, he kills her.

Berg conveys Wozzeck’s mental state through music that is atonal, angular, and dissonant. The scene is an “invention on a single note” — the pitch B — which functions as a constant presence, like a fixed idea in Wozzeck’s tormented mind. The note B begins low in the basses, rises, and is passed through the instruments; it is trilled, flutter-tongued, and sustained. At the moment of the “red moon,” it is held in all octaves simultaneously. When Wozzeck kills Marie, the timpani pounds out thirty strokes on B. The orchestral interlude that follows builds to a massive crescendo on B, and the timpani plays the rhythmic pattern of the next scene.

This note B is the musical parallel to Wozzeck’s fixation on revenge.

Berg, Wozzeck, Act III, scenes 2–3

Act III, Scene 3: “Invention on a Rhythmic Pattern” (NAWM 182b)

Wozzeck is now in a tavern, drinking and dancing with Marie’s friend Margret, who discovers blood on his arm. The scene is unified by a distinctive and obsessive rhythmic pattern — the musical equivalent of Wozzeck’s obsessive guilt. The rhythm is first presented by an out-of-tune onstage piano playing a polka; it appears in augmentation (slowed down) and diminution (sped up), and even infiltrates Margret’s song. Everything distorts — the piano polka, the song — under the pressure of Wozzeck’s guilt.

Once the blood is discovered (m. 186ff), the tension intensifies: Margret and Wozzeck sing the obsessive rhythm in rhythmic canon. The bass line plays the obsessive rhythmic pattern, rising by whole tone. The dissonance tightens to a major seventh interval (A/B♭), played col legno — with the wood of the bow — producing a scratching, unsettling sound.

Anton Webern (1883–1945)

Anton Webern, born into minor nobility, studied with Schoenberg from 1904 to 1908 with intense devotion — bordering on obsession. He completed a PhD in musicology at the University of Vienna in 1906, writing on the 16^th-century polyphony of Heinrich Isaac — an interest in strict contrapuntal techniques that would profoundly shape his compositional approach.

Webern built a career as a conductor in the 1920s and early 1930s, but his work was labelled degenerate by the Nazi regime in 1938, and his career was abruptly cut short. He died in 1945 under murky circumstances: while staying with family in Mittersill, Austria, he stepped onto a veranda to smoke a cigar and was shot by an American soldier during the Allied occupation.

Webern’s entire output can be performed in approximately four hours — his works are extremely concentrated, distilling musical ideas to their essence.

Webern, Six Bagatelles for String Quartet

Symphony, Op. 21 (1928, NAWM 183)

How do you write a twelve-tone symphony? Webern’s answer involved three strategies:

1. Make It Brief

The symphony is just 66 bars long in its first movement, scored for chamber orchestra, and lasts about ten minutes across its two movements (I. Sonata form; II. Theme and Variations).

2. Use Existing Forms

The first movement is cast in sonata form — the standard Classical form with exposition, development, and recapitulation. The recapitulation returns to the “main key” (P0) and follows the same succession of rows as the exposition. The second movement is a theme with variations.

3. Use Other Methods of Organization

a) Design the row with internal organization. Webern’s row is a palindrome — it reads the same backwards as forwards. This means that the retrograde of the row is identical to a transposition of the prime, reducing the number of truly distinct forms.

b) Superimpose layers of symmetry. The development section is an exact palindrome: its centre point falls at measures 34–35, and the music from that point to the end is an exact reversal of the music from the beginning to that point.

c) Superimpose other devices. The first movement is constructed as a double canon at inversion (contrary motion): Canon 1 pairs P0 with I0; Canon 2 pairs I8 with P4.

Treatment of the Orchestra

Webern deploys the chamber orchestra using a technique called Klangfarbenmelodie — a German term coined by Schoenberg meaning “tone-colour melody.” A single melodic line is distributed among different instruments note by note, so that the changing timbres become an essential dimension of the musical structure. The resulting texture is called pointillism: a succession of tiny points or wisps of sound, analogous to the dots of colour in a Pointillist painting.

What Makes It a Symphony?

Size does not matter. What makes Webern’s Op. 21 a symphony is its intensity, its concentration, and its monumental thought — compressed into a crystalline miniature.

Webern, Symphony, Op. 21 — beginning of development section

“Gimme Some of That Ol’ Atonal Music”

Neoclassicism and Parody I — Erik Satie

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 32: pp. 799–803
• NAWM 179: Satie, Embryons desséchés, No. 3, “De Podophthalma”

Erik Satie (1866–1925)

Erik Satie was an avant-garde composer who sought to overthrow accepted aesthetics with unrelenting opposition to the status quo. He was irreverent, iconoclastic, and endlessly witty — a satirist whose primary target was the Romantic tradition itself.

Subverting Convention

Satie challenged every Romantic gesture of individuality and expressivity. His Gymnopédies (1888) for piano are marked “slow and painful/sorrowful,” yet the music is plain and unemotional — deliberately refusing the expressive warmth that a Romantic composer would pour into such a tempo marking. This was a challenge to the classical hierarchy that placed “serious” concert music above amateur entertainment.

Satie, Gymnopédie No. 1

Satie’s written directions in his scores are a distinctive feature — satirizing Debussy and other contemporaries, they were intended for the performer’s eyes only (not to be read aloud), thereby subverting the hierarchy of the concert experience.

Beyond Masterworks

Satie deliberately did not write masterworks. His larger works direct our attention to the present moment rather than to some grand aesthetic achievement:

Parade (1917) was a “ballet réaliste” — a collaboration with Jean Cocteau (scenario), Léonide Massine (choreography), and Pablo Picasso (sets and costumes). The music is Cubist in conception, incorporating fragments from everyday life, including ragtime and typewriter sounds.

Satie, Parade — “The Little American Girl” (Steamboat Rag)

Satie, Parade — ballet excerpt

Vexations (1893) is a minimalist experiment avant la lettre: a theme and two harmonizations to be repeated 840 times (lasting approximately 19 hours). Satie’s influence on younger French and American composers was profound, anticipating Surrealism, Dada, and Minimalism.

Embryons desséchés (1913, NAWM 179): “De Podophthalma”

Embryons desséchés (Dried Embryos) is a set of three character pieces for piano solo. The drafted introduction mocks Romantic notions of profundity and unconscious genius. The titles — dried embryos of sea creatures — are absurdly academic (post-Darwinian) and impossible to depict in music, which is precisely the point: Satie is mocking program music and the idea that music can represent anything at all.

The three pieces are titled: No. 1 “Holothuria,” No. 2 “Edriophthalma,” and No. 3 “De Podophthalma.” The preface for No. 3 notes: “Crustaceans with eyes placed on movable stalks. They are skillful, tireless hunters. They are found in all the oceans. The meat of the Podophthalma constitutes a tasty food.”

Satie rejected tradition: there is no key signature and no bar lines.

Satie, Embryons desséchés, No. 3 — “De Podophthalma”

Musical Satire

The score is filled with written directions that function as ironic commentary:

“A la chasse” (Hunt) / “climbing” / “pursuit”: The music moves from F major to whole-tone chords and melodies, with a rising figure that evokes a chase.

“Un conseilleur” (Adviser): A Leitmotif with chromatic chords, identified in the score everywhere it appears — satirizing Wagnerian analysis and the practice of labeling every recurring theme.

“Pour charmer le gibier” (To cast a spell over the game): A hunting call in C major, adapted from the traditional call “La Royale” (sounded after slaying prey).

“Obligatory cadenza (by the composer)”: A cadenza in F major that parodies the long, bombastic cadences of Beethoven, making them sound like clichés.

Quotation of Popular Music

Satie quotes Parisian popular music from the cabaret and café-concert world he knew intimately — he had played piano and composed cabaret songs at the “Chat Noir” in the 1880s. In “De Podophthalma,” he quotes “The Song of the Orangutan” from a popular operetta, a tune his audience would have recognized. The hunting call is likewise drawn from popular culture rather than the high art tradition.

Satie, Vexations — one iteration

Neoclassicism and Parody II — Stravinsky

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 33: pp. 827–32
• NAWM 185: Stravinsky, Octet for Wind Instruments, I: “Sinfonia”

Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism was a broad movement spanning the late 1910s through the 1950s, in which composers revived, imitated, and evoked the styles, genres, and forms of pre-Romantic music — especially the music of the 18^th century and the Classical period. The movement originated in France, driven by a rejection of German Romanticism — its intense emotion, irrationality, and nationalism — in the wake of the First World War. Neoclassicism valued balance, objectivity, and absolute music (music without a program or story) over the programmatic excess of the late Romantic tradition.

Stravinsky and Neoclassicism (1919–1951)

Stravinsky is the composer most associated with Neoclassicism. After the visceral primitivism of The Rite of Spring, he turned away from Russian folk music and toward earlier Western art music — imitation, quotation, and allusion to models from the Baroque, Classical, and earlier periods. His first neoclassical work was Pulcinella (1919), a ballet based on music attributed to Pergolesi. Stravinsky himself described it as “my discovery of the past — the epiphany through which the whole of my later music became possible. It was a backwards glance of course, but it was a look into the mirror too.” His last neoclassical work was The Rake’s Progress (1951), a full-scale opera in the tradition of Mozart.

Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism is characterized by emotional detachment and an anti-Romantic stance. But these older models are filtered through Stravinsky’s own distinctive idiom — the irregular rhythms, the dissonance, the brilliant orchestral colour that are unmistakably his. He drew on a wide range of models: Classical forms, Baroque counterpoint, and even contemporary popular idioms.

Popular Idioms

Stravinsky also incorporated popular music into his neoclassical works. His Ragtime for piano (1918) draws on American ragtime, and L’Histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale, 1917) includes stylized versions of a tango, a waltz, and ragtime.

Stravinsky, Ragtime for Piano

Stravinsky, L’Histoire du soldat — Tango, Waltz, Ragtime

Octet for Wind Instruments (1922–23, NAWM 185)

Stravinsky conducted the premiere of the Octet in Paris in October 1923. The work is scored for an ensemble of winds only — flute, clarinet in B♭, two bassoons, trumpet in C, trumpet in A, tenor trombone, and bass trombone — chosen for their more abstract, less “human” sound compared to strings.

The work has three movements: I. “Sinfonia” (in sonata form), II. “Theme with Variations,” and III. “Finale.”

Classical and Modern

The first movement brilliantly juxtaposes Classical and modern elements:

Classical elements: The form is a Classical-era sonata form with a slow introduction (like Haydn). Baroque figuration, Bach-like counterpoint, major triads, scales, walking bass lines, and canons all appear.

Modern elements: These Classical gestures are mixed with modern dissonance, octatonic melodies, meter changes, and abrupt interruptions.

Stravinsky, Octet for Wind Instruments — with score

Theme 1

Theme 1 uses Classical-era gestures — bold opening leaps followed by stepwise motion — but with modernist features: parallel fifths and fourths (forbidden in Classical harmony), frequent changes of meter that create disorienting rhythmic groupings, and persistent dissonance.

Theme 2

Theme 2 is a cantabile-like melody with contrapuntal accompaniment — a Classical gesture — but the melody is heavily syncopated, the meter changes constantly, and the accompaniment maintains constant dissonance.

Neotonality

The harmonic language of the Octet exemplifies what might be called neotonality — tonal centres exist, but they are not established through functional harmonic progressions. Theme 1 establishes its tonal centre through sheer assertion — the music simply insists on a pitch as home. Theme 2 defines its tonal centre through the melody, which constantly returns to the note D. The overarching tonal structure of the movement is E♭–D–E–E♭, articulated by the thematic statements — a large-scale tonal plan achieved without a single functional chord progression.

Neoclassicism and Parody III — Milhaud

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 35: pp. 869–76
• NAWM 194: Milhaud, La création du monde, Tableau I

Darius Milhaud (1892–1974)

Darius Milhaud was a member of Les Six — a group of six French composers championed by the writer Jean Cocteau and inspired by the anti-Romantic aesthetic of Erik Satie. Where Stravinsky looked to the 18^th century for his neoclassical models, Milhaud found inspiration in a strikingly different direction: jazz.

La création du monde (1923, NAWM 194)

La création du monde (The Creation of the World), Op. 81a, is a ballet composed for the Ballets Suédois (Swedish Ballet), with choreography by Jean Börlin, a scenario by the poet Blaise Cendrars, and visual design by the painter Fernand Léger. The scenario is an African creation myth. Milhaud had visited the United States in 1922–23 on a concert tour, and while there he traveled to Harlem and heard African-American jazz bands — an experience that proved transformative. Returning to Paris, he channeled this inspiration into a ballet that fused jazz idioms with neoclassical formal structures, reflecting the Parisian avant-garde’s fascination with African art and culture.

The work is structured as an Overture followed by five tableaux (continuous sections). NAWM 194 focuses on Tableau I: “The Chaos Before Creation.”

Jazz and Classical Synthesis

The orchestration is remarkable for its synthesis of jazz and classical forces: alongside conventional winds, brass, strings, and percussion, Milhaud includes jazz band instrumentation — saxophone, piano in a jazz role, and characteristic jazz timbres. The result is neither pure jazz nor pure classical music but a new synthesis.

Tableau I: Fugue with Jazz

The opening tableau is structured as a fugue — that most traditional of Classical forms — but infused with jazz elements:

The fugue exposition (mm. 1–23) presents the subject in D through successive entries: double bass, then trombone (on E), then alto saxophone (on A), and trumpet (on D), each with countersubjects. The subject itself incorporates blue notes and blues melodies, jazz syncopation, piano riffs, and the layered texture of a jazz combo.

The second section (mm. 24–45) moves away from strict fugal procedure: ostinato layers build up, the clarinet presents the fugue subject four times while other parts create metric conflict, and trombone glissandi add jazz colour. Polytonality — the simultaneous sounding of two or more keys — and polyrhythms thicken the texture.

The third section (mm. 46–59) returns to the tonic and combines and rearranges the earlier elements before fading to a quiet transition.

Milhaud, La création du monde — full ballet (Tableau I begins around 3:30)

Nationalism — Sibelius and Bartók

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 32: pp. 797–99; Ch. 33: pp. 832–39
• NAWM 178: Sibelius, Symphony No. 4, III
• NAWM 186: Bartók, Mikrokosmos, No. 123, “Staccato and Legato”

Jean Sibelius (1865–1957)

Jean Sibelius became the musical voice of Finnish national identity at a time when Finland was culturally dominated by Sweden and politically controlled by Russia (independence came only in 1917). His tone poem Finlandia (1900) became an unofficial national anthem, and from 1897 the Finnish government supported him as a national artist. He drew inspiration from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, and created a body of work — including seven symphonies (1899–1924) and a beloved Violin Concerto (1903–04) — that made him one of the most performed and most debated composers of the 20^th century.

Sibelius, Finlandia — main theme

A Controversial Legacy

Few composers have inspired such extreme critical disagreement. Aaron Copland dismissed Sibelius in 1941 as “essentially a late-Romantic composer…a hangover from the eighteen nineties.” Charles Ives was harsher still, calling his music “trite, tiresome awnings of platitudes.” Theodor Adorno denounced it as “a symptom of the disorder of musical consciousness.” Yet the critic Cecil Gray declared him “one of the major figures in the entire history of music,” and Constant Lambert wrote that he was “not only the most important symphonic writer since Beethoven, but the only writer since Beethoven who has definitely advanced” the symphony as a form.

Symphony No. 4 in A Minor (1910–11, NAWM 178)

The Fourth Symphony is Sibelius at his most austere and uncompromising. The key scheme of the four movements — A–F–C♯–A — already suggests an unusual tonal world, with the tritone A–C♯ (enharmonically A–D♭) playing a central structural role.

The third movement (NAWM 178) demonstrates two of Sibelius’s most innovative formal techniques:

Teleological genesis: The principal theme is not stated at the outset. Instead, it gradually assembles itself from motivic fragments heard throughout the movement. The theme appears complete only at measures 82–87 — at the very end — in the strings, in three octaves, forte, in the tonic of C♯ minor. Everything before has been a process of becoming, not a statement of being.

Rotational form: The music cycles through the same series of thematic elements, varied each time. There are six rotations through three main ideas (theme fragments, opening figures, and closing figures), achieving both variety and coherent unity through the continuous development of a small number of motives. The effect is extraordinarily economical: few motives, almost no transition sections, and a reliance on tonality as the organizing force.

Sibelius, Symphony No. 4 — Mvt. III (Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä)

Béla Bartók (1881–1945)

Béla Bartók was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, and one of the founders of the discipline of ethnomusicology. He studied piano at the Hungarian Royal Academy of Music, served as a piano professor at the Budapest Conservatory from 1907 to 1934, and left Hungary for New York City in 1940 after the Nazi annexation of Austria, dying of leukemia in 1945.

Collecting Folk Music

From 1904 onward, Bartók collected peasant folk songs — eventually publishing nearly 2,000 tunes from Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and other regions. He was one of the first scholars to use audio recording technology (acoustic cylinder machines) in the field, and his systematic approach to collecting and classifying folk music set new standards for the discipline.

What Bartók found in peasant music was what he called “artistic perfection” — simple, primitive forms that broke decisively with 19^th-century Romanticism. There was nothing sentimental or excessive about this music. By assimilating the peasant music idiom “like a mother tongue,” Bartók made it pervasive throughout his works — not as quotation or decoration but as the fundamental material from which his musical language was built.

Bartók’s Musical Language

Bartók’s harmonic materials are derived from the scales, rhythms, and melodies of peasant music: modal scales, mixed modes, and rhythmic devices drawn from folk dance (shifting and asymmetrical meters such as 2+3 or 5+3). Peasant music, he wrote, “freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys.”

His approach to tonality is neotonal: tonal centres exist but are established through pitch assertion rather than functional harmony. Tritone relationships (such as C and F♯) are characteristic. He wrote in traditional forms (bagatelles, concertos, string quartets, fugues) while also exploring proportional and mirror forms. His synthesis of peasant music with classical technique — unified by a love of dissonance and symmetry — produced a musical language of extraordinary power and originality.

Bartók, Hungarian Sketches, V — “Swineherd’s Dance” (orchestral arrangement)

Mikrokosmos, No. 123: “Staccato and Legato” (NAWM 186)

Mikrokosmos is a collection of 153 piano pieces in six volumes, progressing from simplest to most difficult. Its purpose is to introduce piano students to the techniques of modern music. No. 123, “Staccato and Legato,” is an exercise in articulation — all entries begin legato and shift to staccato.

The piece brilliantly synthesizes Classical and peasant elements:

Classical (Bach-influenced): The piece is a strict two-part invention — an exact canon between the hands. In version (a) (mm. 1–11), the second voice follows at an octave plus a fourth below, one bar apart. At m. 13, the imitation tightens to half a bar apart, and the theme is inverted. At m. 24, a cadence arrives. Version (b) (m. 26) inverts the counterpoint, placing the second voice above the first. The overall tonal structure mimics Classical practice: C–G–F–C.

Peasant (Hungarian): The melody has the contour of a Hungarian folk tune — spanning the interval of a fourth, moving up and down. The right hand plays short phrases with rests between them (m. 7 transposes the opening phrase up a fifth). There is immediate variation rather than exact repetition — a hallmark of Hungarian folk melody. The rhythm follows the characteristic short-short-long pattern of Hungarian peasant music. The scale is mixed-mode: ascending in C major, descending in Phrygian — a feature common in Hungarian folk songs.

Bartók, Mikrokosmos No. 123 — “Staccato and Legato”

Music and Politics in the Soviet Union — Shostakovich

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 35: pp. 880–84
• NAWM 198: Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5, II

Music Under Stalin

The Soviet Union exerted unprecedented control over the arts, treating them as a tool of state propaganda. After the Revolution, musical institutions were nationalized and concert programming was strictly regulated. In 1923, two competing organizations were founded: the Association for Contemporary Music (which maintained contact with Western modernist trends) and the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (which demanded simple, tonal music with socialist texts for the masses). When Stalin consolidated power in 1929, dissent was suppressed, and in 1933 the Union of Soviet Composers was established as the sole authorized body.

The official aesthetic doctrine was Socialist Realism (codified in 1934): art was to celebrate socialism in a positive, accessible, and realistic style. Music should be simple, melodic, folk-like, and comprehensible. Its opposite, Formalism — modernist music made for its own sake, without ideological content — was condemned. Dissonance was acceptable only if its meaning was clear.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)

Dmitri Shostakovich chose to remain in Russia and work within the Soviet system — a decision that shaped every aspect of his creative life. His output includes fifteen symphonies, fifteen string quartets, and two operas.

Crisis and Survival

Shostakovich was popular and successful until 1936, when Stalin walked out of a performance of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The next day, the government newspaper Pravda published a devastating editorial titled “Chaos Instead of Music,” denouncing the opera as Formalist and anti-Soviet. This was not merely critical disapproval; it was dangerous. In 1936, Stalin was consolidating total control through purges that swept away intellectuals, artists, and political figures — execution or prison camps awaited those who fell afoul of the regime. Composers lived in genuine fear, not only for themselves but for their families. Shostakovich withdrew his Fourth Symphony in December (fearing the consequences of performing it) and responded with his Fifth Symphony (1937), described as “a Soviet artist’s practical reply to just criticism.” The Fifth adopted a more moderate style and restored his reputation.

The Seventh Symphony, “The Leningrad” (1941), celebrating the heroic defense of Leningrad against the German siege, made Shostakovich a national hero. But in 1948 came another crackdown: he was denounced again, along with Prokofiev, before being later “rehabilitated.”

Symphony No. 5, Op. 47 (1937): II. Allegretto (NAWM 198)

The Fifth Symphony is cast in four movements using classical forms. The second movement is a Scherzo and Trio in ternary form, influenced by Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) — particularly Mahler’s style of Austrian Ländler (a rustic triple-meter dance), his distinctive orchestration, and his abrupt mood shifts.

The movement’s tone is deeply satirical: it outwardly conforms to the expectations of Socialist Realism, but beneath the surface lies a possible message of bitterness, mourning, and veiled criticism. The harmony is traditional (A minor for the Scherzo, C major for the Trio) but features unexpected, unprepared shifts and tonal centres established through assertion rather than functional progression.

Scherzo (A minor): Opens with the basses. At m. 45, an abrupt shift to C minor introduces two contrasting ideas — a crude waltz thrown off balance by bars in 4/4, and a march (m. 56) with blaring horns and fanfare.

Trio (C major, m. 87): A lilting waltz for solo violin and flute, interrupted by intrusions of fanfare and waltz material from the Scherzo.

Scherzo Return (m. 157): Bassoon and pizzicato strings (recalling the scherzo of Beethoven’s Fifth). The second part shifts up a half step — from C to C♯ — a subtle but destabilizing harmonic move.

Coda (m. 241): A brief, ghostly statement of the Trio’s waltz theme in the oboe, followed by an abrupt final cadence in A minor.

Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 — Mvt. II (with score)

American Originals I — Ives and Copland

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 33: pp. 839–47; Ch. 35: pp. 893–95
• NAWM 189: Ives, Piano Sonata No. 2 (“Concord”), III: “The Alcotts”
• NAWM 203: Copland, Appalachian Spring, excerpt

Charles Ives (1874–1954)

Charles Ives was an American original in every sense — a composer who worked largely in isolation, drew on the sounds of American life (Protestant hymn tunes, parlor songs, minstrel show music, marching bands), and experimented with techniques that anticipated developments in European modernism by decades. Many of his works were performed long after their composition and revised extensively over the years. His influence on younger American avant-garde composers was profound.

The Unanswered Question (ca. 1906–08)

One of Ives’s most famous experimental works, The Unanswered Question is a tone poem for chamber orchestra featuring three distinct layers: strings (or string quartet) playing serene tonal harmonies, a solo trumpet posing “the perennial question of existence,” and four flutes attempting — with increasing agitation — to answer. The title comes from an Emerson poem, “The Sphinx,” and Ives provided his own program explaining the philosophical drama.

Ives, The Unanswered Question — Frankfurt Radio Symphony

Piano Sonata No. 2: “Concord, Mass., 1840–1860” (NAWM 189)

The “Concord” Sonata (ca. 1916–19, revised through the 1940s) is a four-movement piano sonata paying tribute to the Transcendentalist writers of Concord, Massachusetts — Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau. Transcendentalism held that God’s presence suffused the natural world, that people are innately good, and that individual intuition and self-reliance are paramount.

III. “The Alcotts”

The third movement is inspired by the domestic life and music-making described in Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women (1868–69), interweaving the everyday world of piano playing, hymns, and Scottish songs with the philosophical aspirations of Transcendentalism.

Two main themes anchor the movement:

Theme A melds the opening motive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with the American hymn tune Missionary Chant (1832). Ives weaves the Fifth’s famous four-note motive into the fabric of the hymn, connecting the sublime and the everyday — the European masterwork and the American parlor.

Theme B alludes to Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106.

Ives, “The Alcotts” — with score

The movement unfolds in three sections. Section 1 presents the themes in fragments — styles and topics adapted, varied, and juxtaposed. Section 2 evokes parlor songs and popular tunes from the Alcott piano. Section 3 presents the main theme of the entire sonata in complete form — what Ives called the “human faith melody.”

This is cumulative form — a form in which the principal theme appears first in fragments, variants, and partial statements, and coalesces into a complete statement only at the end of the movement. It is similar to Sibelius’s “teleological genesis”: both composers delay the full revelation of their material, making the complete theme a goal to be achieved rather than a premise to be elaborated.

Aaron Copland (1900–1990)

Aaron Copland grew up in a Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn, exposed to ragtime and popular music from an early age. He was the first American composer to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and his career traced an arc from early modernism (with jazz elements and strong dissonances) toward a deliberately simpler, more accessible style in the 1930s. This was a conscious artistic choice: reflecting on the composer’s social responsibility, Copland decided to reach a broader public through diatonic melodies, transparent textures, and recognizable allusions to folk and popular music — not a sell-out but a democratic reimagining of what modernism could mean in America. Despite being an immigrant, Jewish, politically leftist, and homosexual, Copland created what many consider the quintessential sound of Americana.

Copland, Fanfare for the Common Man

Appalachian Spring (1943–44, NAWM 203)

Appalachian Spring is a ballet written for the choreographer Martha Graham, premiered on October 30, 1944, in Washington, D.C. Copland had simply called it Ballet for Martha during composition; it was Graham herself who suggested the title Appalachian Spring, though the exact reason for her choice remains unclear. It is scored for an ensemble of thirteen instruments (later arranged as an orchestral suite). The scenario depicts a pioneer wedding in rural Pennsylvania.

The first part (Allegro–Presto) combines modernist traits — shifting meters, offbeat accents, sudden changes of texture, Stravinsky’s influence — with diatonic melodies and harmonies that evoke American folk music. A slower section (mm. 137–151) for violin and oboe features leaps of fourths and fifths, widely spaced chords, and sparse texture — the distinctive sound of open spaces and a sparsely populated landscape.

Copland, Appalachian Spring — orchestral suite (Ulster Orchestra)

Variations on “Simple Gifts”

The heart of the ballet is a set of five variations on the Shaker hymn ‘Tis the Gift to Be Simple by Joseph Brackett (1797–1882). The Shakers were a religious sect who practiced celibacy and communal living, growing and making everything themselves. Their hymns were sung in unaccompanied unison. Copland found the tune in a published collection, and it suited Graham’s scenario perfectly.

The melody remains relatively unchanged across the variations, but each setting provides a contrasting character:

The coda (m. 288) brings the full ensemble over a slowly descending bass line, settling into a serene benediction.

Copland, Appalachian Spring — Martha Graham ballet (1959)

American Originals II — Cowell and Crawford Seeger

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 35: pp. 887–92
• NAWM 201: Cowell, The Banshee
• NAWM 202: Crawford Seeger, String Quartet 1931, IV

Henry Cowell (1897–1965)

Henry Cowell, from California, had little training in the European tradition — which may have been precisely what freed him to explore radical new approaches to making sound. His early piano music introduced tone clusters — chords produced by striking the keyboard with the fist or forearm. His eclectic approach to composition and his deep interest in non-Western music had an enormous impact on younger composers — most notably John Cage, who was one of Cowell’s students, absorbing not just new techniques but a philosophy: that any sound, made by any means, could be musical.

Cowell also founded the periodical New Music, which promoted concerts and published scores by Ives, Schoenberg, and other modernist and Ultramodernist composers — a vital infrastructure for the American avant-garde.

The Banshee (1925, NAWM 201)

The Banshee is a piano piece that dispenses with the keyboard entirely. The banshee is a female spirit in Irish folklore who wails outside the house of someone about to die. To evoke this spirit, Cowell plays directly on the piano strings — with the lid raised and the sustain pedal held down so that all strings resonate freely.

Four types of sounds are produced:

1. Glissando across the strings (sweeping the hand along them)
2. Friction from rubbing along the length of a string with the fingertip, producing a howling, otherworldly sound — the voice of the banshee
3. Raspy sound from rubbing along a string with the back of the fingernail
4. Plucking individual strings (D–D♭–B♭ in the mid-range)

The piece unfolds in four sections (mm. 1–8, 9–20, 21–33, 34–40), with the first three articulated by a recurring plucked motive. Sections 1 through 3 grow progressively louder and more intense; Section 4 subsides. The notation uses a combination of graphic symbols and letter abbreviations. The actual sound varies significantly between performances, since the rubbing and friction techniques produce unpredictable results — making each performance unique.

Cowell, The Banshee — live performance

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–1953)

Ruth Crawford Seeger was the first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship in music (1931) — a remarkable achievement in an era when male critics praised her by saying she could “sling dissonances like a man,” a backhanded compliment that reveals the unconscious sexism of the period. She composed intensively from 1924 to 1933 in Chicago and New York, studying with the composer and musicologist Charles Seeger and experimenting with serial techniques applied beyond pitch — to rhythm, dynamics, and articulation. In 1934 she stopped composing and turned to preserving American folk songs, editing field recordings with her husband Charles Seeger. Her compositional output is small but extraordinary.

String Quartet 1931 (NAWM 202): IV. Finale

The String Quartet 1931 is Crawford Seeger’s best-known work, published in Henry Cowell’s New Music in 1941. Each of its four movements employs a different compositional device. The Finale is one of the most ingeniously constructed movements in the chamber music literature.

Palindrome Form

The second half of the movement is an exact retrograde (backwards version) of the first half, transposed up one semitone. The centre point falls at measures 58–59. The entire movement is therefore a palindrome — it reads the same backwards as forwards (transposed).

Contrast of Opposites

The texture is a two-part counterpoint: the first violin (unmuted) against the other three instruments (muted, playing in octaves). These two voices move in opposite directions in every parameter:

First violin: Plays phrases that increase in length — 1 note, then 2, then 3, up to 21 notes. The durations are varied and freely chosen. The dynamic gradually gets softer.

Other instruments: Play phrases that decrease by one note each time (20, 19, 18, etc.). The notes are generated through permutations of a ten-note series, using a process of rotation (the first note moves to the end with each repetition). The note values are even. The dynamic gradually crescendos.

The result is a systematic counterpoint of opposites: expanding against contracting, free against systematic, soft against loud, unmuted against muted. At the palindrome’s midpoint, the two processes cross — and then reverse, retracing their steps in retrograde.

Crawford Seeger, String Quartet 1931 — Finale (Playground Ensemble, with score)

Postwar — Messiaen and Boulez

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 37: pp. 919–22, 925–32
• NAWM 210: Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time, I
• NAWM 211: Boulez, Le marteau sans maître, Mvt. 6

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992)

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer, organist, and one of the most influential teachers in 20^th-century music — his students at the Paris Conservatoire (where he taught harmony from 1941) included Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono. A devout Catholic mystic, Messiaen understood music as a vehicle for ecstatic contemplation of the divine. Like Scriabin, he experienced synesthesia, perceiving specific colours when hearing specific harmonies.

Musical Language

Three elements define Messiaen’s distinctive sound:

Harmony: Messiaen developed what he called modes of limited transposition — scales (including the whole-tone and octatonic) that produce the same collection of pitches when transposed by certain intervals. These modes suggest contemplation and the negation of desire — a static, luminous harmonic world quite unlike the goal-directed harmony of the tonal tradition.

Rhythm: Messiaen rejected traditional Western meters entirely. He worked with durations rather than meter, employed non-retrogradable rhythms (palindromic patterns that read the same forwards and backwards), and incorporated the notated rhythms of birdsong. For Messiaen, rhythm was the “realm of time, ruled by the divine.”

Birdsong: Messiaen was the first major European composer to systematically transcribe and incorporate specific birdsongs into his music. Works like Le merle noir (The Blackbird, 1952) and the massive Catalogue d’oiseaux (Catalogue of Birds, 1956–58) are built entirely from notated bird calls.

Quartet for the End of Time (1940–41, NAWM 210)

The Quartet for the End of Time was composed in a German prisoner-of-war camp — Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Silesia. Remarkably, one of the guards — a classical music lover who recognized Messiaen as a prominent composer — allowed him manuscript paper, a private space to compose, and protection from disturbance. The work was first performed on January 15, 1941, in unheated barracks before an audience of prisoners and guards.

The instrumentation — clarinet, violin, cello, and piano — was dictated by the musicians available in the camp.

The work’s title and inspiration come from the Book of Revelation:

“I saw a mighty angel descending from heaven, clothed in a cloud having a rainbow on his head. His face was as the sun, his feet as columns of fire… and he raised his hand towards heaven and swore by him who lives forever and ever, saying: ‘There will be no more time…’”

The eight movements are:

I. “Liturgie de cristal” (Liturgy of Crystal)

The first movement is Messiaen’s first composition to include depictions of specific birdsongs and one of the first works in history to apply numerical organization to multiple musical parameters — pitch, duration, dynamics, and mode of attack (timbre).

The violin plays the song of the nightingale (unpredictable, improvisatory); the clarinet plays the song of the blackbird (equally unpredictable). Against these, the cello and piano play in a system of overlapping, non-coinciding cycles:

The cello plays a repeating series of 5 pitches (C–E–D–F♯–B♭, drawn from modes of limited transposition), presented three times within a rhythmic pattern of 15 durations. The rhythmic pattern is itself a palindrome.

The piano employs the medieval technique of isorhythm — a structure in which a repeating rhythmic pattern (talea) of 17 durations is combined with a repeating melodic segment (color) of 29 chords. Because 17 and 29 are coprime, the two cycles do not coincide for an enormously long time — approximately 4,000 bars, or four hours of music. The effect is one of eternal, unhurried meditation — music that seems to exist outside time itself, which is precisely Messiaen’s theological point: the “end of time” means the beginning of eternity.

Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time — Mvt. I, “Liturgie de cristal”

Extensions of Serialism: Total Serialism

The end of the Second World War was a turning point. In Europe, there was a renewed interest in serial methods, and the summer courses in new music at Darmstadt, Germany (from 1946) became a laboratory for the avant-garde. A 1953 memorial concert for Webern anointed him as “the father of the new music.”

Total serialism applies the principles of twelve-tone composition to musical parameters beyond pitch — rhythm, dynamics, tempo, timbre, articulation, and instrumentation. Messiaen himself took the first step with Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (Mode of Durations and Intensities, 1949), a piano piece organizing 36 pitches, 24 durations, 12 modes of attack, and 7 dynamic levels.

Pierre Boulez (1925–2016)

Pierre Boulez studied with Messiaen in Paris and trained in both mathematics and music. He became a world-renowned conductor while continuing to compose works of extraordinary complexity.

His Structures (1952) for two pianos was one of the first compositions based on total serialism, applying series of 12 to pitch, duration, dynamics, and articulation. Every parameter was determined by serial procedures.

Le marteau sans maître (1953–55, NAWM 211)

Le marteau sans maître (The Hammer Without a Master) sets surrealist poetry by René Char (1934) for alto voice with a chamber ensemble of alto flute, xylorimba, vibraphone, maracas, guitar, and viola — a combination that produces a dark, exotic sonority recalling Javanese gamelan. The work has nine movements arranged in three interlocking cycles, with a different group of instruments in each movement (like Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire).

Movement 6, “Bourreaux de solitude” (“Executioners of Solitude”), is in the second cycle. The vocal line is highly disjunct, incorporating glissando and Sprechstimme. Total serial procedures govern pitch, duration, dynamics, and timbres — though the procedures are so complex that the resulting surface sounds free and spontaneous rather than mechanical. The movement has a clear overall shape with a prelude and postlude; song sections alternate with instrumental interludes, and the texture thins during vocal passages.

Boulez, Le marteau sans maître — complete

John Cage — Indeterminacy and Chance

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 37: pp. 934–41
• NAWM 212: Cage, Sonatas and Interludes, Sonata V

John Cage (1912–1992)

John Cage is one of the most radical figures in the history of Western music — a composer, philosopher, and provocateur who systematically questioned every assumption about what music is, what it is for, and who controls it. He studied with both Schoenberg and Henry Cowell, beginning as a serialist before moving through percussion music, prepared piano, chance operations, and indeterminacy to arrive at a vision of music in which the composer’s ego is removed from the creative process entirely.

By 1950, living in New York and deeply influenced by Zen Buddhism, Cage conceived of music as a practice that focuses the listener on the present moment — on sounds as they are, without the imposition of meaning, narrative, or expression.

Percussion and the Organization of Time

In the 1930s and 1940s, Cage wrote percussion works influenced by Varèse and Cowell, using non-traditional instruments. A crucial shift in his thinking came from organizing music in units of time rather than pitch and rhythmic relationships — influenced by Schoenberg’s concept of organic structure and Cowell’s idea of organizing form from duration.

The Prepared Piano

Cage’s most celebrated invention was the prepared piano — a grand piano in which various objects (screws, bolts, rubber, felt) are inserted between the strings, transforming it into a one-person percussion ensemble capable of producing delicate, complex timbres reminiscent of drums, woodblocks, and gongs. Each preparation produces a different set of sounds when the corresponding keys are played on the keyboard.

Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48, NAWM 212)

Sonatas and Interludes consists of sixteen “sonatas” (brief movements, most in binary form) and four interludes, all for prepared piano. Detailed instructions specify how to prepare the piano for each movement.

Every movement features a different set of timbres and figurations.

Sonata V

Sonata V illustrates the interplay between content and durational structure. The timbral world ranges from woody to metallic: right-hand notes in the range B to E♭ have objects between the second and third strings, while the una corda pedal leaves the first string unaltered. Left-hand notes in the same range sound like tuned log drums.

The form is binary (‖: A :‖: B :‖) organized according to Cage’s square-root form: the large-scale proportions of the whole piece are reflected in each unit. The movement has 9 units of 9 bars each (= 81 bars total). The proportions within each unit (2 + 2 + 2½ + 2½ bars) mirror the proportions of the larger structure.

Cage, Sonatas and Interludes — Sonata V

The Journey to 4'33"

Several experiences converged to lead Cage toward his most radical work:

Zen Buddhism taught awareness and listening — attention to what is already present rather than what is imposed.

Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951) — canvases painted entirely white — demonstrated that a seemingly empty surface could draw attention to the play of light, shadows, and particles of dust. They were not “blank” but full of ambient visual activity.

In 1951, Cage visited an anechoic chamber — the quietest room on earth, designed to absorb all sound. He expected to experience total silence. Instead, he heard two distinct sounds: a high-pitched ringing and a low tone. When he reported this to the lab technician, he was told: “The high one was your nervous system in operation. The low one was your blood in circulation.” Cage’s conclusion was revolutionary: there is no such thing as total silence. Even in the quietest place on earth, ambient sound is always present. “Silence” is simply sounds we have not yet learned to listen to.

4'33" (1952)

4'33" is the ultimate work of indeterminacy — an approach to composition in which the composer leaves certain aspects of the music unspecified. The score consists of three movements. At the premiere, the pianist David Tudor sat at the piano, lowered the keyboard lid to begin each movement, lifted it to end each movement, and sat quietly with a stopwatch, occasionally turning pages of an empty score. He played nothing.

The premiere took place at Maverick Concert Hall, outside Woodstock, New York — a venue built in 1916 by artists as a colony for freethinkers and experimenters. Yet even this progressive audience reacted with hostility; one member reportedly called for “the good people of Woodstock” to drive these composers out of town. But Cage later reflected:

“What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering on the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”

Music of Changes (1951)

Music of Changes is one of the first pieces to explore chance operations — an approach pioneered by Cage in which decisions normally made by the composer are determined by random procedures. Cage used the ancient Chinese divination text, the I Ching (Book of Changes): tossing a coin six times produces one of 64 possible outcomes, which Cage then applied to a series of charts governing pitch, duration, dynamics, and other parameters.

The notation is proportional — a note’s position in the bar corresponds to its position in time. The result is extraordinarily difficult to perform (unusual techniques, complex rhythms), but the sounds are simply themselves — not determined by the composer’s taste, psychology, value judgments, or message. As Cage put it: “A ‘mistake’ is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.”

Cage, Music of Changes, Book I

New Sounds — Babbitt, Varèse, and Penderecki

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 37: pp. 941–49
• NAWM 214: Varèse, Poème électronique
• NAWM 215: Babbitt, Philomel, Section I
• NAWM 216: Penderecki, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima

Milton Babbitt (1916–2011)

Milton Babbitt was a professor of music at Princeton (1938–1984) and a Pulitzer Prize winner (1982) who championed the cause of twelve-tone and serial composition with intellectual rigour and polemical force. In a famous 1958 article — published under the title “Who Cares If You Listen?” (a title imposed by the editor; Babbitt preferred “The Composer as Specialist”) — he argued that serious contemporary composers, like physicists and mathematicians, are specialists whose work need not be immediately accessible to a general audience. The unprecedented divergence between composers and listeners, he maintained, was neither transitory nor necessarily bad — and composers deserved the support of universities, just as scientists did.

Philomel (1964, NAWM 215)

Philomel is described as a “monodrama for soprano, recorded soprano, and synthesized sound.” It was commissioned by the Ford Foundation for the soprano Bethany Beardslee and created at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center using the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer — the first programmable electronic synthesizer.

The text is a three-section poem by John Hollander based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the story of Philomela, a princess of Athens who was raped and had her tongue cut out by Tereus, then was transformed into a nightingale. Babbitt’s setting begins as Philomel discovers her new voice and song.

The work alternates live vocal sections with non-notated synthesizer and tape interludes. The live soprano part is extraordinarily difficult — disjunct, incorporating Sprechstimme and glissandi. The taped voice acts as a Greek chorus, response, and echo, including manipulated recorded sounds and electronic sounds. Word painting abounds: the note E is sustained for “ee,” synthesized trills accompany the word “trilled,” and real taped birdsong appears in Section II.

The serial organization is rigorous: a tone row (E–F–E♭–D–G–F♯–G♯–C–B–C♯–A–B♭) unfolds through successive transpositions so that E becomes the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th note of the row in turn. The synthesizer completes the twelve-tone aggregate for each vocal phrase. Every detail is serially determined — integral (total) serialism applied with extraordinary precision.

Electronic Music

Two approaches to electronic music emerged in the early 1950s:

Musique concrète (“concrete music”), developed in Paris, uses recorded sounds — natural, environmental, instrumental — that are manipulated through mechanical and electronic means and assembled into collages. The composer works with “concrete” sounds rather than abstract notation.

Electronic sound, developed at studios in Cologne, Milan, Tokyo, and at Columbia University in New York, uses sounds produced entirely by electronic equipment — oscillators, filters, synthesizers — manipulated through electronic devices and tape. These studios were funded by governments and grants; the work was expensive and time-consuming.

Edgard Varèse (1883–1965)

Edgard Varèse was born in France and moved to New York in 1915, where he founded the International Composers’ Guild. His influences spanned Debussy (non-developmental approach, focus on timbre), Schoenberg (pitch organization, chromatic saturation), Stravinsky (layering, block construction), and the Italian Futurists — particularly Luigi Russolo, whose Art of Noises manifesto (1913) called for music suited to an urbanized, mechanized world.

Varèse pursued what he called the “emancipation of noise” — the idea that music is simply “organized sound” and that all sounds are acceptable as raw material. He sought to depose pitch as the all-powerful generator of form, treating percussion as equal to strings and winds. His Ionisation (1929–31) is scored entirely for percussion instruments — one of the first Western concert works to do so.

Varèse conceived of musical sound as a spatial, sculpted object — bodies of sound defined by timbre, register, rhythm, and melodic gesture that move through musical space, remaining stable or being transformed.

Poème électronique (1957–58, NAWM 214)

The Poème électronique (Electronic Poem) was commissioned by the Philips Company for its pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. The architect Le Corbusier created the pavilion (with the composer-architect Iannis Xenakis designing the hyperbolic paraboloid structure), and Varèse wrote an eight-minute electronic piece played over 350 loudspeakers throughout the building, accompanied by moving coloured lights and projected images. Varèse composed the music without knowing what visuals would be shown.

The piece combines electronic sounds, non-traditional sounds, and traditional sounds (some altered electronically), recorded on three separate tracks and distributed through complex wiring to hundreds of speakers. Time is measured in seconds, not bars. Musical events relate only to one another. Dynamics are specified in decibels to create effects of spatial distance. Seven sections correspond to Le Corbusier’s colour and image scheme.

Varèse, Poème électronique — with video reconstruction of the original visual projections

Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933)

Krzysztof Penderecki studied and taught at Kraków. After the end of Stalinist rule in Poland in 1956, the government actively promoted new music — and Penderecki’s Threnody won the UNESCO Prize of the International Composers’ Jury in 1961.

Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960, NAWM 216)

Penderecki originally titled the work simply 8'37" (its duration), without programmatic intention. But upon hearing it, he recognized in its anguished soundscape an apt expression of grief and renamed it Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima — a retitling that reveals how the work’s expressive power transcended its original abstract conception. The Threnody is a tone poem for 52 strings — each player having a unique part. Traditional melody, harmony, and meter are absent. In their place, Penderecki employs a radical array of new techniques:

Notation: Time is measured in real seconds rather than metric durations. Graphic notation replaces traditional staff notation for many passages — abbreviations and symbols indicate wedges, clusters, and glissandi.

Extended techniques: Quartertone clusters (the final chord is a 52-note quartertone cluster spanning a wide range), group glissandi (bands of sound that slide up or down), and percussive effects on the instruments’ bodies.

The form is ABA’, delineated by timbres and articulations:

A (mm. 1–25): Opens with high-pitched dissonant clusters, followed by various effects in rapid succession. Sustained quartertone clusters and glissandi create thickening bands of sound. Climax at m. 19.

B (mm. 26–55): The most complex section — various sound effects organized as a three-part canon in three orchestral groups.

A’ (mm. 56–70): Repeats effects from the A section. The final gesture is a fortissimo 52-quartertone cluster sustained for thirty seconds, fading from fff to pppp.

Minimalism — Steve Reich

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 38: pp. 971–77
• NAWM 218: Reich, Come Out

Minimalism

Minimalism emerged in the early 1960s as an aesthetic reaction against the postwar complexity and difficulty of total serialism and the New York School. In both visual art and music, materials are reduced to a minimum, and procedures are simplified so that the process is immediately audible or observable.

In visual art, minimalism (from around 1965) reduced materials and forms to fundamentals. Works by Sol LeWitt and Frank Stella use repetitive patterns of simple geometric shapes. The art is not self-expressive; it does not convey feelings. But stare at LeWitt’s repetitive grids long enough, and new shapes emerge as “byproducts” of the process — patterns that are not explicitly present in the design but arise from the interaction of simple elements.

In music, minimalism is characterized by a constant pulse, many repetitions of simple rhythmic, melodic, or harmonic patterns, and gradual, audible processes of change. The leading composers of minimalist music — Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and John Adams — each developed distinctive individual approaches, but all share the commitment to audible process and reduced materials.

Steve Reich (b. 1936)

Steve Reich’s minimalism is built on several core principles: repetition of a small amount of musical material, gradual change applied to patterns, static “tonal” harmony (emphasis through repetition rather than functional progression), and a kind of virtuosity in which individual parts may be simple but their coordination is demanding. His music is often called “process music” — the compositional process is audible in the music itself.

Reich’s thinking was profoundly influenced by non-Western rhythmic traditions, particularly Ghanaian drumming, where a foundational 12-beat pattern (often played on a bell) anchors other interlocking patterns around it. Small variations create a kaleidoscopic effect — a principle that animates much of his compositional approach.

Clapping Music (1971)

Clapping Music demonstrates Reich’s technique of rotation and phase shifting with maximum simplicity. Two performers clap the same 12-beat pattern. Performer 1 repeats the unaltered pattern throughout. Performer 2 rotates the pattern, shifting one eighth-note “to the right” in each bar. Each shift creates a new composite rhythmic pattern — byproducts that emerge from the interaction of two simple, nearly identical processes. The focus is on material and process, not on personal expression.

Reich, Clapping Music

Come Out (1966, NAWM 218)

Come Out is an early minimalist experiment using a spoken verbal excerpt and the technique of phasing. The source material is a single phrase spoken by a young Black man during the Harlem Six case of 1964. When he and other teenagers intervened to protect children from police violence, they were themselves brutally beaten. Denied medical care because his injuries were not visibly bleeding, he had to reopen his own bruise to prove he was hurt. He and five others were convicted of a crime they did not commit and imprisoned for twenty years before their release. His words:

“I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.”

Two tape loops of this phrase are superimposed. Because one loop is slightly shorter than the other, it gradually moves ahead — the two copies drift out of phase, creating a shifting pattern of echoes and rhythmic interactions. The texture progressively thickens: 2 simultaneous loops become 4, then 8. As the phasing process continues, the words dissolve into pure sound — the consonants and vowels (k, m, sh, uh, oh) become musical material in their own right.

Reich, Come Out

Accessible Modernism — Pärt and Ligeti

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 38: pp. 978–79, 983–85
• NAWM 223: Pärt, Seven Magnificat Antiphons, Nos. 1 and 6
• NAWM 220: Ligeti, Étude No. 9, Vertige

A Move Toward Greater Simplicity

By the late 20^th century, many composers were seeking ways to make modernist music more accessible without abandoning its intellectual seriousness. Two composers who achieved this in strikingly different ways are Arvo Pärt and György Ligeti.

Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)

Arvo Pärt is an Estonian composer who moved to Berlin in 1980 (returning to Estonia in 2010). Inspired by Gregorian chant and early polyphony, he devised his own compositional method in the 1970s — a technique he called tintinnabuli (Latin for “ringing bells”).

The Tintinnabuli Technique

In tintinnabuli style, one voice presents a diatonic melody that moves by step around a central note, while other voices sound notes of the tonic triad, determined by a preset system. The effect is luminous, bell-like, and deeply serene — a radical simplicity that stands in stark contrast to the complexity of postwar serialism.

Seven Magnificat Antiphons (1988, rev. 1991, NAWM 223)

The Seven Magnificat Antiphons are choral antiphons sung before and after the Magnificat in the seven Vespers (evening services) before Christmas Eve.

No. 1: “O Weisheit” (O Wisdom)

The text setting is syllabic and homophonic — one note per syllable, with bar lines corresponding to the length of individual words. Half notes are assigned to each syllable, with whole notes on stressed syllables. Soprano and bass sing only every second word, with three-beat rests after each comma in the text.

The tenor carries the main melody with parallel thirds. The other voices sound notes of the A major triad: soprano and bass alternate between A and E (perfect fifths or fourths) at irregular intervals, creating the bell-like effect. The altos sing the note of the A major triad that is closest to and higher than the tenor line.

The harmonic palette is astonishingly restricted — only six harmonies appear in the entire antiphon. The first two chords outline the key centres of all seven antiphons: A–F♯–C♯–A–E–D–A.

No. 6: “O König aller Völker” (O King of All Peoples)

No. 6 uses a different application of the tintinnabuli technique. The texture has three parts: sopranos in half and whole notes, tenors and basses in the same rhythm at half the duration, and altos chanting independently on a single note (D) in quarter notes.

The opening features a canon in augmentation between second tenor (half notes) and second soprano (whole notes), both presenting a plain modal melody on A. Other parts sound notes of the D minor triad in a predetermined pattern. Compared to No. 1, there are no rests, the harmony is more varied and dissonant, and a dramatic climax builds before the end. Three different simultaneous rhythmic patterns create a texture of greater complexity.

György Ligeti (1923–2006)

György Ligeti, born in Hungary, became known for works focusing on texture and processes of change. His choral work Lux Aeterna reached a worldwide audience through its use in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

2001: A Space Odyssey — featuring Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna

Étude No. 9, Vertige (1990, NAWM 220)

Vertige (Vertigo) is the ninth of Ligeti’s eighteen études for piano (1985–2001), works that combine modern techniques (including minimalism) with the 19^th-century virtuoso tradition of Liszt — making them accessible to a wider audience while remaining technically and intellectually demanding. The title suggests the sensation of whirling, dizziness, and the false sensation of movement.

The Shepard Effect

Ligeti’s own performance instructions are as poetic as they are technical: the notes should be played so rapidly that they “almost melt into continuous lines,” and the chromatic runs should cascade “like waves from different directions” with irregular interference patterns. The central effect is a musical version of the Shepard tone — an auditory illusion of a tone that continuously descends without ever actually getting lower. Ligeti transfers this psychoacoustic phenomenon to an acoustic instrument:

Overlapping, rapidly descending scales of various lengths cascade through the same register. The notes move very fast and legato, blurring into continuous lines. Despite the constant downward motion, the music remains in the same range — creating a paradoxical aural illusion of falling without falling. The effect requires enormous pianistic skill.

The opening section presents overlapping descending lines all within the same range (B′ to A♭), producing the falling sensation without any actual descent in register. The lengths of the individual descending figures are irregular, preventing the listener from predicting the pattern.

The piece has no definable form in the traditional sense — it unfolds as a series of events marked by constant variation: expanding and contracting ranges, rising and falling registral envelopes of descending scales, and a gradual dissolution. The ending fades into nothingness.

World Interactions — Bright Sheng

Readings:

• Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ch. 38: pp. 962–65
• NAWM 217: Sheng, Seven Tunes Heard in China, “Seasons”

Bright Sheng (b. 1955)

Bright Sheng was born and trained in Shanghai. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to the remote province of Qinghai, where he learned and collected folk music — an experience that would profoundly shape his artistic vision. He later earned degrees from the Shanghai Conservatory before moving to New York, where he studied with Leonard Bernstein and Chou Wen-chung (b. 1923, a Chinese-American composer who had been a student of Varèse). Sheng’s central artistic goal is to integrate elements of Asian and Western music — not as exotic quotation or superficial fusion but as a genuine synthesis of two great traditions.

“Seasons” from Seven Tunes Heard in China (1995, NAWM 217)

Seven Tunes Heard in China is a solo suite for cello, written for the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and premiered at the University of California. The seven movements present tunes that Sheng heard in different provinces of China. “Seasons” uses a tune from Qinghai province — a mostly pentatonic Chinese melody, spun out using both Baroque and modernist techniques.

Western Foundation: The Bach Cello Suite Tradition

The piece is rooted in the Western tradition of the solo cello suite, particularly the suites of J. S. Bach. Western techniques include dance-like rhythms, double stops, motivic repetition (mm. 7–11), sequences, and simulated polyphony (mm. 7–11, where a single cello line implies two-part counterpoint).

Chinese Influence: The Erhu

The erhu is a two-stringed Chinese bowed fiddle with a distinctive playing technique that Sheng translates to the cello: glissando (sliding between notes), quick ornamental turns, freer rhythm, long notes with crescendo and vibrato, and single-finger passages (m. 1) that replicate the erhu’s characteristic sound.

Musical Features

The piece presents several short melodic ideas in a highly rhythmic manner. A is established as the central pitch through its prominence in the opening bars and the cadence at m. 12. At m. 13, the music veers toward E♭ (and ends there) — the tritone relationship (A–E♭) that has been a recurring feature throughout this course, from Bartók to Shostakovich to Scriabin.

Recurring motives — rising fourths plus descending lines (m. 1), repeated pentatonic ideas (mm. 2–3), a high D reached with vibrato followed by two pentatonic phrases and a scalar descent — are developed throughout the piece, creating a satisfying sense of organic unity from modest materials.

Sheng, “Seasons” from Seven Tunes Heard in China