Music 14: Contemporary Music Living Music (Classical Music of the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries) Dustin Donahue
Music 14: Contemporary Music �Living Music (Classical Music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries) �
Dustin Donahue
Defining ‘classical’ music
Composer
Text (Musical Notation)
(Reading) Performer
(Passive) Audience
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
The Rite of Spring (1913)
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) Quartet for the End of Time, VII. (1941)
World War
• 36.5 million casualties
• Equivalent to the entire pre-war population of France
• 19 million of which were civilian
• ca. 4.9 million European Jews (over half the pre-war number)
• Entire cities systematically destroyed (Warsaw, Dresden)
• Left 25 million homeless in the Soviet Union
• 20 million in Germany
Warsaw (1944)
Dresden (1945)
After the War: The Music of ‘Forgetting’
Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black (1921)
Wassily Kandinsky, Gentle Ascent (1934)
Olivier Messiaen Mode de valeurs et d’intensite (1949) • Pitch
– Chromatic: use of all available pitches (think every note on a piano)
• Rhythm/Duration • Articulation • Dynamic
• Serial music / serialism: – Music in which the entire work is derived from a particular sequence of
notes.
John Cage (1912-1992) Sonatas and Interludes (1948) • Timbre
• Prepared Piano
Inside John Cage’s prepared piano