Kerrys Corner – The Rise
of New Age
Hello Music Lovers it’s “Kerry’s Corner” time again, this is my 9th article, where I delve into the lives and works of the GREAT COMPOSERS!
Claude Debussy
The Rise Of A New Age
The harmonic tonal framework of the Baroque and Classical
eras remained common currency until the turn of the 20th century,
when the magic of impressionism came to the fore. Of course we all know of
Debussy, and how he loosened the hold of tonality.
And…….at the same time in Germany, the Expressionist Arnold
Schoenberg was working on a completely new harmonic system, based on the principle
of the ‘equality’ of the 12 notes of the Western scale.
Arnold Schoenberg
Schoenberg’s 12-note system destroyed common harmony as we
know it, and a lot of people didn’t like it, even to this day he is considered
a ‘difficult’ composer, however he had a lot of influence on future composers
such as Berg, Webern and Messiaen.
The innovations of Debussy and Schoenberg, coupled with raw
and exotic harmonies and rhythms of Russian folk music, went on to massively
influence Stravinsky, and especially his works entitled The Firebird and The
Rite Of Spring.
Stravinsky
Stravinsky always tried to keep in fashion with his music,
and near the end of his life produced a string of original masterpieces and
constantly reinventing his style, to accommodate changing tastes.
Shostakovich
Moving into Central Europe now with two others, namely Bela Bartok and Janacek, Bartok was a maniacal collector of Folk Songs, and Mr. J’s operas are now very famous masterpieces.
Bartok
Janacek
The political scene in Europe in the mid-20th
century, drove many fine composers into exile to America, including Schoenberg
and Bartok, (must interject here with a little memory I have of Mr B ……as part
of my studies many years ago now, I had to study the score of Bartok’s
“Concerto for Orchestra’, on the face of it that doesn’t seem so bad, but
unfortunately Bartok never used ‘key-signatures’ in his work, one of the first
to do so, consequently then virtually every other note had a sharp or flat sign
in front of it which meant the score looked like a million baby spiders
crawling all over it! Certainly
concentrated my mind), but the USA had its own home-grown composers such as
Aaron Copeland, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Ives and John Cage. The latter
experimented with new composing techniques like the ‘Prepared-Piano’ where he
attached many bizarre objects like laundry pegs to the piano strings to see
what that sounded like … and of course his ‘silent’ composition’ where nobody
plays anything for over 4 minutes!
John Cage above, ‘preparing’ a piano!
And then there was Aleatory music (music by chance) and
Polytonality (music played in different keys at the same time), blimey what a
cacophony!
Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed my rather ‘alternative’ article,
and I’m off to compose some silence at the piano … brilliant, just finished it.
Enjoy this marvellous video below of part of Stravinsky’s
“Rite Of Spring”
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