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Wednesday 10 March 2021

Kerry's Corner #9 The Rise of New Age Music

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.


Prokofiev


His compatriots Prokofiev and Shostakovich made great strides and offerings to music of the 20th century…..Prokofiev-ballets, operas and concertos, and Shostakovich-symphonies and string quartets.

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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