20th Century, and Popular Music! :)

   I want to talk about the class presentation first. I am thinking about talking about particular bands... Either Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, but that might be cliche. Or I could just do a blog post about one of the two. I'm sure yet. But anyway...

20th century and popular music is what I'm going to talk about in this post. Well I think I should start with the Beatles. To me, they are different from any band I've ever heard. The way they drew people in to listen to them was so clever. They attracted so many different audiences. From my great grandmother to my little sister, the Beatles are liked by anyone. And their songs, there are so many perfect songs that I can't even pick a favorite, or even a ''Top 5". They changed their style a lot, I think so people wouldn't get bored of them.
The Rolling Stones and The Who came next with the British invasion, which the Beatles of course started. ;) Their music also amazes me, even if it is way older than me. I would prefer to listen to it over any of today's music.
The Doors. In the 60s, they were different than anything that had ever been heard. The melodies and harmonies get stuck in my head easier than anything. And the rhythm they had was amazing. I've read several books about them, and a few about Morrison's life before and after the Doors. And Pink Floyd! One of my favorite bands in the world. Everything about Pink Floyd is perfect to me. Their lyrics are strange and inspiring, and the music behind those lyrics just draw you in and take you to a different place it seems...
Led Zeppelin came out in the late 60s, about 1968. The videos I've watched of their earlier shows were amazing. The audience were just sitting there, and it looked like they were in a trance. I would be too. They dominated the 70's, but in 1980 after Bonham passed on, they were done. I thought it was really classy that they didn't find a replacement.

Jazz Music

     Jazz is a musical tradition and style of music that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the now, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th century American popular music. Its West African styles are evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, and swung notes.

     From its beginnings in the early 20th century jazz has spawned a variety of subgenres: New Orleans Dixieland dating from the early 1910s, big band-style swing from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s, a variety of Latin jazz fusions such as Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz, free jazz from the 1950s and 1960s, jazz fusion from the 1970s, acid jazz from the 1980s, and Nujazz in the 1990s. As the music has spread around the world it has drawn on local, national, and regional musical cultures, its characteristics being adapted to its despite its varied starting points, and causing new genres to erupt.

     Improvisation is clearly one of its key elements. Early blues were very repetitive and used a call-and-response pattern, a common element in the African American oral tradition. These features are fundamental to the nature of jazz. While in European classical music elements of interpretation, ornamentation and accompaniment are sometimes left to the performer's discretion, the performer's primary goal is to play a composition just as it was written.
In jazz, however, the muisician will interpret a tune in very individual ways, never playing the same composition exactly the same way twice. Depending upon the performer's mood and personal experience, interactions with fellow musicians, or even members of the audience, a jazz musician/performer may alter melodies, harmonies or time signature at will.

In New Orleans and Dixieland jazz, performers took turns playing the melody, while others improvised. By the swing era, big bands were coming to rely more on arranged music: arrangements were either written or learned by ear and memorized—many early jazz performers could not read music. Individual soloists would improvise within these arrangements. Later, in bebop, the focus shifted back towards small groups; the melody would be stated briefly at the start and end of a piece but the core of the performance would be the series of improvisations in the middle. Later styles of jazz such as modal jazz abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression, allowing the individual musicians to improvise even more freely within the context of a given scale or mode. The avant-garde and free jazz idioms permit, even call for, abandoning chords, scales, and rhythmic meters.

Serialism

In 1923, Arnold Schoenberg developed a new technique of composing music. He called this the "twelve tone system". He used all twelve notes in the octave. At that time, music was played in the same key until this new system of course. In twelve tone music, all 12 notes are equal and there is no key note. It's called "atonal". All music at the time was tonal, and composers seemed to think that every new way of writing and composing had already been done. Notes were organized so that similar notes were heard together, in the same key, making beautiful sounds that were great to listen to. In twelve tone music however, no note was repeated until the eleven others were heard..

To me, serialism is not very pleasing to listen to. It sounds like someone is picking up an instrument for the first time and trying to play it. But it is also brilliant to me because of the way it is written. It can be written in codes. Like taking a series of numbers and assigning each number a random note. This is why it's called serialism; like serial numbers on a manufactured item.

Schoenberg taught two pupils that later became a little famous for their work. (Alban Berg and Anton Webern) Soon, others who could understand and appreciate twelve tone music began to write it in a slightly different way. Benjamin Britten added tonal music AND atonal music together. I think this sounded a lot better than plain atonal music.

Serialism

Romantic Music!

The Romantic era produced many more composers whose names and music are still familiar and popular today: Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Schubert, Chopin, and Wagner are perhaps the most well-known, but there are plenty of others who may also be familiar, including Strauss, Verdi, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Puccini, and Mahler. Ludwig van Beethoven, possibly the most famous composer of all, is harder to place. His early works are from the Classical period and are clearly Classical in style. But his later music, including the majority of his most famous music, is just as clearly Romantic. (Beethoven wrote 9 symphonies, 32 piano sonatas, 16 string quartets, ten violon sonatas, and a few piano trios).

Sometimes a new style of music happens when composers forcefully reject the old style. Early Classical composers, for example, were determined to get away from what they considered the excesses of the Baroque style. Modern composers also were consciously trying to invent something new and very different.

The romantic era lasted from 1850 to about 1910.

The main difference between Classical and Romantic music came from attitudes towards these "rules". In the eighteenth century, composers were primarily interested in forms, melodies, and harmonies that provided an easily-audible structure for the music. In the first movement of a sonata, for example, each prescribed section would likely be where it belonged, the appropriate length, and in the proper key. In the nineteenth century, the "rules" that provided this structure were more likely to be seen as boundaries and limits that needed to be explored, tested, and even defied. For example, the first movement of a Romantic sonata may contain all the expected sections as the music develops, but the composer might feel free to expand or contract some sections or to add unexpected interruptions between them. The harmonies in the movement might lead away from and back to the tonic just as expected, but they might wander much further afield than a Classical sonata would, before they make their final return.

It was also acceptable for music to clearly be from a particular place. People of many eras enjoyed an opera set in a distant country, complete with the composer's version of exotic-sounding music. But many nineteenth-century composers (including Weber, Wagner, Verdi, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Grieg, Dvorak, Sibelius,and Albeniz) used folk tunes and other aspects of the musical traditions of their own countries to appeal to their public. Much of this nationalistic music was produced in the post-Romantic period, in the late nineteenth century; in fact, the composers best known for folk-inspired classical music in England (Holst and Vaughan Williams) and the U. S. (Ives, Copland, and Gershwin) were twentieth-century composers who composed in Romantic, post-Romantic, or Neoclassical styles instead of embracing the more severe Modernist styles.

Some of the characteristics of romanic music were this:

• A freedom in form and design; a more intense personal expression of emotion in which fantasy, imagination and a quest for adventure play an important part.
• Emphasis on lyrical, songlike melodies; adventurous modulation; richer harmonies, often chromatic, with striking use of discords.
• Greater sense of ambiguity: especially in tonality or harmonic function, but also in rhythm or meter.
• Denser, weightier textures with bold dramatic contrasts, exploring a wider range of pitch, dynamics and tone-colours.
• Expansion of the orchestra, sometimes to gigantic proportions; the invention of the valve system leads to development of the brass section whose weight and power often dominate the texture.
• Rich variety of types of piece, ranging from songs and fairly short piano pieces to huge musical canvasses with lengthy time-span structures with spectacular, dramatic, and dynamic climaxes.
• Closer links with other arts lead to a keener interest in programme music (programme symphony, symphonic poem, concert overture).
• Greater technical virtuosity – especially from pianists, violinists and flautists.

Here's a link to more information. http://library.thinkquest.org/15413/history/history-rom.htm

Amadeus

Amadeus is a movie based on the lives of the 2 composers Mozart and Salieri in the 18th century. It is set in Vienna, Austria.

It starts by showing Salieri as an old man. He locked himself in a room, and tried to kill him as he yelled apologies for killing Mozart. I thought he was dead in the beginning, but he didn't. Then, he is out into an asylum. A priest comes in to talk to him about what happened, and to get a confession. Salieri doesn't really want to talk to the priest at first, but he ends up talking to him.

Salieri tells how he wanted to become a composer at an early age. His father wanted him to do something else, but when his father suddenly choked at dinner, Salieri took it as a sign. He thought God wanted him to be a composer. It flashes forward to Salieri as an adult, a court composer in Vienna. Salieri next meets Mozart, but they weren't really introduced. His opinion of him completeky changes, and he thinks he is childish.

Salieri had prepared a Welcome March for Mozart as he met the emperor, and the emperor and his court thought it was great. But Mozart, only hearing it once, played it for them again adding things to it and making it better. Salieri wasn't too happy about this, and he started to envy Mozart even more. But he still thinks his music is perfect and amazing.

Salieri decides to disguise himself as Mozart's father, and asks him to write a requiem mass. He gives him money, and promises there will be a lot more. Mozart doesn't know that as soon as he writes it, Salieri's plot to kill him will work. Salieri doesn't think about how he will kill Mozart, he only thinks about how the court will praise him when he steals Mozart's work.

Mozart continues to srruggle financially, and work on the pieces, soon causing his wife to leave him. He finally finishes, but collapses during the performance from exhaustion. The movie ends with Salieri finishing his story to the priest, who is shocked. He says that God killed Mozart, and is taken away in his wheelchair.

I think this was a great movie overall, but it isn't historically accurate. From what I have read, they were only accquaintances in their time. Mozart supposedly died of a fever...

http://www.ask.com/wiki/Amadeus_(film) I got most of my information from here. http://www.csci-snc.com/WhatKilledMozart.htm

Baroque Period

      The Baroque Period was during 1600 to 1750. The baroque period can be put into three 50 year sub groups: Early Baroque, Middle Baroque, and Late Baroque.

      During the Early Baroque period, Monteverdi was a popular Italian composer. His music marked the transition from the Renaissance period to the Baroque period. Some say he was one of the earliest composers using polyphony. He also wrote one of the earliest operas, L'Orfeo. It is still performed today.

      In the Middle Baroque period, Henry Purcell and Jean Baptiste Lully were famous.. Lully was a French composer whose music was known for its power and liveliness but also for its deep emotion.  Some of his most popular works are his passacaille and chaconne which are dance movements. He introduced ballets and rhythm. Lully's music is still played regularly via recordings at the Palace of Versailles during the summertime in the gardens. Henry Purcell was an English composer however. His music incorporated Italian and French elements into it, but it was still considered a unique form of English music.

      In the Late Baroque period, several composers were well known. Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi were some of them.
Bach was a court musician who eventually became a composer. His family was also full of composers and musicians and such. (he was German)  His most famous works include The Brandenberg Concertos, Well-Tempered Clavier and Art of the Fugue. His fame during his lifetime was mostly due to his skills on the organ, but he today he is viewed as an excellent composer.
Handel was a European composer who is well known for writing an oratorio called Messiah. He composed operas while still living in Germany. He later lived in Italy. Handel's most famous works include Water Music, Music for the Royal Fireworks and Zadok the Priest.
Vivaldi was an Italian priest who became a composer. During his time, he was a very influential composer. He is known mainly for composing concertos, (mostly for the violin) as well as 40 operas. His best known violin concerto is The Four Seasons.
After the Baroque period, what is known as the Classical period came ''next''. Music from the Baroque period is appreciated today, and still influences artists.
I got a lot of my information from this website. http://www.ask.com/wiki/Baroque_music 

(to be continued, still need to add pictures and more links...)