Category: Modernism

  • Composing Irony

    The round tune “Frère Jacques” (Brother John) is known across cultures and languages in Europe. In German, it’s called “Bruder Martin” or “Bruder Jakob.” In the third movement of his Symphony no. 1 in D minor, Gustav Mahler presents us with a sardonic, funeral-march like version of the song in minor. He was inspired by…

  • Time and Space from Beethoven to 1913

    (Variation V m. 30 from the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 32 in C minor, op. 111.) In 1913, an art exhibit was mounted at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in New York City (around the corner from where Hunter College is now located). This exhibit, which came to be known…

  • Is it Composed? Is it Improvised?

    George Crumb (1929 – ) wrote Apparition, a song cycle for soprano and amplified piano, in 1979. The text is taken from Walt Whitman’s elegy on the death of Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” considered one of the greatest of all American poems. Crumb used the following excerpts from the poem: The night in…

  • From the Village to the Concert Hall

    Bartók recording folk music. His subject sings into the horn of an Edison phonograph, which incised a cylinder disk with a needle. Bela Bartók was one of the earliest ethnomusicologists. Here is a field recording he made of Romanian folk dances. Here is his piano composition entitle Romanian Folk Dances. Here is a folk song he…

  • Clair de lune

    Nuit du carnaval (Henri Rousseau, 1886). In an art song, there are many layers of meaning. There is the meaning of the sounds of the music. There is the meaning of the words of the text. There is also the meaning of the sounds of the words themselves. Listen to the sounds of the text read in French.…

  • Pierrot

    Pierrot and Harlequin (Pablo Picasso, 1920). Pierrot is one of the stock characters of commedia dell’arte, an improvised form of theater that was performed by traveling players throughout Italy and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is a sad clown, in love with the stock heroine of commedia, Colombina (Columbine), who in turn is…

  • The Alliances that Led to WWI

    Europe in 1914. The multiple alliances that led to the European conflagration This sums it up: