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Discussion Activities

Questions on the Text

1. Which of Schoenberg's compositions were written in a post-Wagnerian manner?

2. Through what phases had Schoenberg's musical language evolved before he worked out his twelve-tone method of composition?

3. Did Schoenberg's innovative method make an immediate im­pact on most of his contemporaries? When was it fully ap­preciated?

4. What theoretical works did Schoenberg write?

5. What questions are discussed in his essay The Composition with Twelve Tones?

6. Find in this essay the passage in which Schoenberg explains his view on the artistic value of music. How did Schoenberg understand it?

7. Find in the essay the passage in which Schoenberg gives his views on the harmony of Debussy and Wagner. What made Schoenberg revise the traditional concept of tonality?

8. What does Schoenberg mean by "emancipation of the disso­nance"?

9. What, according to Schoenberg, are the main advantages of using the twelve-tone method?

Discussion Points

1. How would you interpret the following statement by Schoen­berg: "What distinguishes dissonances from consonances is not a greater or lesser degree of beauty, but a greater or lesser degree of comprehensibility"?

2. What do you think Schoenberg meant when he wrote that "the accent was not so much on the twelve tones as on the art of composing"?

3. What modifications were introduced into the twelve-tone method by Webern?

4. What are the most characteristic features of dodecaphonic mu­sic?

5. What composition did Schoenberg conduct in St. Petersburg in the 1912-13 season?

6. Why is Schoenberg regarded as the father of modern music? Why is his twelve-tone technique (also called sertalism) con­sidered one of the landmarks in the Western musical tradi­tion?

7. Which Soviet composers have used the twelve-tone technique in their works? Give examples.

8. Comment on the following statement about the composer and his audience: "In his rejection of traditional melody, harmony, rhythm, and tonality Schoenberg abandoned the basic lan­guage long shared by composer and audience. Compared with music of the previous era, Schoenberg's style reflects a new emphasis on intellectual-analytical qualities."

9. Why, in your opinion, does it sometimes happen that a mu­sician who was not appreciated in his own time gets the recognition of the following generations?

BELA BARTOK (1881-1945)

Bela Bartok (1881-1945) was born the son of a director of an agricultural school in the southern region of the Hungarian plain, and the countryside of his native land was to be an inspiration to him as a composer. He was trained at the Conservatory in Budapest and his early music shows a natural inclination to the style of Brahms and Dohnanyi,* and then of Liszt. During these years he wrote the Kossuth Overture, first performed under Hans Richter at Manchester in 1904, and a rhapsody for piano and orchestra. Then, in 1905, he undertook with his friend Zoltan Kodaly a profound and scientific study of the true folk music of Hungary, Slovakia and Rumania.



The two musicians travelled through the villages with a phono­graph, complete with a stock of waxed cylinders, to record not only the music but the performances of peasant musicians. The result of this, the first great exercise in folk musicology in the field, was 16,000 recordings. The outcome of his discoveries decided Bartok to break away from the confines of tonality. He became interested in a form of melody derived from the most ancient pentatonic Magyar airs* and with rhythms both firm and complex like those of folk songs, and he also experimented with popular Hungarian instruments, among which percussion plays a major role. However, Bartok was by no means in the general run of "folklore" composers. It is relatively rare for him to borrow textually from popular folk music, nor does he compose in a "folk" idiom, as did Liszt, the Russians, Grieg and many others. Rather, he was inspired by his fundamental studies of the creative principles of folk art to write profoundly original music. In 1908 he himself became teacher of the piano at the Academy, Budapest. During the inter-war years Bartok found himself increas­ingly out of sympathy with the rightist Horthy regime, and this was possibly a factor that led him to resign his teaching post in 1934 to devote himself exclusively to research into folk music. Then, in 1940, disgusted by Hungary's rapprochement with Nazi Germany and the increasingly extreme tendencies of the government, the sixty-year-old composer left his native country for the United States. There he was given an honorary professorship at Columbia University and sup­ported himself as a pianist. When he died in 1945 he was a poor man and his funeral was attended by only a few friends.

Throughout his life Bartok, whose research took him not only through Hungary and the neighbouring territories but also to Bul­garia, Turkey and North Africa, tried to prove scientifically that these traditions had common roots. As a composer he soon realised that to use this new material he would have to invent a new musical language, free from the traditional rules of harmony and from the limitations imposed on rhythms by the use of bars. Liszt had antici­pated much of this, but Bartok's final liberation from tradition was stimulated by Debussy, whose work he first heard in 1905. Bartok's resultant synthesis was a minutely elaborated, coherent and original language.

From: The Larousse Encyclopedia of Music


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 759


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