Discussion Activities

Questions on the Text about Ligeti

1. In what areas is Ligeti's music especially inventive?

2. What effect does it have on the receptive listener?

3. How does Ligeti use the traditional technique of composition? Give examples.

4. To what school does Ligeti belong, in your opinion?

About Stockhausen and Experimental Composers

1. Briefly outline Stockhausen's career as a composer and teacher. Name his main works. Why is he regarded as the leader of the electronic avant-garde? What innovations did he bring into music?

2. Speak about his work Momente. What does the word Moment imply for Stockhausen?

3. What is the "open form" in Stockhausen's concept? How does he use it? What is the role of improvisation in the perfor­mance of his works?

4. Which composers contributed to the development of the tech­niques of new music after World War II? Comment on the most daring experiments in music.

5. What new information have you found in this part of the book? Will it be useful to you in your work?

Questions about Western Music of the 20th Century

1. Since 1900 we have seen more drastic changes in our way of life than man has yet known. But somehow we have ex­pected our musicians to continue as they did in previous times, producing a music of romantic feeling and sentiment while we live in a mechanical world. Music of the 20th cen­tury held no future if it was only to become more national­istic, more romantic, or more realistic - it must in some way reflect the age in which it is created. How far, in your opinion, is this a true statement?

2. Can it be that some day the instruments familiar to us will be banished to museums and our orchestras abolished? Or perhaps a wonderful and undiscovered world of sound lies ahead of us? What is your opinion?

3. How do you understand Varese's statement that "the elec­tronic medium has added an unbelievable variety of new tim­bres to our musical store and has freed music from tempered system, which has prevented music from keeping pace with other arts and science"?

4. Would Mozart have composed The Magic Flute in a machine age? Would Felix Mendelssohn have composed the Overture

to a Midsummer Nights Dream in 1826 if a railroad had run near his family's private estate in Berlin? How would Stock­hausen's Momente sound in Mendelssohn's garden? Give your opinion on the influence of industrialization on the listener.

5. How would you interpret the following statement by Robert Schumann: "If Mozart were alive today he would write piano concertos not of the type Mozart wrote but of the type Chopin wrote"?

6. Did you go to any of the concerts at The Third International

Festival of Contemporary Music held in Leningrad in 1988? What compositions made the strongest impression on you? Why?

7. Do you agree that modern music, as we have come to know it, appears less unique and strange, that today's musical audience is coming to know this music with increasing sympathy? Give arguments to support your view.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 843