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Questions on the Text

1. Name the most important compositions by Tippett.

2. Discuss Tippett's treatment of musical tradition.

3. When was the oratorio A Child of Our Time written? When was it first' performed?

4. What are the literary and philosophical sources of the libretto?

5. What message does the oratorio convey?

6. Briefly outline the plot of the oratorio.

7. Find in the text the passage which describes the resemblance between Tippett's oratorio and Bach's Passions. What features are characteristic of Tippett's style?

8. Make a summary of the texts and use it to reproduce the main points orally.

EXPERIMENTAL (AVANT-GARDE) MUSIC

Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky opened up certain pathways to modern music. Although we have discovered that each had important connections to the European notated tradition, their musical languages represented a distinct break with long-established practices. Their music exemplified the single most important trait of modernism: Anything is possible. No tradition is sacred; it is the composer (or artist, or writer) who makes his or her own rules. As trailblazers,* they may be considered first-generation moderns (although both Stravinsky and Schoenberg continued to compose and influence the musical culture for some time). But what happens with the second and third generations, for whom the music of Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg represents the traditional? It is in these composers' works that the full impact of modernism is felt. We will consider three later moderns - Messiaen, Ligeti, and Stockhausen - chosen from a field of many possibilities.

From: Music: A Living Language by T. Manoff

OLIVIER MESSIAEN

Messiaen (b. 1908) à French composer, organist, and teacher, was born into a literary family: his father was a professor of literature and translator of Shakespeare, and his mother a poet, Cécile Sauvage. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Dukas* (composition) and Dupré* (organ) and himself became a teacher at the Ecole Normale de Musique and the Schola Cantorum. Since 1931 he has been organist at La Trinité, Paris. In 1936 with Bau­drier,* Lesur* and Jolivet* he formed the group known as La Jeune France.* In 1940 he was imprisoned by the Nazis (his Quartet for the End of Time reflects his period in a concentration camp) but he was subsequently repatriated and in 1942 he became a teacher of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire (later he taught analysis and composition). His pupils have included Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Goehr. Though his musical roots seem to lie in César Franck

and to some extent in Berlioz, Messiaen is one of the most original of modern composers, and one of the most influential. His musical language makes use of diverse but (in his case) surprisingly compati­ble sound sources - birdsong, Indian music, plainsong, the timbres of oriental percussion, Franckian harmony, Bartokian night-music - which he employs to immensely spacious and powerful effects. A lifelong Catholic, he uses nature (birds, mountains, etc.) as symbols of divinity in works such as Oiseaux exotiques* (1956) for piano and wind instruments, the vast Catalogue d'oiseaux* (1956-58) for piano and Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorem (1964) for woodwind, brass and percussion - a work designed to be performed in the open air, on mountain slopes, where its great gong-strokes and silences would surely find the surroundings they deserve. Messiaen gave a new di­mension of colour and intensity to organ music, making special use of acoustic reverberations and contrasts of timbres. His harmony, rich and chromatic, derives from Debussy's use of the 7ths and 9ths and modal progressions of chords.* In his orchestral works he makes use of the ondes Martenot* in the vast Turangalila-symphonie* and exotic percussion instruments, giving an oriental effect. Birdsong is also a major feature of his music. His treatment of rhythm is novel, involving irregular metres, some of them originating in ancient Greek procedures.



From: Collins Encyclopedia of Music; The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1096


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