I'll Never Ever Forget Wozzeck

            This semester in Music History: Contemporary has been chalk full of a wide variety of music, ranging from symphonies to jazz to movie scores.  I can honestly say that, before this class, I hadn’t heard most of this music.  While much of it was unique and interesting enough to make a lasting impression in my mind, one work really sticks out in my brain.  The composer Alban Berg and his opera Wozzeck was an experience unlike one I had ever had, and I believe I will remember it long after this class is completed and over.

            I think that the main reason this work sticks with me is because of how uncomfortable it made me feel when I watched it.  As I said before, it wasn’t like anything I had encountered before.  I personally like my opera tonal, with beautiful costumes and sets, and making sense.  I could not find any of these characteristics in the opera Wozzeck when I first watched it.  Going back to my blog from the Berg week, I wrote

The very first time I had ever heard Berg’s Wozzeck was on Monday afternoon when I watched a performance of it in the listening room upstairs in Jensen.  I can only imagine what my face must have looked like throughout the hour and 40 minutes of the opera.  This opera is unlike anything I have ever heard or seen before in my 21 years of life.  Without any background information on the work, I was at a complete loss as to how this positions itself into my musical world.

The costumes were very minimal and simple.  They were clothing that I’ve seen people wear before, and yet there was something disconcerting about them.  The child of Wozzeck and Marie wore a white mask the whole time, which from beginning to end creeped me out.

The set was even more unusual and unconventional.  It felt like the entire stage was a giant box the actors were in.  The ground they walked on was moveable, huge and rolled out as the scene changed.  The set designers used abnormal shapes for things.  Marie’s house was bright red, but only the size of a dog house.  Sometimes a wooden floor hung down from wires and swayed back and forth, with people on it acting out scenes.  One scene, with the doctor, Wozzeck’s employer, and Wozzeck, there is a tower that they can climb up; instead of it just being a tower, however, it’s a giant pyramid.

            The music and plot line were very distressing to me as well.  One scene in particular that I remember is scene 4, when Wozzeck goes to visit the doctor.  It is in this scene that the audience finds out Wozzeck has been part of bizarre medical experiments with outrageous rules, like not being allowed to cough, and a rigid diet that must be followed.  Wozzeck can’t stop coughing though, and this angers the doctor.  Wozzeck goes into what the synopsis of the opera describes as “an outburst of hallucinatory insanity.”  The doctor is very happy about this, and believes that he will become famous with his discoveries with Wozzeck.  The music that coincides this scene sounds sinister and a little fantastical, especially as Wozzeck goes into his outburst.  It is obvious that something bad is happening during this scene just by listening to the music.  The idea of a doctor purposely making his patient go crazy is disturbing, and yet that is what the premise of the opera is.

            Another scene that is unsettling is the last scene of the opera.  This is the morning after Wozzeck kills his wife and then dies himself.  Their child is outside playing with the other children, when another child runs up and says that his mother is dead, but the child doesn’t seem to understand.  He continues to play on his horse as the other children all run away to the pond.  The music during this scene has a childlike quality to it, and yet puts a chill down my spine when I listen to it.  The innocence of the children singing is ruined by the orchestra underneath it, and the overall tone of the final scene is, well, creepy.

            For all of the spine tingling moments of the opera, there was one part of it that I really enjoyed listening to: Marie’s Cradle Song from Act 1.  I thought that this was a beautiful part of a very harsh-sounding opera.  We looked at this particular song a little more in depth in class that week.  There are tonal aspects to the piece that create the softer sounds.  Quartal and quintal harmonies are found in this song, along with simplistic harmony, like a chord in one measure.  Marie is singing a lullaby to her child, and it is a pretty moment in the opera.

            Overall, this opera by Berg is one that will stick with me for a long time.  I didn’t even know that things like this work existed before watching Wozzeck.  While it’s not something I think I would ever want to watch again, it definitely held my attention throughout the entire show, and kept me interested.  While a lot of music we listened to this semester did this, nothing struck a chord in me quite like Berg’s Wozzeck.

Steve Reich Post

A very poignant part of our world’s history is, without question, the Holocaust in Europe during WWII.  A piece of music that is truly inspiring about this time is ‘Different Trains’, composed by Steve Reich.  Reich was born in New York on October 3, 1936 in New York.  When he was just 1 year old, his parents divorced and his mother moved to Los Angeles.  Because they settled on joint custody, Reich spent much of his early childhood with a governess Virginia on a train travelling back and forth between the two.  As an adult looking back on this experience, he realized that, if he were a Jew living in Europe when he was taking these train rides, it would have been different trains and very different destinations.  The structure of this piece is separated into 3 parts.  The first is tape of his governess Virginia reminiscing about the train trips between Los Angeles and New York with Reich.  The second part is tape of 3 Holocaust survivors who had moved to America speaking about their experiences in concentrations camps.  The third is using both tapes together.

Today we will be listening to 3 different moments in the work that are interesting to listen to and think about in context to the subject.  In the first movement, we are listening to Virginia talk, and the music being played is symbolizing the chugging of the train.  She says things like “From Chicago to New York” and “one of the fastest trains.”  At 6:22 of this movement, her words change and are no longer about this trip.  Instead, she starts stating dates, saying “in 1939”, “1939”, “1940”, 1941”, “1941 I guess it must have been.”  As the words change to these dates, the music changes as well.  It speeds up quite dramatically here, and it feels like we’re racing towards a different place than New York or Chicago; we’re moving towards the war.

In the first minute of the 2^nd movement, the mood of the music has become much more scary.  There are sirens going on, and there is more a sense of urgency.  The words are “1940” (Rachella), “on my birthday”, “The Germans walked in”, “walked into Holland”.  At 0:55, however, things change again.  The narration says “Germans invaded Hungary” (Paul) and the music changes with it.  The rhythms slow down a little, and the tone of the siren becomes lower in pitch.  The sense of urgency becomes less as the Germans take over Hungary.  The train feeling of the strings aren’t as fast as the first movement either.  The need to get their passengers to their destination becomes less, because it is no longer paying customers, but Jews.

The last moment of the work we’ll be listening to is in the 3^rd movement.  The last part of the whole work is very interesting.  The music of the strings has a more hopeful feel to it.  At 7:29, the words are “There was one girl, who had a beautiful voice” (Rachella), “and they loved to listen to the singing, the Germans” “and when she stopped singing they said, ‘More, more’ and they applauded.”  The words and the music give an idea of hope, until the words stop and the instruments end.  At the very end of the piece, the strings slow down, fade in and out, and then fade out completely, much like a train does as it stops.  Where has the train stopped?  It is in Los Angeles to see Steve Reich’s mother?  Or is it at the concentration camp that Rachella, Paul, or Rachel lived?  What does it say that Reich is comparing his train trips to those of the concentration camp survivors?  Is it politically correct for him to do so?  In the end, the work creates a lot of questions, and is an excellent piece of work about the Holocaust.

Coltrane Blog Post

Much like the painting by Pat Steir, I created a work of art that showed my process in the end result.  I used a crayon and pencil medium, which is represented in the lower left-hand part of the picture. Up the side of the left are boxes of the colors utilized in the picture, along with a rough pencil sketch of the leaf I was replicating through the picture. The purpose of this work is to see a leaf through the stages of its life, from green and newly alive to brown and dead. If I could expand on it, there would be more leafs, and a more subtle change of colors throughout the cycle.  The process to creating this idea is much like Coltrane's musical sketch, where you get an idea of what he's planning, a riff of the music, and then notes in the margins explaining his thought processes and where he would be going with the work.

Cage, Anderson, Golijov, and Myself

           In this third unit of the class, we have studied three composers, whose musical and aesthetic philosophies are very distinct.  The first composer we studied was John Cage.  He had many ideas about music that were revolutionary at the time.  One of these ideas was the aesthetics of silence.  He believed that silence wasn’t just the absence of sound; it’s a musical object that is equal to others.  He utilized this aesthetic in his piece 4’33”.  In this piece, the performer sits at a piano, and there is silence for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.  The idea is that the audience is listening to the sounds inside the silence.  A musical philosophy that Cage worked through is the idea of umberto ecco, or moment form.  In this idea, each moment in time had nothing to do with the moment before or the moment after.  This philosophy can be seen in many of his works, including Atlas Eclipticalis.  In this piece, there are no tempo markings, measures, or note durations notated.  Each musician is given the music with their part hi-lighted, and it is set up with the time of 60 second intervals.  Each musician decides when it is the time to play their note, depending on how fast or slow they are keeping track of the 60 seconds.  The musician also decides what pitch to play, and how long the note will be held.  Each note has nothing to do with the one before it, or the one after it. 

            The next composer we studied was Laurie Anderson.  Her musical and aesthetic philosophies are both unique like Cage’s, and nothing like Cage’s.  For Anderson, music is as much expressed through the body as through the music itself.  This is evident when watching her performances, like her video of “O Superman.”  Her use of her body through shadows to illustrate her song is almost like a dance.  The song by itself creates an interesting experience, but the song with her performing it creates a whole new, unique experience.  Her philosophy on using the body is also apparent with her drum dance, where she uses technology hooked to her clothes to create the music, as she dances and hit herself in different places to create different sounds.  Technology is also another big part of Anderson’s philosophy on music.  She breaks the barriers of “Man vs Technology” with her music, and is fascinated with using technology to create her music.  Many of her songs, like “Let X=X” has the use of a vocodor, which takes the sounds and words she makes and sings, and creates chords with them.  

            The last composer is Osvaldo Golijov.  He has very different philosophies than the previous two composers.  His musical philosophy works with using different kinds of music to create something unique and not what the audience is expecting.  A big example of this is his work La Pasión según San Marcos.  This piece incorporates a lot of different music, such as Latin, South American, and European.  The text that he uses, while in Spanish, is very true to the story and text we hear in European passions.  The rhythms and beats are very much Latin.  He is quoted as saying “…the main thing in this Passion is to present a dark Jesus, and not a pale European Jesus.  It’s going to be about Jesus’ last days on earth seen through the Latin American experience and what it implies.”  Another unique part to this work is that the voices of the main people, like Jesus and Peter, are not voiced by one soloist.  Multiple people sing their solos, including women.  An example of this is with “I am –Confession”, which is a soprano solo, or “Colorless Moon”, the aria of Peter’s tears, also sung by a woman.

            In the end, each of these three composers have interesting and unique for their time philosophies about their music that is quite evident in their compositions.  Thinking about these philosophies makes me consider what parts of music I find important.  Thus, here is my music manifesto:

1.      The number one thing that I believe and value as a musician is that music is approachable for everybody.  Music is universal.  All societies have music, and I don’t believe there is such a thing as a world without music.  There are elements of music in everything, from pitch in which we talk to the tempo in which we walk.  Given this unavoidability, I believe that every single person should be able to enjoy music, both in listening and creating, regardless of their level of talent.

2.      I believe that music is an emotional expression of both the composer(s) and the performer(s).  In this class in particular, we’ve been studying composers who believe that music can be separated from feelings, but even their music has emotional elements, in the idea that we’re noticing what emotions aren’t there.  I believe that, hard as you try, music creates emotions and feelings in the listener, no matter what type of music it is.

3.      I believe that creating music is a very physical act, and therefore anybody can learn to sing or play an instrument to a degree, regardless of their initial talent.  I have been learning a lot about this fact this year with a few of my other classes specified to singing, because that is my primary instrument.  Many people never pursue singing because they feel that they aren’t talented enough to be any good.  However, singing is all about how you physically use your body to produce the ideal sound, so with the proper training and a teacher who knows what they’re talking about, I believe anybody can learn to sing and make music.

4.      As a musician, I put a lot of value on music in schools, and I believe that it needs to continue to be taught.  Children need creative outlets, music can be used to teach many other educational ideas, and students with knowledge and background in music are generally more well-rounded people.  Music should continue to be part of the educational curriculum in schools.

Music Symposium: Keynote Speaker Laurie Anderson Introduction

Welcome to our annual Music Symposium!  Our topic of discussion today is feminism in music.  While there are plenty of artists out there who would have been an excellent choice to speak here today, there is one woman in particular whose music has been inspirational on this topic.  Our Keynote Speaker Laurie Anderson was born in 1947 in Chicago.  She is an accomplished violinist and vocalist, and she graduated from Barnard College and Columbia University.  Laurie is now a visual artist, with her work being displayed in museums such at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and a recording artist, releasing seven albums for Warner Bros.  From her album Big Science come hits such as “From the Air”, “Let X=X”, and the namesake “Big Science.”  Also from this album is her biggest mainstream hit, “O Superman”, which actually made it to number two on the British’s pop charts.  You may recognize it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd7XnOnSkkA. 

A chapter in the book Feminine Endings by Susan McClary entitled “This is Not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laure Anderson“ talks her music as a whole in respect to feminism.  In Western culture, women’s bodies are usually viewed as the objects on display; they perform the art that is created by male artists.  Anderson combats this notion through her androgynous look.  Because she uses her body so thoroughly in her music, such as in this clip of her Drum Dance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mRq1xgKykM “She walks a very thin line –foregrounding her body while trying not to make it the entire point.”  Another idea that McClary talks about is that Man is supposed to “give birth to and who tames the Machine.”  Anderson breaks this tradition wide open through her use of technology to create her music, like the vocoder and the sensors on her body.  Anderson uses technology for another aspect of feminism: female pleasure.  “For feminine pleasure has either been silenced in Western music or else has been simulated by male composers as the monstrous stuff requiring containment in Carmen or Salome.”  Her piece “Langue d’amour” is an excellent example of this.  There are strong pulses throughout the piece, although there isn’t regular metric organization.  Her voice is split through the use of the vocoder, creating a “blurred, diffused eroticism.”  Her use of repeated la, la, la’s are like tongues, “inciting feminine ecstasy.”  These are just a few ways that Anderson’s music is a staple for feminism in music, and why she is our Keynote Speaker today. Please help me welcome Laurie Anderson!