Unit 1 Overall Blog Post

The evolution of music from its beginnings in the ancient world to today’s music of top 40 has been a diverse and expansive evolution.  Looking at how music has grown and changed has been an integral part of my music education here at Luther College.  One of the most interesting parts of music history thus far, for me, has been the birth of the blues, which gave way to jazz, which we have studied this first part of the semester.  Two very important ideas that we studied were the connection between the blues and jazz, and the idea of “place” in a composer or musician’s music.

The blues are looked to be the most influential music of the 20^th century.  It would stand to reason, then, that the blues greatly influenced the early jazz.  Some of the early jazz pieces we heard in this unit have similarities to the blues.  ‘King Porter Stomp’ is shaped into phrases as well, although it is into 8 bar phrases instead of 12 like the 12 bar blues.  It has a faster tempo than most blues.  However, it has the repetition known of the blues, the question question answer.  The ‘Black Bottom Stomp’ utilizes solo instruments, much like the blues did with the blues singers.  The trumpet has a solo line, followed by the clarinet.  These two instruments sing the vocal line in the piece.  The rhythm has a swing feel to it. 

The “blues sensibility” remained as jazz music took off.  The idea of transcending structure, subject matter, and tone to remain positive while facing opposition is still present in jazz music, even if there are plenty of differences between the two genres of music.  In jazz music, there are ideas such as spontaneously created music, which originated from the Black New Orleans Band.  The music isn’t set in a certain structure, and the musicians are allowed to spontaneously create the music as they play.  There is a lot of improvisation, both with the soloists in the piece, and with collective improvisation of all the parts together.  Taking liberty with the music to express feeling and emotion is what the blues sensibility was all about.

There are still connections to the jazz of the early 1900s and the jazz music played today.  Today’s jazz still contains a lot of repetition.  I think of the music the jazz band played in my high school.  It felt to me that the music was written to accompany the soloist(s), so the themes and phrases were repeated a lot throughout the pieces.  A lot of the jazz music today has many different solos throughout the piece, much like the early jazz music.  I think in many places, jazz music is still used to express emotions from the musicians and conductor.  It is a great tie to many people’s heritage, and is used to teach about an integral in our country’s history.  While the music has grown and changed, there are still many similarities between early jazz and jazz music today.

Looking through the lens of “place” should be an integral part of examining any music.  I think that understanding both where the composer was originally from, and where the composer was when they composed a piece will give a lot of insight to the piece itself.  An excellent example is the composer Stravinsky.  Knowing that he is Russian helps the listener to pick out the Russian folk tunes within his ‘Rite of Spring’.  This is also evident in musicians such as Louis Armstrong.  He was born and raised near the red light district in New Orleans, and grew up with the music coming from the brothels.  This led to his picking up this music and making it his own.  Louis Armstrong may not have ever bought a cornet and started learning to play if he had not been in contact with the music changes going on in the poor parts of New Orleans.

“Place” being an important part of a composer or musician’s music is not an idea born from the last two centuries.  It can be applied to the composers and musicians we have learned about in other music history classes.  Studying the life of Beethoven or Mozart helped us to understand why their music was written the way it was written, and why it is considered some of the greatest music ever written.  What they wrote depended on what was going on during that particular time in history, who they were currently working for, and who (if anyone) commissioned the work to be written.  "Place" being important can also be seen in musicians of today’s music.  Many country music singers come from the south.  This is where country music was born, and it is where it is listened to the most.  They have the southern drawl that is generically associated with country music already instilled into their voices.  Because of where they are from, they are usually partial to that music.  Opera singers are people who grew up and studied classical music.  The place they chose to go to school greatly influenced their entire lives.

For me personally, the notion of “place” is very prominent in the music part of my life.  Growing up, the music that I listened to was generally pop and top 40 music.  Because of this, I am able to mimic the singing of these types of musicians.  However, I am also classically trained.  From 6^th grade on, I sang in choir, and did art songs for Solo Ensemble.  Coming to Luther has only distinguished this genre of music for me.  Not only does a Luther student study classical music and opera, it is also engrained into them that this is the superior music.  We study the beauty and complex rules that go into composing this music, and we see its differences to the music of today.  A lot of students talk about being “music snobs” or spoiled because of the musical education we receive here at Luther.  I know it has made me this way, and more partial to classical music as opposed to other genres of music.  This will forever be the music of my choice, because of the place I chose to go to school.

Berg's Wozzeck

            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.  After a week of studying both Berg and his opera, however, I now see that there are plenty of musical elements from other eras in this opera that I know, and the juxtaposition of these with the new stylistic ideas of the contemporary era make this opera a very interesting work.

            The images from the Wagner train station, the Secessionist building, and Klimt's "The Kiss," are all examples that combine old ideas with new ones.  Berg’s Wozzeck does the same thing.  In Willi Reich’s article in The Musical Quarterly, he created a chart that shows the scheme of the musical forms in the opera.  While Wozzeck is an atonal work, the musical forms Berg used in most of the opera are those most associated with tonal music.  In the first act, Scene 1 is a Suite, Scene 2 a Rhapsody, Scene 3 a Military March and Cradle Song, Scene 4 a Passacaglia, and Scene 5 an Andante Affetuoso.  When listening to the opera, however, the audience doesn’t hear these forms.  Berg commented on this in an interview found at the end of Reich’s article.

 “What I do consider my particular accomplishment is this. No one in the audience, no matter how aware he may be of the musical forms contained in the framework of the opera, of the precision and logic with which it has been worked out, no one, from the moment the curtain parts until it closes for the last time, pays any attention to the various fugues, inventions, suites, sonata movements, variations, and passacaglias about which so much has been written.” 

            I found this to be true when we listened to Marie’s Cradle Song from Act 1.  When just listening to the song, it sounds similar to the rest of the opera: atonal and weird.  However, when analyzing the song, there are tonal sounding aspects to it.  There are quartal and quintal harmonies found in places such as measures 425 and 426.  While this obviously isn’t tonally written, the movements of fourths and fifths create a soft, pretty sound to this lullaby.  In measure 420, there is an actual chord, an FM7.  Little touches like these combine the old ideas with the new that the images from earlier are like as well.

            Overall, between the form of the scenes throughout the opera and the little tonal touches in some of the music, Berg creates in Wozzeck a collaboration of old and new ideas.  Because this isn’t immediately evident when the audience listens to the opera the first time, first impressions can be like mine was: What exactly am I watching?  However, once the opera is looked at closer, it become a piece of work that, despite Berg’s argument that he is a reformer of the opera through such innovations, does actually do this.

The Rite of Spring

             When I listened to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring last weekend, it was the very first time I had ever heard of it.  Without any background information on the piece, I will be honest: it blew my mind.  Seeing as how this is Music History Contemporary, obviously the piece is contemporary, but I had never heard anything like it from any musical era.  After spending a week studying both the piece and Stravinsky, it has become even more exciting for me once learning how it was written and the publicity that surrounded its debut.

            The piece itself is apparently a collage of folk songs tweaked, transposed, and altered to create many of the motifs.  When Dr. Joyce told us this in class, I didn’t believe him at first.  It was so unique-sounding the first time I listened to it; how could it be created from different folk tunes?  Folk tunes are generally happy and simple; this piece has many dark and ominous parts to it, like the very beginning of The Augurs of Spring, Dances of the Young Girls on page 12 of the score.  The strings have staccato eighth notes while the horns have eighth notes on the off beats.  There are a lot of accidentals in this section of the piece.  However, there are many different folk tunes found throughout the piece.  In one of the handouts from class, there are excerpts from this piece, such as measure 49, that sounds particularly close to a Russian folk song called “Spring Rounds.” 

            The publicity surrounding the debut of this piece as an opera was very interesting to learn about as well.  This was written about in an article entitled “The Riot at the Rite: Not So Surprising After All” by Truman Bullard.  Today, music like this is received rather well, because our generation is all for experimentation and being unique.  In the early 1900s, however, this was not the case.  Bullard states in the first paragraph “…that historic premiere turned a fashionable Parisian audience into a mob of shouting, whistling, stamping, and even fist-fighting partisans.”  However, in the rest of the article, we find out that the management of the Ballets Russes, where the ballet premiered, was behind the publicity that caused this uproar.  Diaghilev would invite people to their rehearsals to “admire his original choreography” and then they would leave and talk about it all over Paris.  Before opening night, everybody was talking the ballet and what to expect.  This story about gaining notoriety about the ballet before it was even premiered made me really think when I listened to it again.  Combining that with the short clip we watched of the beginning of the ballet helped me understand how exciting creating this ballet must have been.  The piece itself is exciting and thrilling when you listen to it, even after the first time; why shouldn’t it have come into the world amidst the same type of excitement?