a rising chromatic phrase. This is heard three more times, on the first violin, cello, and viola again, and once upside-down on the second violin. The dissonance caused by these phrases rising and falling continues to tease the ear. By the sixteenth bar the part-writing is less sinuous and the music seems to be approaching a cadence ...
like Salome, Strauss’s enthusiasm for the subject stemmed from watching a Max Reinhardt production of Hofmannsthal’s play. Elektra continues along the harmonic path of Salome, venturing further into dissonance and, at times, veering towards complete atonality, which is all at the service of the drama. It is the psychological examination of character that makes both Elektra ...
(including For Children, 85 easy pieces for beginners) and his solitary opera, the one-act Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1911). He was impressed by the revolutionary rhythmic language and vivid dissonance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913), and sympathetic to Schoenberg’s exploration of music without a sense of key. These influences enriched and expanded his musical language. In the Second ...
marital history did not make him a bad match: his second wife was Leonora d’Este, sister of the duke of Ferrara. Gesualdo’s music, which makes extreme use of dissonance, is interesting for its own sake, but had little far-reaching influence. Recommended Recording: O dolorosa gioia: madrigali, Concerto Italiano (dir) Rinaldo Alessandrini (Opus 111) Introduction | Renaissance ...
are, and the unfortunate saxophonist who goes on playing when everyone else has stopped. The ‘Country Band’ March is what Ives called a ‘stunt’, but in its enjoyment of dissonance and its very precise noting-down of unsynchronized musical strands it is characteristic of many of his major works. He reused parts of it in the ‘Putnam’s Camp’ section of Three ...
needed its own music, untrammelled by the legacy of the nineteenth. He emigrated to the US and began to write music (Amériques, Offrandes, 1921) that took the dissonance and rhythmic energy of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring as a starting-point. He gave more and more importance to percussion, writing Ionisation (1931) for percussion alone, used the ...
no less often changed the number of beats every bar; listeners are aware of powerful rhythm, but cannot tap their feet to it. Most music before The Rite used dissonance (notes that clash when played together) only as expressive ‘seasoning’; in The Rite dissonance becomes the norm. Before The Rite, most music used recurring themes and ordered contrast of ...
The lead guitarist in Radiohead, Jonny Greenwood, has straddled the line between dissonance and resonance, noise and melody. His arsenal of effects, virtuosity and unconventional phrasing have been key features in this very English band’s development. No wonder Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour is a fan. ‘They’ve done some very good things. I can see why people make ...
(Re-khart Shtrous) 1864–1949 German composer During an amazingly productive career, Richard Strauss wrote 15 operas, five ballets, several orchestral masterpieces, well over 200 songs and many other works. As a conductor he contributed in countless practical ways to the musical life of Europe and the US in the flourishing period from the last two decades of the nineteenth ...
While Louis Armstrong remained a pre-eminent jazz symbol in the public mind through the 1930s, and inspired many imitators (Taft Jordan, Hot Lips Page, Wingy Manone), younger and better-schooled musicians were coming up who could navigate the trumpet with great agility and dexterity. They would break through the perimeters that Armstrong had established in the 1920s and take ...
larger string group. A typical Corelli concerto comprises five or six short movements, with tempi alternating between fast and slow. Their customary contrapuntal texture, frequent instances of weak-to-strong-beat dissonance (known as suspensions), repeated use of harmonic sequences and clear tonal structures lend these pieces an elegance and poise that was widely admired in the early eighteenth century. Of the ...
of eternity, whose jarring harmonies sound surprisingly modern. Machaut’s Secular Music If Perotin and his contemporaries had a different concept of what later musicians would come to define as dissonance, composers of the fourteenth century expanded the idea of what constituted a serious composition beyond the practice of the previous generation. Defined as the Ars Nova, in contrast ...
poet Petrarch, achieves a sustained lyrical intensity through dramatic word-painting, a greater degree of chromaticism – harmony remote from the home key – and the controlled use of dissonance, which increasingly featured in Renaissance harmonic practice. ‘He is the master of the notes. They must do as he wills; as for the other composers, they have to ...
The word ‘Baroque’ is derived from the Portuguese barrocco, a term for a misshapen pearl, and it was still with this sense of something twisted that it was first applied – to the period between about 1600 and 1750 – in the nineteenth century. In 1768, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: ‘a Baroque music is that in which the harmony ...
Following the social and political upheaval of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Europe enjoyed a short period of relative stability with Napoleon’s exile, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France and the establishment of the Vienna Peace Settlement in 1815. However, in the early 1820s a number of minor revolts broke out in Naples and ...
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