Week 1

Introduction to the class, Mahler and Straus, Debussy and Ravel

 

Read

Paul Griffiths, A Concise History of Western Music (CHWM), pp. 215-30.

Arved Ashby on Mahler and his Seventh Symphony

Ton De Leeuw, "Introduction" to Music of the Twentieth Century: A Study of Its Elements and Structure (Amsterdam University Press, 2005)

Mark DeVoto on "The Debussy sound: colour, texture, gesture"

 

Additional Reading

 

Alex Ross on Debussy

Ton De Leeuw, Music of the Twentieth Century

Decoding the music masterpieces: Strauss's An Alpine Symphony

 

Listening Click works to download scores

 

Gustav Mahler, Scherzo of Symphony No. 7

 

Richard Strauss, Last four sections of Alpensinfonie

 

Claude Debussy, La Mer, De L'Aube A Midi Sur La Mer

 

Maurice Ravel, Three brief scenes from L'enfant et les sortilèges

 

Composers discussed in CHWM, pp. 215-30

 

Australian: Percy Grainger

British: Frederick Delius, Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, Ethel Smyth

Czech: Leoš Janáček

Finnish: Jean Sibelius

French: Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel

German/Austrian: Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss

Hungarian: Zoltán Kodály

Italian: Giacomo Puccini

Russian: Sergey Rachmaninoff

Spanish: Manuel de Falla

 

Topics: modernism in music