Week 4

Ruth Crawford Seeger, Benjamin Britten, Carlos Chávez, Olivier Messiaen

 

Read

Paul Griffiths, CHWM, pp. 258-69.

Joseph Auner, “Ruth Crawford Seeger’s New Compositional Systems,” in Music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (NY: W. W. Norton, 2013), 140-41.

William Robin, “The Pioneering Modernist Who Wrote an Audacious String Quartet,” The New York Times (Oct. 13, 2017).

Leonora Saavedra, Excerpt from “Preface,” in Carols Chávez and His World, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

Donald Mitchell, "Catching on to the Technique in Pagoda-Land," Tempo 146 (Sep., 1983), 13-24.

Anthony Pople, Excerpts from “Messiaen’s Musical Language: an Introduction,” in The Messiaen Companion(London: Faber & Faber, 1995), 15–50.

 

Listening link and scores

 

Crawford Seeger, String Quartet, IV

Britten, Scene II, The Pagodas from The Prince of the Pagodas

Chávez, movement III Sinfonia India

Messiaen, final cadenza and coda of Oiseaux exotiques piano and chamber ensemble

 

Composers discussed in CHWM, pp. 258-69:

 

American: John Cage, Aaron Copland, Harry Partch

Danish: Carl Nielsen

French: Olivier Messiaen

German/Austrian: Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Stefan Wolpe

 

Topics: electronic music