Week 3


Béla Bartók, Leoš Janáček, Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Twelve-tone music of Berg and Webern

 

Read


Amanda Bayley, Excerpt from “The String Quartets and works for chamber orchestra,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bartók, edit. Amanda Bayley (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 151-53; 160-63; 169-171.

Joseph Auner, “Bartók and the search for a mother tongue,” in Music in the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries (NT: W. W. Norton, 2013), 67–70.

Béla Bartók, “The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music (1931)” in Béla Bartók: Essays, ed. by Benjamin Suchoff (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), 322–23.

Peter Burkholder, Excerpts from "Ives and the Four Musical Traditions," in Peter Burkholder, ed., Charles Ives and His World (Princeton University Press, 1996)

Charles Ives, "Music and Its Future" (1929)

Joseph Auner, “Berg's Allusions to Tonality,” in Music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (NT: W. W. Norton, 2013), 133-36.

 

Listening link and scores

 

Bartók, String Quartet No. 4, IV

Janáček, “Frantík,” Nursery Rhymes No. 13

Janáček, “The White Goat is Picking Pears,” Nursery Rhymes No. 14

Ives, General William Booth Enters Into Heaven (voice and piano)

Cowell, The Banshee

Berg, Violin Concerto, I, mm. 1-104

Webern, Concerto, Op. 24, I

 

Additional Reading

 

Nicholas Slonimsky, "Ives Musical Rebel," from Writings on Music

Malcolm Gillies,"Béla Bartók," Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook, ed. Larry Sitsky (Bloomsbury, 2002)

Paul Wingfield,"Leoš Janáček," Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde.

Donald Walker,"Charles Edward Ives," Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde.

The Ruhrklavierfestival Explore the Score site: Bartók

The Janáček site

 

Other Composers in this period:

 

Czech: Bohuslav Martinů, Erwin Schulhoff

French: Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Albert Roussel, Edgard Varèse

German/Austrian: Hanns Eisler, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill

 

Topics: electronic music, serialism