Twentieth-century Music

Week 6

Dmitri Shostakovich, Luciano Berio, Witold Lutosławski, John Cage, Discussion of Modernism and the role of the composer in society

Read

Joseph Auner, “Shostakovich,” in Music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (NY: W. W. Norton, 2013), 183-88.

Joseph Auner, “The Past in the Present,” in Music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (NY: W. W. Norton, 2013), 258–61.

Michael O'Brien, "Witold Lutosławski Venetian Games," The Moldenhauer Archives, Library of Congress.

Joseph Auner, “Cage and Chance,” in Music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (NY: W. W. Norton, 2013), 200-10.

John Cage, “The Future of Music: CREDO,” from Silence: Lectures and Writings (Wesleyan, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).

Milton Babbitt, “The Composer as Specialist,,” in The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, ed. Stephen Peles, Milton Babbitt, Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, Joseph N. Straus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 48–54.

Lloyd Whitesell, “Twentieth-Century Tonality, or, Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” in The Pleasure of Modernist Music ed. Arved Ashby (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 103–120.

Additional Reading/Listening

James Pritchett, “Six views of the Sonatas and Interludes,” (1995).

Richard K. Winslow, “ John Cage,” in Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook, ed. Larry Sitsky (Bloomsbury, 2002), 91–98.

TV Köln (1960) Performed by Elif Önal

TV Köln (1960) Performed by Sippakorn & Sippapas Kaewthamai

Listening link and scores

Shostakovich, Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 8, I.

Lutosławski, Jeux venitiens, Pt. 1.

Berio, "O King" Sinfonia (1968-69), movement II.

Cage, Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, I and V (1946–48).

Cage, Aria (1958).

Cage, TV Köln (1960).

Other Composers in this period:

American: Leonard Bernstein, George Rochberg

Argentinian: Mauricio Kagel