Week 4

 

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

 

Read

 

    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 Carlos 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.

Additional Reading

 

Listen

 

Scores in week 4 packet

 

    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 for piano and chamber ensemble.