A Qualitative Study on Popular and Classical Music free essay sample

It has been, like everything else, affected by the rate of speed of technological accomplishments in this century. Because classical music is one genre of music, it is expected that it has also evolved during this period of time and it is has also been subjected to advancements in technology. Musical Characteristics About the only generalization one can make about modern classical music is to say, it is diverse and often complex. Composers have written for every conceivable medium from a single, solo instrument to a huge symphony orchestra. They have written for conventional orchestra instruments, expected performers to play conventional instruments in nonconventional ways, and written for nonconventional instruments, adding them to the orchestra or creating new ensembles. Composers have written for a tremendous diversity of instrumental combinations, many of them small in number and many incorporating the solo voice. When a composer wrote for large orchestra, the texture frequently was more thin and transparent than was common in orchestral writing towards the end of the nineteenth century. Chromaticism had increased and harmony had become complex, at times reducing the clarity of tonality to the point of absence of tonal center. Melodies were longer, phrases were less clear, and form was more difficult to discern. To a great extent, twentieth-century composers have placed considerable emphasis on timbre and rhythm rather than on melody and harmony, creating the need for a different way of listening to music than when a melody predominates. Silence has become a conscious compositional device in modern music and not just a time for a performer to rest. The organization and form of music ranged from totally controlled to free and improvisatory music. In controlled music, the composer gives minute instructions about how the music should be played. In the more free music, performers, in some cases, are given instructions to improvise passages, usually within certain guidelines and restrictions. Much of this music is organized in time segments, measured in seconds rather than bars and phrases. The horizontal pitch organization is typically angular and disjunct, moving with wide intervals or skips. Melodic lines span wide, even extreme, ranges. Dissonance is the rule, and unresolved dissonances and sustained tension are common. Modern classical music may be tonal, but any sense of a major or minor key most likely will be obscure. Some music lacks any sense of key feeling, and some may sound in two or more keys at the same time. Frequently, pitches are based on scales other than major or minor. They may incorporate scales found in other cultures or scales invented by the composer. The five-note pentatonic scale and a whole-tone scale, which excludes half steps, are common in some modern pieces. Many modern composers, however, are experimenting with a return to tonal music. Major Stylistic Developments Certain developments in musical style have occurred in the twentieth century. Some are derived from or run parallel to developments in painting; some are a continuation of earlier stylistic concepts in music; still others are musical developments which belong distinctly to the twentieth century. It should be kept in mind, in any case, that no one stylistic development represents all the music literature of the twentieth century; not all compositions fit neatly into one or another of these classifications; most are the result of several influences. Neoromanticism The term neoromanticism applies to the continuance of German romantic traditions. Post-Wagnerian style continued well into the 20th century. It is characterized not only by a somewhat heavy emotionalism, enormous orchestras, and great symphonic lengths, but also by advances in harmonic idiom and orchestration. Representative composers are Mahler, Bruckner, Richard Strauss, and Sibelius. Impressionism Impressionism is derived from the philosophy and practice of a group of French painters, notably Monet and Renoir, in the last few decades of the nienteenthh century. Impressionism in music was a reaction to the massive, intellectual Germanic music as practiced by Brahms, Wagner, and Mahler. It is best typified in the music of Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and is marked by the delicate sonorities of flute, harp, and strings rather than massive sounds of brass and by subtle shadings rather than dramatic contrasts of tone color. Impressionistic music is sensuous and beautiful and seldom harsh. It may be described generally as having refinement, delicacy, vagueness, and an over-all â€Å"luminous fog† atmosphere. Expressionism The term expressionism, like â€Å"impressionism†, was borrowed from painting. In general, it was intended to mean the expression of the inner self, especially the subconscious, as oppose to impressionism as an interpretation of external things. Expressionism in art, which gave rise to abstraction and surrealism, found its parallel in music from about 1910 to 1925 in the radical works of such composers as Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. Expressionistic music is characteristically subjective, dissonant, and atonal, although, these traits are by no means confined to the expressionistic category. Neoclassicism Many twentieth-century composers have valued the importance of form and structure in their music, in many cases returning to the common practices and aesthetic values of the past. The new classicism or neoclassicism of the 20th century represents a return to ideals of the 18th century while retaining modern techniques of harmony, tonality, melody, etc. Neoclassical music may be derived from past practices, but its language is not. A neoclassical piece by Stravinsky, perhaps the best-known neoclassical composer, does not sound like Mozart, but it may have commonalities with the classic ideals of control, order, emotional restraint, adherence to formal structure, minimal instrumentation, and transparent texture. Neoclassicism is largely antiromantic and predominantly objective. It strives for simplicity and clarity of material, form, texture, and medium. An important attribute of neoclassicism is the revival of interest in contrapuntal technique. Atonal Music and Serialism In traditional tonal music, compositions usually are organized around sets of whole-step/half-step patterns that establish key centers: the major or minor scales. Atonality in music composition existed when any establishment of a tonal center was deliberately avoided. This provided an alternative approach to the major/minor tonal system. Serialism, known as serial composition or twelve-tone technique, evolved as a systematic means of organizing atonal music. It was a formula that served as the basis got creating a piece of music. The essence of serialism is a set of pitches comprised, typically, of the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, each half step within the octave. This set of pitches – a tone row – is the basis of the composition; by its nature, it avoids key centers. The tone row is subsequently used in various forms in its entirety, never repeating a tone until the entire row is completed. In addition to its original order of pitches, the row may be used backward, or upside down. The first and most important composer associated wth this means of organizing sounds in music was Arnold Schoenberg, although few composers, including Schoenberg, adhered to the system with rigidity except perhaps in a few pieces. Nationalism and Folk Music Nationalism became a major stylistic feature among a number of late-nineteenth-century composers, particularly from Russia and Eastern Europe. Many twentieth-century composers from throughout Europe and America valued nationalistic attributes in their music. Among the most noted of these was Bela Bartok. Electronic Music The impetus of electronic music came from the development of magnetic tape recording. Technicians in Paris experimented with musique concrete, a name given to the technique of manipulating tape recorded sounds from existing natural sources. The altered sounds, combined with natural sounds, could then serve as sound sources for composition. The next development in electronic music was the construction of sound-generating equipment and synthesizers in which the electronic sound generation was combined with sound modification. Composers could now control every detail of their creation: rhythm, dynamics, pitch organization, timbre, reverberation, and even how a tone is begun and released. Most electronic music today is created to be used with live performance. The performance may include standard instrument(s) with prerecorded rape or a standard instrument using tape for sound modification. The most recent development that will most likely dominate the field in generations to come is computer-generated music. Here the composer plots desired sounds in numerical sequence, feeds them into a digital-to-analog converter, and records these sounds on tape. Software programs now make this process easy through MIDI (musical Instrument Digital Interface) that connects a computer with a synthesizer to store sounds and to produce sounds for recording or immediate playback in live performance. One of the most prominent of early composers of electronic music was Edgard Varese. Chance Music Chance music, sometimes called indeterminate music, allows the performer to participate in the creative process. This process can include the random selection of sounds, selection by chance, or improvised passages within the structure of a composition. The overall structure may be indicated in a score, but details are left to the performer. A work utilizing techniques of chance music will never be performed the same way twice. The most noted exponent of chance music is John Cage. Minimalism Minimalism is a style of composition that seeks the greatest effect from the least amount of material. It emerged in the late 1960s with music by Philip Glass, in part as a reaction against the complexities of serialism and other twentieth-century styles that lacked melodic shape, tonal clarity, and perhaps audience appeal. The technique of minimalism is to take a musical pattern or idea and repeat it incessantly, creating slow subtle changes in rhythm, chord movement, or other musical elements. The rhythmic activity may be fast, but the speed of change in the ativity will be slow.