Beethoven's Trills, Webern's Bagatelle, and the Shards of Tradition (original) (raw)
Related papers
Anton Webern And The Musical Perception.docx
The vocal elements used by the Austrian composer Anton Webern in the Das Augenlicht op.26 for mixed choir and orchestra are considered the start point of the new phase of the History of Music. The work written in 1935, was the first of the three great voice collections in the last years of his life. The technique applied on this five and half minutes short piece, in the vocal part, is the main factor of the changes of the History of Music. The effect of the technique used by the composer is the perception the feature of the timbre as well as the dramatic tempo suspension, wich together cause the paralysing feeling. The uncommom orchestration of the histerical vocal parts against the light touch of instruments obtain an extraordinary combination with the new harmonical language. Webern changed the conception of the musical perception in his time.
An Analysis of Anton Von Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, 2014
Anton Webern’s (1883-1945) largest project of the early the 1930s, the Concerto for Nine (solo) Instrument’s Op. 24, is for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, violin, viola, and piano. This serial work’s analysis became almost as famous as the concerto itself. Highly economical, short, concentrated and free relationship between the intervals take over from tonality as the main organizational principle “pontillistic” style. The clear and transparent frame “Klangfarbenmelodie”, is a row, that was distributed among different instruments. So that, several notes can be heard in the same timbre. Like most of Webern works, there are quiet special effects like a whisper, string harmonics, pizzicato, muting, and athematic intevalic cells as the basic structural element. Concerto for Nine Instruments has succeeding series of twelve-tone works. Webern worked for a long time on the Concerto’s raw, trying to arrive at an equivalent to the Latin word-square palindrome which reads the same left to right from the top, right to left from the bottom, downwards from the top left, or upwards from the bottom right.
Temporal Proportions as a Unifying Process in Anton Webern's Variations for Piano Op. 27
2014
Austrian composer Anton Webern (1883-1945) often emphasized the importance of creating comprehensive formal unity between all musical elements within in his serial composition. Previous studies have focused primarily on properties of symmetry and invariance as unifying elements in pitch and rhythm domains. This study concerns Webern’s Variations for Piano Op. 27 (1937), specifically examining how organization of time and duration in Op. 27 contributes to formal unity through both large-scale temporal organization and connections between temporal structure and the organization of other musical parameters. The analysis provides evidence that Webern consistently organized musical time in each of the three movements of Op. 27 as series of temporal proportions determined by the Golden Ratio, and further demonstrates the significance of temporal structure to comprehensive formal unity by identifying patterned correspondences between Golden Mean points within series of Golden Sections and ...
Happy to finally release the results of this long-time research on the Webern's Variations. My goal was to observe how Webern's orchestration interacts with serialism. The paper points to some usefull (I hope!) and unpreceded (I guess!) conclusions, and a lot of future work. Abstract: Webern’s Variationen op. 30 constituted a well-known milestone in the consolidation of serialism as a compositional technique. It has been the target of a large number of investigations focused on the way the composer developed a broader concept. As could it not be otherwise, his orchestral design is also closely tied to his structural concerns. However, it appears to lack a systematization of the composer’s orchestration principles. Thus, to propose an analysis of Webern’s orchestration, one need to elaborate an ad hoc method, virtually starting from scratch. This paper aims to describe the main points of this method in its current experimental stage. At the same time, we point to some conclusions about Webern’s orchestration according to his aesthetics. Direct link: https://musmat.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/07-Didier.pdf
"Variation as Thematic Actualisation: The Case of Brahms's Op. 9."
Music Analysis, 2012
Variations may be classified into (a) those which show that the composer knows his theme, and (b) those which show that he does not. (Tovey 1972, pp. 139–40) 1 I Generally speaking, variation sets in the Classical period are characterised primarily by embellishment and change of texture, effected so as to create a multitude of views of the same object. In the Romantic period, on the other hand, the theme is not so much decorated as reinterpreted: its harmonic and melodic constituents are exposed, then reconfigured. The change can be traced back to as early as 1802, the year in which Beethoven wrote his Eroica Variations, Op. 35, describing them to his publishers as having been composed in 'a truly new manner'. Yet, like many generalisations, this binary opposition distorts reality to a certain extent: not all variations in Classical sets are primarily decorative, and even those that are often employ figuration and texture in subtle, strategic ways so as to foreground, elucidate and alter tonal and motivic elements of the theme. 2 Indeed, decorative and interpretative functions can coexist. Conversely , some variations in Romantic sets are unapologetically decorative: their figuration fails to shed new light on their themes. 3 However, the stylistic dichotomy proposed here does, I believe, reflect a general trend, according to which nineteenth-century variations reimagine their themes more often, and more significantly, than do their eighteenth-century predecessors. 4 This dichotomy may be recast from the standpoint of a theme. The implicit corollary of the belief that Classical variations are essentially decorative is that the theme in a Classical set is an autonomous entity with fixed melodic and harmonic components, susceptible to embellishment but not reinterpretation. In other words, anyone who presupposed a set of variations to be primarily ornamental would probably also regard the theme as self-contained, self-defined and directly given – an entity whose underlying structural properties are neither laid bare nor fundamentally altered in the course of the variations. By contrast, anyone who granted variations greater interpretative potency would probably regard the theme not as an a priori entity but as something whose identity is contingent upon the processes to which it is subjected. Again, although we can not neatly align the former conception with the pre-Eroica sets and the latter one with those of Beethoven's middle period and beyond, I contend that the themes
Musical Topoi in Brahms's 7 Fantasien, Op. 116
2020
A fair amount of literature has been published on the use of musical topics in the works of eighteenth-century composers, with the writings of Leonard Ratner and Wendy Allanbrook among the most influential. Allanbrook, Ratner, and their disciples have shown how studying representations of topics in opera might allow for the recognition of those same musical characteristics when they appear in instrumental music. Although for these scholars the use of topics was an eighteenth-century practice, it is also useful to consider their use in nineteenth-century repertoire. Ratner's method can be used to create a guideline for the general musical topoi that Johannes Brahms uses in his late piano works through the examination of his other piano pieces, chamber music works, and songs. The comparison of Brahms' written tempo markings and the examination of textural elements such as rhythmic patterns, figurations, and key areas help support the identification of certain topical characteristics. Brahms' songs in particular offer instructive information on common textural topoi, where the text helps underline the given mood of a passage. The compilation of a list of musical topoi used by Brahms, one that reflects both the given period's and the composer's personal musical choices, furthers the understanding of Brahms' musical language and allows for more well-informed interpretations of his works.
Per Musi
The article is devoted to consideration of the compositional, dramaturgical and stylistic features of two cycles of C. Schumann’s piano miniatures: Quatre Pièces characteristicistiques op.5 and Quatre Pièces fugitives op.15, which show the evolution of the composer’s style. An example of a concert-virtuoso interpretation is the cycle op.5. It is characterized by a variety of strokes and a wealth of dynamic nuances, as well as an emphasized brightness of musical images. Another cycle, op.15, is an intimate composition and demonstrates a departure from the brilliant virtuosity that was characteristic of the first period of the composer’s work. These opuses differ in the principles of the dramaturgical solution and the implementation of programmatic in them. However, they have certain stylistic constants: contrasting combinations of different textures and themes, whimsical rhythms.
Chapter 3: Webern's Piano Variations, Op. 27/iii. From "Analysis of Silences in Music"
Analysis of Silences in Music: Theoretical Perspectives, Analytical Examples from Twentieth-Century Music, and In-Depth Case Study of Webern’s Op. 27/iii, 2020, 2020
How to cite: Syroyid Syroyid, B. (2020). Analysis of Silences in Music: Theoretical Perspectives, Analytical Examples from Twentieth-Century Music, and In-Depth Case Study of Webern’s Op. 27/iii [Doctoral dissertation in musicology, KU Leuven]. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.23953.86884/5 ____________________________________________________________________________________ Anton Webern (1883–1945) was an Austrian composer, a prominent advocate of the dodecaphonic technique in the first half of the twentieth century. Webern’s musical output was relatively small. Only 31 compositions where published during his lifetime with an opus number. His tragic death, caused by the accidental shooting of a US soldier led to great commotion in large musical circles (Moldenhauer, 1970). The perfectionism of Webern’s compositional technique has heavily influenced the course of twentieth-century music, particularly “Boulez and Stockhausen and other integral serialists of the Darmstadt School in the 1950s” (Puffett, 2015, para. 1). Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) significantly shaped the musical style of Anton Webern and his fellow composer Alban Berg (1885–1935).