MUSIC APPRECIATION
Twentieth century composers were known for the innovativeness, and developed new organizing systems and included sounds like never before never before seen or heard in Western fine art music. Music has grown over time and today, we hear rhythms and blues, psychedelic music to disco and rock, rock and roll, rap, and hip-hop to name a few. Composers like Edwin Outwater, Morton Feldman, Luigi Russolo, and Edgard Varèse have changed the concept of what music is and should be.
Melody was a composition that was not overtly preferred by Edwin Outwater. American music composer, Morton Feldman’s orchestra plays to a “sweet, wistful tune that stops unfolding and repeats, dozens of times like a skipping record, on a G and an E flat,” reports Wells (2009). Writing on Edwin Outwater, Wells says that, Outwater has a way of playing music out of his hat. He is innovative and adventurous, and brings a refreshing change to music. Outwater who leads an orchestra, dilly-dallies with a lot of 20th and 21st century music, perhaps more than any other conductor in contemporary era. He plays to the galleries by injecting life into his performances, by recasting into the older Germanic repertoire, something unique and unheard of that is the heart of. He teamed up with the young, U.S music composer, Nico Muhly, whose music is a mixture of ancient church chorales, minimalism and alternative rock. The idea is obviously to entice a more proactive audience who swear by rock. In a world dominated by hip-hop, rock, psychedelic music and rap, Outwater wants to experiment with a new brand of music that he feels will revolutionalize orchestra. Outwater feels that since musicians are experimenting with sound; be in rock, reggae, rap, or whatever, and they’re very serious about it, there is no harm in breaking away from tradition to explore new possibilities, because that was what people wanted. In order to do this, we “asked Richard Reed Parry from Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre to write a piece,” and this, he ended, “will follow the heartbeats of the musicians, and everyone on stage will wear a stethoscope, and the pace of each musician’s heartbeat will set the tempo at which he plays his part.”
Orchestras became smaller as they began to focus on penetrating timbres of winds, percussion, and piano rather than strings. In 1913, young Italian painter, Luigi Russolo, while listening to an orchestra, struck on an idea that he believed could inject more life into such performances. He came up with the ‘Art of Noises,’ an innovation that was to change the way the music world improvised. Russolo began the tradition of ‘destroying the cult of the past,’ for Russolo sought to break from the past “by devising new methods of sound expression,” says Medina (2010). Russolo’s innovativeness lurks in the shadow of contemporary music. “Found sound and noise is a central element of most modern electronic and sample-based music; be it hip hop, techno, and its offshoots,” ended Medina (2010).
New concepts of harmony, which include polychords, polytonality and atonality pressed music beyond traditional forms. Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, or Edgar Varèse, was an innovative French composer. His music is made up of timbre and rhythm. It was he who introduced organized music; the grouping of certain timbres and rhythms together to create different sounds. In doing so, he was able to discover ways to transform noise into music. It was not just creating noise, but organizing noise to produce sound. It was he who used the electronic mediums for sound production for the first time, because of which; he is called the ‘Father of Electronic Music.’ Much of his style has been copied by leading musicians of the late twentieth century.
In his book ‘What to Listen for in Music,’ Aaron Copland suggests that modern compositions can be divided into four categories that relate to how difficult it is to understand the music: very easy, quite approachable, fairly difficult, and very tough. Some of the compositions that come under the category of ‘very easy’ would be those of Shostakovich and Khachaturian, early Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and Virgil Thomson. Those that come under the category of ‘quite approachable,’ would be those by Ernest Bloch and William Walton. In the ‘fairly difficult’ category, we would have the late Stravinsky, Milhaud, William Schuman and Britten. Finally, in the ‘very tough’ category, would be the compositions of the middle and late Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Varese, and Charles Ives.
References
Famous People: Musicians, Edgard Varese Biography, Accessed March 5, 2014, from <http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/edgard-varese-340.php>
Medina, O. P, (2010), Luigi Russolo: How the Art of Noise Revolutionized 20th Century Music, Accessed March 5, 2014, from <http://www.hydramag.com/2010/08/27/luigi-russolo-how-the-art-of-noise-revolutionized-20th-century-music/>
Wells, P, (2009), Stethoscopes at the symphony: Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry has written a piece based on each musician’s heartbeat, Accessed March 5, 2014, from <http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/10/27/stethoscopes-at-the-symphony/>
Kerman J and Tomlinson, G, (2012), Listen, seventh edition, Bedford/St.Martin’s, ISBN-10 0-312-67212-8
