Music 14: Contemporary Music �Living Music (Classical Music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries) �

Dustin Donahue

Defining ‘classical’ music

Composer

Text (Musical Notation)

(Reading) Performer

(Passive) Audience

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

The Rite of Spring (1913)

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) Quartet for the End of Time, VII. (1941)

World War

•  36.5 million casualties

•  Equivalent to the entire pre-war population of France

•  19 million of which were civilian

•  ca. 4.9 million European Jews (over half the pre-war number)

•  Entire cities systematically destroyed (Warsaw, Dresden)

•  Left 25 million homeless in the Soviet Union

•  20 million in Germany

Warsaw (1944)

Dresden (1945)

After the War: The Music of ‘Forgetting’

Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black (1921)

Wassily Kandinsky, Gentle Ascent (1934)

Olivier Messiaen Mode de valeurs et d’intensite (1949) •  Pitch

–  Chromatic: use of all available pitches (think every note on a piano)

•  Rhythm/Duration •  Articulation •  Dynamic

•  Serial music / serialism: –  Music in which the entire work is derived from a particular sequence of

notes.

John Cage (1912-1992) Sonatas and Interludes (1948) •  Timbre

•  Prepared Piano

Inside John Cage’s prepared piano