Up the down staff; 13; Recapitulation - what Have We Learned?

The following program is produced at WG U.S. in cooperation with the national educational radio network. The down staff. Conversations on music with composer Scott Houston and Carolyn wiles of the University of Cincinnati Carolyn. Before we summarize that is try to find what have we learned and predict what next. Let us illustrate two more trends by which the OB on guard broke away from the old guard. We have already spoken about the trends of brevity use of space and time. A lot of numbers or chance operations which we need to television to show microtones and percussion. That is the over use of percussion. Now I am not we must add electronic music and the static quality of the electronic music enthusiasts of not been neglected. Here is part of the work

called tele music by Karlheinz Stockhausen which attempts electronically and by other means to merge all the music of all the peoples of the world. Yeah. All. Right. Wing.

Lol. This is because it did bend the knot had Elvis and you know just recently I'd like to put the ones upside you know about Stockhausen and he said I have never heard so much hostility put into sound as Stockhausen plays it I think that illustrates it perfectly well may be true it's not for me to take sides. I don't I have lunch when I want to do my bit. But the equipment needed for telling music are an electronic synthesizer. A bank of tape recorders real instruments whose tone has been changed and imagination. You heard some people talking in that intro so I thought it was spot thing wrong with it. Now if I want to match them to the tape called conversations in the

winter cocktail party conversation and speeded it up and slow down overlayed where's the music. And now for the I said we have to report it. Back now with the final trend noticeable in many composers are young and old writing today. The trend toward the static quality or one sonority that exists for a measurable period of time in which there is either very great activity or practically none. To illustrate this data quality in a recent work let's listen to the final section of a very brief composition. The string quartet of the Polish composer Penderecki. Note how fragile it is and besides the static

qualities how the instruments of the string quartet to violin the viola and cello are made to sound Perkasa is by tapping the body of the violin with a hand playing with the wood in the bowl behind the bridge and plucking the string and very high pitches when it is a brittle sound. In theory all tomes are produced by playing in back of the knot or off the fingerboard. And there are many other techniques that are on unusual usual instruments that bothers me. Here is take an instrument that a violin we presume to be passable but I have claimed that if you want those sounds they should have devised his own instrument and not used in existing but there are the two aspects of it you can use chains and sandpaper if you wish. That is normal sounds from unusual sound in instruments. And the other trend is to have unusual sounds from normal instruments which is what Penderecki did there right away. For instance I could on the piano.

Which is silly of course but I was excited for some of them don't though they've already done it so bad. We are ready to summarize our six hours of exposure to some of the laws and literature of music perhaps to reinforce some of the basic concepts and include a few more items we may have missed due to my inexperience of radio techniques. Your own enthusiasm and our engineer is frantic signalling that we have five minutes left. That's not quite true. It was his tingling in my frantic qualities. We began with and are still using the concept of intervals. I really recommend a Penderecki to your dead God even as much MUCH issue as I took with it and what he did with the violin and I can tell you how strained it is not then. Yes I heard the concept of intervals the difference in pitch between two tongues. The dissonant intervals. Need resolution. And the consonant intervals to which the distance resolves. I do not say that the listener should hear all the intervals in a composition but all of us know

should be aware that most musical structures are made of intervals and the intervals have had an impact on the growth of the music. Aside from matters of rhythm and instrumentation one can pinpoint a musical style quickly judging just by composers use of intervals. This short series on the play of illustrations will explain if you do this. That's nine hundred eighty four parallel force to do this. And adds two hundred years to eleven hundred. If we do this. That adds another three hundred years bringing us to fourteen hundred. And this one. To 700 on the classical period Middlebrook this one. Hundred sixty. To eighteen hundred or just after Mozart and Beethoven and this one.

And I was not forced to try to manage forests to 9800 or impressionism and parallel minor 9. To 1930. So in a nutshell there's your history of music. We then combine just two intervals. The difference in between two tones again the major third. In the minor third. To form just four kinds of triads the Major. Flat flat the minor planets the diminished sheet. And the augmented there are only four sharp. SHARP. By stacking more thirds we arrive at all kinds of seventh cards. Ninth card and

eleventh cards. Dropped in casually a quarter the 13th now and then with that screaming bit. And showed how music progresses away from a tonal center and gravitates on return toward the tonic by chord connection by inverting the triads and seventh chords and by altering tones in the diatonic scale F major. Tonic altered chord. SHARP to tip scale degree. We go here. That's a super tonic chord in first inversion the dominant. Past the seventh. And there is the total that or again we go away from by flatting the seventh scale degree. Go to the sub. Dominant. Third in Marion. Tremendous pull there. Tonic in first

inversion subdominant. The 1 6 4. Are you going to rest. Just. One. Everybody knows that. Card progressions in a key brought us to modulation are moving either smoothly or abruptly from one key to another. We illustrated a smooth one modulating from D flat major to its relative minor B flat by a common card. There's a card in the five now becomes the tonic a B flat minor we go. And here are two we had to admit because of time one from deep major. To a key quite distant in the Baroque period B flat major. Far away that is in the Baroque period not known sonce there was no piano sounds and not very distant of course from Brahms or you know the flat major.

I would get an altered chord in D flat major. Chord tone does not belong in. The flat and becomes the chord in B flat and. The whole thing. To return to the flight he used the third major going. Into the flat. And here is one the box son Carl for the manual and both game modes are very fond of. Major again. Pretty far away F Major to deep. That's right.

Far away from Mozart but that way it was. Well if you change this try to see the normal some dominant major triad in a major key. If you simply change it to a minor. That makes the progressions stride. Into D flat major. In much modern music there are very few or no modulations since there is no key to move away from. In fourteen hundred he began to develop took 300 years to become full grown and as soon as Correlli handed a tonal system on a pewter platter to J.S. Bach and Bach himself began to try to fight his contrapuntal way out of it and by 1745. And in another hundred and fifty years 1895 to be exact he was almost dead. Brahms Wagner and Strauss helps lay the tonal center and churning realizing

that he was probing a dead end to say flogging a dead. That was the original found his way out by a serializing the 12 tones of the chromatic scale. Other composers Davis the rebel Bard talk and Stravinsky Between 1950 used and I thought this is. Polly's anality. Polly Card's. Synthetic scales. And choral harmony. Get out of the key there. And very barren.

Each had his own methods of using a 12 tone row either freely or strictly. There might be something that George said you know are very well known and he said once that it took Beethoven's motif and but the present day composer says is here I am not. It is true Vader was left out. Well that doesn't mean we don't like Beethoven. That doesn't mean we can't appreciate Palestrina and one thing I found out in teaching and watching a student develop you know from a perhaps a limited taste. He only likes this composer only likes that work. Is that pretty soon need of it begins to develop a taste and to be used to like in this work in the 14th century in this work in the 18th century and a work he formerly adored now does lives. You

begin to appreciate the techniques he's grown and grown to do. Hardly ever failed to happen once in a while to get somebody who just never changes and he only likes Beethoven he only likes in the mid whatever. Composers in 1050 know Note the rapidity of change. More than a thousand years elapsed from simple modal tunes. To simple counterpoint. 500 years from ode to begin the change to key three hundred more years for key to develop. Two hundred years while he was being used before his last and fifty years in which 12 tone and other methods appeared and sank almost out of sight and in just the last 21 years.

I have a daughter twenty two years old in just the last 21 years. Composers in one thousand fifty at the use strict twelve tone sounded something like they bear if they use free twelve tone. They sounded something like Baird. So what's left to explore noise. Electronic synthesisers microtones chance operations throwing dice non pitch percussion anti-music mathematics clusters. Static sonority. Normal saw them on usual instruments unusual sounds from normal instruments all just plain creative energy bursting out like as somebody said about John Cage and I feel about a lot of this you're just talking about that is not composing there they are inventors not composers. Somebody said that a

sure but also he was a composer he was a an inventor but he wasn't using prepared piano with those inside and smashing up things with an axe to get an effect Lizzie. Well there are three kinds of composers those who combinators style like jazz by the style bequeath them they do not want to change. Changes go on while they're composing but they never sway from their own names. There's a composer only innovates and dies as soon as the innovation is finished. And other composers carry that on. That's the second group you see you get three of those are culminate those who carry on and those who begin the new stuff is a place in today's music for the composer that carries on say that the style of what we saw it with with Wagner with my own know that there's just no place for many of my most frequent laughed at.

Although some people would say my that's beautiful music but it sounds like Wagner. No one can duplicate a style you can teach a student how to write in the style of a law in the military or whatever. But as soon as he begins to develop his own into that individual he changes. Someone just dreaming at Mass General starts the act. As I pointed out I think several weeks ago it's the amateur who tries to compose in a certain style it makes people sick you can and you can when you can't get the psyche is not of there in other words you know there is really not of himself that that is outside you so there's another kind of composer which involves all three and that is the composer who enjoys a reputation for ease and has made a lot of money and as we never changes. But maybe you just answered your question at least in part. So what have the music up to Beethoven. And even after bar talk. The fact is the rapid changes in our societies and technological developments since 1950 are reflected in the music and are brought to some a state of mental confusion

to others. High anticipation. We hope that some of our explanations of erased some of the confusion or at least prepared the listener for a more or less rational judgement by helping him to sort out some of the trends before we conclude let us play for excerpts from works written for by forcing composers in the past three years would show not only a diversity of styles but also how the composer each in his own way tries to find something extraordinary and fine and beautiful to say. Tell me this I will buy one. All right we've come this far. What now. I've been with you I can see what happened the eruption getting away from the bridges opened the way for strange sounds like mining noises I wised up to the individual. There is an experimentation but we had a week of experimentation. But now you can you give me an idea of what's next what and when we make a prediction I do as I told you at least what's happened in the past and what's happening now. I would not make him a date perhaps after 2080 every child was born in the cultivated world

will be given a tape recorder with his own serial number which becomes a social security number and assumes he goes to school learn a little math. He will begin to experiment with mathematical formulas on the tape recorder to write music only for himself. There be no concert halls you know symphony orchestras no music schools. Everybody makes his own music. Do you think it's possible that this method by computer we can get the 10th Symphony of Beethoven. I just heard of the Apes writing the Bible. No you and I sat on him provided we might even come up with a major triad who knows. Well so long as it's delayed and I hope I'm here in 2000 I want to hear this. I would like to to but no one has the gift to predict the Sound of Music in 2008 as I pointed out not many many times. How could Davis you have predicted Stockhausen mana Verdi had no idea of what Beethoven was going to do to monetary this would be

horrible and to Palestrina this would be awful. That would be terrible. Still there was an interval involved there where I didn't hear any and it wasn't easy. He knows you're making the wrong critique. Oh dear. Well we're going to break that off. Here is a portion of Paul Palumbo knows more opposes a ballet with electronic music. Yes.

It really is unfortunate of the time limits us to ex-service. One doesn't get the scope of the work and the contrast of the work we picked some of the most attractive portions and I have always felt guilty in doing so even in the very first Brandenburg Concerto we used at the beginning of the series.

But I hope the composer is alive and in memory will forgive us. I really feel that I could get it but in this way that is why I had to brace the whole look. Well that's good. There again crystalline intervals all sorts of things and they are light and that's good. Next day portion of Paul Cooper's variations for Violin and Piano. Her.

Truly attractive well organized and disciplined work here is an unusual combination of instruments obal flute string bass and harpsichord in Bender Thomas phenomenon. It would have been Oregon students that I was going to remark about the vocabulary seems to be

12 home but is not. It's a very much freer technique and does not sound like their core of a recorded till there were deliberate. At least as I read the score the work is a time somber and other times very lively but it is always delicate and there is none of this forcing it on you. You neither of you like and or appreciate and appreciated because it is personal sounding It is very it is a personal thing. Let's good to the last of the four excerpts from these four sane composers. Is from Ellsworth Milburn's string quintet. Hey hey.

Hey hey. That's a word charged with adrenaline. It's not good. It's static qualities full of movement and vigor are some nation is brief and simple. One does not need education to enjoy music but one need some information to truly appreciate it. Never be afraid to listen to music you have never heard. Learn to accept a composer on his own terms not your own. Don't listen to the critics and let them make up their mind of your mind for you. If they don't make up their mind in there and do not fear to make your own judgement. Only in that process do we develop good taste which I believe is born in us. The trick is to develop it. Karen I hope you will continue to listen to

judge and to find. You've been listening to up the down staff conversations on music with composer Scott Houston and Carolyn Watts. Our technical director is Bob Stevenson. This program was produced in cooperation with the national educational radio network in the studios of WBEZ UC on the campus of the University of Cincinnati. This is the national educational radio network.