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1890-1914 Western Art Music – A Brief Overview

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The late 19 th century and early 20 th century was a period of considerable changes in society as a whole. The rapid industrialization and technological development, and the ideas introduced by Freud would lead to a significant paradigm shift in social life. The arts, as a reflection of the environment to which it is inserted, had to modernize itself along with the new world around it. In music, this modernization came in different fronts championed by composers of different nationalities and traditions: Mahler, Debussy, Schoenberg, Strauss, and Stravinsky are examples of artists who developed their own methods to achieve what would become the modern music, the music of their time. The original approaches utilized by these composers would result in the pulverization of art music as a language. As Joseph Auner states: “a defining characteristic of music since 1900 has been the lack of any single, unifying mainstream [1] ”. Despite the means employed, these composers had the same goal...
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Recovery

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At the beginning of Chapter 8, “Recovery”, Rutherford-Johnson returns to 1989, the starting point of his journey, to reflect on the nostalgia felt by avant-garde composers after the fall of the Berlin Wall, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia. This is perhaps the first instance in the book where we have a clear historical distance which allows us to analyze and comprehend the music of that period in more profound ways than what our sensorial responses enable. While works such as  La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura  by Luigi Nono may strike us as yet another large-scale harsh-sounding inaccessible piece, the history of the piece’s compositional process and the circumstances in which it was written facilitates the understanding of its wandering and haunting nature. Not only the comprehension of the context in which avant-garde pieces were made grants us access to a deeper meaning, but it also draws our attention to the context itself. As quoted by Rutherford-Johnson,...
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Loss

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During my brief period working as a guitar professor at the University of Passo Fundo in southern Brazil I had the pleasure to share an apartment with a composer good friend of mine, Lauro Pektor, who worked at the same university teaching music theory, analysis and acoustics, and currently is working on his PhD in music composition at the University of Calgary. During our discussions about music and the contents we were interested in teaching the students, he introduced me to some aural illusions and the Shepard-Risset glissandi. This effect is defined by Tim Rutherford-Johnson as “ an aural effect analogous to a rotating barber’s pole in which a sense of continuously descending pitch is created by fading in the upper partials of a descending glissando while fading out the lower one . At the time I found this effect curious, perhaps a bit gimmicky, but reading Chapter 7 I stumbled on Rutherford-Johnson exposition of Georg Friedrich Haas’s music which explores this effect...
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Mobility

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The discussion on Chapter V on globalization, the Silk Road project, embodiment, the composer-performer and the specialist performer reminded me of a very recurrent discussion topic during my early years in academia in Brazil: whether the so-called “crossover” repertoire was a worthy musical endeavor. The cross-genre projects like the Silk Road project were often considered of less value by university professors and professional classical musicians in the academic environment. This would be a common discussion in classrooms, masterclasses and concert venues. On the other end of that discussion there were the highly specialized performers and avant-garde composers, very often struggling to find their own space in the musical market. For a long time, these trends were portrayed as antagonists of each other, mimicking the rivalry between Neo-classicism and serialism in the early XX century, while in reality both are high-quality musical expressions and require very specialized, high-ski...
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Up-close

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The beginning of Chapter 4, which discusses the digitization of music and fluidity between medias, brings yet another opportunity for the discussion of the mediation of music and how it can influence music making, understanding and consumption. In the 1980’s and 1990’s technology made possible to make our musical experiences mobile through the Walkman and CD players, as discussed in Chapter 3, and with the advent of the MP3 format in the early 2000’s, and more recently streaming services such as YouTube and Spotify, it became possible to any person to have access to a virtually endless audiovisual catalogue at any given moment or place. The 1980’s and 1990’s expanded our musical experience through mobility, however, this experience was still limited by the physical boundaries of CDs or tapes. Digitization of music extinguishes these boundaries and broadens our access, yet, at the same time, the current digital state of music reflects the XXI century’s fluidity and challenges our pre...
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Quid est musica?

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This is not a definition, but rather some thoughts about the definition I usually tend to align with: Under a modern perspective music is usually described as "a succession of sounds and silence organized in time by a composer, a performer and/or a listener".  I tend to agree with this definition for its objectiveness. However, music can have different functions and mean a multiplicity of things for different individuals and groups in different regions, and specially, in different eras. Considering the different and sometimes conflicting definitions we have for music, it is safe to say that ultimately these definitions are subjective at their core, and not able to answer this question objectively, due to our inherited inability to have access to a deeper reality. The proof of the subjectivity of this answer is in the answer itself: composer, performer and listener can be and often are one in the same, and thus as long as there's sound, or silence, occurring over ti...
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