MUSC 892: Seminar in 20th Century Music

Music after the Fall surveys contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post-Cold War era. Music is placed in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing connections with the other arts, in particular visual art and architecture, the definition of Western art music is expanded to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall.

This book offers an up to date survey of experiential music for anyone with an interest, from seasoned practitioners to curious readers. This book takes the stance that experimental music is not a limited historical event, but is a proliferation of approaches to sound that reveals much about present-day experience.

A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a Theoretic-Analytical Contextis an integrated account of the genres and concepts of twentieth-century art music, organized topically according to aesthetic, stylistic, technical, and geographic categories, and set within the larger political, social, economic, and cultural framework.

Joseph Auner's Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries explores the sense of possibility unleashed by the era's destabilizing military conflicts, social upheavals, and technological advances. Auner shows how the multiplicity of musical styles has called into question traditional assumptions about compositional practice, the boundaries of music and noise, and the relationship among composer, performer, and listener. He also shows how composers and their works have played important roles in defining ideas of nation, race, and gender, and thus in shaping the modern world for better and worse.

This volume sheds light on the origins of early serial music at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. The significance of Milton Babbitt is put into perspective, as are the idiosyncratic contributions by Herman Van San, Karel Goeyvaerts, Michel Fano, Jean Barraque or Bruno Maderna. The contributions to this collected volume deal with the historical position of these composers by analyzing their composition techniques and aesthetical frameworks. In addition, Brian Ferneyhough clarifies his relationship with the legacy of early serial music.

A study of music since the Second World War; this title examines the disruptions of the war, and the struggles of the ensuing peace, were reflected in the music of the time: in Pierre Boulez's radical reformation of compositional technique and in John Cage's development of zen music; in Milton Babbitt's settling of the serial system and in Dmitry Shostakovich's unsettling symphonies; in Karl Stockhausen'sdevelopment of electronic music and in Luigi Nono's pursuit of the universally human, in Iannis Xenakis's view of music as sounding mathematics and in Luciano Berio's consideration of it as language. The initiatives of these composers and their contemporaries opened prospects that haven't yet stopped unfolding. This constant expansion of musical thinking since 1945 has left us with no singular history of music; Griffiths's study accordingly follows several different paths, showing how and why they converge and diverge.

Part of the Oxford History of Western Music, five-volume survey of the traditions of Western music, by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time, Richard Taruskin, this volume examines the music of the early twentieth century, ranging from Mahler and Strauss to Gerswhin and Copeland. Taking a critical perspective, Taruskin sets the details of music, the chronological sweep of figures, works, and musical ideas, within the larger context of world affairs and cultural history. He combines an emphasis on structure and form with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts in the age, to illustrate how the music itself works, and how contemporaries heard and understood it. He also describes how the context of each stylistic period--key cultural, historical,social, economic, and scientific events--influenced and directed compositional choices.

Part of the Oxford History of Western Music, five-volume survey of the traditions of Western music, by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time, Richard Taruskin, this volume examines the music of the late twentieth century, ranging from Milton Babbitt and Edgard Varese to Steven Reich and Philip Glass.