Main composers characteristics Essay Example

Main composers characteristics Paper The sounds of a galloping horse, the steady reassuring tones of the father, sweet enticements of he Elf King, the increasingly frantic cries of the boy, are all left to the machinations of the composer. Schubert had a distinctive talent for creating music that depicted both the spirit and nuance of the text; the voice and the piano expressed every shade and color of the poem. Schubert Earl ¶nigh is termed a through-composed art song. Schubert also created the song cycle?a well-thought-out group of individual songs that together tell a story, similar to a concept album. Alliterated is a German word indicating an informal evening gathering during which Lieder (art songs) are reformed. Schubert held Cafeterias a social gathering for music and poetry and Lieder that featured the songs and piano music of Franz Schubert. Robert Schumann (1810-1856) was a German composer. He was something of a streak composer and wrote music for solo piano almost exclusively. Inspired by his marriage to Clara, he composed almost nothing but art songs, most of them about love. His wife, Clara one of the great piano virtuosos of the nineteenth century, was also a gifted composer. Works I listened to such as miniatures Kindergartens (Scenes from Childhood), Album or die Eugene (Album for the Young), are suitable to be played on piano by children or beginners. BluntestKC, (Flower Piece) is a series of short, connected and melodic sequences of which the theme and variations forms a recurring refrain while undergoing changes in both key and mood. Sonata NON Albertan (Album Leaves) for piano, Pop. 124: No. 6 Highhandedly and Du Ring an mine Finger Fraudulence undo Label 4/8 pop. 42 Schumann (Lied) are among his most famous. We will write a custom essay sample on Main composers characteristics specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on Main composers characteristics specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on Main composers characteristics specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer Schumann had been afflicted with bipolar disorder. By his own request, he was confined to an asylum where he died of dementia in 1856. Franz List (1811-1886) Franz List was not merely a composer and pianist?he was a sensation, perhaps the most colorful artistic composer of the nineteenth century. His father, who worked at the court of Count Shysters, gave him his first music lessons when he was six years old. List gave more than a thousand concerts, from Ireland to Turkey, from Sweden played at the keyboard with a lighted cigar between his fingers. Lists concerts in the asses became our modern-day piano recital. The majority of Lists piano compositions reflect his advanced virtuosity. He was a productive composer, and rote works at several levels of difficulty, some being manageable for intermediate and even beginner level pianists. Abscessed (Farewell) is a beautiful short piece based on an old Russian folk song and Engages Grid are examples of this less virtuosic style and are the two cases of Legalization I participated in. List hobnobbed with composers FRR ©d ©rice Chopin, Hector Burlier, Robert Schumann, and his daughter married Richard Wagner. His most famous achievement was the creation of what would become known as the symphonic poem, a kind of orchestral musical piece that calls to mind a poem, a story, or a painting. He observed that a program provided a means by which to protect the listener against a wrong poetical interpretation and to direct his attention to the poetical idea of the whole. In 1860, one of Lists rivals, Johannes Brahms, co-published a statement against him and other modern composers. By his death, he had written more than 700 compositions. FRR ©d ©rice Chopin (1810-1849) Chopin is considered Pollards greatest composer, although Chopin spent the rest of his life mainly in France, he became a voice for Polish musical nationalism. In Paris, Chopin found his delicate style didnt always charm he larger concert audiences, who had been exposed to the works of Franz Schubert and Ludwig Van Beethoven. FRR ©d ©rice Chopin concentrated his efforts on piano composition and was a solid influence on composers who admired him. Chopin was physically slight and somewhat sickly. He was also introverted and hated performing in public. Chopin was a piano virtuoso and a composer, but he never let the physical challenges of the piano surpass his basic musical ideas. Chopin was a rarity among Romantic composers?he wrote only works for solo piano or ensemble pieces in which the dream-like nocturnes embodied the spirit of musical Romanticism. He formed a friendship with Franz List and Chopin received the first key endorsement from an exceptional contemporary when Robert Schumann, reviewing Chopping Pop. 2 Variations in the Alignment musicales Getting (his first published article on music), declared: Hats off, gentlemen! A genius.. Chopping innovations in style, musical form, and harmony, and his association of music with nationalism were influential throughout and after the late Romantic period. Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) Born in Hamburg, Germany, on May 7, 1833, Brahms as the great master of symphonic and sonata style in the second half of the 19th century. He can be viewed as the hero of the Classical tradition of Joseph Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. During this term, I listened to the German Requiem (Nine Deutsche Requiem), Abrahams Lullaby and Brahmas Violin Concerto in D major. The music of Brahms unfolds as patterns of pure, abstract sound within the stiff limits of traditional forms. While Brahms could write lovely romantic melodies, he was, in fact, a developer in the tradition of Bach and Beethoven. Brahms employed the art of laying double stops, a technique in which a violinist holds or stops two and never wrote an opera, nor did he ever write in the characteristic 19th century form of the tone poem. He strongly believed in absolute music, music that does not rely upon a concrete scene or narrative as the tone poem does. It is instrumental music free of text or any pre-existing program. His works were labeled old-fashioned by the New German School whose principal figures included F. List and Wagner. Brahms admired some of Wagers music and admired List as a great pianist, but in 1860, he attempted to organize a public protest against some of the wilder excesses of their music. Although Brahms may often be regarded as one of the last defenders of the Romantic Period, he was a supporter of form and logic within his works in contrast to the opulence and excesses of many of his contemporaries. Hector Burlier (1803-1869) Hector Burlier was one of the most original figures in the history of music. He was born in 1803 near the mountain city of Greenbelt, France. He had no regular training in music theory or composition and little exposure to the music of the great masters. In his mind, there was always a connection between music and the written word. Burlier rarely used such standard forms as sonata-allegro or theme and variations. Instead, he preferred to create forms that flowed from the particular narrative of the story at hand. Burlier created the first program symphony a symphony with the usual three, four, or five movements in which the individual movements together tell a tale or depict a succession of particular events or scenes. This term I listened to Symphonies Fantasies, Pop. 14 Songs Dune Unit Du Sabbath and found wild swings of mood expressed in the music. Burlier called for enormous performing forces. He added new instruments to the orchestra and called for traditional instruments to be played in non-traditional ways. Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) and Ballet Music The tone poems which were a one-movement work for orchestra captured the emotions and events of a story through the soaring music of Peter Tchaikovsky. He excelled in an artistic genre that others did not: ballet. In his early years, Tchaikovsky entered the Moscow Conservatory in his native Russia. Tchaikovsky realized that the ballet required Just the compositional skills that he possessed. His genius was to create one resting melody and mood after another?to fashion one vivid scene and then move on to the next. Tchaikovsky short-segment style proved perfect for the ballet. Now, the terms Russian and ballerina seem inseparably interconnected. Tchaikovsky gift was not in the development of thematic material but in the invention of striking melodies. Peter Tchaikovsky is known today primarily for his tone poems, such as Romeo and Juliet and The 1812 Overture, and ballets, such as Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, which I enjoyed watching in their full length on Youth. From the Baroque to the early Romantic age, opera was typically neatly divided into reiterative (plain speech or recitative, which advanced the story) and songs (which paused the story to highlight key elements). In the mid/late Romantic age, opera tended to embrace continuous narrative, in which the story unfolds constantly throughout both speech, recitative and songs. The distinction between recitative and songs was often blurred, as recitative became more lyrical, and songs came to lack principal styles of opera -P Italian and German. Italian opera was to a great extent a vehicle of good melodies and exciting tunes with less emphasis on drama, while German operas were more concerned with drama and perhaps less so with memorable tunes. Two of the most prominent composers from this period are Verdi in Italy and Wagner in Germany. Italy Italian opera experienced a dramatic shift in tone throughout the Romantic period. The early Romantic was dominated by lively comic opera, the mid/late Romantic by starkly serious opera. Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) twenty-six operas, La Scalar Opera House in Milan, Nabisco launched Verses career in Europe. He worked for the overthrow of the Austrian government, which then ruled most of Italy. By coincidence, the name Verdi (Green in Italian). La Trivia (1853) The Woman Gone Astray, Aid (1871. Verdi replaces simple recitative, accompanied only by basso continuo, with orchestral accompanied recitative accompanist (recitative accompanied by the orchestra instead of merely the harpsichord; the opposite of simple recitative) . He is a composer squarely in the tradition of Italian bell canto opera, he pays attention to the solo voice and on a lyrical, beautiful vocal line. In 1861, Verdi wrote the stunning La Forgo del Destine commissioned by the Imperial Theatre in SST. Petersburg, Russia. The music of the overture begins with the famous Fate Motif, an ominous three E notes in unison in the brass. His grand-opera Aid premiered in Cairo as part of the celebrations of the opening of the Suez Canal and became an instant success. I saw the opera Aid with my Mother when I was a young girl at what was then the Pacific Coliseum. Aid is a drama on a religious theme, full of processions, prayers, a baptism and naturally, a crusade. I remember seeing live elephants and horses which performed on the giant Egyptian themed stage. Giuseppe Verdi wrote opera for popular appeal, full of excellent, melodic arias and choruses which are still popular today and performed regularly throughout the world a hundred years after is death. Germany In the Romantic period, serious German opera finally attained prominence equal to its Italian and French counterparts. Romantic German opera typically featured supernatural characters and plots drawn from Germanic mythology; in some cases, ordinary humans are drawn into supernatural matters. Richard Wagner (1813-1883) The Romantic imagination chose to model itself on the Middle Ages. The tantalizing discovery of ancient German literature went hand in hand with the growth functional tradition of German opera, one led by Richard Wagner. Wagner could barely play the IANA, let alone any instrument, and was an indifferent score reader. However, he composed heroic themes and powerful orchestral climaxes. The compositions I listened to were Tristan undo Soled {Lifebelts} (1865), and Deer Ring des Unbelieving (The Ring of the Unbelieving) a set of four operas. The Ring cycle together tells the tale vociferating legend. Wagner created his Ring by adapting the myths from Iceland and Germany. Wagers music drama differs from predictable Italian opera in many ways. Aria, recitative, duet, would no longer bring the dramatic action to a halt in order to spotlight the vocal flourishes of a soloist. Instead, he wrote a seamless flow of identical solo singing and recitative, what is called endless melody. With Wagner, the orchestra is everything. The thoughts, both conscious and unconscious, of the main characters are projected through short, suggestive musical motives called a leitmotif (signature tune), a distinctive unit of music designed to represent a character, object, or idea. Wagner removed ensemble singing almost entirely. Wagner banished the melodic aria to the wings. He avoided melodic repetition, symmetry, and regular cadences?all things that can make a tune catchy; his melodies are long-flowing, nonrestrictive, and not particularly song-like. Wagner epitomizes chromatics in 19th century. As the tuneful aria decreased in quality, the role of the orchestra increased. A bigger orchestra demanded, in turn, more forceful singers. To be heard above an orchestra of nearly a hundred players, large, specially trained voices were needed: the so-called Wagnerian tenor and Wagnerian soprano. Wagner asked why anyone after Beethoven bothered to write symphonies at all. Wagner solicited the money to build his own opera house at Bayreuth, Germany. Here the first Bayreuth Festival took place. During the second half of the nineteenth century, a contrasting type of opera developed in Europe, one more in tune with the social truths of the day called realistic opera. Georges Baizes Carmen (1875) Baizes realistic opera Carmen is full of alluring melodies including the well-known and beloved Hibernia. The Hibernia, which introduces the character Carmen, makes use of a then-popular Spanish song. Hibernia means the thing from Havana. Careens rich melody, and finally her soaring voice on the word L amour (Love) as the chorus accompanies is instantly recognizable and incredibly virtuosic. In shaping these melodies, Baize borrowed phrases from various Spanish popular songs, folk songs, and flamenco tunes which were folk songs of southern Spain infused with gypsy elements. In France, Baize was a most prominent composer, and two of his operas remain in the repertoire to this day. Carmen is a story of tragic love and has many famous arias, including the Flower song, the Toreadors song and the Hibernia. Listening to the mezzo soprano voice accompanied by piano and a mixed-voice choir, I hear the use of rubout to emphasis the importance of the text at the end of the excerpt. Giaconda Puccini La bob ©me 1896) Giaconda Puccini (1858-1924) Italian realistic opera goes by its own distinct name, version opera. Version is Italian for realism. Puccini most famous of all version operas?is La bob ©me or Bohemian Life. A bohemian is somebody, often a writer or an artist, who does not live according to the conventions of society. La bob ©me is well known for its glorious arias and duets, above all the You Tube video of Lucian Protractor sings Chew gelid mania. I hear the gradual path of his voice moving from low to high, speech to song, over the course fever more passionate and increasingly beautiful romantic work. The aria typically starts syllabicate as if the character is beginning a conversation. As the speakers ardor grows, the voice gains passion and becomes grander, with the strings doubling the melody to add warmth Parisian life, including the hustle and bustle of Christmas Eve in the street outside the Cafe © Moms and dawn on a winter day on the outskirts of the city. The Late Romantic Symphony and Concerto The late Romantics wallowed happily in symphonies with more than four movements, symphonies of enormous length, and symphonies with voices, organs and other instruments usually inessential to the symphony orchestra. The orchestra itself so far exceeded the modest of Classical proportions that it certainly altered the symphonic form. Throughout the Romantic era, composers continued to produce these large- scale orchestral statements, and persisted in calling them symphonies. For a while, the late-Romantic symphony seemed a traditional impulse a clinging to the warm colors and tonal comforts of a large orchestra in the face of a sharp modernist sensibility. Notable composers of symphonies and concertos in the late-Romantic period include Peter Tchaikovsky, Antonio Devoid and Gustavo Mailer. Kindergà ¤rtners (Songs on the Death of Children) is a song cycle, a sort of concept album for voice and orchestra by Gustavo Mailer. The works are written in Mailers late-romantic style, and conveys a mixture of feelings: anguish, fantasy resuscitation of the children, resignation. The final song ends in a major key and a mood of transcendence. Throughout the nineteenth century, the symphonic movements got progressively longer, and so composers wrote fewer symphonies. Schumann and Brahms composed only four; Mendelssohn, five; Tchaikovsky, six; and Devoid, Burner, and Mailer, nine each. No one approached the 40-odd symphonies of Mozart, to say nothing of the 106 of Haydn. A Classical concerto may last twenty minutes, a Romantic one forty. Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) Russia was one of the first countries to develop its own national style of art music, one that was distinct and separate from the traditions of German orchestral music and the operatic styles of Italy and Germany. A nationalist spirit was passed too group of five young composers (Brooding, Cut, Balkier, Rims-Karaoke, and Mussorgsky) centered in SST. Petersburg, whose aim it was to write purely Russian music free of European influence. Modest Mussorgsky composed a boldly inventive tone poem, Night on Bald Mountain (1867, used prominently in Walt Disneys Fantasia), and an imaginative set of miniatures (character pieces) called Pictures at an Exhibition (1874). Pictures at an Exhibition give listeners the impression of enjoying a leisurely stroll into and through an art gallery, moving from one image to the next. To provide harmony within the structure of these musical pictures, the Mussorgsky thought of combining a regular interlude, which he called Promenade. With the Promenade, we enter not any gallery, UT one filled with purely Russian art. The tempo is marked Fast but resolute, in the Russian manner. The meter continually shifts?a characteristic of folk music. The meter is irregular, as infill dance, with alternating five- and six-beat measures, and the melody is built on a pentatonic scale , which uses only five notes instead of the usual seven notes. Pictures at an Exhibition is now best known in the orchestrated version by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), completed in 1922. Perhaps by coincidence, the first attempts at making color motion pictures occurred about this same time. Ravels version greatly developed the impact of the music by replacing the black- and-white sounds of the piano with the blooming color of the full late-Romantic A violent social disruption that shook Europe was the outbreak of World War l. The strongest challenge to the authority of the Germans came from their enemies, the French. The earliest indications of modernism were French artists and writers, who abandoned the grandiose subjects and expressions of Romanticism. Impressionist artists wished to capture on canvas the freshness of their first impressions and were assonated with the continuous change in the appearance of their subjects through varied treatment of light and color. French composers began to ridicule the sentimentality of Romanticism and the lavish structures of German music which was said to be too pretentious and preposterous. This new music was given the name Impressionism. Claude Debussy (1862-1918) Debussy spent most of his time in the company of poets and painters. Pr ©elude leap ©s-midi dun fauna (Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun), and the symphonic poem La mere (The Sea, 1905), were the works I studied this term. The composer believed that music doesnt need to progress and evolve to be pleasing to the listener. To Debussy, color and texture might exist independent of the melody and, perhaps, overshadow it, preferring fleeting splashes of sound color rather than sweeping sinkable melodies or musical development. There are no repeating rhythms or clear-cut meters to push the Debussy music forward; instead of a melody as we know it, I hear a twisting, undulating swirl of sound. Debussy music honors the distinctive colors of instruments, especially woodwinds, to suggest vibrant moods and sensations. From Debussy forward, imposers began to think of color as an independent expressive element, capable of eliciting a strong emotional response. The technological advancements that led to the modern symphony orchestra transformed nineteenth-century music. Our reaction to the orchestra today is very different from the response of nineteenth-century listeners. Apart from the military cannon and the steam engine, the nineteenth-century orchestra produced the loudest sonic level of any human machine. The big sound?and the big contrasts were new and startling, and audiences packed ever-larger concert halls to hear them.