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This doesn't tap into musicality specifically, but approaches the concept of an effective performance with musicality and intention being a part of it

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Although they are many strategies and methods to learning a piece of music, whether as an individual studio teacher or as a director of a large ensemble, I have found "5 Steps" to be the most efficient and effective plan for learning and teaching music. Each step of the 5 Steps should be mastered and completed before tackling the next level, and yes, in many instances the first three or four levels can be accomplished during sight-reading, especially with more experienced players and/or with easier music. However, I have witnessed many times directors, and individual students, working on higher levels of the 5 Steps (i.e. dynamics) before the foundations (i.e. rhythm, notes) have been mastered. By following these 5 Steps, you, as an individual player, a studio teacher, or as a director/conductor for a large ensemble, can reach a higher musical level faster, with an overall more musical performance. The 5 Steps, if followed in order, will increase your effectiveness as a director and teacher, and make your teaching and rehearsing much more efficient.

To be sure, there is nothing earth shaking here, but the order of the 5 Steps is the prime consideration. It makes no sense to worry about the breathing and phrasing, if there are still wrong notes within a phrase. Likewise it doesn't pay to concentrate on dynamics, when the articulation is the wrong style or non-existent. Note that the first three are often used in auditions, either to evaluate prepared works or to evaluate sight-reading. These are the objective elements of music that constitute the foundation of the musical piece. 'Phrasing' (Step 4), although somewhat objective, starts to move into the subjective territory that transports the musical performance from just the mechanical playing of notes and rhythms into actual expression and communication. The foundation must be there first, however. If you want, you can think of the "5 Steps" as a continuum from Step 1 to Step 5 paralleled by the concepts of Science/Math to Art within music, and a continuum from Objective to Subjective elements of musical expression.

Rhythm, is the most important aspect of laying the foundation of a musical performance. It is putting the right notes and spaces in the right place at the right time. Music is an art within time so we, as musicians, must be constantly aware of it. All the right notes with no time or rhythm cannot be a musical performance, ever. As you teach rhythm to your students, again whether individually or in a group, give them a counting system so they can figure the rhythms out on their own. It is very much like the Chinese proverb "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Teach your students a rhythm and you have fed them for that musical piece only. Teach them a system for counting, and they will soon read music on their own and for their lifetime. Isn't that what we as music educators should be doing, teaching a lifetime skill? There are many counting systems out there; choose one, use it, and teach it. Whether it is the "1 & 2 &" system or a "ta-ti" or "la-li" or macro and micro beats, figure out a system that works for you (if you haven't already), master it and then teach it well.

While you teach rhythm and counting, stress that notes and rests are the same; notes are measured sound and rests are measured silence. They are equal. It has been my experience that many students do not make errors in reading note rhythms, but most errors occur counting rest rhythms. Somewhere, somehow, they have been taught that rests "don't count" or matter, or are just rests, a time to relax. Rests must be taught as equals to notes, only measured silence as opposed to measured sound. Rhythm is the foundation for everything that follows, so lay the foundation well. Give your students the skills to succeed at this on their own. "Say it, and Play it", or clap rhythms constantly within your lessons and rehearsals. Sight-read on a regular basis to build rhythm-reading skills. Reading rhythms, with rests, only gets better by practicing and doing it on a regular basis (just like anything else). This is Step 1. Once you have mastered this for a piece of music, you may now move on to Step 2.

Step 2 of the 5 Steps is Notes/Pitches. This implies everything about playing the correct pitch; i.e. the correct frequency of vibration. That means specifically the right valve combination or slide position, the correct fingering (standard or alternate), the correct octave and mallets on percussion and/or the correct finger/string on string instruments. This also implies the absolute correct intonation. Again, the correct pitch by definition is the correct 'frequency of vibration'. That's all it is. To play "in tune" means to match that frequency of vibration. It is either matched or it isn't. It is that black and white. Teach the pitch tendencies of the individual instruments to the players, as well as what to do about them. Knowing that certain pitches are normally flat or sharp is one thing, but then teach how to compensate so the absolute correct pitch will be played. I have witnessed many students who recognize that they are playing sharp or flat, but do not know what to do about it. Again, teach them to 'fish' and teach them the solutions. Teach the concept of 'longer' and 'shorter' for adjustments to sharp and flat pitches. Make all musicians responsible for the sound they produce and all aspects of that sound.

As you tune your large ensemble, tune from the bottom up, meaning bass voices to the soprano voices. Tuning from the concert 'A' or 'Bb' from the higher pitched instruments, down, is very inefficient, backwards, and worse, frustrating. Unless the bass voices of your group are in tune with each other, the overtones they generate will not line up so the higher pitched instruments will not be able to find their frequency to match. Remember the overtone series? It's not only the heart of how brass instruments play different pitches, it's also the heart of how to tune a large group. Follow this. If bass voices tune to a concert 'A', 55 Hz; an octave above is 110 Hz, an octave above that is 220 Hz, an octave above that is 440 Hz, an octave above is 880 Hz, etc. But note what happens; the space between octaves (the number of frequencies) gets farther and farther apart (220 frequencies, 440 frequencies). To me, that means there is more space for error in matching a pitch (frequency) at the higher pitch levels. By tuning from the bottom up, and as the various octaves above that are added, the higher pitches become more and more apparent and are easier to match. Top down tuning is opposite of the natural overtone series, and allows more error in the lower pitches from the given tuning note. Try it. It works.

Some passages in music are more difficult that others and sometimes require a lot more fingering work to master. This is all part of Notes/Pitches. Working out the passage with a slow steady beat is one solution, but always within the context of the rhythm already mastered (Step 1). If that isn't enough, break it down to one note to one note, but work the passage or phrase from the 'Back to the Front'. Start with the last 2 notes of the passage. When those notes are smooth, with the correct fingerings, etc. (or alternate), add the next note in front of those two. Maintain the correct rhythm relationships always. After three notes within the phrase are mastered, add the fourth, and continue. 'Back to Front' works because as the passage is learned, the material becomes more familiar and more solid. If the passage is learned from the front to end, the passage, when performed, can become weaker and possibly more ragged. This works especially well with tricky fingerings, using alternate fingerings, cross sticking, or new higher positions with no open strings. Always maintain the note rhythm relationships while working on notes/pitches, and always work with a steady beat. After Step 2 is mastered, Step 3 - Articulation, may be addressed.

Step 3 of the 5 Steps is labeled Articulation. This includes any type of manipulation of the sound, including starting the sound and manipulating the sound throughout a phrase or passage. This includes, basically, for winds, tonguing/slurring, for strings, bowing issues, and for percussion, sticking issues. For strings, it is basically when to up/down bow and the type of bowing to use. For winds, this is when to tongue and when to slur (essentially, not to tongue) and the type of attack produced by the tongue and air. But beyond the basics, there are different styles of articulation and bowing. Even the least experienced player, soon into their study of the instrument, should be taught differences in addressing the start of the sound on their instrument. There is a difference between "tah" and "tee" as you say them, but also when you play them. They each have a different weight and length. Spacing of notes within a passage, or lack thereof, through staccato, marcato or legato styles can be successfully integrated into the learning of a musical work. Again, this level assumes that all rhythms and notes/pitches are mastered and are solid. If there is the slightest weakness in rhythm or notes, adding another layer of difficulty or concern will not make the others stronger. Practice within the context of rhythm and notes, and again if necessary practice harder sections from the back to the front of the passage, adding notes in front as mastery is achieved. Within a musical piece you can sometimes group passages together according to articulation or bowing style. Practice those together and then incorporate them within the total work.

Again, the first three steps of the Five Steps are the 'nuts and bolts' objective elements of a musical performance. It is those elements that are generally evaluated during auditions and the first elements observed during adjudicated performances. After Step 3 - Articulation is addressed and mastered, it is now time to move into a more subjective element of musical performance, Step 4 - Phrasing.

Step 4 - Phrasing is essentially when to take a breath and why for winds, or in the case of strings, how to start a musical line (up or down bow) and when and how to finish it. It is the punctuation of music. Phrasing helps convey whether the passage is ended with a ., a ? or an ! It is the start of making a musical line out of the 'nuts and bolts' of the previous three steps, and is the beginning of the subjective and interpretive aspect of being a musician and making music. Computers can play correct pitches with correct rhythms and maybe even some form of articulation, but most cannot make a phrase or start to put 'life' into music. That's why musicians are still important. They breathe life into music and make it the art that it is.

So how are you going to build a phrase? Most musical phrases are obvious because they come in nice, neat, and orderly 1, 2, or 4 measure units. Some are irregular length, but most, if not all, are easily identifiable. Remember it should make 'musical' sense. Phrasing is adding musical punctuation, so yes, sometimes a breath is only a comma before the overall phrase continues and finally concludes. Sometimes phrases are a series of shorter notes (eighths or sixteenths) ending with a longer note (quarter or half). Think of those shorter notes as 'leading' to the longer note, or as a giant 'pickup' line to the 'resting' note. There are many analogies that can work here depending on the age of the student musician. "Jumping from lily pad to lily pad" sometimes even works. Regardless, keep the line moving forward. Develop phrasing as early as possible in younger players to start building musical skill and to develop the concert of a musical line. Again, this step assumes that all previous steps are solid and mastered. Phrasing will not correct rhythm, pitch or articulation errors. After you have added phrasing to your musical work, it is now time to add the finishing touches and time to go to Step 5 - Musical Extras.

For string players, the issues are sometimes compounded but can still be addressed in a logical manner. Step 1 is still about the rhythm of the music. Step 2 is still about the pitches and intonation. Steps 3 and 4 are about articulation and phrasing, and for strings, they can be considered simultaneously, however not before the first 2 are mastered. If bowing makes the fingering patterns more difficult, practice them as pizzicato first. Then add the bowing and perhaps considering the phrasing of the bowing at the same time. Keep in mind that the bowing 'rhythm' is many times different from the rhythm of the music. For instance, if you are playing groups of eighth notes, in 4/4 time, grouped together by 4s, the bowing rhythm is 2 half notes, while the musical rhythm is all eighth notes. This is a relatively easy example but there are many actual musical examples that are much more complex. This is one of the elements of string performance that compounds the relative ease of playing a string instrument.

Step 5 of the 5 Steps is labeled 'Musical Extras'. It contains all those elements that require interpretation, flexibility, and musicality. It is the icing on the cake and the final polish to the other musical elements. Dynamics are the most obvious of this group and are the first to be added to a performance after the previous 4 steps have been mastered. Dynamics might also be the easiest to add and because of this, directors and teachers sometimes jump to this before the foundation has been laid. Wait and add them after the foundation has been laid. A performance with obvious rhythm and note errors, but with good dynamic contrast is still a flawed performance but perhaps more frustrating and troublesome for the listener. Again, all other steps are assumed to be mastered and solid, before you should start to consider overall dynamics and changes within a piece. Most groups and/or individual musicians should be able to demonstrate 6 distinctly different dynamic levels (pp-ff) to be effective as musical communicators. Practice these during your warm-ups, as well as within your performance music to keep the musicians focused on their relative volume. Dynamics are always relative to the context of the piece; in other words, not all mf dynamics are created equal. Make students aware of their dynamics in relation to the function of their part. Some music can be played at this Step during sight-reading, but many works require additional work before reaching this level.

This Step also includes subtle or sudden changes in tempo, dynamics, and perhaps articulation and/or phrasing. In a way, this is the fine-tuning of all of the previous Steps, in addition to the final polishing of the total performance. It is similar to going from gross motor skills to fine motor skills. The previous steps were the initially framing of our musical house and now we are adding the finishing touches. Accents within a certain articulation now give a phrase a whole new meaning, but the rhythm, the notes, the basic articulation, and the musical punctuation (phrasing), all had to be there first. When they are, adding some accented punches is much easier and more effective.

Step 5 also includes, for large groups, the concepts of balance and blend. Balance includes equalizing levels within instrumental sections, and between instrumental sections. Balance within an instrumental section can sometimes be tricky as there are many issues to deal with, including fragile egos. Be diplomatic but firm and let the music be the final judge. Balance between sections is easier as it can be defined and prioritized by the function of the part. Is it a rhythm part, is it a harmony or melody part, or is it just a textural part? Balance also becomes more difficult if instrumental sections are unbalanced in numbers to begin with. Again, regardless of the issues, let the music be the final judge, with no excuses.

As much as Steps 1, 2, & 3 (Rhythm, Pitches, & Articulation) can sometimes be grouped together and realized simultaneously, Steps 4 & 5 (Phrasing & Musical Extras) can also be worked on together. Again, mastery of the previous three steps is assumed and the order of the steps is the most important consideration. In evaluating performances, the 5 Steps can also be used to determine the overall strengths and weaknesses present. The 5 Steps can be considered a priority list as you evaluate performances and in many cases, identify the priorities of the teachers and directors. If all rhythms are very solid, but phrasing and/or dynamics are haphazard or non-existent, that may identify the priorities of the director, or the performance has not moved beyond Step 1. Or as in a previous example, there is good dynamic contrast but with wrong rhythms and notes, Steps 1 & 2 were not mastered before concentrating on Step 5. There are many uses for this 5 Step priority list.

Following the order of the 5 Steps can make your practicing and rehearsing more effective and efficient. It can help you identify weaknesses in performances quickly so solutions can be addressed and it can help you achieve a higher level of musical expression, more quickly. The order of the Steps is the prime consideration and if followed moves the performance to the highest level with the least amount of work very efficiently.

Dr. Royer holds a doctorate from the University of Utah in Music Education, a Master's Degree from the University of Wyoming and a Bachelor's Degree from South Dakota State University. Dr. Royer serves as director of the Jazz Ensemble and the Chamber Orchestra. He also teaches woodwinds, percussion, theory, and American Music. Dr. Royer's principal performance interest is oboe and he also performs on guitar and bass. Dr. Royer brings a wealth of public school teaching experience to his position at Black Hills State University.

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To be sure, there is nothing earth shaking here, but the order of the 5 Steps is the prime consideration. It makes no sense to worry about the breathing and phrasing, if there are still wrong notes within a phrase. Likewise it doesn't pay to concentrate on dynamics, when the articulation is the wrong style or non-existent.

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The Importance of Music Education in Schools

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The Importance of Music Education in Schools

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This article talks about direct benefits to students from band in a utilitarian way. There are also social benefits and other developmental aspects within this text

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The Importance of Music Education in Schools - Graduate Programs for Educators

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The focus is often on traditional academics when discussing education, but what about music? Learn more about the importance of music education in schools.

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an introduction into Woodwind pedagogy, instrument specific instructions

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Woodwind playing and pedagogy Archives | Bret Pimentel, woodwinds

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Saxophone, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and world and electronic woodwinds

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Choral Music Educator Rehearsing a simple warm up song

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Today’s warmup is based on @coldplay’s Viva La Vida! Enjoy!  #musicteacher #musiceducation #choirteachersoftiktok #millenialteacher #choirtok #choirdirector #choralmusic #choirkid 

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@itsmrfinn
Today’s warmup is based on @coldplay’s Viva La Vida! Enjoy! #musicteacher #musiceducation #choirteachersoftiktok #millenialteacher #choirtok #choirdirector #choralmusic #choirkid
♬ original sound - Mr. Finn

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A wonderful resource for shopping effective lesson plans from different schools and educators

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Music's Historical Influence: From Ancient Greece to Modern Times

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Music's Historical Influence: From Ancient Greece to Modern Times

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Music History Crash course of musical influences from different periods in history

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Music’s Historical Influence Over Time | Musicians Institute

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Music has played an important role in human history from the earliest civilizations to the present. Discover the vast history of music over the centuries.

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Analyzing famous works of the past and how these instances are not inclusive and were not accepting of diverse composers as well as audiences

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As orchestras strive for greater inclusion, it’s time to finally let go of the notion of a classical music “canon”

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Music and Culture: How Do They Influence Each Other?

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Music and Culture: How Do They Influence Each Other?

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impacts of culture within music

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Music and culture have always had a close relationship. Long before recording equipment, music symbolized who people were and how they related to one another. Today, music continues to impact our lives and express the values, traditions, and conflicts both within and between communities.

Below, we'll dive into the historical context of music beyond self-expression. You'll learn more about its ability to immortalize heritage, inspire social change, and create global connections between people from different backgrounds.

The historical context for music and culture

In every corner of the world, music inspires, educates, and brings neighbors together. In ancient Greece and medieval Europe, music anchored religious ceremonies and secular events. In indigenous cultures, tribes used music to pass down stories and traditions to new generations.

There are also numerous examples of music serving as a catalyst or symbol during times of struggle. For example, before South Africa combined national anthems, Nelson Mandela officially declared the song "Lord Bless Africa" a joint anthem. Originally a hymn, the song came to represent defiance of Apartheid's harsh regime.

In the same vein, songs like "We Shall Overcome" and "This Little Light of Mine" were popular during the Civil Rights Movement. The lyrics were clear calls for people to stand up against racist rules and regulations.

All over the world, we can see music and culture mixing together across eras, with each time period lending its own unique perspective to the repertoire.

How does music reflect cultural identity?

There are countless ways to express cultural identity, which explains the dozens of musical genres and the expansive range of instruments, sounds, and lyrics. Let's take a look at the role of music in cultural identity and how its elements converge to convey a much larger message.

Representation through lyrics

Lyrics can be anything from abstract poems to direct calls to action. But regardless of their presentation, many musical styles verbalize the values, history, and social issues of a culture.

Perhaps the most widely seen representation is in religious ceremonies, as most cultures express their faith in the divine or their general spirituality through lyrics.

Communities can also use lyrics for more practical matters in their daily lives. For example, ballads were popular in Appalachian regions to recount recent events to largely illiterate communities.

Traditional instruments and sounds

Musical instruments have always reflected the available materials, technology, and craftsmanship of the culture that created them. At 50,000 years old, the earliest known instrument is the Neanderthal flute. Despite its age, this bone instrument follows the underlying principles of our modern scales today.

Instruments have also served different purposes beyond just making music. Based on artwork dated as far back as 2,800 BC, historians noted that Ancient Mesopotamians used instruments to denote class and labor divisions.

We can still see music-related class divisions and stereotypes today, particularly surrounding traditional sounds. For example, people may view genres like classical music as stuffy or reserved for the upper classes - which couldn't be further from the truth!

Instruments often create a musical experience that mirrors the group's emotions, affairs, or social climate. Some sounds are very distinct, like the sound of drums to signify the start of battle or rhythmic chanting to encourage solemnity during an act of worship.

However, instruments are versatile enough to bridge traditions. For example, drums have always been just as common during celebrations as they were during war. In Brazil, drums and tambourines energize crowds at Carnival. In China, lion dances blend martial arts and dance with percussion to scare off evil spirits and ring in the new year.

Music genres and regional styles

When you study a particular genre, you'll find that its unique sounds, lyrics, and style are what define it. For example, popular music is a mix of thrilling beats, catchy hooks, and steady rhythms predictable enough to dance to.

These characteristics are often a side effect of the music's geographic birthplace. For example, enslaved Africans in the South continued practicing their homeland's musical traditions. Their musical heritage coincided with the rising popularity of brass bands in New Orleans.

Around the turn of the century, African-American musicians like Buddy Bolden bent the rules of the genres, deploying his cornet to inspire the earliest versions of jazz. Infectious and exciting, jazz's popularity was near-instantaneous, and it wasn't long before it became a beloved genre in nearly every corner of the country.

Thanks to globalization, we continue to see musical genres spread out, encouraging people to discover new sounds and add their own flavors to the mix.

Examples of preserving cultural heritage through music

Music can preserve a culture's heritage by capturing its people's history and traditions. Let's look at the efforts of different groups to preserve identity and celebrate every culture's contributions to the modern musical world.

Revival of indigenous music

All over the world, cultures are emphasizing the preservation of indigenous music, with today's tribes bringing new ideas to traditional works.

For example, the haka chant was customarily reserved for men during Maorian ceremonies. Today, some Maorian women perform the chant, challenging the custom and claiming this cultural expression for themselves.

In Canada, the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami tribe teaches traditional throat singing to new generations. In Mexico, the Yaqui tribe restored deer dances, using traditional instruments and sounds to honor the spirits of hunted deer and celebrate the animal's contributions to the tribe's well-being.

In the U.S., the Annual Harold A. Cedartree Memorial Pow Wow invites artists from indigenous tribes to share their family history and traditions.

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is a nonprofit record label that honors the legacy of Moses Asch. Asch was the founder of Folkways Records in the 1940s, a record label that collected and preserved the "people's music" from all over the world.

In 2005, Smithsonian Folkways Records launched an online resource with tens of thousands of audio recordings. To collect and properly preserve these recordings, they partnered with organizations like:

The International Library of African Music at Willard Rhodes University in South Africa

The Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology of the American Institute for Indian Studies in India

The Aga Khan Music Initiative for Central Asia

UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage List

UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage List comprises cultural practices that best define the heritage of different communities. Every year, a UNESCO committee meets to decide which expressions to add to the list and ensures communities consent before making official changes.

This includes the recognition and preservation of musical traditions, like the Mongolian traditional art of Khöömei (throat singing) and Flamenco from Spain. To join this prestigious list, the music must have made a significant impact on the culture's evolution and the people's heritage.

Digital archiving

Today's technology provides nearly unlimited storage space for audio and video recordings. Future generations can see how their ancestors used instruments and lyrics to express emotions, capture traditions, and add artistic interpretations to their heritage.

Digital archives may not be immune from all threats, but they are more robust and versatile than physical media. Individuals, governments, and cultural organizations can use digital assets like the cloud to preserve and protect more music, reducing the chances of quality loss or destruction.

How does music influence culture over time?

There are plenty of examples of music influencing communities and cultures during important historical periods, so let's take a look at some of them.

Catalyst for social change

Music is a powerful tool for social change. In some cases, artists penned songs specifically to motivate listeners to take action. For example, Sam Cooke released "A Change is Gonna Come" in 1964 as an anthem for the Civil Rights Movement.

Now, as it was then, the song is a powerful reminder that cultures must change with the times. Since then, the song has been sampled by pop artists like Beyoncé and played at Obama's presidential rallies.

Other times, a generation or group will adopt a song to represent their stance on a particular issue. For example, Bob Dylan didn't write "Blowin' in the Wind" expressly for protesters during the Vietnam War. But it did come to represent the desire for peace and the safe return of America's troops.

Globalization and cross-cultural influence

The evidence of cross-cultural influence in music is well-documented. Perhaps one of the more extreme examples would be when British artists like the Beatles visited America, and their music performances inspired hysteria. Long before planes and trains, though, even modest travel could result in major cross-cultural events.

Today, musicians have access to more sounds and technology than ever before, resulting in a richer, more diverse musical database. Globalization has exposed cultures to one another, creating multiple fusion genres, like Reggaeton (Latin music and hip-hop) and Afrobeat (African rhythms and electronic music).

Globalization has also opened doors for artists from all different backgrounds to build their fan base. Non-Western artists, like BTS and Dua Lipa, exploded in popularity thanks to globalization.

Unfortunately, globalization has also made cultural appropriation more common, prompting concerns about how artists and fans interpret other traditions and cultures.

For example, artists may portray people as caricatures in their videos or mimic accents with little regard for indigenous cultures. In addition, Western pop is such a juggernaut in the musical world that some fear it will dilute the power of music in different regions.

Digital age of music

The digital age of music has transformed how we consume sound today, making music as a lifestyle possible. Streaming platforms, social media promotion, digital storage, and emerging technology have created new discovery paths for everyone.

With technology more affordable and accessible than ever, it's easier for people to stumble onto music that speaks to their moods and desires. There are also fewer barriers to becoming an artist, as tools like auto-tune and social media have helped people kick-start their careers in a heavily digitized space.

The influence on global culture and individual identity runs the gamut. In one sense, it's resulted in more subcultures, as people are no longer limited to the shared experience of a handful of songs (either in their region or on the radio). They may listen less to absorb their heritage and more to satisfy their individual sensibilities and tastes.

In another sense, though, digitalization has brought more fans together, regardless of background. These music communities, like the BTS Army or Swifties, essentially sparked new cultural identities that their global audiences use to connect with one another.

Explore the enduring connection between music and culture

Looking back through history, you can see that music is essential to the human experience. Regardless of time or place, every culture harnesses its positive effects to express the values and traditions that are most important to them.

To truly appreciate music's mark on the world, it helps to explore the music and lyrics of different cultures throughout history. But to truly appreciate what it means to create music, you'll need to pick up an instrument.

At Trala, we inspire violinists of all skill levels to push themselves to new heights. We've seen first-hand how learning an instrument can transform people's understanding of the musical world around them.
Ready to experience music on a different level? Sign up for violin lessons with Trala's world-class teachers today!

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Music and Culture: How Do They Influence Each Other? | Trala

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Dive into the profound ways music influences culture. Understand its role in societal changes, identity formation, and cultural solidarity.

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An example of text painting within Debussy's compositions

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Debussy and his theory of music and impressionism inspirations

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Debussy and the Poetic Image | All Classical Radio

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The 100th anniversary of Debussy’s death was this past March 25th. Debussy’s adventurous uses of harmony and orchestration would come to impact nearly every distinguished composer of the early and middle twentieth century. His music leaves behind classical structures and agendas and moves toward beauty for beauty’s sake. One experiences a profound sense of dreamlike…

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a wonderful performance of such an impactful piece

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C.Debussy - Clair de Lune, Maria João Pires live at Jardin Musical

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Claire De Lune and Music by Claude Debussy

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Claire De Lune and Music by Claude Debussy

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selected more for the text involved, explaining the specific philosophy behind this piece and its creation

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Clair de Lune Music by Claude Debussy and Poem by Paul Verlaine

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Tuesday, December 8 A short daily reading and companion meditation from the Institute Executive Leadership Seminars Department, designed to nourish, inspire, and challenge you.

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The Story Behind: Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring"

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The Story Behind: Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring"

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Stravinsky made history with this one for sure. There was public outrage upon the release of his ballet

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THE STORY BEHIND: Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”

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On April 15, conductor Sascha Goetzel and the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra will present THE RITE OF SPRING with violinist James Ehnes.Title: The Rite of SpringComposer: Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)Last time performed by the Rhode Island Philharmonic: Last performed May 2, 2009 with Larry Rachleff conducting. This piece is scored for two flutes, two piccolos, alto flute, three oboes, two English horns, two clarinets, two bass clarinets, E-flat clarinet, three bassoons, two contrabassoons, seven horns, Wagner tuba, three trumpets, piccolo trumpet, bass trumpet, three trombones, two tubas, timpani, percussion and strings.

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Commentary on Igor Stravinsky's music philosophy. It is found to be very profound, especially for his time

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An article that discusses the cultural impacts and influence of others that ultimately became Stravinsky's writing

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Igor Stravinsky was not only one of the greatest composers and minds of the twentieth century, but also one of the last Christian humanists in the world of art... (essay by Michael De Sapio)

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Program Notes of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2

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Program Notes of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2

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explains cultural influence in Liszt's writing, showing different cultural references and nuance

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Franz Liszt (trans. Clark McAlister; ed. Alfred Reed)

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one of the most famous members of the orchestral canon

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A Historical and Analytical Research on the Development of Percy Grainger's Wind Ensemble Masterpiece: Lincolnshire Posy

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A Historical and Analytical Research on the Development of Percy Grainger's Wind Ensemble Masterpiece: Lincolnshire Posy

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Performance of Lincolnshire Posy based on traditional song

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A piece that I love so very much

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hr-Sinfonieorchester – Frankfurt Radio Symphony

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Rimskij-Korsakow: Scheherazade ∙ hr-Sinfonieorchester ∙ Alain Altinoglu

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one example of the story responsible for a world renowned composition

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Just one Voxman duet book

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78 Duets, Volume 1 (Voxman) (performance score) - OB/CL o - Trevco Music

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Seventy-Eight Duets, volume 1 (1-55) Easy to Mediumfor flute (or oboe) and clarinetedited by Himie Voxman A wonderful compilation of duets from Rubank, the two volumes presented here supplement musical development and provide a rich experience for growing musicians. Duet playing is often a student’s first form of ensem

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Wonderful Educator who composed countless duets ranging from numerous skill levels for musicians to be able to play together. He was originally a chemist but fell into music

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Himie Voxman was a band director nearly all his life. He studied chemistry in college but fell into music because jobs were hard for chemists to find in the days of the Great Depression. Since he had studied clarinet beginning when he was eight, he felt he could teach. Over his extensive musical career, Himie earned a doctorate in music, was given countless awards and taught thousands of people to play music. His impact reached beyond those he taught in his classrooms. He wrote several method books because he felt more teaching materials were needed. Among his publications were a series of books designed to have the teacher interact and play more with their students such as his duet books.

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Himie Voxman was a band director nearly all his life. He studied chemistry in college but fell into music because jobs were hard for chemists to find in the days of the Great Depression. Since he had studied clarinet beginning when he was eight, he felt he could teach.

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another Music and Music Education Philosopher worth looking into

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Welcome To REALLSUP.COM | Randall Everett Allsup Ed.D. – Remixing The Classroom

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Carl Baermann had his own approach to Clarinet method, usually studied by all professional clarinetists

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Antecedent and Consequent: concepts of phrasing within music seen from a very literal level, explaining call and response in a way

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Program Music vs. Absolute Music / Definition and Differences

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Program Music vs. Absolute Music / Definition and Differences

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defining the different approaches to programming music and approaching music, whether it's for an absolute way with a philosophical performative decision or a programatic way with purpose behind meaning

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Regeleski: Autonomania: Music and Music Education from Mars

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Regeleski: Autonomania: Music and Music Education from Mars

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Thomas A. Regelski is a music philosopher with an approach to a praxis educational approach. This is more to mention him as a philosopher and further researching him

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Autonomania: Music and Music Education from Mars

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Traditional aesthetic theory has posited an account of music, and the other arts, as autonomous of social meanings, relevance, and conditions. In the case of music, “absolute music” is sequestered from social and other roots that bring music into being in the first place. The typical claim, thus, is that classical music is music for its own sake, divorced from the many and highly evident social dimensions that it serves. It ignores all other genres of music, most of which are more appreciated than can be accounted for by the theory of autonomania. This aesthetic theory of music, one of many theories, is unconvincing in history, and discourse of the broader philosophy of music, and a praxial theory of music is offered here in contradiction. The implications for music education should be clear, that the autonomy of music and music education from society is a troublesome and misleading contention.

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collegiate clarinet study etudes for better approach to performance

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reward systems in the brain firing when receptive to music, displaying enjoyment of music despite direct human benefit

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Communication between the brain's auditory and reward circuits is the reason why humans find music rewarding, according to new research published in Journal of Neuroscience.
Despite no obvious biological benefits, humans love music. Neuroimaging studies highlight similarities between how the brain's reward circuits process music and other rewards like food, money, and alcohol. Yet neuroimaging studies are correlational by nature.

In a new study, Mas-Herrero et al. sought to nail down the causal role of this circuitry by using non-invasive brain stimulation.

A group of pop music fans listened to a set of pop songs while the research team measured their brain activity with fMRI. Before the scan, the team indirectly excited or inhibited the brain's reward circuit with transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Greater induced pleasure differences was associated with increased synchronized activity between auditory and reward regions. Credit: Mas-Herrero et al., JNeurosci 2021

Exciting the reward circuit prior to hearing music increased the pleasure participants felt when listening to the songs, while inhibiting it decreased pleasure. These induced pleasure changes were linked to changes in activity in the nucleus accumbens, a key region of the reward circuit.

The participants with the greatest difference in pleasure also showed the greatest difference in synchronized activity between auditory and reward regions.

These results indicate interactions between auditory and reward regions drive the pleasure we feel when listening to music.

About this music and neuroscience research news

Source: SfN
Contact: Calli McMurray - SfN
Image: The image is credited to Mas-Herrero et al., JNeurosci 2021

Original Research: Closed access.
" Unraveling the Temporal Dynamics of Reward Signals in Music-Induced Pleasure with TMS" by Ernest Mas-Herrero, Alain Dagher, Marcel Farrés-Franch and Robert J. Zatorre. Journal of Neuroscience
Abstract Unraveling the Temporal Dynamics of Reward Signals in Music-Induced Pleasure with TMS
Music's ability to induce feelings of pleasure has been the subject of intense neuroscientific research lately. Prior neuroimaging studies have shown that music-induced pleasure engages cortico-striatal circuits related to the anticipation and receipt of biologically relevant rewards/incentives, but these reports are necessarily correlational.

Here, we studied both the causal role of this circuitry and its temporal dynamics by applying Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex combined with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) in 17 male and female participants. Behaviorally, we found that, in accord with previous findings, excitation of fronto-striatal pathways enhanced subjective reports of music-induced pleasure and motivation; whereas inhibition of the same circuitry led to the reduction of both.

fMRI activity patterns indicated that these behavioral changes were driven by bidirectional TMS-induced alteration of fronto-striatal function. Specifically, changes in activity in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) predicted modulation of both hedonic and motivational responses, with a dissociation between pre-experiential vs. experiential components of musical reward. In addition, TMS-induced changes in the fMRI functional connectivity between the NAcc and frontal and auditory cortices predicted the degree of modulation of hedonic responses.

These results indicate that the engagement of cortico-striatal pathways and the NAcc, in particular, is indispensable to experience rewarding feelings from music.
SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT:
Neuroimaging studies have shown that music-induced pleasure engages cortico-striatal circuits involved in the processing of biologically relevant rewards. Yet, these reports are necessarily correlational.

Here, we studied both the causal role of this circuitry and its temporal dynamics by combining brain stimulation over the frontal cortex with functional imaging.

Behaviorally, we found that excitation and inhibition of fronto-striatal pathways enhanced and disrupted, respectively, subjective reports of music-induced pleasure and motivation. These changes were associated with changes in nucleus accumbens (NAcc) activity and NAcc coupling with frontal and auditory cortices, dissociating between pre-experimental vs. experiential components of musical reward.

These results indicate that the engagement of cortico-striatal pathways, and the NAcc in particular, is indispensable to experience rewarding feeling from music.

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Why the Brain Enjoys Music - Neuroscience News

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Interaction between auditory areas of the brain and the reward system drive pleasure when we listen to music.

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Scientifically claiming possible reasons that the human brain is receptive to music and its conversational aspect that fulfills human desire

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Why Do People Like Music? | Salina Public Library

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Connecting people to information, learning, and culture.

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consider the identity you choose to define with music, why you even enjoy making music. What defines how you approach music.

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In this article, we aim to help you (re)discover your reasons for making music, and ask questions that will hopefully help you understand what you truly care about and want from your art.

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Discussing importance of composer intention that is present in the performative decisions, agreeing and disagreeing with direct instruction from composer and conversating that topic

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Challenging Performance: The Book. 6.13 Composers' intentions are known

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6 Further WCM delusions One of the funniest things I've read about WCM in a long time was a headline in the online academics' daily, The Conversation, on 14 January 2015: 'We're playing classical music all wrong - composers wanted us to improvise'. Suddenly disobedience becomes obedience: for we still have to be obedient, naturally.

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The idea of interpretation of composer intention involved within the performance process

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By Samuil Feinberg
Introduction
An artist of a plastic art form, whether a painter, a sculptor, or an architect, is the sole creator of the material object. There is no need for an intermediary or interpreter between the author and the spectator. True, in order to finalize his project an architect (and sometimes a sculptor) turns to the help of experienced workers who realize his models and sketches in stone and wood. But their work is purely that of the craftsman and does not involve any new, additional creative impulses.

The situation in music is entirely different. The composer needs an intermediary-performer, a creative interpreter of his composition. The word "performer" does in fact express the essence of the artistically significant and intensely creative process of musical interpretation. The more perfect, complete and brilliant the performance of an artist, the more exposed is his artistic persona. He is not an "executor" of another's will; rather the mind of the composer should become the performer's own, and blend with the individual traits of his talent, with his own artistic aspirations. The performer gains strength and courage in this unity, which is necessary for the concrete realization in sound of the ideas and images contained in the work.

A musician-interpreter, at one and the same time, realizes his connection to the composer's intentions, and realizes himself as an artistic personality: acknowledging both the enormous importance of the author of the composition - and at the same time his own role in the realization of the composer's ideas.

Naturally, a composer can be a performer of his own compositions. Probably this combination of composer and performer in one person is the most fruitful and yields the highest artistic achievements. The author then is an actor playing the main character in the drama written by him. However, the composer is not always a perfect instrumentalist. Creation of a composition and its concert performance are two different aspects of the musical art. Therefore it shouldn't be surprising if a composer relegates the interpretation of his work to another musician with a greater mastery of the instrument.

Even composers who have the necessary instrumental proficiency and technique are still not always the best performers of their work. In such cases, the composer has somehow exhausted his main source of creative force in the composition process.

This problem has a special interest from the historical perspective. It is known that separation of the roles of the composer and performer is related to the development of virtuosity and the emergence of professional performers whose artistic efforts go mostly into performance/recitals. The many reasons for this division of creative tasks require a study of their own.

It happens sometimes that a composer is unable to take into account all the technical, colorific and expressive possibilities of a master instrumentalist. Depending on the precision with which the composer estimates the instrument's potential one may talk of a sensitive or insensitive presentation of compositional details, and a good or bad instrumentation. However, no matter how great the abilities of the performer - a pianist, violinist, singer, conductor - no matter how diverse the individual qualities, character and emotions of the artist-interpreter, or how widely differing are the various styles of playing and interpretation of the composer's ideas; any valuable and artistically justified concert performance requires from the artist the most careful and deep penetration of the composer's ideas and emotional intentions. The interpreter must present the composition to the listener as an undistorted whole, and he should see this as his first and foremost artistic goal.

Does the composer need the artist-interpreter as an independent creative personality? Do the brilliance and emotions of the performer not impede our view of the ideas and images of the work interpreted? And, finally, doesn't the composition potentially contain everything that an interpreter may present? Is the live sound related to the written notes as cause and effect or is it simply an occasion for display of the individual features and virtues of a great master-performer?

All these questions were answered differently by different schools in various times. There are artists who not only treat the author's text arbitrarily, ignore the performance directions, tempo and dynamic markings, but also change the text according to their own notions, add their own cadenzas, other harmonies, new passages etc. This was an accepted practice by many performers of the old school, and attempts to revise the text of a composition still appear in our day.

Sometimes a composer trusts the performer to introduce some changes into the text: not only editorial modifications - in the most general sense - but also radical compositional changes that are most definitely the author's prerogative. This may be explained by the composer's desire to employ the knowledge and mastery of the performer-instrumentalist, who knows playing technique and the possibilities of the instrument perfectly. Such a friendly collaboration may help the author find a path to the most grateful exposition.

Technical perfection is a gift that the performer presents to the composer. The last and decisive component in the musical creation - concrete realization - depends completely on the skills of the performer, his technical perfection, and the individuality of his interpretation.

Quite often a composer has sufficient skills as a pianist. However, he would naturally seek advice from an expert when creating a part for a less familiar instrument.

The tradition of relegating the composition of virtuosic cadenzas to the performer is quite understandable, because of the historical development of the relationship between composer and performer. This musical practice takes full advantage of the knowledge and mastery of both, without a strict division between the creative domains of the composer and his interpreter. Still, these two areas of musical art are separated even when the composer himself is a noteworthy interpreter.

In that case we often hear a composition written in a way that takes into account the composer's own accomplishments as a virtuoso instrumentalist. On the other hand, a prominent instrumentalist often develops an urge to create his own compositions for his recitals. It is hard to determine the creative stimulus for these: whether it is the performer's vigor and the perfection of his artistry, or whether the very saturation and force of the creative ideas causes them to come to life, in realized sound, through powerful and perfect technique.

Still, musical practice shows that though the combination of the composer and performer in one person is both natural and harmonious, and despite the large impression left by gigantic creative personalities of the past (who possessed deeply and totally both a purely creative gift and perfect methods of realization) - usually we encounter the familiar separation, and the instrument in a concert hall usually resounds under the fingers of a performer and not the author himself.
Transcriptions
The composer's desire to participate in the realization of his intentions is quite understandable. Performance markings, sometimes very detailed, which complement the written notes, point to a vital interest on the part of the composer in perfect, and closely directed, future interpretation.

On the other hand, a noteworthy performer who has devoted his life to working on perfect realizations of the ideas of various composers, has spent many hours on practice and technique, and has penetrated special mysteries that have been opened only to him - may hardly remain indifferent to the misses and shortcomings of presentation committed by even the greatest of composers. It would be a mistake to attribute the performer's adjustments and corrections solely to lack of modesty and to a presumptuous crossing of the boundaries demarking his subordinate role.

Music history knows many examples of great collaborations full of fruitful and selfless labor, such as Rimsky-Korsakov's creative help to Mussorgsky, or Liszt's transcriptions, which popularized his favorite composers; even those without worldwide fame. The numerous transcriptions of Bach organ works by the great masters of pianism - Busoni, Tausig and others - also belong here. (We should point to Bach transcriptions by A.F. Goedike, and more specifically to his symphonic transcription of the Passacaglia, as far as our own country is concerned.)

We should, however, quickly mention that the purpose of any transcription is not precisely editorial correction of the presentation. Transcription leads to deeper modifications that depart somewhat from exact adherence to the author's original. Such changes are caused quite logically by the features of another instrument or instrumentation system.

Thus, some changes in the text are unavoidable in a transcription. However, it is difficult to find an example of a successful intervention by a performer into the notes of a composer.

The reality of concert performances and quite often of editions by famous pianists demonstrates that even a small deviation from the author's text, addition of even one extra note into a chord, a change in figuration or other detail, typically distorts the composer's intentions. Most frequently such "improvements" show that the performer doesn't have a complete grasp of the author's style.

It is regrettable that many excellent musicians and remarkable performers sometimes did not have sufficient tact and artistic sensitivity, and allowed themselves to modify the author's text arbitrarily, not only on the concert stage, where this may be at least explained as an improvisational gimmick, but also in thought-out and carefully considered editions of the classics. Even the greatest performers were sometimes guilty of taking such unnecessary liberties, such as, for instance, Busoni: two additional bars with arpeggiated dominant and tonic chords at the end of Chopin's Etude #1 were especially unsuccessful.

As examples of less than completely successful editions one may mention a great number of publications of the classical works, starting with Bulow and Czerny, and up to editions by Klindworth, d'Albert, Lamond and others. Some of the Siloti editions of the Tchaikovsky works belong here as well; for instance, Variations in F major.

Unsolicited intervention by the editor is especially unpleasantly surprising in those cases where there is no reason to doubt the caliber of the composing - which is the work of a composer with a perfect style. Thus many experienced performers prefer to study compositions using the main unedited publications, which present the author's text correctly.

Many editors find it possible - in lieu of a careful reading of the composer's text, an understanding of his intentions and ideas, and careful preservation of the note pattern as a characteristic signature of the author - to instead supply arbitrary modifications, introduce their own considerations into every detail of the text, transpose voices into different octaves, and replace nearly all the performance directions. The editor treats the author condescendingly, as an inspired lunatic or a spoiled child who has no time to finalize his intentions precisely or to descend from the heights of his creative metier to the prosaic task of careful writing.

Some corrections are introduced by editors out of considerations related to the gradual development and perfection of instruments and playing technique. For instance, they often add notes or transpose the sound into a different register, either higher or lower, based on the fact that at the time when the work was created, the author's keyboard had a lesser range. Indeed, Beethoven had to vary the repeat in many sonatas, as well as in the first movement of the Fourth Concerto. On the other hand, restoring the exact correspondence of repeat and exposition, we lose a precious variation, one that creatively enhances the composition, even though the reason for the author's inventiveness was in this case merely the restricted number of octaves on contemporary fortepianos. A note that crosses the scale of the composer sounds foreign to the composing style, like a random instrument in a well thought-out score. For instance, in the Tchaikovsky Sixth Symphony, the commonly practiced first-movement introduction of the bass clarinet for four notes in the transition to the secondary theme, should be considered not totally justified.

Reality demonstrates that even though theoretically an experienced and talented performer-pianist, undertaking to edit the author's score, may conceivably help the composer, one may hardly find an example where such corrections and addenda improve the quality of the original. If one undertook the thankless task of writing the history of editions of classical compositions, it would be a study of more or less radical but almost always unjustified distortions of the author's text. Liszt, a genius interpreter of the Beethoven scores, regretted at the end of his life that he allowed himself deviations from the true text in his concert interpretations.

Thus the only place where a pianist has the right to make creative corrections to the author's style is in transcription and arrangements. But even in this domain one should avoid unnecessary deviations, the extraneous rhetoric of invented passages, and ornaments that violate the style of the composer. The goal of a transcription is to express the sound-character of the original by alternate means, while retaining the composition's style as much as possible. This is impossible to accomplish mechanically. One has to know the possibilities of the instrument well, and also creatively find adequate forms of presentation and new means of expression, to shed light on the composer's intentions. New avenues of presentation and expression are needed solely in order to preserve, not break apart the concept of the work.

The metrically transcribed melody contour in the Liszt transcription of "Gretchen am Spinnrade" attains almost vocal expressivity due to this shift. By contrast, the precisely maintained movement of the accompaniment in the "Erlkoenig," performed by the left hand in the transcription, produces the impression of stressful virtuoso jumps in place of the airiness of the Schubert original. Of course, some difficulties can be smoothed out by the virtuosity of a performer, but that has no bearing on the transcription itself.

The transfer of thematic elements leads to corrections in the notation, not only in piano arrangements with a significantly different specific presentation but also in the handing off from one instrument to another in symphonic compositions. Beethoven often replaced two quarters by one half-note in the presentation of the Freude theme by cellos and basses in the finale of the Ninth Symphony. Comparison to a literary translation suggests itself - as when a translator-poet changes the meter and the number of syllables of the original in order to express more precisely its very spirit.

No matter how we treat transcriptions and arrangements for other instruments, it is impossible to deny that many examples of this genre have the right to exist and are themselves a special kind of creative expression. There is also no doubt that the border that separates composition and performance tends to encroach, to a certain extent, on the domain of the composer's art.
Individuality of a performer
Discussing the individuality and originality of a formidable artist's playing, we try to distinguish him from less distinctive performers as if a performance satisfying artistic demands without introducing personal qualities is even possible. This false distinction often leads to the conclusion that there are special, artistic types of performers who create their own worlds of images and ideas, which differ from that of the composition.

One may, of course, artificially separate the issue of how the composition is performed from that of what is being performed. Reality shows that indeed an artist-performer type does exist whose impetuous virtuosity and pretentious phrasing hide the true intentions of the composer. Can, however, such playing be justified artistically? Individuality of performance may shine brilliantly only when it is illuminated by the light emanating from the composer's ideas. Otherwise the artist's playing is dimmed and turns into a calculated, cold display of technique and mannerisms. Such playing is an unnecessary spinning of the wheels of the performing machine, one that does not touch the essential aspects of the composition.

On the other hand, is it possible to speak of good playing by an artist if he does not invest any individual qualities into his performance, does not transmit his personal interest in the ideas and emotional intentions of the composer, and does not possess his own, special and refined mastery? Listening to a superlative artist we become convinced that every phrase, every chord and passage invariably transmits a special charm, characteristic of the true creative process.

If the sound of a composition were fixed for eternity (say, a composer's performance has been preserved) - would it be possible to treat this performance as the only one possible, an undisputed and unsurpassable standard for all other performers?

A composer should, of course, take into account the possibilities of great performing art. Still, an outstanding interpretation invariably introduces special qualities that shed new light both on the composition and on the author himself.

One should not suppose that a performer's individual characteristics are visible only at moments of significant deviation from the score. Individuality and brilliance of performance are seen not only in free tempo variation, weight of stress on certain parts of the sound thread, or magnitude of crescendo and decrescendo, but also in the smallest details and shadings of playing.

Everything that is overly obvious and explicit in the playing of an artist may be imitated and may become characteristic of a whole group of pianists, or even of a school. By contrast, the hidden, invisible features of playing, the finest shadings of rhythm and sound, which may not be transmitted and are hard to teach - all this constitutes the mystery of an artist-performer's charm, and makes us lend an infinitely attentive ear to his playing; playing that opens up the deep sources of a truly creative realization of the composer's ideas. Listening to such an artist we experience the widening of the usual boundaries of our imagination, the ideas are purged of the everyday common sounds that create layer upon layer in our consciousness, and the composition recovers its original force, vitality and relevance.

An ordinary performance never crosses the horizon beyond which lies the composer's art; the original stimuli that led the composer to the work remain indiscernible.

Spirited playing by an artist completes the continuity of process that leads from the vague, dimmed images of the original concept to their complete realization in sound.

Without broaching the depths of the matter of simplicity and complexity in art, or the question of why a composition's complexity and accessibility are treated as inversely proportional, it is still necessary to determine whether these issues are relevant in the performing art.

The complexity of a composition may be regarded as the quantifiable complexity of its components, at least in some respects. One may point to the number of voices in a fugue, the multi-layered content of harmonic combinations, the conjoining of varying meters, the complexity of thematic and variation development, or finally to broad formal development that requires special attention. One might say that polyphonic compositions are more complex than homophonic and that polytonal and polyrhythmic compositions require greater attention by the listener and performer.

However, no matter how complex a given work may be, all of its components can be accounted for, described and analyzed. Sometimes the sources of art are infinitely far away. Their appearance may not succumb to analysis. However, every musical element is subjected to special temperament in the final form of the score, in order to be expressed in the metrical system. A composer's ideas obtain their complete and final form gradually, as they progressfrom infinitely remote, infinitely complex, unaccountable creative sources.

Accordingly, the question of a musical work's complexity and simplicity is legitimate and logical. Is the matter similar in the performing art? May we speak of the finiteness of its basic elements? Are its qualities and accomplishments accessible to thorough analysis?

May one speak of a simplicity in a remarkable violinist's sound, or an expressive phrasing, that admits of scientific analysis? Or count the number of vibrations of a singer? Or point to the exact means and principles of construction of a flexible and free rhythm?

This is no place to list all the components of the live performing process. It is clear that none of these elements have a precise, closed form. A critic has to leave the realm of scrupulous analysis and measurement when describing an outstanding performance. He can find only approximate and unreliable reference points for measuring the actual impression left by the playing of a remarkable artist. The man-made bird of the Andersen tale is a precise mechanism; all its wheels may be counted. It is "simpler" than the live nightingale whose singing - in its inexpressible delight - cannot be subjected to precise analysis. An artist's performance isn't necessarily "simple." The most telling and impressive sounds in music are those created by the perfect motions of a formidable artist. In that sense the most refined and complex movements may create an impression of simplicity, whereas imperfect, approximate or apprentice methods can create the feeling of a complicated and confused mess.

If we imagine the entire path of a composition, from its origins to its completion in a real interpretation, we see a line passing from infinity, through the finite elements of the written score, and back to infinity. The original stimuli of art are infinitely complex, the sound elements that need to be written as notes are finite, and the number of interpretations that appear out of them is endless. Performance depends on an uncountable number of reasons and conditions. Performing style changes with the tastes and moods of the times. It responds to the demands of new audiences. Each new performer introduces special, individual qualities into his playing.

Therefore it is extremely difficult to fix the character of any performance in strict and precise terms. The author himself envisions the inevitable variability of future performances of his composition. He equips his work with detailed directions to the performer, striving to avoid the total dissipation of his intentions in the numerous individual interpretations to come. However, two difficulties arise.

The composer understands that a restriction of the performer's will and freedom of interpretation hinders the natural expression of the artist-performer. Too pedantic an adherence to the author's directions may rob the artist's playing of the necessary freedom and persuasiveness. Everybody remarks on the value and exacting precision of Beethoven's performance directions. Still, even these often slow down and obstruct the natural flow of an interpreter's ideas. The overly frequent variations of dynamics and force of sound that are fixed in the shadings of the score may destroy a performer's internal conviction as to the correctness of his choice of interpretive ideas, and rob his playing of unity and logical development.

How often a composer softens his directions by such terms as mezzo, poco, non troppo, so as not to make the stipulated performance shading sound like a teacher's directive or unsolicited advice. Nevertheless, in the real world one sees that the natural and logical flow of playing is most often disrupted precisely where there are composer's or editor's performance directions

Another difficulty, maybe the most important one, lies in the dichotomy between pre-imagined ideas of sound, and the realized work. This dichotomy treacherously awaits both the composer and the performer throughout the entire creative process. It is easy to make a mistake as to future interpretation while sitting at one's desk, writing down and playing the work in one's mind. Introducing tempo markings and shadings, the composer either recalls his own playing or imagines the ideal effort of a performer-interpreter. In both cases his imagination can mislead him, presenting only a partial rendering of the actual performing process - which depends on various factors: the creation of sound, overcoming technical difficulties, and most importantly - the possibilities and restrictions of a concrete instrumental style.

It sometimes happens that an author makes requirements that cannot be realized on a given instrument. Among these are Beethoven's crescendos on one note in the first movement of his Sonata Op. 81a, or the Adagio of Sonata Op. 7 or the end of Liszt's B-minor Sonata. These errors may be explained as carelessness but one may also conjecture that the author was attracted by some imagined instrumental sound.

Quite often accents, rinfordanzo, and other shadings that for one reason or other are not appropriate for the piano, can be successfully applied on other instruments. A composer can easily exaggerate the possibilities of the piano in his imagination, attributing to it the additional wealth and color of foreign sounds.

One is led to the conclusion that the flow of an imagined sound thread follows its own rules and principles, and is not necessarily identical to real sound. Imagined sounds are somehow lighter. They are independent of the technical, material aspects of playing. Notes stressed in the author's mind may not need to be played any more loudly: it suffices for the composer to stress them in his own mind. An accent stressed in the realm of the imagination may not always be transferred adequately to performance.

Illusion and reality always complement and affect each other in music. The mutual penetration of these two elements permeates the sound fabric. Both the composition concept and the style of interpretation are built upon the synthesis of imagined and real sounds. The very perception of music is related to these differing varieties of sound. Many Schumann shadings-stress, softening and accents-belong to the category of mentally stressed sounds, more speculative than empirical. Sound elements that occur in reality and imagined ones, intended for the mental ear only, can complement each other but can also be contradictory. Their struggle sometimes increases the tension of the perceived musical fabric.

A careful analysis of performance directions (especially as far as the Romantics are concerned) shows that many performers not only fail to follow them with pedantic precision, but tend to do the opposite. The observations of B.L. Yavorsky, who noted the contradictions between Scriabin's performance markings and his own interpretations in concert recitals, are especially interesting.

It is highly interesting and instructive to compare recordings of the playing of noteworthy composers with the markings in their scores. In his recollection of Rachmaninov's performance of his own Second Piano Concerto, A.B. Goldenweiser points to significant differences between the author's interpretation and the tempo and dynamic markings in the score.
The Role of the Author's Directions
We find the most precise performance markings in Beethoven. Notation is less scrupulous in the Romantic works. In Schumann, one may find them to be contradictory.

Bach wrote almost no tempo or other markings, obviously following the custom of his time. It is difficult to judge the playing style of a period in the distant past. Probably tempo variations were not so significant or were understood without explicit differentiation. One may name composers of modern times who have supplied their compositions with few and imprecise markings, but at the same time used very extensive means of expression in their performances. Accordingly it is not always possible to determine a composer's own playing style from the directions in his scores.

It is necessary to point out significant differences between three varying systems of composer directions.

In the first case, as we have seen in Bach, the author restricts himself to an insignificant number of tempo and dynamic directions. He provides the performer with a maximum of freedom in interpreting the score.

In the second case, performance markings are so closely related to the character of the music that they follow inevitably from the notes themselves. A performer often follows the markings in the score unwittingly, as the music itself directs him to the interpretive style destined by the composer's notations. The more a performer may infer directly from the author's composing style, from comparisons and analogies, and from the rhythmic and melodic components of the composition, the less he needs the composer's directions, and as a result his playing relates more naturally to the notated score. The system of physical and technical devices suggested by the score often assumes a certain character of interpretation.

The supremacy of the composer in interpretation, his will directing performance along a certain path, is most profoundly felt when the composer himself is a proficient performer. Then all the qualities of his performing art unwittingly find a place in the notes of the score, in the specifics of the writing. The work itself implements in its musical images and compositional character the performance style and technical proficiency of the author-performer. The often stated thesis that if such composers as Liszt, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Medtner, and Prokofiev had left their scores without any performance directions at all, their compositions would have been interpreted exactly the same way, is quite sound.

A pianist would be wise to try to find the source of his interpretation solely in the notes when playing the works of genius composer-performers. He will find the concrete features of the author's performance in every bar. Not only the presentation but also the only possible means of execution, even hand position on the keyboard, are suggested by the character of figurations; they point the interpreter in the right direction and tell the attentive and sensitive performer more than the most detailed directions

No matter how attentive regarding composer's directions the performer is, he should pay the greatest attention to composing style. The music itself bespeaks the heart and mind of the musician to a greater degree than do the additional directions. The more so, in that sometimes the composer's intentions and his tempo and dynamic markings contradict each other.

The third type of performance direction is the most valuable and necessary. It complements essentially the metric-pitch coordinates of the text. Such are directions of piano and forte at the same note density in chords, identical registers or presentation. In this category are sudden tempo changes at moments distinguished neither by new thematic content nor by varying treatment: the same music, interpreted by the author in different ways. In these cases the performer should follow only the composer's notations since the notes themselves provide no ground for adopting one interpretation or the other. Such absolutely necessary performance notations happen most often in the classical works, especially in Beethoven. These are mostly directions for unexpected tempo or dynamic changes, which form a third dimension of coordinates, complementing the metric-pitch row of written notes.

All these considerations make us strongly distinguish between the text that is written in notes, and the accompanying composer's directions.

These remarks should not of course lessen the enormous respect and quite understandable aura surrounding not only author's directions but each and every comment by the great composers that has reached us ,on their compositions. Are the tempo markings themselves, as well as occasional extensive tempo characterizations, not a kind of authorial pronouncement on the content and expressive means of the music itself?

Such tempo markings as tempetuoso, stretto, marcato, molto con fuoco serve more to characterize the content of the composition than to regulate tempo and dynamics. They are so figurative that in essence they allow the performer to choose the appropriate tempo himself. One often encounters pathetique characteristics and adjectives among them. However, when the author speaks of the exalted, deep, and penetrating character of his music, there is no reason to accuse him of immodesty, since the composer is looking for a friend in the performer, united with him in common striving for a high goal.

A quip by Taneyev comes to mind. Upon hearing Scriabin's Third Symphony, he commented that many of the performance directions, such as divin, grandiose, sublime or sensual, passionné, caressant, seem to be compliments to the music, not notations.

As I have already mentioned, Chopin's works rarely contain tempo or dynamic markings that are not confirmed by the composing style. Therefore it is hard to justify the abrupt tempo or dynamics changes that some performers indulge in, cultivating a variety of interpretations that agree with neither the score's notes nor its performance notations.

For example, the tradition of beginning the repeat of the famous funeral march in the Chopin B flat minor sonata fortissimo has no basis. If that were the composer's intention, then - given the wealth of expressive means and diversity of textural techniques that Chopin so amply possessed - there is no doubt that he would have found chords better suited to fortissimo. One may point out many other cases where composing style is violated by unjustified shadings of dynamics and tempo, though the note-text by no means conforms to that interpretation.

A luminous example of total unity of performance and text is provided by Rachmaninov's playing. Listen carefully to his interpretation of the finale of the Chopin sonata. How flexibly and precisely the genius performer follows each change in figuration character, shading melodic and harmonic elements, underlining thematic elements in continuous, swift motion. It suffices to compare Rachmaninov's interpretation with most of the other available performances to understand its perfection and logic.

We have established three main types of composer's directions accompanying the note-text. That is, the system of sparingly used directions; the method of detailed directions that follow from the composing style and the notes themselves; and finally, the case of additions that significantly enrich the metric-pitch coordinates themselves. Nevertheless (though with some danger that we might be accused of insufficient respect for the performance markings of the classical composers), we suggest giving preference to the note-text, which fixes the main metric-pitch coordinates of the composition, and with them what are, for a performer, the most precious details of style.

Experience shows that matters that are finalized and fixed turn out to be not necessarily the most durable in the development and evolution of style. Much is destroyed under the attack of historical changes and new trends, in art as well as in real life. Style changes, the evolution of consciousness, individual ways of perceiving - all shatter the seemingly unshakable basis of the greatest accomplishments of genius, and quite often accepted canons and traditions suffer because of the rigidity of their construction.

A performer possesses a complex and perfected mechanism for opening up the content of a composition to a given audience, making it valuable to people close to him in their esthetic judgments, attaching it to a certain period and place in the listener's consciousness. Therefore those pianists who learn a work using examples established in recordings make an error. Imitating another artist they adopt not only his interpretation but also the conditions under which it developed and was realized. But all those conditions may be radically different from the ones a given performer can reliably expect.

Are we always confident that the best example would be the composer's playing? If samples of Bach, Haendel, Mozart or Beethoven playing had been preserved, given the great interest they hold, would these high examples seem blemish-less to us? If the gramophone record had been invented two hundred years ago, it is in fact unlikely that a modern performer would precisely replicate the performing traditions of times long past.

The evolving performing art is less durable than the composition itself. A fruit tree's flowers come and go every spring, but the tree itself may live for centuries.

A musical composition that has been fixed in notes but has not been performed, that is only on its way to full realization in sound, is not completed. Probably it is because of this that a beautiful but for whatever reason unperformed composition sometimes retains an unexhausted potential energy of ideas and emotional essence. On the other hand, typically great works that are heard over several artistic epochs successfully survive the stylistic diversity of performance techniques. Not only do phrasing styles and the means of sound-production change, but also the very instrument that the work has been written for undergoes evolution and perfecting. The modern listener might not be satisfied by the sound of the harpsichord in performances of old works written for the instrument. The modern piano is so different from the original keyboard instruments that the appearance of new stylistic trends related to new sound and technical possibilities is quite natural. Descriptions of the playing of the great pianists of the past do not always conform to modern esthetic demands. Even in the course of his own life a pianist often witnesses changing tastes and styles of interpretation.

However, playing is devoid of conviction when the performer himself is unsure of the logic and necessity of his interpretation. If a performer changes the basis of his interpretation too often, if he exhibits a constant readiness to move away from his understanding of the piece - under the influence of critics or random mood changes - this is a sign of a superficial, insufficiently deep penetration of the composer's ideas.

A student should be willing to attempt varying kinds of interpretation, following a teacher's directions. An artist is distinguished by conviction and the stability of his artistic positions.

One should not think that a performer's confidence that the correctness of his way comes from the structure and style of the composition is a sign of over-confidence, an overblown notion of his merits. On the contrary, the clearer and more convincing the artist's vision of his path, the more demanding is his attitude toward his performance. The more distinctly the desired result of his efforts emerges, the more clearly the artist sees the shortcomings of his playing. A clear musical vision increases demands on performance.

A well prepared plan of interpretation helps to solve not only problems of style but technical difficulties as well. We always consider the harmonic agreement of goals and means to be the highest stage of mastery.

There exist champions of curatorial trends in the performing art. Their basis is the idea that the loss of the original - coeval with the work - performing techniques and playing styles; new instruments, evolving virtuosity and changes of technique - all widen the gap that separates us from the earlier composers, and serve to attribute foreign stylistic qualities to him. These views permit of no progress in performing techniques for the classical works. Mutatis mutandis (introducing necessary modifications), one should not put new wine into old barrels: new "clothes" do not conform to the artistic aspirations of the past.

The authorities who strive to preserve the integrity of composers' ideas consider those ideas inseparable from the performance styles of past times. The old instruments are restored for that purpose, the finest details and stylistic particulars of prior eras are imagined, using descriptions and evidence that have reached our times, the old atmosphere is recovered, turning off the electric lights and lighting the candles.

Does a composition that touches the heart of a modern listener need these transparently ancient clothes if it makes us forget the destructive forces of time, and stimulates our imagination and aesthetic feeling? Doesn't such an attitude toward the great compositions of the past lead us away from life to the still darkness of the museum?

A composer's own performance, naturally, is especially valuable for understanding his intentions, but it is also subject to the passing conditions of time and place. Any performance is just a transparent membrane for the invariable inner force that holds together the content and form of the work, for everything that has been crystallized and finalized in the written notes. It should allow a clear vision of the potential energy that is contained in the composition, and that is eager to be seen under new conditions.

A composer exhibits the special wisdom of historical foresight when he allows sufficient freedom of interpretation to the performer, and crafts his ideas with flexibility and elasticity. The most firmly fixed material often turns out to be the most fragile. It is necessary to give freedom to the performer, if the deepest and most stable base contained in the composer's ideas is to be preserved. These ideas are the springs of time. The inner force of original ideas comes into live emotional contact with a multitude of perceptive minds - the new audience, new times, new tastes and artistic vision - through the flexible elements of the performing art.
A Professional and an Amateur
One of the main problems related to the performing art is its value socially. The need for and role of an artist-interpreter are obvious. Nevertheless it is not always possible to know which features of a performance may have objective value and which might best remain in the performer's mind - subjective feelings not meant to take on social reality.

Besides playing aloud, one may also replay the sound as reminiscence, or imagine it while reading the score.

A poem also assumes a performance. Declamation depends on an individual performance to an even greater degree than music. A reader of a poetic work is simultaneously a performer. Even if he does not recite a poem out loud, the rhythm and all the sound elements of the work are realized in his mind - as a particular interpretation. A creative refraction of the text is necessary even in reading. Still it is unlikely that a poetry lover attributes any objective value to his interpretation.

Of course, one has to consider silent reading as the most subjective degree of "performance." Such reading - in music - is the exclusive province of experts and requires the utmost imaginative concentration. The inner sound images in music appear most often as a recollection. However, the next stage of subjective interpretation in poetry - "reading out loud but for myself only" - corresponds reasonably to the playing of an amateur acquainting himself with a composition or performing at home.

Lack of technique, naturally, prevents an amateur from a complete expression of his understanding of a piece, and he realizes this, restricting his audience to his home circle or playing just for himself. However, even such intimate playing is not simply a mechanical process but rather a creative one that reflects individual treatment of the content and form of the work.

A form of competition between amateur and professional arises, which subjects the contested originality of ideas and depth of emotions to mutual criticism and analysis. All the advantages are of course on the side of the professional, who possesses a technique that allows him to completely express his ideas as to a musical work. Nevertheless, how many creative forces and ideas may be hidden in the unassuming and imperfect playing of a dilettante!

How often a listener returning from a recital by an important performer remains unsatisfied. Not because of the imperfection of the artist's playing but because of lack of penetration into the composer's ideas - ideas that the amateur has cultivated lovingly and at length, developing his own special plan of interpretation in his own modest efforts at playing alone. How unwavering sometimes is an amateur's conviction that he alone has found ideas and expressive possibilities in the piece that surpass everything he has heard in concert performance.

This reflects a deep need for one's own individual interpretation of a composition. An amateur does not completely trust the professional. He treats each new public interpretation of his favorite work with jealousy, accusing the performer of superficial, insufficient love, and lack of selflessness in his chosen pursuits.

It would be a mistake to dismiss this as a sign of sheer overconfidence. It's true that one does often encounter an ignoramus whose self-regard is shocking. However, no matter how convinced an expert is of the supremacy of his erudition and the strength of his craft, he should take into account the persistent, passionate desire of a listener, which accompanies the active perception of music, to take initiative in conveying the ideas and images of a piece. Not only is a musical composition a treasure that belongs to all amateurs, but also not a single listener in any audience relegates himself to the passive role of spectator.

A nod, a hand movement that follows the music rhythm, an attempt to sing silently a memorable theme or tune on the way back from the concert - these are all signs of a natural desire to participate in the performing process. A listener appreciates the moment of total completion of the composer's work, in the reality of sound. The expression of even minimal creative activity leads to high moral satisfaction for an amateur, as it is accompanied by the feeling that something created as abstract, general and non-concrete, now resounds for him too.

This feeling doesn't just arise for the amateur. The movements of a professional conductor nearly turn him into a kind of master of music, independent of his immediate artistic direction. [...] He is subject to an illusion not only that the music is played for him, but that he actually creates it.

A dancer, by means of expressive plasticity, or even a marching soldier, merges his movements with the music, as if possessing it for themselves.

A perception drops any claims to its own individual plan of interpretation only when a listener becomes one of the performers - as a participant in the common musical action - as a chorister, or orchestra or ensemble member. The socially unifying value of musical art overcomes individual proclivities in this case, and expressiveness increases with the spontaneous unity of all the performers' actions.

We observe two distinct domains - those of composition and of sound realization - and establish the prerogatives of the performer and the composer. At the same time we may determine varying degrees of involvement on the part of a given [listener]. The links that connect the two ends of the chain running from a passively listening mind to the artist-performer, are the ideal listeners in Schiller's sense, who participate actively, with all their thoughts and will, in the developing musical drama. They not only follow the development of musical ideas but also feel the coming direction of the flow of sound, anticipate the importance of musical events. The destiny of the composer's creation and the musical form opens up as a united whole. Like participants in an ancient Greek tragedy, they melt together with all the turns and twists of the drama, sympathizing, feeling anguish, and foreseeing coming events.

Underestimation of the personal participation of the listener in music perception is a grave error on the part of an artist-performer. Not all the emotions, life and breath of the performer on stage reach the audience completely; a concretizing artist must be content with silence and attention. But this in itself is not sufficient: agreement and unity are needed. Accordingly, the performer's playing should carefully avoid anything controversial and overly personal.

A performance in front of an audience is an act of purification as well, of all that is hermetic and subjective, an act establishing individual features that have universal value. A performer justifiably requires total attention from listeners as he brings them not random and passing accomplishments of taste, fashion or artistic whim, but his own gift of opening the depths and values that are inseparably linked to a true creative process.
The Double Life of a Musical Image
A musical image has two lives: one in our minds, and another in real sound. Not just simple melodies but entire compositions - with all their harmonic and polyphonic riches and the timbre color of the orchestral score - fit comfortably in the part of mind responsible for musical conceptions and auditory imagination. This is a special domain of consciousness where music can live a priori - before realization in sound and before the experience of sound.

Musical imagination and inner hearing help the composer, during the creative process, write his ideas down in notes with sufficient precision. Even before concrete sound is realized, he can hear the composition in his mind with sufficient precision and clarity. Upon completion of a score, the composer knows that the created music now exists as an artistic entity. This constitutes a significantdifference between a musical score and an artist's concept of a painting or sculpture.

We reconstruct a musical piece in our mind, using this same auditory imagination. The precision and completeness of this reproduction depend, of course, on the musical memory and gift of the listener. The composition is deposited in the musical imagination with greater and greater completeness and increasingly refined detail upon repeated listening. It is recorded in our mind, which is blessed with a musical memory.

This process may go faster or slower, with differing force or clarity of musical images, depending on the listener's musical memory. Still, one should hold the musical imagination in the same regard as the skill of musical perception.

We may regard a musical image's capability of being heard and meaningfully imagined as the main distinction of this art. Hence each sound imprints in our mind an imagined sound echo. This echo occurs in a silent world. Silence in a sense serves as a neutral surface. The sounds of real music arise out of stillness. However, sinking below the surface we enter the realm of sound imagination. This opposition may be perceived as the original positive and negative sides of musical sound. Silence is the background of musical art. A real sound emerges above the surface; it sinks lightly into it, the convexity of the sound changed by the concavity of the imagination.

The imagined loud sound - the fortissimo of a slowly read score - contrasts dramatically with the solitude and silence of a musician's working office. A composer collects sounds drop by drop in his work, neither reaching nor violating the stillness.

An artist's original concept - in any plastic art form - always differs from its final form. The paint in painting, or the stone in sculpting, invariably brings essential modifications to the artistic plan. A finished sculpture stands in front of us as a result of the unified efforts of nature and artistic will.

But a musical idea usually reveals itself as an identity of inner and outer forms, the identity of an inner concept with its realization. As if a sculptor's workshop has been stripped of everything material, and art images appeared as phantoms, one after another, brought to life solely by the forces of imagination and given an illusory reality.

The absorption of a musician reading the score of a noteworthy composer is understandable: he is imagining beautiful music that has not yet been realized in sound.

Wagner claimed that creating the instrumentation of his pieces brought him a special uplifting, as he now heard the music in an ideal rendition. Schumann pointed out as well that all the signs of the score were reconstructed in his mind as he listened to music.

There is no doubt that an essential and serious barrier exists, separating imagined and realized music. A composer often approaches the instrument in an attempt to escape the enclosed world of the imagination. He is looking for support in real sound for the created musical image. He verifies his theoretical findings like an experimental scientist.

But this does not modify the principles of the composer for whom the clear picture of a musical image is simultaneously its realization - in a smooth and integral transition.

Many extraordinary composers have written without an instrument, particularly during the classical bloom of symphonism. It is said that Mozart wrote the sketch for the score of the overture to "Don Giovanni" in one night, as it had already been fully composed in his mind. With his hearing loss, at the end of his life Beethoven completely lost the ability to hear his own music. Enormous strength of conviction as to the infallibility of their creative decisions - decisions that virtually never required correction on account of realized sound - is felt in the scores of Bach, Haydn, Mozart.

However, the process of realization of sound images does not pass so painlessly and easily with some composers. Some shyness, lack of trust in the reality of sound, some fear of loss of much of the feeling and thought in the final act of creation, is felt in many Schumann scores and especially in his chamber compositions. A creative dream sometimes exceeds the possibility of its realization. The concept is grander and at the same time finer than the result.

The music dies in Schumann's ingenious pauses before merging into the world of imagined sounds. A kind of unfilled gap is left in the second movement of the Piano Concerto, or in the romance on the Heine poem "I cried bitterly in a dream" - a gap in which the imagination acts more strongly on the far side of real sound, in the kingdom of pure poetic fantasy.

The sound dries up in the second act of the "Meistersinger" before the beginning of Hans Sachs's monologue. The last precious drop of sound is spilled only after an interval of time. This is perhaps an example of the utmost expressivity that a pause in sound can produce.

It would be reckless to underestimate the special position of the art of musical interpretation - between the two contrasting but similar domains: the world of real-sound perception, and that of sound imagination. In one case the sound and sound image are perceived as they are executed in reality. The music's sound can be extremely plastic and material. In the other case, real sound is restricted to necessary and crucial moments. An importunate finality may only ruin such music. Excessive precision leaves no room for the imagination. The listener feels overly passive, paralyzed by a stranger's will.

At the same time, a musical image that lacks support in reality loses stability as well as the ability to spontaneously influence the audience.

The armory of a symphony orchestra includes not only tender-sounding instruments capable of carrying the sound to an utmost diminuendo but also the brass and percussion groups, which produce sharp formulations and strong accents. It would be naïve to think that only the weak sounds are directed to listeners' imaginations. Even at the utmost stress of real physical sound a performance can carry much that is hidden and unsaid, and that appeals to the forces of inner hearing and fantasy.

Were we to attempt to indicate the doorway between the appearance of sound and the surface that encloses the world of musical images, we would find that the appearance of sound depends on its force as well as on the physical properties of hearing, its acuity and sensitivity. Musical sounds are perceived by people placed at different distances from their source.

Beethoven's hearing threshold at the end of his life was painfully high. However this disadvantage was compensated for by the enormous capacity of his musical and creative imagination.

Nevertheless, much of the clarity of music perception depends on more than the physical "threshold" of the listener. It is the task of the performer to create an undistorted reflection of the musical image in the listener's mind. Listening to a musical composition one may receive a right or wrong understanding of the rhythm, melodic material, structure, harmony, polyphonic development of the piece. Finally, even after digesting all that, one may fail to grasp the meaning of a musical composition, its mood, its relation to other realms of mind.

Everything that a music critic knows and usually states with such confidence may seem quite unclear to many listeners even if they possess the necessary musicality and experience listening to music.

A listener sometimes has too modest an opinion of his own creative intuition, overestimating the qualities of the performer. However, the interaction and cooperation of the performer and the listener lie at the very core of musical aesthetics. If this connection is possible and assumed in almost all kinds of art - a creative connection between an object of art and a counter-directed understanding - musical comprehension remains special in this regard. Not only the evaluation and understanding of the music, but also the ability to carry an undistorted musical image to the mind, depend on the listener's gift. Sometimes the listener has to enhance the musical thread, enriching an illusory and incomplete musical message with clear musical notions of his own.

Hence we speak not only of what is known as art comprehension but also of the influence of the listener's fantasy and imagination on the aesthetic object itself, which is perceived differently by each listener.

The reality of architecture and the fine arts is not subjected to such deep shifts. A spectator may always be pointed to the correct starting place for viewing and understanding a painting, sculpture or work of architecture. However, if in even these arts the optimal viewing point is not always found immediately , such oscillations and sharp shifts are observed in music even more frequently. As if the surface of each listener's imagination had its own refraction index that modifies in its own way - either distorting or clarifying - the music.

Listening to the playing of a great pianist, we often point to the perfection of his performance, to his extended and singing expressivity of sound, rhythmic clarity, rich color palette, delicacy and logic of form and nuance, not noticing that this impression is assisted to a great degree by the imaginative abilities of the listener himself.

The very position of the performer as an intermediary between the composer's concepts and the realized world of sound makes the performer refer alternatively, by turns, to his imagination - and the musical images it creates - and to the firm support found in real sound.

The whole concept of the interpretation is formed by a listener as a consequence of impulses and moods that come from the stage. The more definite and stable the construction of the musical image - the more active the artist's role - the more inevitable the audience's subordination to his will.

The immediately gripping playing of an artist is usually mentioned in this context. Everything is done, finished and finalized on the stage so that the listener has to obey the orders of the performer.

However, could one transmit the dreamy images of Chopin, Schumann, and Scriabin that sometimes lie outside the boundaries of real sound, with didactic musical judgments of that kind? Here the performer should count more on the listener's trust that on his unquestioning obedience. These are images that are not solely created by the performer's playing, but should emerge as a response in the excited listener's soul.

These images are of course always individually colored. One observes sometimes that overly zealous teachers find the greatest imprecision and distortion in student playing in exactly those musical episodes where the sound image depends almost completely on this kind of individual direction of perception.
Two Types of Interpretation
We will not label each type of interpretation as romantic, classical, realistic or psychological, etc. Contrasting terminology would serve only to sidetrack the flow of ideas. Still, one should point to a significant distinction between characteristics of playing by various artists.

Some touch the sympathetic creative inclinations of the listener, with varying success. Others cultivate a kind of interpretation that leaves no room for listener doubt as to the structure or importance of the constructed musical image.

However, it would be a mistake to consider this distinction as solely a matter of the performer's interpretation. On the contrary, the work itself is created with a view toward one or another type of interpretation. The author himself delineates in his composing style a severely underlined or dreamily wandering manner of interpretation.

The performer appealing to listener imagination is as confident of the final result of his interaction with the audience, as an artist of willful inclination. Otherwise, playing that is rich in illusory constructions and colors might not reach its intended goal, and might not induce a responsive creative wave in the listener's mind. Then artistic illusion becomes fiction - the listener ceases to comprehend the performer's intentions.

Many prefer a kind of interpretation that is better suited to their own creative imaginations' level of activity; even though a priori justification of both ways of addressing the listener depends on the individual's perceptual taste.

An injustice to a departed artist can never be corrected. It is remarkably said that "descendants do not leave wreaths at an artist's grave." Still one may recall several exceptional cases when even a performer's most ingenious accomplishments have not been understood by a wide audience in his lifetime.

It suffices to read Mikuli's opinion of the playing of his teacher, Chopin, or the negative opinions of Scriabin's playing that we still hear now, to be convinced that sometimes the greatest perfection of playing fails to be understood by contemporary listeners. Most often, lack of appreciation is the fate of playing that is blessed by refinement and poetry.

Interpretations are usually less accessible to the listener when the work performed is of a style and character meant for the imaginations of individual listeners. Such music is too often perceived as being "for oneself" to allow easy acceptance of the performer's strange creative will. No matter how penetrating, clever and perfect the reading of your favorite poem by an actor, his interpretation conflicts easily with the preconceived poetic image. The divergence of inner image from external sound can give rise to a variety of incompatibilities.

Sometimes a composer over-trusts the plasticity of sound. When the work is performed, this results in an oversupply of color. The sound-creating phenomenon misses individual links in the chain that connects it to the creative concept. The integrity of the psycho-emotional and ideological basis of the music is once again violated.

However, sometimes the spontaneous forces of sound break loose from the hold of their creator. The method of the composer changes. He accepts that sound may express more than what was meant by the original ideas. The author is guilty of a kind of fetishism allowing the reality of sound to express its special mysterious forces. Such music may not be composed at a desk following the guidance of the imagination. One has to experiment and explore in detail the willful qualities of sound.

Such is the nature of many impressionistic scores. However, one may find that real sound spills outside the boundaries of standard musical imagination in other works as well. One may encounter such flights of fancy even in the classics. Beethoven's Prometheus as conceived in his ballet not only gives the gift of life and movement to soulless clay bodies but provides them with the ability to express their wills independent of their creator: an experienced master leaves for a time the "magician student" without supervision, knowing that he may achieve more than the teacher. A student will experiment more courageously than the teacher, as he is less confident in his knowledge and less convinced of the power his concept holds over its realization.

The calling of a performer, positioned between the realms of imagined sound and real sound, is to penetrate both worlds simultaneously. He cannot miss any shade of the music sounding in his mind while listening, carefully, to the actual sound elements he brings to life. A performer's vision is not translucent to the outside world. It is fogged, as he follows the interior image and his attention concentrates on realizing his ideas. The violinist's head turned toward the instrument expresses symbolically the essence of the performing craft.

Just as the composer's creative process is closer to the world of the imagination, the art of a performer is closer to real sound. The goal of a performer is to realize the composer's ideas and open them up to the audience.

The depth of the stillness and silence surrounding the composer as he opens the stream of unborn sounds in his soul is juxtaposed with the expressivity and force of the sounds he imagines.

A performer transposes this sensitive alertness of creative thought, the negative imagined forms, into real images, playing brought alive. His performance makes inroads into the outside world, surmounting the virtuosic difficulties of style, the resistance and inertness of instrumental means. The performer's extreme demands for perfection of realized sound follow naturally from this: he requires more than an instrument can provide in normal conditions.

Let us recall the eternal argument between musicians and theoretical physicists as to the extent of possible influences on piano sound-quality. How remarkable that the practicing musician, and not the theoretical scientist, turns out to win in those disagreements!

A complex score intended for numerous and diverse orchestra members allows the composer to avoid the arbitrariness of the individual performer. The composer considers joint music-making as a blending of many personae sharing a unified goal. The interpretation of a symphony is realized not by one person but as the joint effort of a large group.

The conductor directing an orchestra cannot feel as free in his intentions as a soloist, especially a pianist, who is the sole possessor of the thread and development of the musical form. A conductor is not only an interpreter but also a manager of the will of the group. He must direct non-homogeneous groups of musicians like an experienced general, taking into account the spirits and weapons of his army. Still, not even the most gifted conductor can do anything with orchestral sound unless he has guessed correctly the artistic dreams of each musician and is capable of blending all these individualities into one whole, collective will.
The Creative Freedom of a Performer
In speaking of the creative freedom of a pianist one should underline the need for a musical image that is nurtured by the mental ear. of the score should come before the production of sound. Each note should be first heard in the mind and only later realized. Then the pianist's playing becomes a creative act that turns the world of musical images into actual sound.

The music lives before and after the actual sound, in constant development. The musical memory connects the preceding sounds with their later development, joining the future and the past, and creating the image of a whole musical form.

The charm and poetry of a solo performance are in the fact that the transition from inner image to real sound is achieved by the individual will of an artist. The performer's art blends the inner life of a musical image and the external form of sound. The elastic reality of art and its shadow are synthesized in a united creative process.

The competition between the soloist and the orchestral accompaniment in a concerto invariably underlines the difference between objective accomplishment and the dreamy vision of the soloist. The orchestral part is closed in a concrete circle. The orchestra always "knows everything," like the chorus in a Greek tragedy.

The soloist's interpretation is full of unsolved mysteries, hopes, fears, expectations. Threads from the past lead the performer into the realm of an unresolved future. The entire art of the soloist is to address not only the hearing but to a greater extent the imagination and sympathy of the audience. It is up to him to stress or leave in shadow, accentuate or soften details in the landscape of the musical form. This is the source of the word "rubato": stealing.

An outstanding artist-performer appears in front of the listener as an important, gifted, complete individuality with an active mind, a rich inner world, and the special mastery of musical form that may be called the gift of artistic vision.

The score of a composer is not a marching order "to be performed!" - for a gifted soloist. A performer must resolve the entire depth of the ideas contained there. How often carefully notated shadings, accents, tempo changes reveal not simply a positive characteristic of sound but rather the untold sides of the author's concept. How many directions we find in Schumann, Chopin, Scriabin, even Beethoven that a pianist should follow not in a real sound but by addressing the subtlest hints to the imagination of a listener!

The observations of composers performing their works are instructive; the phrasing in their own performances, following their own directions, often turns convex lines into concave, the prescribed tempo and dynamic markings are violated. Such substitutions may only be explained by the dominance of the author's imagination over the actual sound.

The gradual acquisition of realistic qualities of sound leads to drastic changes in the musical images. Therefore the inviolate reading of the score a priori - before touching the instrument - may not give the complete scope of the interpretation to come.

The performer gradually limits the composer's concept to the practical possibilities of the instrument, upon mastering it with the mental ear. Being in the center of the musical forces he creates the sound while simultaneously being carried by the sound field. The will of the playing artist expresses itself in overcoming and restraining the capriciousness of the sound matter: his creative will alternatingly accepts and rejects the sounds produced by the instrument.

We call playing emotional exactly when this struggle reaches an incredible stress. A flawless performance of difficult passages does not always satisfy a listener even though he acknowledges the mastery of the pianist. The playing truly overcomes the listener when the struggle of the inner image and its outside covering becomes apparent. Virtuosic playing becomes the victory of intellect over earthly matter, and the listener sees clearly the spirit and essence of the musical art. Otherwise the most precise and refined mastery seems mechanical, like a substitute for a pianola.

Gifted playing is a dialectic process where the inner world of sound constantly acquires new qualities as it is being realized.

The deeper and more penetrating the reading of the composer's ideas as found in the score, the richer and more substantial the performance. The significance of the musical ideas transmitted by the performer depends on careful reading and attention to the score. It is wrong to consider the composer's text an excuse for displaying the unique qualities of a gifted artist's playing. As if the goal of the performer is not to make the written score audible, but to impose the best aspects of his playing over the text independent of the author's ideas.

A vital, effective and impressive art cuts various paths and uses different, sometimes contradictory means to achieve its artistic goals. It is hard to distinguish in art between the carefully worked out techniques that form the everyday labor of an artist, and the more rare, enlightening and intuitively found paths and solutions. Both are necessary, "inspiration is a guest that does not like to visit the lazy," - as was said by a great Russian composer.

Sometimes the most prosaic attempts lead to unexpected artistic discoveries, while an inspired breakthrough requires long, unrelenting work for triumphal practical results. Everything in the work of an artist is important and illuminated by the grand aesthetic goal. There are no accomplishments that have not been preceded by many steps in developing mastery and an understanding of the principles of the creative method.

Any work of art, be it an artist's painting, a sculptor's creation or the inspired performance of a pianist, leaves us an impression of uniqueness and rarity, as a feat of human action. The composition itself, as well as its performance, transpires as a marvelous act born out of accomplishments, where the goal and the means stand in the usual causal relation.

Observing the creation of a painting, following the artist's brush or the chisel cutting into the stone, it is difficult to perceive the connection between the sculptor or artist's movements and the intended goal. The pianist's fingers touching the keyboard seem mysterious, possessed of special elusive qualities. We perceive this secret of mastery as a gift, a piece of genius. It is hard to believe that the complicated creative process may be reduced to a series of simple actions that can be understood and comprehended.

An observer strongly influenced by art falls into a kind of fetishism. People talk of Rafael's brush, Michelangelo's chisel as we talk of the fingers and hands of a great performer, forgetting the artistic will that guides them. However, while the metonymy whereby an artist's brush is praised is clear to everybody, many prejudices exist because of incorrectly addressed attention.

A certain palm-reading is still practiced by the many piano teachers who predict their students' future success or failure, along the thorny route to pianistic heights, on the sole basis of the build of their hands.

The goal of art theory is to reclaim slowly everything that is accessible to understanding, generalization and logical development, from the realm of the seemingly unknowable. It is commonly objected that the path of a creative artist is different from the usual conscious behavior of man, that it is built of unconscious, intuitive acts, like the path of a lawless comet in the "predictable circle of planets." However, much can be accounted for in the domain of artistic instinct: a constant, stable logic of artistic interactions can be found, just as a comet's orbit can be marked on a map of the stars.

The pianist's art is often treated simplistically - in light of the laws of physiology and in connection with the anatomical build of the hand - or as an incomprehensible process lying purely in the domain of intuitive human actions. This simplisticness is often related to the fact that many performers with insufficient knowledge of the practice of art prefer to rely on the general accomplishments seen from the motor-apparatus perspective. Others, having scaled the highest summits of art, forget the many mistakes and difficulties that they have experienced, and have overcome through ceaseless productive thinking. The superstitious theory that a clear, conscious understanding of all the stages of a creative path might hinder the freedom and immediacy of artistic thought - is sometimes invoked.

In reality artistic inspiration cannot completely reject the mind - the intellect that corrects the free flight of imagination in even the most precious moments of creative impulse. The most fruitful hours of creation may coincide with those of rigorous critical thinking.

One way or another, one has to balance "pure mind" and "pure intuition" in one's work. The artist's wisdom ideally helps and guides his inspiration, preventing it from turning into the baseless ecstasy condemned so reasonably by Pushkin. Finally, an artist does not exist perpetually in an exalted state of mind, in which artistic discoveries follow one after another. He spends many hours in everyday, but necessary, practice-hours when he needs both a clear mind and wise guidance.

Let every performer confess how many hours, days and even years have been wasted as a result of poorly thought-through ideas, either his own or his teacher's, guiding his studies!

A pianist claiming that his interpretation changes radically from one performance to the next and does not obey a careful plan, is mistakenly claiming excessive improvisation as a virtue. Naturally, an artistic plan is dynamic, and it is impossible to play a piece identically, even at the same recital. Still, these distinctions, no matter how serious, should not distort the overall, thought-out concept. They pertain only to differing realizations of the course of the prepared interpretation.

The dynamics of artistic will play an enormous role in the development of a performer's artistic self, but they should not be identified with thoughtlessness and a careless wish for on-stage elation.

One should not merely live and feel in art, one has to live through a great deal and endure a great deal. This extra qualifier applies equally to thought, as much is reconsidered while artistic images build.

And there is another danger: that the mind may overlook the most important in art and overestimate the secondary and unnecessary. How often musicians dogmatize random qualities of interpretation, or irrelevant details of a performance, especially if these features are found in the playing of a great artist! Humans are guilty sometimes of mannerisms and posturing, but those things do not hold the key to a great master's charm. Strength of analytic thought and sharpness of observation do not lie in canonizing outer, random tricks, but in capturing the essence that lies at the core of mastery but is invisible at a superficial glance. The purpose of deep critical thought is to grasp the invisible and make it tangible. On the other hand one should be careful not to fall under the dogmatic spell of theoretical preconceptions.

What can be the best hope of a researcher undertaking the task of untangling the specifics of such a refined art as piano playing? This art has no detailed theoretical system. This art changes constantly in its favorite forms and tastes, its technique and common trends. Almost all theoretical concepts have to retreat when confronted with the practice of outstanding masters of pianism, overwhelmed by the contradictions and complexity of live phenomena. This leads to an almost uniform and quite understandable skepticism on the part of expert practitioners, who tend to reject the universality of any "theory" and confine themselves to a "working hypothesis."

Hence the most we can hope for is to capture at least some universal trends and general principles, which may lead a conscientious pianist toward the steady development of his art. Anything that might be said of such a dynamic art may be of only passing value, as any principle or technique bows out to new stylistic logic. However, an artist changes with the times as well. He is alive as an artist only as long as his performing concepts remain unfinished, as long as they are transformed along with modern musical art as well as developments in other arts. Hence, the contradictions that the reader has found in these notes should be attributed to the difficulties that inevitably accompany any attempt to fix and stabilize live artistic development.

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Relating Musical Experience with Personal Experience Depending on Approach

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Did you know critical thinking is a skill that can be taught? That's right! Critical thinking is a purposeful, active, and conscious process; one that can grow and be honed. And what's more, music can be used to develop it. This is thanks to music's ability to tap into logic, reasoning, and creativity - especially when it comes to problem solving!

Let's take a closer look.

What is Critical Thinking?

First and foremost, if we're going to discuss a topic, it's best we understand what it is first. The truth is, critical thinking is a dynamic and complicated subject, but there are a few ways it can be defined:

One of the most well known definitions comes from the Socratic Method. Here, critical thinking is evident when individuals consider opposite sides to an argument, search for evidence to support their conclusions, and challenge one another with high quality, informed questions.

Anther definition relies on a person's ability to self-correct and make decisions based on investigation and evidence; and when the strategies they use can be used in other situations.

Finally, philosophers Richard Paul and Linda Elder suggest that critical thinking happens when; your ability to process information improves; all relevant information you can gather can be used to ask significant questions; you can examine and justify conclusions; you can stay open to other points of view.

Despite this shifting definition, music has been shown to help us with each of these complicated mental acrobatics. In fact, according to Emma Walton Hamilton, language and arts expert:

" We know, absolutely, for a fact, that there is no better way for children to learn critical thinking skills, communication skills, empathy and tolerance than through music. This is true across every boundary, across cultural and socio-economic boundaries. Music is a great leveler in terms of unifying our world."

Critical Thinking & Music

For a long time, and until only recently, the prevailing theory held by the educational community was that only certain subjects were needed to promote the development of critical thinking skills. However, this idea changed when John Dewey insisted that all subjects promote critical thinking; as long as the lessons is presented through a problem-solving framework, and reflection is encouraged.

Since both listening to and performing music offer a challenge where there is no single goal, they can both help to develop flexible, divergent, lateral, and deep thinking.

Music Touches Different Kinds of Thinkers

But why is it that music has such a profound impact on critical thinking? One reason may be that both listeners and performers of music are encouraged to explore the emotions they have while listening or performing. Furthermore, they learn to handle and honour the feelings they have about these experiences. This, in turn, can lead to the exploration of more extensive parts of the brain, which creates:

Divergent Thinkers

These students consider many different answers for each situation. This is the opposite of "convergent thinkers," who expect to find only one correct answer for each situation they encounter.

Flexible Thinkers

These individuals imagine different kinds of possible ideas to respond to questions, problems, or situations. This is very different from "fluent thinkers." A fluent thinker, when asked what they want for lunch, for example, may have five answers, but all of them burger places. The flexible thinker, on the other hand, may suggest a variety of cuisines.

Elaborate Thinkers

These are those who can expand on or combine ideas. If we continue the example of going for lunch, an elaborate thinker may consider the flexible thinker's suggestions, and then provide a number of reasons why one of them is best; e.g. the service, location, etc.

Original Thinkers

These people are the non-conformists. They can come up with elaborate ideas to any given question. For our lunch example, they are the kind to suggest buying food for a picnic, and finding a nice, sunny spot to eat.

Music Methodologies to Encourage Critical Thinking

So, how can those who both listen to and play music harness this incredible power? We've got a few strategies that may help:

Driving Questions

Starting off any musical experience with the right questions creates opportunities to consider multiple conclusions. The most effective questions start with "how," "why," or "what if..." With that in mind, consider the questions like these while listening, practicing, or performing:

How does the sound of silence make you feel?

Why do you spend time learning, and how will you learn new things in the future?

What if you could repaint your bedroom? What colours would you choose and why?

They may seem unrelated to music, but your brain is already doing the work as you experience the music, and driving questions like these deepen that work.

Diverse Soundtracks

Soundtracks to movies, TV shows, and video games are specifically composed to elicit emotion. For this reason they can be used as the foundation for thinking routines. Play soundtracks and consider what they may mean regarding events, plot predictions, and moods. Consider why they may have been chosen.

Rhythm & Movement

Incorporate the meanings of other educational material with drumming, rhyme, and other forms of so-called "corporal language," or body language, like dancing. Connecting the academic with music and movement creates a deeper connection and experience.

Final Thoughts

The fact is, critical thinking techniques must be taught. This is due to the simple fact that no one critical thinking technique that is useful in every situation. Instead, we face hundreds, or even thousands of different circumstances that require different strategies. For this reason, those with flexible critical thinking skills have an invaluable toolbox for facing the challenges that come their way.

Want to boost the critical thinking skills of your children - or even your own? Check out all The Music Studios programs, classes, and lessons, and start today!

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Developing Critical Thinking Through Music | The Music Studio

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Critical thinking is a purposeful, active, and conscious process; one that can grow and be honed. And music can be used to develop it.

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hearing music, triggering thinking and conceptualization. Also considering other student comments and applying that to an individual's story or thought process

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This is an in-depth dive into each brass instrument in ways to teach and learn a brass instrument

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This textbook is designed for undergraduate brass techniques courses as part of a music education degree. The text is designed for a one semester course and includes instructional materials, guided practice materials, and teacher resources. Over 60 videos are integrated into the text to provide both instruction and guided practice. The book is designed to allow for a flipped classroom approach to brass techniques so that the classroom time focuses on applying technical and pedagogical learning.

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This is a website that allows educators to find composers that come from diverse backgrounds and use their works within music ensembles

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This provides solo repertoire for all levels of performance

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This is a comic book that talks about music history

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This is a deep dive into music education. A plethora of information can be found through this resource

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The Art of Musical Notation

In its primary sources, music merges with the representational arts. Oral tradition has played a fundamental role in all ages, but in its formal sense, history--and the history of music--begins with the visual record.

Musical notation, having emerged on a wide scale in all civilizations, produced in itself a highly individual record of artistic endeavor. The medieval monks who compiled the missals and other liturgical books for the service of worship rose from their function as scribes to artists in their own right; among the greatest documents of Baroque art are the holographs by Bach; and an entirely novel phase in artistic musical score design was initiated in the twentieth century. The primary sources of music reproduced in this volume rely on various aspects of the graphic arts, but foremost among them stands the representation of the musical sound itself, the art of musical notation.

Among the manifold forms the written image of music has taken are letters or syllables, to represent individual tones, and symbols to represent groups of them. But a more advanced approach is expressed in notation guided not only by the wish to fix the immediate impression of a given musical sound but by the attempt to render the act of musical performance in its continuity. The notational signs which were to prove of the most lasting influence were the highly expressive neumes; it was from them that the generally surviving style of musical script arose. The term was derived from the Greek word neuma --a nod or motion, and in this particular context the manual gesture or gestures to establish different pitch levels--and it suggests the melodic flow as indicated by the leader of an ensemble. Widely used in Eastern and Western music practice, the neumes were invariably connected with vocal performance whose notation was also greatly aided by the joining of musical symbols with verbal text.

The decisive step in the evolution of a readily perceptible image for the musical sound was taken by the Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo (circa 1000), the preceptor of the cathedral choir school at that northern Italian city and a theorist of unusual pedagogical gift. Guido's achievement was in placing the neumes on lines, for clearer orientation drawn in different colors and representing the interval of a third. With this invention he created the basis of a system that has remained alive in modern practice. So immediately successful was his method that Pope John XIX, "after brief instruction, and to his own surprise, was able to sight-read a melody not previously known to him, without any error," and in justified pride, Guido added "musica sine linea est sicut puteus sine fune" ("music without lines is like a well without a rope").

Guido's refinements in the definition of pitch were followed by corresponding advances in graphically defining the musical sound's duration. The use of neumes gradually gave way to that of square-shaped notes and combinations of notes in so-called ligatures. While obviously emanating from the forms of neumes, these new symbols served their purpose with greater exactness of detail.

contribution to the history of music. Influences from the south and east met with those from the north and west by which traditions of monophonic music--unaccompanied melody--merged with developments in probing the harmony of simultaneously sounding voices. They led to the work of the masters at Notre Dame in Paris and various other regions of northern France, the first figures in music history who stand out as individual composers of indigenous styles. In the early polyphonic settings of chant, long and short note values were distinguished by applying the rhythmic modes, inferred from the verse meters of antiquity, to groups of notes. But fourteenth-century theorists declared a categoric difference between old and new styles (ars antiqua and ars nova), the latter reflected by means of notation that departed from the modal system and adopted a system of strict measuring, the so-called mensural notation. The differentiation of note values grew, adding to the horizontally placed square shapes more precisely placed diamond shapes; and the color of notes changed from black to white (i.e., a mere black outline of the note shape which, once again, ensured greater precision of notation).

The magnificent appearance of missals from the waning Middle Ages and early Renaissance, with their lavish illuminations, may make it at times difficult to decide which is the greater artistic achievement: the manuscript itself, or the art it represents. We are dealing with a period that was not yet fully conscious of the distinction between artist and artisan known in later ages. But the time was approaching when the work of the scribe was supplanted by that originating in centers of printing whose interest and influence reached beyond the sphere of the individual artifact. The process of music printing obviously grew in stages. In early phases, merely the lines were given in print, the neumes being entered by hand, or folios were produced by "double printing"--the lines in red and, in a second imprint, the notes in black. The first printer of mensural music, the Venetian Ottaviano Petrucci, was for a long time considered the inventor of the art of printing music with movable type, yet his excellent work (begun about 1500) was preceded by that of various print shops in the north.

* * *

The sixteenth century became a "golden age" that produced the classical summaries of the art of vocal polyphony in sacred and secular music as well as in treatises on music theory. Among the latter, L'Istitutioni Harmoniche (1555, reprinted 1562 and 1573) by Gioseffo Zarlino (1517-1590), Master of the Chapel at St. Mark's in Venice, assumed a preeminent place. As the title suggests, the work was dedicated to the age-old ideals of symmetry and proportion, the "harmony of all parts in relation to the whole," as described by the writers of antiquity. In his thorough discussion of the correlation of tones and melodies, Zarlino--like the early authors on perspective--saw himself obliged to create a completely new terminology. His concern with measurement and the concepts of division and inversion lends his work an authority extending to the fine arts as much as to music, and the numerous ornamental illustrations accompanying his text go far beyond the traditional embellishment of enhanced initial letters. They render scientific design that represents a true counterpart to the decorative music printing of the era.

The work is divided into four parts which the author joins in two larger sections. The first pair deals with the conceptual and physical properties of the musical sound, and the second with the technique of composition. What Zarlino recognizes and, in fact, reconciles, is the time-honored distinction between musica speculativa and musica activa --theory and practice. In a rather robust way, Guido had referred to the two domains with the well-known verse:
Musicorum et cantorum magna est distantia Isti dicunt, illi sciunt, quae componit musica
Between musicians and singers exists a wide gulf
The latter perform, the former know, the substance of music

His dichotomy led Guido into a bit of polemic comment on "those who do what they not know" which has remained alive through the centuries, though amply misconstrued. While Zarlino links an introductory chapter on the division of music into speculative and practical branches to "the difference between musician and singer," he significantly redefines the ideas and terms involved, because he speaks of the musico as the artist able to judge not only the sound but also the "reason contained in this science," whereas the prattico is considered, in his text, on equal terms with a "composer, singer, or player." He states categorically that "practical music is the art of counterpoint," and that the domains of theory and practice are, as in other arts, complementary rather than opposed.

What is of special interest is that he refers to the practice of playing as well as singing, for the rise of instrumental music had posed a fresh challenge to polyphony and to its notation. Zarlino's music examples are still arranged according to the old choir book notation in which the separate voices appear side by side; and the audition requirements for early sixteenth-century organists, which have been preserved, call for the ability to play a motet from the given number of individual part books. Such an astounding grasp of polyphonic texture, however, gradually became a rare achievement. A historic exception was Mozart's encounter with the choral music of Bach, kept in the library of St. Thomas's church in Leipzig only in separate parts. The account of an eyewitness reads: "and then it was for the silent observer a joy to see how eagerly Mozart sat himself down, with the parts all around him--in both hands, on his knees, and on the chairs next to him--and, forgetting everything else, did not get up again until he had looked through everything." The sixteenth-century organist, faced with the task of rendering all parts of a polyphonic composition on a single instrument, soon felt the need to tabulate them in a form in which their simultaneous sound could be readily recognized. The "tabulations" that resulted characterize the appearance of the early keyboard literature and herald the notation of the modern keyboard score.

Score arrangements were actually known as early as the ars antiqua, for the works of the Notre Dame school appear in parts written one under the other, though not necessarily in careful alignment. Older, too, was the device of intabulation itself, but it covered a wide range of notation applied to instrumental music of various kinds. In fact, the device of tablature goes back to the ancient world in the notation of music for instruments such as the flute or zither in systems that lived on in the lute tablatures of the Renaissance. Here, however, it was not a series of pitches that was tabulated, but rather the relative position of fingers or strings to be used in order to produce them, and the tradition has survived in examples of modern notation.

Conversely, the tablatures of polyphonic keyboard music retained a direct connection with the early scores rendering vocal music, and they appeared on a number of staves representing the different voices of the composition, or merely on two staves, showing how these voices were to be combined in the right and left hands of the player.

A certain exception was the tablature notation used by German organists, in which the tones were not identified by notes but by the letters designating them. Since this was done in Gothic script, German organ tablature presents a particularly difficult picture, and this picture becomes doubly bewildering through the use of a number of special symbols. Nevertheless, the notation is precise. Measures and individual parts are neatly grouped; the rhythm is marked by strokes, dots, and flags; and the register is indicated by horizontal lines as well as by a distinction between the use of capital and small letters (among which, according to German custom, b stands for b-flat and h for b-natural).

Above all, the manuscripts in German organ tablature impress again upon the modern reader the fact that the scribe approached his task as an art. Perhaps the most conspicuous feature on a page of German organ tablature is the occasional elongation of a letter by which, for instance, "f" is changed to "fis" (the German note name for f-sharp). What was an abbreviation of the suffix "is" became a flourish, a very characteristic expression of the art of musical notation. In its particular form of German organ tablature this art was ultimately glorified in isolated cases appearing in the autographs of Handel and Bach.

Notes

The Rise of Music Drama

We speak of the intellectual life of the Renaissance as Humanism--the study of man--and the first writer to use the term Renaissance, the French historian Jules Michelet, referred to the reawakening or "rebirth" of ancient culture as both la découverte du monde and la découverte de l'homme --the discovery of the world and the discovery of man. It is indicative of the era that several documents in this collection, preserved from the waning sixteenth century, bear personal signatures. In documentary history the signature moves into focus, as the portrait moves into the focus of pictorial history. Western music had for centuries evolved primarily in the sacred service, but a new age of the art began to be oriented not by the relation of man to God so much as by his relation to man. Its prime expression was no longer the liturgy but human drama.

It is well known that a learned academy met in one of the Florentine palaces for discussions devoted to a revival of the dramatic art of antiquity and that these discussions led to the inception of music drama. The name Camerata, by which the group is remembered, signaled the fact that decisive developments in music had passed from the church to the camera, the princely chamber. Yet the scholars and artists of the Camerata were by no means the originators of dramatic music, nor did the influence of sacred music practice decline due to the evolution of dramatic music. The two great Venetians of the period, Gioseffo Zarlino and Giovanni Gabrieli, who in this collection are represented by autograph signatures, were church musicians; they both served at St. Mark's. But the work of Gabrieli, whose fame outshone that of all other musicians of his era, announces a new age, a new style of music that is totally dramatic.

Unlike Palestrina's music, written for the Papal Chapel and borne by ideas of retrospection, the music of Gabrieli was of a progressive, in fact, revolutionary nature. It favored the dramatic contrasts of the "concerted" style, in which several choirs vied with one another in the unfolding of resonant splendor, and in which a "choir" of instruments began to assume an independent role. It is especially interesting that we find Gabrieli's signature paired with that of Heinrich Julius, Duke of Brunswick, one of the most eminent musical patrons of the new era and himself well trained as a musician. The names of Antonio Goretti, Giovanni Battista Buonamente, and Luigi Battiferri, however, lead us to a generation of church musicians already fully versed in the secular dramatic style, the greatest of whom was Claudio Monteverdi.

Here we encounter one of those towering figures whose work shaped an epoch in music history. Born in 1567 at Cremona, the city of the famed violin makers, Monteverdi was trained in the old contrapuntal art by Marco Antonio Ingegneri, the eminent master of the Cathedral Chapel, but it was as a violinist that in young years he was appointed to the ducal court of Mantua. Soon he was also to earn the more highly regarded title of cantore, and in time he took over the direction of all instrumental and vocal music at the court. By the turn of the century he had become the leading exponent of what in the works of one of his contemporaries, the Florentine lutenist and singer Giulio Caccini, was designated as "nuove musiche" and "nuova maniera di scriverla" ("new music" and "the new manner of writing it"), but what was attacked by another contemporary, the Bolognese theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi, as "imperfettioni della moderna musica" ("imperfections of modern music"). Monteverdi answered the latter charge with a famous statement in which he boldly asserted that the alleged imperfections were in reality perfections; that what was involved was a novel style with its own legitimacy; and that it represented a "Second Practice," postulated by the requirements of dramatic music, to which the principles of the "First Practice"--those codified by Zarlino--no longer applied. Just as the fourteenth century had declared an ars nova in music, the rising eventeenth century thus established a new style period that, in fact, figures as the beginning of many to follow.

In 1607 Monteverdi received a court commission to write a "musical fable," characteristically based on the legend of Orpheus, the mythical singer whose art moved the forces of nature and conquered the supernatural spirits. Orfeo became Monteverdi's most celebrated work. In it he drew on the wealth of musical expression the Renaissance had produced, placing it in the service of drama. It is indicative of a new age that in Orfeo it is no longer the voice alone that serves dramatic means but the instrument as well--an example is the expressive use of the violin, Monteverdi's own instrument, in introducing the climactic song of Orpheus. Monteverdi's achievement went beyond a fulfillment of the aims of the Camerata. It was music itself that triumphed through his work in the rebirth of ancient drama.

Yet the "new music" of the theater was immediately blended with the music of the church. In 1613, a year after Gabrieli had died, Monteverdi was appointed Master of the Chapel at St. Mark's Cathedral. The "sacred concerto" now took its place next to mass and motet; and from it was to arise theProtestant church cantata, for the greatest of the German church composers of the time, Heinrich Schütz, who had studied with both Gabrieli and Monteverdi, brought the new forms to the north.

Giovanni Battista Buonamente, less well known as one of the Monteverdi followers, may have shared with Schütz the latter's role as initiator of dramatic music beyond the Alps. Like Monteverdi, active at the court of the Gonzagas in Mantua as a violinist, he wrote works in which the element of instrumental virtuosity begins to come to the fore. They are characteristic of the rapidity with which the dramatic style had entered all aspects of musical practice. It found expression in the sonata which now arose in distinction to the cantata as the piece that was "sounded" rather than sung, and it led eventually to the instrumental concerto in which one or several soloists are singled out from the orchestra. But on a broader scale it continued to serve the music for the stage. At the occasion of the wedding of Princess Eleanora Gonzaga to the Emperor Ferdinand II, Buonamente took up service at the Viennese court. His preserved letters to Prince Cesare Gonzaga give a vivid account of the Imperial court music, and his description of a Pastoral Comedia suggests that it was he who composed the instrumental music for the dances in the work.

The term Comedia did not carry the connotation of the later "comic" play--rather, in accordance with the Greek origin of the word, it designated a festive entertainment that was presented through song. In his letter written in Parma on February 28, 1628, Antonio Goretti, a distinguished patron of music and friend of Monteverdi's, mentions his ardent wish ("mi moro di voglia"--"I die with desire") to return from Parma to Ferrara in order to attend the forthcoming Comedia there. The letter was apparently addressed to the Marchesa Bentivoglio who represented one of the aristocratic families of Ferrara and with whom Monteverdi and Goretti were visiting at the time.

Ever since his early years in the employ at the court of Mantua, Monteverdi had been connected in various ways with the neighboring court of Ferrara. Musical life in Ferrara, which flourished at the court, in churches, and in theaters, had received a particular impetus from various academies, learned and philanthropic societies which often maintained their own musical establishments. To one of them, the Accademia degli Intrepidi, Monteverdi had dedicated his Fourth Book of Madrigals, the earliest of the works that had touched off the controversy with Artusi. The most famous of the academies was the Accademia della Morte (originally a monastic order to aid those condemned to death), and among its eminent music directors was Luigi Battiferri, who, as late as the time of Bach, was praised as a master of the contrapuntal art.

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The Renaissance was an essentially Italian movement, though its roots stretched throughout Europe. In the north it was paralleled by the Reformation which was to lead the northern world into a war that lasted for an entire generation--the Thirty Years War. It profoundly affected all cultural life, and the work of such a composer as Schütz gives eloquent witness to the adversity of the age. In the highly interesting statements with which he prefaced the prints of his works, he referred to "the wretched times our dear homeland is still undergoing" and he gave suggestions to the performer as to how his compositions might be executed with more modest means than called for in the printed form.

Nevertheless, the early seventeenth century saw a significant turn to German texts in manuscripts and published editions of music. German had become an established literary language with Luther's Bible translation, and whereas in the documents of this collection we have dealt so far only with Latin and Italian, we now have before us an immense body of works in which texts in the northern languages predominate. The rise of music drama spread beyond the Alps, and it found its strongest expression in the Protestant liturgy.

The oldest piece of Protestant church music represented here introduces a little-known name, Johannes Wanning. One of the numerous musicians who had migrated from the Netherlands to Germany, this fertile and imaginative composer is a true representative of a well-developed art with which the new church had begun to assimilate the influences of music drama. Though Latin texts still prevail in his music, it suggests a genuinely northern style. He spent the major part of his life in Danzig, one of the Hanseatic seaports, whose new organ at St. Mary's Church had "caused a sensation in all of Europe."

The Reformation had divided the continent into a Catholic south and a Protestant north. A dividing line was never sharply drawn, nor did it remain without various enclaves north and south. But there is no question that this division initiated a certain shift of weight. Padre Giambattista Martini, teacher of the young Mozart, was to open his famous treatise on counterpoint with the statement that in the art of music, the sixteenth century had made Italy "the mistress of the other nations." This hegemony gradually declined in subsequent centuries, though not without leaving an Italian legacy to the world. The Italian language became international in musical terminology. It was within the lands where the German language was spoken, however, that a certain dividing line between Catholic and Protestant music became recognizable. The works of Christoph Demantius and Christoph Bernhard mark the generations of German Protestantism before and after Schütz, whereas the name of Wolfgang Ebner reminds us of a different school of composers whose works initiated the style that was to become of enduring influence at the Catholic imperial court of Vienna.

The style element that characterized the rise of dramatic music everywhere was the bassus generalis or basso continuo, the thoroughbass that accompanied the vocal melody with harmonic support of keyboard or other chordal instruments as well as various bass instruments. As its designation implies, it ran through the entire composition; being executed by the conductor himself at the keyboard, with the support of bass instruments, it provided a sure foundation for a musical fabric largely dominated by the dramatic expression of the vocal or instrumental solo. Its rule arose in phases, and it is typical of the church music of Demantius that its polyphonic texture, though tending toward a polarity of the outer voices, is maintained without continuo accompaniment. His orientation was conservative, though in his most significant work, a St. John Passion for six-part choir, he heralded the form in which Protestant church music was to culminate.

Christoph Bernhard, foremost student of Schütz, was born in Danzig, the city where Wanning had been active, but he was trained in Italy as well as in Germany. In his important theoretical writings he acted as the catalyst who interpreted the old art of polyphony to a new generation. Through Schütz's tutelage he was thoroughly schooled in the a cappella style, the "Palestrinian manner," but in his sacred concertos, which again adopted the model of Schütz, the modern continuo style was firmly established. His works were of direct influence upon Dietrich Buxtehude, the mentor of the young Bach, into whose era the life of Bernhard was to extend.

The work of Ebner, while itself overshadowed by that of his greater contemporary Johann Jakob Froberger, guides us to the Viennese keyboard art of the seventeenth century. The dance suite, one of the oldest forms of instrumental ensemble music, now appears as a form of courtly keyboard music, merging French, German, and English style elements with genuine Viennese influences. Ebner's keyboard music remained in high esteem, as is shown by the fact that his own name is joined in the copy of the composition here preserved to those of Alessandro Poglietti and Giuseppe Antonio Paganelli, noted Italian keyboard composers, both of whose careers developed on German soil. Ebner served, together with Froberger, as imperial court organist, though during the latter's extensive travels, he often carried out the duties of this assignment alone. Eventually he combined his court position with that of Master of the Chapel at St. Stephen's Cathedral, where in later years Johann Pachelbel served for some time as organist.

It was Pachelbel who carried the South German keyboard style into the Protestant orbit, and it is indicative of his influence that the sample of his work contained in this collection, and as yet unpublished, has come down to us in a copy by Heinrich Nikolaus Gerber, one of Bach's pupils. The generations overlap. Pachelbel had moved to Eisenach, Bach's birthplace, where for a brief period he held the position of court organist, and he became a friend of Bach's father who was in charge of the town music. Bach's eldest brother, Johann Christoph, to whose household Bach moved when he lost his parents at an early age, was Pachelbel's student, and it was through him that the young Bach was introduced to the organist's profession.

As we approach the era of Bach and Handel, we enter into two realms of music that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may seem to have grown far apart in purpose and style, though in reality they remained innately related to one another. It is more difficult to honor the height of an era than to trace its beginnings. Music history has borrowed the term Baroque, now commonly accepted, from the history of art, in order to describe characteristics that works of music from the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century have in common. Such epoch designations are always problematic because an afterglow of the past invariably merges with developments that foreshadow the future. As an alternate, more precise designation of what has come to be recognized as a particular era of music, historians formed the term basso continuo age. Though more cumbersome, it represents a more direct understanding of the style involved, for the technical criterion of thoroughbass accompaniment is by its very function inseparably connected with the emergence of the dramatic art forms that dominated the music of this era and that found their fulfillment in the works of Bach and Handel.

The names of the two great composers, both of whom were born in 1685, have been linked customarily, as have been those of Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso, who both died in 1594. But the attempt to derive a certain periodization from these dates remains in its ramifications inaccurate, as does the attempt to see any obvious parallel in the composers' artistic bequest and mission.

Bach and Handel were born in Saxon towns less than a hundred miles apart, and they entered their profession in the environment of the Protestant church. The legacy of Protestant church music, however, was imparted in diverse ways to the lives of the two masters. Bach, born into a family of town and church musicians, was heir to a tradition which, ranging over more than a century before his time and extending for generations after his own, stands for a unique hereditary history. Handel appears in a genealogy of more than two centuries as the only musician. His was a well-to-do bourgeois family in which artistic and intellectual tendencies were represented rather through the goldsmith's trade and the ministry. His father, a court physician, had not looked with favor upon the son's studies for the musical profession.

This may help to explain the divergent course of the two careers. Bach was committed to an overwhelming artistic inheritance; Handel, throughout his life, was an artist of absolute independence. Bach's work unfolded entirely on German soil, whereas Handel's extended through Europe, became Italianized and eventually Anglicized to the astounding degree that English music became thoroughly shaped by the Handelian style. But in Bach's German church cantatas and Passion settings, and in Handel's English oratorios, the music drama of what we have come to call the age of the Baroque reached its final form.

Johann Pachelbel, from a keyboard partita on a chorale

Copied by the Bach student, Heinrich Nikolaus Gerber

It is also a final phase of the composers' lives with which the documents before us are concerned. Though merely provided as a formality, Bach's signatures are of particular historical significance because they are the last we have from his hand--the signature bearing the latest date had, in fact, to be supplied by his son Johann Christian because of the master's increasing blindness. And they verify the fact that Bach's duties had remained those of a church musician and official. Handel's autograph happens to be likewise written within a short period before the onset of blindness. But he was to resist the decline of his powers for yet another decade, in which his work remained devoted to English oratorio, the form which was his most original creation.

Opera, which all but absorbed musical life in Italy, had experienced a different fate in the countries north of the Alps. In France, it had risen to prime importance at the court through the work of an Italian, Giovanni Battista Lulli, who, as Jean Baptiste Lully, gave opera its French guise and strengthened its nature by imparting to it a salient feature, the overture, which in turn came to be combined with operatic ballets to form the orchestral suite. In Germany, devastated by the war that raged in the first half of the seventeenth century, opera gained its place in society with much delay, and for a long time it survived essentially as an Italian import. In England, removed from the source of opera by a continent and the sea, it was considered totally alien--in the words of the satirist Samuel Johnson, "an exotic and irrational entertainment." Whereas in Germany music drama had found its way into the Protestant cantata and dramatic setting of the Gospel story, England had essentially resisted these developments. The very term opera appeared in English music first in the The Beggar's Opera (1728), written in open defiance of Handel's introduction of Italian opera to London audiences.

Handel's opera enterprise, desired and supported by the English aristocracy and a primary challenge of absorbing fascination to the composer, eventually failed. Relying on Italian singers whose fame and virtuosity was its principal attraction, opera was undeniably foreign to the wider English audience. Its Italian texts, dealing with intrigues from unfamiliar history, had no meaning for its listeners. And from a protracted struggle between the composer and his public emerged, as a solution, English oratorio, a new form in which English texts, chosen predominantly (though by no means exclusively) from the Old Testament, were presented by English singers (or foreign artists who had adapted their performance to the English language). It was the form that eventually raised the composer to the level of a national hero.

The Reformation had created a Church of the State in England; yet the Anglican rite, despite all violent reactions to "popish" tendencies, stayed closer to the Roman rite than German Protestantism. Henry Purcell, "true genius of the Restoration," was one of the first openly to embrace the new dramatic forms in England, and in his sacred and secular works English seventeenth-century music found its finest expression. It was through the tragically early death of Purcell that John Blow, an able composer, though of minor stature, emerged as the leading English musician of the waning seventeenth century. He was a teacher and predecessor of Purcell as court composer and Master of the Chapel Royal, but in the end also his successor. In his anthems and odes we encounter what had become the predominant forms of English music, forms that were to contribute decisively to the genesis of English oratorio.

Unlike Bach, Handel was surrounded by musicians who, like himself, were immigrants and had sought their fortune in a country representing "a parliamentary state with free institutions alongside a Europe ruled by absolutism." German musicians took a significant part in the Royal Band that, after 1714, served a German prince as ruler, and to German musicians was entrusted the musical instruction of the nobility. Handel's official court appointment was that of Royal Music Master, and his course of instruction for Anne, the eldest of the daughters of George I, is preserved. A counterpart to this extraordinary didactic document is a theoretical discourse by John Christopher (Johann Christoph) Pepusch. Apparently written for the daughter of a prominent English official, and still unpublished, it reflects the authority this German musician enjoyed as a theorist and teacher. He was one of the founders of the Academy of Ancient Music, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a widely respected composer. Handel had entrusted his own student John Christopher Smith (later his assistant and successor as Royal Music Master) to the tutelage of Pepusch, and he was at times closely associated with Pepusch in his work, though the fact that Pepusch had composed music for The Beggar's Opera finally led to an estrangement.

As if to summarize the large chapter of music history we have considered in this section, the sequence of the collection's documents leads finally to the title most universally applied in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to dramatic works of secular as well as sacred nature--dramma per musica. It appears in a work by Georg Philipp Telemann (who rearranged the letters of his name in his often preferred pseudonym Melante), Bach's and Handel's most celebrated and prolific contemporary. Telemann was originally given preference to Bach as a candidate for the office of Cantor at St. Thomas's in Leipzig, but he declined the position in favor of the musical directorship at the churches of the North German metropolis of Hamburg, a position in which he was to be succeeded by his godson, C.P. E. Bach. In fact, a lifelong friendship connected him with Bach and Handel, both of whom he outlived, though his name was ultimately overshadowed by theirs.

The composer's signature in the upper right-hand corner shows his pseudonym "Melante." Though crossed out, the customary pattern of a French overture, with its dotted rhythm of an opening section and a subsequent fugue in livelier rhythmic motion, can be recognized clearly. The theme for the latter, revised at the end of the last four staves, appears there in a more marked melodic contour than in the earlier version above. History is the most partial of the sciences. When it becomes enamored of a man, it loves him jealously; it will not even hear of others. Since the day when the greatness of Johann Sebastian Bach was admitted, all that was great in his lifetime has become less than nothing. The world has hardly been able to forgive Handel for the impertinence of having had as great a genius as Bach's and a much greater success. The rest have fallen into dust; and there is no dust so dry as that of Telemann, whom posterity has forced to pay for the insolent victory which he won over Bach in his lifetime.

These words by Romain Rolland, the French writer and music historian, were somewhat superseded in years closer to our time, and they characterize the varying approach posterity has taken to the climax of an epoch. Telemann's greatest dramatic works were written at the time Mozart composed his first sonatas and symphonies, and whatever judgment is accorded his stature, he was the last illustrious master of the musical Baroque.

Notes

Classicism and Romanticism

In a penetrating essay, Friedrich Blume, the eminent music encyclopedist of the twentieth century, has convincingly argued that Classicism and Romanticism were not opposed but rather collateral and complementary tendencies which have guided the arts since the eighteenth century. Both meant a certain return to the ideals of the past. The word classic, which ever since the days of the Roman Empire applied to that which was in a "class" by itself, and hence exemplary, was now applied to the art of antiquity as such, whereas the word romantic harkens back to the "roman," the medieval epic, and thus to a more recent past that had developed a folklore and art born from the mist of northern climates rather than the southern sun. In distinction to classic clarity, equilibrium, and remoteness, its spirit is that of varying immediacy, of emotional changes of mood, of that which is not deliberately measured but passionate and fantastic, dreamlike and mysterious--"romantic."

The juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements might be seen as the rightful bequest of dramatic art, and in ever new ways music was ruled by drama. Opera itself had developed into two contrasting forms: serious opera, opera seria , and comic opera, opera buffa . The latter had evolved especially in the south of Italy, in Naples, at the hands of Alessandro Scarlatti and his followers Leonardo Leo and Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. It dealt with contemporary types and situations, rather than subjects of history and mythology, and it contributed an enlivening element to opera: ensemble. That which in spoken drama is not possible, the simultaneous expression of different personages and moods, now gave polyphony a novel function which, as we shall see, also greatly influenced instrumental music.

Opera seria was dominated for a long time by its famed librettist, Pietro Metastasio, himself a gifted musician. But the vitality of the traditional form gradually declined, and Romain Rolland has shown that Metastasio's influence heralded much of the impending reform of opera. As we know, it was brought about--in part through the encounter with the aged Handel--by the epochal works of Christoph Willibald von Gluck, whose first reform opera significantly returned to the subject of Orfeo.

The key figure in the rise of opera buffa was Pergolesi, who in his short life veritably changed operatic history. His famous miniature, La Serva Padrona (The Servant as Mistress), was designed, in the prevalent manner of early opera buffa, as intermezzo scenes to be presented between the acts of an opera seria. But its title was symbolic; the young subsidiary form was destined to assume a ruling role. We sense here the dawn of the Age of Revolution. And it was similarly reflected in another fundamental development of eighteenth-century music. The concerto which, in the works of such Italian masters as Arcangelo Corelli and Antonio Vivaldi as well as in the works of Bach and Handel, had risen to leadership in instrumental music, began to share this leadership with a new genre. Alessandro Scarlatti transformed the old opera overture of Lullian style, with its ceremoniously slow- paced beginning (often resumed for the ending), reversing its slow and fast sections. His overtures, for which he adopted the age-old term sinfonia , opened and closed in a lively (allegro) tempo, and the new form eventually gained independence in the Classical symphony. Its independence became complete. What the small introduction had assimilated from the drama acted out by the singers took on a new dramatic guise. It rose from the orchestra pit (or its equivalent) and conquered the stage. Its hero and heroine were themes and instrumental timbres, and, aided by the operatic ensemble technique, a new and purely instrumental form arose that dominated musical life for the era to come.

Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Berlin court conductor in later years, extolled Bach's chorales as "the highest achievement of German art" and referred to Bach as "the greatest harmonist of all times and nations." This statement is all the more interesting because it came from one of the principal representatives of the modern form of singspiel, the German counterpart to opera buffa. But the new and old worlds of music met and crossed in many ways; Johann Adam Hiller, also active in Berlin as a singspiel composer, became one of the successors to Bach's Leipzig office.

Thus we are dealing with a greatly widened array of musical personalities and trends, and it is a characteristic phenomenon of eighteenth-century music that it produced the first music historians offering an overview of the development of different styles. The learned Padre Giambattista Martini, author of a three-volume history of the music of antiquity and teacher of Bach's youngest son, Johann Christian, and of Mozart, spoke again of "the world famous Bach." The English historian Charles Burney, whose History of Music (1776-1789) stands out among the similar works of the period, failed to deal with Bach's work, but his praise of Bach was reported by a contemporary. Samuel Wesley, the eminent organist who was the first to make Bach's works known in England and who in veneration of the Leipzig master had named his son Sebastian, related in a letter to a colleague that, in conversation, Burney "evinced the most cordial veneration for our Sacred Musician."

In the end, the Romantics claimed Bach as their own and made his works known to the whole world. We know of Mendelssohn's epochal revival of the St. Matthew Passion, aided by his teacher Karl Friedrich Zelter who had revived Bach's motets with his Berlin Singakademie, and it was also Mendelssohn who gave the first recital entirely devoted to Bach's organ works. His influence brought about a decisive change, for while the name Bach had remained known to everyone throughout the eighteenth century, it had referred generally to one or the other of Bach's famous sons, and to works which were quite removed from the sphere of Johann Sebastian Bach. When Mozart said in a letter to his father from Paris in 1778 "Kapellmeister Bach is about to arrive . . . as you know, I love and revere him with all my heart," he spoke of Johann Christian Bach; and when Haydn acknowledged his great debt to Bach, he referred to Philipp Emanuel.

It was the domain of the sonata, the string quartet, and the symphony--the last amply paying back to its parent form what debt of origin it owed--that had taken over the music of the later eighteenth century. In the narrower sense, the classic era of music is understood to mean Viennese Classicism, the style that arose in the works of Haydn and Mozart. Yet the critical phase in the evolution of Haydn's symphonic work has become known as the "Romantic crisis" in his creative career.

* * *

Haydn's long life extended from the first third of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. He wrote his greatest compositions in old age. One might say that the secret of his art was his remarkable power of rejuvenation. One of the strongest influences upon his work was the encounter with Mozart who, in turn, was profoundly influenced by Haydn, almost a quarter of a century his senior. The work of both masters embraced all genres. While Haydn virtually created the string quartet, his church music goes back to strong roots of the Baroque, and his indebtedness in the oratorio unequivocally to Handel. In his operas he followed such Italian composers as Giovanni Paisiello and Domenico Cimarosa; in his piano works he was the disciple of C. P. E. Bach; but in his symphonies, taking their point of departure from such works as those by the Imperial court composer Georg Christoph Wagenseil, he was at his most Viennese. All of these forms he led to consummate heights. Yet posterity has almost forgotten that, like Bach's, Haydn's name held a dual meaning in its time. It is in the a cappella music of Michael Haydn, who served with Mozart at the court of Salzburg, and whose work has been overshadowed by that of his older brother, that the Classic image was most truly revealed to the young Schubert. As a student, Schubert noted after a vocal trio (preserved only in fragmentary form) "written in the manner of Haydn"--by which he meant the style of Michael Haydn- and in a letter he wrote in later years to his brother, Schubert described his thoughts in visiting a monument erected to Michael Haydn: "May your calm, clear spirit be imparted to me, cherished Haydn; though I can never be so calm and clear, no one on earth reveres you as dearly as I."

A similar sense of affection, absent from documents of earlier periods, is expressed in the letter of dedication to Joseph Haydn that accompanied the collection of Mozart's six string quartets subsequently published as Opus X, his masterwork in the genre. The wide range of Mozartiana in this collection attests to an equally wide range of close personal attachments. Mozart biography has given honored places to Leopold Mozart, the composer's father who provided the child prodigy with a uniquely rich education and who remained an important figure in later phases of his professional life; to his sister Maria Anna ("Nannerl") who shared his appearances in the early travels throughout Europe with their father; to Franz Xaver Süssmayr, Mozart's pupil who is believed to have finished his teacher's last work, the Requiem; and to Thomas Attwood, whose course of studies under Mozart represents the most extraordinary didactic document from the waning eighteenth century. It is indicative of these associations that Mozart's handwriting has been confused with his father's, with Süssmayer's, and with Attwood's, and that it has taken scholars a long time to establish clear texts in the instances concerned.

Elation and tragedy were intermingled in Mozart's short life--less than half the span of Haydn's. It has been difficult for posterity to understand fully that the ingratiating, romanticized rococo idol grew to a heroic figure, the classic master, in very young years, and that, in fact, utter seriousness permeated the life of the playful artist at all times. The Age of the Revolution here, too, cast its shadow over the career of the composer who failed to obtain the traditional supportive court or church position, and who was less suited to take on the lot of an independent position in society than Handel before and Beethoven after him.

Whereas he was the student of Haydn in his string quartets, his symphonies influenced the work of the older master, and the latter clearly admitted Mozart's superiority in the genre of opera. Yet the encounter with Haydn remained the turning point in his artistic orientation; it guided him to a new exploration of polyphony and an assimilation of styles of the past with which he became acquainted through the eminent music collection of Haydn's later oratorio librettist, the imperial court librarian Gottfried van Swieten.

The three generations of the masters of Viennese Classicism overlap in striking manner. By the time Haydn wrote his last symphonies and quartets and Mozart wrote his last operas, the young Beethoven had journeyed to Vienna in order to study with Mozart. His early works had already reached the international market, but he still felt the need for a concentrated course of study. This fact, which found a parallel in Schubert's career, is indicative of the greatly widened perspective from which a modern generation of composers viewed the craft. Beethoven was called back to his hometown, Bonn, where he was in service at the Electoral court. When he was able to return to Vienna, several years later, Mozart had died; Beethoven turned to Haydn for instruction, and his studies have been preserved. Impatient about his progress, he secretly supplemented his lessons in consultation with the Viennese singspiel composer Johann Schenk, a student of Wagenseil. But once again, the facts were romanticized by posterity. The document that combines the handwriting of Beethoven with that of Haydn shows a very deliberate survey of the technique of strict counterpoint. The exchange of the aged master and his student was anything but superficial or--as has often been asserted--a failure, and it is characteristic of the situation that when Haydn left on his second journey for engagements in England (a journey on which Beethoven originally was to accompany him), Beethoven embarked on further contrapuntal study with Haydn's friend Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, Master of the Cathedral Chapel in Vienna; at the same time he took up studies in the Italian vocal style with the Viennese court composer Antonio Salieri.

The enlarged scope of didactic commitment reflects the musical crosscurrents at the turn of the century. Salieri, whose role in music history has come down mainly (and unjustly) as that of Mozart's antagonist, represented a tradition that remained of great importance to a generation no longer readily conversant with it--Italian opera. His eminent pedagogical influence is reflected in the fact that it led from his training of the choirboys as Master of the Imperial Chapel to the establishment of the Vienna Conservatory. He was the teacher of the young Schubert and, in later years, of Meyerbeer and Liszt. Several of his contemporaries are remembered principally through their teaching manuals and collections of methodical studies. In the case of Stanislao Mattei, the student of Padre Martini, and that of Luigi Cherubini, Inspecteur and subsequently director of the Paris Conservatory, it was the contrapuntal legacy that was handed down in their works; in those of Ignaz Pleyel, Muzio Clementi, and Karl Czerny, it was the new pianistic art; and in Rodolphe Kreutzer's famous Etude s, that of classical violin virtuosity.

We tend to forget that these preceptors of compositional and instrumental technique were composers in their own right and of deserved recognition. Kreutzer's operas, though relegated to oblivion, were not without influence upon the works of later generations, and Cherubini's sacred and dramatic works were highly regarded by Beethoven (who also honored Kreutzer with the dedication of his Sonata Opus 47). Clementi was ranked next to Mozart in his time; Pleyel next to Haydn (whose devoted student he was). But the fame of Czerny, whom Beethoven had singled out as a piano pupil and whose guidance as a teacher became decisive upon the young Liszt, rested solely, as it does now, on his genius of piano pedagogy.

A new situation arose in music history by which the domains of creative and interpretive arts were beginning to be separated. Nor did performance remain limited to interpretation; more than ever before, it now took on a role of its own. It is epitomized in the thoroughly Romantic figure of the travelling virtuoso, for which Niccolò Paganini, the demonic violinist, stands as a symbol for all times. And it extended into all spheres of performance. A particularly arresting example is the career of Domenico Dragonetti, the "Paganini of the double bass," whose stupendous proficiency on his instrument evidently influenced the design of passages in the fifth and ninth symphonies of Beethoven, with whom he was on friendly terms.

A counterpart to the specialized performer became the specialized teacher. The theorists of past ages, such as Zarlino, Artusi, or Kirnberger, were active and appreciated as composers and performers in the first place. But Simon Sechter, the leading Viennese theorist in the first half of the nineteenth century, to whom Schubert still turned for advice in his last days, represented a new profession, that of "Professor of Thoroughbass and Composition," at the Vienna Conservatory, while his allegedly more than 8,000 compositions remained unknown. But the pervading influence he exerted in his time is characterized by the fact that toward the end of his long tenure he became the trusted mentor of Anton Bruckner who, in fact, succeeded him in his professorship at the Conservatory. Whereas Sechter is remembered as a famous teacher, the memory of the English composer Thomas Attwood lives on as that of a famous student. Son of a British court musician, the gifted young member of the Chapel Royal had received a stipend from the Prince of Wales to take up studies in Italy. Though pursued under two noted Neapolitan maestri, they proved in the end not satisfactory, and Attwood, "perceiving the declineof the Italian school and foreseeing the ascendancy of that of Germany . . . proceeded to Vienna and immediately became a pupil of Mozart."

We owe it to the association with Attwood that Mozart's work as a teacher is fully documented. The course of studies he designed for the student, who became a close friend, covered the better part of two years; the manuscript was carefully preserved by Attwood and has been published. Attwood, in later years organist at St. Paul's and composer-in-ordinary of the Chapel Royal, became the guardian of the legacy of Viennese Classicism. It was he who was principally responsible for introducing Mozart's and Beethoven's symphonic work in England. But in equal measure he became the advocate of the young German Romantics and of the nineteenth-century Bach renaissance. The year in which Mendelssohn gave his epochal performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion also marked his first journey to England, on which he was warmly welcomed by the sixty-four-year-old Attwood. The two composers, though of unequal stature, found themselves devoted to some of the same ideals. Britain, as we know, became Mendelssohn's second homeland, and a remarkable association developed between the representatives of the old and young generations--of what we have to come to call the Classic and Romantic ages of music.

Nowhere are Classic form and Romantic expression more powerfully blended than in the work of Beethoven. Popular appellations have somewhat superficially attached the defiance of fate to his Fifth Symphony and the serene tranquillity of moonlight to his Piano Sonata op. 27, No. 2. But the designation Grande Sonate Pathétique for his Piano Sonata op. 13, written before his first quartets, concertos and symphonies, and that of Sinfonia Eroica for his Third Symphony, are his own. One of his biographers called Beethoven the "man who freed music," a dictum which is again of flimsy nature. Yet Beethoven was totally a son of the Revolutionary Age. He tore up the dedication of his Third Symphony to Napoleon when Bonaparte declared himself emperor. He was devoted to the revolutionary ideas of liberté and egalité; and the ideal of fraternité is glorified in the ode that concludes his Ninth Symphony. It is the rebellion of the artist that placed Beethoven in his era. He wrote to Count Lichnowsky, soon after dedicating the Sonate Pathétique to him, "Prince, what you are you are by the accident of birth; what I am, I am of myself." But no artist ever wrestled more intensely with law and order, with classical discipline, than Beethoven. Whereas the Romantics were to claim him as theirs, his life work proceeded along the lines of the Classic forms. It is no mere accident that the Beethoveniana of this collection include, with samples from his sketches--his ubiquitous detailed working material--his copy from one of Mozart's works. Beyond the classical genres of sonata, quartet and symphony, he even turned to opera, though it represented a world essentially foreign to him, and his vocal works attest to some of the greatest triumphs of his symphonic language.

When Beethoven undertook the composition of Fidelio (originally Leonore), the genre of opera had undergone wide proliferation. We have seen that the two prototypes, opera seria and opera buffa, were interrelated from the beginning: the latter arose in intermezzo performances from the former. By and large, it was to opera buffa that the future belonged. But its original subject matter, the antagonism of master and servant, had lost its significance, or rather, the human and social implications had widened to the point where comic elements were intermingled with genuine drama and tragedy. Nevertheless, in Gioacchino Rossini's Barber of Seville, whose story came from the same literary source as Mozart's Figaro, the old opera buffa found a lasting monument whose quality remained unattained in any of the works by his contemporaries.

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The German-born Friedrich von Flotow, whose works have retained a somewhat uneasy place in the repertory, partly because of their sentimental appeal, transplanted the Biedermeier opera to France; it was left to a later German-born French opera composer, Jacques Offenbach, to produce some lasting works derived from the genre. With Offenbach, however, the opera of bourgeois society was transformed to the entertaining and satirical operetta, though his great lyrical and dramatic gifts are revealed in the work that took its point of departure from the stories of the poet-artist-musician who was the embodiment of the German Romantic-- Tales of Hoffmann.

While the opera of German Romanticism had surrendered, in the end, to styles of French entertainment, the genre of operetta was to be glorified in the work of a Viennese composer, Johann Strauss. His popular operettas, above all Die Fledermaus (The Bat) were born of dance. Like his father, Johann Strauss the elder, he was the master of the waltz that dominated the imperial court of Vienna- and Europe--as its ancestral dance form, the minuet, had dominated the royal French court--and Europe--in the Age of Absolutism.

Italian opera, unlike German opera, always had solid traditions on which to draw; and they are evident in the works of the two principal opera composers Italy produced next to Rossini, neither, however, reaching his greatness--Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini. Donizetti's comic operas are the last fine examples of opera buffa, and they outshine his works in the serious vein, whereas Bellini's operas are entirely devoted to the glories of the human voice, though they do not measure up to the glories of the old bel canto. But both composers eventually forsook the Italian stage, turning to France. It was in Verdi's work that Italy finally recovered its leading role in operatic tradition, while Wagner's work established a totally new one in Germany.

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Almost completely obscured by the great and lesser names of Classic and Romantic music is that of Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg, Swabian court conductor at the turn of the eighteenth century. Yet it deserves to be singled out, as it stands for a genre that, despite its own relative obscurity, marked a fresh departure of significance--the ballad. In its original meaning, the "dancing song," the ballad had a long and distinguished history, and the song as such is obviously the oldest of musical forms. But in the merging of musical Classicism and Romanticism, the term song--in its German version lied--acquired a new meaning. Greatly influenced by the poetry of Goethe and Schiller, Classical figures of German literature, the decisive phase in the history of the art song was heralded in works of such composers as Reichardt and Zelter (as well as in isolated examples by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven).

In the development leading to the Romantic lied, the special form of the ballad assumed an important role. The dancing character of the ballad had early receded to the choral refrain with which the narrative of a solo singer was rounded out. This narrative, dealing predominantly with ancient and medieval sagas and valiant stories of feudal times, turned in the works of Classic German poetry more and more to folklike renditions of adventuresome, mysterious, and not infrequently gruesome scenes. The new form of solo song whose accompaniment was determined by the ascendancy of the modern keyboard instrument, the piano, lent itself especially well to the ballad. In its terse structure, it served the dramatic tendencies of the time more directly than the elaborate opera, and thus the ballad holds a key position in a transitional phase of vocal styles.

Zumsteeg, who had become a friend of Schiller's in school days, became the prime representative of the ballad, and the direct way in which his work influenced that of Schubert can be gathered from the fact that Schubert's first song, "Hagar's Lament" ( Hagars Klage), was modeled on Zumsteeg's ballad bearing the same title. Schubert's ballad Erlkönig, on a poem by Goethe and published four years later as his Opus 1, opens the literature of the Romantic song, and Schubert's more than six hundred contributions to the genre remained the chief component of the nineteenth-century song literature. The ballad, however, retained its own life and reached a high point in the works of Karl Loewe, a student of Zelter's and strongly influenced by Reichardt. Through these two early lied composers, Loewe had become acquainted with the world of Goethe and Schiller, but it is most characteristic of his work that as his Opus 1 he published settings of Erlkönig and Edward, the latter on the text of an old Scottish ballad that had served Schubert for one of his last songs.

Schubert has always been seen as a Januslike figure, "at times called the classicist of romanticism, at others the romanticist of classicism." While this observation, germane to our discussion, is so convincingly true to the facts of stylistic analysis, it does not provide a key to the understanding of Schubert's creative nature. The same duality (which we have observed earlier in connection with the work of Beethoven) can be and has been ascribed to Brahms. Yet the blending of stylistic bequests must in each case merely be understood as an element characterizing, in different ways, overwhelmingly individual artistic personalities. Similarly, the epithet "Father of the Song" is as unjustly applied to Schubert as it does an injustice to the genre itself: it is the individuality of the Schubertian lied that explains the inception of a new literature.

The house in which Schubert was born, unchanged over the centuries, offers the visitor a most touching impression--the tiny dwelling of a schoolmaster's family, in which Schubert grew up as one of nineteen children. Salieri discovered the talent of the boy and accepted him into the Imperial Chapel. But Schubert's existence moved with remarkable directness into circles far removed from his background. His deep sense of literary values determined his work from the beginning, and he spent his short life in the company of highly cultivated young artists and poets. In the immense wealth of his songs, he grew to maturity immediately. But though the form of the song remained his own until his last composition, one might say that he departed from it to an extent often not fully realized. His genius sought expression in the Classical forms of the symphony and string quartet, and while he labored consciously and with unabating discipline under the shadow of Beethoven, he rose to equal the stature of the giant as did no later composer. His symphonies in B Minor (the "Unfinished") and C Major (the "Great"), his quartets in A and D Minor, and his last chamber music work, the String Quintet in C Major, mark the end of Classic instrumental literature. It is characteristic of Schubert's earnestness and modesty that toward the end of his life he became conscious of the fact that he had not mastered one particular form, the fugue. And it is well known that, two weeks before his death, he turned to Sechter for the discussion of some sketches of fugal compositions--the last music manuscript we have from his hand.

The forms of Classical chamber music and symphony remained the challenge for composers throughout the nineteenth century. Yet the Romantic song, as the century's most original creation, dominated the era to the extent that Mendelssohn wrote his famous "Songs without Words." Though they inaugurated the Romantic symphony, both Mendelssohn's and Schumann's best known major instrumental compositions are their concertos in which classic form was united with Romantic virtuosity. But the lives of these two masters, tragically short like Schubert's, produced a broad spectrum of highly original works. Schumann, barely in his twenties, also founded the first modern journal of music criticism that heralded the careers of Chopin and later Brahms. His many-sided work, guided by a wide vision of the Romantic scene, favors the fantastic element yet shows genuine lyrical strength. He was the greatest exponent of the German lied after Schubert. In his songs, the brilliance of the accompaniment often rises to leadership, and in extended postludes he tends to develop the poet's text to a level not reached by the voice but reflecting the finesse of his pianistic art and his power of interpretation.

There is something admirably sound about the gentle and refined figure of Mendelssohn. His work burst into maturity with his Overture for A Midsummer Night's Dream when he was seventeen, but he harnessed his great gift with elegant assuredness, and his amiable music exhibits true mastery. An intellectual by background and upbringing, he was always earnest, sincere, and wholly artistic in his work. More clearly devoted to the bequest of past generations than any other composer of his time, he yet remained entirely original. The Protestant chorale and the Handelian oratorio became all-important models for him, and though it was not given to his era to recover their original strength, this era was ennobled by Mendelssohn's historical orientation. Yet there is none of the historian in his brilliant violin concerto, his octet, or the First Walpurgis Night. Later ages, in turn, were unable to recover his finely controlled expression. He fully shared the problems of a post-Classical age, but he mastered them with the grace of his art.

Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn were composers for whom the range of Classic forms remained a natural working basis. But while their masterpieces were thus distributed over various genres, the emphasis of nineteenth-century music turned to composers devoted to a single form or medium--as if history were to acknowledge with a grand gesture that the opulence it had produced began to elude a comprehensive grasp. The career of the traveling virtuoso, writing works for his own appearances, was an isolated phenomenon in the time of Vivaldi; in the nineteenth century, however, it tended to dominate the musical scene. The triumphs of Paganini were paralleled in the appearances of the young Liszt, who became the greatest pianist of all times, and Liszt's activities as a composer were determined at first by his international success on the concert stage.

The most typical representative of the composer whose creative work was so closely focused on his own performance medium was Frédéric Chopin, whom Liszt hailed as his equal. Chopin's piano works mirror the world of the Romantic virtuoso to the extent that his concertos for piano and orchestra were almost completely neglected--by the composer who gave them the most sparsely developed accompaniment, as well as by posterity which knows the composer merely by his finely wrought preludes, polonaises, mazurkas, impromptus, nocturnes and waltzes. These compositions combine frail detail and intensely poetic expression with a passionate virtuosity that makes them a unique achievement in the keyboard literature, and Chopin's life work, once again prematurely ended, raised soloistic composition to a level unattained ever after.

The violin literature fared differently; and though the nineteenth century is studded with spectacular violin concertos, we are dealing here by and large with mere show pieces. The exceptions came from composers committed to the symphonic rather than the soloistic ideal, and it is characteristic of the merging of Romantic virtuosity and Classic form that one of the most popular violin concertos of the era bears the title symphony-- the Symphonie Espagnole by Edouard Lalo, a French composer of Spanish ancestry.

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A gigantic rapprochement took place, more or less curiously brought about, by which the genres of opera, symphony and song met in new forms. In the case of Hector Berlioz, it was not the single instrument but their sum total--the vastly enlarged and technically perfected orchestra--that was the adopted "specialty." His Grand Traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration (1844) became the classic of orchestration manuals, and in his works he explored the resources of the Romantic orchestra to their fullest. He called his symphonies, headed by the Symphonie Fantastique, "instrumental dramas," and in them he raised the concept of program music--purely instrumental music based on a literary source--to a new ideal. They embraced, once again, the genre of the concerto--the solo part in Harold in Italie was written with Paganini in mind. The monumental works of Berlioz include church music (his Requiem Mass and Te Deum), oratorios and operas, but in all of them he remained at heart the orchestrator. Despite their originality, his sacred works, in their grandiose sonority, negate the essence of the spiritual element, while staged drama negated, in fact, the artistic creed of program music.

Liszt, in the end dissatisfied with the career of the virtuoso and with compositions determined solely by the scope (albeit greatly widened) of his instrument, was inspired by the concept of program music in the work of Berlioz. At the height of his fame, he took up this new challenge and, turning now entirely to his creative work, arrived at a new symphonic form that became the model for a "New German School" whose influence actually extended well beyond Germany, the Tone Poem. His mastery of the Romantic orchestra was entirely beholden to symphonic principles of elaboration, and rather than following a "program," his works arose from a total conception that did not rely on descriptive details. In later years he wrote sacred oratorios and liturgical compositions, and just as his symphonic language stands in contrast to that of Berlioz by a thoroughly poetic approach, these choral works differ from those of Berlioz by a genuinely religious attitude. Liszt was a devoted Roman Catholic and, in later years, took minor orders as an abbé. His interests in all aspects of the music of his time developed on a wide scale throughout his life, and a host of students followed him to his centers of activity in Germany, Italy and Hungary.

Liszt was closely associated, both through his work and family ties, with Wagner (who married his daughter Cosima), and the extensive literary work of both composers provides revealing commentary on the ideals which they shared and which dominated the musical scene of the waning nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the two great exponents of the New German School were worlds apart. Whereas Liszt solved the challenges of over-ripe Romanticism by blending symphony and poem, Wagner announced that the time had come for a blending of all the arts and, in no way hesitant to suggest that the total artistic effort of past generations led to his own work, inaugurated a new concept, the Gesamtkunstwerk or Universal Art Work. That he could maintain such a claim is, in the end, due to his musical genius that triumphed over the problems posed by his complex artistic personality.

Wagner, in whose family the theater governed professional life, grew up under the influence of Weber and the early Romantic opera of Germany, but soon reached for the grand opera of France. A revolutionary to the core, he found himself fleeing from one country to another between successes and failures. It was in Switzerland that he wrote the text for his most towering work, the Ring of the Nibelung, and it bespeaks the magnitude of his planning that this work, originally designed as a single drama, grew into a cycle of four, as each text required the preface of a new one. The vastness of his conception becomes fully evident when we consider that, in setting the finished libretto to music, he stopped in the middle and, over a number of years, interspersed two of his most decisive, yet totally unlike dramatic works-- Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger--before completing the Ring. The choice of his subject matter, ranging from romantic fairy tale and Nordic myth to the solid burgher milieu of the late medieval guild, was determined in different ways by a pervading idea of redemption, to which in his last work, Parsifal, he gave final form.

It is equally characteristic of Wagner's extraordinary career that he salvaged its perilously disintegrating fortunes by what had become an anachronism--princely subvention--and that this subvention came from a mentally ailing king, Ludwig II of Bavaria. The king, who built the fantastic castles in the Bavarian Alps, enabled Wagner to establish a shrine for the Universal Art Work--for what Wagner had termed the "Music of the Future"--in Bayreuth, formerly the residence of the rulers of a Franconian principality, and a place of pilgrimage for an international opera audience ever since.

It remains problematic to compare the two great representatives of nineteenth-century opera, the egocentric Wagner and the philanthropic Verdi: the creator of the new "music drama" who- mistakenly--considered himself first and foremost a literary figure, and the consummate master of traditional Italian opera which Wagner considered superseded. While the aims of their art were so diverse as virtually to defy comparison, their techniques show some surprising similarities. Wagner considered himself the heir of Beethoven, and the Beethovenian symphonic development of musical ideas assumed in Wagner's scores the role of the narrator who, like the ancient Greek chorus, interpreted dramatic continuity and meaning. His well-known orchestral device of using recurring and "guiding" melodies (leitmotives), however, was not his own invention. It appears in Verdi's works as well as those of other composers of the time. Yet while in Wagner's language the orchestral comment became the primary agent in conveying dramatic situations and philosophical concepts, in Verdi's works the human voice and human drama rule throughout. His roles eschew the supernatural and the saga; the brooding elements of Wagner's poetry and music were foreign to him. He was the supreme operista, and his last two works, Otello and Falstaff, written when the composer was at a very advanced age, are lasting monuments to the old opera seria and opera buffa.

There is only one nineteenth-century opera that has equaled the stature and popularity of Wagner's and Verdi's works: Bizet's Carmen; in fact, this work has become the most popular opera in history. Georges Bizet, a highly educated musician, was by no means what history made of him: the composer of a single work. But Carmen became a world success because here the composer's great gifts merged with the tendencies of his time in a unique manner. The characterization of a heroine who is also the villain and murdered on stage in the final scene took unusual dramatic skill. It reflected the fin de siècle trend of Realism, a strong reaction to the gentleness of early Romanticism, and the choice of setting, drawing on Spanish and gypsy themes, was guided by another typical expression of the declining Romantic age, Exoticism. Bizet treated the subject with a surprisingly light hand, and his delicate and invariably interesting orchestration borders on the finesse of chamber music. He did not live to witness his triumph; the work was initially a failure that may have contributed to the composer's untimely death.

Bizet's Carmen, despite the enduring qualities of the work, signals a moribund epoch. Realism was met immediately with yet another reaction, Impressionism. The Romantic world withdrew into its most refined utterances, and in the last of the famous French operas, Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, music no longer presents, it merely suggests the drama. Its frailty has a wonderful strength of its own, and its miraculously enriched palette of subtle colors heralds a new century and a new age.

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As in all phases of history, what appears as a deltalike disintegration of a major era actually carries the seeds of significant rejuvenation and integration. A final reconstruction of Romantic expression and Classic form entered the music of the declining nineteenth century in the work of several major symphonists who, like the symphonists of Viennese Classicism, contributed to a large array of musical genres while being especially committed to the instrumental idiom. Vienna again claimed its place as a European musical capital in the works of Johannes Brahms and Anton Bruckner--as in the twentieth century it was to see the rise of a "Second Viennese School." The concept of a "School," however, would in no way fit the work of the two composers who dominated the Viennese musical scene in the last decades of the nineteenth century, because of the radical difference in their styles and because of a renewed emergence of the symphony at the hands of such entirely heterogeneous composers as Tchaikovsky, Dvorák, and César Franck. But that the traditional symphonic structure was by no means exhausted was amply borne out by their work and their influence that lasted well into the twentieth century.

The personalities of Brahms, the pianist, and Bruckner, the organist, strongly exemplify the contrast of Northern Protestantism and Southern Catholicism. They found their way early to choral works inspired by the new role of choral music in society--both of them conducted various amateur choral organizations. In Bruckner's work, however, the choral medium remained closely tied to the service of worship, and religious mysticism was to be carried into his symphonic work. The symphonic bequest of Brahms, on the other hand, is entirely Beethovenian, and the model of Beethoven remained a fundamental challenge throughout his life. As he embarked upon the large form, he found himself immediately in a crisis; what was to be his first symphony turned into a piano concerto. But from the young composer's crisis arose works marked both by overwhelming beauty and a conscientious working procedure that produced abundant, though always highly integrated, proportions. Like Beethoven, he returned to the piano concerto; but against Beethoven's five stand only two; against Beethoven's nine symphonies stand four. Like Beethoven, Brahms wrote one violin concerto that has remained a lasting work in the repertoire, as did Tchaikovsky (and as had Mendelssohn before him); and we might add to this list the G Minor Violin Concerto by Max Bruch, a composer close in orientation to Brahms, though he did not reach his stature.

Bruckner's symphonic work towers over the orchestral music of the late nineteenth century by its sheer monumentality. It is a monumentality seemingly inconsistent with the touching naiveté of a composer who dedicated one of his symphonies "to the dear Lord," and who pleaded with the emperor to call a halt to the bad reviews his works were receiving--but indeed only seemingly so. His simple soul was imbued with genius. His nine symphonies are related to one another in a vast cycle not unlike Wagner's tetralogy. Wagnerian is the language of his harmony and orchestration. But his work is the antithesis of Romantic music drama; it reaches back beyond the world of Schubertian lyricism to that of the great Catholic past, yet in epic dimensions that bring the history of the nineteenth-century symphony to a close.

The reconciliation of Romantic spirit and Classic tradition was a universal phenomenon that pervaded the music of Europe. When we speak of national "schools," in Russia, Bohemia and Scandinavia, we actually refer to individual expressions in the same process, although individuality defies such a generalization, as we are reminded in the cases of some bold innovations. Yet in a certain way even France, with its glorious legacy of music, developed a "school" that, on the whole departing from opera, reflected the age of Brahms and Bruckner. Like Bruckner, arriving at the symphonic form through his work as an organist, César Franck dealt in new ways with the old form. Like Brahms, Franck and his followers returned to a variety of classic genres which met with fresh interest and the support of a Societé Nationale de Musique established through the initiative of Camille Saint-Saëns, a composer versed and successful in veritably all musical forms. The most colorful of a group called the "Russian five," Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was also the first Russian composer to write a symphony. Standing apart from this group, Tchaikovsky, the single nineteenth-century Russian composer of truly European training and orientation, was essentially a traditionalist, though of eminent stature. But in the last of the "five"--Modest Petrovitch Musorgsky--Russia gave to nineteenth-century music a totally original and overpowering figure. A number of nineteenth-century composers such as Bruch, Saint- Saëns, and his student Gabriél Fauré, saw the Classic-Romantic tradition into the new century--Dvorák, significantly, into the New World.

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In concluding our survey of the epochs of musical Classicism and Romanticism, we must pay tribute once more to the role of the interpreter. As we have observed, composer and performer, creative and interpretive art, tended to claim individually defined domains at the rise of the nineteenth century. In the process, the role of the interpreter gained in originality and importance. A new key figure now took command of the concert stage and the opera pit: the professional conductor. Liszt and Wagner, like earlier composers, were professional conductors in their own right--the premiere of Wagner's Lohengrin was conducted by Liszt. But the premiere performances of Tristan and Die Meistersinger were in the hands of an acknowledged specialist, Hans von Bülow. A student of Liszt, whose daughter Cosima was espoused to him in first marriage, von Bülow became the chief interpreter of Wagner's and later of Brahms's work. He set the model for the modern career of the orchestral disciplinarian and virtuoso conductor. Public attendance at civic concerts had grown considerably, and the works of the masters, interpreted by professional conductors, became subject to further interpretation through daily reviews in which the public was served by professional critics.

Eduard Hanslick, prototype of the powerful and domineering critic, is known for his relentless attacks upon Wagner's and Bruckner's work (it was he who prompted Bruckner's plea for the emperor's protection) as well as for his loyal support of the work of Brahms. But posterity has unjustly judged this knowledgeable guardian of classic principles a belligerent misanthrope. Though seemingly conservative, he was ahead of his time in sensing in its musical grandeur the dangers of a decline. Hanslick was the first to be appointed to the faculty of the University of Vienna to represent music as an integral part of the academic curriculum, and chairs of music had meanwhile been established also at other universities. The professorship at the University of Berlin was held in Hanslick's time by Heinrich Bellermann, a scholar whose influence was of a more broadly didactic, rather than polemic, kind. Devoted to the a cappella ideal that had been reawakened in the early part of the nineteenth century, he freshly interpreted the roots of its pedagogy and issued the first modern textbook of counterpoint. It was of decisive influence on numerous subsequent courses of instruction in a period in which composer, performer, and audience alike began to obtain a more clearly defined view of past musical styles.

When Liszt gave the first performance of Lohengrin, the concertmaster of the orchestra was the nineteen-year-old Joseph Joachim. One of the finest interpreters of the era, Joachim was a musician of comprehensive command. It was he who called Schumann's attention to the young Brahms. His artistry inspired the violin concertos of Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Bruch. He was the first to free Bach's solo violin works from contemporaneous arrangements; and over a period of forty years, as director of the newly founded Berlin Academy of Music, he led the string quartet that established the classic works of chamber music in the modern concert repertoire. Like that from Liszt, a direct line of descent leads from Joachim to yesterday's and today's great performers on the concert stage.

Notes

An Age of Personal Memory

As the perspective of time diminishes and the historian becomes witness, the image of personages and events is apt to lose rather than gain in clarity. Figures and events that seem to "make history" may quickly fade; their significance is in danger of being blurred rather than being authoritatively defined. The heir apparent to the "New German" tradition of the era of Liszt and Wagner, Richard Strauss, wrote his last works as the new century that is now drawing to its close had reached the halfway mark. The past mingles with the present. It was with a shock of immediacy that the writer of these lines received, by curious circumstances, from the hand of the aged master what he had designated as his Artistic Testament, to be handed to the proper authorities in the turmoil of war. Yet the remarkable document, which now forms part of this collection, in the end gives witness only to the fact that the great symphonist and composer of dramatic works, while still in command of his extraordinary powers, began to outlive his own times. It deals with a future of opera that can no longer be realized.

Opera, like symphony and art song, had lived into the twentieth century, continuing to glorify the spirit of the nineteenth century despite all the radical reactions of a new age. There is no opera composer who has remained in more general demand than Giacomo Puccini, whose often drastic style is undeniably derived from nineteenth-century Realism ("verismo") and its frequently favored Exoticism.

It is characteristic of our unvarying indebtedness to the past as well that Vienna never ceased to be the musical metropolis of immediate memory. It was in Vienna that Hugo Wolf, who barely lived into the twentieth century, spent his tragically brief life. The only song composer who could fully measure up to Schubert's stature, he gave the Romantic lied its final form. Yet it is no longer the song composed for the private and intimate setting that lives in his oeuvre, but the song for the modern concert hall, the work in which the "accompaniment," designed for the modern concert piano, dominates and penetrates the poetic meaning to an extent unknown to earlier composers of the genre.

The powerful interpretation of Romantic lyricism proved to be more problematic in the Viennese symphony of the turn of the century. Gustav Mahler, the key figure in upholding the Bruckner tradition, introduced the song as an essential component into the symphony; in fact, he gave the designation "Symphonie" to his Lied von der Erde, a cycle of orchestral songs. It is the lyrical element that rules his symphonic work, yet its permeating influence stands in contrast to the grandiose gestures with which the symphonic genre overreached itself. Mahler's Eighth Symphony, the "Symphony of the Thousand," is the largest vocal work ever written.

Nevertheless, paired with such abandon to post-Wagnerian dimensions, there is prophetic strength in the composer's work, and in his frequent returns to smaller forms he anticipated the rise of a "Second Viennese School." In later years he was closely connected with the work of Alexander von Zemlinsky and Zemlinsky's student and brother-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg. A new spirit of chamber music entered the orchestral world; but the most pronounced reaction to post-Romanticism became a new theory that renounced the fin de siècle language of overwrought chromaticism.

Schoenberg introduced the concept of twelve-tone music, a melodic idiom that dismissed all harmonic implications; and, constructed over predetermined series or rows, all tones of the chromatic scale were now declared as equals in musical importance. It was a theory of "atonality" which swept away all past traditions and to which the gifted followers of the Schoenberg school, Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, and in later years even the aged Igor Stravinsky, succumbed.

This revolutionary step has to be seen against the background of the dawn of an agitated century, and through the disasters of two global wars the new musical language experienced both setbacks and expansion. Leading twentieth-century composers, including Paul Hindemith and a host of others, distanced themselves from it; under political suppression it temporarily all but vanished, only to reawaken to a late bloom especially in postwar America; and it eventually gave way to more radical developments that changed, technologically expanded, and veritably obliterated the nature of musical sound. It gave way to aleatory tendencies, and to such extremes as the American John Cage's 4'33'' --a gesture that seems to raise the question: What is music?

* * *

The immediacy of events--remembered or known to have been witnessed--makes it problematic for the observer to chart a course through the music of our century. Hand in hand with the twentieth-century world conflicts went a new international understanding and interpenetration. Ever since the days of Dvorák and Tchaikovsky, European composers and performers spent a significant part of their careers in America. In totally new dimensions, an international musical language took form, shaped by components from many cultures. The so-called domains of "popular" and "serious" music merged, while they continued to claim individual, growing and shrinking, territories. With George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, American jazz had obtained legitimacy on the international concert stage; yet for a young generation at the end of the twentieth century, the word "concert" has taken on a new meaning of vast demonstrations, often out-of-doors, of musical entertainment entirely oblivious to the old "concert repertoire."

Opening page of Max Reger's piano-vocal score for Requiem, op. 144b on a text by Friedrich Hebbel.
At the upper right margin appears the composer's dedication of the piece to the German soldiers killed during the first year of World War I.

Nevertheless, demarcation lines remain. During the First World War, a German composer died whose work, while of recognized stature, has been genuinely appreciated only in Germany--Max Reger. His role in this respect is not unlike that of his American contemporary, Edward MacDowell, and a "school" of American composers began to form whose most widely acclaimed exponent became Charles Ives. Universally admired, his originality and keen sense of independence have recently become a matter of dispute, because evidence has come to light to suggest that he consciously altered dates of his compositions, so that they would have preceded such revolutionary works as Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps. If so, he cast a tragic shadow over works that in no way would be in need of such defense--doubly tragic, for the situation would reflect the agonies of twentieth-century innovations of so-called serious music. The composer's ideal of freedom from the European heritage was doubtless served in his novel creations; yet the popular works of his contemporary, Cole Porter, steeped in the folklore of the Western Hemisphere, were recognized as being free of any other derivation--without argument or lack of ease.

Ironically, it was at the hands of the European-born that some of the most important developments in modern American experimentalism grew. An outstanding case is that of Edgar Varèse, a Parisian who was trained by some of the leading French composers of the early twentieth century, after having studied mathematics and sciences at the École Polytechnique. Having come to America during the First World War, he inspired generations of American composers with his novelties in sound and rhythm, novelties which remain "somewhat abstruse to those of us who have not studied in polytechnical schools."

The impact of such influences, however, can be no more subject to question than their sincerity. At the same time, the traditional European influence has remained an integral part of the American musical scene. This is in part due to the fact that leading European composers, such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Hindemith, who left Europe under the threat of the approaching Second World War, became the mentors of young Americans. A far-reaching didactic influence was exerted by Ernest Bloch, who had come to this country earlier. Yet the pedagogical role of the European composer in America varied. Bloch, a Swiss by birth, who with his widely recognized works served an independent ideal of establishing a new Jewish idiom in music, became, as director of the Cleveland Institute of Music and of the San Francisco Conservatory, the admired teacher of a host of American composers who were to pursue their own independent paths of success. His somewhat younger contemporary, Ernst Krenek, a Viennese who had gained an international reputation early in life, received an appointment at an American college that dismissed him when he introduced twelve-tone music in his theory curriculum. A highly respected, though more or less intentionally isolated career was to carry his life almost to the end of the century at whose beginning he was born.

It is with dismay that the chronicler makes mention of the American phase that concluded the life of Béla Bartók, in the opinion of many destined to become the century's most enduring composer. Bartók gave new meaning to creative impulse guided by a commitment to national heritage. What achieved world fame in the work of this modest and withdrawn artist was due to the dual attributes of scrupulous scholarship and a most original gift. He had recognized early that the wealth of indigenous Slavic music was in danger of being forever lost, and in painstaking exploration he set out to uncover its roots. He was neither a folklorist nor a curator. But in exacting field work that would put many a social scientist to shame, he rescued treasures whose preservation would represent a life work in itself. From the achievement of the researcher, however, departed that of the composer, and while the culture of the land formed a nurturing element in his music, the style of his works became entirely his own. His last compositions were written in the United States, but the ailing composer remained a stranger in the country, and he died in relative obscurity and poverty.

In curious contrast to the fate of Bartók stands that of Kurt Weill. Like Krenek born with the century, this highly gifted and successful composer wrote music that, in the best sense of the word, was popular. As a young man he came to America, leaving Germany at the time the National Socialists came into power, but he did not remain a mere immigrant. More readily than any of the other Europeans who had crossed the Atlantic, he embraced the art of American twentieth-century music and, with an innate sense for its dramatic potential, added his own impulse to it. His posthumous fame, which has markedly grown toward the end of the century, attests to a singularly gratifying career.

* * *

Yet the survey of twentieth-century developments in music directs our attention to the fact that, in very different manners, the age that has seen an unparalleled widening and integration of the international scene remains, despite all fertile exchange, beholden to national domains.

Sergei Prokofieff, the greatest among the older generation of Russian twentieth-century composers, wrote after an extended stay abroad, "A foreign atmosphere does not provide me with any foreign inspiration, I am a Russian." The spell of their country's fate looms over the career of this eminent composer as well as over that of his younger contemporary Dimitri Shostakovitch. Unlike Prokofieff, the latter identified his work clearly with Soviet ideals. In contrasting ways, their art was committed to their homeland and its sad lot in twentieth-century history. In contrasting ways, too, it was committed to the symphony and its Western heritage. Prokofieff approached the latter early in life with his famous "Classical Symphony," but his work was distributed over many genres, notably those of opera and ballet. In the oeuvre of Shostakovitch the symphony took on a central role, and especially in his later periods one senses the influence of Bruckner and Mahler.

What is totally absent from his work is the influence of French Impressionism, and this seems to suggest an enforced separation between the European East and West. Yet the palette of the twentieth century had grown too complex for categoric distinctions. While no twentieth-century composer seems more markedly French than Maurice Ravel, this foremost twentieth-century representative of the music of his country was drawn to the work of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Stravinsky (with whom he shares a penchant for articulate clarity), and his famous Daphnis and Chloé; was written for Sergei Diaghilev's Russian Ballet. Ravel was at heart an instrumental composer, inspired by the dance and apt to treat even the voice with instrumental precision. The style of his piano music, chamber music, and orchestral works may border on the brittle, but it never lacks a characteristic French grace.

The indebtedness to a national character comes to the fore even in the music of Arthur Honegger, although here we are dealing with composite nationality. This Swiss composer was born in France; he settled eventually in Paris, and a French orientation is predominant in his music. But it is the French orientation of an artist in whose home country French is one of several native languages. He received his early training in Zurich and returned to Switzerland throughout his life. The German-Swiss Alemanic heritage remained strongly present in his many-sided oeuvre. He is "one of the least dogmatic composers of the recent past, whose work is governed by synthesis rather than eclecticism."

Like Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre, the composer of fine orchestral scores that are remembered, belonged to the group Les Six, whose work she propagated throughout Europe. Its members, however, were connected in friendly association rather than a set program of French modern music.

More directly felt is the national influence of the most prominent twentieth-century composers in Spain and Latin America, Manuel de Falla and the slightly younger Heitor Villa-Lobos. De Falla raised Spanish music, after a long period of relative obscurity, to international importance again. A friend of Debussy and Ravel, he spent his formative years in Paris, yet a fundamental direction to his creative work was given by Felipe Pedrell, Spain's most eminent music historian whose research in the treasures of indigenous music is comparable to Bartók's. The folk music of Andalusia, the region where he was born, gave de Falla's work inspiration--the work of a highly sensitive and disciplined artist whose historic role it was to deliver Spanish music from its Romantic stigma of Exoticism. In contrast with de Falla's work stands that of the lesser known Federico Mompou whose predominantly pianistic work is not without reference to folkloristic themes. But the style of this Spanish composer was more clearly guided by his interest in the group Les Six and his devotion to Debussy.

Page from Heitor Villa-Lobos, Estudio No. 7, for Guitar, with pencil fingerings entered by Segovia MS Mus 230 (1318) Houghton Library, Harvard University

The music of Villa-Lobos is not so much indebted to scholarly discovery as to technical brilliance which, however, is obviously founded in the composer's interest in Brazilian folk traditions. Trained as a violoncellist, he turned to the study of the guitar and popular improvisations; and while his life work embraced the symphonic and dramatic genres, chamber and piano music, his most successful works were written for his own instruments. In later years he explored the classical heritage of music, largely in his role as his country's most acknowledged musical educator, and the pieces involving an ensemble of eight cellos in his Bachianas Brasileiras are among his best known.

The tendency to draw fresh strength from the roots of folk music might be understood in a larger sense as a reaction against the over-refined and intellectualized twentieth-century musical language. Nevertheless, the incentives varied. In Poland, as in Russia, it was the regime that urged composers to concern themselves with the national heritage, and this pressure obscured many an artist's life. Yet it was only until about a decade after the end of the Second World War that Polish music was virtually closed off from the West; by 1956, international music festivals were being held in that country. This may have been the reason why the folk element in the music of Witold Lutosławski, the foremost Polish composer in the first half of the century, was in evidence only in those years. But it was doubtless also prompted by genuine interest. Lutosławski's Concerto for Orchestra , possibly his most eminent work, was inspired by folk music, yet as a matter of course he would treat folk motifs with atonality. Thus his Funeral Music honoring the memory of Bartók, whose work was venerated in Poland, is based on a twelve-tone row.

Poland produced another internationally recognized composer who, in fact, stands out as the most vigorous and the most successful of the waning twentieth century. Freed from the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century commitment to folk music, Krysztof Penderecki rose to universal fame overnight with his St. Luke Passion. In full command of all the means of a new age, he has embraced the major orchestral and choral forms and has proved himself a master of the music drama. Trained as a violinist, he developed a keen sense for all colors of sound and harmony. In view of the complexity of his work, his mastery of the a cappella medium is remarkable, and in such works as his Agnus Dei for eight-part unaccompanied chorus, or his Stabat Mater for three unaccompanied choirs, the listener is immediately under the spell of his sense of form and expression.

Trends of twentieth-century music have curiously overlapped in the work of some of its central figures. Whereas the "Second Viennese School," led by Schoenberg, was unequivocal in its adherence to serialism, its post-Romantic heritage nevertheless was undeniable. It merged in Alban Berg's music with an individual interpretation of atonality, and even the bold language of Wozzeck, the opera that established his reputation, is beholden to Romantic ideals. But the sensitive art of Anton von Webern, whose posthumous recognition is decisively indebted to the collector of these source documents, severed its Romantic roots with a radically new approach to form. He became the celebrated "miniaturist" of the twentieth century, an aspect of his creative career that by no means exhausts a characterization of his strikingly original oeuvre. In Stravinsky's work, Russian heritage met with a pervading Western orientation of the composer who settled in Paris and later in the United States, with "Neo-Classicism," and eventually with the undeniable influence of the Schoenberg circle, especially Anton von Webern. By contrast, Hindemith, who had dominated the scene of German music in the second and third decades of the century, remained inherently German. Having made America his home at the height of his creative powers, he returned to Europe in later years to take a professorship in Zurich. His innate gift of instrumental performance and a wide artistic perspective always guided his course; he was a traditional guild musician as well as a historian and mystic.

There is a further aspect of Hindemith's work which was to become an important bequest to the later German and international scene, that of organizer for the promotion of modern music. Under his leadership the gathering place for young composers developed in Donaueschingen, center of a former German principality, which after the Second World War found a parallel in the Darmstadt music festivals.

The countries freed from Fascism reawakened with a certain shock to contemporary music, and the prototype of the composer-performer found greatly varying new challenges in experimentation. While Luigi Dallapiccola, the Italian, remained indebted to the brilliant dualistic career of Ferruccio Busoni and later to Schoenberg and Alban Berg, the most conspicuous figure among the young Germans, Karlheinz Stockhausen, extended serialism in ways that relied upon the whim of the performer as much as upon the precision provided by the means of the electronic age. His work had received primary impulse from latter-day French music, and his partner at Darmstadt became the composer-conductor Pierre Boulez, one of the foremost avant-gardists. But throughout the twentieth century the avant-garde wrestled with the problem of becoming the old guard. A telling epithet for the music of the declining century has become "Post-modernism," and composers such as the American George Rochberg renounced the advances of technology and looked to past ages for inspiration.

The latter orientation has led to especially stimulating results in the music of Elliott Carter, one of the most highly honored American composers of the century. New interpretations of polyphony and the concertante element are determining factors in his far-flung oeuvre, in which what one might call the counterpoint of rhythm and meter has assumed a major role; and the classical genre of the string quartet has occupied a key position in his work.

The old and the ever new developed the greatest contrasts in the world of twentieth-century performance. The autonomous composer who became his own conductor with the aid of the synthesizer worked next to such a widely versed musician as Boulez who, for a time, was the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. But the image of the orchestral sovereign such as the erstwhile conductor of the Boston Symphony, Karl Muck, whose imposing career lasted well into the twentieth century, lives on. The era of the Romantic performer stayed with us in such supreme figures as Andrés Segovia and Pablo Casals, and the legacy of the nineteenth-century pedagogue remained alive in the famous twentieth-century violinists who studied with Leopold Auer, himself a student of Joachim.

* * *

Personal recollection rather than the detached sifting process granted by the passage of time increasingly influences the sorting out of names from the twentieth century, and while the collectors' views continue to be guided by critical observation, their numbers become legion. Hans Moldenhauer, himself an active musician, retained through direct encounters of his long life an unusually vivid impression of the unfolding European and American musical scene. As a friend, he witnessed the essentially tragic career of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco whose great gift suffered in emigration--the young avant-gardist was destined to become a respected conservative. Moldenhauer's teacher in young years was the prominent conductor Hans Rosbaud, the early interpreter of Schoenberg who in later years became the champion of contemporary music in Donaueschingen. In America it was Rudolph Ganz, President of the Chicago Musical College, under whose guidance Moldenhauer continued and completed his formal education. He was connected, often in close association, with such heterogeneous musical personalities as Karl Amadeus Hartmann, proponent of avant-garde performance and eminent symphonist; Paul A. Pisk, Schoenberg student, able composer, critic, and scholar; Eduard Steuermann, student of Busoni and Schoenberg, to whom many of the latter's premiere performances were entrusted; Nicolas Slonimsky, pianist, conductor and spirited lexicographer; Aurelio de la Vega, Cuban- American composer and musicographer; and Wolfgang Fraenkel, whom the escape from Germany had driven to new educational challenges in China before he settled in the United States.

The documents brought together in this collection obviously vary in importance, and the record of history they offer remains in constant need of revision. Will continuing currency or growing obscurity be accorded to figures of the recent past? To what extent will a new century rearrange the phalanx of the old? History has its own ways of being selective, and a name seemingly lost may acquire a new ring after a good deal more than a century. At any given age, critical evaluation can do no more than attempt to point the way. The only reliable guide into the future will always be the primary source.

Notes

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Music History from Primary Sources | A Guide to the Moldenhauer Archives | Articles and Essays | The Moldenhauer Archives - The Rosaleen Moldenhauer Memorial | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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The Art of Musical Notation In its primary sources, music merges with the representational arts. Oral tradition has played a fundamental role in all ages, but in its formal sense, history--and the history of music--begins with the visual record.

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Teaching Children About the World Through Music

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Teaching Children About the World Through Music

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This explains the process of teaching culture through music

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Teaching Children About the World Through Music - Percussion Play

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Music, as an essential element of culture, is an excellent place for early discussions about diversity, inclusion and celebrating our differences in all people

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Another musical example of a different style and culture around music

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This book talks about Wooden's philosophy of achievement, success, and excellence as well as the lessons that he's learned along the way. These can directly be applied to music

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This is a guide created to explain the importance of picking good repertoire for the performers so that they are successful in their achievement

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Resources for music educators and students

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Online Music Education Resources - Virtual Classroom Info

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Save The Music has curated the best online music education resources and experiences. Implement music learning with lessons and readings. ✓ Get started!

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This video explains a way to read musical notation

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How to Read Notes The EASY Way You Weren’t Taught

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This blog explains what a genre is and lists examples of musical genres

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Music Genres Explained | Blog | Startle Music

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Whichever is your favourite, genres make the music world go round. Let’s take a look at them.

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This video introduces the concept of musicianship and musicality

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Quick Tip to Add Musicality to Your Music: Dynamic Nuancing Explained

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This covers the basics of clarinet assembly and talks about the parts of the instrument

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This is a website/resource that students can use to practice/ study basic music theory and aural skills

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Introductory and intermediate music theory lessons, exercises, ear trainers, and calculators.

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The National Association for Music Education is an association created to support music educators and provide them with resources to better provide for their students

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National Association for Music Education (NAfME)

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NAfME is an association where all people are heard, seen, and feel they belong throughout their lifelong experiences in music.

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This book explains the importance of creating and maintaining daily and long-term habits. This would be a great book for general life or could be applied to an academic or performance side of life.

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This is a glossary of musical terms that could be useful for beginners

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A complete and comprehensive dictionary of 12, 500 Italian, French, German, English and other musical terms, phrases and abbreviations

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This was a post informing music historians that a new piece was discovered

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Pubity on Instagram: "A previously unknown piece of music likely composed by a teenage Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was recently uncovered at a library in Germany.

The piece, which dates to the mid- to late-1760s, consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio. It lasts around 12 minutes, researchers with the Leipzig Municipal Libraries said in a statement.

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#news #viral #mozart #music #pubity"

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559K likes, 3,358 comments - pubity on September 23, 2024: "A previously unknown piece of music likely composed by a teenage Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was recently uncovered at a library in Germany.

The piece, which dates to the mid- to late-1760s, consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio. It lasts around 12 minutes, researchers with the Leipzig Municipal Libraries said in a statement.

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#news #viral #mozart #music #pubity". 

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Pubity (@pubity)

# data[].attributes.body
This piece Ode to Death was a response to the poet Walt Whitman's poem that spoke on death, the uncertainty of life, and eternal life after death.

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This is another wind band piece that provides some cultural diversity

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Texas All-State 5A Symphonic Band - Topic

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Conga del Fuego Nuevo (Arr. O. Nickel for Wind Band) (Live)

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The Psychology of Learning is an article that educators could use to understand how their students absorb information. This could lead educators to change their delivery of information to best serve their students

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A Study Guide for Your Psychology of Learning Exam

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The psychology of learning describes how people learn and interact with their environments through classical and operant conditioning and observational learning.

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This talks about the process that musicians do to effectively practice their instrument

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Help Student Effectively Practice Their Instruments - Best 10 Tips!

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Learning a musical instrument can be an incredibly rewarding journey, but progress doesn’t come without dedicated practice.

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This is a recording of what the typical rehearsal process could look like for some ensembles

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Lake Travis HS Wind Ensemble & LTMS Band Rehearsal

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This is WGI indoor percussion group, Matrix. This show included samples of famous songs about love while also creating its own story.

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Matrix 2023 - Love Light The Way - Finals - Multicam

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This is a full run of DCI corps The Blue Devils. Full runs are performed after a rehearsal block

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Blue Devils 2023 - Corps Rehearsal - DCI Southeastern Championship

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This is a method book that thousands of educators use in teaching beginning band. This could also go under the education column

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This a TedTalk that is given by author Angela Lee Duckworth who talks about her book grit and her findings of the most successful people displaying the characteristic of grit.

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Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance | Angela Lee Duckworth | TED

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This book covers the importance of the mental side of performance and practice

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This is a short segment in which Marin Alsop, a now famous conductor, talks about the process of learning from the great Leonard Bernstein

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Learning from Leonard Bernstein | The Conductor | Great Performances on PBS

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This doctoral project speaks about the responsibilities that a conductor must uphold when rehearsing an ensemble

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This website includes a plethora of sample lessons, songs, and activities that music educators can use at the elementary level to teach about different cultures

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Music in World Cultures | PBS LearningMedia

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Find lessons on Music in World Cultures for all grades. Free interactive resources and activities for the classroom and home.

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This movie did a great job of exploring and accurately depicting a Hispanic culture while also incorporating the cultures music as well

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This is a sight-reading activity that beginners would/ could practice to improve their music reading skills.

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Sight reading rhythms for beginner musicians - 5 levels of difficulty. Which level can you read perfectly first try? 🥁🎵 #rhythmchallenge #sightreadingchallenge #musicianchallenge #drumpractice #musiciansoftiktok #rhythmgame 

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@sightreaddrums
Sight reading rhythms for beginner musicians - 5 levels of difficulty. Which level can you read perfectly first try? 🥁🎵 #rhythmchallenge #sightreadingchallenge #musicianchallenge #drumpractice #musiciansoftiktok #rhythmgame
♬ original sound - Sight Read Drums

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WGI (Winter Guard International) is almost a subgenre within band. It explores not only musical performance but physical and visual performance/ storytelling as well.

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Unique Opportunities for WGI Winds performers

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This website is essentially the Wikipedia of wind band music. It's a domain that allows anyone to find, research, and listen to wind repertoire

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From Wind Repertory Project

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The Wind Repertory Project™ is a comprehensive database of wind literature, expanded by contributions of band directors/conductors, students, and wind band enthusiasts worldwide. Here you will find detailed information on literature for winds, including program notes, instrumentation, errata, and much more. As we celebrate our ten-year anniversary, the Wind Repertory Project™ asks for your assistance in helping to make this an invaluable resource for our profession. You can help by contributing information to the WRP in any way, shape, or form, from entire articles to simply adding recent performances, known audio links/recordings, pictures, or errata lists. Please visit the FAQ section, or jump in with both feet by creating an account. Please help us spread awareness of the WRP by forwarding a link to your colleagues, students, and anyone else you feel would benefit from the information within. Many thanks for your support!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Wind Repertory Project™ is a comprehensive database of wind literature, expanded by contributions of band directors/conductors, students, and wind band enthusiasts worldwide. Here you will find detailed information on literature for winds, including program notes, instrumentation, errata, and much more.

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This website page covers the historical context of American Guernica as well as provides the exact program notes from the composer

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This piece is a depiction of the war, chaos, and destruction caused during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1969

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Assessing musical concepts/ context and relating it back to human experiences

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Assessing musical concepts/ context and relating it back to human experiences

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Accounting for music related to historical events

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Accounting for music related to historical events

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Understanding the context of the music/ its impact

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Understanding the context of the music/ its impact

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Topics covering performance quality, practice/ study habits, and the mental/ philosophical side of performance.

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Topics covering performance quality, practice/ study habits, and the mental/ philosophical side of performance.

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The action of realizing the text in the way in which the composer intended

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The action of realizing the text in the way in which the composer intended