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The Classical period in Western music occurred from about 1730 to 1820, despite considerable overlap at both ends with preceding and following periods, as is true for all musical eras. Although the term classical music is used as a blanket term meaning all kinds of music in this tradition, it can also occasionally mean this particular era within that tradition.

The Classical period falls between the Baroque and the Romantic periods. Probably the best known composers from this period are Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, and Ludwig van Beethoven, though other notable names include Muzio Clementi, Johann Ladislaus Dussek, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and Christoph Willibald Gluck. Beethoven is also regarded either as a Romantic composer or a composer who was part of the transition to the Romantic; Franz Schubert is also something of a transitional figure. The period is sometimes referred to as Viennese Classic, since Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert all worked at some time in Vienna.

Main characteristics of music in the Classical period

• Lighter, clearer texture than Baroque music, and less complicated; mainly homophonic – melody above chordal accompaniment (but counterpoint is by no means forgotten, especially later in the period).
• An emphasis on grace and beauty of melody and form; proportion and balance, moderation and control; polished and elegant in character with expressiveness and formal structure held in perfect balance.
• More variety and contrast within a piece: of keys, melodies, rhythms and dynamics (now using crescendo and sforzando); frequent changes of mood and timbre.
• Melodies tend to be shorter than those of Baroque, with clear-cut phrases and clearly marked cadences.
• Orchestra increases in size and range; harpsichord continuo falls out of use; woodwind becomes a self-contained section.
• The harpsichord is replaced by the piano (or fortepiano): early piano music is thinnish in texture, often with Alberti bass accompaniment (Haydn and Mozart), but later becomes richer, more sonorous and powerful (Beethoven).
• Importance given to instrumental music – main kinds: sonata, trio, string quartet, symphony, concerto, serenade and divertimento.
• Sonata form develops, and becomes the most important design – used to build up the first movement of most large-scale works, but also other movements, and single pieces (such as overtures).

History of the Classical period

The Classical style as part of a larger artistic change

In the middle of the 18th century, Europe began to move to a new style in architecture, literature, and the arts generally, known as Classicism. While still tightly linked to the court culture and absolutism, with its formality and emphasis on order and hierarchy, the new style was also a cleaner style, one that favored clearer divisions between parts, brighter contrasts and colors, and simplicity rather than complexity. The remarkable development of ideas in "natural philosophy" had established itself in the public consciousness, with Newton's physics taken as a paradigm: structures should be well-founded in axioms, and articulated and orderly. This taste for structural clarity worked its way into the world of music as well, moving away from the layered polyphony of the Baroque period, and towards a style where a melody over a subordinate harmony – a combination called homophony – was preferred. This meant that playing of chords, even if they interrupted the melodic smoothness of a single part, became a much more prevalent feature of music, and this in turn made the tonal structure of works more audible. (See also counterpoint and harmony.)

The new style was also pushed forward by changes in the economic order and in social structure. As the 18th century progressed, the nobility more and more became the primary patrons of instrumental music, and there was a rise in the public taste for comic opera. This led to changes in the way music was performed, the most crucial of which was the move to standard instrumental groups, and the reduction in the importance of the "continuo", the harmonic fill beneath the music, often played by several instruments. One way to trace this decline of the continuo and its figured chords is to examine the decline of the term "obbligato", meaning a mandatory instrumental part in a work of chamber music. In the Baroque world, additional instruments could be optionally added to the continuo; in the Classical world, all parts were noted specifically, though not always notated, as a matter of course, so the word "obbligato" became redundant. By 1800, the term was virtually extinct, as was the practice of conducting a work from the keyboard.

The changes in economic situation just noted also had the effect of altering the balance of availability and quality of musicians. While in the late Baroque a major composer would have the entire musical resources of a town to draw on, the forces available at a hunting lodge were smaller, and more fixed in their level of ability. This was a spur to having primarily simple parts to play, and in the case of a resident virtuoso group, a spur to writing spectacular, idiomatic parts for certain instruments, as in the case of the Mannheim orchestra. In addition, the appetite for a continual supply of new music, carried over from the Baroque, meant that works had to be performable with, at best, one rehearsal. Indeed, even after 1790 Mozart writes about "the rehearsal", to imply that his concerts would have only one.

Since polyphonic texture was no longer the focus of music, but rather a single melodic line with accompaniment, there was greater emphasis on notating that line for dynamics and phrasing. The simplification of texture made such instrumental detail more important, and also made the use of characteristic rhythms, such as attention-getting opening fanfares, the funeral march rhythm, or the minuet genre, more important in establishing and unifying the tone of a single movement.

This led to the Classical style's gradual breaking with the Baroque habit of making each movement of music devoted to a single "affect" or emotion. Instead, it became the style to establish contrasts between sections within movements, giving each its own emotional coloring, using a range of techniques: opposition of major and minor; strident rhythmic themes in opposition to longer, more song-like themes; and especially, making movement between different harmonic areas the principal means of creating dramatic contrast and unity. Transitional episodes became more and more important, as occasions of surprise and delight. Consequently composers and musicians began to pay more attention to these, highlighting their arrival, and making the signs that pointed to them, on one hand, more audible, and on the other hand, more the subject of "play" and subversion – that is, composers more and more created false expectations, only to have the music skitter off in a different direction.

Beginnings of the Classical style (1730-1760)

At first the new style took over Baroque forms – the ternary "da capo aria" and the "sinfonia" and "concerto" – and composed with simpler parts, more notated ornamentation and more emphatic division into sections. However, over time, the new aesthetic caused radical changes in how pieces were put together, and the basic layouts changed. (See History of sonata form.) Composers from this period sought dramatic effects, striking melodies, and clearer textures. The Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti was an important figure in the transition from Baroque to Classical. His unique composition style is strongly related to that of the early Classical period. He is best known for composing more than five hundred one-movement keyboard sonatas. Another important break with the past was the radical overhaul of opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck, who cut away a great deal of the layering and improvisational ornament, and focused on the points of modulation and transition. By making these moments where the harmony changes more focal, he enabled powerful dramatic shifts in the emotional color of the music. To highlight these episodes he used changes in instrumentation, melody, and mode. Among the most successful composers of his time, Gluck spawned many emulators, one of whom was Antonio Salieri. Their emphasis on accessibility was hugely successful in opera, and in vocal music more widely: songs, oratorios, and choruses. These were considered the most important kinds of music for performance, and hence enjoyed greatest success in the public estimation.

The phase between the Baroque and the rise of the Classical, with its broad mixture of competing ideas and attempts to unify the different demands of taste, economics and "worldview", goes by many names. It is sometimes called "Galant", "Rococo", or "pre-Classical", or at other times, "early Classical". It is a period where composers still working in the Baroque style are still successful, if sometimes thought of as being more of the past than the present – Bach, Handel and Telemann all compose well beyond the point at which the homophonic style is clearly in the ascendant. Musical culture was caught at a crossroads: the masters of the older style had the technique, but the public hungered for the new. This is one of the reasons C.P.E. Bach was held in such high regard: he understood the older forms quite well, and knew how to present them in new garb, with an enhanced variety of form; he went far in overhauling the older forms from the Baroque.

The early Classical style (1760-1775)

By the late 1750s there are flourishing centers of the new style in Italy, Vienna, Mannheim, and Paris; dozens of symphonies are composed, and there are "bands" of players associated with theatres. Opera or other vocal music is the feature of most musical events, with concerti and "symphonies", which would over the course of the Classical develop and become independent instrumental works (see symphony), serving as instrumental interludes and introductions, for operas, and for even church services. The norms of a body of strings supplemented by winds, and of movements of particular rhythmic character, are established by the late 1750s in Vienna. But the length and weight of pieces is still set with some Baroque characteristics: individual movements still focus on one affect or have only one sharply contrasting middle section, and their length is not significantly greater than Baroque movements. It should also be noted that at this time there is not yet a clearly enunciated theory of how to compose in the new style. It was a moment ripe for a breakthrough.

Many consider this breakthrough to have been made by C.P.E. Bach, Gluck, and several others. Indeed, C.P.E. Bach and Gluck are often considered to be founders of the Classical style itself.

The first great master of the style was the composer Joseph Haydn. In the late 1750s he began composing symphonies, and by 1761 he had composed a triptych ("Morning", "Noon", and "Evening") solidly in the "contemporary" mode. As a "vice-Kapellmeister" and later "Kapellmeister", his output expanded: he would compose over forty symphonies in the 1760s alone. And while his fame grew, as his orchestra was expanded and his compositions were copied and disseminated, his voice was only one among many.

While some suggest that he was overshadowed by Mozart and Beethoven, it would be difficult to overstate Haydn's centrality to the new style, and therefore to the future of Western art music as a whole. At the time, before the pre-eminence of Mozart or Beethoven, and with Johann Sebastian Bach known primarily to connoisseurs of keyboard music, Haydn reached a place in music that set him above all other composers except perhaps George Friedrich Handel. Some have pointed out that he occupieda place equivalent to the Beatles, for example, in the history of Rock and Roll. It was he who, more than any other single individual, realized that the evolving new style needed to be directed by new ideas and principles. He took existing ideas, and radically altered how they functioned – earning him the titles "father of the symphony," and "father of the string quartet." One might truly say that he was the father of the sonata form – which, in its Classical flowering, relied on dramatic contrast, tension of melody against harmony and rhythm, and required the audience to follow a dramatic curve over a larger span of time than was previously necessary.

Strangely enough, one of the forces that worked as an impetus for his pressing forward was the first stirring of what would later be called "Romanticism" – the "Sturm und Drang", or "storm and stress" phase in the arts, a short period where obvious emotionalism was a stylistic preference: the fad of the 1770s. Haydn accordingly wanted more dramatic contrast and more emotionally appealing melodies, with sharpened character and individuality. This period faded away in music and literature: however, it would color what came afterward, and eventually be a component of aesthetic taste in coming decades.

The "Farewell" Symphony, No. 45 in F# Minor, exemplifies Haydn's integration of the differing demands of the new style, with surprising sharp turns, and a long adagio to end the work. In 1772, Haydn completed his Opus 20 set of six string quartets, in which he deploys the polyphonic techniques he gathered from the previous era to provide structural coherence capable of holding together his melodic ideas. For some this marks the beginning of the "mature" Classical style, where the period of reaction against the complexity of the late Baroque begins to be replaced with a period of integration of elements of both Baroque and Classical styles.

The middle Classical style (1775-1790)

Haydn, having worked for over a decade as the music director for a prince, had far more resources and scope for composing than most, and also the ability to shape the forces that would play his music. This opportunity was not wasted, as Haydn, beginning quite early on his career, restlessly sought to press forward the technique of building ideas in music (see development). His next important breakthrough was in the Opus 33 string quartets (1781), where the melodic and the harmonic roles segue among the instruments: it is often momentarily unclear what is melody and what is harmony. This changes the way the ensemble works its way between dramatic moments of transition and climactic sections: the music flows smoothly and without obvious interruption. He then took this integrated style and began applying it to orchestral and vocal music.

Haydn's gift to music was a way of composing, a way of structuring works, which was at the same time in accord with the governing aesthetic of the new style. It would, however, be a younger contemporary, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who would bring his genius to Haydn's ideas, and apply them to two of the major genres of the day: opera, and the virtuoso concerto. Whereas Haydn spent much of his working life as a court composer, Mozart wanted public success in the concert life of cities. This meant opera, and it meant performing as a virtuoso. Haydn was not a virtuoso at the international touring level; nor was he seeking to create operatic works that could play for many nights in front of a large audience. Mozart wanted both. Moreover, Mozart also had a taste for more chromatic chords (and greater contrasts in harmonic language generally), a greater love for creating a welter of melodies in a single work, and a more Italianate sensibility in music as a whole. He found, in Haydn's music, and later in his study of the polyphony of Bach, the means to discipline and enrich his gifts.

Mozart rapidly came to the attention of Haydn, who hailed the new composer, studied his works, and considered the younger man his only true peer in music. Their letters to each other are filled with the kind of asides that only two people working at a higher plane than their contemporaries can share. In Mozart, Haydn found a greater range of instrumentation, dramatic effect and melodic resource – the learning relationship moved in two directions.

Mozart's arrival in Vienna in 1780 brought an acceleration in the development of the Classical style. There Mozart absorbed the fusion of Italianate brilliance and Germanic cohesiveness which had been brewing for the previous 20 years. His own taste for brilliances, rhythmically complex melodies and figures, long cantilena melodies, and virtuoso flourishes was merged with an appreciation for formal coherence and internal connectedness. Strangely enough, it is at this point that war and inflation halted a trend to larger and larger orchestras and forced the disbanding or reduction of many theatre orchestras. This pressed the Classical style inwards: towards seeking greater ensemble and technical challenge – for example, scattering the melody across woodwinds, or using thirds to highlight the melody taken by them. This process placed a premium on chamber music for more public performance, giving a further boost to the string quartet and other small ensemble groupings.

It was during this decade that public taste began, increasingly, to recognize that Haydn and Mozart had reached a higher standard of composition. By the time Mozart arrived at age 25, in 1781, the dominant styles of Vienna were recognizably connected to the emergence in the 1750s of the early Classical style. By the end of the 1780s, changes in performance practice, the relative standing of instrumental and vocal music, technical demands on musicians, and stylistic unity had become established in the composers who imitated Mozart and Haydn. During this decade Mozart would compose his most famous operas, his six late symphonies which would help redefine the genre, and a string of piano concerti which still stand at the pinnacle of these forms.

One composer who was influential in spreading the more serious style that Mozart and Haydn had formed is Muzio Clementi, a gifted virtuoso pianist who dueled Mozart to a draw before the Emperor, when they exhibited their compositions in performance. His own sonatas for the piano circulated widely, and he became the most successful composer in London during the 1780s. The stage was set for a generation of composers who, having absorbed the lessons of the new style earlier, and having clear examples to aim at, would take the Classical style in new directions. Also in London at this time was Johann Ladislaus Dussek, who, like Clementi, encouraged piano makers to extend the range and other features of their instruments, and then fully exploited the newly opened possibilities. The importance of London in the Classical period is often overlooked – but it served as the home to the Broadwood's factory for piano manufacturing, and as the base for composers who, while less famous than the "Vienna School", would have a decisive influence on what came later. They were composers of a number of fine works, notable in their own right. London's taste for virtuosity may well have encouraged the complex passage work and extended statements on tonic and dominant.

The late Classical style (1790-1825)

When Haydn and Mozart began composing, symphonies were played as single movements before, between, or as interludes within other works, and many of them lasted only ten or twelve minutes; instrumental groups had varying standards of playing and the "continuo" was a central part of music-making. In the intervening years, the social world of music had seen dramatic changes: international publication and touring had grown explosively, concert societies were beginning to be formed, notation had been made more specific, more descriptive, and schematics for works had been simplified (yet became more varied in their exact working out). In 1790, just before Mozart's death, with his reputation spreading rapidly, Haydn was poised for a series of successes, notably his late oratorios and "London" symphonies. Composers in Paris, Rome and all over Germany turned to Haydn and Mozart for their ideas on form.

The moment was again ripe for a dramatic shift. The decade of the 1790s saw the emergence of a new generation of composers, born around 1770, who, while they had grown up with the earlier styles, found in the recent works of Haydn and Mozart a vehicle for greater expression. In 1788 Luigi Cherubini settled in Paris, and in 1791 composed "Lodoiska", an opera that shot him to fame. Its style is clearly reflective of the mature Haydn and Mozart, and its instrumentation gave it a weight that had not yet been felt in the grand opera. His contemporary Étienne Méhul extended instrumental effects with his 1790 opera "Euphrosine et Coradin", from which followed a series of successes.

Of course, the most fateful of the new generation would be Ludwig van Beethoven, who launched his numbered works in 1794 with a set of three piano trios, which remain in the repertoire. Somewhat younger than these, though equally accomplished because of his youthful study under Mozart and his native virtuosity, was Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Hummel studied under Haydn as well; he was a friend to Beethoven and Schubert, and a teacher to Franz Liszt. He concentrated more on the piano than any other instrument, and his time in London in 1791 and 1792 saw the composition, and publication in 1793, of three piano sonatas, opus 2, which idiomatically used Mozart's techniques of avoiding the expected cadence, and Clementi's sometimes modally uncertain virtuoso figuration. Taken together, these composers can be seen now as the vanguard of a broad change in style and the center of gravity in music. They would study one another's works, copy one another's gestures in music, and on occasion behave like quarrelsome rivals.

The crucial differences with the previous wave can be seen in the downward shift in melodies, increasing durations of movements, the acceptance of Mozart and Haydn as paradigmatic, the greater and greater use of keyboard resources, the shift from "vocal" writing to "pianistic" writing, the growing pull of the minor and of modal ambiguity, and the increasing importance of varying accompanying figures to bring "texture" forward as an element in music. In short, the late Classical was seeking a music that was internally more complex. The growth of concert societies and amateur orchestras, marking the importance of music as part of middle-class life, contributed to a booming market for pianos, piano music, and virtuosi to serve as examplars. Hummel, Beethoven, Clementi were all renowned for their improvising.

One explanation for the shift in style has been advanced by Schoenberg and others: the increasing centrality of the idea of theme and variations in compositional thinking. Schoenberg argues that the Classical style was one of "continuing variation", where a development was, in effect, a theme and variations with greater continuity. In any event, theme and variations replaced the fugue as the standard vehicle for improvising, and was often included, directly or indirectly, as a movement in longer instrumental works.

Direct influence of the Baroque continued to fade: the figured bass grew less prominent as a means of holding performance together, the performance practices of the mid 18th century continued to die out. However, at the same time, complete editions of Baroque masters began to become available, and the influence of Baroque style, as the Classical period understood it, continued to grow, particularly in the ever more expansive use of brass. Another feature of the period is the growing number of performances where the composer was not present. This led to increased detail and specificity in notation; for example, there were fewer and fewer "optional" parts that stood separately from the main score.

The force of these shifts would be abundantly apparent with Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, given the name "Eroica", which is Italian for "heroic", by the composer. As with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, it may not have been the first in all of its innovations, but its aggressive use of every part of the Classical style set it apart from its contemporary works: in length, ambition, and harmonic resources.

Classical influence on later composers

Musical eras seldom disappear at once; instead, features are replaced over time, until the old is simply felt as "old-fashioned". The Classical style did not "die" so much as transform under the weight of changes.

One crucial change was the shift towards harmonies centering around "flatward" or subdominant keys. In the Classical style, major key was far more common than minor, chromaticism being moderated through the use of "sharpward" modulation, and sections in the minor mode were often merely for contrast. Beginning with Mozart and Clementi, there began a creeping colonization of the subdominant region. With Schubert, subdominant moves flourished after being introduced in contexts in which earlier composers would have confined themselves to dominant shifts (For a fuller discussion of these terms see Tonality.). This introduced darker colors to music, strengthened the minor mode, and made structure harder to maintain. Beethoven would contribute to this, by his increasing use of the fourth as a consonance, and modal ambiguity – for example, the opening of the D Minor Symphony.

Among this generation of "Classical Romantics" Franz Schubert, Carl Maria von Weber, and John Field are among the most prominent, along with the young Felix Mendelssohn. Their sense of form was strongly influenced by the Classical style, and they were not yet "learned" (imitating rules which were codified by others), but directly responding to works by Beethoven, Mozart, Clementi, and others, as they encountered them. The instrumental forces at their disposal were also quite "Classical" in number and variety, permitting similarity with avowedly Classical works.

However, the forces destined to end the hold of the Classical style gather strength in the works of each of these composers. The most commonly cited one is, of course, harmonic innovation. However, also important is the increasing focus on having a continuous and rhythmically uniform accompanying figuration. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata would be the model for hundreds of later pieces – where the shifting movement of a rhythmic figure provides much of the drama and interest of the work, while a melody drifts above it. As years wore on, greater knowledge of works, greater instrumental expertise, increasing variety of instruments, the growth of concert societies, and the unstoppable domination of the piano – which created a huge audience for sophisticated music – all contributed to the shift to the "Romantic" style.

Drawing the line exactly is impossible: there are sections of Mozart's works which, taken alone, are indistinguishable in harmony and orchestration from music written 80 years later, and composers continue to write in normative Classical styles all the way into the 20th century. Even before Beethoven's death, composers such as Louis Spohr were self-described Romantics, incorporating, for example, more and more extravagant chromaticism in their works. However, generally the fall of Vienna as the most important musical center for orchestral composition is felt to be the occasion of the Classical style's final eclipse, along with its continuous organic development of one composer learning in close proximity to others. Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin visited Vienna when young, but they then moved on to other vistas. Composers such as Carl Czerny, while deeply influenced by Beethoven, also searched for new ideas and new forms to contain the larger world of musical expression and performance in which they lived.

Renewed interest in the formal balance and restraint of 18th century classical music led in the early 20th century to the development of so-called Neoclassical style, which numbered Stravinsky and Prokofiev among its proponents.

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K

The harp is one of the oldest musical instruments, found in various forms all over the world. It is a chordophone (string instrument).

Origins of the Harp

It may have been invented when people found that the sound of a plucked bow string sounded nice, and added extra strings to the bow. The oldest documented reference to the harp is as long ago as 3000 BCE, in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The harp is mentioned in the Bible, ancient epics, even in Egyptian wall paintings. Today, there are two main types of modern harps: folk and concert. Different kinds of folk harps are found all over the world.

The European harp first appeared in Ireland and is the national symbol, appearing on all its coins from the Middle Ages to the new Euro coins, 2002, and on all official Government of Ireland seals and stationery.

Harps are triangular and have nylon, gut, wire, and/or copper wound nylon strings. Most harps have a single row of strings with seven notes per octave. Harpists can tell which notes they are playing because all F strings are black or blue and all C strings are red or orange. The instrument rests between the knees of the harpist and along their right shoulder. One exception is the Welsh Triple Harp which is traditionally placed on the left shoulder. The first four fingers on each hand are used to pluck the strings: the pinky fingers are too short and cannot reach the correct position without distorting the position of the other fingers. Plucking with various degrees of forcefulness creates dynamics. Depending on finger position, different sounds can be produced: a "fleshy" pluck (near the middle of the first finger joint) will make a warm tone, and a pluck near the end of the finger will make a loud, bright sound.

Harp technique

There are two main methods of harp technique: the French (or Grandjany) method and the Salzedo method. Neither method hasa definite majority among harpists, but the issue of which is better is a source of friction and debate. The distinguishing features of the Salzedo method are the encouragement of expressive gestures, elbows remain parallel to the ground, wrists are comparatively stiff, and neither arm ever touches the soundboard. The French method advocates lowered elbows, fluid wrists, and the right arm resting lightly on the soundboard. In both methods, the shoulders, neck, and back are relaxed. Some harpists combine the two methods into their own version that works best for them.

In addition to those techniques, which are suitable for modern pedal harps with their very high string tension, in recent years some harpists have been developing another technique - the so called: "thumb under" technique - which is more suitable for lower string tensions, as they are found on most historical harps. This technique takes baroque performance practices as its starting point. In the absence of much evidence on historical harp techniques, harpists have taken their lead from lute and early keyboard techniques.

As in all baroque instrumental techniques, the underlying principle is that of strong and weak articulation. The player only uses three fingers of each hand, and - as the name implies - the thumb moves under the other fingers, rather than being held very high, as in modern harp technique. The thumb and third fingers are "strong" fingers and the second finger is a "weak" finger. Scales are fingered alternating strong and weak fingers - that is, a scale fingering could be either 1 2 1 2 1 2 or 3 2 3 2 3 2. This technique produces a mellow, well articulated sound on harps with low string tension. It also avoids large movements of the wrists and arms, since on low-tension harps, much less force is required than on modern high tension ones.

The pedal harp

The pedal harp has six and a half octaves (47 strings), weighs about 80 pounds, and is approximately 6 feet high and 4 feet wide at the widest. The notes range from three octaves below middle C to three and a half octaves above (landing on G). The pressure of the strings on the sound board is roughly equal to a ton. The lowest strings are made of copper wound nylon, the middle strings of gut, and the highest of nylon. The pedal harp uses pedals to change the pitches of the strings. There are seven pedals, one for each note. When a pedal is moved, it rotates a wheel at the top of the harp. This wheel is studded with two pegs which pinch the string then they turn, shortening the vibrating length of the string. The pedal has three positions. In the top position no pegs are in contact with the string and all notes are flat. In the middle position the top wheel pinches the string resulting in a natural. In the bottom position another wheel is turned shortening the string to create a sharp. This mechanism is called the double-action pedal system, invented by Sabastien Erard in 1810.

Folk harps/lever harps

The folk harp ranges in size from two octaves to about six octaves, and uses levers to change the pitches. The most common form is 33 strings: two octaves below middle C and two and a half above (landing on G). The strings are made of nylon or gut, except for a few special kinds strung with wire and played with the fingernails. At the top of each string is a lever; when it is raised, it shortens the string so its pitch is raised a half-step, resulting in a sharp if the string was in natural.

Multi-course harps

A multi-course harp is a harp with more than one row of strings. A harp with only one row of strings is called a single-course harp.

A double harp consists of two rows of diatonic strings one on either side of the neck. These strings may run parallel to each other or may converge so the bottom ends of the strings are very close together. Either way, the strings that are next to each other are tuned to the same note. Double harps often have levers either on every string or on the strings that are most commonly sharped. (for example C and F) Having two sets of strings allows the harpist left and right hands to occupy the same range of notes without having both hands attempt to play the same string at the same time. It also allows for special effects such as repeating a note very quickly with out stopping the sound from the previous note.

A triple harp features three rows of parallel strings, two outer rows of diatonic strings (natural notes), and a center row of chromatic strings (sharps). To play a sharp, the harpist reaches in between the strings in either outer row and plucks the center row string. Like the double harp, the two outer rows of strings are tuned the same, but the triple harp has no levers. This harp originated in Italy in the sixteenth century as a low headed instrument, and towards the end of 1600s it arrived in Wales where it developed a high head and larger size. It established itself as part of Welsh tradition and became known as the Welsh Harp. The traditional design has all of the strings strung from the left side of the neck, but modern neck designs have the two outer rows of strings strung from opposite sides of the neck to greatly reduce the tendency for the neck to roll over to the left.

The cross harp consists of one row of diatonically tuned strings and another row of chromatic notes. These strings cross approximately in the middle of the string without touching. Traditionally the diatonic row runs from the right (as seen by someone sitting at the harp) side of the neck to the left side of the sound board. The chromatic row runs from the left of the neck to the right of the sound board. The diatonic row has the normal string coloration for a harp, but the chromatic row may be black. The chromatic row is not a full set of strings. It is missing the strings between the Es and Fs in the diatonic row and between the Bs and Cs in the diatonic row. In this respect it is much like a piano. The diatonic row corresponds to the white keys and the chromatic row to the black keys. Playing each string in sucession results in a complete chromatic scale.

Miscellaneous

In South America, there are Mexican, Peruvian, Venezuelan, and Paraguayan harps. They are similar to Spanish harps: wide on the bottom and narrow at the top, with perfect balance when being played but unable to stand independently for lack of a base. The Paraguayan harp is the most popular, and is Paraguay's national instrument. It has about 36 strings with narrower spacing and lighter tension than other harps, and so has a slightly (four to five notes) lower pitch. It does not necessarily have the same string coloration as the other harps. For example, some Paraguayan harps may have red B's and blue E's instead of red C's and blue F's. This harp is also played mostly with the fingernails.

Almost every other culture has a form of the harp. In Asia, the koto is a kind of lyre, a close relative of the harp. Africa has the kora.

Ancient Rome and Greece played lyres, similar to harps but not triangular. The Aeolian harp is played by wind blowing through the strings.

The harp is used sparingly in most classical music, usually for special effects such as the glissando, arpeggios, and bisbigliando. Italian and German opera uses harp for romantic arias and dances, an example of which is Musetta's Waltz from La Bohome. French composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel composed harp concertos and chamber music widely played today. Henriette Renie and Marcel Grandjany have composed many lesser-known solo pieces and chamber music. Modern composers utilize the harp frequently because the pedals on a concert harp allow many sorts of non-diatonic scales and strange accidentals to be played (although some modern pieces call for impractical pedal manipulations).

Lyon and Healy, Camac, and other manufacturers also make electric harps. The electric harp is a concert harp, with microphone pickups at the base of each string and an amplifier. The electric harp is significantly heavier than an acoustic harp, but looks the same.

Harps are a part of the mythologies of many cultures. In Irish mythology, a magical harp is possessed by The Dagda. In the Bible King David is a harpist, and angels sometimes play harps.

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K

The term medieval music encompasses European music written during the Middle Ages. This era begins with the fall of the Roman Empire (476 AD) and ends in approximately the middle of the fifteenth century. Establishing the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the Renaissance is admittedly arbitrary; 1400 is used here.

Overview

Style and trends

The only medieval music which can be studied is that which was written down and survived. Since creating musical manuscripts was very expensive, due to the expense of parchment, and the huge amount of time necessary for a scribe to copy it all down, only very rich institutions were able to create manuscripts which survived to the current time. These institutions generally included the church and church institutions, such as monasteries, although some secular music was also preserved in these institutions. These manuscript traditions do not reflect much of the popular music of the time. At the start of the era, the notated music is presumed to be monophonic and homorhythmic with what appears to be a unison sung text and no notated instrumental support. In earlier medieval notation, rhythm cannot be specified, although neumatic notations can give clear phrasing ideas, and somewhat later notations indicate rhythmic modes.

The simplicity of chant, with unison voice and natural declamation, is most common. The notation of polyphony develops, and the assumption is that formalised polyphonic practices first arose in this period. Harmony, in consonant intervals of perfect fifths, unisons, octaves, (and later, perfect fourths) begins to be notated. Rhythmic notation allows for complex interactions between multiple vocal lines in a repeatable fashion. The use of multiple texts and the notation of instrumental accompaniment has developed by the end of the era.

Instruments

The instruments used to perform medieval music largely still exist, though in different forms. The medieval cornett differed immensely from its modern counterpart, the trumpet, not least in traditionally being made of ivory or wood rather than metal. Cornetts in medieval times were quite short. They were either straight or somewhat curved, and construction became standardised on a curved version by approximately the middle 15th century. In one side, there would be several holes. The flute was once made of wood rather than silver or other metal, and could be made as a side-blown or end-blown instrument. The recorder, on the other hand, has more or less retained its past form. The gemshorn is similar to the recorder in having finger holes on its front, though it is really a member of the ocarina family. One of the flute's predecessors, the pan flute, was popular in medieval times, and is possibly of Hellenic origin. This instrument's pipes were made of wood, and were graduated in length to produce different pitches.

Many medieval plucked string instruments were similar to the modern guitar, such as the lute and mandolin. The hammered dulcimer, similar in structure to the psaltery and zither, was not plucked but struck. The hurdy-gurdy was (and still is) a mechanical violin using a rosined wooden wheel attached to a crank to "bow" its strings. Instruments without sound boxes such as the Jew's harp were also popular. Early versions of the organ, fiddle (or vielle), and trombone (called the sackbut) existed as well.

Genres

In this era, music was both sacred and secular, although almost no early secular music has survived, and since notation was a relatively late development, reconstruction of this music, especially before the 12th century, is currently subject to conjecture (see authentic performance).

Theory and notation

In music theory the period saw several advances over previous practice, mostly in the conception and notation of rhythm. Previously music was organised rhythmically into "longs" and "breves" (in other words, "shorts"), though often without any clear regular differentiation between which should be used. The most famous music theorist of the first half of the 13th century, Johannes de Garlandia, was the author of the De mensurabili musica (about 1240), the treatise which defined and most completely elucidated the rhythmic modes,a notational system for rhythm in which one of six possible patterns was denoted by a particular succession of note-shapes (organized in what is called "ligatures"). The melodic line, once it had its mode, would generally remain in it, although rhythmic adjustments could be indicated by changes in the expected pattern of ligatures, even to the extent of changing to another rhythmic mode. A German theorist of a slightly later period, Franco of Cologne, was the first to describe a system of notation in which differently shaped notes have entirely different rhythmic values (in the Ars Cantus Mensurabilis of approximately 1260), an innovation which had a massive impact on the subsequent history of European music. Most of the surviving notated music of the 13th century uses the rhythmic modes as defined by Garlandia.

Philippe de Vitry is most famous in music history for writing the Ars Nova (1322), a treatise on music which gave its name to the music of the entire era. His contributions to notation, in particular notation of rhythm, were particularly important, and made possible the free and quite complex music of the next hundred years. In some ways the modern system of rhythmic notation began with Vitry, who broke free from the older idea of the rhythmic modes, short rhythmic patterns that were repeated without being individually differentiated. The notational predecessors of modern time meters also originate in the Ars Nova; for Franco, a breve (for a brief explanation of the mensural notation in general, see the article Renaissance music) had equalled three semibreves (that is, half breves) (on occasion, two, locally and with certain context; almost always, however, these two semibreves were one of normal length and one of double length, thereby taking the same space of time), and the same ternary division held for all larger and smaller note values. By the time of Ars Nova, the breve could be pre-divided, for an entire composition or section of one, into groups of two or three smaller semibreves by use of a "mensuration sign," equivalent to our modern "time signature." This way, the "tempus" (denoting the division of the breve, which ultimately achieved the same primacy over rhythmic structure as our modern "measure") could be either "perfect," with ternary subdivision, or "imperfect," with binary subdivision. Tempus perfectus was indicated by a circle, while tempus imperfectus was denoted by a half-circle (our current "C" as a stand-in for the 4/4 time signature is actually a holdover from this practice, not an abbreviation for "common time", as popularly believed). In a similar fashion, the semibreve could in turn be divided into three "minima" or "minims" (prolatio perfectus or major prolation) or two (prolatio imperfectus or minor prolation) and, at the higher level, the longs into three or two breves (modus perfectus or perfect mode, or modus imperfectus or imperfect mode respectively).

For the duration of the medieval period, most music would be composed primarily in perfect tempus, with special effects created by sections of imperfect tempus; there is a great current controversy among musicologists as to whether such sections were performed with a breve of equal length or whether it changed, and if so, at what proportion. In the highly syncopated works of the Ars subtilior, different voices of the same composition would sometimes be written in different tempus signatures simultaneously.

Many scholars, citing a lack of positive attributory evidence, now consider "Vitry's" treatise to be anonymous, but this does not diminish its importance for the history of rhythmic notation. The first definitely identifiable scholar to accept and explain the mensural system was Johannes de Muris (Jehan des Mars), who can be said to have done for it what Garlandia did for the rhythmic modes.

Early medieval music ( -1150)

Early chant traditions

Chant (or plainsong) is a monophonic sacred form which represents the earliest known music of the Christian church. The Jewish Synagogue tradition of singing psalms was a strong influence on Christian chanting.

Chant developed separately in several European centres. The most important were Rome, Spain, Gaul, Milan, and Ireland. These chants were all developed to support the regional liturgies used when celebrating the Mass there. Each area developed its own chants and rules for celebration. In Spain, Mozarabic chant was used and shows the influence of North African music. The Mozarabic liturgy even survived through Muslim rule, though this was an isolated strand and this music was later suppressed in an attempt to enforce conformity on the entire liturgy. In Milan, Ambrosian chant, named after St. Ambrose, was the standard, while Beneventan chant developed around Benevento, another Italian liturgical center. Gallican chant was used in Gaul, and Celtic chant in Ireland and Great Britain.

Around 1011 AD, the Roman Catholic Church wanted to standardize the Mass and chant. At this time, Rome was the religious centre of western Europe, and Paris was the political centre. The standardization effort consisted mainly of combining these two (Roman and Gallican) regional liturgies. This body of chant became known as Gregorian Chant. By the 12th and 13th centuries, Gregorian chant had superseded all the other Western chant traditions, with the exception of the Ambrosian chant in Milan, and the Mozarabic chant in a few specially designated Spanish chapels.

Gregorian chant

A doctrinally unified version which came together from under the supervision of Rome in approximately the ninth century was called Gregorian chant, a type of plainsong that was central to the musical tradition of Europe in the Medieval era. The actual melodies that make up the repertory probably come from several sources, some as far back as the pontificate of Gregory the Great himself (c. 590–604). Many of them were probably written in the politically stable, relatively literate setting of western monasteries during the reign of Charlemagne.

The earliest surviving sources of chant showing musical notation are from the early ninth century, though the consistency of the music across a wide area implies that some form of chant notation, now lost, may have existed earlier than this. It should be noted that music notation existed in the ancient world–for example Greece–but the ability to read and write this notation was lost around the fifth century, as was all of the music that went with it.

To what extent the music of the Gregorian chant represents a survival of the music of the ancient world is much debated by scholars, but certainly there must have been some influence, if only from the music of the synagogue. Only the smallest of scraps of ancient music have survived (for instance, the Seikilos epitaph), but those that have show an unsurprising similarity of mode, shape and phrase conception to later Western music.

Chant survived and prospered in monasteries and religious centres throughout the chaotic years of the early middle ages, for these were the places of greatest stability and literacy. Most developments in western classical music are either related to, or directly descended from, procedures first seen in chant and its earliest elaborations.

Early polyphony: organum

Around the end of the ninth century, singers in monasteries such as St. Gall in Switzerland began experimenting with adding another part to the chant, generally a voice in parallel motion, singing in mostly perfect fourths or fifths with the original tune (see interval). This development is called organum, and represents the beginnings of harmony and, ultimately, counterpoint. Over the next several centuries organum developed in several ways.

The most significant was the creation of "florid organum" around 1100, sometimes known as the school of St. Martial (named after a monastery in south-central France, which contains the best-preserved manuscript of this repertory). In "florid organum" the original tune would be sung in long notes while an accompanying voice would sing many notes to each one of the original, often in a highly elaborate fashion, all the while emphasizing the perfect consonances (fourths, fifths and octaves) as in the earlier organa. Later developments of organum occurred in England, where the interval of the third was particularly favoured, and where organa were likely improvised against an existing chant melody, and at Notre Dame in Paris, which was to be the centre of musical creative activity throughout the thirteenth century.

Much of the music from the early medieval period is anonymous. Some of the names may have been poets and lyric writers, and the tunes for which they wrote words may have been composed by others. Attribution of monophonic music of the medieval period is not always reliable. Surviving manuscripts from this period include the Musica Enchiriadis, Codex Calixtinus of Santiago de Compostela, and the Winchester Troper.

Liturgical drama

Another musical tradition of Europe originated during the early Middle Ages was the liturgical drama. In its original form, it may represent a survival of Roman drama with Christian stories - mainly the Gospel, the Passion, and the lives of the saints - grafted on. Every part of Europe had some sort of tradition of musical or semi-musical drama in the middle ages, involving acting, speaking, singing and instrumental accompaniment in some combination. Probably these dramas were performed by travelling actors and musicians. Many have been preserved sufficiently to allow modern reconstruction and performance (for example the Play of Daniel, which has been recently recorded).

Goliards

The Goliards were itinerant poet-musicians of Europe from the tenth to the middle of the thirteenth century. Most were scholars or ecclesiastics, and they wrote and sang in Latin. Although many of the poems have survived, very little of the music has. They were possibly influential — even decisively so — on the troubadour-trouvère tradition which was to follow. Most of their poetry is secular and, while some of the songs celebrate religious ideals, others are frankly profane, dealing with drunkenness, debauchery and lechery.

High medieval music (1150-1300)

Ars antiqua

The flowering of the Notre Dame school of polyphony from around 1150 to 1250 corresponded to the equally impressive achievements in Gothic architecture: indeed the centre of activity was at the cathedral of Notre Dame itself. Sometimes the music of this period is called the Parisian school, or Parisian organum, and represents the beginning of what is conventionally known as Ars antiqua. This was the period in which rhythmic notation first appeared in western music, mainly a context-based method of rhythmic notation known as the rhythmic modes.

This was also the period in which concepts of formal structure developed which were attentive to proportion, texture, and architectural effect. Composers of the period alternated florid and discant organum (more note-against-note, as opposed to the succession of many-note melismas against long-held notes found in the florid type), and created several new musical forms: clausulae, which were melismatic sections of organa extracted and fitted with new words and further musical elaboration; conductus, which was a song for one or more voices to be sung rhythmically, most likely in a procession of some sort; and tropes, which were rearrangements of older chants with new words and sometimes new music. All of these genres save one were based upon chant; that is, one of the voices, (usually three, though sometimes four) nearly always the lowest (the tenor at this point) sung a chant melody, though with freely composed note-lengths, over which the other voices sang organum. The exception to this method was the conductus, a two-voice composition that was freely composed in its entirety.

The motet, one of the most important musical forms of the high Middle Ages and Renaissance, developed initially during the Notre Dame period out of the clausula, especially the form using multiple voices as elaborated by Pérotin, who paved the way for this particularly by replacing many of his predecessor (as canon of the cathedral) Léonin's lengthy florid clausulae with substitutes in a discant style. Gradually, there came to be entire books of these substitutes, available to be fitted in and out of the various chants. Since, in fact, there were more than can possibly have been used in context, it is probable that the clausulae came to be performed independently, either in other parts of the mass, or in private devotions. The clausulae, thus practised, became the motet when troped with non-liturgical words, and was further developed into a form of great elaboration, sophistication and subtlety in the fourteenth century, the period of Ars nova.

Surviving manuscripts from this era include the Codex Montpellier, Codex Bamberg, and El Codex musical de Las Huelgas.

Composers of this time include Léonin, Pérotin, W. de Wycombe, Adam de St. Victor, and Petrus de Cruce (Pierre de la Croix). Petrus is credited with the innovation of writing more than three semibreves to fit the length of a breve. Coming before the innovation of imperfect tempus, this practice innagurated the era of what are now called "Petronian" motets. These late 13th-century works are in three, sometimes four, parts and have multiple texts sung simultaneously. These texts can be either sacred or secular in subject, and with Latin and French mixed. The Petronian motet is a highly complex genre, given its mixture of several semibreve breves with rhythmic modes and sometimes (with increasing frequency) substitution of secular songs for chant in the tenor. Indeed, ever-increasing rhythmic complexity would be a fundamental characteristic of the 14th century, though music in France, Italy, and England would take quite different paths during that time.

Troubadours and trouvères

The music of the troubadours and trouvères was a vernacular tradition of monophonic secular song, probably accompanied by instruments, sung by professional, occasionally itinerant, musicians who were as skilled as poets as they were singers and instrumentalists. The language of the troubadours was Occitan (also known as the langue d'oc, or Provençal); the language of the trouvères was Old French (also known as langue d'oil). The period of the troubadours corresponded to the flowering of cultural life in Provence which lasted through the twelfth century and into the first decade of the thirteenth. Typical subjects of troubadour song were war, chivalry and courtly love. The period of the troubadours ended abruptly with the Albigensian Crusade, the fierce campaign by Pope Innocent III to eliminate the Cathar heresy (and northern barons' desire to appropriate the wealth of the south). Surviving troubadours went either to Spain, northern Italy or northern France (where the trouvère tradition lived on), where their skills and techniques contributed to the later developments of secular musical culture in those places.

The music of the trouvères was similar to that of the troubadours, but was able to survive into the thirteenth century unaffected by the Albigensian Crusade. Most of the more than two thousand surviving trouvère songs include music, and show a sophistication as great as that of the poetry it accompanies.

The Minnesinger tradition was the Germanic counterpart to the activity of the troubadours and trouvères to the west. Unfortunately, few sources survive from the time; the sources of Minnesang are mostly from two or three centuries after the peak of the movement, leading to some controversy over their accuracy.

Late medieval music (1300-1400)

France: Ars nova

The beginning of the Ars nova is one of the few clean chronological divisions in medieval music, since it corresponds to the publication of the Roman de Fauvel, a huge compilation of poetry and music, in 1310 and 1314. The Roman de Fauvel is a satire on abuses in the medieval church, and is filled with medieval motets, lais, rondeaux and other new secular forms. While most of the music is anonymous, it contains several pieces by Philippe de Vitry, one of the first composers of the isorhythmic motet, a development which distinguishes the fourteenth century. The isorhythmic motet was perfected by Guillaume de Machaut, the finest composer of the time.

During the Ars nova era, secular music acquired a polyphonic sophistication formerly found only in sacred music, a development not surprising considering the secular character of the early Renaissance (and it should be noted that while this music is typically considered to be "medieval", the social forces that produced it were responsible for the beginning of the literary and artistic Renaissance in Italy—the distinction between Middle Ages and Renaissance is a blurry one, especially considering arts as different as music and painting). The term "Ars nova" (new art, or new technique) was coined by Philippe de Vitry in his treatise of that name (probably written in 1322), in order to distinguish the practice from the music of the immediately preceding age.

The dominant secular genre of the Ars Nova was the chanson, as it would continue to be in France for another two centuries. These chansons were composed in musical forms corresponding to the poetry they set, which were in the so-called formes fixes of rondeau, ballade, and virelai. These forms significantly affected the development of musical structure in ways that are felt even today; for example, the ouvert-clos rhyme-scheme shared by all three demanded a musical realization which contributed directly to the modern notion of antecedent and consequent phrases. It was in this period, too, in which began the long tradition of setting the mass ordinary. This tradition started around mid-century with isolated or paired settings of Kyries, Glorias, etc., but Machaut composed what is thought to be the first complete mass conceived as one composition. The sound world of Ars Nova music is very much one of linear primacy and rhythmic complexity. "Resting" intervals are the fifth and octave, with thirds and sixths considered dissonances. Leaps of more than a sixth in individual voices are not uncommon, leading to speculation of instrumental participation at least in secular performance.

Italy: Trecento

Most of the music of Ars nova was French in origin; however, the term is often loosely applied to all of the music of the fourteenth century, especially to include the secular music in Italy. There this period was often referred to as Trecento.

Italian music has always, it seems, been known for its lyrical or melodic character, and this goes back to the 14th century in many respects. Italian secular music of this time (what little surviving liturgical music there is, is similar to the French except for somewhat different notation) featured what has been called the cantalina style, with a florid top voice supported by two (or even one; a fair amount of Italian Trecento music is for only two voices) that are more regular and slower moving. This type of texture remained a feature of Italian music in the popular 15th and 16th century secular genres as well, and was an important influence on the eventual development of the trio texture that revolutionized music in the 17th.

There were three main forms for secular works in the Trecento. One was the madrigal, not the same as that of 150-250 years later, but with a verse/refrain-like form. Three-line stanzas, each with different words, alternated with a two-line ritornello, with the same text at each appearance. Perhaps we can see the seeds of the subsequent late-Renaissance and Baroque ritornello in this device; it too returns again and again, recognizable each time, in contrast with its surrounding disparate sections. Another form, the caccia ("chase,") was written for two voices in a canon at the unison. Sometimes, this form also featured a ritornello, which was occasionally also in a canonic style. Usually, the name of this genre provided a double meaning, since the texts of caccia were primarily about hunts and related outdoor activities, or at least action-filled scenes. The third main form was the ballata, which was roughly equivalent to the French ballade.

Surviving Italian manuscripts include the Squarcialupi Codex and the Rossi Codex. In all, however, significantly less Italian music survives from the 14th century than French.

Germany: Geisslerlieder

The Geisslerlieder were the songs of wandering bands of flagellants, who sought to appease the wrath of an angry God by penitential music accompanied by mortification of their bodies. There were two separate periods of activity of Geisslerlied: one around the middle of the thirteenth century, from which, unfortunately, no music survives (although numerous lyrics do); and another from 1349, for which both words and music survive intact due to the attention of a single priest who wrote about the movement and recorded its music. This second period corresponds to the spread of the Black Death in Europe, and documents one of the most terrible events in European history. Both periods of Geisslerlied activity were mainly in Germany.

There was also French-influenced polyphony written in German areas at this time, but it was somewhat less sophisticated than its models. In fairness to the mostly anonymous composers of this repertoire, however, most of the surviving manuscripts seem to have been copied with extreme incompetence, and are filled with errors that make a truly thorough evaluation of the music's quality impossible.

Mannerism and Ars subtilior

As often seen at the end of any musical era, the end of the medieval era is marked by a highly manneristic style known as Ars subtilior. In some ways, this was an attempt to meld the French and Italian styles. This music was highly stylized, with a rhythmic complexity that was not matched until the 20th century. In fact, not only was the rhythmic complexity of this repertoire largely unmatched for five and a half centuries, with extreme syncopations, mensural trickery, and even examples of augenmusik (such as a chanson by Baude Cordier written out in manuscript in the shape of a heart), but also its melodic material was quite complex as well, particularly in its interaction with the rhythmic structures. Already discussed under Ars Nova has been the practice of isorhythm, which continued to develop through late-century and in fact did not achieve its highest degree of sophistication until early in the 15th century. Instead of using isorhythmic techniques in one or two voices, or trading them among voices, some works came to feature a pervading isorhythmic texture which rivals the integral serialism of the 20th century in its systematic ordering of rhythmic and tonal elements. The term "mannerism" was applied by later scholars, as it often is, in response to an impression of sophistication being practised for its own sake, a malady which some authors have felt infected the Ars subtilior.

Transitioning to the Renaissance

Demarcating the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the Renaissance, with regards to the composition of music, is problematic. While the music of the fourteenth century is fairly obviously medieval in conception, the music of the early fifteenth century is often conceived as belonging to a transitional period, not only retaining some of the ideals of the end of the Middle Ages (such as a type of polyphonic writing in which the parts differ widely from each other in character, as each has its specific textural function), but also showing some of the characteristic traits of the Renaissance (such as the international style developing through the diffusion of Franco-Flemish musicians throughout Europe, and in terms of texture an increasing equality of parts). The Renaissance began early in Italy, but musical innovation there lagged far behind that of France and England; the Renaissance came late to England, but musical innovation there was ahead of continental Europe.

Music historians do not agree on when the Renaissance era began, but most historians agree that England was still a medieval society in the early fifteenth century (see a discussion of periodization issues of the Middle Ages). While there is no consensus, 1400 is a useful marker, because it was around that time that the Renaissance came into full swing in Italy.

The increasing reliance on the interval of the third as a consonance is one of the most pronounced features of transition into the Renaissance. Polyphony, in use since the 12th century, became increasingly elaborate with highly independent voices throughout the 14th century. With John Dunstaple and other English composers, partly through the local technique of faburden (an improvisatory process in which a chant melody and a written part predominantly in parallel sixths above it are ornamented by one sung in perfect fourths below the latter, and which later took hold on the continent as "fauxbordon"), the interval of the third emerges as an important musical development; because of this Contenance Angloise ("English countenance"), English composers' music is often regarded as the first to sound less truly bizarre to modern, unschooled audiences. English stylistic tendencies in this regard had come to fruition and began to influence continental composers as early as the 1420s, as can be seen in works of the young Dufay, among others. While the Hundred Years' War continued, English nobles, armies, their chapels and retinues, and therefore some of their composers, travelled in France and performed their music there; it must also of course be remembered that the English controlled portions of northern France at this time.

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K

A guitar is a stringed musical instrument played with the fingers (and sometimes a plectrum).

The guitar is descended from the lute. Guitars usually have 6 strings, although there are variations on this, the most common being a twelve string guitar. A variety of different tunings are used. The most common by far, known as "standard tuning", is (low to high) E-A-d-g-b-e', which provides a good compromise providing both simple fingering for many chords, and the ability to play common scales with minimal left hand movement. Others such as E-A-d-f#-b-e' (which provides the same intervals as for a lute), D-G-d-g-b-d' ("open G," commonly used for blues or slide guitar) or D-A-d-g-b-e' ("drop D", frequently used by nu metal bands) tend to be restricted to more specialist forms of music.

Broadly speaking, guitars can be divided into 4 categories:

1. Classical guitars: These are typically strung with nylon or gut, and amplification is provided by the resonant hollow body. They are normally played in a seated position and used to play classical music. Flamenco guitars are almost equal in construction, have a sharper sound, and are used in flamenco.
2. Acoustic guitars: Similar to the Classical guitar, but with a narrower, reinforced neck to sustain the extra tension of steel strings which produce a louder and brighter tone, the acoustic guitar is a staple in folk, traditional and blues music.
3. Electric guitars: Electric guitars have a solid body and produce little sound without amplification. Electromagnetic pickups convert the vibration of the steel strings into electric signals which are fed to an amplifier through a cable or radio device. The sound is frequently modified by other electronic devices or natural distortion of valves in the amplifier. The electric guitar is used extensively in blues and rock and roll, and was invented by Les Paul and independently by Leo Fender.
4. 12-string guitars usually have steel strings and are widely used in folk music and rock and roll. Rather than having only six strings, the 12-string guitar has (logically enough) twelve. Each pair of strings is tuned either in unison (the two highest) or an octave apart (the others). They are made both in acoustic and electric forms.

Hybrids of acoustic and electric guitars are also common. There are also more exotic varieties, such as "double-headed" electric guitars, all manner of alternate string arrangements, and such.

 

EVOLUTION OF THE GUITAR

Whether it be a heavy Warlock, a fancy Flying - V, a classic Stratocaster or a plain old acoustic, everyone knows what a guitar is. But not many know where the instrument came from.

It is amazing how we can all be so familiar with something and not know its history or its origin. Let me fill you in and take you on a trip through the evolution and development of the guitar. You will be introduced to the great grandfathers of all stringed instruments and show you how they developed into what we recognize as a guitar today.

Anyone who thinks the guitar is an American or modern invention, is wrong. Anyone who thinks that the guitar is a hundred, two hundred or even a thousand years old is also mistaken. Actually, most musical historians believe that the guitar was born at least 4000 years ago, although no one really knows for sure. The oldest evidence of the existence of the guitar dates back to 1900-1800 B.C. It was found in Babylonia on clay plaques, which depict nude figures playing instruments that bear a general resemblance to the guitar. Of course, this is far too early for us to expect it to look exactly like the guitars of today, but it did have strings and a distinctly differentiated body and neck.

Around the same time in Egypt, the only plucked instrument was a bow-shaped harp. A little later on, however, there was a new development; a necked instrument with carefully marked frets possibly made of gut, wound around the neck. An instrument was also found in an Egyptian tomb dating back to around 30 B.C. - 400 A.D. The sides had deeper curves than the older instruments, the back had become completely flat (instead of curving upward to meet the soundboard) and the two surfaces, back and front, were attached to each other with strips of wood that form the sides of the sound box. Much like today's guitars.

Meanwhile, in Rome, the instrument had been growing and developing more and more into the basic guitar shape. They began to construct the entire instrument out of wood, even the soundboards which were previously made with rawhide. This made the instrument firmer because the materials were stronger.

The first known European stringed instrument dates back to the third century. It had a round sound box that tapers into a wide neck, similar to the lute. A second instrument had also been invented called the Carolingian instrument, getting its name from the era in which it was conceived. It was a rectangular shaped instrument with strings. Finally another instrument develops side by side with the Carolingian and its straight sides were starting to give way to slight curves.

The only evidence man has of the existence of guitars before the sixteenth century is based on artwork. The only real instruments discovered were from the 1700's or later.

Moving into the seventeenth century, the guitar was becoming popular and particularly valued by the nobility. In France, King Louis the XIV played the guitar and apparently regarded it as his favourite instrument. The number of composers, guitarists and guitar makers grew rapidly during that time.

By the eighteenth century, Germany had become increasingly active in this particular music field. It too accumulated an impressive number of guitarists and composers especially as baroque music reached its peak. Meanwhile in France, the guitar had attained the status of an instrument par excellence by the nobility. Soon after, the French revolution caused many nobles to be exiled and surprisingly the guitar actually became more popular as the general public adopted the instrument.

But it wasn't until the nineteenth century that it really reached the peak of its development. Rising in all its glory to shine not only in every part of Europe, but also on the American continent. In the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution brought about great change. With improved means of transportation, railways for example, musicians were able to travel more widely than before. This led to concert tours, which gave artists the opportunity to play for bigger audiences.

The guitar has been known in the New World from as early as the sixteenth century when Spanish colonists sold guitars to the Aztec Indians. Portuguese artists also helped the guitar's popularity, particularly in South America. Their activities led to the deep involvement of the guitar in the folk music of many countries

It isn't until the 20th century that the guitar fully reaches it's potential. The extraordinary technological progress and the development of mass media communications contribute to the global exposure of the instrument. Consequently, more people are given the opportunity to participate in and around the guitar, such as musicians, composers, listeners and those of us who just enjoy picking out a tune for our own enjoyment.

As we near the end of our journey through the guitar's history, landing in the twenty-first century, there isn't much more to say. You now know where the instrument came from and how it has developed into what it is today. Guitar makers have built on each other's knowledge and experience over the centuries, steadily improving the quality of the instrument. From the Babylonians, through the classical world and into the new world, we have seen the guitar evolve as an instrument revered by millions of people over the course of 4000 years. Indeed the guitar has earned respect from people all over the world and from all walks of life.

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K

Renaissance music is European classical music written during the Renaissance, approximately 1400 to 1600. Defining the beginning of the era is difficult, given the lack of abrupt shifts in musical thinking during the 15th century. Additionally, the process by which music acquired "Renaissance" characteristics was a gradual one, but 1400 is used here.

Overview

Style and trends

The increasing reliance on the interval of the third as a consonance is one of the most pronounced features of early Renaissance European art music (in the Middle Ages, thirds had been considered dissonances: see interval). Polyphony, in use since the 12th century, became increasingly elaborate with highly independent voices throughout the 14th century: the beginning of the 15th century showed simplification, with the voices often striving for smoothness. This was possible because of a greatly increased vocal range in music—in the Middle Ages, the narrow range made necessary frequent crossing of parts, thus requiring a greater contrast between them.

The modal (as opposed to tonal) characteristics of Renaissance music began to break down towards the end of the period with the increased use of root motions of fifths. This has since developed into one of the defining characteristics of tonality.

Genres

Principal liturgical forms which endured throughout the entire Renaissance period were masses and motets, with some other developments towards the end, especially as composers of sacred music began to adopt secular forms (such as the madrigal) for their own designs.

Common sacred genres were the mass, the motet, the madrigale spirituale, and the laude.

During the period, secular music had an increasingly wide distribution, with a wide variety of forms, but one must be cautious about assuming an explosion in variety: since printing made music more widely available, much more has survived from this era than from the preceding Medieval era, and probably a rich store of popular music of the late Middle Ages is irretrievably lost. Secular music included songs for one or many voices, forms such as the frottola, chanson and madrigal.

Secular vocal genres included the madrigal, the frottola, the caccia, the chanson in several forms (rondeau, virelai, bergerette, ballade, musique mesurée), the canzonetta, the villancico, the villanella, the villotta, and the lute song.

Purely instrumental music included consort music for recorder or viol and other instruments, and dances for various ensembles. Common genres were the toccata, the prelude, the ricercar, the canzona, and intabulation (intavolatura, intabulierung). Instrumental ensembles for dances might play a basse danse (or bassedanza), a pavane, a galliard, an allemande, or a courante.

Towards the end of the period, the early dramatic precursors of opera such as monody, the madrigal comedy, and the intermedio are seen.

Theory and notation

According to Margaret Bent (1998), "Renaissance notation is under-prescriptive by our standards; when translated into modern form it acquires a prescriptive weight that overspecifies and distorts its original openness."

Renaissance compositions were notated only in individual parts; scores were extremely rare, and barlines were not used. Note values were generally larger than are in use today; the primary unit of beat was the semibreve, or whole note. As had been the case since the Ars Nova (see Medieval music), there could be either two or three of these for each breve (a double-whole note), which may be looked on as equivalent to the modern "measure," though it was itself a note-value and a measure is not. The situation can be considered this way: it is the same as the rule by which in modern music a quarter-note may equal either two eighth-notes or three, which would be written as a "triplet." By the same reckoning, there could be two or three of the next-smallest note, the "minim," (equivalent to the modern "half note") to each semi-breve. These different permutations were called "perfect/imperfect tempus" at the level of the breve-semibreve relationship, "perfect/imperfect prolation" at the level of the semibreve-minim, and existed in all possible combinations with each other. Three-to-one was called "perfect," and two-to-one "imperfect." Rules existed also whereby single notes could be halved or doubled in value ("imperfected" or "altered," respectively} when preceded or followed by other certain notes. Notes with black noteheads (such as quarter notes) occurred less often. This development of white mensural notation may be a result of the increased use of paper (rather than vellum), as the weaker paper was less able to withstand the scratching required to fill in solid noteheads; notation of previous times, written on vellum, had been black. Other colors, and later, filled-in notes, were used routinely as well, mainly to enfore the aforementioned imperfections or alterations and to call for other temporary rhythmical changes.

Accidentals were not always specified, somewhat as in certain fingering notations (tablatures) today. However, Renaissance musicians would have been highly trained in dyadic counterpoint and thus possessed this and other information necessary to read a score, "what modern notation requires [accidentals] would then have been perfectly apparent without notation to a singer versed in counterpoint." See musica ficta. A singer would interpret his or her part by figuring cadential formulas with other parts in mind, and when singing together musicians would avoid parallel octaves and fifths or alter their cadential parts in light of decisions by other musicians (Bent, 1998).

Interestingly, it is through contemporary tablatures for various plucked instruments that we have gained much information about what accidentals were performed by the original practitioners.

Early Renaissance music (1400 - 1467)

The Burgundian School of composers, led by Guillaume Dufay, demonstrated characteristics of both the late Medieval era and the early Renaissance (see Medieval music). This group gradually dropped the late Medieval period's complex devices of isorhythm and extreme syncopation, resulting in a more limpid and flowing style. What their music "lost" in rhythmic complexity, however, it gained in rhythmic vitality, as a "drive to the cadence" became a prominent feature around mid-century.

Middle Renaissance music (1467 - 1534)

Towards the end of the 15th century, polyphonic sacred music (as exemplified in the masses of Johannes Ockeghem and Jacob Obrecht) had once again become more complex, in a manner that can perhaps be seen as correlating to the stunning detail in the painting at the time. Ockeghem, particularly, was fond of canon, both contrapuntal and mensural. He even composed a mass in which all the parts are derived canonically from one musical line.

It was in the opening decades of the next century that music felt in a tactus (think of the modern time signature) of two semibreves-to-a-breve began to be as common as that with three semibreves-to-a-breve, as had prevailed prior to that time.

In the early 16th century, there is another trend towards simplification, as can be seen to some degree in the work of Josquin des Prez and his comtemporaries in the Franco-Flemish School, then later in that of G. P. Palestrina, who was partially reacting to the strictures of the Council of Trent, which discouraged excessively complex polyphony as inhibiting understanding the text. Early 16th-century Franco-Flemmings moved away from the complex systems of canonic and other mensural play of Ockeghem's generation, tending toward points of imitation and duet or trio sections within an overall texture that grew to five and six voices. They also began, even before the Tridentine reforms, to insert ever-lengthening passages of homophony, to underline important text or points of articulation. Palestrina, on the other hand, came to cultivate a freely flowing style of counterpoint in a thick, rich texture within which consonance followed dissonance on a nearly beat-by-beat basis, and suspensions ruled the day (see counterpoint). By now, tactus was generally two semibreves per breve with three per breve used for special effects and climactic sections; this was a nearly exact reversal of the prevailing technique a century before.

Late Renaissance music (1534 - 1600)

In Venice, from about 1534 until around 1600, an impressive polychoral style developed, which gave Europe some of the grandest, most sonorous music composed up until that time, with multiple choirs of singers, brass and strings in different spatial locations in the Basilica San Marco di Venezia (see Venetian School). These multiple revolutions spread over Europe in the next several decades, beginning in Germany and then moving to Spain, France and England somewhat later, demarcating the beginning of what we now know as the Baroque musical era.

The Roman School was a group of composers of predominantly church music, in Rome, spanning the late Renaissance into early Baroque eras. Many of the composers had a direct connection to the Vatican and the papal chapel, though they worked at several churches; stylistically they are often contrasted with the Venetian School of composers, a concurrent movement which was much more progressive. By far the most famous composer of the Roman School is Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, whose name has been associated for four hundred years with smooth, clear, polyphonic perfection.

The brief but intense flowering of the musical madrigal in England, mostly from 1588 to 1627, along with the composers who produced them, is known as the English Madrigal School. The English madrigals were a cappella, predominantly light in style, and generally began as either copies or direct translations of Italian models. Most were for three to six voices.

Musica reservata is a term referring to either a style or a performance practice in a cappella vocal music of the latter, mainly in Italy and southern Germany, involving refinement, exclusivity, and intense emotional expression of sung text.

In addition, many composers observed a division in their own works between a prima pratica (music in the Renaissance polyphonic style) anda seconda pratica (music in the new style) during the first part of the 17th century.

Mannerism

In the late 16th century, as the Renaissance era closes, an extremely manneristic style develops. In secular music, especially in the madrigal, there was a trend towards complexity and even extreme chromaticism (as exemplified in madrigals of Luzzaschi, Marenzio, and Gesualdo). The term "mannerism" derives from art history.

Transition to the Baroque

Beginning in Florence, there was an attempt to revive the dramatic and musical forms of Ancient Greece, through the means of monody, a form of declaimed music over a simple accompaniment; a more extreme contrast with the preceding polyphonic style would be hard to find; this was also, at least at the outset, a secular trend. These musicians were known as the Florentine Camerata.

We have already noted some of the musical developments that helped to usher in the Baroque, but for further explanation of this transition, see polychoral, concertato, monody, madrigal, and opera, as well as the works given under "Sources and further reading."

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K

The cittern is any member of the lute family generally played with a pick. They come in many lengths from the size of mandolins to that of mandobasses and in several different tunings. They usually have strings tuned in pairs in the manner of 12 string guitars, mandola and mandolins. Although renaissance citterns tended to have any number of strings between 8 and 20 their modern counterparts usually have 10.

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K

Baroque Period, a time during the 17th century that portrayed exemplified drama and grandeur. During this era architectural structures consisted of irregular shapes and elaborate design. The musical genre of this time falls between the Renaissance and the Classical era. The music forms a major portion of the classical music canon. Baroque period is recognized as the time when more ornamental and elaborate music appeared and was associated with composers such as J.S. Bach, Antonio Vilvaldi and Claudio Monteverdi.

Overview

When we speak of music associated to the Baroque era we are generally speaking of music from a wide range of styles and geographical region. This music was composed during a period of 150 years. The term Baroque as applied to music is a more recent development, only acquiring currency in English in the 1940's. In the 1960's it was commonly disputed as to the result of lumping together such diverse music.

Baroque vs. Renaissance

To distinguish between these two eras we begin by taking a close look at what stylistic differences the music had. While both shared a heavy use of polyphony and counterpoint they differed in the use of these techniques. Renaissance achieved harmony through the consonances incidental to the smooth flow of polyphony where the Baroque used these consonances as chords in a hierarchical, functional tonal scheme. The chord root motion is also distinctly different in terms of how these two eras achieved harmony. Baroque music uses longer lines and stronger rhythms than does Renaissance. These differences show a definite transition from the fantasias of the Renaissance to the more defining Baroque form.

Baroque vs. Classical

The classical era followed Baroque diminishing the role of counterpoint all together. It was replaced with a homophonic texture. Classical works begin to reduce the need for ornamentation and became more articulated. Classical era used the use of modulation to portray a dramatic journey through a sequence of musical keys. In comparison the Baroque modulation has less structural importance than that of the classical era. Baroque is known to portray a single emotion where classical gave birth to the widely varying emotions in music ending in a more dramatic climax.

Brief history

Baroque music began to surface in Italy between 1567-1643. The first composer to begin this new era was Claudio Monteverdi. He created a recitative style and the rise of musical drama called opera. The adoption of this change demonstrated a change in musical thinking all together placing a higher emphasis on harmony rather than polyphony. While harmonic thinking occurred among particular composers it was not until after the Renaissance that it became part of the common vocabulary.

In Italy, the Roman Catholic Church sought a method to increase faith in their religion. They decided that the arts should communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement. The demands of religion were also to make the test of sacred works clearer. This increased the pressure to move away from the Renaissance era which offered more densely layered polyphony. It demanded lines that put the words front and center or had a more limited range of imitation.

Middle Baroque music

The middle Baroque is separated by the coming of systematic thinking to a new style. This time brought a gradual institutionalization of the forms and norms particularly in opera. The printing press and trade created an expanded international audience of works for music much in the same fashion they had done for literature.

This time period is often identified by increasingly harmonic focus and the creation of formal systems of teaching. The teaching of music demanded to be taught in an orderly fashion to uphold the demands of this art.

There are many influential composers that stand out from the middle Baroque period including Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) who explored contrast between stately and fully orchestrated sections and simple recitatives and airs, Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) who is remembered for his achievements on the other side of musical technique as a violinist who organized violin technique and pedagouy, Henry Purcell (1659-1695) who is referred to as a commentary genius because he produced a profusion of music widely recognized in his lifetime, and Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707) who, in contrast to the previous composers, was an organist and entrepreneurial presenter of music.

Late Baroque music

Between 1680 and 1720 the dividing between middle and late Baroque occurred. The exact date is widely debated due a lack in synchronized transition. The important dividing line seems to lay in the full absorption of tonality as a structuring principle of music. The theoretical work of Rameau made this particularly evident. The sense of two styles of composition was created from the combination of modal counterpoint with tonal logic of cadences. These two styles were referred to as the homophonic dominated by vertical considerations and the polyphonic dominated by imitation and contrapuntal considerations.

Some of the famous composers closely associated with this time period include Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) and probably the most famous composer George Frederic Handel (1685-1759). Other leading figures include J.S. Bach (1685-1750), George Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) and Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764).

The Baroque influence on later music

Baroque music was the basis for pedagogy and as a result retained a stylistic influence. It became an influence in the 19th century as a paragon of academic and formal purity. Many composers set a standard to aspire to from Bach's fugue style in music. In contemporary music there are many pieces being published as “rediscovered” Baroque such as a viola concerto written by Henri Casadesus but attributed to Handel. In addition many pieces have been termed as neo-Baroque for a focus on imitative polyphony.

There are many similarities between the Baroque style and that of jazz as well. Baroque is similar to a jazz quartet in that pieces used a variety of improvisation on the performers part with the most similar aspect being improvisation of the lead instrument.

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K

The Gusli is an ancient Russian musical instrument, a kind of a harp.

There were two modifications of gusli:

Slemovidnye gusli (helmet-shaped gusli). The musician held this instrument on his knees, so that strings were horizontal, resonator body under them. He uses his left hand to mute unnecessary strings and thus forming chords, while passing all the strings with his right hand. The instrument was spread in southern and western regions of ancient Russia.

Krylovidnye gusli (wing-shaped gusli). This instrument was much smaller, had more resemblence with scandinavian harps, was held much more like modern guitars (although strings were still muted by the left hand through a special opening in the instrument's body). This modifications was more prelevant in northern parts of Russia, especially Novgorod and Pskov.

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K

The era of Romantic music is defined as the period of European classical music that runs roughly from the early 1800s to the first decade of the 20th century, as well as music written according to the norms and styles of that period. The Romantic period was preceded by the classical period, and was followed by the modern period.

Romantic music is related to Romantic movements in literature, art, and philosophy, though the conventional periods used in musicology are now very different from their counterparts in the other arts, which define "romantic" as running from the 1780s to the 1840s. The Romanticism movement held that not all truth could be deduced from axioms, that there were inescapable realities in the world which could only be reached through emotion, feeling and intuition. Romantic music struggled to increase emotional expression and power to describe these deeper truths, while preserving or even extending the formal structures from the classical period.

The vernacular use of the term romantic music applies to music which is thought to evoke a soft or dreamy atmosphere. This usage is rooted in the connotations of the word "romantic" that were established during the period, but not all "Romantic" pieces fit this description. Conversely, music that is "romantic" in the modern everyday usage of the word (that is, relating to the emotion of love) is not necessarily linked to the Romantic period.

Trends of the Romantic period

Musical language

Music theorists of the Romantic era established the concept of tonality to describe the harmonic vocabulary inherited from the Baroque and Classical periods. Romantic composers sought to fuse the large structural harmonic planning demonstrated by earlier masters such as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven with further chromatic innovations, in order to achieve greater fluidity and contrast, and to meet the needs of longer works. Chromaticism grew more varied, as did dissonances and their resolution. Composers modulated to increasingly remote keys, and their music often prepared the listener less for these modulations than the music of the classical era. Sometimes, instead ofa pivot chord, a pivot note was used. The properties of the diminished seventh and related chords, which facilitate modulation to many keys, were also extensively exploited. Composers such as Beethoven and, later, Richard Wagner expanded the harmonic language with previously-unused chords, or innovative chord progressions. Much has been written, for example, about Wagner's Tristan chord, found near the opening of Tristan und Isolde, and its precise harmonic function.

Some Romantic composers analogized music to poetry and its rhapsodic and narrative structures, while creating a more systematic basis for the composing and performing of concert music. Music theorists of the Romantic era codified previous practices, such as the sonata form, while composers extended them. There was an increasing focus on melodies and themes, as well as an explosion in the composition of songs. The emphasis on melody found expression in the increasingly extensive use of cyclic form, which was an important unifying device for some of the longer pieces that became common during the period.

The greater harmonic elusiveness and fluidity, the longer melodies, poesis as the basis of expression, and the use of literary inspirations were all present prior to the Romantic period. However, some composers of the Romantic period adopted them as the central pursuit of music itself. Romantic composers were also influenced by technological advances, including an increase in the range and power of the piano and the improved chromatic abilities and greater projection of the instruments of the symphony orchestra.

Non-musical influences

One of the controversies that raged through the Romantic period was the relationship of music to external texts or sources. While program music was common before the 19th century, the conflict between formal and external inspiration became an important aesthetic issue for some composers during the Romantic era.

During the 1830s Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, which was presented with an extensive program text, caused many critics and academics to pick up their pens. Prominent among the detractors was François-Joseph Fétis, the head of the newly-founded Brussels Conservatory, who declared that the work was "not music". Robert Schumann defended the work, but not the program, saying that bad titles would not hurt good music, but good titles could not save a bad work. Franz Liszt was one of the prominent defenders of extra-musical inspiration.

This rift grew, with polemics delivered from both sides. For the supporters of "absolute" music, formal perfection rested on musical expression that obeys the schematics laid down in previous works, most notably the sonata form then being codified. To the adherents of program music, the rhapsodic expression of poetry or some other external text was, itself, a form. They argued that for the artist to bring his life into a work, the form must follow the narrative. Both sides used Beethoven as inspiration and justification. The rift was exemplified by the conflict between followers of Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner: Brahms' disciples took him to be a pinnacle of absolute music, while Wagnerites put their faith in the poetic "substance" shaping the harmonic and melodic flow of his music.

Examples of music inspired by literary and artistic sources include Liszt's Faust Symphony, Dante Symphony, his symphonic poems and his Annees de Pelerinage, Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony, Mahler's First Symphony (based on the novel Titan), and the tone poems of Richard Strauss. Schubert included material from his Lieder in some of his extended works, and others, such as Liszt, transcribed opera arias and songs for solo instrumental performance.

Romantic opera

In opera, the forms for individual numbers that had been established in classical and baroque opera were more loosely used. By the time Wagner's operas were performed, arias, choruses, recitatives and ensemble pieces often cannot easily be distinguished from each other in the continuous, through-composed music.

The decline of castrati led to the heroic leading role in many operas being ascribed to the tenor voice. The chorus was often given a more important role.

Towards the end of the Romantic period, verismo opera became popular, particularly in Italy. It depicted realistic, rather than historical or mythological, subjects. France followed with operas such as Bizet's Carmen.

Nationalism

A number of Romantic composers wrote nationalist music. Mikhail Glinka's operas, for example, are on specifically Russian subjects, while Bed���ich Smetana and Antonín Dvo���ák both used rhythms and themes from Czech folk dances and songs. Late in the 19th century, Jean Sibelius wrote music based on the Finnish epic, the Kalevala and his piece 'Finlandia' became a symbol of Finnish nationalism.

Instrumentation and scale

Instrumentation continued to undergo technological advances during the romantic era. Composers such as Hector Berlioz used the new capabilities of instruments in hitherto unimagined orchestrations. Some composers' works called for a much larger symphony orchestra, and instruments that were previously rarities began to be used more frequently. Mahler's Symphony No. 8 is known as the Symphony of a Thousand because of the massive choral and orchestral forces required to perform it.

Also much longer works became acceptable. A typical Haydn or Mozart symphony lasts between twenty and twenty-five minutes. Beethoven's Third Symphony lasts over forty-five minutes, and the longest symphonies of, among others, Anton Bruckner and Mahler last more than an hour.

The Romantic period also saw the continuing rise of the instrumental virtuoso. The violinist Niccolò Paganini was one of the musical stars of the early 19th century. Liszt, in addition to his skills as a composer, was also a very popular and influential virtuoso pianist. A leading virtuoso was an outstanding attraction for audiences. Chopin wrote in forms like the polonaise and mazurka, that were derived from Polish folk music. Many Russian composers like Balkirev, Cui, Borodin, Rimski-Korsakov, and Balkirev shared the commone dream to write music that was inspired by Russian folk music.

Chronology

Classical roots (1780-1815)

In literature, the Romantic period is often taken to start in 1770s or 1780s Germany with the movement known as Sturm und Drang ("storm and struggle") attended by a greater regard for Shakespeare and Homer, and for folk sagas, whether genuine or Ossian. It affected writers including Goethe and Schiller, while in Scotland Robert Burns began setting down folk music.[citation needed] This literary movement is reflected in the music of contemporary composers, including Mozart's German operas, Haydn's so-called Sturm und Drang symphonies, the lyrics that composers (particularly Schubert) chose for their Lieder, and a gradual increase in the violence of emotion that music expressed. As long as most composers relied on royal or court patronage, their opportunity to engage in "romanticism and revolt" was limited. Mozart's troubles in the banning of his The Marriage of Figaro as revolutionary are a case in point.

Romanticism drew its fundamental formal substance from the structures of classical practice. Performing standards improved during the classical era with the establishment of performing groups of professional musicians. The author E.T.A. Hoffmann called Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn the "three Romantic composers".

The role of chromaticism and harmonic ambiguity developed during the classical era. All of the major classical composers used harmonic ambiguity, and the technique of moving rapidly between different keys. One of the most famous examples is the "harmonic chaos" at the opening of Haydn's The Creation, in which the composer avoids establishing a "home" key at all.

By the 1810s, the use of chromaticism and the minor key, and the desire to move into remote keys to give music a deeper range, were combined with a greater operatic reach. While Beethoven would later be regarded as the central figure in this movement, it was composers such as Clementi and Spohr who represented the contemporary taste in incorporating more chromatic notes into their thematic material. There was a tension between the desire for more expressive "color" and the desire for classical structure. One response was in the field of opera, where texts could provide structure in the absence of formal models. ETA Hoffman is principally known as a critic nowadays, but his opera Undine of 1814 was a radical musical innovation. Another response to the tension between structure and emotional expression was in shorter musical forms, including novel ones such as the nocturne.

Early Romantic (1815-1850)

By the second decade of the 19th century, the shift towards new sources of musical inspiration, along with an increasing chromaticism in melody and more expressive harmony, became a palpable stylistic shift. The forces underlying this shift were not only musical, but economic, political and social.[citation needed] A new generation of composers emerged in post-Napoleonic Europe, among whom were Beethoven, Ludwig Spohr, ETA Hoffman, Carl Maria von Weber and Franz Schubert.

These composers grew up amidst the dramatic expansion of public concert life during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which partly shaped their subsequent styles and expectations. Beethoven was extremely influential as among the first composers to work freelance rather than being employed full-time by a royal or ecclesiastic patron. The chromatic melodies of Muzio Clementi and the stirring operatic works of Rossini, Cherubini and Méhul, also had an influence. The setting of folk poetry and songs for voice and piano, to serve a growing market of middle-class homes where private music-making was becoming an essential part of domestic life, was also becoming an important source of income for composers.

Works of this group of early Romantics include the song cycles and symphonies of Franz Schubert, and the operas of Weber, particularly Oberon, Der Freischütz and Euryanthe. Schubert's work found limited contemporary audiences, and only gradually had a wider impact. In contrast, the compositions of John Field quickly became well-known, partly because he had a gift for creating small "characteristic" piano forms and dances.

Early-Romantic composers of a slightly later generation included Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin, and Hector Berlioz. All were born in the 19th century, and produced works of lasting value early in their careers. Mendelssohn was particularly precocious, and wrote two string quartets, a string octet and orchestral music before even leaving his teens. Chopin focussed on compositions for the piano. Berlioz broke new ground in his orchestration, and with his programatic symphonies Symphonie Fantastique and Harold in Italy, the latter based on Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

What is now labelled "Romantic Opera" became established at around this time, with a strong connection between Paris and northern Italy. The combination of French orchestral virtuosity, Italianate vocal lines and dramatic flare, along with texts drawn from increasingly popular literature, established a norm of emotional expression which continues to dominate the operatic stage. The work of Bellini and Donizetti was immensely popular at this time.

Virtuoso concerts (or "recitals", as they were called by Franz Liszt) became immensely popular. This phenomenon was pioneered by Niccolò Paganini, the famous violin virtuoso. The virtuoso piano recital became particularly popular, and often included improvisations on popular themes, and the performance of shorter compositions as well as longer works such as the sonatas of Beethoven and Mozart. One of the most prominent exponents of Beethoven was Clara Wieck, who later married Robert Schumann. The increase in travel, facilitated by rail and later by steamship, created international audiences for touring piano virtuosi such as Liszt, Chopin and Thalberg. Concerts and recitals were promoted as significant events.

During the late 1830s and 1840s, music of Romantic expression became generally accepted, even expected. The music of Robert Schumann, Giacomo Meyerbeer and the young Giuseppe Verdi continued the trends. "Romanticism" was not, however, the only, or even the dominant, style of music making at the time. A post-classical style exemplified by the Paris Conservatoire, as well as court music, still dominated concert programs. This began to change with the rise of performing institutions, along the lines of the Philharmonic Society of London founded in 1813. Such institutions often promoted regular concert seasons, a trend promoted by Felix Mendelssohn among others. Listening to music came to be accepted as a life-enhancing, almost religious, experience. The public's engagement in the music of the time contrasted with the less formal manners of concerts in the classical period, where music had often been promoted as a background diversion.

Also the 1830s and 1840s Richard Wagner produced his first successful operas. He argued for a radically expanded conception of "musical drama". A man who described himself as a revolutionary, and who was in constant trouble with creditors and the authorities, he began gathering around him a body of like-minded musicians, including Franz Liszt, who dedicated themselves to making the "Music of the Future".

Literary Romanticism ended in 1848, with the revolutions of that year marking a turning point in the mood of Europe. With the rise of realism, as well as the deaths of Paganini, Mendelssohn and Schumann, and Liszt's retirement from public performance, perceptions altered of where the cutting edge in music and art lay.

Late Romantic Era (1850-1910)

As the 19th century moved into its second half, many social, political and economic changes set in motion in the post-Napoleonic period became entrenched. Railways and the electric telegraph bound the European world ever closer together. The nationalism that had been an important strain of early 19th century Romantic music became formalized by political and linguistic means. Literature for the middle classes became the publishing norm, including the rise of the novel as the primary literary form.

In the previous 50 years numerous innovations in instrumentation, including the double escarpment piano action, the valved wind instrument, and the chin rest for violins and violas, were no longer novelties but requirements. The dramatic increase in musical education brought a still wider sophisticated audience, and many composers took advantage of the greater regularity of concert life, and the greater financial and technical resources available. These changes brought an expansion in the sheer number of symphonies, concerti and "tone poems" which were composed, and the number of performances in the opera seasons in Paris, London and Italy. The establishment of conservatories and universities also created centers where musicians could forge stable teaching careers, rather than relying on their own entrepreneurship.

During this late Romantic period, some composers created styles and forms associated with their national folk cultures. The notion that there were "German" and "Italian" styles had long been established in writing on music, but the late 19th century saw the rise of a nationalist Russian style (Glinka, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky and Borodin), and also Czech, Finnish and French nationalist styles of composition. Some composers were expressly nationalistic in their objectives, seeking to rediscover their country's national identity in the face of occupation or oppression, as did for example the Bohemian Bed���ich Smetana and the Finnish Jean Sibelius.

Romanticism in the 20th century

Many composers born in the nineteenth century continued to compose in a Romantic style well into the 20th century, including Sergei Rachmaninoff, Giacomo Puccini and Richard Strauss. In addition, many composers who would later be identified as musical modernists composed works in Romantic styles early in their career, including Igor Stravinsky with his Firebird ballet, Arnold Schoenberg with Gurrelieder, and Béla Bartók with Bluebeard's Castle.

The vocabulary and structure of the music of the late 19th century was no mere relics; composers including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Erich Korngold, Berthold Goldschmidt and Sergei Prokofiev continued to compose works in recognizably Romantic styles after 1950. While new tendencies such as neo-classicism and atonal music challenged the preeminence of the Romantic style, the desire to use a tonally-centered chromatic vocabulary remained present in major works. Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, Gustav Holst, Dmitri Shostakovich, Malcolm Arnold and Arnold Bax drew frequently from musical Romanticism in their works, and did not consider themselves old-fashioned.

Musical romanticism reached a rhetorical and artistic nadir around 1960: it seemed as if the future lay with avant garde styles of composition, or with neo-classicism of some kind. While Hindemith moved back to a style more recognizably rooted in romanticism, most composers moved in the other direction. Only in the conservative academic hierarchy of the USSR and China did it seem that musical romanticism had a place. However, by the late 1960s a revival of music using the surface of musical romanticism began. Composers such as George Rochberg switched from serialism to models drawn from Gustav Mahler, a project which found him the company of Nicholas Maw and David Del Tredici. This movement is described as Neo-Romanticism, and includes works such as John Corigliano's First Symphony.

Another area where the Romantic style has survived, and even flourished, is in film scoring. Many of the early émigres escaping from Nazi Germany were Jewish composers who had studied, or even studied under, Gustav Mahler's disciples in Vienna. Max Steiner's lush score for Gone with the Wind provides an example of the use of Wagnerian leitmotifs and Mahlerian orchestration. The "Golden Age of Hollywood" film music rested heavily on the work of composers such as Korngold and Steiner as well as Franz Waxman and Alfred Newman. The next generation of film composers, Alexander North, John Williams, and Elmer Bernstein drew on this tradition to write some of the most familiar orchestral music of the late 20th century.

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K

Origin of the Balalaika
Description of the Balalaika
Tuning the Balalaika
Playing the Balalaika

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Origin of the Balalaika

The Balalaika most likely evolved from the Oriental dombra. The dombra, which is still played in present-day Kazakhstan, has an oval shaped soundboard and two-strings. Knowledge and use of the dombra, was most likely spread to Russia by Mongol trade and conquest. After the dombra’s introduced to Russia in the 14th century it underwent structural changes.

With its new form, the Balalaika was embraced by Russia and took its place in Russian folklore. It is said that the Balalaika embodies the Russian people’s character, with its ability to switch from happiness to sadness with ease. Originally it was a folk and peasant instrument. It was common for the peasant ballads, composed for the Balalaika, to irreverently poked fun at the authority of the times. For this reason there were times when the Balalaika was banned by both the Orthodox Church and the State. The instrument enjoyed its greatest folk popularity in the early 18th century.

In the later 19th century the instrument underwent a number of changes, including the adoption the classic triangular shape. Reportedly, in the late 19th century, the Russian nobleman Vassily Vassilievich Andreyev, was responsible for the transition of the Balalaika from folk instrument to concert stage performances. Andeyev’s chamber ensemble’s first public concert in 1888 was a great success. It was this ensemble that was renamed The Great Russian Imperial Balalaika Orchestra. As this orchestra toured the Balalaika was introduced beyond Russia’s borders, even to The US. The Instrument was also carried by the common people when they fled Russia at times of war.

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Description of the Balalaika

The Balalaika is a chordophone. The most striking structural component of the Balalaika is the triangular body. The Neck is narrow and terminates in a peg box that is at an acute angle to the neck. It has three strings and metal frets. Balalaikas come in number of sizes. The Piccolo Balalaika is the smallest and is rarely seen. The most common size is the Prima. It is approximately two and one-half feet in length. The next two larger sizes are the Second, and Alto Balalaikas. The Oriental Dombra is still used for the Bass-Baritone range. There is a larger Bass and the very large Contrabass Balalaikas.

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Tuning the Balalaika

Before tuning, the proper bridge position must be located. First find the nut. The nut is the ivory-toned bar at the joint between the neck and the peg box. Measure the distance from the nut to the 12th fret. Repeat this distance from the 12th fret to the bridge location. The nut and the bridge should be equal distance from the 12th fret. Position the bridge at a right angle to the strings.

The Balalaika strings are tuned above middle C to: A, E, E (1st-3rd). The 1st string is the thinnest, and lays over more frets that the 2nd & 3rd strings. Use a piano or electronic tuner as a reference for tuning. To play, the left hand notes the strings while the index finger of the right hand strums high on the soundboard near the neck. The dark rosewood on the soundboard is decorative but also protects the soundboard from the strumming.

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Playing the Balalaika

There are similarities and differences between the style of playing a balalaika and a guitar. They are similar in the way they are held when played. You may be most comfortable playing the balalaika while seated in a chair. Hold the neck between the thumb and index finger of your left hand. Tuck the body of the balalaika under your right arm and hold it close to your chest. The corner of the instrument should rest between your knees. This is a very similar position to playing the guitar. Unlike playing the guitar you do not strum the balalaika over the center of the soundboard. The soundboard of the balalaika is a relatively soft un-finished wood. Strumming over the center of the soundboard would disfigure the soundboard. The balalaika is strummed high on the soundboard near the neck. Additionally, when you strum the balalaika the motion is from the elbow. The forearm wrist and hand are relaxed, and you strum with the edge of the thumb or tip of the index finger, not the fingernail. The finger techniques of the left hand more closely resemble the style used to play the violin.

An instructional book, the Best Balalaika Method-Yet, is available separately. The book provides music fundamentals, playing techniques, terms, American and Russian melodies and Classical Themes.

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K

20th century classical music, the classical music of the 20th century, was extremely diverse, beginning with the late Romantic style of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Impressionism of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, the Neoclassicism of middle-period Igor Stravinsky, and ranging to such distant sound-worlds as the complete serialism of Pierre Boulez, the simple triadic harmonies of minimalist composers such as Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer, the microtonal music adopted by Harry Partch, Alois Hába and others, the aleatoric music of John Cage, the electronic music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the polystylism of Alfred Schnittke.

Perhaps the most salient common thread during this time period of classical music was the wider use of dissonance in composing music. Because of this, the 20th century is sometimes called the "Dissonant Period" of classical music, which followed the common practice period, which emphasized consonance until about 1900.

Among the most prominent composers of the 20th century were Béla Bartók, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Giacomo Puccini, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Charles Ives, Edward Elgar, Arnold Schoenberg, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Aaron Copland, Carl Nielsen, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Henri Dutilleux and Witold Lutoslawski. Classical music also had an intense cross fertilization with jazz, with several composers being able to work in both genres, including George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein. An important feature of 20th century concert music is the existence of the splitting of the audience into traditional and avant-garde, with many figures prominent in one world considered minor or unacceptable in the other. Composers such as Anton Webern, Elliott Carter, Edgard Varèse, Milton Babbitt, and Luciano Berio have devoted followings within the avant-garde, but are often attacked outside of it. As time has passed, however, it is increasingly accepted, though by no means universally so, that the boundaries are more porous than the many polemics would lead one to believe: many of the techniques pioneered by the above composers show up in popular music by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, Nirvana, Enigma, Vangelis, Jean Michel Jarre and in film scores that draw mass audiences.

It should be kept in mind that this article presents an overview of 20th century classical music and many of the composers listed under the following trends and movements may not identify exclusively as such and may be considered as participating in different movements. For instance, at different times during his career, Igor Stravinsky may be considered a romantic, modernist, neoclassicist, and a serialist.

The 20th century was also an age where recording and broadcast changed the economics and social relationships inherent in music. An individual in the 19th century made most music themselves, or attended performances. An individual in the industrialized world had access to radio, television, phonograph and later digital music such as the CD.

Romantic style

Particularly in the early part of the century, many composers wrote music which was an extension of 19th century Romantic music. Harmony, though sometimes complex, was tonal, and traditional instrumental groupings such as the orchestra and string quartet remained the most usual. Traditional forms such as the symphony and concerto remained in use. (See Romantic Music)

Many prominent composers — among them Dmitri Kabalevsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Maurice Ravel, and Benjamin Britten — made significant advances in style and technique while still employinga melodic, harmonic, structural and textural language which was related to that of the 19th century and quite accessible to the average listener.

Music along these lines was written throughout the 20th century, and continues to be written today. Some other twentieth-century composers of works in a more-or-less-traditional idiom include:

• Samuel Barber
• Leonard Bernstein
• Aaron Copland
• John Corigliano
• George Gershwin
• Henryk Górecki
• Percy Grainger
• Howard Hanson
• Roy Harris
• Alan Hovhaness
• Gustav Holst
• Aram Khachaturian
• Colin McPhee
• Carl Nielsen
• Giacomo Puccini
• Sergei Rachmaninoff
• Ned Rorem
• Jean Sibelius
• Ralph Vaughan Williams

Minimalist composers such as Philip Glass can also be said to evoke some sense of nineteenth-century melodic and harmonic language, but depart radically in structure and texture, harmony, ideas, development, counterpoint and rhythm.

Many other 20th century composers took more experimental routes.

Modernism

Modernism is the name given to a series of movements (See Modernism) arising out of the idea that the 20th century presented a new basis for society and activity, and therefore art should adopt this new basis, however construed, as the fundamental of aesthetics. Modernism took the progressive spirit of the late 19th century, its love of rigor and of technical advancement, and unhinged it from the norms and forms of late 19th century art. To take one example, architect Frank Lloyd Wright did his drafting work with tools, not because he could not draw freehand, but because "the machine was the coming thing, therefore I wanted to make beauty with the machine". Various movements in 20th century music, including neo-classicism, serialism, experimentalism, conceptualism can be traced to this idea.

The Second Viennese School, atonality and serialism

Arnold Schoenberg is one of the most significant figures in 20th century music. His early works are in a late Romantic style, influenced by Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler, but he later abandoned a tonal framework altogether, instead writing freely atonal music — he is often reckoned to have been the first composer to have done so. In time, he developed the twelve-tone technique of composition, intended to be a replacement for traditional tonal pitch organisation. His pupils Anton Webern and Alban Berg also developed and furthered the use of the twelve-tone system and were notable for their use of the technique in their own right. They together are known, colloquially, as the Schoenberg "trinity" or the Second Viennese School. This name was created to imply that this "New Music" would have the same effect as the "First Viennese School" of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Schoenberg's music and that of his followers was very controversial in its day, and remains so to some degree now. Many listeners found, and still find, his music hard to follow, lacking a sense of definite melody. Nonetheless, works such as Pierrot Lunaire continue to be performed, studied and listened to, while many of the contemporary works which were considered more acceptable have been forgotten. A larger measure of the reason for this is that the style he pioneered was very influential, even among composers who continued to compose tonal music. Many composers have since written music which does not rely on traditional tonality.

The twelve-tone technique itself was later adapted by other composers to control aspects of music other than the pitch of the notes, such as dynamics and methods of attack, creating completely serialised music. Milton Babbitt created his time point system, where the distance in time between attack points for the notes is serialized also, while some composers serialized aspects such as register or dynamics. The "pointillistic" style of Webern — in which individual sounds are carefully placed within the piece such that each has importance — was very influential in the years following World War II among composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. After years of unpopularity, the twelve tone technique became the norm in Europe during the 50's and 60's, but then experienced a backlash as generations of younger and older composers returned to writing tonal music, either in a neoclassical, romantic, or minimalist vein. Stravinsky, who studied as a young man with Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, became a modernist, then a neoclassicist, and ultimately became a serialist upon Schoenberg's death.

Free dissonance and experimentalism

In the early part of the 20th century modernist composers such as George Antheil and others produced music that was shocking to audiences of the time for its disregard or flaunting of musical conventions. Charles Ives quoted popular music, often had multiple or bitonal layers of music, extreme dissonance, and seemingly unplayable rhythmic complexity. Henry Cowell performed his solo piano pieces by strumming or plucking the inside of the piano, knocking on the outside, or depressing tone clusters with his arms or boards. Edgard Varèse wrote highly dissonant pieces that utilized unusual sonorities and futuristic, scientific sounding names; he also dreamed of producing music electronically. Charles Seeger enunciated the concept of dissonant counterpoint, a technique used by Carl Ruggles, Ruth Crawford-Seeger, and others. Igor Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev fled the riot that greeted The Rite of Spring and Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography. Darius Milhaud and Paul Hindemith explored bitonality. Amadeo Roldán brought music written specifically for percussion ensemble into the classical tradition; he was soon followed by Varèse and then others. Kurt Weill wrote the popular Threepenny Opera entirely in the popular idiom of German cabarets. Modernist composers being the avant-garde, they often wrote atonally, sometimes explored twelve tone technique, used liberal amounts of dissonance, quoted or imitated popular music, or somehow provoked their audience.

Neoclassicism

Neo-classicism, in music, means the movement in the 20th century to return to a revived "common practice" harmony, mixed with greater dissonance and rhythm, as the basic point of departure for music. Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev, Vangelis Papathanasiou and Béla Bartók are usually listed as the most important composers in this mode, but also the prolific Darius Milhaud and his contemporary Francis Poulenc.

Neo-classicism was born at the same time as the general return to rational models in the arts in response to World War I. Smaller, more spare, more orderly was conceived of as the response to the overwrought emotionalism which many felt had herded people into the trenches. Since economics also favored smaller ensembles, the search for doing "more with less" took on a practical imperative as well. Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat is thought of as a seminal "neo-classical piece", as are his Dumbarton Oaks Concerto and his "Symphonies of Wind Instruments", as well as his Symphony in C. Stravinsky's neo-classicism culminated with his opera Rake's Progress, with the book done by the well known modernist poet, W. H. Auden.

Stravinsky's rival for a time in neo-classicism was the German Paul Hindemith, who mixed spiky dissonance, polyphony and free ranging chromaticism into a style which was "useful". He produced both chamber works and orchestral works in this style, perhaps most famously "Mathis der Maler". His chamber output includes his Sonata for French Horn, an expressionistic work filled with dark detail and internal connections.

Neo-classicism found a welcome audience in America, the school of Nadia Boulanger promulgated ideas about music based on their understanding of Stravinsky's music. Students of theirs include neo-classicists Elliott Carter (in his early years), Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Darius Milhaud, Ástor Piazzolla and Virgil Thomson.

Neo-classicism's most audible traits are melodies which use the tritone as a stable interval, and coloristically add dissonant notes to ostinato and block harmonies, along with the free mixture of polyrhythms. Neo-classicism won greater audience acceptance more quickly, and was taken to heart by those opposed to atonality as the true "modern" music. Neo-classicism also embraced the use of folk musics to give greater rhythmic and harmonic variety. Modernists such as the Hungarians Béla Bartók and Romantically inclined Zoltán Kodály and the Czech Leoš JanáÄÂek collected and studied their native folk musics which then influenced their compositions.

In 1990s the world was introduced to a new wonder of neo-classicism - Vangelis Papathanasiou. A former New Age composer wrote over 30 compositions, cilminating with such wonderful pieces as Foros Timis Ston Greco , 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Mythodea ( 2001 ). The symphonic opera of Mythodea was written in 1993. The 2001 version of Mythodea was recorded and played on-stage by: Vangelis on synthesizers and keyboards, the London Metropolitan Orchestra, sopranos Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman, two harpists, the chorus of the Greek National Opera, and the Seistron and Typana percussion ensembles (concert only). The concert was held in Athens, Greece on June 28, 2001, and the record was officially released on October 23, 2001, to coincide with the NASA 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft entering the orbit of planet Mars.

Post-modernist music

Post-modernism's birth

Post-modernism can be said to be a response to modernism which asserts that the products of human activity — particularly manufactured or created by artifice — are the central subject for art itself, and that the purpose of art is to focus people's attention on objects for contemplation, as composer-critic Steve Hicken explained it. This strain of modernism looks backward to the dada school of art exemplified by Duchamp, and to the collage of "concrete" music, as well as experiments with electronic music by Edgard Varèse and others. However, post-modernism asserted that this was the primary mode of human existence, an individual aswim in a sea of the products of people.

John Cage is a prominent figure in 20th century music whose influence steadily grew during his lifetime, and who is regarded by many as the founder of post-modernist music. Cage questioned the very definition of music in his pieces, and stressed a philosophy that all sounds are essentially music. Cage in the "silent" 4'33" presents the listener with his idea that the unintentional sounds are just as musically valid as the sounds originating from an instrument. Cage also notably used aleatoric music, and "found sounds" in order to create an interesting and different type of music. His music not only rested on his argument that there was no "music" or "noise" only "sound", and that combinations of found sound were musical events as well - but on the importance of focusing of attention and "framing" as essential to art. (See Post-Modernism)

Cage, though, has been seen by some to be too avant-garde in his approach; for this reason, many find his music unappealing. Interestingly, the seeming opposite of Cage's indeterminism is the overdetermined music of the serialists, which both schools have noted produce similar sounding pieces, yet many serialists, such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen have used aleatoric processes. Michael Nyman argues in Experimental Music that minimalism was a reaction to and made possible by both serialism and indeterminism. (See also experimental music)

Post-modernism reached music and painting at very similar moments, on one hand, the spareness, purity, love of mechanism, abstraction and the grid which are very modernist traits were preserved, as was the emphasis on personalizing style and experimentalism. However, post-modernism rejected the hermeneutic stance - the need to be "in" on the joke as it were - of modernism. Instead post-modernism took the popular and pared down as its aesthetic guide. One of the first movements to overtly break with the modernist took inspiration from Cage's work, and its emphasis on layering sounds: Minimalism.

Minimalism

Many composers in the later 20th century began to explore what is now called minimalism. The most specific definition of minimalism refers to the dominance of process in music — where fragments are layered on top of each other, often looped, to produce the entirety of the sonic canvas. Early examples include Terry Riley's In C and Steve Reich's Drumming. Riley is seen by some as the "father" of minimalist music with In C, a work comprised of melodic cells that each performer in an ensemble plays through at their own rate. The minimalist wave of composers — Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and La Monte Young to name the most prominent — wanted music to be "accessible" to ordinary listeners, and wanted to express concrete specific questions of dramatic and music form, not hidden in layers of technique, but very overtly. One key difference between minimalism and previous music is the use of different cells being "out of phase" or determined by the performers; contrast this with the opening of Das Rheingold by Richard Wagner which, despite its use of triadic cells, has each part controlled by the same impulse and moving at the same speed.

Minimalist music is often contentious amongst traditional listeners. Its critics find it to be overly repetitive and empty while proponents argue that the static elements that are often prevalent draw more interest to small changes. Minimalism has, however, inspired and influenced many composers not usually labeled "minimalist" such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti. Composers such as Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, and Henryk Górecki, whose Symphony No. 3 was the highest selling classical album of the 1990s, have found great success with what has been called "Holy Minimalism" in their deeply felt religious works.

The next wave of composers working in this tradition are not called "Minimalist" by some, but are by others. These include opera composer John Adams and his student Aaron Jay Kernis. The expansion of minimalism from process music, to music which relies on texture to hold together the movement of the music has created a wider diversity of compositions and composers.

Electronic music

Technological advances in the 20th century enabled composers to use electronic means of producing sound. The first electronic instrument was invented in Russia in 1919 by Leon Theremin, and was called the theremin. Some composers simply incorporated electronic instruments into relatively conventional pieces. Olivier Messiaen, for example, used the ondes martenot in a number of works.

Other composers abandoned conventional instruments and used magnetic tape to create music, recording sounds and then manipulating them in some way. Pierre Schaeffer was the pioneer of such music, termed Musique concrète. Some figures, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, used purely electronic means to create their work. In the United States of America, Milton Babbitt used the RCA Mark II Synthesizer to create music. Sometimes such electronic music was combined with more conventional instruments, Stockhausen's Hymnen, Edgard Varèse's Déserts, and Mario Davidovsky's Synchronisms offer a few examples (although Déserts is sometimes performed today without the tape part).

Oskar Sala, created the non-musical soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds, using the trautonium electronic instrument he helped develop. Morton Subotnick provided the electronic music for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Some well known electronic works generally regarded as in the classical tradition include "Film Music" by Vladimir Ussachevsky, A Rainbow in Curved Air and Shri Camel by Terry Riley, "Silver Apples", "The Wild Bull", and "Return" by Morton Subotnick, Sonic Seasonings and Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos, "Light Over Water" by John Adams, Aqua by Edgar Froese, and Poème électronique by Edgar Varèse.

Iannis Xenakis is another modern composer who used computers and electronic instruments, including one he invented, in many compositions. Some of his electronic works are gentle ambient pieces and some are savage sonic violence. Composers such as Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and David Tudor created and performed live electronic music, often designing their own electronics or using tape. A number of institutions sprung up in the 20th century specialising in electronic music, with IRCAM in Paris perhaps the best known.

The influences of minimalists such as Steve Reich (in particular 'Drumming') are clear in much of the work of DJ Spooky showing a perfect example of the crossover between 20th century classical, and electronic music such as trip-hop and even trance and drum n bass.

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K

Originally from "banjar," an African string instrument. Some etymologists derive it from a dialectal pronunciation of "bandore".

The banjo comes in a variety of different forms, including four-string (or plectrum) and five-string versions. In all of its forms it is a poorly sustaining instrument and its playing is characterised by a fast strumming or arpeggiated right hand.

The banjo consists of a drum, used as a soundboard and often with a ring made of metal, a neck mounted on the side of the drum, a tailpiece mounted on the opposite side, four or five strings, and a bridge. In the five-string banjo, the fifth peg is normally on the side of the neck, but it may be on the tuning head with the others, and the string pass through a tube. Some banjos have a resonator on the back of the drum or a wrist piece on the edge of the drumhead.

The five-string banjo is tuned gDGBd. The fifth string (g) is identical to the first (d) except that it is five frets shorter (3/4 as long). The plectrum banjo is tuned DGBd, i.e. it is missing the fifth string. Other tunings are also used.

The banjo can be played in several styles and is used in various forms of music. In bluegrass music, which uses the five-string banjo extensively, it is often played in Scruggs style. American old-time music also typically uses the 5-string banjo, but it is played in different styles, notably claw-hammer or frailing. Another characteristic of old-time banjo styles is the use of a wide range of different tunings.

The plectrum banjo evolved out of the 5-string banjo to cater for styles of music involving strummed chords. A further development is the tenor banjo, which also has four strings and is typically played with a plectrum. It is usually tuned CGDA, like a viola, or GDAE, like a violin (but an octave lower), and has become quite a standard instrument for Irish traditional music.

Early Stages

Banjos belong to a family of instruments that are very old. Drums with strings stretched over them can be traced throughout the Far East, the Middle East and Africa almost from the beginning. They can be played like the banjo, bowed or plucked like a harp depending on their development. These instruments were spread, in "modern" times, to Europe through the Arab conquest of Spain, and the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. The banjo, as we can begin to recognize it, was made by African slaves based on instruments that were indigenous to their parts of Africa. These early "banjos" were spread to the colonies of those countries engaged in the slave trade. Scholars have found that many of these instruments have names that are related to the modern word "banjo", such as "banjar", "banjil", "banza", "bangoe", "bangie", "banshaw". Some historians mention the diaries of Richard Jobson as the first record of the instrument.. While exploring the Gambra River in Africa in 1620 he recorded an instrument "...made of a great gourd and a neck, thereunto was fastened strings." The first mention of the name for these instruments in the Western Hemisphere is from Martinique in a document dated 1678. It mentions slave gatherings where an instrument called the "banza" is used. Further mentions are fairly frequent and documented. One such is quoted in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians from a poem by an Englishman in the British West Indies in 1763: "Permit thy slaves to lead the choral dance/To the wild banshaw's melancholy sound/". The best known is probably that of Thomas Jefferson in 1781: "The instrument proper to them (i.e. the slaves) is the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa."

Minstrel Era

White men began using blackface as a comic gimmick before the American Revolution. The banjo became a prop for these entertainers, either individually or in groups. By the early part of the 19th century, minstrelsy became a very popular form of entertainment. Joel Walker Sweeney and his Sweeney Minstrels were already popular by the 1830s. By 1843 the Virginia Minstrels began to do an entire show of this blackface entertainment and this is usually the date used to mark the beginning of the minstrel era. The Virginia Minstrels had 2 Banjo players, Dan Emmett and Billy Whitlock, a pupil of Sweeney. In addition Minstrel shows usually had a fiddler, a bones player and a drum/tambourine. We know from early Banjo instruction books by performers like Thomas Briggs, 1855, Philip Rice, 1858 and Frank Converse, 1865, that the minstrel style of playing was the "downstroke", what we call frailing today. This style was learned from the slave performers themselves.

Briggs in Banjo Instructor of 1855 describes playing as follows: "In playing the thumb and first finger only of the right hand are used; the 5th string is touched by the thumb only; this string is always played open, the other strings are touched by the thumb and first finger...The strings are touched by the ball of the thumb and the nail of the 1st finger. The first finger should strike the strings with the back of the nail and then slide to....."

Frank Converse in his Banjo Without a Master describes the style of playing as follows: "Partly close the hand, allowing the first finger to project a little in advance of the others. Hold the fingers firm in this position. Slightly curve the thumb. Strike the strings with the first finger (nail) and pull with the thumb."

The Fifth string

Joel Walker Sweeney of The Sweeney Minstrels, born 1810, was often credited with the invention of the short fifth string. Scholars know that this is not the case. A painting entitled The Old Plantation painted between 1777 and 1800 shows a black gourd banjo player with a banjo having the fifth string peg half-way up the neck. If Sweeney did add a fifth string to the banjo it was probably the lowest string, or fourth string by today's reckoning. This would parallel the development of the banjo elsewhere for example in England, where the tendency was to add more of the long strings with seven and ten strings being common. Sweeney was responsible for the spread of the banjo and probably contracted with a drum maker in Baltimore, William Boucher, to start producing banjos for public sales. These banjos are basically drums with necks attached. A number have survived and a couple of them are in the collections of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. Other makers like Jacobs of New York or Morrell who moved his shop to San Francisco during the Gold Rush, helped to supply the growing demand for the instrument in the mid 1840s as the minstrel shows traveled Westward to entertain the gold diggers.

Minstrel to Parlor

From the 1840s through the 1890s the Minstrel show was not the only place to see banjo players. There are records of urban Banjo contests and tournaments held at hotels, race tracks and bars, especially in New York to the enthusiastic cheering and clapping of sometimes inebriated crowds. Most of the contestants were white in the early contests but there are records of black players taking part in the post-civil war era. During this time (c. 1857) metal strings were invented. It seems they were cheaper than the normal professionally made gut strings and more long lasting then the home-made fiber or gut variety. Urban bar room players, minstrel show performers, slave performers, southern country players, all these performers were to come together during the Civil War (1860-1864). Regiments and Companies formed Minstrel groups and bands to entertain themselves during lulls in battle as did sailors aboard gunboats. The most famous of the Civil War banjoist was perhaps Samuel Sweeney, the younger brother of Joel Sweeney, who was an orderly of Jeb Stuart. Stuart apparently liked banjo music and when he wanted to relax he had Sweeney play for him. Sweeney also entertained Stuart's entire regiment.

After the War soldiers carried the knowledge and appreciation of the instrument home to almost every corner of America. During most of this time the banjo was looked-down upon by the more well-to-do classes of the population. Articles in the papers of the day like that in the Boston Daily Evening Voice of 1866, classified the Banjo of the 1840s and 1850s as an instrument in "the depth of popular degradation", an instrument fit only for "the jig-dancing lower classes of the community..." By 1866, however, the instrument had become a "universal favorite" with over 10,000 instruments in use in Boston alone. The cause of this sudden popularity was the introduction of the banjo as a parlor instrument. This is the somewhat misnamed "classical" period of the banjo. The banjo was played in the "classical" style which meant that it was picked with the fingers in imitation of the popular guitar players of the day. Many outstanding performers and teachers had banjos named after them that incorporated their own changes in the instrument in an attempt to make the banjo more refined and above all louder.

The Dobson Brothers and their sons were among the most active in the early stages. Henry C. Dobson is credited with adding the first frets about 1878. He is also credited with producing the first resonator and the first attempt at the use of a tone ring. Though the designs were his, many of the instruments were actually made by the Buckbee Company located on Webster Ave, in New York City until 1897, and later on 13th St. The company was later sold to Rettberg & Lange who went on to produce the Orpheum Banjo. Lange after leaving Rettburg would produce one of the finest sounding Banjos of the day, The Paramount. George C. Dobson, the son of H. C. Dobson continued to be active in the development of the banjo and continued performing almost until his death in 1931.

A.A. Farland (1859-1954) was another famous performer and was most outspoken about the development of the banjo. His banjos were also produced by Buckbee, and later by Rettberg and Lang. About 1915 he produced Farland's Patent Banjo Head made of "annealed steel, beautifully enameled" in an attempt to give more volume to his playing. He abhorred wire strings saying that "... the z-z-z- given by the final vibrations of wire strings is so offensive that I could not bear to use them." He claimed that "all but the deaf" in an audience of 12,000 could hear his banjo when he used his new "annealed" steel head !

Perhaps the most prolific of the banjo makers and enthusiasts of this period was S.S. Stewart of Philadelphia who made a whole range of instruments to fit every pocket book. He began in 1878 and produced banjos of all sizes and models, some made especially for ladies and for children. In 1898 SS Stewart was awarded the Sears contract and teamed up with the Mandolin maker Baur. Stewart died the same year but his sons teamed up with Baur to continue the Sears contract which ended in 1901. His sons continued making banjos until 1904. It is estimated that the Stewarts produced somewhere in excess of 25,000 banjos from 1878 to 1904. In addition Stewart published his own magazine for the banjo player were he regularly expounded his "philosophy" on banjo playing. It was Stewart who spread the story that Joel Sweeney "invented" the banjo by adding the fifth string.( Mike Holmes, banjo historian and editor of Mugwumps Online Magazine >http://www.mugwumps.com < adds that it was "Louise Scruggs, in a 70's lady's magazine who perpetuated the myth, and who most everyone has read as the "source" of this misinformation.")

No discussion of this period would be complete without a mention of A.C. Fairbanks of Boston who either on his own (1870-1880) or with Cole as the Fairbanks & Cole Co. (1880-1890), or as Fairbanks Co. again (1890-1894) produced some of the most beautiful instruments ever produced. In 1890 he began producing the "Electric" (having a scalloped metal truss, usually topped with a brass rod, all set into rim), the forerunner of the Whyte Laydie. By late 1890s the company had grade designations for the Electric and names like "Special" "Imperial" Other cheaper, non-"Electric" models were the "Columbian" "Regent", and "Senator". They also made an "Electric" model banjeaurine. Metal name plates saying "Fairbanks Company" appeared about 1895-1896. About this time Fairbanks left the firm. In 1901 David Day joined the company and introduced the "White-Laydie" which had a bracket band which fit around the outside of the rim eliminating the need for holes drilled through the rim for shoe bolts. The model used the "Electric" tone ring and unstained maple wood for both rim and neck and hence the name. It was produced in two models; No. 2, a plain model; and the No.7, with carved heel and elaborate inlays.

After Fairbank's departure the company continued the production of fine instruments under David Day until 1904 when it was purchased by Vega to produce the Vega-Fairbanks Co. . Vega introduced the Tubaphone in 1909 and finally sold out to the Martin Guitar Co. in 1970.

After breaking with Fairbanks in 1890, William Cole started his own company with his brothers. They began producing the "Eclipse" which consisted of a simple tone rim sitting on small nails set into the rim. He received the patent for his Eclipse in 1894. He was also said to have perfected the banjo-mandolin around 1910.

Some of the banjo players of the "classical" period were outstanding banjoists and could indeed play anything . The great Armenian- American banjo virtuoso Harry J. Chopourian was said to be able to play any violin score at sight and performed regularly as a soloist with symphony orchestras. But the majority of the music of the period was not really classical and included popular airs, marches, waltzes and dances of the day. It could be better termed parlor music.

The First World War, like the Civil War, was a watershed in the popularity of the banjo. America entered a time of isolation and turned to "American made" music for pleasure. Jazz entered the picture and the banjo became an integral part of the early jazz bands. At first it was the plectrum banjo, a five string, without the fifth string, that led the way. This gave way to the shorter neck Tenor banjo, thought to be a corruption the word "Tango" because it rose to popularity through the Tango dance craze that swept America.

The stock market collapse of 1929 and the world wide depression that followed wiped out the banjo. To quote Robert Webb, "Demand for its bright happy sound disappeared almost overnight. Professional orchestras made a quick transition to the "arch-top" guitar, developed in the 1920s by Gibson and others which provided a mellow and integral rhythm more in keeping with the subdued nature of the times."

 

Some Important Dates

• 1620- Explorer Richard Jobson mentions "gourd with neck and strings"in Africa
• 1678- "Banza" noted in Martinique as played by blacks
• 1769- white banjo players performed in blackface
• 1813-1860 Joel Walker Sweeney
• 1843-first documented minstrel show by Dan Emmett & Virginia Minstrels
• 1840s-1850s Minstrel Craze; Banjo becomes urban instrument
• 1830s to 1850s Boucher of Baltimore first "shop-made" banjos
• 1850's- metal strings invented; James Ashhorn, guitar and banjo maker between 1851-56 made silver wound silk guitar strings at factory in Wolcottsville, Connecticut.
• 1851-Stephen Foster writes "Old Folks at Home"
• 1855-Thomas Briggs Banjo Primer published
• 1858-Philip Rice's banjo method published
• 1859-Dan Emmett writes "Dixie"
• 1859- Stephen Van Hagen patents 7 string (1 short) guitar banjo with frets
• 1860s-1870s first closed back banjos and first top tension banjos marketed by Dobson (i.e. Buckbee) in US & England
• 1865- Frank Converse Banjo primer published
  1863-1897 James H. Buckbee Co., of New York largest maker.
• 1870-Uncle Dave Macon born in Tennessee
  1878-Henry Dobson produces 5 string with frets (made by Buckbee)
• 1880-1890 Fairbanks and Cole of Boston.
• 1881-Dobson patents a tone ring
• 1890s-Steel strings widely available: cheaper than gut
• 1890-1904 Fairbanks Co.
• 1878-1904. SS. Stewart Co. of Philadelphia Made 25,000 banjos !
• 1880s- first banjos documented in "the hills"
• 1892-Charlie Poole born in North Carolina
• 1894-first patent for a banjo mute
• 1894-first Grover bridge patent
• 1898-Dock Boggs born
• 1901-Whyte Laydie introduced by Fairbanks
• 1904-1970 Vega of Boston
• 1907- J. B. Schall of Chicago invents Tenor Banjo or 4 string banjo tuned like a mandolin.
• 1909-Vega Tubaphone introduced
• 1910- Tango craze reached America. Tenor, corruption of Tango Banjos; Cole said to have perfected Mandolin-Banjo
  1914-Dave Akeman "Stringbean" born.
• 1918- First Gibson Banjos
• 1921-first modern flange and resonator by William Lange & Paramount Banjos
• 1921- Mc Hugh of Gibson company patents adjustable truss rod for guitar and Mando, adjustable tension rods for banjo & adjustable bridge
• 1923-first geared tuners patented by C. Kremp
  1924-Earl Scruggs born
• 1925-31-Charlie Poole popular rural recording artist
• 1925- Gibson "Mastertone" introduced
• 1927-Ralph Stanley born
• 1929-modern banjo arm rest invented by L.A. Elkington
• 1929- Stock market collapse
• 1930-1945 5 string Banjo almost disappears. No strings available
• 1939 -Bill Monroe & Bluegrass Boys on Grand Ole Opry without banjo
• 1940s- Earl Scruggs develops his 3 finger style based on classical style
• 1941-Bill Monroe adds banjo to band-"Stringbean" Ackeman. 2 finger style
• 1940s- renewed urban interest in banjo, beginning of "folk-revival"
• 1943- Seeger creates ,long-neck
• 1945- Scruggs joins Monroe band with 3 finger style
• 1948-Seeger published "How to Play 5 string Banjo"
• 1950s-plastic heads become available
• 1960s when folk boom hit, Gibson and Vega were only companies to still have banjos in their catalogues as compared to 200 makers in 1900, and only Vega still had banjos in production.

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K

In the broadest sense, contemporary music is any music being written in the present day. In the context of classical music the term has been applied to music written in the last quarter century or so, particularly works post-1975. There is debate over whether the term should be used to apply to music in any style, or only to composers writing avant-garde music, or only to "modernist" music. There is some use of "Contemporary" as a synonym for "Modern", particularly in academic settings. A more restrictive use applies the term only to living composers and their works (perhaps only their recent works). Since "contemporary" is a word that describes a time frame, rather thana style or a unifying idea, there are no universally agreed criteria for making these distinctions.

History

In the early part of the 20th century contemporary music included modernism, the twelve tone technique, atonality, futurism, primitivism, constructivism, New Objectivity, unresolved and greater amounts of dissonance, rhythmic complexity, nationalism, social and socialist realism, and neoclassicism. In the fifties, contemporary music generally meant serialism, in the sixties serialism, post-serialism, indeterminacy, electronic music including computer music, mixed media, performance art, and fluxus, and since then minimal music, post-minimalism, New Simplicity, New Complexity, and all of the above.

Since the 1970s there has been increasing stylistic variety, with far too many schools to name or label. However, in general, there are three broad trends. The first is the continuation of modern avant-garde traditions, including musical experimentalism. The second are schools which sought to revitalize a tonal style based on previous common practice. The third focuses on non-functional triadic harmony, exemplified by composers working in the minimalist and related traditions.

Contemporary music composition has been altered with growing force by computers in composition, which allow for composers to listen to renderings of their scores before performance, compose by layering performed parts over each other and to disseminate scores over the internet. It is far too soon to tell what the final result of this wave of computerization will have as an effect on music.

All history is provisional, and contemporary history even more so, because of the well known problems of dissemination and social power. Who is "in" and who is "out" is often more important to who is known than the music itself. In an era with perhaps as many as 40,000 composers of concert music in the United States alone, first performances are difficult, and second performances even more so. The lesson of obscure composers in the past becoming important later applies doubly so to contemporary music, where it is likely that there are "firsts" before the officially listed first, and works which will be later admired as exemplars of style, which are as yet, unheralded in their own time.

Movements in contemporary music

Modernism

Many of the key figures of the high modern movement are alive, or only recently deceased and there is also still an extremely active core of composers, performers and listeners who continue to advance the ideas and forms of Modernism. Elliott Carter is still active, for example, as is Lukas Foss. While high modernist schools of composing, such as serialism are no longer as rhetorically central, the contemporary period is beginning the process of sorting through the modern corpus, looking for works which will have repertory value.

Modernism is also present as surface or trope in works of a large range of composers, as atonality has lost much of its ability to terrorize listeners, and even film scores use sections of music clearly rooted in modernist musical language. Active modernist composers include Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Judith Weir, Thomas Adès, Magnus Lindberg and Gunther Schuller.

Serialism

More specifically named "integral" or "compound" serialism, one of the most important post-war movements, led by composers such as Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Europe, and by Milton Babbitt, Donald Martino, and Charles Wuorinen in America.

Compositions use an ordered set or several such sets, which may be the basis for the whole composition. The term is also often used for dodecaphony, or twelve-tone technique, which is alternatively regarded as the model for integral serialism.

Post-modernism

Post-modernism is held to by many critics to be a strong influence in contemporary classical music. While explanations of what post-modernism is, and why it is influential vary widely, and responses to whether post-modernism is "good" for music, or even a good in and of itself - there is a wide agreement that instrumental concert music, and "art music" has absorbed ideas and influences from the wider culture, and that the results of these influences, for better and for worse, can be detected in musical results. Examples include polystylism, bricolage and collage, pop music references, the use of fragments, found sounds and incorporated voices, the shift from increasingly chromatic surfaces to more triadic ones, juxtaposition of genres, the use of new instrumental combinations which take instruments from several different cultures, and the combining of composition with video and other media images. Key composers include the Scottish composer, James MacMillan (who draws on sources as diverse as plainchant, South American Liberation Theology and Polish avant-garde techniques of the 1960s), the American Michael Torke (drawing on classical tradition, minimalism and popular music) and Mark-Anthony Turnage from the UK (drawing from jazz, English pastoralism and the avant-garde).

Polystylism

Polystylism is the use of multiple styles or techniques of music, and is seen as a postmodern characteristic. Polystylist composers include William Bolcom, Sofia Gubaidulina, George Rochberg, Frederic Rzewski, Alfred Schnittke, Ezequiel Viñao and John Zorn.

Conceptualism

When Duchamp displayed a urinal in an art museum, he struck the most visible blow for artistic conceptualism. Music conceptualism found a champion in John Cage and, a bit later, in the composers associated with the Fluxus movement. A conceptualist work is an act whose musical importance draws from the frame, rather than the content of the work. An example would be Alvin Singleton's 56 Blows, a work that has the distinction of being mentioned in debate on the floor of the Senate.

Minimalism and post-minimalism

The minimalist generation still has a prominent role in new composition. Philip Glass has been expanding his symphony cycle, while John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls, a choral work commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks won a Pulitzer Prize. Steve Reich has explored electronic opera (most notably in Three Tales) and Terry Riley has been active in composing instrumental music and music theatre. But beyond the minimalists themselves, the tropes of non-functional triadic harmony are now commonplace, even among composers who are not regarded as minimalists per se.

Many composers are expanding the resources of minimalist music to include rock and world instrumentation and rhythms, serialism, and many other techniques. Kyle Gann considers William Duckworth's Time Curve Preludes as the first "post-minimalism" piece, and labels John Adams as a "post-minimalist" composer, rather than as a minimalist. Gann defines "post-minimalism" as the search for greater harmonic and rhythmic complexity by composers such as Mikel Rouse and Glenn Branca. Another notable characteristic is storytelling and emotional expression taking precedence over technique. Post-minimalism is also [1] a movement in painting and sculpture which began in the late 1960s. (See lumpers/splitters)

Other composers sometimes referred to as "post-minimalist" include Erkki-Sven Tüür, Peteris Vasks, Giya Kancheli, Arvo Pärt, Gavin Bryars, Lepo Sumera, Valentin Silvestrov, Veljo Tormis, Ingram Marshall, Kevin Volans, Daniel Lentz, Louis Andriessen, Frederic Rzewski, and many composers associated with the Bang on a Can collective.

Post-classic tonality

Other aspects of post-modernity can be seen in a "post-classic" tonality that has advocates such as Michael Daugherty, Elena Kats-Chernin and Tan Dun.

"World music" influence

An increasing number of composers mix western and non-western instruments, including gamelan from Indonesia, Chinese traditional instruments, ragas from Indian Classical music. There is also an exploration of eastern-European and non-Western tonalities, even in relatively traditionally structured works. This can be in the context of post-minimalist works, such as Janice Giteck's and Evan Ziporyn's Balinese-influenced works, bandura works by Julian Kytasty, or in the context of post-classic tonality, such as in the music of Bright Sheng, or in the context of thoroughly modernist styled works.

Rock influence

Similarly, many composers have emerged since the 1980s who are heavily influenced by rock. Many, such as Scott Johnson and Steven Mackey started out as rock musicians and only later moved into the realm of scored music. Other notable composers who draw on rock include Annie Gosfield, Evan Ziporyn, Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, David Lang, John Zorn, Steve Martland, Ben Johnston, Anne LeBaron, Kitty Brazelton, Glenn Branca, and Nick Didkovsky. Many of these composers (Gordon, Lang, Wolfe, Ziporyn, Martland, Branca) are post-minimalist in orientation, but some (Didkovsky, Brazelton) are very much not.

Historicism

There are composers that have adopted historicist approach to composition, employing a variety of styles of previous eras. Some composers had occasional forays into this approach previously (Alfred Schnittke), while others embraced it to varying degrees of exclusion of other styles.

Some post-minimalist works, such as Gavin Bryars' "Oi me lasso" cycle employ medievalism. Other composers embrace renaissance, baroque and classical styles with varying degrees of purism (Fritz Kreisler, Robert Casadesus, Jordi Savall, Rene Clemencic, Thomas Binkley, Benjamin Bagby, Joseph Dillon Ford, Ladislav Kupkovič, Winfried Michel, the several composers of the Delian Society, and the Vox Saeculorum group). This movement is related to Early Music Revival and a number of historicist composers are influenced by their intimate familiarity with the instrumental practice of earlier eras (Alexandre Danilevsky, Paulo Galvão, Roman Turovsky-Savchuk).

Historicism may also be combined with minimalism, post-minimalism, and world-music.

Experimentalism

One important movement in contemporary music involves expanding the range of gestures available to instrumentalists, for example the work of George Crumb. The Kronos Quartet has been among the most active ensembles in promoting contemporary American works for string quartet, and they take delight in music which stretches the manner in which sound can be drawn out of instruments.

European composers who make heavy use of extended techniques include Helmut Lachenmann, Salvatore Sciarrino and Heinz Holliger.

Electronic music

Electronics are now part of mainstream music creation. Performances of regular works often use midi synthesizers to back or replace regular musicians. Looping, sampling, and (rarely) drum machines may also be used. However the older idea of electronic music (musique concrète, electroacoustics...) - as a search for pure sound and an interaction with the hardware itself - continues to find a place in composition, from commercially successful pieces to works targeted at very narrow audiences. See, for example, the work of Michel Chion.

Neo-Romanticism

The resurgence of the vocabulary of extended tonality which flourished in the first years of the 20th century continues in the contemporary period, though it is no longer considered shocking or controversial as such. Composers working in the neoromantic vein include John Corigliano, George Rochberg (in some of his works after 1971), David Del Tredici and Krzysztof Penderecki (after about 1975).

New Simplicity

A movement in Germany in the late seventies and early eighties, reacting with a variety of strategies to restore the subjective to composing. New Simplicity's best-known composer is Wolfgang Rihm, who strives for the emotional volatility of late 19th-century Romanticism and early 20th-century Expressionism. Called Die neue Einfachheit in German, it has also been termed "New Romanticism," "New Subjectivity," "New Inwardness," "New Sensuality," "New Expressivity," and "New Tonality."

Styles found in other countries sometimes associated with the German New Simplicity movement include the so-called "Holy Minimalism" of the Pole Henryk Górecki and the Estonian Arvo Pärt (in their works after 1970), as well as Englishman John Tavener, who unlike the New Simplicity composers have turned back to Medieval and Renaissance models, however, rather than to 19th-century romanticism for inspiration. Important representative works include Symphony No. 3 "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" (1976) by Górecki, Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977) by Pärt, and The Veil of the Temple (2002) by Tavener.

New Complexity

"New Complexity" is a current within today's European contemporary avant-garde music scene, named in reaction to the New Simplicity. Among this diverse group are Richard Barrett, Brian Ferneyhough, James Dillon and Michael Finnissy.

Spectral Music

Epitomized by the works of Hugues Dufourt, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, and Horatiu Radulescu. Much of Kaija Saariaho's and the last few pieces of Claude Vivier's music are influenced by the spectralists.

Contemporary choral music

At the turn of the century, Eric Whitacre has achieved considerable attention by combining tonal music with tone clusters and similar experimental techniques. Although it is too soon to discern trends in the 21st century, the spirit of more practical music which dominated the last decades of the 20th century seems to be continuing via the works of Karl Jenkins, John Rutter, Kentaro Sato and Morten Lauridsen amongst others.

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K

Origin of the Bouzouki
Description of the Bouzouki
Tuning the Bouzouki

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Origin of the Bouzouki

The Bouzouki is a long-necked lute. The family of Lutes includes the Oud, Bouzouki, Saz, and even the American Banjo. It is believed that the Greek Bouzouki evolved from the Turkish Saz. The Saz most likely originated in Central Asia and was introduced to the western neighbors of the Turks as they migrated across Europe. Today the bouzouki is commonly linked with Greece. However, the bouzouki can be found in a number of countries. There is even an Irish bouzouki. Today the Greek bouzouki has 8 strings in four courses, though it once had fewer. The addition of two more strings came some time after World War II. It is said that the addition of two strings made the harmonic and melodic fingering more comfortable. Check out the FAQ’s for bouzouki for web links.

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Description of the Bouzouki

Bouzoukis are light weight with long thin necks. They are usually about 3 ft in length. The neck on the bouzouki is longer and thinner than on the lute of oud. The light colored, pair-shaped, soundboard is backed by a bowl-shaped resonator. There are a number of fixed metal frets along the neck. Typically there are three or four metal strings paired in courses. The instrument is tuned with geared tuning pegs and is played with a plectrum.

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Tuning the Bouzouki

Have you ever noticed the bridge of a steel guitar? It has a slight slant, away from the tuning pegs of the lower noted strings. This slant adds length to the lower noted strings, which compensates for the increased stiffness of these strings. The floating bridge on a bouzouki can be placed at a similar slant. It is a simple task to find the best location for the bridge on the soundboard. Measure the distance from the first fret to the twelfth fret. Repeat this distance from the twelfth fret to the bridge location. In this manner the first fret and the bridge should be equal distances from the twelfth fret. Our bouzouki is tuned in octaves. The pairs are high/low. The most common tuning on the 4-course bouzouki is the Greek style, which is to say, CFAD. The instrument can also be tuned in the Irish style, GDAD or ADAD (low to high).

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K

To attract women takes exposure. Where ever you are, to get a woman to like you and to spend time with you will take time and work getting to know one another. That is why most places where people meet are where men and women frequent automatically because they don't havea choice. Women have no choice about going to work. The work place is the number one area where people meet often. Everyone has to work. Even the most beautiful women have to make a living somehow. They go to work and they have to talk to the people that are there. At work you will encounter women as you carry on with the tasks of the day. This brings us to the number one spot to meet women:

1. At Work

Statistics show that some 70 percent of married people got together at work. The key ingredients are time, getting to know each other and similar interests. Women search for men with similar talents to their own and none of the flaws in what is called compatibility. We all have flaws, but we try to limit those by meeting a person with different flaws of our own. When it comes to aptitudes and natural talents women look for men similar to themselves. This insured the dissolution of bad genes and concentration of good genes. At the same work place people tend to have similarities in their abilities, especially when is comes to the same lines of work. Combined with time and the opportunity to get to thoroughly know one another, the right people automatically click together. That is why it's so important to work at something you are good at and really enjoy.

2. Church

Church is supposed to be a spiritual place and not a dating service and yet it's a known fact that a lot of people meet and get married through church. The kind of church to join is one with similar background to yourself as well as your faith. The more similar people are the more chances there are for compatibility. Even in one denomination there are different locations. Join the one with people the most similar to yourself. The more you like the people there the more you will be eager to help out and as a result you will get noticed.

3. School

Studies show that people build special emotional bonds at an early age. The girls you have met in high school, especially near the age of sixteen usually will have a special memory of you. People were not meant to get married and have kids as late as they do it today's day and age. In the old times, girls used to get pregnant in their teens. Nature equipped girls with a special imprinting during those early ears. Keep in touch with a girl you knew in high school. She probably has deeper feelings for you than you knew.

4. Friends

Needless to say, every group has their own spots they like to hang out at. It's different for every group of friends, but the facts are that a lot of people meet through a friend or a friend of a friend. It could be a buddies ex or a friend of your ex girlfriends friend, whatever the case. Most people consider it immoral to date your friends ex girlfriends, but look at it this way, statistically most people end up doing it anyway. Just don't hit on your friends current girlfriend or somebody that he is currently dating. Chances are she is more interested in him, and in this case jeopardizing the relationship is more than it's worth.

The way to get access to your buddies girls is to be facilitating with you own female friends. This does two things. It makes you popular with the ladies because they want to meet guys just as much as we want them. Second, it gets your buddy to be less possessive. When he's involved with someone, she's not going to like him being jealous over someone else. This is when all of his female contacts become fair game.

5. Sports Teams

Gym memberships are increasing world wide. However, it's not in the gym or the wait room where couples tend to meet. Instead consider joining a team that gets together once or twice a week on a regular basis. Good sports are volleyball, soccer and frisbee. These are usually stand alone organizations you just have to find them. The idea is that team sports set the tone for interaction. Also, body smell such as from sweating during physical activity helps females determine genetic compatibility from pheromones and Androstenone smell. To recap, yes most successful marriages do start off in the work place or from the high school years. However, with the right ingredients of time, compatibility and interaction other places could be an opportunity for meeting women as well.

6. Grocery Stores

As with work, everyone has to go to the grocery store or supermarket. Again, this includes even the most beautiful women. One advantage of supermarkets is that single men and women, as well as single parents, must shop there. Also, visits to the supermarket are likely to be very frequent, as frequent as for example going to church services. It is thus possible to meet and get to know men or women by regularly visiting your local supermarket. In the UK, Sainsbury's stores are particularly good for meeting potential partners.

So can you meet a woman just about anywhere? Successful pickups have happened at bars, clubs, coffee shops, mall, elevator you name it. It's not a question of getting a date. To find the right woman takes time with her and getting to know her. Meanwhile, all those other places are great practice.

7 Jan 2005 by RaftingCanadian 1.1K