Lecture 22. Modernism and Mahler
Yale (YouTube) · lecture · en · indexed 2026-02-08
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So today we're going to engage modernism we're going be talking principally about uh the music of eigor Stravinsky I should also mention Arnold schernberg just as ver and uh Vagner were the principal composers of Opera in the 19th century so schernberg and Stravinsky were the principal proponents not only of instrumental music but some vocal music in the first half of the 20th century so we want to keep them uh carefully positioned on our radar screen here Igor Stravinsky of course was a Russian composer born in St Petersburg you had the dates up there on the board I'm sure uh he studied with Nikolai rimsky corov who wrote One famous piece Shahara zad which I used to hear all the time as a kid uh and then caught the eye of Serge diev Seri diev was an empresario what's an empresario who can tell me what an empresario is it's a fancy word for Thaddius a producer okay think of the Broadway show The Producers he's simply um a producer and what nagev was producing was and importing uh into Paris from Russia was modernist art from Russia modernist painting modernist balet modernist art music and modernist Opera so that's what we want to keep in mind with with regard to sgate diev and for diev Stravinsky composed early in his career three important ballet scores and you have those titles up on the board there Firebird with its date well 1909 uh petrushka 1911 and then uh the right of spring in 1913 now the first of these ballets to really show a heavy modernist content is not so much Firebird but more the second of this troa here petrushka it's modern because of the new approach to rhythm in the romantic music that we have been listening to we would hear these long somewhat amorphous Melodies amorphous in terms of the uh Rhythm but now here with the Advent of modernism in the 20th century we get a much more driving uh type of Rhythm it almost in some ways goes back to the driving rhythms of the Baroque except with one major difference and that is that these modern rhythms are highly irregular what we get often times are irregular meters what would you imagine an irregular meter is anyone want to feel that one irregular meters well simply said it's not a succession of 24 242424 34 34 but 2 4 54 44 2 4 64 38 and and so on each measure can have a different meter in addition we also have this phenomenon called poly meters in which you could assign to your clarinet to play in three4 and your bassoon to play in 44 and maybe your violins in 78 so as a result you get something of a disjunctive uh rhythmic texture here disjointed uh rhythms and the second second aspect of this uh approach to modernism has something to do with the orchest rtion there's a great deal more emphasis now on percussive effects new instruments are added uh to the orchestra instruments called the xylophone the Glock andiel the chesta and if you want to see a picture of some of these you could open your textbook at some point just write this in your notes C figure I think I wrote it down here figure 10 no excuse me five number 10 chapter 5 number 10 you can see some of these percussion instruments but basically they're just either sticks or pieces of metal bars that you beat with sticks or in the case of the chesta you activate with a keyboard so we've got these two things here driving but irregular rhythms and we also have this new approach to orchestration so let's listen to a bit now of Igor Stravinsky's ballet of 191 petrushka [Music] okay so we'll stop there uh Jacob and I were fooling around with this in the background trying to figure out what these meters were see if we could pick up these different changes but they are as in and how' we do not well Jacob says we did not do well uh because without the score it's difficult to anticipate which meter is going to come next and you heard the intense percussive effects there but Stravinsky's most radical statement of modernism occurs not here in petruska but two years later in the right of spring uh at premiered in Paris uh in uh May of 1913 and it's become something of a cultural icon this whole idea of the right of spring indeed uh I have this book and I've had it for quite a while rights of Spring by modris exin it's often required reading in the history Department here history programs anybody ever run into this been asked you read anything by modus Xin well the subtitle is here the Great War and the birth of the Modern Age but it's not accidental that he is playing off of this title of a ballet of eigor Stravinsky because the ballet of Stravinsky was a kind of watershed a touchstone The Benchmark from which modernism uh can be uh uh calculated and against which it can be uh measured so when the audience arrived there at the the sh the sh in Paris and that theater still is there you can walk down the Avenue Montana It's all where the Hermes is and GUI and all of these fancy stores it's there in Paris and go in and still hear concerts there I've heard concerts in the theat sh so you can still do that today still functioning as one of the major concert halls in Paris so in any event May 1913 the audience arrives they're there to hear a Russian ballet what kind of music do they expect to hear well let's listen to what they were expecting to hear [Music] so whose music is this chovsky anybody Leia you know the title of it Swan Lake so lots of Tut and poad up there and moving around so this is what they thought Russian ballet was so they arrive so they arrive let's go in and set up the next uh take their seats the lights uh go down everybody is properly uh addressed for uh this particular occasion and here's the kind of music that they [Music] hear so that's a radically new s sound radically new approach to Modern Art and indeed once again if you ask generally cultural historians to put their finger on the moment that constitutes the beginning of modernism it would probably be this moment of the performance of the of the right of spring how did Stravinsky create these radically new sounds well he did so in a in a couple of ways uh We've we've been talking before about this idea of of irregular meters let's see how the these play out the music that you were just listening to not the pitches but the durations are up here on the board and they're all as you can see quarter notes but they are grouped in different sorts of ways grouped by these accents so I've asked Jacob Jacob's up here to grab his Viola now he's going to come over and play this sequence for us following the accents uh and then he will be joined by Our Guest artist okay okay so that's the way it goes that's all the all the violin or the violist or violinist all the strings do let's do that one more time with our guest artist we're going to add percussion now ah what a [Applause] virtu okay um so that was one uh Jacob don't go away completely uh here uh one other point watch Jacob's hand when he is doing this this is not the way string players normally play he's doing something extraordinary here and it tells us we don't hear the when he play [Music] chovi but that's ain't what he's playing now okay so what's he doing he's playing all with down bows everything down bow and that's that's counterintuitive to St your normal string teaching so uh run back there if you would and set the the slide projector Force so we've taken the string instruments instead of using them as these warm vbr filled communicators we're uh in the String family we're sort of turning them in now to percussion instruments that's a very percussive effect so not only do we have new percussion instruments we have percussive effects with the existing uh instruments uh and uh perhaps most important here is the chord the music that Stravinsky is setting forth here it's an odd odd chord it's an odd occurrence what he's got here is a perfectly uh innocuous E major Triad I'll put it down here in octave and then on top of it he's got a seventh chord uh starting on E flat and either each of those each by itself is is rather consonant but you put the two of them together so this is a good example of another way this modern ISM in music is created and that's through the use of very obviously a polycord interesting point I'm going to go to some slides now because it's exactly at this time in the history of art that painters started doing this same kind of thing so we're going to go to the first slide here who painted this please nice nice and loud I hear it in the back Picasso okay three musicians by Pablo Picasso uh and what we have here is sort of one musician kind of out of phase uh with himself uh one musician and then another musician slightly in an irregular position against it next type of slide here this is uh George Brock uh woman with violin a little bit difficult to see the um the woman there but in the context of this highly fragmented violin now we're going to go on to one gree uh violin and now we're going to go onto a slide taken from a book published in 1916 by Albert GLE uh can you focus that just a little bit for us Jacob there's a focus knob up there uh go the other way with it oh well but we can see the we can see the point here um off to the left we have just a square and that square then is being rotated against itself it's being rotated itself against itself in another position rotated itself in yet another position and that's all these musicians are doing they're taking one Triad and then taking the Triad right next to each other so the Triads are slightly out of phase with each other and ultimately it produces a rather dissonant uh configuration okay that's all we that's all we need here uh by way of the of the slides well the pre premere of the right of spring uh was just as dissonant as some of these paintings are indeed it it caused a scandal it caused a riot it would it created the most uh Infamous I guess riot in the history of music and uh we have uh fortunately and they are contained here in mod xin's book among other places some primary source accounts people that were there at the time telling what it was like to be at this Premiere so here are a couple of direct quotes then in ued a battery of Screams countered by a foil of Applause we Ward over art I like that Ward over art or what some thought was Art but others didn't about 40 of the protesters were forced out of the theater by the police but that did not quell the disturbance the lights in the auditorium were turned fully on but that did not still the disjointed ravings of a mob of angry men and women uh end quote and here's another Direct quote I was sitting in a box in which I had rented one seat three ladies sat in front of me and a young man occupied the place behind me he stood up during the course of the ballet to see more clearly the intense excitement under which he was laboring thanks to the potent force of the music portrayed itself presently when he began to beat rhythmically with his fists on the top of my head end quote well what is it again specific in this music of Stravinsky that causes this kind of reaction let me uh list for you let me enumerate five things here one heavy dissonance we just heard some of that that kind of sound almost a cluster type dissonant heavy dissonance created by poly chords in which we have Triads and these Triads are only a half step apart the roots are only a half step apart so one heavy dissonance two much greater Reliance on percussion Tony glocken Spiel chesta that sort of thing three as we saw with Jacob the use of stringed instruments as percussion instruments so a new use of these uh traditional instruments and even the piano this banging on the piano to the percussion the piano is technically a percussion instrument but it's a particularly lyrical one well it's not so lyrically used here in the modern idiom number four uh an increased use of woodwinds the strings fall into the background the woodwinds with their potentially bright brittle sound are now foregrounded and fifth uh this idea of Rhythm driving rhythms yes but irregular rhythms and poly uh poly meters and uh irregular meters all creating this kind of disjunctive effect so let's listen now where to a passage out of Stravinsky's right of spring you heard one of them let's listen to another one in which all five of these elements uh sound at once [Music] whoops we have track we have track five oh okay at 50 yes oh all right let's I'm sorry let's go ahead then [Music] let's stop so what do you think do you like that music Brian you've been a good student here you showed up virtually every lecture I see you out there what do you think of this just it's different more fast-paced more sort of upbeat kind of like a slap in the face uh who doesn't like it uh end of okay Caroline Caroline Hest person out there she doesn't like it the end of the day are you going to go home when it's time to relax and put on this music probably not uh do I like this music yeah I really do like this music um I love this music but I've heard it a lot uh and when I first heard it I didn't like it it's one of these things like sort of oral spinach or whatever you got to really get used to it over over the years mushrooms or whatever it might happen to be I first heard this piece in 1967 when I was a TA I had to teach it and I didn't really know it uh and then I had the honor and pleasure of hearing it performed live in Paris in 1970 uh and it was really an epiphany because I was sitting there I remember distinctly it was in a boxing arena of all places but they had an elevated stage and the dancers came out and they started going that kind of thing and the whole Arena began to shake and said whoa I Now understand I get it it's not just the music music is just part of this total artistic experience it's a kind of sympathetic vibration uh in conjunction with the kinetic experience of the dance that really brings all of this to life so music here is just a kind of catalyst for the ballet and to really begin to appreciate uh something such as this triny's approach to modernism we've kind of uh we do in fact have to see it to to experience it fully and that's really what we're going to do here next we're going to do that in section starting today we have a wonderful video for you of the Reconstruction of the right of spring because the initial choreography uh which is an important part of this was lost so um a woman a choreographer came along melissen Hodson and she reconstructed all the choreography for this dance and then they filmed it so this is a wonderful opportunity to see this we'll be talking about this in uh section starting today okay we're finished with our brief introduction to modernism and where do we stand now in our course uh well obviously we're pretty much uh at the end of it uh what do you have to do what remains for you to do Zach what do you got to do last you got to do your last paper each ta will assign that last paper what else do you have to do prepare for the final exam we will be sending you a prep sheet the final exam I believe is Wednesday the 17th at 2 p.m. will be in this room other things yeah the last six listening exercises and I think that's about it and of course in addition there's a review section uh that I and one or two of the Tas will be doing a week from today right back right back in here so uh is that the end of today no that's not the end of today we have h a good half hour left and I'd like to work just with one piece um and and one composer uh at the end of the course I like to do a a piece that's really uh that I love it doesn't really teach you much of anything it's it's an odd sensation often times there are really lovely pieces that I would like to incorporate in the textbook and in this program generally but I can't do it because they don't really teach us anything we were listening to One in section just intro music the other day uh by Samuel Barber anybody know who wrote the famous piece or what the name of that famous piece by Samuel Barber is stadius Elizabeth Raul ra the adio of for Strings by Samuel Barber American samel Beautiful we should everybody should download it for 99 cents it's just gorgeous but we we don't really learn anything from it well this is a piece that we that we're about to hear that we will learn only really one thing about and that is the idea of an orchestral lead so I'm going to go back to one of my favorite composers and that is Gustaf mer we talked a little bit about Gustaf mer uh when we had our lecture on the symphony in the 19th century and we said that mer was of Jewish descent from what is now a portion of the Czech Republic who came into Vienna to study music he started as a Pianist became a conductor and basically he earned his living as a conductor he got smalltime jobs out in the provinces and then ultimately worked his way back to Vienna where he became the conductor of the STS oper in Vienna and if you ever go to Vienna and you should all go to Vienna it's an incredibly musical city everywhere you go you see these silhouettes of Mozart it is so cool so you have to go you have to go I mean you can't walk a block without seeing Mozart just to die for um so there we are on the ring straw so with the great STS Opera and this is where Gustaf merer conducted it's still there um but mer was a difficult person to get along with I suppose often times great artists are geniuses are they tend to be self- referential and maybe rightly so uh but in any event he was a orchestral Tyrant his players didn't like playing for them and after 10 years they didn't renew his contract in effect he was fired in Vienna but as good fortune had it he um uh was able or that time there was an opening in New York city so he comes to New York to conduct first the Metropolitan Opera and then a year or so later he took on what was to become the New York philarmonic so there he is the principal conductor now in New York City interestingly enough uh on two occasions on two occasions mer um came to New Haven he came to New Haven he brought uh first was in 1910 he brought the New York philarmonic to New Haven and where where did they perform where would you imagine they perform woy Hall okay woy Hall Wy Hall was built for Gustaf mer no that's not really true but it gets across a point that Wy Hall was built to be a concert hall for what Gustaf mer represented which was the apotheosis the ultimate flourishing although they didn't know it was the ultimate at the time of this great instrument which was the 19th century Orchestra so mer brings the New York philarmonic to woy Hall next time you're in woy Hall think of Gustaf mer standing on those boards there and as good luck would have it again it was reviewed in of all places as you can see by the handout for today T the Yale daily okay how about that the daily reviews Gustaf merer astonishing okay astonishing um and I didn't darn it I didn't bring my glasses today but you can sort of look at the look at the review there uh and it talks about the repertoire what what did he what did he perform first of all they slightly misspelled his name there's no e on Gustaf in the way he spelled it but that doesn't really matter um what did they perform at this concert conducted by mer in wolves Hall what's it say there Elizabeth fantas okay s fantastic the basis of what your listening exercise 34 okay so that was one of the big pieces ones that you have just engaged what else please sweet okay boach orchestral site doesn't say which one doesn't matter what else and St till yeah that's good till oil and Spiegel marry pranks that's another one of these tone poems like Zara Thruster and like death and Transfiguration by Strauss and there was also um a a Pianist there and what did she perform Olga samarov yeah the Greek piano conero but no music by mer because in his uh day uh mer was thought to really be more of a conductor uh conductor than he was a uh composer we'll come back to that point in minute the second time that mer came to New Haven was the next year 1911 he went to what was then called New Haven Hospital why because he had a heart condition uh and I gather and we have in our midst today a specialist who can talk to this more directly than I um a streptococcal infection a lingering strepto infection in the area of the heart uh that had greatly weakened his heart uh so the doctors at Yale New Haven Hospital New Haven Hospital say really nothing we can do for you he goes back to New York goes immediately back to Vienna and he dies within 6 weeks of this uh heart condition and we have and I'm delighted to say Dr Jame James Hines has been with us all semester Jim thank you for your attendance uh a cardiologist he has been here you may thought that this was just accidental but in case I was thinking this morning uh we'd never told you that we had if your heart begins to palpitate when you're listening to all this really great music and you become a phasic or something like that we have an attendant here ready to serve you in the form of Dr hind so you've been in good hands all along and thank you Jim for for being here uh so uh let's take a look at some of the things that Gustaf mer composed here and I think we've got a list up on the board okay uh Symphonies nine Symphonies why is everybody composes nine Symphonies and then they die uh I stop at 8 no uh comp he composed also nine Symphonies he composed nine Symphonies um and if you like mer and I hope you will come to like mer uh I think there's an entry path into these Symphonies start with number four it's the most user friendly then number one we played extracts out of number one in that Symphony lecture so you know that's it's a great piece too then uh Symphony Number Five which is worth the price of admission really if for no other reason than the middle movement there that adagietto is just so heartbreakingly beautiful that no one would want to miss it and then ultimately a little bit more challenging Symphonies bigger Symphonies uh number eight and number nine mer also wrote as you can see up there two collections of songs they're called orchestral leader we have this term orchestral lead simply means orchestral song uh we've had the leite before in our course uh where indeed what was the name of the lead that we worked with composer's name the name of the piece Wasing the okay that's it that's it what was the name of the piece elf king thank you Frederick and who was the composer Fran Schubert Okay so we've had a that's that's a lead for piano but now we have a lead for voice and Orchestra so it tends to be bigger and more flamboyant this is a new genre it's longer it's more colorful yet it features a single Voice singing a uh a single single text so we're going to focus on now on one of of Gustaf Mer's orchestral uh leads um and it's talked about in the textbook there uh right before impressionism uh no listening exercise on it and as I say it's in there just because I think it's a Drop dead beautiful piece and I want to to try to prze a bit with regard to M's music so it has a text here's the text the text is by romantic German poet Fredick rukard we're now talking about uh ivelt abhanden Goman by Fredick ruker as set in this collection of five songs about 190 1902 1902 um and let's take a look at the German here just for a moment I've become detached from the world um and uh I thought it might be nice to hear um a German speaker or somebody that speaks pretty good German uh tackle this text so I've asked a student David nsky to stand up if you would um and uh David's applying to med school right you're going around with all kinds of Med School interviews but here he's putting on his German hat for us uh this morning so read the first strophy please David okay and let's cut to the last one and a little bit more slowly and a little because it slows down so let's let's read it a little more slowly okay great thanks very much so as you can see here uh this is in a sense old person's music in that this is an individual that has become uh disenchanted is exhausted from the trials and tribulations of this of this world as it says I've become detached from the world and if you don't see much of me anymore I don't really care because as it says uh in the last strophy gumu I'm dead to the trumold I guess of of the world and who and I'm still in gabit and I rest now in a still land uh I'm living alone in my heaven in myin in Min Le and there we it's an interesting play of the word lead because it's not so much a song this is a metaphor for all of his music so this is an individual that has become detached from the world uh and simply wants to live in the world of music so let's listen to a bit of it now um and it starts out uh with an English horn somebody tell us review for us what an English horn is talked about this before Jerry it's basically a lower obow that's right a lower obow and it sounds a little bit mournful sounds a little bit nostalgic here so we hear lovely harp underneath and then the English horn will start with just one phrase and then the phrase will grow it's kind of a cell or a motive growing into a longer Melody as we discussed at the beginning of the course whoops uh we need let's see track two it's okay of the mo of of the Red CD oops no no let's see it should be have been the single CD that was in here it should be cd5 is sure it's not in there this is track two of what you gave it should be CD3 sorry that's it's that red one there yeah okay um so we how many CDs do we have it's doing the thing where it won't change all the way okay um shut shut it down then and we'll and and then see if we can get it back to that CD and it should be tracked two of that that CD sometimes our CD player eats our CDs it get gets it up there and it won't release them so we'll have to reconfigure this um it's an interesting uh song in that I'm going to Vamp here just for a moment we' it starts out with with the harp underneath and the English horn and it's a movement in which there is no brass whatsoever so I believe we have it set up now it's not to be an exciting movement a much more a reflective movement [Music] [Music] passes off the melody to a clarinet [Music] and then the voice will come in okay we're going to pause it there um then we will go on to a little bit of material from the climax of the song just by way of a preview here we're going to go now to 447 if you if you will uh where he works up to a peak on this text La line in m in he in m in leben in m in lead [Music] [Music] an [Music] [Music] a little bit of [Music] dissonance back to the tonic English horn comes back in builds out the melody [Music] [Music] okay now we're going to pause it here because there's one other small point I want to make and that has to do with a what's called a suspension the suspension is something that composers set up in music to sort of make us feel a particular way and they'll start with this by having a note B consonant and then having moving the harmony underneath of it to a dissonance and then resolving it to a consonant like that or [Music] maybe and the longer they sit on the dissonance the more feeling I think is is communicated and here at the end of the Romantic Period it tends to be they tend to sit on these diss inside of the suspension for a long period of time so we're about to hear we still got it right there we're about to hear the strings go up and play a suspension and then the English horn will do the same there it is now the English horn will suspend [Music] dissonance okay so that's the piece now we're going to do something we've only done one other occasion in the our class and that is the list the whole piece from beginning to end I'd like to do this I'm even a little hokey I guess but doesn't matter I'm going turn off all the lights here as best I can and I do this because gives you a sense sometimes of what at least how I engage music often times what does it do for us well we've talked before to beginning it allows us kind of relax Center our attention you're under a lot of stress at the moment this is uh the sort of climax crunch time in the academic world so this is an opportunity to kind of tune everything out maybe go inside of your own gabit here your own musical territory uh and maybe think of things in the past music as a creator of Nostalgia think of things that might be music giving us a vision perhaps of a better world uh whatever you'd like ever spin you want to put on this but we're going to each of us is now going to go into our own Zone here for about seven minutes as we listen to this orchestral lead hielt Goman by Gustaf Mala [Music] [Music] [Music] dear great [Music] titer door for on [Music] [Music] the Z Mar for [Music] GL we of God need [Music] the G and [Music] to to [Music] [Music] I am [Music] [Applause] the in [Music] my my [Music] and [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so that's our last piece of music for listening to music here now I'm going to tell you what this class was really about it wasn't about listening to music it was about saving classical music Saving classical music why why would we want to save classical music we could spend hours discussing that uh we would want to save it arguably because it is one of the things that we value in Western culture what do we value I think about this this morning we got we just had a big election right we value democracy we value religious freedom we value uh quality of the Sexes of gender what else uh du process under the law we value Shakespeare we value Leonard D Vinci and the Symphonies of of Mozart for example uh and these are very important things I think they're worth worth fighting for and worth trying to trying to preserve recently somebody gave the School of Music how much money $100 million to keep classical music Al live that's a lot of money I've done my part showed up here every day haven't missed a minute now it's time for you to do your part what's your part you have to do the following kinds of things you have to continue to buy C s and download classical music uh off of iTunes or whatever it is don't steal that stuff why if you take that stuff for nothing what are you doing you're taking the livelihood away from Jacob and Santana and uh Linda here there just the livelihood of musicians they've put their labor into it and you're taking it for nothing so download these things it doesn't cost all all that much two get involved get involved in informal singing groups keep your piano lessons if you ever had those kinds of things going on Local Coral groups whatever you get out of Yale what do you do get on the boards of these artistic institutions your local Symphony your local Coral Society Opera Company neighborhood music school here get on the board of that and help them those sorts of folks most important give music lessons to your children adopted or or natural why teaches them hard work teaches them to think sequentially teaches them various forms of quantitative reasoning teaches them also uh to be disciplined and teaches them to uh have a pride in the work product that that they that they uh ultimately ultimately generate so these are the kinds of things that that you can do I thank you for your attention I thank you I thank the Tas for doing such a wonderful we've had great Tas this year and uh to I will end by quoting thanking you for for allowing me to quote here Gustaf M once again to share with you m leben mind lead because it really is thanks very much