ART, FOLK, POPULAR MUSIC

(F-11)

 

1. Social categories of music

2-way categorization - In 18th century and before the big musical division was between rural and urban music – court music vs. music of ordinary people – Over course of 19th century there was more and more commercial music – in 20th the old categorization was replaced by 3-way categorization: “Art-pop-folk” – Note that what we call "folk" music is often popular and commercial (e.g. Stephen Foster songs, bluegrass scene)

“Art” refers to music of educated elite, "folk" refers to traditional, rural music, "popular" to commercial, urban music – “folk” and “pop” can be called "vernacular" - for language: speech of the people (not of the learned class) - For music: "people's music" as opposed to art music

After WW I some composers tried to connect art music compositions to vernacular music, either “folk” or “pop” – Variety of motives, mainly related to modernism or nationalism

“Available” vernaculars – different in different countries, different situations – We’ll consider 3 composers, each working with different vernaculars

 

2.  Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Biography – father was Danbury CT bandmaster, Charles was whiz on piano as young man, then studied music at Yale – Ives later emphasized father over Yale, but he was very well trained – Composed from college days through 1927 or so – Career in life insurance industry (Ives & Myrick agency in New York), very successful and wealthy – Heart attack in 1918 – after that he mainly revised and promoted his compositions – Also supported other composers (Cowell, Harrison, Ruggles)

Jan Swafford comments that Ives was musically a modernist but temperamentally and socially conservative and anti-bohemian – This is one reason he wasn’t successful as a composer – His friends and associates hated his music – He had no audience

Ives was “discovered” in 50s – people like Kirkpatrick, Stokowski, Bernstein started to perform his music

Ives used American vernaculars as path away from European 19th-century traditions and toward modern music – American vernaculars differentiated his music categorically from European traditions

What were some available American vernacular sources at end of 19th century?

Hymn tunes

Patriotic tunes, marches

Dance tunes – fiddle tunes

Ragtime (later jazz)

“parlor” songs

Ballads

Immigrant music (polkas, Yiddish songs, etc)

Black music, spirituals

Ives chooses among these vernaculars – He uses the first three a lot, the next two quite a bit, the last three not at all – He sometimes uses several different vernaculars in the same piece

Ives’s characteristic technique was "collage" - i.e. combining pre-existing material (mainly vernacular) without diluting or making accommodations on any side, i.e. each element, each fragment retains all its character - (Ives didn't call it collage; term is borrowed from art) – Sometimes he quotes literally; sometimes he rewrites or paraphrases

Collage technique is connected to Ives's ideas about music as "substance":  Each bit of the mosaic has individuality and meaning, their combination creates the world "as it really is", not a prettied-up, artificial, "artistic" world – Borrowed elements bring meanings to music – Ives insisted that music was only important if it meant something to people

“General William Booth Enters Heaven” (1914) (NAWM 168)

Poem by Vachel Lindsey – William Booth was founder of Salvation Army (Christian evangelists with military organization) – Ives set the poem as it was published in the newspaper at the time of Booth’s death (1912)

PLAY beginning – listen for vernacular elements

drumbeat

hymn tune – “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?” – Later this segues into another hymn “There is a fountain filled with blood” – These were late 19th-century “gospel” hymns, not traditional Protestant or Methodist hymns – i.e. more like “pop” tunes

READ poem text – What is Lindsey's attitude toward Booth and militant Christianity? What is Ives's attitude? – Neither is entirely clear

PLAY again – Name different vernaculars that Ives uses

 

3. Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) - Creation of the World (ballet - 1923) (NAWM 173)

Milhaud had spent the war years in South America and had heard a lot of Samba music - "Le boeuf sur la toit" (ballet - 1920) is based on samba

"Creation" assimilates recent American jazz -- James Reese Europe had toured France during WWI - Milhaud had heard Billy Arnold (white band) in London and then visited US in 1922, where he spent some time in Harlem

Ballet commissioned by Ballet Suedois (Ballets Russes wannabe) - Sets and costumes by Fernand Léger

What did the French public understand by "jazz" in 1923, and what did Jazz mean to them?

Jazz was almost any US popular music - e.g. Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Paul Whiteman, James P. Johnson (here's another) - Thus mostly what we now think of as ragtime

Meaning was contradictory combination of primitivism and modernism - a) Jazz = Black = African = primitive, uncivilized, natural, vital b) Jazz = American = modern = industry, innovation, bobbed hair

Other jazz-influenced compositions:  Ravel, Violin sonata; Kurt Weill, 3-Penny Opera, Mahagonny; Stravinsky, Soldier's Tale, Ragtime

Contrast to Ives who uses a vernacular that belongs to both himself and his audience – Milhaud uses an "exotic" (though familiar) vernacular

PLAY fugue – Which elements of 1920s jazz style are assimilated by Milhaud? (instrumentation, syncopated clichés, dirty notes) – Which not used? (chord changes, beat, forms)

Note that in some ways Milhaud is anticipating later developments in jazz, e.g. use of saxophone, parallel chords, bowed bass, riffing

 

4.  Bela Bartok (1881-1945)

To break with romantic traditions of 19th century, Milhaud and Weill used urban popular music - Bartok found a different source: music of villages, i.e. "folk music"

We heard use of "folk" materials already in Stravinsky - There they were heard as "exotic" or “primitive” - Bartok makes folk material central and essential – For Bartok folk music was the path to modernism

B. was introduced to folk music study by Zoltan Kodaly – Bartok didn’t just exploit printed collections like Stravinsky -- B. did a great deal of collecting in the field with wax cylinders - Then transcribed what he had recorded -- Not just in Hungary – he began there, but also collected in Rumania, Serbia, Turkey, Morocco - "By the end of his life he had recorded and transcribed about 8,000 tunes" (Austin, p.225)

For Bartok, folk music served as a means of freeing himself from inherited traditions, especially harmonic traditions - The modes of Hungarian folk music de-emphasized tonic-dominant and chromatic harmonies and led in the direction of non-tonal music in which the scale degrees had equal importance

Contrast with Liszt or Brahms who took Hungarian (or Gypsy) folk tunes and set them with common-practice harmonies – Bartok insisted that harmonizations be derived from the melodies themselves

Bartok often took tunes he had collected, arranged and harmonized them, especially for piano and in vocal arrangements – just as often he composed his own tunes in one or another folk style – The latter procedure is more characteristic of his orchestral music – I don’t believe that any of the tunes in Strings, Percussion and Celesta are arrangements; all are original

Bartok balanced folkloric strain with "systematic" strain – He treated folk and folk-derived materials with rigorous technique – fugue, canon, mirrors, inversion, complex rhythmic schemes, systematic harmonic procedures

 

5.  Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) NAWM 167

Composed during time of personal success and achievement – Professor at Budapest Academy, concert tours as pianist (with wife, Ditta), many commissions – Other works: 5th string quartet, sonata for 2 pianos and percussion, Contrasts (for Benny Goodman), 2nd violin concerto, Mikrokosmos (later volumes)

Scored for 2 string orchestras (antiphonal), piano, percussion section (inc. timpani) and celesta – piano is used mainly as pitched percussion, 2 hands usually play together

Four movements alternate between more folkloric and more systematic

1st is slow fugue (systematic)

2nd is energetic allegro (more folkloric) (supplementary listening)

3rd is adagio, symmetrical structure (systematic) (NAWM 167)

4th is fast dance (folkloric)

But note that more folkloric movements have systematic aspects and more systematic have folkloric aspects – I’ll point these out below

2nd movement (supplementary)

PLAY beginning through 2nd theme – listen for folk-like features – rhythm, melodic profile, oom-pah accompaniment, melodic sequence, suggestion of modal scale (though actually chromatic), homophony (but not in unison), ornamentation of 2nd theme,

But note systematic features: alternation between orchestras, canonic entrances, 2nd theme at tritone, inversion of 2nd theme

3rd mvt (NAWM 167) – Example of more systematic procedures

Division of orchestra

m.1-3 – palindrome (mirror) in xylophone – notes are grouped according the Fibonacci series – 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 . . . – Bartok used this series in several different ways as rhythmic principle – Webern and Weird Al Yankovich both used palindromes as a compositional principle

m.14-16- canonic imitation

PLAY (track 36)

BUT folklore in 2nd section – PLAY 37 – melody, timbre and harmonization

Systematic treatment of folk-like material – PLAY 39 – inversion, diminution