MHL 603 – PREPARATION 8

(F-11)

Due Monday Nov 28 via Email

Listen to all the music on the Art-Pop-Folk CD and also on the "Art-Folk-Pop Originals" CD.

Please read the following essays:

Béla Bartók, “The influence of peasant music on modern music,” in Schwarz and Childs, Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (1967), 72-76, (1st published, 1931).

Constant Lambert, “Nationalism and the modern scene,” Music Ho! (1936/1966), 151-163.

Write a couple of paragraphs in response to one of the following questions:

1. Review Lambert’s and Bartók’s comments on the incompatibility of modern harmonies and folk melodies (Lambert, p.155; Bartók, p.77). Is their reasoning the same or different? Discuss the compatibility of modern harmonies and folk (or folk-like) melodies in three pieces from this unit. Are there any that you feel are examples of what Lambert calls " an harmonic style that has not the remotest emotional or technical relation to the harmonies suggested by the melody itself"?

2. Lambert argues that by the 1930s folk music had become “artificial,” replaced in Europe and America by international popular styles (156-57). This suggests, though Lambert doesn’t say so, that popular music might be a better source for modern composers than folk music. Discuss the use of "popular" music by Ives, Villa-Lobos and Bolcom. Do these composers use any or all of Bartók's three strategies? Discuss with examples.

Send your paragraph (or two) to john.spitzer@notes sfcm.edu by Monday 28 Nov at 6 PM. This is the last preparation of the semester. Hooray! I want to compliment all of you on the mostly timely and often thoughtful work you’ve put in on them.