Arnold Schoenberg "broke down the traditional tonal system and invented a new way of organizing music" with the concepts of "twelve-tone music," "Emancipation of the dissonance" and "equal rights of pitches." He persisted his sense of tonality through his life. Pierrot Lunaire consists of musical settings of 21 poems about the character and set for voice, flute, clarinet, cello, violin, and piano. He took "atonality to never before heard places." Igor Stravinsky was a primary tonal composer with an anti-romantic attitude who sought to extend musical ambiguity as far as possible, while remaining within the tonal system. He was an objectivist who treated everything in composition including emotion as object. His work The Rite of Spring has highly
asymmetrical forms within the music, and is "highly dissonant but still based on old tonal forms."
Each time I read The Awakening, I am drawn to the passage on page 69 where Edna and Madame Ratignolle argue about “the essential” and “the unessential.” Edna tries to explain, “I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself.” What most would see as essential—money (you need it for food, clothing, shelter, etc) and life—Edna sees as “unessential.” Edna is speaking of more than that which one needs for physical survival; she would not hesitate to give her life to save the life of one of her children. On the other hand, Edna’s being, her “self,” is something quite different from her physical form.
As this passage commences, Chopin, through Edna’s thoughts, describes the seemingly endless sea that presents itself before her. Edna, through personification, shows the intimacy of her relationship with both nature and the sea. This large, “[…] never ceasing […]” (Chopin 139) body of water has entranced and enthralled Edna to the point where she is now beginning to see this natural element that amazes her so much as the only option left to her in life. Chopin reveals these intentions to the reader by describing the sea as “[…] inviting the soul to wander in the abyss of solitude” (Chopin 139). The word abyss in itself leaves the reader the impression of a mysterious place in which one might not return from; and it is later implied that Edna accepts this sensuous invitation from the sea.
My first choice was a ballet piece named La Sylphide. La Sylphide is a story about a young Scottish man named James who is soon to be wed. He falls asleep and has an intricate dream about a beautiful sylphide, which is a spirit. In his dream they dance and he soon falls in love with the sylphide. When he awakes, he soon forgets about the sylphide and focuses on his fiancée.
Johannes Brahms, a great German composer and pianist of the Romantic period, composed symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, and voice and chorus. He is considered as both a traditionalist and an innovator and his music is firmly rooted in structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters. He has contributed a lot to music by composing the master pieces such as Symphony no. 3. The Symphony no. 3 is written in F major. The symphony involves the instruments such as flute, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, contrabassoons, horns, trumpets, trombones, timpani, and strings. The symphony consists of the four movements. The first one is the Allegro con brio which is written in F major, in sonata form. The three-note motto begins
The play that I went and saw was Midsummer Night’s Dream at the University Theatre. This play was set in a proscenium venue because the audience was in front of the stage facing the actors. The playwright of this play is William Shakespeare and it was directed by Kirsten Brandt. This play centered around a bunch of lovers who get trapped in an absurd love triangle that is caused by the use of a love potion.
William Williams' "Spring and All" The Modernist era of poetry, like all reactionary movements, was directed, influenced, and determined by the events preceding it. The gradual shift away from the romanticized writing of the Victorian Era served as a litmus test for the values, and the shape of poetry to come. Adopting this same idea, William Carlos Williams concentrated his poetry in redirecting the course of Modernist writing, continuing a break from the past in more ways than he saw being done, particularly by T.S. Eliot, an American-born poet living abroad. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, was a historically rooted, worldly conscious work that was brought about by the effects of World War One. The implementation of literary allusions versus imagination was one point that Williams attacked Eliot over, but was Williams completely in stride with his own guidelines?
‘Midsummer Nights Dream’ is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and successful plays. The play was part of Shakespeare’s early work. It was written and performed around 1595. ‘A Midsummer Nights Dream’ is a romantic comedy play; and that’s what I will be focusing on how Shakespeare creates humour in act 5 scene 1. So how does he create humour?
By examining a piece like The Rite Of Spring, modernist techniques and styles can be observed, Stravinsky created “an extra rhythmic tier, somewhat like the stresses superimposed on the regular patterns of The Rite.” 4 Stravinsky pushed the envelope of rhy...
"To me he seemed like a trapped man, whose only wish was to be left alone, to the peace of his own art and to the tragic destiny to which he, like most of his countrymen, has been forced to resign himself." Nicholas Nabokov on meeting Shostakovich in 1949 in New York
Tchaikovsky is one of the most popular of all composers. The reasons are several and understandable. His music is extremely tuneful, opulently and colourfully scored, and filled with emotional passion. Undoubtedly the emotional temperature of the music reflected the composer's nature. He was afflicted by both repressed homosexuality and by the tendency to extreme fluctuations between ecstasy and depression. Tchaikovsky was neurotic and deeply sensitive, and his life was often painful, but through the agony shone a genius that created some of the most beautiful of all romantic melodies. With his rich gifts for melody and special flair for writing memorable dance tunes, with his ready response to the atmosphere of a theatrical situation and his masterly orchestration, Tchaikovsky was ideally equipped as a ballet composer. His delightful fairy-tale ballets, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker are performed more than any other ballets. Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky's first ballet, was commissioned by the Imperial Theatres in Moscow in 1875. He used some music from a little domestic ballet of the same title, composed for his sister Alexandra's children in 1871.
Next, I want to focus on the choreographic choices Fosse made during this piece. Fosse took the stereotypical view that the Weimar Republic of this time was the “hedonistic capital of avant-garde culture.” Under this approach he exaggerated the sexualization of the female dancers by providing choreography that placed an emphasis on the shaking and swaying of their buttocks and bosom. The choreography also exhibited females being self-indulgent as they were seen spanking themselves and feeling their upper thighs. In addition, Fosse’s choreography was primarily based on the principle of unison. These “Tiller Girls,” both in the piece and in Weimar culture became known for their signature synchronization. The group was created as a way of responding to the industrialization of America. As a result, the choreographic elements were inspired by the creation of factories. Fosse’s choreography was inspired by these events as he adhered to strict machine like formations of dancers within the piece. Each formation was linear and showed order.
Ask any student, and they remember middle and high school assignments to decipher William Shakespeare’s plays, whether it was Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, or other plays. Often a teacher would create a lesson plan where the students would act out the play, learning from the direct interaction. Likewise, many Shakespearean rewrites read by students inevitably contained dialogue decoders, which allowed the readers the ability to interpret a Shakespearean word or phrase into modern diction. However, many of these lesson plans are routinely used with subsequent grade levels, and therefore can become monotonous for a reader, boring the student who has to read and decipher the text.
If I were to re-record this piece, I would try to find a way of
play. The play rely’s heavily on contrast to enforce this metaphorical comparison. Helena is tall
The characteristics of romantic music are influenced by the Romantic Movement, where the arts of literature and painting play a great role in influencing romantic music. Other evidence of non-musical influences in romantic music is the popularity of romantic poetry during that era. Poems, opera arias and works form great romantic poets are transformed into instrumental works and composers like Schubert uses musical elements such as melodies inspired by poetry in his works (http://absoluteastronomy.com). The musical language itself has shown that romantic music is different from the rest of the music before its time. Extended tonal and harmonic elements are noticed in romantic music compared to those in the classical era, where chromaticism, the usage of dissonance, and modulations are used extensively.