My Edge

When I was considering signing up for this class, I thought very carefully about why I wanted to take it and what I could possibly glean from studying the music of the 20th century. My decision was made when I completed a Research Methods assignment on Gian Carlo Menotti and his music, focusing on his brilliant career in the 1930s and 50s, and his sudden fall from popularity in the mid 1960s. His choice of medium was Opera, a genre thought to be dying in the early part of the 20th century, and his work was often thought to be too traditional to survive in the modern musical world, where everyone around him was frantically trying to find new ways of expression. I feel however, that through his adoption of this supposedly antiquated form, he managed to produce innovative operas for a new generation, and his work with television and Broadway pushed aside many of the previously held ideas about where and how opera could be performed. His work allowed other composers to find new ways to experiment within the operatic form, paving the way for John Adams and William Bolcom among many other American opera composers.
Beyond the operatic stage, the only other 20th century American music that I know well is that of the Broadway theatre, which I deeply and passionately love. This probably explains my affection for composers such as Bernstein and Copland. My familiarity with other major composers however, is at best brief and more often, fleeting. Composers such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Berg, and Cage are not in my general repertoire though bits and pieces of their works pass through my hands, I will admit that I rarely consider them with any great degree of depth. In this class, I hope that I will be able to change that. My “edge” is very much on the experimental music, which includes electronic music, which I hate. Not because it is electronic, but because it often involves prolonged high-pitched sounds which then causes me to suffer from painful headaches. The works of the Serialists are often outside my comfort zone as well. Though I have worked with and enjoyed several pieces by Schoenberg (an entire portion of my recital is dedicated to his cabaret music) as well as Berg and Webern, much of the concept of Serialism is lost on me, largely because I do not have a particularly mathematical way of thinking about music.
Because of my fascination with Menotti, I am hoping that this class will give me a better concept of the world in which he lived and worked, as well as the music that was being composed around him. Perhaps this will help me explain his overwhelming popularity at one point in time and his later dismissal as a sentimentalist. If possible, I would very much like to look at the influence of Broadway on American Classical music, and how the 1950s seems to have shaped much of popular America’s ideas on what Classical music should and should not be. I feel that this class will give me an invaluable amount of perspective on the many works outside of my comfort zone, and with that perspective, I will more fully understand the music that I love.