I have learned that... (1)

For a while Dr. Brunner has talked about his concerns with how to evaluate our learning in this course, so I decided to start a series of posts with a summary of what I have learned so far about our composers. So here is post 1!!!

Charles Edward Ives (1874 –1954) – Considered one of the first American composers of international significance. Besides being a professional trained organist and composer, he also worked in insurance for 30 years, composition was, then, his free time activity. George Ives, Charles’s father, had probably a great influence on the type of music his son would write in the future. George was a marching band director with some unusual musical routines; he taught his son the traditions of harmony and counterpoint while at the same time he would encourage Charles to experiment – he would often make his son sing a song in one key, while he accompanied in another key. In 1894 Ives started his formal music studies at Yale, in the same year, his father died suddenly of a stroke. When Ives first started at Yale he was as a virtuoso organist and an experienced composer of popular and church music but with limited exposure to classical music. He was introduced to more classical style of composition by his teacher Horatio Parker with whom he had courses in harmony and music history during his first two years, and then studied counterpoint, strict composition and instrumentation, sometimes as the only registered student. Ives’s compositions are very diversified – some of them (especially his academic works) carry traces of European-Romantic traditions; other, are essentially experimentalist using techniques such as polytonality, polyrhythm, use of chords based on 4ths or 5ths, atonality and tone clusters among others. A work that I can immediately relate his name with – the Concord Sonata.

Edgard Varèse (1883 – 1965) – Although he was French-born he spent the greater part of his career in the United States. His music shows rhythmic complexity, use of free atonality and forms not principally dependent on harmonic progression or thematic working. He is considered the precursor of electronic music.Most of his traditional music studies happened during the first decade of the 20th century when he studied with Giovanni Bolzoni, Roussel, Bordes, and d'Indy. A work to relate – Hyperism.

Morton Feldman (1926 – 1987) – Although he had studied composition with Wallingford Riegger and Stefan Wolpe, he did not agree with many of the views of these composition teachers, and he spent much of his time simply arguing with them. Feldman was an admire of Varèse’s music. In the early 1950s he became associated with John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and David Tudor. His strongest influence, however, came from New York abstract expressionist painters. Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and especially Philip Guston stimulated Feldman to imagine a sound world unlike any he had ever heard. A work I will relate – String Quartet II (probably because it is over six hours long without a break!!!)

Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884 – 1920) – I was not in class when he was discussed (icy storm!!!!!), but I researched a little about him. He started his music studies having piano lessons with his sister, later on he began to study the piano with Mary Selena Broughton. She had a profound influence on his personal and musical development; she both suggested and financed his musical studies in Berlin. He went to Berlin decided to prepare himself for a career as a concert pianist. There he studied the piano with Ernst Jedliczka and Gottfried Galston, composition with Philippe Rüfer, and counterpoint with Max Loewengard and Wilhelm Klatte. He became more and more interested in composition. He was fascinated by the exotic, mysterious sound of the French Impressionists, and was compositionally much influenced by them while he was in Europe. He also studied the work of contemporary Russian composers (for example Scriabin). He is the most famous American representative of musical Impressionism.
His most famous work I believe are White Peacock, Piano Sonata, The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, and Poem for Flute and Orchestra.

Henry Cowell (1897 –1965) – His vitae states: American composer, writer, performer, publisher and teacher. If nothing else got stuck on my head about Cowel, the phrase “play inside the piano” did. Cowell was considered ultra-modernist. The ultra-modernist movement had expanded its reach in 1928, when Cowell led a group that included Ruggles, Varèse, Carlos Salzedo, Emerson Whithorne, and Carlos Chávez in founding the Pan-American Association of Composers, dedicated to promoting composers from around the Western Hemisphere and creating a community among them that would transcend national lines. Cowell himself was strongly influenced by non-western tradition. I think Aeolian Harp is a good piece to remember him.

Conlon Nancarrow (1912 –1997) – First idea that will come to my mind when I hear his name is “player piano.” Nancarrow was born in the USA, but lived and worked in Mexico for the most part of his adult life. During his youth he used to play the trumpet in a jazz band, he would later study with Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Nicolas Slonimsky. Nancarrow was a member of the communist party and when the Spanish Civil War broke out, he traveled to Spain to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in fighting against Francisco Franco. Upon his return to the United States in 1939, he learned that his Brigade colleagues were having trouble getting their U.S. passports renewed because of their Communist Party membership. After spending time in New York City in 1940, Nancarrow moved to Mexico to escape the harassment visited upon former Communist Party members. Even though Nancarrow had already composed during his time in his native country, it was in Mexico that he did the work he is best known for today. Nancarow’s compositions demand extra-human abilities to perform because of its rhythmic complexity, the alternative he found was to write for the player piano because it could produce extremely complex rhythmic patterns at a speed far beyond the abilities of humans. Nancarow was so exigent with the type of sound he wanted that he adapted his own player pianos, increasing their dynamic range by tinkering with their mechanism, and covering the hammers with leather (in one player piano) and metal (in the other) so as to produce a more percussive sound. His music is so dense that when one listen to it, even a short one-minute piece, he has the feeling of hearing a much longer work.

Harry Partch (1901 –1974) – With the name of Partch I can associate, besides composition, just intonation, microtonality, and musical instrument creation. Here is a list of some of his instruments I found on Wikipedia
* The Diamond Marimba is a marimba with keys arranged in a physical manifestation of the 11-limit tonality diamond.
* The Quadrangularis Reversum inverted the key layout of the Diamond Marimba with sets of alto-range auxiliary keys on either side.
* The 11-key Bass Marimba and the 4-key Marimba Eroica have more traditional linear layouts, and are very low in pitch. The Eroica's range extends well below that of the concert piano.
* The Mazda Marimba is made of Mazda light bulbs and named after the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda.
* The Bamboo Marimbas, nicknamed "Boo" and "Boo II", are marimbas made of bamboo, using the concept of a tongued resonator to produce the tones.
* The Cloud Chamber Bowls is a set of pyrex bowls from a cloud chamber, suspended in a frame.
* The Spoils of War is a collection of several instruments, including more Cloud Chamber Bowls, artillery shell casings, metal whang-guns, and several wooden tones.
* The Gourd Tree and Cone Gongs are two separate instruments often played by the same player. The gourd tree is a bough of eucalyptus supporting several singing bowls attached to gourd resonators. The cone gongs are two fuel tank nose-cones, mounted on a stand low to the ground.
* The Zymo-Xyl (from the Greek words for "fermentation" and "wood") is a xylophone augmented with tuned liquor bottles and hubcaps. (Partch lamented that there was no Greek word for "hubcaps".)
* The Kitharas (named after the Greek kithara) are large upright stringed instruments, tuned by sliding pyrex rods underneath the strings, and played with fingers or a variety of plectra. Their sound is one of the most unmistakable in Partch's music.
* The Harmonic Canons (from the same root as qanún) are 44-stringed instruments with complex systems of bridges. They are tuned differently depending on the piece, and are played with fingers or picks, or in some cases, unique mallets.

Benjamin Burwell Johnston, Junior (b. 1926) – He is know for his work in microtonality. Similarly to Partch, he also experimented just intonation, however he had no skills to build new instruments which forced him to compose primarily for traditional instruments. He was also an experimentalist, but indeed the majority of his pieces are tonal.