Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story”, Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and Nielson’s “Symphony No. 5” all utilize different symphonic techniques to create 3 beautiful pieces.…
Popularity of the Third Symphony reaches far beyond the world of classical music. In 1992, the symphony has reached the top of the American and British music charts. The composition was included in several movie soundtracks, and as well it has become…
Berlioz was known for his use of large orchestras, often made up of more than 1000 performers. The use of giant orchestras is a development of the romantic period. Leonard Bernstein describes the symphony as “”the first musical expedition into psychedelic because of its hallucinatory and dream-like nature”; this is very unique to a piece composed of this period. Berlioz composed music that represented his lively imagination. Freedom of form and design was also a key aspect of the romantic period and Berlioz’s symphony portrays this well. Lastly, during his five movements there is a large range of dramatic contrasts of dynamics and pitch, especially during his first movement. A dramatic contrast is also a characteristic well known during this…
The second piece I am going to discuss is the Symphony No.2 in D Minor, Op. 36 composed by Ludwig van Beethoven(1770-1827). It was in the Classical period, and the genre of it is Symphony because of it had four movements. The first movement is in the Adagio molto form, the second movement is in the Larghetto form, the third movement is in the Scherzo: Allegro form which breaks the rule of most of symphonies, and the fourth movement is in the Allegro molto form. The length of the work is about thirty-five minutes and…
Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, composed in 1830, helped lead into the new genre of programme music. Much like the dialogue before a song in opera, the programme was designed to be read by the audience before hearing the symphony. Berlioz’s program was an overview of the story that the music portrayed, or as Holoman wrote “To explain the context of the drama represented in his [Berlioz’s] work…”. For an instrumental drama, written context is needed if the listener is to interpret the meaning within the music that the composer intended. Although Schumann wrote about how he and his friend, whose “…two visions coincided even to the exact city.” about a march without the need of a written prompt, I feel that perhaps the average listener…
Symphonie Fantastique is a symphony written by French composer Hector Berlioz in 1830 and composed of five movements. It was written for his English lover and was program music. The first movement is the basic introduction to the movements and it starts off slow and emotional and then it quickens and sounds frantic and crazy. With the slowing and speeding up of the music, there are elements of acoustics and it sounds like there is a heavy and light use of plucking strings. There is also a very repetitive themes, both the acoustics and in the pounding of the drum. Unpredictability was also an element of the movement, just when you thought…
The classical era brought about a plethora of changes which drove western music into a brand new direction. Whereas the Renaissance period brought about enlightenment and the breaking away of traditional religious music, and the Baroque period exploding the provisions of artistic expression, the Classical period came back to square one and established systemized order. Although we no longer have the same verbosity of the Baroque era, the Classical period combined the elements of order and grace to achieve a more widespread method of entertainment and culture. Among these elements is the classical symphony, which was established by Joseph Haydn. Though many other genres existed at the time, it was the symphony that stood out and clearly represented the substance of the Classical period.…
He was said to be both a traditionalist and an innovator. He was perceived so by many musicians of his time because he tried to find new ways to approach harmony and melody by using techniques that had previously been mastered by composers like Beethoven, Mozart and Bach. Some of his most important musical contributions were: the Ein Deutsches Requiem, which Brahms composed for the death of his friend Robert Schumann and of his mother; the Hungarian Dances, which were among some of his most popular works; “Brahms’ Lullaby”, which he composed for the birth of a friend’s child; and Brahms’ Symphony No. 3, which has been highly admired by many world class…
I attended concert Welcome Christmas 2014 performed by the Vocal Essence and The Ensemble singers on Friday December 5th from 7.30 to 9: 30 pm at the Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church, Apple Valley. The concert was conducted by Phillip Brunelle, narrated by Katherrine Fennard and fiddled by Sara Pajounen. Recording devices and cameras were prohibited it could have been a nice opportunity to record and listen again. I arrived just on time and the singers all dressed in black suites for men and black dresses for women processed silently as they took their spots on the stage according to the parts they were practicing for while the audience cheered for them as they took their spots on stage. As the choristers arrived the hall the musical prelude was going on with different instruments such as the flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, horn, trumpet, fiddle, violin, viola, cello, bass and percussion but the musicians stopped playing and cheered them as well. Everyone cheered them and then sat down and the deal began.…
Brahms is a composer in which melody is not the key focus, but still does in fact use it to his advantage. As a romantic composer Brahms definitely uses the features of the romantic era in his music, for example, the augmentation of motifs. This happens regularly throughout the piece but specifically he does an augmentation of the x motif in bar 105-108. Another melodic feature that is present in this Piano Quintet is the use of ornamentation. This helps to create decoration to the melody line and is seen in the y motif at bar 109. The last melodic feature that Brahms predominantly uses is rests and staccatos. This creates a jerky melody throughout for the strings and piano to play.…
No. 1 - Dvorak - Symphony No. 1 - Bizet - Carmen Suite No.1 & 2 - Hanson - Symphony No. 2 Romantic - Strauss - Feierlicher Einzug Notable Wind…
About two weeks after the 2013 All-State concert, juniors Mitch Dekutoski and Julianna Norby received letters from the Honors Performance Series at Carnegie Hall inviting them to audition for their program…
Even in the Nineteenth century Mozart was one of the leading Classical composers and was a master at all genres of classical music, his music was often cheerful and disorderly, but yet he could write outstanding melodies that were simple and unpretentious, which contained an unforgettable, haunting beauty. His music was greatly influenced by Franz Joseph Hayden' who was one of the main influences which transformed the classical genre from little more than a divertimento of strings to music with an almost chamber music style but which gave all parts of the orchestra an equal role. His ideas not only influenced Mozart they also went on to influence Ludwig Van Beethoven' who's music is not only astonishing and remarkable but is still very popular. But for what ever influential reason these composers wrote, all their musical compositions often had significant similarities, as with all classical music they were written for an orchestra, mainly full and often symphony. Many composers of the classical genre wrote music with flexible rhythm, and the symphonies they wrote were full of complicated and complex key changes, modulations and…
The famous "Emperor Quartet" (op. 76, Nr. 3) whose second movement contains variations on the old Austrian national anthem, "Gott erhalte Franz der Kaiser", for which Haydn composed the music. Unfortunately, this song was adopted as the melody for "Deutschland Über Alles" and, after World War II, the Austrians adopted a new national anthem.…
The Yellow River’s 2nd movement begins with the conjunct rise and fall of the cello melody in the upbeat to the first bar, the Classical Symphony’s 3rd movement melody begins after the 4 bar intro with a heavy ‘rustic’ ie. pastoral-like themed in its whimsicality. This melody in the upper strings descends sequentially and modulates to chord 6 in B minor after the first two bars of figure 1. The chord progression in bar 7 moves from F sharp through C sharp and then back to F sharp in an interrupted cadence. This is then surpassed by the key change in bar 10 to C sharp major 2nd inversion, returning to the original tonic key of D major by bar 12 by means of a very innovative, neat ascending chromatic scale manifested most clearly in the flutes, oboes and first violins. Here the B sharp, C sharp, D chromaticism is quite clearly a romanticised, neo-classic aspect of Prokofiev’s ‘Classical Symphony’. In the first 12 bars, he simply uses a number of harmonic and melodic devices to modulate into numerous foreign keys and then uses a neat little hinge, in this case the ascending chromatic scale to bring us back to the tonic. This is typical of Prokofiev’s compositional style.…