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Modernism

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What does it mean to be "modern"?

Arnold Schönberg:

Erinnerung an Oskar Kokoschka

Memory of Oskar Kokoschka 1910

Listen to the Second String Quartet. First, listen to movement 3, then movement 4. What kind of transition do you hear?

Now, listen to the whole piece to hear how these transitions happened.

How good or bad are modern composers in expressing their ideas? 

How well or bad express modern composers their ideas?

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(Red) Gazes of

March 1910

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“Faces and eyes, everywhere eyes!”

“ The immensities behind his eyes.”

- S. N. Behrman

 

“His too sensitive face, difficult to look into…and impossible not to look into.”

- Robert Craft

“When Schoenberg looked at you, you disappeared."

- Igor Stravinsky

Gazes of May 1910

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Gazes of 1910

Reduced to an abstract

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Cards

What do your cards look like?

How are these modern?

How do the design vary?

Can you make connections to other theorists like Goethe?

Dials and spectra

Color and music scholars across time have tried to shuffle and organize all types and classifications of color into some visual representation--including some of their own “twists”:

  • Newton’s color circle incorporated note names, Scriabin’s “clavier à lumières” associates colors to notes on a keyboard, and Helmholtz explored theories of sound and color perception. 

  • The "rose of temperaments" (Temperamentenrose) by Goethe and Schiller, grouped and matched twelve colours to human character traits Goethe’s Theory of Colors: The 1810 Treatise talks about the sensations of color reaching our brain as shaped by our perception, in addition to the physics of light.

  • Some other known color wheels were made by Itten, Munsell, Boutet, and Schiffermüller. 

  • Pitch constellations and the circle of fifths are used to visualize key signatures, and chord or transposing wheels are created to help musicians understand harmony. Coltrane's Tone Circle borrows this shape to explore patterns of notes (scales, chords) to write songs. More recently, cyborg Harbisson has also developed a human color wheel. 

“The various forms of the [twelve tone row] overlap both horizontally and vertically to such an extent that completely free melodies and harmonies seem to arise whose relations to the basic shape are not easily recognizable. Almost every note is constituent part at once of several forms of the basic shape, and is capable of more than one interpretation.”

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Webern's "Magic Square"

(The Path to New Music)

EAR - EYE

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Latin Palindrome square

Learn more about Schoenberg’s Chart of the Regions or Hauer’s 12-tone experiments that try to visualize music.

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Structural Functions of Harmony, 1939 - 1948

Chart of harmonic Regions.

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Primary colors are “louder,” with crescendos and decrescendos.

How might you make a connection between what you hear and see?

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