Transcript Lesson 1 - Twelve Tone-Extended Techniques-New

Grade 8
Unit 1 –
Lesson 1
Please have a seat and prepare
yourself for an awesome year
First thing is first, the person to the right or left
of you is your partner for the day. Introduce
yourself and start talking about the piece of
music you’re hearing
Do you like it? Why or why not?
What type of music is this?
What does this music make you think of?
What do you
think happened
to music after
WW II?
World War II was a unique situation for music and its
relationship to warfare. Never before was it possible for
not only single songs, but also single recordings of songs
to be so widely distributed to the population. Never
before had the number of listeners to a single
performance (a recording or broadcast production) been
so high. And never before had states had so much
power to determine not only what songs were
performed and listened to, but to control the recordings
not allowing local people to alter the songs in their own
performances. Though local people still sang and
produced songs, this form of music faced serious new
competition from centralized electronic distributed
music.
Remember people were just
beginning to have radios
Music had to change….
And it did. One example is
Arnold Schoenberg (18741951)
Atonal music – a piece of music with no tonal center
Twelve tone music - The technique is a
means of ensuring that all 12 notes of
the chromatic scale are sounded as often
as one another in a piece of music while
preventing the emphasis of any one
note through the use of tone rows, an
ordering of the 12 pitches. All 12 notes are
thus given more or less equal importance,
and the music avoids being in a key. The
technique was influential on composers in
the mid-twentieth century.
Deals a lot with mathematics
A tone row – has all 12 notes of the chromatic scale.
Retrograde – the tone row is backwards.
Inversion – the intervals go in opposite direction from
the original tone row.
Several individuals after Schoenberg took music a step
further and manipulated current instruments or made
their own instruments
Henry Cowell – The
Banshee
The Quadrangularis Reversum is a percussion instrument invented and
built by Harry Partch in 1965. The instrument features an inverted diamond
shaped centre compared to an earlier instrument made by Partch,
the Diamond Marimba.
Underneath the bars there are bamboo resonators. The instrument is made
out of a eucalyptus branch and redwood structure and one of Partch‘s bigger
instrument sculptures. Partch used the instrument in his two last
compositions.
What household items could you use to make
an instrument?
Do you see anything in this room that
might be used, aside from all of the
keyboards?
What about an old tape recorder? Could
this be used as an instrument?
How?
Next class we will talk about Steve
Reich and Minimalism.
We will also be talking about teams,
and how you will be designing your
instruments.
Could you add an electric, or
computer component to your
instrument?