musica

Romanticism: 19th century, most outstanding period in the history of music/ result of the new society that appeared since the French Revolution /The Romantic aspiration “art for art´s sake”, without conditionings, led music to great formal and expressive freedom, where the melody was the most important element and dynamic effects were constant./ New forms for piano and voice appeared among others and Nationalism as another part of Romanticism burst into the scene seeking to reinforce the idea of individuality and to highlight the typical and characteristic aspects of their society through folklore./ Program music: classical instrumental forms were still cultivated but the search for free and open forms made room for the development of the program music, based on the description of a program or plot (usually literary)./ two main forms : Program Symphony, (compound instrumental form divided into several movements, created by Hector Berlioz,Symphonic Poem (composition in one movement, created by Franz Liszt./ Lied: short form written for voice and piano upon a poetic text. These are popular, simple, short and easy-to-sing pieces, even for non-proffesionals. most commom scheme are: • Strophic lied A A A • Two-part lied A B • three-part lied A B A/Franz Shubert and Robert Shumann /Piano: favourite instrument of the Romanticsm because, due to its features, it makes it possible the individual performance and expression of feelings.In this period the piano reached its ultimate technical perfection thanks to improvements in the lever system in order to make the keyboard more sensitive to the touch of the performer. Damper pedal was also added which makes possible to release the keys and maintain the sound. Many short and long pieces for piano whose names are quite varied were composed/Franz Shubert, Franz Liszt., Robert Shumann and Frederick Chopin.Romantic Opera:During the Romanticism, opera underwent a great development and became the wealthy bourgeosie´s favorite performance. Big theaters were built around all Europe and singers became true stars thanks to the vocal brilliance of their arias/ italy, house of the opera,two different schools that marked the evolution of the genre everywhere in Europe: Belcanto: “beautiful singing”, genre that prevailed throughout most of Europe 18th and 19th centuries, kind of singing in which phrasing, and skill in executing highly florid passages is more important than intensity of voices. It´s a style for singers to shine mainly in the highest register. Composers: Gaetano Donizetti /Vincenzo Bellini/Verismo: more realistic plots and characters, It´s a late 19th-century style of opera/to bring realism to the opera house.ordinary characters and everyday emotions of its time particularly their darker side. Inspired by Emile Zola,Italian composers began to bring realism to their operas with gritty plots, lower-class characters and plenty of sordid violence opposite to the tales of princesses and goddesses that existed in the past/Ruggiero Leoncavallo /Giacomo Puccini 

Verismo:One of the most prolific opera composers is undoubtedly Giuseppe Verdi who represents the peak of the Italian opera. Giuseppe Verdi was born in Italy in 1813, prior to Italian unification and produced many successful operas, including La Traviata, Falstaff, Nabucco, Rigoletto and Aida, became known for his skill in creating melody and his profound use of theatrical effect. Verdi died on January 27, 1901, in Milan, Italy.France: Main composers:Giacomo Meyerbeer, creator of the “grand opera” with Les Huguenots, which uses large set designs and ballets. • Jacques Offenbach, main representative of the “operetta” with Orpheus in the Underworld, full of humor and passages with dialog and The Hoffman´s Tales.(Hoffmann´s Tales-Cuentos de Hoffman- Olympia´s aria) • George Bizet, with his opera Carmen set in Seville, which used popular dances and themes. Germany, the great leading figure was Richard Wagner who conceived opera as a “total work of art”: poetry, music, set design and action put together, in order to create a continuous “musical drama” orchestra had a leading role. The texts of his opera, written by Wagner himself, were inspired by Greek mythology. Richard Wagner born May 22, 1813, Leipzig (Germany) died February 13, 1883, Venice, (Italy), German dramatic composer and theorist whose operas and music had a revolutionary influence on the course of Western music. Among his major Works are “The Flying Dutchman” (El Holandés errante) (1843), Tannhäuser (1845), Lohengrin (1850), Tristan und Isolde (1865), Parsifal (1882), and his great tetralogy “The Ring of the Nibelung (1869-76).Spain, the reaction against the influence of Italian opera revitalized with the Zarzuela as typical national genre, which evolved two different ways:Zarzuela Grande: three acts and with a larger musical development,Francisco Asenjo Barbieri and his The Little Barber of Lavapies.Género Chico: single act with fewer characters and a predominance of the spoken text over the sung text. Federico Chueca ( La Gran Via), Tomás Bretón (La Verbena de la Paloma) Romantic music and Leitmotiv. an association of ideas and musical timbres with particular characters, emotions, actions or objects, which allowed listeners to follow the narration. It is what Berlioz called “fixed idea” to represent his loved one. Wagner´s orchestras made use of the leitmotiv in order to represent all kinds of objects, characters and emotions. Nationalisms: appeared in the mid-1800s as another Romantic component. They sought to accentuate the musical and cultural individuality and autonomy of different countries and acquired special relevance in those which had not had much weight in the artistic development. In this way they wanted to come out of their cultural inferiority by looking into their own history and recovering their traditions.music is characterized by the use of folklore in two different ways: • By literally copying the sources • By imitating its characteristic musical features, scales and melodies, dance rhythms,.

Russia:most famous representative was Piotr Ilicch Tchaikovsky, born April 25 (May 7, New Style), 1840, Votkinsk, Russia—died October 25 (November 6), 1893, St. Petersburg, the most popular Russian composer of all time. His music has always had great appeal for the general public in virtue of its tuneful, open-hearted melodies, impressive harmonies, and colourful, picturesque orchestration, all of which evoke a profound emotional response.Norway: Represented by Edvar Grieg with his incidental music for the play Peer Gynt.) Czechoslovakia Anton Dvorak represents this nationalism with his new World Symphony.United States With George Gershwin who showed the influence of jazz in his Rhapsody in Blue. Spain Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados represent Spanish Nationalism, both of them famous for their piano works apart from other instrumental compositions. SIGLO XX Evolution 1.-Impressionism:typical French movement related to impressionist paintings with colorful open spaces and bright landscapes. The main composers were Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). looked for the pleasure of sounds by means of “faded” melodies, and a new concept of timbre .Expressionism German movement that influenced art, literature and music, characterized by the expression of the human soul in a very harsh and pessimistic way. Arnold Schoenberg (1874- 1951). Expressionist music used constant dissonances, an atonal system that broke away with melodic organization and classical harmony.New sonority: Stravinsky The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) marked the beginning of a truly contemporary sonority that influenced every composer of this period.great work was the ballet The Rite of Spring, written in 1913.Rupture/Futurism  born in Italy,1909, it broke with the art of the past in order to defend a new modern era characterized by machines and movement. The futurist movement did not last very long. But its idea of connecting music and reality by using noises from modern societies had a great impact on many contemporary composers. Among the most important pieces that we can call futurist, we can mention “Ionisation” by Edgar Varese (1885-1965) and “Pacific 231” by Arthur Honegger (1892-1955).Dodecaphonism It is a composition technique based on the twelve sounds of the chromatic scale. This method created by Schoenberg,1923 intention of establishing a new organized system of musical composition. According to Schoenberg, Dodecaphonism is “a method of composing with twelve notes which are related only to one another”, very note is as important as the rest. The twelve-sound sequences can be presented on the harmonic or melodic level, and in any register or timbre. 

The return: Neoclassicism: appeared in the 1920s as a reaction against Post-romanticism, Impressionism and Expressionism. It went back to the cultivation of forms and genres from the Classicism and the Baroque, in order to find a new type of simplicity. Erik Satie (1866-1925), incorporated in their music influences from jazz and music-hall, Carl Orff (1895-1892) with his famous “Carmina Burana” based on the songs of goliards from the 13th century; and Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) with Classical Symphony and the folktale for narrator and orchestra Peter and the Wolf.20th century in Spain: Manuel de Falla (1876-1946), due to his connection with the literary generation. Falla took Nationalism to its peak but he was also influenced by other tendencies like Impressionism and Neoclassicism.  most important works:the Andalucian ballets “El Amor Brujo” and “El Sombrero de Tres Picos The composers of the so-called Generation of the Republic or Generation of 27, due to their connection with the poetic generation, followed the path started by Falla and achieved international consolidation for Spanish music. Among the main composers of the generation of 27 we can point out Federico Mompou (1893-1987) whose music was remarkably simple and lyrical; Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999)“Concierto de Aranjuez”