Individualism and

Polystylism
Expansion and Elaboration

- Composers from the 1950s and 1960s remained active, exploring new
avenues and expanding on personal idioms

Ex.

- Milton Babbitt
- Karlheinz Stockhausen
- Pierre Boulez
Gyorgy Ligeti

What influences did he use to escape the

constraints of modernism and the avant-garde?

What is micropolyphony?

What are some of the techniques he uses in

Etude No. 9, Vertige to give the illusion of
directionality and establish textures?
“Ligeti’s pieces are often short, even miniature, but
it’s as if that smallness of scale makes you aware
of some gigantic vacuum around them”

“It’s music that gives you a glimpse of the

heat-death of the universe- and the necessity to
keep going, to keep composing, to keep living in
the face of that nihilistic fate that awaits us, even if
it all, in the end, amounts to nothing”

**Le Grand Macabre**

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFFpzip-SZk
Spectralism

What is spectralism?

**Gerard Grisey- Partiels**

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb0pcZ53u
D4&t=186s
Why did the 20th century bolster the creation of more competing schools of
composition (more isms) than any previous era?

Most younger composers resisted conforming to any particular artistic

movement. Why? Does this remind you of any previous composers?
Sofia Gubaidulina

“I am the place where east meets west”

“Gubaidulina...writes with her blood.”

- What is meant by these statements?

Why might she have faced criticism from the

USSR?

Describe the characteristics of Rejoice!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zSmNn6r_E
U
Individualism

- Louis Andriessen
- Murray Schafer

How do composers use music as a platform for

ideology?

What is environmental music? How does in

function in terms of musical accessibility?

What does it mean to be an individualist in

music? Is this a new concept?
Polystylism

**Breakdown of common musical language, individualism, and the prominence

of niche genres**

- Does this still apply today? Is it positive? Problematic?

What is polystylism and how does it relate to postmodernism?

How does this provide artists with more compositional freedom?

Alfred Schnittke
How did the policies of the Kruschev
administration affect composers in the USSR?

How can abstraction and defamiliarization

enhance or offer new perspective?

***Concerto Grosso No. 1, Toccata***

What three styles are incorporated?

How is this piece a model of the modern music

world?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZkooRLqm
jE
John Corigliano
What is The Ghosts of Versailles?

How does it defy musical expectations?

******

How has film changed the way we are exposed to

music?

The way composers present their music?

The way we program concerts?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFkcX4Qi11g&t=95
s
 Peter Schickele (or PDQ Bach)
Who is PDQ Bach?

Why make allusions?

- How does the context of an allusion change

its impact?

If you could parody any musical style, what would

it be and how would you do it?

“I don’t know what it is about the french language. It

seems to be scared of coming out of the mouth so it
comes out of the nose instead”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j6vrcbi470