Chapter 29: National Monuments

I. Introduction
A. Modernism existed in places other than Austro-Germany or France.
B. After the defeat of Germany in 1918, music became increasingly international in Europe and
the United States.

II. Outskirts of Western Europe

A. Sibelius
1. Sibelius was one of the earliest of these composers to become famous internationally.
2. His life established a pattern that many subsequent composers followed: traditional
music training abroad, study with Modernist composers, interest in his own national traditions,
fame at home that resulted in an international reputation.
3. From Finland and speaking Swedish (because of Swedish domination of Finnish
culture and politics), Sibelius studied with Busoni in Helsinki.
4. He then studied in Berlin and Vienna.
5. Wagner was an early influence, later Strauss and Debussy.
6. Sibelius’ native interest followed similar strains in music by Tchaikovsky and Grieg.
7. He used Finnish native literature, such as epic poetry (see his Kalevala), in his music.
8. Sibelius’ most famous tone poem was Finlandia (1900).
a. It aided in Finland’s struggle for independence from Russia.
b. It became an unofficial national anthem.
9. His symphonies and Violin Concerto owe some debt to Tchaikovsky.
10. Sibelius wrote less and less as he got older, even though he became something of a
national monument (his birthday is a national holiday). He came to be seen as the embodiment of
“The North.”

B. England
1. Since the eighteenth century, England’s musical life was dominated by imported
composers. This changed in the late nineteenth century.
2. Elgar was the most prominent English composer at the turn of the century.
3. The famous conductor Hans Richter promoted Elgar’s music.
4. The most prominent composer of the next generation was Ralph Vaughan Williams.
a. He studied at Cambridge with Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry.
b. He then went to Berlin, where he studied with Max Bruch.
c. Vaughan Williams also studied with Ravel (who was three years younger than
he was).
5. Vaughan Williams frequently used English folk songs and early music (Tudor).
a. He collected over 800 folk songs, which he acknowledged as the “common
stem” of English music.
b. These became the sources for many of his pieces.
6. His Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis exemplifies his use of early music.
a. Based on a work by the sixteenth-century English composer, the tune was in a
hymnal that Vaughan Williams encountered in 1906.
b. The scoring reflects both the liturgical set-up of the English choir (responsive)
and the English tradition of the viol consort (from the seventeenth century).
 7. His first two symphonies contain aspects of sounds from English landscapes.
a. The first incorporates voices and folks songs.
b. The second, London, includes sounds to mimic such things as Big Ben and
street cries.
8. Vaughan Williams thought it important to cultivate a national style.

C. Spain
1. Spain’s musical heritage stretches back centuries.
2. Falla met leading figures in Paris in 1907.
3. He did not quote directly from folk songs but chose to combine indigenous folk
material with international compositional techniques.

III. Eastern Europe

A. Folk and Modernist Synthesis: Béla Bartòk
1. Bartòk was one of the first ethnomusicologists.
2. His early works are influenced by German music.
3. He soon turned to his native Hungary for inspiration and study of folk music.
4. With Kodály, Bartòk sought to find “real” Hungarian music, not the typical “Gypsy
music” heard in cafes and the like.
5. The two transcribed peasant songs and published them in 1906.
6. Bartòk said that this act “liberated” him from having to use only major or minor keys.
7. He sought to transplant the new with the old, adding life to the new with the old.

B. Folk Ways
1. Bartòk developed theories about the relationship between “peasant” and “modern”
music, which he published in Budapest.
2. Of the three ways detailed in the text, Bartòk’s third way relates to some of the others
we have studied.
a. Adopt characteristics of folk music without copying it.
3. Bartòk did not stick to Hungarian music but broadened his interests to include a larger
geographical area that included Romania, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovakia. He even extended into
Turkey and North Africa.
4. Bartòk felt that Modern music needed a foundation in “nature.”
a. This idea set him apart from some of his contemporaries.
b. He wrote pedagogical works.
5. An early example of how Bartòk incorporated folk elements into his Modern music is
the fourteen Bagatelles for piano, Op. 6.
a. These reflect the ideas in his published essay mentioned previously.
6. The Dance Suite does not use folk songs but references folk elements, bringing several
different nations together in the final dance.
7. His six quartets show how Bartòk used traditional, established genres and imbued them
with his own aesthetics of folklore, newness, and advancement.

C. Szymanowski and Enescu

1. Small Central and Eastern European countries experienced oppressive control from
stronger outside forces.
 2. The pre-eminent early Modernist composer from Poland was Szymanowski, who also
featured elements of his native land in his music.
3. Born in the Ukraine, Szymanowski studied in Warsaw, Berlin, and Vienna. He also
developed interests in Asian music, Impressionism, and Russian music (in different guises).
4. Enescu was the prominent Romanian composer of the early twentieth century.
5. He too studied in Vienna (noticed by Brahms) and Paris (Fauré and Massanet).

D. The Oldest Modernist: Leoš Janáček

1. A Czech composer (born in Moravia), Janáček came into his own as a composer late.
2. He was initially seen as a provincial composer.
3. The work that brought him international fame was Jenůfa, a “Czech verismo shocker.”
a. Composed between 1895 and 1903, it premiered in 1904 in Brno.
b. The opera was not well known until 1916 when it was given successful
performances in Prague.
c. The opera eventually was performed in Vienna and New York (at the Met).
4. The success of Jenůfa when he was sixty-two caused Janáček to compose many more
works, including several operas.
5. Janáček felt that music should be stylistically accessible to the people from whom it
draws its themes.

E. Speech-Tunelets
1. Janáček felt that music should also reflect speech patterns.
2. In the 1890s he began writing down “speech-tunelets,” known in English as “speech
melodies.”
3. These followed melodic curves and rhythms of speech.
a. Janáček saw them as reflecting a person’s soul.
4. Janáček sought to capture the rhythmic style of the Czech language in his music.
a. This aspect of his music can be detected even in music without text.

F. Scriabin: From Expression to Revelation

1. Maximalism in Russia reached its height with Scriabin.
2. He traveled extensively in Western Europe and the United States, and showed no
interest in Russian folk music.
3. Scriabin was involved in “mystical symbolist” groups and avant-garde theology, and
he joined the theosophy movement.
a. Theosophy seeks to bring together Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
4. For theosophists, art was a medium of Gnostic revelation. They saw Scriabin as a
prophet.
a. He consciously changed his style to fit the ideals of theosophy.
5. Scriabin’s early music is mostly for piano—not surprising, as he was a child prodigy.
a. His piano pieces move (chronologically) from Chopinesque preludes to single-
movement sonatas based on octatonic and whole-tone scales.
b. He eventually quit using key signatures.
c. The late preludes demonstrate a bond with Symbolism, a particular Russian-
hued Symbolism that is characterized by maximalized religious ecstasy.
6. Scriabin’s music moved from mystical (sometimes sublime) to revelatory.
 7. His symphonies show a penchant for maximalism in the same vein as Strauss and
Mahler.
a. His Le poème de l’extase is his most famous work (Symphony No. 4).
b. The Fifth Symphony, Prométhée, le poème du feu, opens with the famous
“Prometheus chord” or “mystic chord,” which Scriabin called “the chord of pleroma.”
(“Plenitude” or all encompassing of the physical universe)
1) This chord was supposed to reveal what was beyond the mind’s
capacity to envision.
2) It represents a hidden otherness.
8. Scriabin moved away from the diatonic scale (which represents the known human
world), although the circle of fifths and other remnants of tonality remain in some ways.
9. Vers la flamme (1914) is a late work that depicts Scriabin’s juxtaposition of harmony
with visionary aspirations.
a. The composition moves from dark, quiet to loud, bright through very slow-
moving harmonic progressions.
b. It incorporates whole-tone and octatonic scales, as well as parallelism and other
familiar devices.
c. The conclusion is marked by a completion of a pattern, not a dominant-tonic
defined conclusion.

G. Mysterium and the Ultimate Aggregate Harmonies

1. Toward the end of his life, Scriabin was working on a piece he called Mysterium,
which he felt would be his ultimate statement.
2. He wrote a text for it that summed up theosophist doctrine.
3. He came to envision the work as something that would last for seven days and bring
the participants to a state of enlightenment transcending humanly time and space. Ultimately it
would end human history.
a. Scriabin realized that, as a human, he could not bring off such a
piece/experience.
4. The sketches that exist for the work that substituted for Mysterium, Acte préalable
show where Scriabin was headed harmonically.
a. They contain a series of aggregate harmonies: “ultimate” chords that contain all
twelve pitches. (By including all pitches, they represent the entire universe.)
b. By incorporating all pitches, they represent maximalism.
5. Scriabin eventually renounced Acte préalable in favor of silence.

IV. United States of America

A. Charles Ives
1. In the nineteenth century, much of the music in America was imported from Europe,
but some people worked to produce home-grown pieces.
2. The first writer to promote these ideas was Emerson, in a movement known as
Transcendentalism.
a. This philosophy encouraged people to respect their intuitions and trust their
instincts.
b. One had to unlearn conventional learning.
 3. New England Transcendentalism inspired Ives, perhaps the first great American
composer.
a. Ives went so far as to pursue a career not in music, as a reflection of his
idealistic principles.
b. He was an organist, following in his father’s footsteps, leaving to study at Yale.
4. Ives studied with Horatio Parker at Yale and began composing in a style much
influenced by Dvořák.
5. After the premiere of his The Celestial Country in 1902, Ives renounced a career in
music.
a. He would not hear a public performance of his pieces for twenty years after
this.
b. Ives moved into insurance, where he was a successful businessman.

B. Terms of Reception
1. Ives suffered health problems in 1918 that plagued him for years and effectively ended
his creative life, but at the same time his music began to be heard.
a. In this respect, he is similar to Schubert, except that Ives lived long enough to
enjoy some degree of fame.
b. The conductor Leonard Bernstein called him “our Washington, Lincoln and
Jefferson of music.”
2. The first public performance of the Concord Sonata in 1939 received positive reviews.
a. One particularly favorable review by Lawrence Gilman recognized Ives’
connection with the Transcendentalists.
b. Gilman noted that Ives was Modern before Schoenberg and Stravinsky.
3. That Ives composed so Modern so early could lead critics to devalue his music
aesthetically.
a. The composer Elliott Carter identified Ives as a Great Anticipator rather than a
Great Emancipator.
b. Two works will demonstrate Ives in perspective with European and American
ideals: Concord Sonata and Three Places in New England.

C. “Manner” and “Substance”: The Concord Sonata

1. The idea of dating exactly when Ives was “Modern” is foreign to Ives’s own ideas
about manner versus substance.
a. Ives considered essentially conservative composers as his influences.
b. He particularly identified with Franck’s work, which was deemed full of
substance.
2. The Concord Sonata brings to mind Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; the opening motive
pervades the composition.
3. Ives provided Essays Before a Sonata.
a. The message was a uniting of Transcendentalism with the music through
Beethoven’s motive.
b. The movements are labeled “Emerson,” “Hawthorne,” “The Alcotts,” and
“Thoreau.”

D. Nostalgia
 1. Some of Ives’s works do not seem to blend so easily with Transcendentalism and are
disruptive, humorous, and heavy.
2. Similar to Beethoven’s scherzos, they might be considered “scherzoids.”
a. They are often programmatic.
3. These programmatic pieces often display aspects of America’s pastoral primitivism—
views of unspoiled, abundant countryside over the polluted and corrupt big city.
4. The most famous and characteristic of these compositions is “Putnam’s Camp” from
Three Places in New England.
a. The setting is a campground for Revolutionary War troops (near Ives’s
birthplace).
b. Ives’s program notes set the stage.
c. He uses well-known tunes throughout the work to depict the action of life in
camp.
d. He even split the orchestra into two groups to indicate to simultaneous bands.
5. Like Scriabin and Schoenberg, Ives also worked on a huge orchestral piece, which he
called the Universe Symphony.
a. It was to tell the story of everything.
b. Three orchestras were required.
c. This is similar to Scriabin’s Mysterium and also used aggregate harmonies.

E. Societal Commitments
1. All of the composers in this chapter come from different geographic areas, but
commonalities exist among them.
2. Many studied abroad and then tried to use their native culture in their compositions.
a. The means used by each differs.
3. Most came to be seen as national monuments.
4. They also demonstrated a sense of commitment to society in other ways, such as
education, practical music making, and composition with pedagogy in mind.