Unit 5

The Modern Era.....

You would think that by now, we would have come up with a new name for some of the art we're about to discuss.....and yet sadly, we're still refering to Debussy as "modern"....a man who has been dead almost 100 years....

As with every other turn of artistic minds, the post-romantics saw a new future.  Theirs was a direct, blunt, bold, gruff, and sometimes challenging new world. 

As we've seen before, artists left the romantic world before composers did - painters such as Manet, Monet and Degas found themselves swirling colours and blurring lines to impress upon their audience a scene that "might be".

Monet is probably the most well known of the impressionists - he was obsessed with water....an obsession that Debussy also had.  They loved the way light played on water...its transparency....sunlight....movement.....

     And while Monet was obsessed with water, Degas was in love with the ballet.  His countless paintings show the beauty of these supreme artists/atheletes.  All at once being graceful and beautiful, but not noble.

Well, if I went in to every kind of art style that compromises the "modern era"......we'd be here all day....

Cubism

Picasso....can you guess what this is?

Expressionism

Kandinsky...a true synesthete!

...minimalism....

Mondrian...

And Pop Art

Andy Warhol...all this and a can of soup.

And to be honest, I missed the majority of art styles....expressionism, naturalism, supremism, spatialism, postwar, prewar, realism, anti-realism, post-realism, new realism..........

What came of architecture???



....and where are we going?

Debussy...water...light....impressionism

Ah Debussy....is there any composer who had as much guts as he?  Even at a young age Claude challenged the teachers at the Paris Conservatoire...not only was he an incredibly gifted pianist (with sight reading skills that left people speechless) but his ideas on composition were already light-years ahead of that of his teachers.

Teenage Debussy

Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune is based on a poeme by Stephan Mallarme - there were many works of music inspired by this poem...but this one takes the cake.

This particular work of Debussy's is considered to be a "turning point" in music history.

Mallarme's original poeme, translated in to English:  L'apres-midi d'un faune

Stravinsky.....the man who caused fist fights at the ballet

Maybe more than any other compsoer, Stravinsky defined the 20th Century.  His music career encompasses 71 years of the 1900s.  His lived a true global celebrity life.  A Russian who made life successful living in Switzerland, France, and the United States.

His music is adventerous....from his early ballets that exemplify the new Russian music that Rimsky-Korsakov set out for us...to his neoclassical works like his Symphony of Psalms and his opera The Rake's Progress...to his Serial period with Agon where he explored tone-row and dodecophony.

He was a prolific writer and well known in celebrity circles.  His use of serialism, primitivism, neoclassicism, and musical quotations change the orchestral landscapes of music.  His piano music loving all 88 keys and ignoring the span of a human hand. 

The one of the most loved and controversial figures of music history....whose music never fails to make you feel something.

Bernstein...say it soft and its almost like praying....

So a few years back, Shakespeare wrote a little story called Romeo and Julliet...you may have heard of it.  Well, jump ahead a bit, and along comes the American composer, conductor, pianist, self-esteem promoter Leonard Bernstein.