Notes, summaries, assignments, exams, and problems for Music

Oceanian Music

Maori Music

Maori music is primarily vocal, featuring love stories and lullabies. Traditional instruments are made from wood, bone, stone, shells, and animal hides. Percussion instruments are common, including wind instruments. Modern instruments like the guitar and ukulele have also been adopted.

Australian Aboriginal Music

Aboriginal songs serve as a vital link to the spiritual realm. Instruments are few and rudimentary, with the didgeridoo being the most recognizable.

Indonesian and Malaysian Music

The gamelan is a prominent instrumental ensemble in these cultures, featuring up to 30 musicians playing xylophones, metallophones, drums, and gongs.

Classical Music (18th Century)

Features

Classical music is characterized by clarity, balance,... Continue reading "Oceanian, Classical, Romani, and Romantic Music" »

Baroque Literature

The Baroque was a cultural movement that developed in Spain and throughout Europe in the 17th century.

Political and religious crises, the Spanish empire ravaged by hunger and military misery. Diderot begins by contrasting the decadent splendor of literature and arts.

The rise of beauty, this class impulse defended their privileges and their values: absolute monarchy, obsession with purity of blood, social stagnation, and a return to traditional religiosity. This era is reflected in theater.

A disillusioned vision of existence, this pessimistic conception of life was manifested in literature in the constant presence of subjects such as death and the transience of life and its inconsistency, expressed in terms of topics such as... Continue reading "Baroque and Renaissance Literature: Themes and Styles" »

Romanticism: An Overview

Romanticism is a movement that emerged in Germany in the late eighteenth century and spread throughout Europe during the early nineteenth century. It prioritized imagination and sensibility over reason, emphasizing self-exaltation, restless excitement, and the flow of passions. Romanticism invites evasion through the fantastic, irrational, mysterious, or frightening, while also engaging with the political realities of its time.

General Characteristics

1. Individualism and Subjectivism: The importance of the self is emphasized, claiming originality as the concept of the modern artist. It often flees to the values of the Middle Ages, exploring themes of society, the night, and exotic elements.
2. Revaluation of the Middle Ages:

The Literature of the Baroque

The Baroque was the cultural movement of the seventeenth century, the second of the Spanish Golden Age. In contrast to the Renaissance's desire for naturalness and harmony, the Baroque is the triumph of exaggeration and contrast. Against the optimism of the Renaissance, the Baroque is characterized by pessimism and disappointment. Both attitudes have their origin in the sense of decadence in the country. Baroque artists constantly reflect on death and time. The most important authors are:

• Poetry: Góngora and Quevedo
• Theatre: Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca
• Prose: Quevedo and Baltasar Gracián

Baroque Poetry

Formally, Baroque poetry is expressed in a lively style, far from the artifice and naturalness of the previous... Continue reading "Spanish Baroque Literature: Authors, Styles, and Works" »

Catalan Theater Revival: Post-War to 1970s

The Post-War Resurgence (1946-1950s)

After the Civil War, Catalan-language drama was banned from professional stages until the end of World War II. Since 1946, Catalan theater resumed its activity, nurturing traditional patterns and forms. Josep Maria de Sagarra sought to address the moral nature of contemporary conflicts in Galatea (1948). However, Sagarra's proposed renewal was dismissed by critics and audiences, forcing him to return to earlier dramatic forms, including poems and comedies of manners.

New Platforms and Influences (Late 1950s - Early 1960s)

Throughout the second half of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, renewal emerged from various platforms, both strictly professional and commercial.... Continue reading "Catalan Theater Revival: Post-War to 1970s Transformations" »

Renaissance Music in Italy

Secular Music

Italian secular music features:

• Homophonic writing
• Syllabism
• Simple, higher melody
• Various types of interpretation (a cappella, with voice substitution for an instrument, or just instrumental)
• Strophic structure
• Lively, animated rhythms
• Simple harmony

Forms:

• Frottola: A form of polyphonic singing that was developed especially in aristocratic and bourgeois circles. The theme is love, with 4 voices and a dance-like rhythm.
• Villanela: A Neapolitan folk song of origin, with a dance-like rhythm and 3 voices. Instruments were also used.
• Madrigal: A song of contrapuntal distillation derived from a troubadour song, making allusions to pastoral poetry with a sentimental or erotic theme, and is for 4 voices.

Religious Music

Venetian

Religious Music of the Middle Ages

Religious music of the Middle Ages began to take shape when Emperor Constantine granted freedom of worship for Christians in 313.

Pope Gregory the Great and Gregorian Chant

Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) was considered the creator of the Gregorian chant, but he was not really the creator. He leveraged his entire organization as a way to strengthen a sense of Christian unity.

Characteristics of Gregorian Chant

Gregorian chant is:

• Music destined to serve the liturgy.
• Uses Latin as a language.
• Monodic in texture.
• Free musical rhythm, according to the melody.
• Text notation differentiates between three styles of chant: syllabic, neumatic, and melismatic.

Troubadours and Minstrels

Troubadours: Poets and musicians, usually... Continue reading "Medieval Religious Music: From Gregorian Chant to Polyphony" »

Albéniz

Rhythm: Binary regular, constant 2/4. Allegro grazioso, moderately fast and graceful. Black note = unit. The right hand plays the melody with staccato eighth notes. These articulated sixteenth notes should sound like half notes going into silence.

The left-hand notes attack with a quaver on the strong part of the bar, quietly leaving the rest of each bar. The three thirty-second notes in the introduction function as arpeggios, and four processional rolls give way to the tune of "La Tarara."

Melody: The theme dominating Section A is taken from a very popular song. It has a symmetrical scheme. The melody is 16 measures long. The melody is anacrustic for joint degrees, overlooking the 2nd and 3rd. The staccato interpretation gives a blank... Continue reading "Albéniz's "Corpus Christi en Sevilla": Musical Analysis" »

Spanish Literature: From Renaissance to Baroque

Mannerism

As a movement of transition between the Renaissance and Baroque, Mannerism was used to define elaborate artists' works. This current arises as a reaction to classicism, characterized by the rejection of rigid rules and the free use of forms. Based on literary theory, a clear example is in the sonnets of Góngora and Lope.

Baroque

There was a great development of poetry. Everything could be poetic material. It is a poetry of contrasts because there is a meditative face, a difficult and misleading world, and almost every issue addressed from a mock perspective. Sonnet and romance are common forms.

The essential feature of the Baroque mentality is distrust in itself. Topics such as disappointment

Morphosyntactic Resources

• Anaphora: Repetition of a word at the beginning of each verse.
• Parallelism: Repetition of structures.
• Anadiplosis: Repetition of the last word at the end and beginning of a verse.
• Concatenation: Several anadiplosis in a row.
• Epanadiplosis: Repetition of a word at the beginning and end of the verse.
• Pun: Repetition of words by reversing the order.
• Chiasmus: Repetition in which there is a cross-distribution of elements in the same structure.
• Hyperbaton: Changing the natural order of a sentence.
• Pun: Repetition of words that sound alike, and at least one of which is composed of two terms.
• Epithet: Adjective that expresses a quality of the accompanying noun.
• Pleonasm: Redundancy through repetition, i.e., adding unnecessary terms.