Thursday  11:30-12:30pm 3rd floor lounge 

Introducing music from the 20th century.  

 Ref. http://www.therestisnoise.com/ 

When people say -

   The years spanning the end of the nineteenth century and the earliest part of the twentieth were a time of great expansion and development of, as well as a dramatic reaction to, the prevailing late Romanticism of previous years. In music, as in all the arts, expression became either overt (as in the early symphonic poems of Richard Strauss (1864-1949), the huge symphonies of Gustav Mahler, or the operas ofGiacomo Puccini), or was merely suggested (as in the so-called "impressionist" music of Claude Debussy. The previous century’s tide of Nationalism found a twentieth century advocate in the Hungarian Béla Bartók. t was a time of deepening psychological awareness, with the works of both Nietzsche and Freud in circulation; and the horrors of the First World War brought death and destruction to the very doorsteps of many people living in Europe. Possibly in reaction to such influences, the expressionistic music of Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples germinated and flourished for a time. Experimentation and new systems of writing music were attempted by avant-garde composers like Edgard Varèse and although none gained a foothold with the public, these techniques had a profound influence on many of the composers who were to follow.

Twentieth-century music has seen a great coming and going of various movements, among them post-romanticism, serialism and neo-classicism in the earlier years of the century, all of which were practiced at one time or another by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. More recently, aleatory or "chance" music, neo-romanticism, and minimalism have been in vogue by a handful of American composers. With the commercial dissemination of music through the various media providing music as a constant background, the general populace has largely dismissed much of the music produced using bold, new, or experimental styles, preferring to turn to the forms and genres (and often the composers) with which it is most familiar. Many of the greatest and best-known composers of this century, including Russian composers Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich, and British composer Benjamin Britten, have been those who have written music directly descended from the approved models of the past, while investing these forms with a style and modernistic tone of their own.

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Do you have any clue what they are talking about? Maybe yes, maybe no. 

Theory is one thing, and you don't need to know everything to 'feel' the music. 

In this program, I will play, explain some music, starting from Stravinsky's Petrushka. 

Please enjoy some of the songs that we will listen together.