This week’s listening features three orchestral works from the 1920s, 30s and 40s. These pieces could hardly be more different from last week’s Futurist-inspired music. These are private, intimate, organically shaped, largely non-repetitive creations; and while the Futurists wished to erase history, these pieces draw upon music history, especially the Bartok and the Berg, in very specific ways.

Listen to all of them all the way through, and then focus on the sections as specified below.

In the Bartok Piano Concerto, please write about the second movement, track 5 on the Naxos site. You only need to write about track 5, not about tracks 4 and 6. Bartok intentionally borrows music from the String Quartet Opus 132 of Beethoven in this part of the piece. Listen to the Beethoven string quartet movement to compare. Try to determine the manner in which Bartok integrates Beethoven’s music into his own. Do you hear the actual music of Beethoven echoed in the Bartok, or is it present more as an atmosphere or evocation? The title of the Beethoven movement is “Holy Song of Thanks to the Deity by One Who Has Regained Health,” and the intermittent sections with a quicker tempo are titled “Feeling New Strength;” this music was meant to reflect Beethoven’s own struggle with an almost fatal illness. Bartok, too, was struggling with serious illness when he composed the Third Piano Concerto.

The Berg Violin Concerto is an extremely difficult piece to comprehend. Listen to it carefully all the way through, and then listen to the Bach chorale, “Es ist genug.” Listen to the Berg concerto again, and indicate exactly where, in the second movement of the Berg, this Bach chorale appears Try to focus on how Berg manages the transition from his own very dissonant and turbulent music to the borrowed chorale of Bach; and then, how he comes out of the borrowed Bach chorale and ends the piece in his own, original musical language.

In the excerpt from the Webern Symphony, you will notice a similar technique to Webern’s orchestration of the Bach Ricercar from Week 1. Ask yourself which aspect of the music seems to carry the expressive weight, or “meaning,” of this music. Is it pitch, harmony, melody, rhythm, tempo, dynamic, contrast… or do these aspects recede from the listener’s attention, to be replaced by something else? What, in this case, might that be?

So these are your listening notes. In your writing, using some of the questions I pose above, try to briefly characterize the expressive nature of each of the three pieces, the kind of beauty, or aesthetic sense, they seem to project. For each of the three pieces, choose an art form outside of music to use as an imaginary example of what these pieces are doing in music… for example, a kind of literary form, or a visual art medium, or a film technique, that could achieve in that medium what these pieces do in music; in effect, describing these musical works as artworks in a different medium. Pay special attention to the manner in which a work of art from the past is integrated into a new work of art. And please answer all parts of this prompt in a single short essay of up to 500 words!

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Daniel Kevins

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