Professor of Literature

(He wasn't actually a composer; he was a librettist)

music critic in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik

attended law school but never went to class

wrote biography of Frederic Chopin

wrote essays

conductor

music critic

teaching music

mentoring Brahms

conductor

founder of Leipzig Conservatory

painter

bank clerk

music theorist

conductor

conductor

professor at Prague University for one year

Bartók's compositional procedures/structures

• using elements of folk music (style hongrois)
• Hungarian, Arabic, Romanian influences
• importance of "nature"- cultivating an understanding of modern music from childhood
• Concerto for Orchestra
• arch structure (sonata form/scherzo/elegiastic movement (arch form)/scherzo/sonata form)
• Intermezzo interrotto
• interrupting theme = direct quotation from Shostakovich's Leningrad (representation of vulgarity)
• altered quotation from Vincze as symbol for prewar Hungary (inversion of Shostakovich)
• use of "flatulence" in trombones
• borrowed
• Bluebeard's Castle
• building on folkloric and classical music traditions
• use of symbolism

• found salvation in 12-tone system
• spare and transparent textures
• economy and symmetry
• frequent use of canon, throwback to Renaissance artists
• Symphony, Op. 21
• two movements
• reduce number of independent row forms
• multiply field of potential relationships between row forms
• Primary row = half steps and thirds, with tritone in the middle (intervallic palindrome)
• only twelve possible primes and twelve possible inversions
• tightly controlled, multidemensional symmetry
• unity above all else

• use of polytonality (different keys at once) and polyrhythm (different groups of instruments at different rhythms)
• use of klangfarbenmelodie-placing the melody in multiple instruments
• dissonance

Concord Sonata

• quoting Beethoven's fifth

mirror (palindromic) and arch forms 

(explanation and example)

Mirror Form

• can be applied to individual movements/segments of a larger piece or can constitute one individual movement/segment
• in the context of serialism: intervals in each hexachord mirror each other (ex: Symphony, Op. 21 Webern)
• Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: sonata form-scherzo-intermezzo interrotto (arch form)-scherzo-sonata form

octatonic scales

(explanation and example)

• based on alternating whole and half step intervals
• Ex: C, D-flat, E-flat, E, G-flat, G, A, B-flat, C
• Used in the theme and variation section of Stravinsky's Octet for Wind Instruments

symphonic/tone poem

(explanation and example)

• one-movement: might be broken up into sections
• Liszt: symphonic poems, Strauss: tone poems
• program music
• for Strauss, involved leitmotivs

12-tone system

(explanation and example)

• Schoenberg first used technique in Suite for Piano, Op. 25
• also known as serialism
• based on idea of "emancipation of dissonance"
• "composition with twelve tones only related to one another"
• no need for a tonic
• no individual note has more importance/centrality than any other
• rows are subdivided into 3-, 4-, or 6-note segments (four trichords, three tetrachords, or two hexachords)
• focus: interval content, not pitch content
• can be transposed, shifting starting pitch but keeping same intervals
• can be inverted, reversing direction of intervals (ex: ascending a major 3rd in primary tone row and descending a major 3rd in inverted tone row) 
• can be retrograde, played backwards
• can be retrograde inverted