Travels, Illness, but more learning also

So sorry to be out last week, illness kept me in bed all day! With the choir on tour, we are losing another day as well, but we can still press forward. Make sure you are ready for your reports. I enjoyed Matt's report on Ives and feel more enlightened and appreciative of Ives. Noteworthy is the variety of musical language used by Ives as well as the amount of music written. He dabbled in many forms, styles, and types of genres of music. While I often believe he made fun of academia, at the same time his music touches people in different ways, not the least of which is his American folk song incorporation. Mostly we find Ives to be strongly individual and uniquely American.

We continue to study and try to understand the 12-tone ideal of the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Since the method of understanding and analyzing this music has altered, we often find different approaches to the dissection of 12-tone music. I would urge you to do some advanced study on your own, including knowing a little about Prime, Inversion, Retrograde, and perhaps invariance, as well as combinatoriality http://www.robertkelleyphd.com/12-tone.htm. Obviously, much of this is graduate level kinds of analyses, but having a basic knowledge is quite useful.

We will be doing some further look at 12-tone and then press onward to the language of Messiaen, Hindemith, and Stravinsky. Before the semester is over, however, we need to return to the Classical/Romantic periods for a little bit more discussion on Sonata-Allegro form as well as the difference between functional harmony and non-functional harmony.

Preference and emotion aside, is there a place for 12-tone music in today's world? What about in popular music? Film scores?