Unit 3: History of music

PALOMA BLASCO

- Video: BBC. Howard Goodall’s Story of Music. The age of elegance and sensibility

https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=_LW99I55Q9Y

- Activity:

1. Make a list about the composers who appear in the video and some of the main work that you can hear and read there.Joseph Haydn – Trumpet Concerto (1796), Symphony N 88 (1787)Mozart – Symphony N 40, Piano Concerto N 21, The marriage of FigaroBeethoven – Patetique, Eroica (1804), The Pastoral Symphony (1808), Ode of the JoySchubert – On the stream (1827)Schumann – Dichterliebe Opus 48Mendelssohn – A midsummer night stream, The Overture of Fingal’s caveChopin – Mazurka Opus 6 N 2 (1830)Johann Stamitz – Symphony in Eb (c.1794)

2. Which consequences does the abstraction of music have in relation to the social and revolutionary atmosphere lived in Europe in the middle of the 18th century?There was a price to pay for this abstraction in music: a lack of meaning and a lack of direct relevance to the times in which was produced. Hyden and Mozart obedient following of their favourite symphonic formulas could not have come of a more disobedient junction in history. The wild spread panic that grips the European aristocracy at the time of the American and French revolutions is, with some exceptions very hard to detect in the bulk of the music.

3. Which kind of connection is there between the colours of the French flag and the three most used chords by the composers in the second half of the 18 th century (that are the same basic chords in rock and roll)?Because red, white and blue flags were being hoisted all over Europe, so those three colours were as good as a metaphor to represent the three chords:

→ Chord 1 (home chord that usually starts and ends a piece) in red→ Chord 4 in blue → Chord 5 in white

Example below: 1st with the three main colours and 2nd adding green to see the space that the three main colours occupied in a piece.

4. Which music genre is composed for orchestra and was very used by great composers from the classical period? Was there any type of link with painting in the abstract style and this genre?

The symphony. The peculiar thing about symphony in point of history is that it doesn´t have any direct parallels in any other artistic field, it is abstract.

5. Mozart and Haydn represent the moment of change from paid servant to freelance composer.

6. What was the mission of Beethoven’s music?

It was not so much to harm or seduce his audience as to confronted.

7. The ‘Eroica’ symphony was originally dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte.8. Beethoven recalibrated what music was for. He turned it from genteel after-dinner

entertainment into a state of mind that no civilized person could live without.9. Which composer is related to the singer Adele and why? And which other composer

was one of the best who evoked a picture in sound?

Schubert. The distance, inform, intention, the mood and expression between Schubert songs for voice and piano and those from Adele are remarkably small. The only thing would shock Schubert about Someone like you is the fact that a young woman is the creator of the song, not is object.

Felix Mendelssohn

VOLUNTARY QUESTIONS (From minute 45)

10. Why was Chopin’s music intimate? He preferred no to perform in large concert halls loudly, but in small salons and privately homes.

11. Who was the greatest inspiration for Schumann’s compositions? Clara Veeck, his wife 12. Why had playing the piano become fashionable for women from the middle class?

Because it gave a chance to women to compose their own songs.