DQ for Watkins, 170-95 (grad students: please be prepared to supply additional references to parallel art works, artists, and contemporaneous events that impacted upon late Expressionism)
Please be prepared to respond in either seminar meeting or in "Comments" on the course blog. In all venues, you must be prepared to cite specific passages (by page, paragraph, line, and quotation) in support of your responses—and specific works.
This section explores the gradual linkage (particularly in
(1) On pp170-71 Watkins describes a “general crisis” that “seemed to suggest the final overthrow of the Romantic age.” What was the shape of this crisis, what factors were understood to be contributing to it, in what arenas outside the arts did it appear, and how did composers in the period respond?
[Note that Watkins acknowledges that works which fall within “Romantic” stylistic or philosophical modes continued to be written in this period, but that certain works may be seen as “a watershed” into a new era. His thesis is not comprehensive, therefore, but selective.]
(2) Watkins further links several different national or stylistic schools, and across various art forms, in describing the elements of this “Expressionist attitude” (170), and in so doing usefully complicates the presumption that “German” or “French” musics in this period can be seen as simply, diametrically opposite. At both the beginning and the end of the chapter he shows relationships and cross-influences between these two national schools. Read the discussion of color theory, “correspondences,” and the Blaue Reiter group carefully (grad students: this would be a review of additional reading on DBR which you have already done).
(3) Note the particular characteristics of the “emotionalism” Watkins cites at the bottom of 171; what are these characteristics, how are they combined in various works cited in the text (grad students: or in additional works of the period), and how could you succinctly summarize the expressive goals of the music that results?
(4) on p173 Watkins provides a remarkably succinct but very dense summary of the goals, strategies, and results of German musical expressionism in the pre-WWI period. Be prepared to unpack this description line by line and phrase by phrase, citing specific works and composers to explain Watkins’s meaning.
(5) Watkins presents Erwartung as an effective test-case for his model of German expressionism. Articulate the specific goals and “moods” which this piece and related works sought to evoke. Explain how the musical/psychological portrait in Erwartung “moves beyond” earlier or parallel corollaries: what are the programmatic subtleties of this portrait? What are the musical specifics? Articulate the ways in which the “Self/Other” dichotomy and the phenomenon of “the Other” can help explain Erwartung.
(6) Follow along Sc. 1 and Sc. 2 using WebCT excerpts and the texts in Watkins. Identify at least THREE specific passages in the text and provide precise discussion of specific compositional choices which support each passage.
(7) Please read this Wikipedia article on the Italian Renaissance theatrical form called commedia dell’arte and articulate links between the behaviors and/or emotional associations of specific characters as they were appropriated by early 20th-century expressionists. Locate and describe at least one additional allusion to commedia characters in 20th-century arts culture from outside Watkins’s examples.
(8) Select at least THREE numbers from Pierrot, follow the texts in Watkins as you listen via WebCT, and provide precise discussion of specific compositional choices which are employed (NOTE: you must expand your analysis beyond Watkins’s own comments).
(9) See 193-94 discussion of Ravel’s La valse and articulate the linkage between Ravel’s 1923 composition and the social/artistic environment(s) that shaped it—please address this in detail.
