DQ for Watkins 287-306 (grad students: please also read p308-20)

DQ for Watkins 287-306 (grad students: please also read p308-20 and be prepared to summarize this material’s key insights for the balance of the class).

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.

Summary: This section explores a network of musical influences, drawn largely from outside the realm of German art music, which began to shape other national and stylistic schools in the ‘Teens and ‘20s. Many of these factors are analogous to those that drove Impressionism in France and various national responses in other regions.

General question for consideration: In light of Messing’s history and critique of the term “Neo-classicism”, to what goals and impulses can we attribute these “New Simplicities”? And how and to what extent did these New Simplicities operate across national boundaries?

(1) Chap 14 opens with a discussion (pp286-88) of Schoenberg’s activities in the realm of cabaret and popular musics. Though these musics are not typically thought of as Schoenberg influences, and though he himself repudiated them, Watkins suggests that his direct experience in these musics connects Schoenberg’s experience in the ‘Teens and ‘20s to that of other composers. Based on this and prior readings, what other composers, both within and outside Germany, share Schoenberg’s experience with cabaret and popular musics in this period?

(2) In the section subheaded “American Currents” (pp288-89), Watkins cites multiple examples of European interest in American popular culture, both within and outside music. What priorities, characteristics, or themes do European composers seem to be finding in these American topics, and how do these play out in their works? (Hint: consider our prior discussion of Parade). Also, in this same section, what connections can be drawn between popular influences, primitivism, and futurism?

(3) The discussion beginning p289 explores a particularly complex and fluid combination of sources and influences in German music in the 1920s, with specific focus on (one aspect of) Hindemith, Orff, Weill, and Krenek. Here are a few questions to help you formulate a thesis which explains how these factors interacted:

• What was the 1920s German perspective on jazz, what it meant, and what resources it might present for concert music?
• Looking at the illustration on p291, what “Isms” could be legitimately be attached to this image (some are more obvious associations, some less)?
• Also on p291, Watkins discusses Hindemith’s 1921 Kammermusik and its scoring. What is the significance of the scoring, and of the texture, of this piece?
• What is the interaction between Expressionism and Futurism? Could these things be matters of compositional (or audience) perspective?
• Be prepared to define the term Zeitoper and to articulate the “Isms” that this idiom might have addressed?
• On p292, last para, Watkins discusses the role that German folk music played in works of Mahler, Berg, and Schoenberg. How does he distinguish these composers’ perspectives on their own folk music from the perspectives of composers in other nations?

(4) On p294-95, be prepared to articulate the relationship between Orff’s background, principle works, and eventual efforts in music education and cognition.

(5) On pp295-399, there is an extensive discussion of Krenek’s Jonny Spielt Auf. This work is not at all well-known (and not easy to find in score or recordings), but in its topic, musical idioms, and general affect it foreshadows at least three later, better-known works (specifically, by Weill, Gershwin, and Blitzstein). How does Jonny grow out of Zeitoper, how does it reflect the “American Currents” cited previously, and how does Jonny anticipate future developments?

(6) Be prepared to articulate the ways in which “New Simplicity”, 1920s progressivism, and “American Currents” play out in Weill’s Threepenny Opera.

(7) Be prepared to articulate both the biographical and the artistic connections between Berg and Gershwin in this period, and to use these connections to contrast Berg’s perspectives on non-German music from those of Schoenberg and Webern.