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Symphony No. 9 (Sessions)
The Symphony No. 9 by Roger Sessions is a symphony in three movements, completed in 1978. A performance lasts about 28 minutes. History Sessions began his Ninth Symphony in 1975 on a commission from the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, whose music director at the time was Frederik Prausnitz. It was completed in October 1978, but by the time of the first performance Prausnitz had been succeeded by Christopher Keene, who conducted the premiere in Syracuse on 17 January 1980. Prausnitz also conducted the work, two months later, at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, on 18 March 1980, followed shortly by the first New York performance on 22 March by Keene and the Syracuse Symphony in Carnegie Hall. Sessions referred to a "special task" he set himself in writing this symphony, which "involves both agony and joy in the making of it". This refers to the portrayal of evil, inspired by William Blake's poem " The Tyger", represented especially in the first movement of Sessions's symphon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Roger Sessions
Roger Huntington Sessions (December 28, 1896March 16, 1985) was an American composer, teacher and musicologist. He had initially started his career writing in a neoclassical style, but gradually moved further towards more complex harmonies and postromanticism, and finally the twelve-tone serialism of the Second Viennese School. Sessions' friendship with Arnold Schoenberg influenced this, but he would modify the technique to develop a unique style involving rows to supply melodic thematic material, while composing the subsidiary parts in a free and dissonant manner. Life Sessions was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a family that could trace its roots back to the American Revolution. His mother, Ruth Huntington Sessions, was a direct descendant of Samuel Huntington, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Roger studied music at Harvard University from the age of 14. There he wrote for and subsequently edited the ''Harvard Musical Review''. Graduating at age 18, he went on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syracuse Symphony Orchestra
The Syracuse Symphony Orchestra (SSO) was a 79-member orchestra located in Syracuse, New York. In its time it was the 43rd largest orchestra in the United States and performed a variety of programs including the Post-Standard Classics Series and M&T Bank Pops Series. The orchestra also operated two youth orchestras in the Syracuse area: the Syracuse Symphony Youth Orchestra and the Syracuse Symphony Youth String Orchestra. History It was founded in 1961 as a community orchestra by a grant from the Gifford Foundation. Its first Music Director was Karl Kritz, assisted by Benson Snyder and Carolyn Hopkins. In its first season it performed four subscription concerts at the Lincoln High School and eight young people's concerts plus one pops concert. By the end of its third season, permanent chamber groups had been formed - a string quartet, a woodwind quintet, a brass quintet and a percussion ensemble. Assisted by a Ford Foundation Challenge Grant, their budget grew, and recordings w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frederik Prausnitz
Frederik William Prausnitz (August 26, 1920 in Cologne – November 12, 2004 in Lewes, Delaware) was a German-born American conductor and teacher. His grandfather, Wilhelm Prausnitz, was the dean of the medical school at Graz, as well as a Privy Counsellor. His family, of Lutheran background, emigrated from Cologne to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1937 because of deep disagreements with the Nazi regime. Upon graduation from the Juilliard School he won a conducting competition sponsored by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 1943, taught at Juilliard for some twenty years in the 1950s and 1960s, took over as conductor of the New England Conservatory Orchestra in Boston, Massachusetts, and eventually moved to London where he was a staff conductor with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. After his return to the US he was the Music Director of the Syracuse Symphony for three years, then joined the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland where he remained until his retirement ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christopher Keene
Christopher Keene (December 21, 1946 – October 8, 1995) was an American conductor. Early life and education Keene was born in 1946 in Berkeley, California, the son of Yvonne (née Cyr) and Jim Keene. His mother was of Acadian, German, and Scottish descent. His parents divorced in 1953 and his mother remarried to Jim San Jule in 1954 until their divorce in 1970.Smith, p. 6 He has three siblings: Philip Keene (born 1941), Elodie Keene (born 1949), and Tamsen (née San Jule) Calhoon (born 1956). His mother remarried to biochemist Daniel E. Koshland Jr. in 2000, of the Haas family, the owners of Levi Strauss & Co. Keene studied the piano and cello in his youth. A highly self motivated student, he organized neighborhood productions of plays and operas while growing up and directed ensembles at his high school while a student. At the University of California, Berkeley he earned a degree in history instead of music; reasoning that he didn't want to waste his time re-learning skills ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Blake
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his " prophetic works" were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry led 21st-century critic Jonathan Jones to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God" or "human existence itself". Although Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, he is held in high regard b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Tyger
"The Tyger" is a poem by the English poet William Blake, published in 1794 as part of his ''Songs of Experience'' collection and rising to prominence in the romantic period. The poem is one of the most anthologised in the English literary canon,Eaves, p. 207. and has been the subject of both literary criticism and many adaptations, including various musical versions.Whitson and Whittaker 63–71. The poem explores and questions Christian religious paradigms prevalent in late 18th century and early 19th century England, discussing God's intention and motivation for creating both the tiger and The Lamb. The ''Songs of Experience'' The ''Songs of Experience'' was published in 1794 as a follow up to Blake's 1789 ''Songs of Innocence.''Gilchrist 1907 p. 118 The two books were published together under the merged title ''Songs of Innocence and of Experience, showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul: the author and printer, W. Blake'' featuring 54 plates. The illustrations a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tone Row
In music, a tone row or note row (german: Reihe or '), also series or set, is a non-repetitive ordering of a set of pitch-classes, typically of the twelve notes in musical set theory of the chromatic scale, though both larger and smaller sets are sometimes found. History and usage Tone rows are the basis of Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique and most types of serial music. Tone rows were widely used in 20th-century contemporary music, like Dmitri Shostakovich's use of twelve-tone rows, "without dodecaphonic transformations." A tone row has been identified in the A minor prelude, BWV 889, from book II of J.S. Bach's ''The Well-Tempered Clavier'' (1742) and by the late eighteenth century it is found in works such as Mozart's C major String Quartet, K. 157 (1772), String Quartet in E-flat major, K. 428, String Quintet in G minor, K. 516 (1790), and the Symphony in G minor, K. 550 (1788). Beethoven also used the technique but, on the whole, "Mozart seems to have employe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Combinatoriality
In music using the twelve tone technique, combinatoriality is a quality shared by twelve-tone tone rows whereby each section of a row and a proportionate number of its transformations combine to form aggregates (all twelve tones). Whittall, Arnold. 2008. ''The Cambridge Introduction to Serialism. Cambridge Introductions to Music'', p. 272. New York: Cambridge University Press. (hardback) (pbk). Much as the pitches of an aggregate created by a tone row do not need to occur simultaneously, the pitches of a combinatorially created aggregate need not occur simultaneously. Arnold Schoenberg, creator of the twelve-tone technique, often combined P-0/I-5 to create "two aggregates, between the first hexachords of each, and the second hexachords of each, respectively." Combinatoriality is a side effect of derived rows, where the initial segment or set may be combined with its transformations (T,R,I,RI) to create an entire row. "Derivation refers to a process whereby, for instance, the ini ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Twelve-tone Technique
The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition first devised by Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer, who published his "law of the twelve tones" in 1919. In 1923, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) developed his own, better-known version of 12-tone technique, which became associated with the "Second Viennese School" composers, who were the primary users of the technique in the first decades of its existence. The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any one notePerle 1977, 2. through the use of tone rows, orderings of the 12 pitch classes. All 12 notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key. Over time, the technique increased greatly in popularity and eventually became widely influential on 20th-cent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pitch Class
In music, a pitch class (p.c. or pc) is a set of all pitches that are a whole number of octaves apart; for example, the pitch class C consists of the Cs in all octaves. "The pitch class C stands for all possible Cs, in whatever octave position." Important to musical set theory, a pitch class is "all pitches related to each other by octave, enharmonic equivalence, or both." Thus, using scientific pitch notation, the pitch class "C" is the set : = . Although there is no formal upper or lower limit to this sequence, only a few of these pitches are audible to humans. Pitch class is important because human pitch-perception is periodic: pitches belonging to the same pitch class are perceived as having a similar quality or color, a property called "octave equivalence". Psychologists refer to the quality of a pitch as its "chroma". A ''chroma'' is an attribute of pitches (as opposed to ''tone height''), just like hue is an attribute of color. A ''pitch class'' is a set of all pit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Set Theory (music)
Musical set theory provides concepts for categorizing musical objects and describing their relationships. Howard Hanson first elaborated many of the concepts for analyzing tonal music. Other theorists, such as Allen Forte, further developed the theory for analyzing atonal music, drawing on the twelve-tone theory of Milton Babbitt. The concepts of musical set theory are very general and can be applied to tonal and atonal styles in any equal temperament tuning system, and to some extent more generally than that. One branch of musical set theory deals with collections ( sets and permutations) of pitches and pitch classes (pitch-class set theory), which may be ordered or unordered, and can be related by musical operations such as transposition, melodic inversion, and complementation. Some theorists apply the methods of musical set theory to the analysis of rhythm as well. Mathematical set theory versus musical set theory Although musical set theory is often thought to involve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rondo
The rondo is an instrumental musical form introduced in the Classical period. Etymology The English word ''rondo'' comes from the Italian form of the French ''rondeau'', which means "a little round". Despite the common etymological root, rondo and rondeau as musical forms are essentially different. Rondeau is a ''vocal'' musical form that was originally developed as monophonic music (in the 13th century) and then as polyphonic music (in the 14th century). Notably, both vocal forms of rondeau nearly disappeared from the repertoire by the beginning of the 16th century. In French, ''rondeau'' is used for both forms, while in English ''rondeau'' is generally used for the ''vocal'' musical form, while ''rondo'' is used for the ''instrumental'' musical form.Don Neville, "Rondò", ''The New Grove Dictionary of Opera'', 4 vols., edited by Stanley Sadie Stanley John Sadie (; 30 October 1930 – 21 March 2005) was an influential and prolific British musicologist, music critic, and edit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
