"Yes, It's a Brilliant Tune": 1 Quotation in Contemporary American Art Song
2016; Routledge; Volume: 72; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2769-4046
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Musicological Studies
ResumoINTRODUCTIONMORE THAN PERHAPS ANY PERIOD IN HISTORY, music after 1900 is defined by its diversity, eclecticism, and fragmentation. At one time or another, trends including serialism, neoclassicism, minimalism, electronic music, neotonality, and chance (aleatoric) have dominated the modern musical landscape, only to be supplanted or refined as new styles came to the fore. Defining culture after World War II under the rubric of postmodernism, French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard noted the increasing fragmentation of the contemporary scene, where examples of high and low culture, pastiche and parody, intermingle freely. This resistance to fixed traits and grand narratives rejects a one-size-fits-all approach in favor of a broader, more inclusive definition of art.2 Rather than creating new paradigms, postmodern artists often evoke or recycle previous works and movements.The concept of reviving older styles is equally significant to 20th century music, evident in Stravinsky's reinterpretation of Mozart in The Rake's Progress (1951), Copland's use of American folk and Shaker tunes in Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1944), and Berio's employment of the third movement from Mahler's Resurrection Symphony in the scherzo to his Sinfonia (1968). American art song composers also have explored the tension between old and new, gradually moving the genre beyond its folk origins to embrace contemporary techniques, modern poetry, and broader experimentation.3After 1945, art song was seen, arguably for the first time, as a legitimate outlet for American concert music. This shift came about in part as a result of first-rate examples by John Duke, Lee Hoiby, Charles Ives, Ned Rorem, Virgil Thomson, and many others, but also through three groundbreaking cycles that were both modern and accessible: Copland's Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson (1949-50), Barber's Hermit Songs (1952-53), and Argento's From the Diary of Virginia Woolf (1974, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in music). After 1980, greater participation from composers across the spectrum-including women, gays and lesbians, and ethnic minorities-encouraged an unprecedented level of musical eclecticism, from dissonant atonality to songs indebted to popular music, jazz, and music theater. In true postmodern fashion, earlier boundaries between classical and popular song were challenged, as in Lori Laitman's Metropolitan Tower (1997) with its echoes of Stephen Sondheim or Ricky Ian Gordon's lyric setting of Emily Dickinson's Will There Really be a Morning (1983) with its unmistakable popular flavor.4A concurrent and overlooked trend during the same period has been the growth of quotation music. Unlike earlier composers, chiefly Ives, who borrowed American popular and sacred tunes, recent composers often use European classical music, and opera in particular, as source material. This essay examines the use of borrowed material in the song output of three Americans well known for their songs: William Bolcom (b. 1938), Tom Cipullo (b. 1956), and Benjamin C. (Ben) Moore (b. 1960). Through a closer examination of their borrowings, it becomes clear that no single technique exists, as each uses pre-existent material according to the dictates of the poetic text, their individual styles, and their expressive goals.5A BRIEF HISTORY OF MUSICAL BORROWINGThe use of borrowed material is virtually as old as Western music itself. Starting in the Middle Ages, when the first notated examples of polyphony featured chant melodies doubled at specified intervals, the trend became ubiquitous during the Renaissance, where composers including Guillaume Dufay, Josquin des Prez, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and Tomas Luis de Victoria used sacred (and sometimes secular) melodies as the basis for elaborate mass settings.6 During the Baroque era, Bach and Handel also borrowed extensively, as in Bach's keyboard transcriptions of Vivaldi's concertos and Handel's borrowings from himself and others in oratorios including Israel in Egypt (1739) and Messiah (1742). …
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