KSKS55 Ways into modernism Jonathan James by Jonathan James is a freelance music educator who lectures around the UK and leads workshops for professional WHY EARLY MODERNISM? orchestras. He was head of performing The seismic shifts in the art world at the turn of the last century (around 1890 to 1920) provoked some of the arts and director most exciting breakthroughs in the history of music. To look at the works of Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg of music at a FE college for six years and other iconoclasts is to look at the fundamental questions of what music is, at how we engage with it, and and has since what its purpose is, both artistically and socially. delivered a variety of teacher training events and courses. This resource is designed around how to ask those questions in a way that encourages exploration both during term-time and the holiday period. It should also open up the following, more specific areas of study, expanding terminology and contextual awareness for both 20th-century set works and unseen excerpts: Board Areas Components Edexcel Composition 2.1 Composing brief related to area of study, ‘New Directions’ Edexcel Appraising 3.1 ‘Fusions’: Debussy Estampes 1&2 3.1 ‘New Directions’: Cage, Saariaho, Stravinsky AQA Appraising 3.1.8 (A2) Art music since 1910: Shostakovich, Messiaen, Reich, MacMillan OCR Historical studies 3.3 and 3.6 Historical and Analytical studies in Music The aim is to give ideas on how to deliver an overview of the developments at the turn of the century, accompanying each main learning point with practical exercises, and culminating in a three-hour sample session plan. This is a not an extended factsheet on modernism, nor a study of new set works, but rather a series of ideas on how to access modern music in a way that connects with the A level learner. ‘What is needed above all is an WHAT IS MODERNISM? scepticism towards all inherited Most textbook definitions start by putting modernism in opposition to aesthetic movements that either preceded concepts.’ it or that ran contemporaneously, such as late Romanticism, bourgeois realism or naturalism, the decadence Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901. of ‘la belle époque’ or the corseted thinking of Victorianism. Modernism is characterised here as a bracing smack in the face of convention, a dramatic reaction against anything that sought to bind an art form to the rulebook of the past. As a movement that is more about posing questions than arriving at answers, a good way of starting the process of definition in the classroom is through deductive reasoning. By playing two late Romantic works and one early Expressionist one, you can immediately start getting away from obvious definitions of style and pilot the learning instead into less charted territory: that intersection between expressive Romanticism and Romantic Expressionism. 1 Music Teacher July 2016 OPENING DISCUSSION IDEA Without revealing anything about the pieces or their composers, play the class the following: All of the excerpts Mahler Symphony No. 7, third movement refered to this Sibelius Symphony No. 7, opening section resource are available on this Schoenberg Verklärte Nacht, second section Spotify playlist. Ask them to note their thoughts on the following as they listen: How easily can you follow the thread of the music? Is the music dominated by form or by gesture? How is dissonance treated? How complex is the texture, and how would you describe the organistion of ideas? The aim is to explore how elements of form, harmony and vertical organisation are already being ‘loosened’ in these works, to the extent that some of the musical material already is starting to feel ‘modern’, straining at the edges of tonality and resisting neat categorisation. Mahler wrote that he didn’t expect his symphonies to be appreciated in his time, but had faith that they would suit later generations (Beethoven said the same about his late string quartets). The spirit of the ‘modern’ is always present whatever the era, in the sense of being both ‘of the moment’ (from the Latin ‘modo’, ‘current’) and innovative, forward-looking. So, although early modernism is often seen as a reaction against the past, the seeds of it were very much present in music of the time – and certain strands of its development have grown organically from previous thinking, rather than being defiant rejections or statements of opposition. The final ‘reveal’ in this opening discussion is to point to the dates of composition for the three pieces above. The most radical of the three, by Schoenberg, was composed at the cusp of the new century in 1899 (a fact students might just remember from their GCSE studies), while the others were written a decade or two later (Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 in 1909, and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 7 in 1924). Music Teacher July 2016 2 SETTING THE SCENE: THE ARTISTIC CONTEXT FOR EARLY MODERNISM Ask your students to compare the following three paintings of snow and reflect on where they feel most connected to the subject: The first is a realistic representation, placing the viewer as an external observer, where form and balance can be discerned. There is a foreground and background, a sweep to line of long grass leading the eye to the distance. Here we’ve telescoped in. Although it’s clear the picture is still about snow, it has been atomised into dancing flakes, falling close to the viewer and evoking memories of what it’s like to be caught in a snowstorm. Rather than giving a statement, it leaves us with an impression. 3 Music Teacher July 2016 Finally, the level of abstraction is at its furthest, giving an internal perception of snow, perhaps from the perspective of a dream or nightmare. It’s snow as it leaves an imprint on our psyche. This is a good way of talking about how the gaze of the viewer shifts from looking outside to looking deep within, with the final ‘modernist’ work bringing the gaze onto our awareness of perception itself. Rather than distancing the snow from the viewer, it offers a far more intimate connection with it. THE SHIFTING GAZE OF MUSIC As you show these three images, play Debussy’s ‘The Snow is Dancing’ from his Children’s Corner suite. At first, the gentle fall of snow is obvious in the staccato descending scales, the equivalent of a Romantic landscape. Then the listener is pulled in to the mind of the little girl observing the snow at night, and into her fear as she makes out ghoulish shapes in the flurries of white (1:10 on the Spotify recording, a repeated-note motif that then falls, given out first by the right hand and answered by the left). It’s an effective strategy to take as your starting point the fact that modernist art offers a way into the psyche, into the identity of both the artist and the listener, who thereby becomes more complicit in the work in the process. It requires more of our imagination, more intellectual and emotional investment. It is not surprising, then, that for such a subjective area – the journey into the subconscious – there was such a diverse set of responses as the century turned. In fact, has there ever been such an impressive cluster of ‘-isms’ in the history of the arts? From primitivism and fauvism through to symbolism, absurdism, futurism and dadaism, all mapping their own way through the world of instinct and dream, each guided by their own set of questions. ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ AS A MUSICAL PAINTING To make these movements more relevant to the learner, you could ask them to either improvise or compose a quick response to each artistic strand. What does a fauvist image sound like compared to a surrealist one? Can they imagine reducing music to the same bold shapes and blunt gestures of an early Picasso piece of cubism? Could they play ‘Happy Birthday’ in all those different styles? Searching for a ‘correspondence of the senses’ Cross-disciplinary thinking is very much a feature of this time, where poets, musicians and painters intermingled When working and discussed their artistic ideas. A famous example is the meeting of the ‘Tuesday-ers’ (‘Les Mardistes’) in on their AS/A2 Paris, where Debussy, Verlaine, Rilke and other thinkers were brought together by symbolist poet Stéphane composition, how Mallarmé every week to share their inspiration. Would Debussy’s so-called ‘Impressionist’ musical ideas have much do students draw on the taken the same dramatic shape without the linguistic freedom of the symbolist poets or the abstract Nocturnes inspiration of other of Whistler? art forms and ideas? Music Teacher July 2016 4 This deliberate cross-fertilisation was also motivated by the central precept of the writer Baudelaire as he tried, in his poetry, to achieve a ‘correspondence of the senses’. Ideas of music and sound belonged equally to his choice of images as did visual ones, or those inspired by touch and smell. Listening to early modernist works there is a similar invitation to free the senses, to listen with the inner eye, and to imagine what it feels like to the touch. CREATIVE WRITING EXERCISE Compare the opening of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture to the opening of Debussy’s La mer. Ask students to write a free-flowing response to both excerpts, not worrying about syntax but rather focusing on images and sensations in a stream of consciousness. Refer to Baudelaire’s ‘correspondence of the senses’ and encourage them to think of smell and touch as well as the more obvious aural and visual images. Which piece invites the more interesting language, and why? Self-awareness and growing uncertainty A good image to characterise the developments so far would be Adam and Eve: Self-awareness, or rather the licence to express that self-awareness, is a core aspect of modernist thinking.