What are the Philippine contemporary music?

Answer 1

Debussy and Impressionism

Impressionism

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s. The name of the style is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari.

Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes; open composition; emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time); common, ordinary subject matter; the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience; and unusual visual angles. The development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature.

The term "Impressionism" can also be used to describe art created in this style, but not during the late 19th century.

Claude Debussy

Claude-Achille Debussy (French pronunciation: [klod aʃil dəbysi]) (22 August 1862 - 25 March 1918) was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions. Debussy is among the most important of all French composers and a central figure in European music of the turn of the 20th century. He was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1903.

His music is noted for its sensory component and for not often forming around one key or pitch. Often Debussy's work reflected the activities or turbulence in his own life. His music virtually defines the transition from late-Romantic music to 20th century modernist music. In French literary circles, the style of this period was known as symbolism, a movement that directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant.

Ø Early life and studies

Claude Debussy was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, August 22, 1862, the eldest of five children. His father, Manuel-Achille Debussy, owned a shop where he sold china and crockery, and his mother, Victorine Manoury Debussy, was a seamstress. The family moved to Paris in 1867, but in 1870 Debussy's pregnant mother sought refuge from the Franco-Prussian war with a paternal aunt of Claude's in Cannes.

· Private life

Debussy's private life was often turbulent. At the age of 18 he began an eight-year affair with Blanche Vasnier, wife of a wealthy Parisian lawyer. The relationship eventually faltered following his winning of the Prix de Rome and obligatory incarceration in the eponymous city.

On his permanent return to Paris and his parents' home on the av. de Berlin in 1889, he began a tempestuous nine-year relationship with Gabrielle ('Gaby') Dupont, a tailor's daughter from Lisieux, with whom he later cohabited on the Rue Gustave Doré. During this time he also had an affair with the singer Thérèse Roger, to whom he was briefly engaged.

· Musical style

Chords, featuring chromatically altered sevenths and ninths and progressing unconventionally, explored by Debussy in a, "celebrated conversation at the piano with his teacher Ernest Guiraud".

Rudolph Reti points out these features of Debussy's music, which "established a new concept of tonality in European music":

1. Glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from occasional absence of tonality;
2. Frequent use of parallel chords which are "in essence not harmonies at all, but rather 'chordal melodies', enriched unisons"; some writers describe these as non-functional harmonies;
3. Bitonality, or at least bitonal chords;
4. Use of the whole-tone and pentatonic scale;
5. Unprepared modulations, "without any harmonic bridge."

He concludes that Debussy's achievement was the synthesis of monophonic based "melodic tonality" with harmonies, albeit different from those of "harmonic tonality".

The application of the term "impressionist" to Debussy and the music he influenced is a matter of intense debate within academic circles. One side argues that the term is a misnomer, an inappropriate label which Debussy himself opposed.

In a letter of 1908, he wrote "I am trying to do 'something different'--an effect of reality...what the imbeciles call 'impressionism', a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by the critics, since they do not hesitate to apply it to Turner, the finest creator of mysterious effects in all the world of art."

Musical instruments of Claude Debussy

Debussy at the piano

This project is an attempt to understand Claude Debussy as a pianist. It is based on my master thesis, on which I worked 2003-2004 at The Norwegian Academy of Music. The title was "Debussy at the piano". My purpose was to study Claude Debussy's own piano playing, his unique style as a pianist. This was done in two ways:

1. Interpreting written accounts describing Debussy playing the piano, and
2. Listening to the recordings of Debussy playing the piano.

Soon I also included a chapter on Debussy's ideas on piano playing, since these would not necessarily be in accordance with how he actually played.

I owe much to two of my piano teachers, Geir Henning Braaten and Avi Schönfeld, who both studied with pupils of Debussy, and were able to introduce me to the Debussy tradition.

· Introduction

One of the more interesting things that has happened in the field of performance of Classical Music the last decades, has been the movement of "authenticity" or "historically informed performances". Starting in the 1960's with "early music", it has moved up to the baroque and classical periods, and it is now moving further up in history. Undoubtly it has enhanced our understanding of older music, and brought new energy and life to the classical repertoir. My thesis lies in this tradition, making use of the same methods and aim to get a better understanding of the music of Debussy through what it is possible to know on the basis of research.

At the same time I am aware of the danger of making music into an exact science. The authenticity movement can become a religious belief in "the right way" to do things, and art should not be like that; it should be playful and creative.

Some Popular Pianists

Ø Camille Bellaigue (1858-1930):

Nothing about the young Debussy, neither his looks, nor his comments, nor his playing, suggested an artist, present or future. [...] He was a pianist, and one of the youngest of us, but not, I repeat, one of the best. I particularly remember his idiosyncrasy, or rather a tic, of emphasizing the strong beats in the bar with a sort of hiccup or raucous gasp.

Ø Gabriel Pierné (1863-1937):

In Marmontel's piano class he used to astound us with his bizarre playing. Whether it was through natural maladroitness or through shyness I don't know, but he literally used to charge at the piano and force all his effects. He seemed to be in rage with the instrument, rushing up and down it with impulsive gestures and breathing noisily during the dificult bits. These faults gradually receded and occasionally he would obtain effects of an astonishing softness. With all its faults and virtues, his playing remained something highly individual. [Nichols p. 4]

Ø Paul Vidal (1863-1931):

His playing was very interesting but not without its defects: he had difficulty with trills, but his left hand was extremely agile and had an extraordinary capacity for extension. [Nichols p. 6]

His gifts as a pianist showed themselves to particular effect during the years that followed in Bazille's accompaniment class, where he distinguished himself. [Nichols p. 6]

Ø Marguerite Long

Marguerite Long (1878-1966), the famous French pianist, studied with Debussy the summer 1914 and the summer 1917. Her impressions are collected in her book At the piano with Debussy [Long]. She says that Debussy 'initiated her into the style, even if he did not go into all his works' [Long p. 12].

Ø E. Robert Schmitz (1889-1949)

E. Robert Schmitz (1889-1949) was a French pianist who later immigrated to the USA. Apparently he had gotten a thorough training from Debussy:

His interesting book The piano works of Claude Debussygives an aesthetic discussion of the style of Debussy, and then goes through all the piano works with analysis and advice on interpretation. The book presents of course the opinions of Schmitz and not necessarily what Debussy himself said, but he was after all a student of Debussy. In addition he published in 1937 the article A Plea for the Real Debussy [Nichols p. 171].

· Maurice Dumesnil (1886-?)

The French pianist Maurice Dumesnil (1886-?) has given us a lot of interesting details of Debussy's teaching in his article Coaching with Debussy [Nichols p. 163] and in his book How to play and teach Debussy [Dumesnil], a piano method with exercises and examples from Debussy's piano pieces.

Ø George Copeland (1882-1971)

George Copeland (1882-1971) was an American pianist who travelled to Paris and studied with Debussy for four months. He published the article Debussy, the man I knew [Nichols p. 167]

Ø Louis Laloy

Another important source is Louis Laloy, not a pianist but an intellectual and a close friend of Debussy. He published already in the year 1909 a biography of Debussy. A chapter in his book is called "Advice on playing Debussy's music" [Priest p. 107]. Laloy had heard Debussy several times in concert and privat. The chapter was also endorsed by Debussy in a letter:

" There's no need to alter anything in the advice you've given for playing my music. It remains simply to read and understand. [Lesure & Nichols p. 209] "

Recordings of Debussy playing the piano

It is not very well known that Debussy made recordings of himself playing the piano. He recorded several of his own pieces on piano rolls, to be played on a mechanical Welte Mignon player piano. The Welte "reproducing system" could capture the performance of the pianist, and reproduce it more or less accurately, complete with dynamics and pedalling.

· Acoustic recordings

Acoustic recordings are of course more interesting when we want to get an impression of Debussy's playing, since piano rolls cannot be completely trusted to faithfully reproduce what the pianist played. Unfortunately there are not many acoustic recordings of Debussy.

The songs they recorded:

• Mes longs cheveux (Pelléas et Mélisande)
• Green (Ariettes Oubliées)
• L'ombre des arbres (Ariettes Oubliées)
• Il pleure dans mon coeur (Ariettes Oubliées)

Other Composers for Impressionism

Other composers associated with impressionism include:

Maurice Ravel

Joseph-Maurice Ravel (March 7, 1875 - December 28, 1937) was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects. Much of his piano music, chamber music, vocal music and orchestral music has entered the standard concert repertoire.

Ravel's piano compositions, such as Jeux d'eau, Miroirs, Le tombeau de Couperin and Gaspard de la nuit, demand considerable virtuosity from the performer, and his orchestral music, including Daphnis et Chloé and his arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, uses a variety of sound and instrumentation.

Albert Roussel

Albert Charles Paul Marie Roussel (pronounced: [albɛːʁ ʁusɛl]) (5 April 1869 - 23 August 1937) was a French composer. He spent seven years as a midshipman, turned to music as an adult, and became one of the most prominent French composers of the interwar period. His early works were strongly influenced by the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel, while he later turned toward neoclassicism.

Isaac Albéniz

Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual (Spanish pronunciation: [iˈsak alˈβeniθ]) (29 May 1860, Camprodon - 18 May 1909, Cambo-les-Bains) was a Spanish Catalan pianist and composer best known for his piano works based on folk music idioms (many of which have been transcribed by others for guitar).

Paul Dukas

Paul Abraham Dukas (1 October 1865 - 17 May 1935) was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher. A studious man, of retiring personality, he was intensely self-critical, and he abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions. His best known work is the orchestral piece, L'apprenti sorcier (The Sorcerer's Apprentice), the fame of which has eclipsed that of his other surviving works. Among these are an opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Ariadne and Bluebeard), a symphony, two substantial works for solo piano, and a ballet, La Péri.

At a time when French musicians were divided into conservative and progressive factions, Dukas adhered to neither but retained the admiration of both. His compositions were influenced by non-French composers including Beethoven and Franck.

Manuel de Falla

Manuel de Falla y Matheu (November 23, 1876 - November 14, 1946) was a Spanish Andalusian composer of classical music. With Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados and Joaquín Turina he is one of Spain's most important musicians of the first half of the 20th century.

Little is known of that period of his life, but his relationship with his teacher was soon ended after she decided to then enter in a convent, Sisters of Charity, to become a nun. In 1889 he continued his piano lessons with Alejandro Odero and learned the techniques of harmony and counterpoint from Enrique Broca. At age 15 he became interested in literature and journalism and founded the literary magazines El Burlón and El Cascabel.

Charles Griffes

Charles Tomlinson Griffes (Elmira, New York, September 17, 1884 - New York City, April 8, 1920) was an American composer for piano, chamber ensembles and for voice.

Griffes is the most famous American representative of musical Impressionism. He was fascinated by the exotic, mysterious sound of the French Impressionists, and was compositionally much influenced by them while he was in Europe. He also studied the work of contemporary Russian composers (for example Scriabin), whose influence is also apparent in his work, for example in his use of synthetic scales.

His most famous works are the White Peacock, for piano (1915, orchestrated in 1919); his Piano Sonata (1917-18, revised 1919); a tone poem, The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, after the fragment by Coleridge (1912, revised in 1916), and Poem for Flute and Orchestra (1918). He also wrote numerous programmatic pieces for piano, chamber ensembles, and for voice. The amount and quality of his music is impressive considering his short life and his full-time teaching job, and much of his music is still performed.

Karol Szymanowski

Karol Maciej Szymanowski (Polish pronunciation: [ˌkarɔl ˌmatɕɛj ʃɨmaˈnɔfskʲi]; 3 October 1882 - 28 March 1937) was a Polish composer and pianist.

He wrote much piano music, including the four Etudes, Op. 4 (of which No. 3 was once his single most popular piece), many mazurkas and the exquisite and highly individual Metopes. Other works include the Three Myths for violin and piano, two masterful string quartets, a sonata for violin and piano, a number of orchestral songs (some to texts by Hafez and James Joyce) and his Stabat Mater, an acknowledged choral masterpiece.

According to Samson (p. 131), "Szymanowski adopted no thorough-going alternatives to tonal organization [...] the harmonic tensions and relaxations and the melodic phraseology have clear origins in tonal procedure, but [...] an underpinning tonal framework has been almost or completely dissolved away."

Many French composers continued impressionism's language through the 1920s and later, including:

Albert Roussel

Albert Charles Paul Marie Roussel (pronounced: [albɛːʁ ʁusɛl]) (5 April 1869 - 23 August 1937) was a French composer. He spent seven years as a midshipman, turned to music as an adult, and became one of the most prominent French composers of the interwar period.

His early works were strongly influenced by the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel, while he later turned toward neoclassicism.Roussel was by temperament a classicist. While his early work was strongly influenced by impressionism, he eventually found a personal style which was more formal in design, with a strong rhythmic drive, and with a more distinct affinity for functional tonality than found in the work of his more famous contemporaries Debussy, Ravel, Satie, and Stravinsky).

Charles Koechlin

Charles Louis Eugène Koechlin (French pronunciation: [ʃaʁl lwi øʒɛn keˈklɛ̃]; 27 November 1867 - 31 December 1950) was a French composer, teacher and writer on music.

He was a political radical all his life and a passionate enthusiast for such diverse things as medieval music, The Jungle Book of Rudyard Kipling, Johann Sebastian Bach, film stars (especially Lilian Harvey and Ginger Rogers), travelling, stereoscopic photography and socialism. He once said: "The artist needs an ivory tower, not as an escape from the world, but as a place where he can view the world and be himself. This tower is for the artist like a lighthouse shining out across the world."

André Caplet

André Caplet (November 23, 1878 - April 22, 1925) was a French composer and conductor now known primarily through his orchestrations of works by Claude Debussy.

Caplet was a composer in his own right, whose very innovative works have been sadly overlooked for the most part. Especially interesting is his instrumental use of voices, as in his Septuor à cordes vocales et instrumentales from 1909 and in the oratorio-like Le Miroir de Jésus from 1923, which features "choeur de femmes" in an accompanying role Caplet termed "voix d'accompagnement". He also wrote two works based on the short story The Mask of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe: Conte fantastique for harp and string quartet, and an orchestral symphonic study Le Masque de la mort rouge.

Caplet served as conductor of the Boston Opera from 1910 to 1914.

While serving in the military during World War I, he was gassed, which resulted in the pleurisy that killed him. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine), a suburb of Paris at age 46.

Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen (French pronunciation: [ɔlivje mɛsjɑ̃]; December 10, 1908 - April 27, 1992) was a French composer, organist and ornithologist, one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex (he was interested in rhythms from ancient Greek and from Hindu sources); harmonically and melodically it is based on modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from his early compositions and improvisations. Many of his compositions depict what he termed "the marvellous aspects of the faith", and drew on his deeply held Roman Catholicism.

Composers fromnon-Western cultures, such as:

Tōru Takemitsu

Toru Takemitsu (武満 徹 Takemitsu Tōru?, October 8, 1930 - February 20, 1996) was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory. Largely self-taught, Takemitsu possessed consummate skill in the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre. He drew from a wide range of influences, including jazz, popular music, avant-garde procedures and traditional Japanese music, in a harmonic idiom largely derived from the music of Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen.

In 1958, his Requiem for strings (1957) gained international attention, led to several commissions from across the world and settled his reputation as one of the leading Japanese composers of the 20th century. He was the recipient of numerous awards, commissions and honours; he composed over 100 film scores and about 130 concert works for ensembles of various sizes and combinations.

Jazz musicians such as:

Duke Ellington

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 - May 24, 1974) was an American composer, pianist, and big band leader. Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions. In the words of Bob Blumenthal of The Boston Globe "In the century since his birth, there has been no greater composer, American or otherwise, than Edward Kennedy Ellington.

A prominent figure in the history of jazz, Ellington's music stretched into various other genres, including blues, gospel, film scores, popular, and classical. His career spanned more than 50 years and included leading his orchestra, composing an inexhaustible songbook, scoring for movies, composing stage musicals, and world tours. Several of his instrumental works were adapted into songs that became standards.

Gil Evans

Gil Evans (born 13 May 1912 in Toronto, Canada, died 20 March 1988 in Cuernavaca, Mexico) was a jazz pianist, arranger, composer and bandleader, active in the United States. He played an important role in the development of cool jazz, modal jazz, free jazz and jazz fusion, and collaborated extensively with Miles DavisIn the 1970s, following Davis and many other jazz musicians, Evans worked in the free jazz and jazz-rock idioms, gaining a new generation of admirers.. In 1974, he released an album of his arrangements of music by Hendrix. In 1986, Evans produced and arranged the soundtrack to the film of the Colin MacInnes book Absolute Beginners, thereby working with such contemporary artists as Sade Adu, Patsy Kensit's Eight Wonder.

Art Tatum

Arthur "Art" Tatum, Jr. (October 13, 1909 - November 5, 1956) was an American jazz pianist and virtuoso. He was nearly blind.

Tatum is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time.

Cecil Taylor

Cecil Percival Taylor (born March 25, 1929 in New York City) is an American pianist and poet.Classically trained, Taylor is generally acknowledged as one of the pioneers of free jazz. His music is characterized by an extremely energetic, physical approach, producing complex improvised sounds, frequently involving tone clusters and intricate polyrhythms. His piano technique has been likened to percussion, for example described as "eighty-eight tuned drums" (referring to the number of keys on a standard piano)and also to Art Tatum's.

Impressionistic Music

An impressionistic music project has a hazy and dreamlike quality and nature is frequently the subject.

The impressionistic music was a movement in European classical music, mainly in France which appeared in the late nineteenth century and continued into the middle of the twentieth century.

· Classical music

Classical music is the art music produced in, or rooted in, the traditions of Western liturgical and secular music, encompassing a broad period from roughly the 11th century to present times. The term "classical music" did not appear until the early 19th century, in an attempt to "canonize" the period from Johann Sebastian Bach to Beethoven as a golden age.[6] The earliest reference to "classical music" recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from about 1836.

Similarly to its precursor in the visual arts, musical Impressionism focuses on a suggestion and an atmosphere rather than on a strong emotion or the depiction of a story as in program music. Musical Impressionism occurred as a reaction to the excesses of the Romantic era. While this era was characterized by a dramatic use of the major and minor scale systems, Impressionist music was tending to make more use of dissonance.

· Romantic music

Romantic music or music in the Romantic Period is a musicological and artistic term referring to a particular period, theory, compositional practice, and canon in Western music history, from about 1830 to 1910.

Romantic music as a movement evolved from the formats, genres and musical ideas established in earlier periods, such as the classical period, and went further in the name of expression and syncretism of different art-forms with music. Romanticism does not necessarily refer to romantic love, though that theme was prevalent in many works composed during this time period, both in literature, painting or music.

Musical Impressionism

Musical Impressionism (Impressionistic Music) was based in France by the French composer Claude Debussy. He and Maurice Ravel were generally considered to be the two "great" Impressionists. However, these days composers are generally not as accurately described by the term "Impressionism" as painters in the genre were. Debussy renounced it, saying: "I am trying to do 'something different' - in a way realities - what the imbeciles call 'impressionism' is a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by art critics.

· Impressionist composers

Besides the two great impressionist composers, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, other composers who composed in what has been described as impressionist style include André Caplet, Frederick Delius, Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados, Erik Satie, Albert Roussel, Alexander Scriabin, Lili Boulanger, Federico Mompou, Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Karol Szymanowski.