Music Essay

Essay Question (to be submitted on UBLearns discussion board by Wednesday, December 10th) [300-500 words] 

A couple of classes ago, I pointed to an aesthetic debate that has surfaced many times in the history of Western classical music: complexity vs. simplicity.  We saw it in the 16th century call to restrict the polyphonic complexity of music in the Catholic Church.  Protestant reformers took issue with polyphony’s tendency to render sacred texts unintelligible and, in response, turned back to simple monophonic chant for use in worship.  Two hundred years later, in the mid-18th century, there was a similar conflict between the late-Baroque polyphonic style (think J.S. Bach) and a simpler, melody-driven homophonic style associated with Classical-era composers like Mozart and Haydn.  In both of these instances, the call for simplicity was tied to concerns over the clarity of ideas.  The Protestant reformers demanded clarity of text in sacred music, and the Classical-era composers, in line with Enlightenment ideals, strove for transparency of form and motivic development. 

Stepping forward another two hundred years (ca. 1945), one the most prevalent trends in musical composition was a method known as total serialism.  Composers working in this manner (think Karlheinz Stockhausen) subjected musical material to complicated arithmetic processes to generate pieces of music.  The results were extremely dense works, widely considered inaccessible to the general public.  A group of composers active in the United States [Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, La Monte Young] took issue with this apparent inaccessibility and sought to create a radically simple aesthetic that was immediately graspable to a listening audience.  This new style would eventually come to be known as Minimalism.  For Steve Reich in particular, the goal was to create pieces that rendered the compositional process itself audible.  He wanted to ensure that listeners could hear how the musical material was transformed.  His series of “phase” pieces, such as Piano Phase, were all attempts at making that process transparent.

For the essay portion of the exam, I would like for you to address a few things:

Define and briefly explain total serialism and minimalism.  [When and where did they arise? What were the aims and motivations of composers in both styles?]

Take Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck IX and Steve Reich’s Piano Phase as representatives of these styles and briefly discuss how they exemplify these widely differing aesthetics.  [What makes Klavierstuck IX a serialist work?  What makes Piano Phase minimalist?

Present your own take on this issue.  [Do you side with one camp or the other? Should music strive for radical levels of complexity or simplicity, or have both sides gone too far in opposite directions?]