Мир современной музыки. Хрестоматия для чтения на английском языке. Учебно-методические материалы для студентов музыкальных вузов и факультетов
.pdfМинистерство культуры Российской Федерации Нижегородская государственная консерватория (академия) им. М.И. Глинки
THE WORLD
OF MODERN MUSIC
Хрестоматия для чтения на английском языке
Автор-составитель:
Т.Г. Бухарова
кандидат филологических наук, доцент
Рекомендовано Приволжским региональным учебно-методическим центром Учебно-методического объединения по образованию в области лингвистики для студентов музыкальных вузов и факультетов
Нижний Новгород Издательство Нижегородской консерватории
2012
1
УДК 781.6
ББК 81.2 Англ.
М 89
Печатается по решению редакционно-издательского совета ННГК им. М.И. Глинки
М89 Мир современной музыки: Хрестоматия для чтения на английском языке. Учебно-методические материалы для студентов музыкальных вузов и
факультетов / Сост. Бухарова Т.Г. – Н.Новгород:
изд-во ННГК им. М.И. Глинки, 2012. – 100 с.
Данное пособие предназначается для обучения чтению оригинальной литературы по специальности студентов высших музыкальных учебных заведений, вузов искусств, музыкальнопедагогических факультетов институтов и университетов.
Рецензенты:
Нестеренко С.В., кандидат филологических наук, доцент НГЛУ им. Н.А. Добролюбова
Фролов А.А., кандидат педагогических наук, доцент ННГК им. М.И. Глинки
УДК 781.6
ББК 81.2 Англ.
©Бухарова Т.Г., 2012
©Нижегородская государственная консерватория (академия) им. М.И. Глинки, 2012
2
ПРЕДИСЛОВИЕ
Данное пособие предназначается для обучения чтению оригинальной литературы по специальности студентов высших музыкальных учебных заведений, вузов искусств, музыкальнопедагогических факультетов институтов и университетов. Цель пособия – развивать и совершенствовать навыки, необходимые для чтения литературы по специальности в подлиннике.
Пособие состоит из четырёх тематических разделов:
1.Композиторы
2.Дирижёры
3.Исполнители
4.Музыкальные события
Тексты подобраны из материалов журналов “Cultural Chronicle” (Inter Nationes) и “Kulturjournal” of the Goethe-Institut 1993 – 2003 годов.
Совершенствование навыков чтения на английском языке предполагает владение различными видами чтения как изучающим, так и просмотровым. Данное пособие предназначено в первую очередь для работы над развитием навыков изучающего вида чтения, предполагающего умения понимать и правильно соотносить грамматические категории английского и русского языков, находить эквиваленты как на уровне отдельных слов, так и адекватность перевода на уровне предложений без искажения смысла. Требования к пониманию текста при различных видах чтения различны. Тем не менее, есть общие моменты, которые являются объектами контроля: определение основной темы (идеи) текста, выделение смысловых частей, нахождение опорных или ключевых слов, необходимых для понимания данного смыслового отрывка, понимание явно или имплицитно выраженного отношения автора статьи к сообщению. Контроль правильности изучающего чтения осуществляется с помощью письменного перевода. Просмотровый вид чтения предполагает составление аннотации с использованием ключевых слов.
Чтение каждого раздела завершается письменной или устной самостоятельной работой студентов, в которой они
3
творчески и профессионально оценивают содержание прочитанного раздела.
В зависимости от уровня лингвистической подготовки студентов преподаватель может варьировать задания в аудитории или для самостоятельной работы дома.
The Joys and Sufferings of Composing
Three Munich composers
Florian Heigenhauser twists his face into a slightly mocking grin. "Must a composer always suffer?" The 28 year-old composer refutes all the clichés about pale, cerebral artists, shaken by existential crises of creativity. Sun-tanned and absolutely fit from mountainclimbing, he sits opposite you, talking about the wind quintet he has worked on in recent months.
Florian Heigenhauser is one of three Munich composers whom the city's cultural authorities commissioned - after consulting teachers at the College of Music and the Richard Strauss Conservatoire - to write pieces for the Salzburg Mozart Week in February 1992. Ensembles from 33 European "Mozart cities" will play especially composed works for this "Week of Contemporary Music" - works from those cities which Mozart once honoured with a stay of more or less long duration.
The cultural authorities decided on three Munich musicians offering different starting-points. Florian Heigenhauser and Lutz Landwehr von Pragenau, both music college students, were each asked to write a wind quintet, and 45 year-old Ulrich Stranz, who now lives in Zurich, was commissioned to compose a piano duo. The only condition was the length. Each piece should last around 15 minutes.
It's necessary to make a slight correction to what was said at the start. Florian Heigenhauser does sometimes suffer - "when I have got completely stuck in my composing". This time he's finished with such problems. After several months of work the piece is virtually ready. This isn't his first wind quintet, and he could even re-use aspects of the earlier piece. The title "Arie glaciale" ("Songs in Ice") isn't intended as a programme or meant to bring to mind any actual landscape images. Nevertheless, the idea of interpreting the piece in
4
that way is tempting, and such associations wouldn't be completely wrong. After all, Heigenhauser is mainly inspired by landscapes - mountains and glaciers: Events in nature interest him more than social processes. He compares musical developments with something flowing. He has no "message" for the listener! "While the piece is being played the listener should simply experience intensively, and be caught up in the music - even having unpleasant feelings as far as I'm concerned".
28 year-old Lutz Landwehr von Pragenau doesn't believe that one can still be seriously critical today. "Social critics are fossils!" His music is instead intended to be predominantly "cheeky" - as he stressed several times. "I want to resist all expectations and surprise people". Above all through diversity. "Our life today is also extremely rich in changes. At the same time people have lost their curiosity because of the enormous range of things on offer".
Pragenau apparently wants to wake them up again - in his contribution for Salzburg through a montage of many short pieces which seem to stand unrelatedly alongside one another. He copies various styles but time and again generates discontinuities, playing with the different musical elements. "Listeners get nothing from me that they can reverently worship. I take them onto thin ice and box their ears". He took as his model the Mozart of the "Basle Briefe" (letters to his cousin), which are full of word-plays and faecal humour: "I wanted to catch the character of those letters, transposing the cheekiness into music".
But how do sounds develop out of words? "I mainly work at the piano, and sometimes also at the computer. Timing is important, and when you only compose at your desk, you don't have any exact sense of time". Ideas are frequently deceptive. "I often abandon a concept during the work. The notes also have a life of their own. I try and let them come. I'm a gardener rather than an inventor".
Ulrich Stranz finds even more poetic images for the process of seeking. "I grope in nothingness. If I'm lucky, the first contact with the sea of endless possibilities is the right one". Sometimes there are "difficult births" too. He compares the creative process with searching for a four-leaved clover in a meadow. "Sometimes you find one!" Stranz doesn't usually write more than two pieces a year, generally
5
paid commissions - "I don't have time for other things. He sits for many hours a day at his piano and desk. "Back-breaking" - says the youthful-looking, walrus-moustached composer in his mid-forties.
In his opinion, a person's character always enters into his or her music. He calls himself a "brooding type", and believes that "a fundamentally melancholy aspect" runs through his music. His piece for two pianos starts "in linear fashion, lightly engraved"; then in the middle section there is a "forwards-storming" element, and a meditative close. He doesn't want to shock. For him harmony and tone-colour are more important. I want to make music filled with light".
He calls himself a "free composer" - but Stranz is not free from material constraints. He may be the only one of the three who has a contract with a music publisher and printed scores - but there are hardly any recordings of his compositions. "I can't live from composing alone - so he gets by financially as a violinist in various orchestras.
Lutz Landwehr von Pragenau and Florian Heigenhauser see their future in similar fashion. Both of them have had a number of pieces performed already, inclusive of the ADEvantgarde in June last year. But they very much doubt whether they will be able to make a living from composing. Both also studied school music, and teach piano or clarinet at the Munich College of music. Heigenhauser also has a job as a bar pianist in a wine house. Faced with the low earnings of "free artists", the three composers have no choice but to earn money in other ways. If they suffer at all, it's probably chiefly from that necessity.
Antje Weber/Süddeutsche Zeitung
Carl Orff Rhythmicist and Music Educationist
His fame extends far, even posthumously. Some people think that Carl Orff is - alongside Richard Strauss - "the only really globally-known German composer in modern times". Others think that rather an exaggeration, especially as in 1995, the year of the 100th anniversary of Orff's birth, his works are seldom performed in opera houses and concert halls. However, they serve as background music to
6
commercials on television and in the cinema. Being made use of in such a way has otherwise not happened to any creator of new music with claims to being art. By now musical modernism in and from Germany is represented across the world by artists like Karl-Heinz Stockhausen or Hans Werner Henze, and in the preceding generation was linked with names like Paul Hindemith or Kurt Weill (both of whom had to emigrate from Germany to America). Orff, a longestablished Bavarian, was never a member of the guild of new music as narrowly defined. He stands for a breach in history and continuity in Germany in a different way, for instance, to Arnold Schoenbcrg, who was also, forced into exile. Schoenberg is almost Orff's antipode. It is not just chance that H. H. Stuckenschmidt, the great liberal music critic, does not even-once mention Orff in his collected writings on new music in the first two thirds of the twentieth century.
How to make a start? That is also the first question in all music teaching. Among my memories of primary school - at the midfifties in Southern Germany - are those pleasant moments when the big old cupboard at the rear of the classroom was opened. Out of its deep recesses came a battery of instruments, accompanied by joyous shovings and warnings from the teacher. -'We were then allowed to drum and whistle, beat and sсrаре accompany folksongs, and improvise with these "Orff instruments". Generations of schoolchildren approached the world of sound by way of these soundmakers especially developed for educational purposes. They thereby felt their way towards new experiences of listening. They practiced musical communication, playing together, and interaction. Orff, at that time one of the very great living masters of contemporary music, has shown the way with his original concept of early musical education. He as no other set a precedent in this sphere and achieved a farreaching impact. Stimulated by ideas about educational reform generally prevalent in the twenties, around 1930 Carl Orff and Gunhild Keetman together started to develop the "Schulwerk" that is associated with his name up to the present day. "I see no way of renewal through making music even more complicated" - was his maxim for both composition and educational work. All children, no matter what their origins and previous musical training, were to pursue rhythmic and melodic models from earlier stages of Western
7
music (and from other cultures), making human development individually attainable - rather than being led into the wonderland of sound through simplified forms of art music. An element in modernism thus deliberately played off very old, rudimentary ways of singing and playing instruments against the highly developed aesthetics of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Up to 1945 people mainly saw the "community-forming" components in Orff's Schulwerk, but after the Second World War the emphasis was on the lack of preconditions and the experimental possibilities involved in this approach with the associated implications for democratic behaviour. It is like concrete - Everything depends on what you make of it.
The possibility of being able to join in without having any special musical or technical skills is at the heart of the Orff way. However, he largely eliminates the more developed contrapuntal and harmonic dimensions of Western art music, and does not call for highly differentiated musical experience. I come from an educated middle-class family, actively engaged in the cultivation of music, so for me learning with Orff constantly involved something that was unsatisfactorily raw and unserious since "real" art was manifested in local performances of oratorios, then in symphony concerts in the locality's main town, and later in the fascinating splendours of opera in the regional capital, ravishing eyes and ears with the best of Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, and also the "real moderns". So what remained of involvement in the Orff instruments was soon nothing but paltry music from the time of "not yet". We did not initially grasp that we were confronted with a form based on reduction or refusal, with a deliberately calculated choice not to go further.
One central principle in Orff's concept results from the hope that speech, music, and movement form a unity, coming together again after all their historical divagations. The composer's attempt to move beyond 19th century symphonic and operatic structures involved the same idea. He working as conductor at various theatres from 1915 - was by no means alone during the twenties in his wish to replace what were viewed as superseded operatic forms by new concepts of music-drama. Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, and many others developed their models. At the end of the twenties
8
his wish for innovation led Orff to come close to» the views of Bertolt
Brecht for a while (and to set some of his texts). Orff wrote in 1930 that he wanted to "move subjectivism and individual isolation towards a binding and generally valid sense of community". However, that yearning for renewed community soon made Orff into an adherent of the Nazis, following the way the times were going. After 1945 he claimed to have been part of the "White Rose" resistance group in Munich whose chief members were executed by the Hitler regime. In the meantime the truth of that assertion, which helped Orff's career in both German states, has been refuted by serious scholarly studies.
A Tragedy about Listening
On its journey through a great variety of performance venues Luigi Nono's "Prometeo" has now returned to Freiburg in Breisgau, to the place where the piece largely came into existence. It was during the Eighties at what was then South-West German Radio's experimental studio in Freiburg with its facilities for live electronics that Nono developed the ideas about sound which shape this "Tragedia dell'ascolto".
Luigi Nono's "Prometeo" is a work which one encounters with reverence - not only, but particularly, in the SWF's Heinrich Strobel Foundation experimental studio. That is hardly surprising since here people know what they are talking about. In this studio Nono developed the work and the Freiburg team has been responsible for the live electronics in all performances since the 1984 premiere, involving assuming responsibility for the entire performance. Nonetheless - stresses studio director Andre Richard - that didn't (and doesn't) happen so as to maintain a monopoly; it happens because "Prometeo" is linked with a singular performance practice. Andre Richard is one of a group of musicians who during the Eighties worked closely with Nono and thus became intimately familiar with his aesthetic and his thought. Up to his death in 1990 Nono had himself directed all five performances of "Prometeo". (Then Richard took on the composer's function of main sound projectionist, thereby becoming an important source for performance of this work.
Nono long incubated the plan for "Prometeo". According to his widow Nuria Schoen-berg-Nono, the 25 year-old already had such
9
ideas. At any rate it is certain that after the premiere in 1975 of "Al gran sole carico d'amore", the great political and philosophical stage work about the revolutions of the twentieth century, a turning-point in Nono's work became apparent, finally leading to "Prometeo". Originally this was also intended for the stage, but it ultimately became invisible theatre without action, intended only for listening: "Tragedia dell'ascolto". Instead of visible stage sets there are acoustic spaces which are brought into existence by live electronics. That is why - as Andre Richard emphasizes - Nono could only realize his visions when he came to the experimental studio.
People at Freiburg had been devoting special attention to the technical possibilities of moving sound around space. In 1971 HansPeter Haller developed the "Halaphon" named after him, a piece of equipment for deploying sound which became important for live electronics in general and "Prometeo" in particular. The objective was to get a sound - for instance the vocalizing of a soprano or the notes of a clarinet - to fly through space like a bird. Live electronics' other tasks include the creation of virtual spaces with assistance from various forms of reverberation and echo, and to defamiliarize and delay sounds. What may sound dry as dust technicalities helped Nono to implement ideas which ultimately derived from acoustic experiences in his native Venice, but not just early baroque Venetian choral polyphony in San Marco. The canals whose surfaces reflect the sounds of the city, prolonging or swallowing them, also play a part. These sounds seem to detach themselves from the place where they arose, producing a complex system which Nono called an "acoustic multiverse". "Prometeo" is also such a multiverse.
The acoustic starting-point, providing the basis for use of electronics, is always produced on the spot by musicians playing in the moment (hence the term lives electronics). In "Prometeo" there are several vocal soloists and a choir of soloists, two speakers, instrumental soloists, and four orchestral groups, positioned in different places and directed by two conductors. So Prometeo's soundworld is not electronically generated. Vocal and instrumental colours remain decisive, but these are changed and moved around by electronic means. "Very often" - reports Andre Richard - "people say afterwards they are disappointed not to have heard anything of the
10