- •Unit 1. Classical Music
- •Is fit for treason, stratagems and spoils;
- •1. Are you a music lover? What role does music play in your life? Express your ideas in a 2-page composition “Music in My Life”.
- •2. Comment on the excerpt from “The Merchant of Venice” given above. Do you agree that one can’t trust a person who is indifferent to music?
- •Recital – evening – prom
- •Item – work – piece
- •Part – movement
- •Concert – concerto – recital – show
- •Part – movement – item – number – work
- •To play the… - to play from music – to read music
- •Miscellanea
- •There’s music in our speech
- •1. Explain the meaning of the following words and phrases:
- •2. Which idiom best fills each space?
- •3. All the following sentences include a musical idiom, with one word missing. Use the words below to complete the sentences.
- •Exercises
- •Renaissance (c.1400 – c.1600)
- •Baroque (c.1600 – c.1750)
- •Classical (c.1750 – c.1830)
- •Early Romantic (c.1830 – c.1860)
- •Late Romantic (c.1860 – c.1920)
- •The Post ‘Great War’ Years (1920 to the present day)
- •Exercises
- •Speaking “for” and “against” classical music
- •Exercises
- •Exercises
- •Mr. Smeeth Goes to a Symphony Concert
- •Exercises
- •Wood-wind instruments
- •Position of players in a modern orchestra
- •(From ‘Incidental Music to “a Midsummer Night’s Dream”)
- •A Guide to Classical Listening
- •Exercises
- •Exercises
- •Mozart’s don giovanni opens in prague
- •Exercises
- •The pros and cons of rock/pop music
- •Exercises
- •The language of rock
- •Exercises
- •Справка
- •Folk music
- •Exercises
- •Jazz, sound of surprise
- •Exercises
- •The tunes you can’t refuse
- •Exercises
- •1. A description of the subject.
- •2. Detailed comments on the successful and unsuccessful features of the subject.
- •3. Summing up and recommendation.
- •Music on the mind
- •Music – the drug of choice for Britain’s Olympians
- •С Бахом… под Майкла Джексона
- •Exercises
- •Types of Music
- •1. Classical music
- •12. Orchestral music
- •13. Chamber music
- •Concert, Recital, Evening
- •14. Concert
- •15. Recital
- •16. Evening
- •17. Verbs used with concert/recital
- •Listen is not used here. Nor should it be used in translating such sentences as:
- •Concert Programmes and repertoires
- •18. Work, item, number, piece
- •19. Repertoire, repertory
- •Classical Works
- •Instrumental Works
- •Concertos are written for an orchestra with solo instrument(s) and the instrument is often specified as follows: a piano concerto, a violin concerto, Beethoven’s third piano concerto, etc.
- •26. Movement, part
- •27. Special names for musical works
- •Vocal Works
- •28. Song
- •29. Use of on with names of instruments
- •Some Common Musical Terms Note, Music, score
- •33. Choir, chorus
- •34. Types of choir
- •A Symphony Orchestra (Instruments and Players)
- •36. Conductor, leader
- •37. Tune, Melody, Theme, Subject
- •38. Types of Opera grand opera – (an) opera with a serious story in which all the words are sung
- •39. Opera Singers
- •40. Use of articles with opera
- •42. Modern Music
- •To cut a single
- •To disband (see also split up)
- •Drummer
- •To be/become a one-hit wonder
- •Supplementary materials Text 1.
- •Text 2.
- •Text 3.
- •Text 4.
- •Text 5.
- •Text 6.
- •Rethinking mozart On the 250th anniversary of his birth, a more realistic picture of the composer's musical genius is emerging.
- •Exercises
- •1. Practise reading the words from the text. Learn their Russian equivalents.
- •2. Define the following words and word-combinations. Say in what context they were used in the article.
- •3. Explain the difference between:
- •Text 7.
- •Styles of Jazz
- •Text 8. Evita (music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Tim Rice)
- •1. A Cinema In Buenos Aires, 26 July 1952
- •9. The Lady's Got Potential
- •10. Charity Concert/The Art Of The Possible
- •13. A New Argentina
- •14. On The Balcony Of The Casa Rosada 1
- •19. Rainbow Tour
- •Contents
- •Unit 5. The Effects of Music on the Human System ………………71
- •A short guide to composer data ………………………………………………….163 sources
Supplementary materials Text 1.
“Like language, music is of some kind is a human universal – all peoples have songs and instruments. And as with language, music in its pure state exists without mutation; written music is a historical artifice…
…There are places music can go only when there is writing, freeing the musician from the requirements of memory. In the Western world, the prime example would be classical music. The orally transmitted folk song will have a simple melody that sits easily in the memory, with lots of “And now, everybody!”-style repetition. I once heard some old babushkas singing Russian folk songs for money in St. Petersburg, and seven years later I still remember the minor-key, three-quarter-time melody of the chorus – it was, after all, designed to get under your skin that way and be passed down through illiterate or semiliterate generations. But Beethoven’s Seventh could not be passed down this way. The melodies are too extended, develop too idiosyncratically, and in too many variations, and the whole thing is simply too long to memorize, short of repeated listenings to people performing it – which they can only do from written scores. In addition, each of over a dozen instruments has its own part. There could be no classical music without pen and ink.
Classical music is, in this sense, unnatural, like elevated oratorical style, classical poetry, and densely constructed prose. Classical music takes painstaking, extended training and serious effort to produce, and requires close attention and practice to appreciate. Beyond the listener-friendly warhorses like Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, or the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth that one would have to be a corpse not to respond to on some level, classical music is hard. Brahms’s chamber pieces are gorgeous as texture, but they are rarely catchy, and only with training or repeated listens can one fully digest them as statements rather than a mere sound. And then when we move ahead to Schoenberg and his quest to bring classical music to a new level of development, his music cam be downright irritating, and he worked at not being catchy. For many musically inclined people, even repeated listenings leave them deaf to his art. Classical pushes the envelope – hard.”
(Doing Our Own Things by John McWhorter (pp 198-199))
Points for Discussion:
1) What differs “oral” music from its “written” variety, in the author’s opinion? Do you agree with this subdivision of music?
2) Does the “written” character of classical music diminish its value in any way, as you see it?
Text 2.
A.
Don Juan, legendary hero in many folklore traditions, originating in Spain, who is the prototype of the unrepentant libertine. The old Spanish tale recounts the promiscuous Don Juan’s seduction of the daughter of Seville’s military commander. After killing the commander in a duel, Juan cynically invites the victim's funerary statue to a feast. The statue comes to life, seizes the defiant Juan, and drags him down to hell.
The first formal literary treatment of the story was the play El burlador de Sevilla (The Libertine of Seville, 1630) attributed to Tirso de Molina. An important later Spanish version, still popular, is the verse play Don Juan tenorio (Don Juan the Rake, 1844) by José Zorrilla y Moral. About 1657 travelling Italian actors performed the story as a pantomime in France. There it was later dramatized by several French playwrights including Molière, who wrote Don Juan; ou, Le festine de pierre (Don Juan; or, The Stone Banquet, first acted in 1665). The theme was treated in 17th-century England by Sir Aston Cokayne in The Tragedy of Ovid (1669) and by Thomas Shadwell in The Libertine (1676). The story and character of the hero were greatly changed by later writers, including Lord Byron in his mock epic Don Juan (1819-1824) and George Bernard Shaw in his comedy Man and Superman (1903). The legend has also inspired musical masterpieces, most notably the opera Don Giovanni (1787) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, and the symphonic poem Don Juan (1889) by Richard Strauss. Both of these works portray Juan as a tragicomic hero, destroyed by his obsessive search for the ideal woman.
(Encarta Encyclopedia)
B.
Из огромного количества суждений писателей и критиков о моцартовском «распутнике», ставшем легендарным, нам бы хотелось привести слова, недавно сказанные Джованни Маккиа: «В «Дон-Жуане» Моцарта нет разнообразия, но есть противоречия, кричащий контраст, скопление одного выразительного материала, который сталкивается с другим выразительным материалом такого же напряжения. Страстное желание выйти за пределы, если воспользоваться выражением Сенанкура, сокрушительная тяга испытать неиспытанное, чрезмерная потребность наслаждений наталкивается на другую сокрушительную силу, леденящую, сверхъестественную… Свобода, беспечность, любовь к настоящему, к сиюминутному – и пугающая пустота вечности… В предшествующих «Дон-Жуанах» [литературных] шло непрерывное развитие действия. Его двигала подобная часовой пружине неустанная энергия главного героя, в то время как другие действующие лица то появлялись, то исчезали, иногда навсегда… «Дон-Жуан» Моцарта более статичен. Герой переживает кризис… Все вокруг препятствует ему. Действующие лица, традиционно составляющие фон (Мазетто, Церлина), здесь имеют принципиальное значение, почти равное значению других персонажей. Целое отличается монументальностью… Все кажется увеличенным, деформированным напряженностью и почти чрезмерностью музыкальной экспрессии. Мера и грация, все сложные схемы XVIII века, одно время прилагавшиеся к великому искусству Моцарта, оказываются сметенными.
Суетное, фривольное, даже скандальное переходят в устрашающее, демоническое».
Эта полумрачная, полукомическая атмосфера породила толки о загадочности главного героя. Дон-Жуан – не только плод музыкального гения Моцарта, но и создание Да Понте, окружившего великого соблазнителя тысячью препятствий и поставившего его поистине в затруднительное положение. Не зная, как лучше выразить себя, он вступает в схватку даже с мертвецами, насмехаясь над достойной памятью знаменитых и почтенных людей, таких, как Командор. Поэтому он и заканчивает жизнь в вечном огне и гораздо раньше, чем предполагалось. Но в последнем испытании, решающем в деле спасения души, он показывает, что всерьез относился к своей жизни и к враждебной судьбе. Он отвергает покаяние и «выигрывает» … битву с неизвестным: он будет проклят, но память о нем, о его делах останется незапятнанной малодушием. Другие персонажи, оставшись одни, станут в растерянности метаться среди остатков стынущей жизни. Никто из них не будет солистом. Прячась друг за друга, они могут только посмеяться над миновавшей опасностью… Кто такие все эти герои? Участники трагического действа или «великого бала жизни»? Вопрос остается без ответа…
(Из эссе немецкого режиссера XX века Вальтера Фельзенштейна (1901-1975))