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Chapter 18Orchestral Music

1850-1900

Thursday, February 7, 13

Music for Dancing and Marching

• concert hall, dance hall, music hall, and parade ground were important venues for orchestral music

• dance halls and music halls served food, drink and music in varying proportions to clients from all classes of society

• most popular dances were:

- quadrille - a type of square dance

- the polka - a lively dance in duple meter

- the waltz - very popular dance in triple meter



• Johann Strauss, Jr. An der schönen blauen Donau (1867)

- title: On the Beautiful Blue Danube

- waltz very popular, you touch (like an embrace) your partner in public

- introduction and series of waltzes

- 4 or 8 bar phrases group into 16 or 32 bar sections

• could be easily repeated to extend the dance

- sections usually use an ABA type form



• music halls offered a mixture of instrumental and vocal works together with comedy, vaudeville routines and animal acts

• the march was written to coordinate physical movement of soldiers

• John Philip Sousa (1854-1932) made the march into a genre for bandstand and parade ground



• John Philip Sousa King Cotton

- might be played on parade field or band stand

- features modular structures

- balanced units of 4, 8, 16, and 32 bars


The Ballet

• began to provide the main attraction for entire evenings of public entertainment in Paris in 1870s

• technical innovations including more athletic kind of movement and dancing en point (on the toe tips)

• costumes became shorter and eventually skintight showcasing human form

• choreography avoided realism combining massive formations of dancers with focus on principal female soloist: prima ballerina


TchaikovskyWhen the composer toured the United States in 1891, he helped

inaugurate the newly built Carnegie Hall in New York City.


The Ballet• France continued to lead the way as ballet became an

increasingly public genre, moving outside patronage of courts

• in the last third of the 19th century, Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) emerded as preeminent ballet composer

• Tchaikovsky The Nutcracker

- based on a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann

- “Le café” evokes the sound of Arabia (drone plus Eng. Horn, Cl.)

- “Le thé” evokes the sound of China (quasi-pentatonic scales)


Symphonic Poem

• symphonic poem - new name for what had been called a concert overture

• usually programmatic and in one movement

• written for concert hall not as the opening of a play or opera

• composers: Liszt, Richard Strauss


The Symphony

• enjoyed renewed vigor in the second half of the 19th century

• to take genre of symphony in new directions, several prominent composers created works that drew on elements from other genres: concerto, cantata, opera, symphonic poem


The Symphony

• The challenge of the past: Brahms

- embraced his musical heritage by openly aligning himself with traditions of composers like Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann

- four symphonies but no common formula

• each takes a different conceptual approach to the genre


The Symphony

• The challenge of the past: Brahms

- relatively diminutive inner movements of First Symphony serve almost as interludes to outer movements

- last movement of 2nd Symphony breaks with tradition of finale as grandiose symphonic culmination

- imposing set of variations in finale of Fourth Symphony stands within tradition set down in last movement of Beethoven’s Eroica - but here Brahms reaches past Beethoven to earlier tradition of J. S. Bach

- See Bonds p. 475 for the ostinato


The Symphony

• Dvorák Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”

- written while in the US

- themes are supposed to be based on Native American and African-American themes

- Dvorák encouraged American composers to use folk songs in their work

- Nationalism in music


The Symphony

• The collision of High and Low: Mahler

- symphonies of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) straddle the 19th and 20th centuries

- First Symphony (1888) uses 19th-century conventions while later symphonies the Ninth (1910) and Tenth anticipated the 20th-century idioms and approaches

- belief that a symphony can and should encompass the banal and mundane as well as the beautiful - symphonies are large-scale works


The Symphony

• Mahler First Symphony

- third movement is a Funereal March

- like Beethoven’s Eroica (second movement)

- opening played by Double Basses very high; using the Frère Jacques tune but in minor

- the world upside down


The world turned upside down.Gustav Mahler once revealed that this well-known woodcut had inspired

the slow movement of his First Symphony. The image is on of a world turned upside down: animals bury the hunter.


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