MUSIC 1B03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Prolongation, Concertmaster, Program Music
8 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Chapter 26: Romanticism in Classic Forms-Orchestral, Chamber, and Choral Music
The Romantic orchestra
• Central to concert life
• Number of orchestras multiply
• Concert societies
• Amateur orchestras
• Professional orchestras; playing in orchestra as a "profession"
• Increased size
• Expanded ranges; valved brass
• Wider range of instrumental colours
• Winds/brass more equal to strings
• Orchestration as an art form
Conductors
• With baton
• Virtuoso/star conductors
Audience and repertoire
• Prestige of and reverence for orchestral music
• Rise of "classical repertoire"
• Reverence for "great" works and composers
• Fidelity to score
• "serious" music
• "Classical music" as genre
Program music
• Narrative/descriptive music
• Explanatory note with concert program: the work's "program"
• Programmatic content: narrative, character , history, philosophy, literature/poetry
• Music as representational
• Program guides interpretation
• Music understood within context of program
Hector Berlioz (Dec. 11, 1803-March 8, 1869)
• Critic in parisian press
• Conductor
Orchestration
• Mastery of instrumental sound colours; distribution/contrast of instrumental groupings
• Vital to depicting programmatic content
• Structure of piece and expressive potential
• 1842: published treatise on orchestration
• Orchestra itself as an instrument
Symphonie Fantastique (1830)
• "Episode in the Life of an Artist: a Fantastic Symphony in Five Movements
• Detailed program, published with score (1845)
• Harriet Smithson
o Irish actress
o Married Berlioz
• Idee fixe
o Melody associated with beloved and emotions from artist
o Various forms
o Palpitations of artist's heart in response to sight of beloved
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