Word: modality
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...young man, Vaughan Williams in vain sought his own musical language in London (at the Royal College of Music) and Berlin (under Composer Max Bruch), finally found it in the modal, autochthonous abundance of the English countryside's folk music. Together with his friend Gustav Hoist, he severed the bonds binding English music to Germany and France. He once wrote: "Have we not all about us forms of musical expression which we can take and purify and raise to the level of great art? For instance, the lilt of the chorus at a music-hall joining in a popular...
After a brilliantly witty commentary, Walter Piston '24, Namburg Professor of Music, conducted his own immaculate "Divertimento for Nine Instruments." Robert Brink was the fine soloist in the first local performance of the revised version of Alan Hovhaness' Concerto No.2 for Violin and String Orchestra, a rather bland neo-modal work. Carl Ruggles' extremely dissonant Angels was written for either string or brass ensemble; the performance here by strings could not equal the extraordinary effect that three trumpets and five trombones can achieve. The concert ended with Daniel Pinkham '44 conducting the combined chorus and orchestra in his new Wedding...
...Gabriel Faure's suite for Pelleas et Melisande, Opus 80. Faure was unsurpassed in the combination of subtle harmonies and delicate colorings; and the four movements of this suite contain some of his most exquisite writing, such as the shimmering muted violins in "La Fileuse" and the tinges of modal harmony in "Mort de Melisande." Everything here is achieved through understatement, through minute shadings within a restrained gamut. The resulting "parfum imperissable," to borrow the title of one of Faure's songs, is perfectly suited to the evocative gentleness of Maeterlinck's great Symbolist play...
...friend who said she liked to sing as she fiddled, but on presenting them to her the composer was told, "I can only hum when I play." As long as two performers are necessary, Holst could have wished none better than Hurwitz and Miss Smith to present his simple, modal settings...
After playing solo piano in his own arrangement of Cole Porter tunes under Fiedler's direction, the conductor of the Harvard Band picked up his own baton for a series of Harvard medleys. The modal renditions of College songs were punctuated by the popping of Crimson balloons on the tips of the violinists' bows...