At 3:09 PM +1100 10/27/09, Matthew Hindson wrote:
Any listers know of a list of 20C works that use the Dies Irae in some form
or another?
(Particularly "important" works?)
Oh, my goodness, Matthew! You've certainly left yourself wide open
on this one!!! "Important," as in "self-important," as in
"pretentious," as in self-declared "art music"?????
A great deal of the most "important" music of the 20th century
(defining "important," just for fun, as "music that has been heard
and enjoyed by the largest number of people and has influenced the
lives of the largest number of people") has been written for movie
scores, and more recently for TV drama scores, specials, or series.
It is, in other words, functional music written for immediate use,
written to be appealing to large numbers of people, and written with
understanding of the huge emotional dimension that music can bring to
any drama.
I think that if you were to take an open and honest look at 20th
century music, you would find that those composers whose music is
written to satisfy their own egos, and who SAY that they don't care
whether people like it or not, say that simply because their music is
NOT music that people like--academic music written by academics for
other academics. And also music that is influential, but only
influential within that tightly-bound sub-culture of academics and
the students who unfortunately have to write to please their
professors.
OK, I might be exaggerating just a teeny bit, but I DO think it's
significant that while academic composers blithely declared the end
of functional harmony, jazz, pop, and musical theater composers and
songwriters ignored them as irrelevant and continue to write tonal
music using functional harmony. Could there be a lesson there?
John
P.S. As to the Dies irae chant melody, it's been used over and over
by composers in ALL styles who managed to stay awake in their music
history classes and who know the strong association it has, for those
in liturgical churches, with the Mass for the Dead. After all, it's
there to be used freely by any composer with a decent undergraduate
knowledge of music history.
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[email protected])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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