Dear John,
I'm not going to bite on this one! Especially as I am also an academic.
Other to say that you will note I put " " around "important", for
reasons that may in fact relate in some way to what you have expounded.
Matthew
John Howell wrote:
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.
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