PROGRAM MUSIC

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(No Transcript)
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PROGRAM MUSIC It is customary to make a
distinction between absolute music and
program music and though the exact dividing
line between the types is a matter of endless
debate, the main difference is clear enough. A
piece of absolute music is to be heard as music
and nothing else. Like a piece of abstract and
non-representational painting, its point lies in
its own pattern and effects, without reference to
any external subject matter. A piece of program
music, on the other hand, is supposed to
represent some subject matter outside itself, to
be about something in the same way that a
literary work is about some subject outside its
own words. Thus when Liszt writes a symphony
about Faust, when Tschaikowsky writes a work for
orchestra about Napoleon in Russia, when Strauss
writes a symphonic poem about the mind and
adventures of Don Quixote, the result is program
music. Calvin S. Brown (1948) NOCTURNE
PROGRAM MUSIC
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John Field (1782-1837)
Witnesses Nicknames
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804-1857) It seemed to
me that he did not actually strike the keys, but
that his fingers simply fell, as if they were
raindrops, scattering like pearls on
velvet. John Field of Petersburg (1822) or
Russian Field (1831) Joseph dOrtigue
(1833) Field is Field a school of his own. The
Racine of the Piano (1833) Robert Schumann
Florestan (1836) Away with your forms and your
thorough-bass conventions! Do your duty, i.e.
have talents, be Fields, write as you wish, be
poets and persons, I beg you! The Englishman
Field (1916) The Irish Regency?
Romantic(2004)
Detail from portrait, c. 1798, attr. to A.M. Shee
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Fields Nocturnality?
Ludwig Spohr (1802) the technical perfection
and the dreamy melancholy of that young
artists execution Adolph Kullak (1861) one
who ranks as one the greatest masters of all
times in his picturesque diffusion of light and
shade, in perfect finish united with the warmest
feeling. Oscar Bie (1898) One of the chief
nocturne-romanticists James Parsons (2004) The
bright sun of Enlightenment guides the intellect,
while night inspires the unhampered imagination.
Schlegels contemporaries evidently agreed, as is
attested by John Field and Frédéric Chopins
nocturnes for solo piano .
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The nightS of the romantics Michel Riffaterre
(1979) Le romantisme avait substitué lantithèse
à lharmonie et à lunité dans le canon
esthetique les Decadents remplacent lantithèse
par loxymore. Jürgen Barkhoff (2004) the
Romantic fascination with the nocturnal side of
human existence Romantic anthropologys belief
in the deep affinity between sleep, trance,
madness, artistic inspiration, and death. Roger
Cardinal (2004) Romantic ideology equates night
with sleep of reason and the awakening of mans
latent faculties. Reverie, dreams, and trance
states offer privileged access to natures
secrets. August K. Wiedmann (1986) It is with
Novalis that Romantic love achieved one of its
finest and most poignant expressions in the
strange form of a nocturnal Christianity which
embraced the night as the womb of revelation.
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The nights of the celtic ROMANTICs James
Thomson, Liberty (1736), Part IV Now turn your
view, and mark from Celtic night  To present
grandeur how my Britain rose.Bold were those
Britons, who, the careless sons Of Nature,
roam'd the forest-bounds, at once Their verdant
city, high-embowering fane, And the gay circle
of their woodland wars For by the Druid taught,
that death but shifts outlawed
by emperor Claudius in 54 AD The vital scene,
they that prime fear despised And, prone to
rush on steel, disdain'd to spare An ill saved
life that must again return. Edmund Burke,
Philos. Enq. (1756), Part II, Sect. XV I think
then, that all edifices calculated to produce an
idea of the sublime, ought rather to be dark and
gloomy, and this for two reasons the first is,
that darkness itself on other occasions is known
by experience to have a greater effect on the
passions than light. The second is, that to make
an object very striking, we should make it as
different as possible from the objects with which
we have been immediately conversant . Oisín
James Macphersons Ossian (1773) countless
occurrences
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jFs nocturne texture 1. Right hand (melody)
Romance? Serenade? Pastoral? JF Nocturne! (1812)
R. H. Colet (1837) The Nocturne is a Romance
sung by 2, 3, or 4 voices Franz Liszt
(1859) Field sang to himself, and his own
pleasure was enough for him he asked nothing
else of music. A. A. Nikolaev(?) (1973) The
Singer among Pianists Patrick Piggott
(1973) the wordless love-songs which Field
called nocturnes Derek Carew (2003) JFs melody
mixture of Italian operatic belcanto and folk
or national tunes and dances, especially those
Irish and Scottish
JF Plaque on Golden Lane, Dublin
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jfs nocturne texture.2 left hand (harmony)
HARMONIC, BROKEN-CHORD, but gt ALBERTI BASS
(Alberti 1710-1740 ? Mozart 1756-1791,
Classical Style, etc.) lt Beethoven, ad es.
op. 109 (1820) Charles Rosen (1976²) The
great harmonic innovations of the Romantics do
not come from Beethoven at all, and have nothing
to do either with his technique or his spirit.
They arise from Hummel, Weber, Field, and
Schubert , and, too, from Italian opera.
K545 (1788)
A lithograph of the composer by Engelbach
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• JFs REZEPTIONSGESCHICHTE
• Quiz perché è ignorato il ruolo
  musico-letterario dei Nocturnes dellirlandese
  JF?
• Scegliete una (o più di una) risposta tra le
  seguenti (qui sinteticamente formulate)
• Perché la storia della sua ricezione incrocia
  quella della Guerra Fredda.
• Per la non benevola influenza (diretta e
  indiretta) dellInghilterra nella fissazione del
  codice culturale anglofono per il XIX secolo (e
  oltre).
• Per una certa reticenza adottata dalla cultura
  inglese del XIX secolo nei confronti della
  cultura musicale-musicologica.
• Altre risposte altrettanto plausibili che lascio
  allintelligenza delluditorio
• Soluzione del quiz tutte le risposte insieme e
  qualche altra che non ho il tempo di menzionare
  in questa sede

Ritratto da Hulton-Archive (1820)
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A Performance interests me less than the idea
behind it, and the idea behind it should be these
great ideas of counterpoint and harmony. Q You
are Jewish and say you are not observant. Yet
your family has a house in Jerusalem, you teach
in a music school there and one of your sons
served in the Israeli army. Is there a message of
support for Israel in this? A I don't agree
with everything, with their policies. My feelings
come strictly from culture. I feel the
Judaeo-Christian culture ... can't exist
without input from this way of thinking and one
has to cultivate it. I'm not observant ... but
I do think the roots of music lie in religion and
that doesn't mean you should be religious ....
I think you can't get there by just practicing,
playing notes and living a hermetic life as a
musician. You have to know from where these ideas
came.
Murray Perahia (1947-), The Poet of the Piano