The Second Viennese School and the Early 20th Century
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This course offers a historical survey of music composed, performed, or premiered in Central Europe in the period from about 1900 to 1950. We will consider the challenges—compositional, political, social—that these early twentieth-century composers faced and the strategies that they adopted to solve them. We will explore these composers, musical works, and contexts through a combination of lectures, readings, listening, discussion, activities, and excursions to historical sites and museums.
Because IES Abroad courses are designed to take advantage of the unique contribution of the instruction and the lecture/discussion format, regular class attendance is mandatory. Any missed class, without a legitimate reason will be reflected in the final grade. A legitimate reason would include a documented illness or family bereavement. Travel, (including travel delays) is not a legitimate reason.
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
- Identify the composer, title, and dates of the works on the listening list by hearing or sight.
- Describe important features of the works on the listening list, including aspects of genre, form, and style.
- Present to the class a coherent, brief, and rehearsed overview of a musical work.
- Write program notes for a concert containing tonal, atonal, and twelve-tone works written in Austria or Germany between 1900 and 1950.
- Write without notes an overview of art music in Austria and Germany in the early twentieth century that describes major stylistic trends, identifies how social and cultural issues impinged on the careers and musical creations of composers, and illustrates these points with specific examples and references to works studied in class.
Lectures, discussions, and excursions
- Class Preparation and Participation - 10%
- Listening Quizzes (2 x 12.5%) - 25%
- Oral Presentation - 10%
- Writing Assignment - 20%
- Final Exam - 35%
Listening Quizzes
The two listening quizzes will have the following format: indicate the composer’s name, title and date of the work, and the movement number/song title (if applicable). An official listening list, to be distributed a week before the quizzes, will contain all information as needed to receive full credit. I will also play one item not discussed in class–you will be asked to suggest a composer and to state the rationale for your choice (this is a bonus question).
Oral Presentation
Your oral presentation to the class will be a carefully prepared and succinct overview of one of the works that you chose for your program notes. The presentation will be eight minutes long and must have a handout (or PowerPoint presentation) and audio examples. Your presentation should discuss the work’s genesis, its place within the composer’s oeuvre, and an overview of its most important musical features. You must also relate the work to other compositions and ideas that we have studied in class.
Writing Assignment
For your written assignment you will write program notes for a (hypothetical) concert (1500–1800 words). You are free to choose music written by any of the composers discussed in the course or other music written during this period that corresponds stylistically or culturally to the issues raised in the course. The concert program should contain around 80 minutes of music and should contain at least three different musical styles (e.g. serial, neo-classical etc.). Your concert will be featured at a major music festival that prides itself upon a dialogue with literature and the visual arts; you are thus expected to include two images of visual art works in your program notes (which do not have to be explicitly discussed but which should complement your text in a meaningful way) and two selections from literary texts from the period (also to be put in dialogue with the works you discuss).
Your proposal shall include a few sentences summarizing the organizing idea of the program, as well as the names of the composers and the titles and durations of the pieces. I can provide assistance in finding scores of works that the library does not have. Once the proposal has been approved, you will compose program notes in clear prose accessible to interested lay listeners. The first page should list the pieces, including the name and dates of the composers and the title, date, and length of each work and movement. The body of the notes should provide information about the composers, the genesis of the works and their places within the composer’s output, a description of the music that can help a lay listener understand and enjoy the music more fully, and also a link between the pieces and the works of visual arts and literature featured in your program. Your notes must be your original prose. As sources, consult books and scholarly articles (not Wikipedia!) and cite them when necessary.
You will submit three copies of your liner notes, one each for me and two of your classmates to comment on. In small discussion groups, you will give feedback to the two classmates whose liner notes you read. Your evaluations should be based on the following criteria:
Content: Do the program notes provide a cogent introduction to each of the pieces on the concert program? Is there a good balance between background information and commentary on the music?
Organization: is the organization clear, both in the notes as a whole and within each paragraph? Are there unnecessary details or redundancies?
Writing style: Are the liner notes enjoyable to read? Can they be understood by an interested listener lacking musical training?
Final Exam
The final will be a two-hour, comprehensive essay exam. There will be two major questions that require you to synthesize and summarize major themes from the course, and a series of shorter essay questions about particular works, composers, and topics from the class. You will receive a study guide for the exam a week in advance.
Reading assignments and scores will be available on blackboard; recordings for all listening assignments are available on Naxos Music Library or YouTube–please keep track of the performers you listened to (for reference in discussions).
| Week | Content | Reading | Listening |
| 1 | Session 1: Course Intro; Romantic Legacies: Wagner and Brahms; The Secession | ||
| Session 2: Secession’s Beethoven Exhibition II; Excursion to the Vienna Secession Building |
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| Session 3: Early Modernism I: Fin de siècle and Decadence |
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| 2 | Session 4: Early Modernism II: The Emancipation of (Mad)Women |
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| Session 5: Early Modernism III: Expressionism and Atonality |
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| Session 6: All-Day Excursion |
We will visit the Schoenberg Haus in Mödling, the Wolf Museum in Perchtoldsdorf, and the Beethoven Haus in Baden bei Wien. |
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| 3 | Session 7: Early Modernism IV: Moving Forward While Looking Back |
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| Session 8: Twelve-Tone Technique: Schoenberg |
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| Session 9: Twelve-Tone Technique: Berg; Twelve-Tone Technique: Webern Listening Quiz 1 |
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| 4 | Session 10: Romanticism’s Afterlife in Vienna |
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| Session 11: Music and the Third Reich I: German Voices |
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Session 12: Music and the Third Reich II: Silenced Voices Overnight Excursion |
We will visit Prague and Theresienstadt/Terezin, a garrison town that the Nazis turned into a Jewish ghetto, where Viktor Ullmann and others worked and performed before being sent to their deaths. |
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| 5 | Session 13: Opera in Inter-war Austria and Weimar Germany I; Submit Draft for Program Notes |
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| Session 14: Opera in Inter-war Austria and Weimar Germany II; Discussion of Drafts |
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| Session 15: What is Modernism? |
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| 6 | Session 16: Assignment Due; Program Notes; Review Session | ||
| Session 17: Presentations | |||
| Session 18: Course Evaluations; Listening Quiz 2, Final Exam | |||
- Albright, Daniel, ed. Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
- Beaumont, Antony. Zemlinsky and His Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.
- Berg, Alban. “The ‘Problem of Opera.’” In Modernism and Music, edited by Daniel Albright.
- Burkholder, J. Peter. “Brahms and Twentieth-Century Classical Music.” 19th-Century Music 8, no. 1 (summer 1984): 75–83.
- Crawford, John C. and Dorothy L. Crawford. Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
- Franklin, Peter. “Distant Sounds-Fallen Music: Der Ferne Klang as ‘Woman’s Opera’?” Cambridge Opera Journal 3/2 (July, 1991): 159–172.
- Feder, Stuart. Gustav Mahler. A Life in Crisis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
- Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Lecture 18: Fixation to Traumas –
- The Unconscious. London: Penguin, 1991.
- Frisch, Walter. The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg 1893–1908. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
- Frisch, Walter. Brahms: The Four Symphonies. New York: Schirmer Books, 1996.
- Hailey, Christopher. Franz Schreker: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Karas, Joza. Music in Terezin, 1941–1945. Stuyvesant: Beaufort Books, 1985.
- Kater, Michael H. The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
- Rognoni, Luigi. The Second Viennese School: Expressionism and Dodecaphony. London: John Calder, 1977.
- Schoenberg, Arnold. “Brahms the Progressive.” In Style and Idea, rev. ed., edited by Leonard Stein, translated by Leo Black. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984
- Schoenberg, Arnold. “Composing with Twelve Tones.” In Modernism and Music, edited by Daniel Albright.
- Schoenberg, Arnold. Correspondence with Kandinsky. In Modernism and Music, edited by Daniel Albright.
- Scruton, Roger. Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Stewart, John L. Ernst Krenek: The Man and His Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
- Taruskin, Richard. Music in the Early Twentieth Century. The Oxford History of Western Music vol. 4. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
- Webern, Anton. The Path to the New Music. Edited by Willi Reich. Bryn Mawr, PA: Theodore Presser, in association with Universal Edition, 1963.
- Weill, Kurt. “Opera—Where To?” In Modernism and Music, edited by Daniel Albright.
- Zweig, Stefan. The World of Yesterday. London: Cassell, 1987.
- Albright, Daniel. Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
- Apke, Bernd. “A Farewell to Allegory,” in The Naked Truth: Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, and Other Scandals. Edited by T. Natter and M. Hollein. Munich: Prestel, 2005.
- Bailey, Kathryn. The Life of Webern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Carr, Jonathan. Mahler: A Biography. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1998.
- Cook, Nicholas and Anthony Pople, eds. The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music. Cambridge:
- Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- Hailey, Christopher. Franz Schreker 1878-1934: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Kater, Michael H. Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
- Hahl-Koch, Jelena. Arnold Schoenberg and Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents. London: Faber and Faber, 1984.
- Janik, Allan and Stephen Toulmin. Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Touchstone, 1973.
- Levi, Erik. Music in the Third Reich. London: Macmillan, 1994.
- Müller, Ulrich and Peter Wapnewski, eds. Wagner Handbook. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
- Rosen, Charles. Arnold Schoenberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
- Schoenberg, Arnold. Style and Idea: Selected Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
- Schorske, Carl E. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1981.
- Taylor-Jay, Claire. The Artist-Operas of Pfitzner, Krenek, and Hindemith: Politics and the Ideology of the Artist.
- Hants: Ashgate Press, 2004.
- Troller, Norbert. Theresienstadt: Hitler’s Gift to the Jews. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2004.
- Vergo, Peter. Art in Vienna 1898–1918. Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1981.
- Wunberg, Gotthart (ed.). Die Wiener Moderne. Literatur, Kunst und Musik zwischen 1890 und 1910. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1995.
- Youens, Susan. Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
