DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Click Here to View My Listening Journal for the course. In my Honors Music Appreciation, we had to listen and document 20 hours of music.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Here are two essays that I wrote for my Music Appreciation Honors class that I took under the instruction of Dr. Alan Nichols during the Spring of 2016. This was my first Honors class that I took as a Global Scholar at Chattanooga State and I thoroughly enjoyed it since it was a class that was specific to my major. 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Evidence of Learning

Published on Oct 24, 2016 at 06:53 PM UTC

Learning Outcome: Written Communication

Reflection:

Emma Allyn

 

Dr. Nichols

 

MUS-1030-55

 

3/25/2016

                            Female Composers of the Romantic Era

            Throughout music history, you will rarely hear about female composers. Their scarcity was because women were expected to avoid creativity and they were assumed to be less musically gifted than men were. Although women weren’t encouraged to write music during the eighteenth century, the Romantic Era includes two of the most influential female composers in music. Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn were German women from the Romantic Era who expressed their creativity through music and are remembered today.

Although some women took piano lessons during the eighteenth century, they appeared to be placed on a different level than man. Matthew Head writes that “in Germany keyboard sonatas and lieder ‘for the fair sex’ appeared both in collections of printed music and in women’s periodicals” and that “the assumption . . . that music for women should be “easy,” furnished the basic vocabulary of late eighteenth-century collections for women” (50). This was probably due to the assumption that a female’s hand could not stretch as far as a male’s. Feminine music was said to be written for “female leisure and luxury as pleasurable and granting status; education and self-improvement” (Head 49). This seemed to displace women from being considered real musicians. The exception seemed to be girls that grew up in musical families.

 

 

Clara Weick Schumann was a prominent musician of the Romantic Period. During her time, she was known as a virtuoso pianist. She began piano lessons with her father, a well know music educator, at the age of five and by the time she was sixteen, she was known to the public as a child prodigy. Because she was so popular, she was able to have her own piano compositions published under her own name. However, she had a lack of confidence in her abilities as a composer. She wrote in her diary at an early in her life, “I once thought that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose—not one has been able to do it, and why should I expect to?” (128). Her husband, Robert, Schumann, a composer himself, encouraged her to keep composing so “she persevered and continued to compose music as long as her husband was alive” (Reich 211). After his death, she “continued both composing and performing . . . [yet] her composing was thwarted by nineteenth century prejudice’s against women’s asserting themselves in the arts” (128). It wasn’t until the twentieth century “that all but two or three of her known compositions are now available in print” (211). She is now one of the most well-known females in music history.

Fanny Mendelssohn, also known as Fanny Hensel after marriage, was the sister of Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn. She was said to “have been as musically talented as her brother” and “Felix readily admitted that she was a better pianist he did” (“Fanny Mendelssohn”). The two were brought up in a musical family. Their mother was said to have familiar with “. . .Sebastian Bach’s music, and in her home she perpetuated his tradition by continually playing the Well-Tempered Clavier” (Todd 7) and her “playing of the Well-Tempered Clavier familiarized her children with the complexities of Bach’s music” (8). Because the two were brought up under the same musical training, their works sounded similar. She is said to have written “about 500 musical compositions in all” with “few works published under her own name,” she was said to have published “six of her songs . . . under Felix’s name in his two sets of Twelve Songs” (“Fanny Mendelssohn”). Fanny was proclaimed to be musically equal to her brother, yet interest in her works didn’t spark until the twentieth century due to the fact that she was a woman.

Clara Weick Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn are two important female composers and musicians from the Romantic Period. Their lives demonstrate that women could have been as musically successful during the eighteenth century as men were if it had been socially accepted for women to do so. Since that time, female composers are continuing to emerge in history.

 

Works Cited

“Fanny Mendelssohn.” Encyclopaedia Briticanna. Web.

Head, Matthew. Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender In Eighteenth-Century Germany.          

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web.

Reich, Nancy B. Clara Schumann: The Artist and The Woman. Ithaca [N.Y.]: Cornell   

University Press 2001. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web.

Todd, R. Larry. Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn. New York: Oxford University Press, 

2010. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Evidence of Learning

Published on Dec 30, 2016 at 02:26 AM UTC

Learning Outcome: Written Communication

Reflection:

Emma Allyn

 

MUS-1030-55

 

4/30/2016

 

Dr. Nichols

                                       Charles Ives Essay

 

         Charles Ives was an American composer and non-traditionalist in the world of music. His ideas were seen as unusual by other composers during his time. Although his works weren’t accepted while he was alive, his music would later make an impact on modern music. His unusual musical ideas would be used by other composers to further advance the world of music. Charles Ives strong personality and love for non-traditional ideas influenced the world of modern music.

 

       Ives was known in his day as a successful insurance rather than an established composer. He was known to have been “responsible for some of the most successful advertising copy ever written in the insurance business” which was the result of “his motivational ideas and sales methods” (Paul 7). His successful company “Ives & Myricks sold $1.6 million of insurance in its first year” and “would reach $15 million in 1918 and $47 million in 1928”  (Budiansky 153). No one from his time expected him to be a brilliant composer with his well-established reputation as a businessman. In fact, when several hundred discovered “an unsolicited package in their mail that contained a pair of books” one that was titled “‘Second Pianoforte Sontana,’ [. . .] there was also a subtitle ‘Concord, Mass., 1840-60,” [. . .] the name of the composer, Charles E. Ives” (Paul 7). None of them were said to have realized that it was the Charles E. Ives of Ives and Myricks. This aspect of Ives could be used as an example to show that a person can have more talents than what they are known for.

 

Several wrote back in response to Ives’ work. An American composer of his time named Charles Wakefield Cadman, in response to his music, wrote “I wish to acknowledge your kindness in sending me your second sonata with the essays. Why you call it a ‘sonata’ is not clear to me” (Ives & Owens 57). Another, John Spencer Camp, replied with “my present impression is that, in spite of the great amount of work you have put into this composition, the fundamental inspiration and glow are lacking” (57).  These men critiqued him because his musical work wasn’t like any other traditional piece they had heard. Modern music wasn’t well liked by musicians and composers. Ives was determined to go beyond tradition to make something that no one had ever heard, whether that something was encouraged or not. If everyone had stuck to traditional music, different styles of music never would have been created.

 

      Ives was known to be an outspoken and opinionated man. It was said that “when he spoke, the words came out in short, vehement bursts” (Paul 1). A young choral conductor named Lehman Engel said he “remembered thinking ‘he was really going to hit me’ when Ives would get going about what he thought was wrong – with music, American society, politics, the world” (1). He didn’t behave like a normal composer would have in his time and he was “forever mocking the ‘nice professors of music,’ the cultured concertgoers, the music critics” (2). He disagreed with the way music was performed and once said he would conduct a concert using “a baseball bat instead of a baton and promising to hit the line drive into the tuba.” (3). He had unusual ideas about music and the way it should be presented, but his musical opinions brought “conventional ideas of harmonic development” (90). His work “Psalm 67 [. . .] creates a more haunting tension between male and female voices [. . .] a sound that would later become almost a cliché in modern church music” (91).

     

       Because Charles Ives didn’t conform to the traditional world of music and the clichés that composers of his time loved, music is what it is today. From balancing his life as a businessman and his desire to experiment with musical ideas, Ives shows that anyone can be successful in whatever they put their mind to. Even though his business career was more commonly accepted during his time, his works influenced many composers of after his death and that shows that new ideas should never be put to rest because it isn’t what others are used to. Others should look at his life and think that nothing they want to do is impossible.

 

Works Cited:

 

Budiansky, Stephen. Mad Music : Charles Ives, The Nostalgic Rebel. Lebanon: ForeEdge, 2014. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 30 Feb. 2016.

 

Ives, Charles, and Thomas Clarke Owens. Selected Correspondence Of Charles Ives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 30 Feb. 2015.

 

Paul, David C. Charles Ives In The Mirror: American Histories Of An Iconic Composer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 30 Feb. 2015

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.