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Modest Mussorgsky

Decent Essays

During the first half of the 19th century, opera was in it’s golden age. Composers sought to capture drama, emotion, and personalities, creating a closer connection with their audience. With this, they also began to reflect on the concerns of a broad audience; love and loyalty to family and/or nation, women’s desire for independence, struggle for freedom, fear of evil. This want to appeal to the population sparked the theme of national identity, which came to be known as Nationalism. The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars helped spread the concept of a nation as a group of citizens with a common heritage, rather than as subjects of a ruler. Influence of this idea grew throughout the 19th century. Nationalism unified the people through …show more content…

His principal non operatic works are a symphonic fantasy, Night on Bald Mountain (1867); a set of piano pieces, Pictures at an Exhibition (1874; later orchestrated by Ravel); and the song cycles The Nursery (1872), Sunless (1874), and Song and Dances of Death (1875). Pictures at an Exhibition is a suite of ten pieces inspired by an exhibition Mussorgsky saw of over four hundred sketches, paintings, and designs by his late friend Viktor Hartmann, who shared an interest in finding a new artistic language that was uniquely Russian. Mussorgsky translates the images into song, combining western European and Russian elements, blending classical procedures with melodies that resemble Russian folk song and harmonies that suggest the modality and parallel motion of folk polyphony. In this particular piece, he states a Russian Orthodox hymn, which adds a prayerful tone and nationalistic element to the …show more content…

Immigrants from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and former African American slaves and their descendants, brought their own musical traditions from folk to classical. Ethnic divisions were the distinctions between classical, popular, and folk music. These three categories represented different attitudes toward notation, composition, and performance. Classical tradition centered on the composer and the work, and required intricate notation of the score. Popular music was written down and sold as a commodity, but centered on the performer and the performance, allowing for leeway in the notated music. Folk music was independent of musical notation, being passed on through oral tradition. Overall, these three categories often overlapped. Folk tunes were written down and sold as popular music, arranged for concert performance, or incorporated into classical pieces; classical works were transcribed and altered for performance in popular venues; and some popular songs became so well known that they were then passed down orally, like folk

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