Musical Style and Structure
Wozzeck is generally regarded as the first opera produced in the 20th century avant garde style and is also one of the most famous examples of employing atonality (music that avoids establishing a key). Berg was following in the footsteps of his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, and The Schoenberg Circle, by using free atonality to express emotions and even the thought processes of the characters on the stage. The expression of madness and alienation was amplified with atonal music.
Though the music is atonal in the sense that it does not follow the techniques of the major/minor tonality system dominant in the West during the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods, the piece is written with other methods for controlling pitch to direct the harmonic flow. The tritonal pair B natural and F natural, for example, represents Wozzeck and Marie, permanently in a struggle with one another. The combination of B flat and D flat (a minor third) represents the link between Marie and the child. In this way the opera continually returns to certain pitches to mark out key moments in the plot. This is not the same as a key center, but over time the repetition of these pitches establishes continuity and structure.
Read more about this topic: Wozzeck
Famous quotes containing the words style and structure, musical, style and/or structure:
“Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up
The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas
For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse.
Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)