9 Composers

This essay will consist of information about nine composers and one piece of work that they are known for dating from 1862 to 1990. The names of these composers are: Aaron Copeland, Claude Debussy, Charles Ives, Scott Joplin, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Leonard Berstein, Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg. The first composer I will discuss will be Aaron Copeland (1900 – 1990). Mr. Copeland was born in Brooklyn, New York USA to Russian merican immigrant parents. His style is strongly tonal with polychords, polyrhythm, changing meters and percussive orchestration. His influences include his teacher Nadia Boulanger, Picasso, Stravinsky and Ernest Hemmingway. Some notable history about Mr. Copeland is that he created Appalachian Spring for Martha Graham and he used American folklore as the subject with many of his works. The piece I will be discussing will be Appalachian Spring Section VII Theme and Variations on Simple Gifts I (1943-1944). The   media of this piece is the orchestra and the texture is definitely homophonic. The melody is songlike, lyrical, and danceable, with conjunct motion. The harmony is tonal because the tune is easily recognizable. This piece is in duple meter with a moderate tempo. The form is theme and variations because the theme is recognizable throughout the entire piece. One of the programmatic ideas is that this piece is to be performed as a ballet. The ballet is a story of a pioneer celebration in spring around a newly built farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills in the 1800’s. The second composer is Claude Debussy 1862 –1918). My Debussy was born in St. Germain–en-laye, Paris France. His style is typically impressionistic; he used unprecedented tone color with subtle changes in timbre. He used frequent instrument solos and the woodwinds were used in unusual registers. Mr. Debussy also used catatonic scales and whole tone scales. Some of his influences were Richard Wagner, Asian music, literary and pictorial ideas and Russian model...