Betsy Jolas's musical language
Item
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Title
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Betsy Jolas's musical language
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:7e09d12a2a1d:11436
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identifier
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11882
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Creator
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Fabra Crespo, Desamparados,
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Contributor
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David Olan | Tania Leon
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music | Betsy Jolas | French contemporary music | interval family | pitch centricity | pitch family | total chromatic
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Abstract
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American-French composer Betsy Jolas (b.1926) has been an outstanding figure in the contemporary musical scene, developing a successful career for over sixty years as a composer and pedagogue in a field traditionally reserved for men. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards by prominent institutions, especially in France and the United States, and yet her name is rarely mentioned in historical texts on French music and contemporary composers. A remarkably imaginative artist, she has offered new perspectives to traditional approaches to melody, harmony, texture and form. Jolas has also contributed significantly to the contemporary scene, particularly to the re-establishment of prominence of melody with her demonstration of the importance of pitch and pitch family over previously prominent serial techniques, which have privileged pitch class or set class. She has also recovered traditional rules for harmony and counterpoint, while reconstructing them as contemporary sonorities. Her textures reveal a great respect and admiration for the masters of the Renaissance. Jolas's methods of setting text in music link directly to those of Robert Schumann, and like him she reinterprets poetry through music. The structure of Jolas's works owes its clarity to classicism, although the layering of the sections links more directly to composers such as Alban Berg, and his idea of building several climaxes that grow in waves within a piece. Jolas also pays tribute to other contemporary composers and pieces, for instance Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, borrowing and treating the elder composer's music in a way that shows her admiration and her explorations into new melodic and textural territory.;Many of Jolas's orchestrational attributes are related to her specific propensity for exchanging the roles of instrumental and vocal parts, i.e., giving the instrument a traditionally vocal or "speaking" role, or the vocalist an instrumental flavor. She brings her own life and daily experiences of sound to her music; seemingly only those sonorities that belong to her intimate universe are present in her work.;The intent of this dissertation is identifying and documenting key elements of Jolas's compositional technique based on a review of central works and interviews with the composer.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Music
