The Hymn of the Bolshevik Party (Гимн партии большевиков / "Gimn partii boljševikov") uses the same melody as the Soviet anthem, but with different lyrics by Vasily Lebedev-Kumach.
Minimalism
Minimalism is a way of making modern art or music that uses simple ideas, sounds or shapes. It was most popular in America in the 1960s and 1970s. There are many different kinds of minimalism. Sometimes a simple thing is repeated many times until it seems very complicated. Today minimalism can be used to talk about many things such as design, architecture, poetry, and movies.
In music, minimalism is a way of composing classical music which became popular during the second half of the 20th century. It is a way of composing by using a simple idea which is repeated many times. A minimalist piece of music usually takes a short idea which may be a melodic or a rhythmic pattern. This idea is then repeated many times, but each time it changes slightly. Sometimes this may be done by two or more instruments which start off by playing their notes or chords together but, as one is going slightly faster than the other, they gradually become “out of sync” (not synchronized, i.e. not together), then eventually they catch up with one another again. Usually this music is tonal so that it is firmly in one key. "A steady pulse is kept throughout the whole piece."
Composers who wrote minimalist music include Steve Reich (b.1936), Philip Glass (b.1937) and Terry Riley (b.1935). Other composers like John Adams (b.1947) have also used minimalist ways of composing, but they combined these with other techniques, so that their music is not just minimalist.
Minimalist music became popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Minimalist composers started writing like this, also because a lot of new music at that time was very complicated and hard to understand. It was often serial music which was atonal with no obvious melodies or ideas that were easy to remember.
Minimalist music is not necessarily simple. It can have a kind of hypnotic effect, but this is part of what the composer wants. Reich’s "Clapping Music" just consists of hand : there is no melody. He was thinking of African drum music when he wrote it. Two performers begin by clapping a rhythm together. After 13 seconds the second performer leaves out the first quaver (eighth note) and puts it at the end of the second bar (measure). After another 13 seconds this happens again so that in the end the two performers are together again. This music has to be listened to in a different way from other kinds of music.
Minimalism in visual art, sometimes referred to as "literalist art" and "ABC Art" emerged in New York in the 1960s. As a product it had much in common with earlier geometric abstraction and suprematism.
The term "minimalism" was not generally embraced by the artists associated with it, and many practitioners of art called minimalist by critics did not identify it as a movement as such.
One of the first artists specifically associated with Minimalism was the painter, Frank Stella, whose early "stripe" paintings were highlighted in the 1959 show, "16 Americans", organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The width of the stripes in Frank Stellas's stripe paintings were determined by the dimensions of the lumber, visible as the depth of the painting when viewed from the side, used to construct the supportive chassis upon which the canvas was stretched. The decisions about structures on the front surface of the canvas were therefore not entirely subjective, but pre-conditioned by a "given" feature of the physical construction of the support. In the show catalog, Carl André noted, "Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting".
These reductive works were in sharp contrast to the energy-filled and emotionally-charged expressionist paintings of Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline.
They leaned more towards the controlled, somber "color field" paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Although Stella received immediate attention from the MOMA show, artists like Kenneth Noland, Ralph Humphrey, Robert Motherwell and Robert Ryman had begun to explore stripes, monochromatic and hard-edge formats from the late 50s through the 1960s.
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky was born in Lomonosov (then Oranienbaum), 17 June 1882 and died in New York, 6 April 1971. He was one of the most important composers of the 20th century, and a leader in modernism in music. He was brought up in Russia. When the Russian Revolution started he moved to Switzerland and then to Paris, and finally, when World War II started in 1939, he moved to the United States.
Stravinsky wrote music in different styles. At first he wrote music similar to his teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. He loved his native Russian music. He wrote music which had very complicated chords and rhythms. It is lively music, and some of his best known works of this kind were written for the "Ballets Russes" of Sergei Diaghilev: "The Firebird", "Petrushka", "The Rite of Spring", "Les noces", "Pulcinella" and "Apollo musagète". They were written from 1910 to 1928.
Then he changed his style and wrote in what is called a “neo-classical” way. He based it on music from the Classical music period but changed it. His only full-length opera "The Rake's Progress" was written in this way. In his later years he wrote serial music.
Igor was the third of four children, all boys. As a child he spent the winter months in St Petersburg and the summers in the country where several of his relatives on his mother’s side had large estates.
Igor was not particularly good at school, but he often went to see the operas in which his father Fyodor was performing. Fyodor was an opera singer with a fine bass voice. He sang at the opera house in Kiev and later at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Igor also went to ballets and even heard Tchaikovsky conduct in 1893, at the end of his life.
For a time Stravinsky studied law at the university of St Petersburg, but gave up in 1906. Then he married one of his cousins. They soon had a son and a daughter.
Meanwhile, since his school days, Igor played the piano, and had lessons in harmony and counterpoint. He enjoyed improvising and he started to be interested in composing. He wrote some short piano pieces and showed them to the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the father of a friend. Rimsky-Korsakov told him he ought to continue to have private music lessons instead of going to the conservatoire. Shortly after this, Stravinsky’s father died. Igor went to stay with Rimsky-Korsakov. He met many musical people there, and Rimsky-Korsakov taught him how to write for the different instruments. In 1905, he began to take twice-weekly private lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov, whom he came to regard as a second father. These lessons continued until Rimsky-Korsakov's death in 1908.
In 1908 Rimsky-Korsakov died. Stravinsky met Sergei Diaghilev, the ballet impresario. Diaghilev wanted to put on performances of new operas and ballets. He needed a composer to write the music and saw that Stravinsky might be the ideal person. He asked him to write music for a ballet called "The Firebird", which was a Russian fairytale. Stravinsky wrote it at Rimsky-Korsakov’s country house and finished it in St Petersburg. The ballet was first performed at the Paris Opéra on 25 June 1910 by the Ballets Russes who were very famous in Europe. Mikhail Fokin was the choreographer. It has remained one of Stravinsky’s most famous pieces of music. Some of the music is often performed in a concert hall without the dancing. This version is called a “suite” (literally “a collection of dances”). It shows his love of Russian folk melody.