Топик: Arts

- Are you fond of arts?

- Yes, I am. I am fond of arts. I really enjoy everything that is aesthetically beautiful. I like painting, sculpture, and architecture. I am also fond of music, ballet, opera, and theatre. Masterpieces have always inspired people. The twentieth century has given the world one more variety of arts - cinema.

- What kind of music do you like?

- I like both serious and pop music. I want to say that the striking changes in musical style occurred about 1900. After World War II avant-garde music began to employ the electronics techniques. The dehumanizing of music has been carried further by the use of computers to determine the nature of sound materials and even to create musical pieces.

- Was popular music wide spread in the 20th century?

- Yes, it was.

- What brought about the tremendous growth of popular music during the 20th century?

- The tremendous growth of popular music during the 20th century was the result of advances in electronics. New techniques have made possible high-fidelity reproduction of sound and its widespread and rapid dissemination through radio, phonograph, tape recorder, and television. In addition, some of the instruments used in popular music have incorporated electronic amplification as well as sound production.

- When did popular music originate?

- Popular music in the modern sense originated in the late 18th century, when ballads made popular in ballad operas and dance music received wide circulation.

- What prompted a new direction in popular music in the 20th century?

- In the 20th century a new direction in popular music was prompted by the emergence of jazz among blacks in the southern United States. After the original ragtime came jazz proper, swing, bebop, and rock in its numerous manifestations - punk, new wave, etc. Early in the century, the novelty of jazz rhythms and dominance of brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments over strings attracted some serious composers who occasionally incorporated suitable jazz idioms into their works. Since about 1930 popular music has gradually adopted techniques that originated in serious music. Regardless of the interaction of popular and serious music, the popularity of the former is one of the most significant musical developments of the 20th century.

- Who is your favourite composer?

- My favourite composer is Sergey Rachmaninoff. He was the last great figure of the tradition of Russian Romanticism and a leading piano virtuoso of his time. He is especially known for his piano concerti and the piece for piano and orchestra entitled "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini". At the age of 19 he graduated from the conservatory, winning a gold medal for his one-act opera "Aleko" (after Aleksandr Pushkin's poem "The Gypsies"). His fame and popularity, both as composer and concert pianist, were launched by two compositions: the "Prelude", and his "Piano Concerto No. 2". Rachmaninoff's music, although produced mostly in the 20th century, re mains firmly entrenched in the 19th-century music. He was the final to express the tradition embodied by P. Tchaikovsky.

- Do you like the music of other Russian composers?

- Yes, of course. I also enjoy Mikhail Glinka's music. He was me first Russian composer to win international recognition, and the acknowledged founder of the Russian nationalist school. The opera that first won him fame was "Life for the Tsar". It was produced at St. Petersburg in 1836.

- What else did Glinka create?

- In 1842 Glinka created his second opera "Ruslan and Lyudmila". The composer Franz Listz was fascinated by the novelty of Glinka's music.

- Did Glinka's music influence the composers of succeeding generations?

- It should be said that Glinka's work, although small in bulk, is the basis of practically all later Russian music. "Ruslan and Lyudmila" provided models of lyrical melody and colourful orchestration on which Mily Balakirev, Aleksandr Borodin, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov formed their styles. Glinka's orchestral composition "Kamarinskaya", of 1848, according to Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, became the foundation of later Russian symphonic music.

- Do you like the music of modern composers?

- As for modern composers I am fond of experimental works of Igor Stravinsky. He heralded a new epoch in music. Stravinsky's revolutionary style, labelled "dynamism," "barbarism," or "primitivism," concentrated on metric imbalance and dissonance. Following the leadership of Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, and Sergey Prokofiev, entered a Neo-classical period characterized by restraint of emotional content.

- Do you like opera?

- Yes, I do. Especially I like the operas created by Mozart, Verdi, and Tchaikovsky.

- Do you known anything about the history of opera?

- It is generally accepted that opera began in 1600 when the Florentine composer Jacopo Peri produced his "Euridice", which is considered to be the first opera, at the wedding of the King of France Henry IV and Maria de Medici. Later a group of Italian musicians, poets, and noblemen called "Camerata" revived the style of musical story that had been used in Greek tragedy. By the late 1600s operas spread throughout Europe. Composers produced complicated arias, recitatives, duets to demonstrate the splendid voices of the singers.

- Do you like pop music?

- Yes, I do. I prefer the "Beatles" to all recent pop groups.

- Who were the members of the group?

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