Word: berge
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...Thompson's favorite points about modern music concerns contemporary sophistication. "Despite the heroic attempts for sublimity in the Berg Concerto, contemporary idioms in general lend themselves only with great difficulty to anything approaching the sublime. After all, though a tinkle-tinkle here and there in a Webern score may satiate one's thirst for the piquant and highly flavored, it does not quench the far more important thirst of the soul. Elevated feeling in the human spirit is generally ignored by modern composers, but it is an important response to the musical art. Any thinking person who made a list...
...Stewart's piece resembles those modern compositions which somehow manage to be simultaneously dissonant and entirely inoffensive. The style draws on composers as disparate as Berg, Barber and William Schuman; there are also a few easily recognizable major triads. It is an odd work in some ways, since Mr. Stewart contrasts tense, massive climaxes with passages that are almost flip--the sly fillip of the flute at the very end, for instance. The opening is very attractive, with the theme (almost a twelve-tone row) announced softly by the low strings pizzicato to the accompaniment of saucy raps...
...Steel Hour (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Gertrude Berg as an overloving grandma who offers too much advice to her daughter (Betsy von Furstenberg). When daughter rebels, frustrated grandma seeks succor in a salesclerk's job, soon comically jangles modern commerce...
Such incongruities suggested that further changes were necessary; twelve-tone music needed a language of its own--not one borrowed from a previous system. The solution was not to be found by Schoenberg's famous pupil, Berg, who frequently used tonality, and whose arch-romantic operas stand far closer to the nineteenth century than to Berg's twelve-tone colleagues. In time it became clear that the major influence on the succeeding generation of twelve-tone writers was Anton Webern, another Schoenberg pupil who has been the subject of a major renaissance in the past few years...
...certain sense, Webern's music was a reaction to the nineteenth century elements that flooded Berg's music and kept on pushing into Schoenberg's. And so a Webern score is extremely economical with notes: most of the pieces are short (some last only a few seconds); virtually every work is full of silence; the sounds heard are frequently very soft and are clearly the result of delicate calculation. There are few mass effects--rather, the attention is concentrated upon a succession of single tones. There is formal economy, too: the care Webern spent in organizing his structures finally resulted...