Word: bernsteins
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This crisis, according to Bernstein, divided modern composers into two warring camps "the way a great river divides into two forks." The Viennese school, led by Arnold Schoenberg, "gave up the struggle to preserve tonality;" Igor Stravinsky and his followers represented a "last ditch stand" against "the rampages of chromaticism." Bernstein's language gives the lie to his pose of dispassionate neutrality, and for that matter his own music plainly shows both his distaste for atonality and his adoration of Stravinsky...
Whither music? The final, triumphant answer is "yes," by which Bernstein means "tonality." He believes that his preference for tonality is more than a matter of his personal taste, that it is an innate, physical necessity. The very existence of the Viennese school's atonal music, not to mention non-tonal music of other cultures and the pre-tonal music of the Renaissance, argues that tonality is not universal, but Bernstein claims that Schoenberg denied his own inner instincts, and, outrageously, that "Schoenberg to this day has not found his public...
...Bernstein, who knows better, often finds tonality where there is none. According to him, the strings in Ives' Unanswered Question play nothing but "pure tonal triads" in C major. What he doesn't say is that the final chord is unresolved, because he wants to claim that "eternal, immortal tonality" is the answer to the solo trumpet's question, which Ives, after all, meant to be unanswered...
...BERNSTEIN'S CASE for Stravinsky is eloquent and convincing. He quotes Theodor Adorno, a dogmatic advocate of Schoenberg who accused Stravinsky of hiding behind an insincere mask of eclecticism. Bernstein defends the neoclassical mask as a reaction to the extreme subjectivity of overblown Romanticism and draws interesting parallels to the poetry of T.S. Eliot. But here, too, his polemic dislike of Schoenberg leads him to inaccuracy and self-contradiction. Having accused the serialists of mechanically turning out music that is "form without content," he now condemns them for discarding the order imposed by diatonicism. Stravinsky's "great save," neoclassicism...
Schoenberg once said that his music wasn't modern, it was just badly played. That is no longer generally true, but it applies to Bernstein's misrepresentation of him. The most convincing argument for Stravinsky on these records is Bernstein's new recording of Oedipus Rex, a neoclassic masterpiece, while Schoenberg is represented only by an excerpt from the Op. 23 piano pieces and a few bars of Pierrot Lunaire--Bernstein hammers out the flute part with one hand and growls the sprechstimme two octaves lower...