Word: music
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...heart of the composer's predicament is the problem of what to do with his inheritance from the nineteenth century and the last few hundred years of Western music in general. How much shall he keep, and how shall he replace what he discards? If he decides to preserve tonality (which might be defined briefly as a system in which one tone, or a chord built on that tone, acts as a sort of aural home base) he has the advantage of manipulating the vocabulary of musical relations and tensions with which most of us are familiar since we have...
Despite the advance beyond tonality in the early years of this century, the power of this great organizing force has been strong enough to dominate most of the production of Bartok, Stravinsky, and Hindemith. It dominates a good deal of the music being written today. The atonalists have not found it easy to resist. How can a piece of music be held together without the familiar tonal relationships? Some composers (Elliott Carter, for example) have attempted highly individual and cerebral ways of unifying a large work. Others have seen a revivifying solution in the twelve-tone system, from which...
...appeal to composers lies in its highly organized nature: the destruction of the complex system of tonal relations seems to demand another complicated set of rules. Schoenberg, the twelvetone pioneer, set up such a system, but curiously enough he retained much of the texture and form of tonal music, writing works that might be said to resemble Brahms quartets played through a twelvetone baffle...
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...
Despite all these drawbacks, there is life and gaiety in the performance. The music is scarcely distinguished and mainly derivative, but it provides an adequate background to the performers efforts. It is these efforts which make the show worth seeing...