Word: music
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Schoenberg's famous twelve-tone system liberated music, not from tonality as is commonly claimed, but, less ominously, from the ancient laws of harmony. His system represented not the loss of all order but the penetration to a simpler more elastic and potentially liberating order...
THERE HAS been an everlasting sad waste of energy in wrongly viewing twelve-tone music as satanic chaos perpetrated by diabolic madmen solely toward the death of music. It is true that the danger of Schoenberg's techniques is their elegant simplicity. In the hands of a master they can be a revelatory means to expression, while in the grip of an ordinary musical merchant they can depreciate into rococo pyrotechnics, vapid and uncommunicative. The calumny heaped upon Schoenberg is disgraceful. He sought not to create "modern" music but to allow music to speak her feelings in the modern...
...radical post-war avant-grade split into those wishing to fulfill the logic of dense twelve-tone organization, represented by such composers as Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez, and those desiring to create music with the least possible constraints, represented by Cage and Stockhausen. The latter reacted against the old ghosts of Kingsor and Vienna, Wagner and Schoenberg himself. The new principle was that the legitimacy of music flows simply from the auditor's effort to feel sheer sounds. Music is the sensitized constancy of the world's masses. To borrow a term from language studies, music is mimetic...
...leads into a problem. If music ultimately depends solely on the individual nervous system rather than patterns imposed by the composer, then music may reduce itself out of existence as an identifiable, separate art. The further extremity of Cage's esthetic of chance would eliminate Cage himself. The universality of the art would have been destroyed as well as all reasonable artistic communication, since that presupposes some conscious relation between at least two people. I suppose that the reason for anxiety over the death of music is that the avant-garde will lead unswervingly to solipsism, in which each sound...
...challenges are so dramatic on one level and yet so familiar on another, it draws strength from an inescapable tradition. Igor Stravinsky, almost certainly the century's greatest composer and one who moved independently of the orthodox avant-garde, more a less stated this tradition in his Poetics of Music...