Word: music
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...unbelievable as it seems, simply sat there without motion or sound. Well, the audience regressed from expectation to uneasiness; then, in crescendo of frustration, through irritation--it was hot, the air fairly visible--rumor (Is he stricken? Sane? Obstinat?) anger, shouting, disgust, and finally mass departure. What is music coming to...?" Only to renewal. The pianist, by refusing to "play," gave rhetorical expression to one of the dramatic esthetics of musical avant-garde composer John Cage. Our matronly subscriber almost certainly goes to ten concerts, sits on the left, prefers the Steinway, adores podium gymnastics "if not excessive" (meaning horizontal...
...ripe for the madhouse for spreading a dozen notes over five minutes in the opening of his Fourth Symphony; to Schoenberg, trying to convince Mahler that a melody could be produced by passing one note around among several instruments' to Cage, who celebrates the esthetic of the suggestive-mundane, music has been a dynamo house, even if it seems lethargic from the outside. Musical history seems like a cycle of vituperation and eulogy. At the present time the vituperation is peculiarly stubborn and the eulogy almost theocratic. We see the spectacle of older people grappling with techniques of 1900, while...
...PERIOD in the arts has so mesmerized succeeding generations of artists, or so bewildered the public, as the years from 1882 to 1935 -- years of almost constant musical detonations. The main crisis was that the girdling shadow of the colossus Wagner had to be escaped. The entire community of Europe agonied in the punishing ascendency of the magnificent nineteenth century figures: Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Metternich, Bismarck, Darwin. Music was caught in a vortex of gigantic, lavish attempts at the final romantic masterpiece. Mahler's Eighth Symphony, Richard Strauss's Symphonia Domestica and Alpine Symphony, Schoenberg's Pelleas and Melisande...
...against such a stark panorama that Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Debussy, their earlier counterpart in the reformation of sensibility, labored to form a musical, syntax of more penetrating and living poetry. Richard Strauss's famous boast that he could set a glass of beer to music contrasts sharply with Debussy's later response to his world...
...revolutionary effect of the turn-of-the-century ferment, and the principle which has animated today's avant-garde, was that expressionism and impressionism were subsumed by a new language. Schoenberg had termed his achievement the "emancipation of dissonance." Insofar as the avant-garde moves toward the conclusion that music is the audible world itself, subject to its own capricious organization, the responsible avant-garde is esthetically atavistic. Ours is in reality a period of secondary musical change. The contemporary avant-garde is secondary because it prosecutes the logical implication of the earlier innovations. In the brief period from...