Word: schoenberg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ironically, just as the minority abandons it, the masses begin to fawn upon its fifty-year-old innovation for the wrong reasons. Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, and Schoenberg were regarded, with varying vehemence, as musical antichrists, Yet now that they are heard, with deadening frequency, they are widely caricatured as rebels or prophets, venerable and unapproachable. They are accorded all honors except the simple duty of critical listening. As Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan laments upon realizing that her belated 1910 canonization was due to a stupid society's mute guilt rather than its compassion: "Woe to him whom...
From Weber, who thought Beethoven 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...
...eternal mystery is that an artist who seemed to his contemporaries so backward-looking should seem to his successors so forward-looking. Compared with Monteverdi or Beethoven or Schoenberg, he was not an innovator. Historically Bach's distinction was to summarize and culminate all the musical developments that led up to him. But he did this with such subtlety and daring, such piety and passion, that he ended up reconciling, completing and extending everything he touched, thereby preparing music for the centuries ahead. It has been said that the history of philosophy consists of a series of footnotes...
...preliminary, Schoenberg's late work, A Survivor from Warsaw (1946) for male chorus, narrator and orchestra was performed. In this work Schoenberg strikes a medium between lyric singing and his own device of sprechstimme, by setting his expressionist text to notes of various vertical distances above and below a reference line. The work, described as "savage" in the program notes but bordering on melodrama, describes Schoenberg's raging desperateness as the Jews flee Nazist Warsaw, and his resumption of the Jewish faith in the face of this tragic modern Diaspora. This profound personal utterance seems to suffer from the same...
...every leading composer except his idols, Debussy and Webern. While praising Stravinsky's rhythmic innovations in Le Sacre du Printemps, Boulez rapped him for his unwillingness to surrender diatonic melody-and reliance on the tonic and dominant-in favor of serialism. As for the father of serialism, Arnold Schoenberg, Boulez took him to task for failing to apply the serialistic principle of melodic organization to other aspects of music like timbres and intervals between notes...