Word: schoenberg
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...program which Adams House presented on Wednesday night seemed at the start totally miscellaneous. The Beethoven Violin Sonata, Op.96, opened it, the Schoenberg String Trio, Op. 45 followed, and the second half plunged into the electronic music of Cage, Mache and Schaeffer. But all the pieces closely complemented each other, for the modern works were all intent upon evoking a sense of enigmatic direction, of thoughtful uncertainty, and the Beethoven at least approached them by using an unusual formal scheme. Listening to all this raised the important question of what should determine taste within so free a style...
...Schoenberg abandoned classical forms for his Trio. Although he divided the work into three meetings, these movements (perhaps better called "episodes") do not fit the conventional categories of movements. The work does not, as do classical forms, progress through several distinct, encased areas; it rather distributes its contrasting moods throughout the piece and makes quick changes between with neither obvious or formal transitions. It is the probing nature of the music which constitutes its development: it stops and starts, moves in one direction only to shift toward another, never leaving the bounds of what it marks...
...professional critics will no doubt call this work eclectic," said Leonard Bernstein, warming to one of his fireside chats from the podium of Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall. "Very well. Here are the elements you may find: certainly Schoenberg, Mahler, perhaps Bartok. This is the music of a very eclectic man, and you should hear the passion of Spain, the worldliness of Vienna, the German methodology, the English love of tradition." With that, New York Philharmonic Pianist Paul Jacobs sounded the first six notes of the tone row with a crashing force that introduced to the U.S. the haunting Symphony...
Speed & Excitement. Gerhard, 66, fled Spain during the Civil War. Earlier he had studied with Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin, but he decided to go to England and settled at Cambridge, turning down teaching offers in favor of life as a freelance composer. "Teaching would have been safety-first," he says, "a sign of lack of confidence to survive." Instead, he adopted a hermit's quiet and began turning out a blizzard of atonal music. The Symphony No. 1, composed in 1953, was not played publicly in England until last February, but it has already made Gerhard a major...
...become a Cause," he wrote while working on his symphony, then proved his freedom from causes by building his music on rhythmic patterns outlawed by the canons of serial technique. The First Symphony opens with a lively burst of serial figures, repeated over and over in headstrong violation of Schoenberg's rules. Rushing excitement then gives way to the eerie calm of the second movement; the science-fiction-thriller sound of Gerhard's adagio strings led the admiring critic of the London Times to pronounce the imagery of Gerhard's world "as excitingly mysterious as that...