Word: schoenberger
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...Repeats. Polytonal, polymodal, polyrhythmic, The Rite took some getting used to. It did not so much reject conventional harmony, as did the twelve-tone works of Arnold Schoenberg. Rather it brought contrasting tonalities crashing dangerously into one another. With its unexpected clustered stresses and pile-driving climaxes, it raised rhythm to an unprecedented preeminence. Jarring the 20th century out of its lingering romanticism, it was more than "the cornerstone of modern music," as Pierre Boulez calls it. It was one of those works, like Joyce's Ulysses and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, that announced...
Tending the Image. The astonishing thing about Stravinsky's development up to this point was that unlike Schoenberg, he never turned his back entirely on the tonalities of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries or on the modal style of earlier eras. In the 1940s, Stravinsky, always a wandering cosmopolite, moved to Hollywood, near Schoenberg's home. Yet the two rivals maintained a chilly distance from their respective hilltops. It was only in 1953, two years after Schoenberg's death, that Stravinsky finally embraced serialism. Of the dozen or so twelve-tone works he produced prior...
Such pieces, though much less doctrinaire than Schoenberg, were probably the least understood and least performed of Stravinsky's whole corpus. Yet like the rest of his work, they were unmistakably Stravinsky, and their quirky unconventionality continued to open fresh byways to other composers. In the words of Aaron Copland: "It is the rightness of his 'wrong' solutions that fascinates one. The notes themselves [seem] surprised at finding themselves situated where they...
...took the Schoenberg concerto-the first of six scheduled performances by Israel-born Violinist Zvi Zeitlin-to bring the taste and tradition crisis to a head. The ticket holders had simply heard enough new music. At the end of the concert at which the walkouts occurred, the management committee decided to drop the Schoenberg. To replace it, Violinist Zeitlin chose a piece well calculated to mollify his tradition-minded audience, Mendelssohn's melodious Violin Concerto. "I approve of the decision," said Mehta on the phone from Los Angeles 10,000 miles away, "but I am not happy about...
...Both the change, and the apparently unexceptionable choice, set off something like a national debate. Editors were swamped with letters, and one subscriber threatened to whistle during the playing of Mendelssohn. Orchestra posters in Jerusalem were defaced with scrawled messages: "Boo to Mendelssohn." Music critics naturally were all for Schoenberg. Only Zeitlin seemed pleased to see such excitement over music. "The whole country is up in arms on the side of Mendelssohn or Schoenberg!" he said. As critical pressure mounted, the orchestra announced a compromise: it would give an extra free performance of the Schoenberg Violin Concerto to all holders...