Word: schoenbergs
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...COMPOSERS I think music is dead, because I don't think any important music is being written today. It was in Schoenberg's and Stravinsky's generation that the decline set in. Béla Bartók is a musical personality of some stature, but Stravinsky is the Rimsky-Korsakov of this generation. I am willing to bet that in the 21st century Stravinsky won't be played very much...
...took an awful lot of arrogance for Arnold Schoenberg to dismiss the historical tradition of music and invent an entirely new one. Of course there are uses for the twelve-tone system. For a composer like Alberto Ginastera, who always sets extremely violent texts to music, the system becomes rather appropriate. There is also Alban Berg, especially in Lulu, and Luigi Dallapiccola. To me, these three are the most impressive twelve-tone composers. My feeling is that the twelve-tone system is incapable of expressing anything but violence...
Brendel finds more beauty in old works than in contemporary ones. "I play everything from Mozart to Schoenberg," he says. "I'm interested in new music, but I don't think I can play it. Wrong temperament. I admire Chopin; that's one of the reasons I don't play him. He eats up a performer. Schubert is my antidote for Beethoven." Brendel also wants to get into more Haydn. Which leaves only one great ambition. "What I really want," he concludes, eying his profile in a mirror, "is to play the lead in a Frankenstein...
...writing for the people. Like Lenny Bernstein. I think West Side Story is one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century because it combines the classics with the vernacular." Munves particularly mourns the disappearance of good old-fashioned melody. When he says, "It all started with that nogoodnik Schoenberg," he is having a laugh, but only partly. "The thing with music is that man has to see his own image in it," he says. "And man's image in music is melody...
...indisputable factor in Stravinsky's conversion to serialism was the arrival within his household of Schoenberg's former research assistant, the young American conductor Rober Craft. In addition to becoming Stravinsky's rehearsal conductor, literary collaborator, companion and surrogate son, Craft was the unofficial custodian of the Stravinskian image. In this role especially through a series of remarkable "conversations with" books, he enabled a wide audience to savor the composer's pungent personality...