Word: schoenbergs
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Since the early years of the twentieth century, when Debussy and Schoenberg made their experiments beyond the familiar ground of tonality, composers have been faced with the problem of choosing a style from a large and exceedingly miscellaneous group of alternatives. These days composers can pick from a selection that ranges from modified romanticism (Poulenc) or modified Puccini (Menotti) through Stravinsky's neo-classic manner to Schoenberg or Berg or exotic explorers like Varese. Of course, a composer can scramble two, or three, or ten of these together and arrive at something unrecognizable enough to prompt the conscientious newspaper reviewer...
...equal, i.e. none of them is emphasized as tonality emphasizes its main tone, its resting point. A substantial part of the system's appeal to composers lies in its highly organized nature: the destruction of the complex system of tonal relations seems to demand another complicated set of rules. Schoenberg, the twelvetone pioneer, set up such a system, but curiously enough he retained much of the texture and form of tonal music, writing works that might be said to resemble Brahms quartets played through a twelvetone baffle...
Such incongruities suggested that further changes were necessary; twelve-tone music needed a language of its own--not one borrowed from a previous system. The solution was not to be found by Schoenberg's famous pupil, Berg, who frequently used tonality, and whose arch-romantic operas stand far closer to the nineteenth century than to Berg's twelve-tone colleagues. In time it became clear that the major influence on the succeeding generation of twelve-tone writers was Anton Webern, another Schoenberg pupil who has been the subject of a major renaissance in the past few years...
...certain sense, Webern's music was a reaction to the nineteenth century elements that flooded Berg's music and kept on pushing into Schoenberg's. And so a Webern score is extremely economical with notes: most of the pieces are short (some last only a few seconds); virtually every work is full of silence; the sounds heard are frequently very soft and are clearly the result of delicate calculation. There are few mass effects--rather, the attention is concentrated upon a succession of single tones. There is formal economy, too: the care Webern spent in organizing his structures finally resulted...
...dramatically simple theme played by strings and woodwinds. The audience could summon up only polite applause. But Cleveland's Composer-Critic Herbert Elwell found Rochberg's mastery of the tone row remarkable and his symphonic ideas "deeply absorbing." The style, explained Composer Rochberg, was strongly influenced by Schoenberg, but he had a warning for young composers who turn to Schoenberg and Stravinsky too early: "Before you take off, you've got to be on the ground...