Word: schonberger
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Berg: Lyric Suite (Galimir String Quartet; Vox-Polydor, 8 sides). In this suite, one of his last works, the late Alban Berg (TIME, May 31) put his teacher Arnold Schonberg's theories to test, came up with perhaps the best work yet composed in twelve-tone technique. That still doesn't make it very listenable to ordinary unpracticedears. Performance: excellent. Recording : excellent...
Composer Berg dedicated this work to his teacher, Arnold Schonberg. But he had not built it on Schonberg's "twelve-tone" technique.* Between two fast, brightly dissonant movements, Berg sandwiched a melodic slow movement that had listeners gasping: the themes build to a climax, then run backward to a close. 1914, even gave it a few licks while he was in the Austrian army. Its successful Berlin premiere in 1925 surprised Berg as much as anyone. He had expected to be booed; instead he got a dozen curtain calls. (The U.S. first saw Wozzeck in 1931; Manhattan audiences heard...
...same ambition Paul Whiteman had in the '20s: to marry classical music and jazz. In Whiteman's case, what emerged was pseudo-symphonic-a blend of Tin Pan Alley and Tchaikovsky. In Kenton's, it is a driving, nervous (and technically skillful) wedding of swing and Schonberg. Kenton started his outfit in 1941, got ahead fast by getting up early to sign autographs, and looking up disc jockeys whenever he hit a new town. For the past two years, his musicians have been voted Band of the Year...
Mozart the Modern. He has written five string quartets, a piano concerto and two symphonies (one of which the Minneapolis Symphony played in 1946). He composes in a freely atonal style, admires the hardy music of Schonberg and Austrian Atonalist Alban Berg. Says he: "After all, Mozart composed 'modern' music when he wrote." When friends ask him why he writes like the new masters, but plays only the music of the old, he says: "I play only music which remains for me problematic-only music that is better than it can be played...
...most original-even if not the most skillful-of all U.S. composers. One New York critic once called his second piano sonata, Concord Mass. 1840-60, "the greatest music composed by an American." He was writing music with strange, exciting rhythms and polytonal harmonies before Stravinsky and Schonberg...