Word: serialists
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...emerges. Rockwell's discussion of serialism--a non-traditional musical system championed by Arnoid Schoenberg--is prefaced by the revealing remark. "But it was serialism more than populism that impeded the evolution of truly American music." Rockwell can't decide which side he is on, the side of serialist Milton Babbitt of Princeton--who once wrote an essay entitled. "Who; Cares if You Listen?"--or the avowedly populist Elliott Carter--whom he accuses of having a "more calculated attitude towards world success" than Babbitt. His classical composers are placed in a musical Catch--22; either they are anti-public...
...decline of the serialist school, which had rigidly dominated composition since the end of World War II, has opened the way once again for a more humanistic, accessible form of musical expression. Shostakovich's pensive, sardonic, sometimes anguished style no longer has to be considered a liability. In fact, as reflected in the Fitzwilliam's excellent, probing performances-which concluded last week in Alice Tully Hall-his directness is one of his great strengths. For the conventional view of Shostakovich as merely a bombastic reactionary is wrong: he had something to say, and he said...
...occasionally a work comes along that sums up everything-right or wrong-about a given period so completely that nothing can come after it: an unequivocal double bar, a decisive fine. Such a piece is the late German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann's sprawling, eclectic but ultimately unsuccessful serialist opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers). First performed in Cologne in 1965, the work was given its American premiere last week by Sarah Caldwell's Opera Company of Boston. With it, an experimental tradition begun by Schoenberg, continued by Alban Berg and refined by avant-gardists of Germany...
...there is one international musical figure who can truly be described as protean, it is Pierre Boulez. The former enfant terrible of French composers, who combines a brilliant mathematical mind with an expert musical ear, Boulez has been the chief theoretician of the postwar serialist movement. During his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1971 to 1977, he introduced audiences to unfamiliar repertory by familiar composers like Liszt, and startled them with lucid, penetrating readings of standards like Debussy's La Mer. Under his baton the orchestra reached a level of technical precision that...
...list is admirable in its division of attention between the gurus of the contemporary styles and their still-emerging disciples. It includes such cornerstone composers as the French mystic Olivier Messiaen and American Serialist Statesman Milton Babbitt, plus a smattering of tiny, wispy recent Stravinsky pieces, as well as chamber works by Aaron Copland, some recently discovered early pieces by Anton Webern, performed by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra...