Word: swoboda
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...Swoboda refuses to be polemical about his ideas. "I am not for a system as a system," he says regarding contemporary music. Swoboda thinks that the exact direction modern music is now following is a very open question. Another example of his undogmatic approach is his feeling that American music's private enterprise "system" may work out its future comfortably without the (excellent) European subsidy "system...
...Swoboda grew up in Czechoslavakia, and as Kodaly's Hary Janos Suite's presence on his first program indicates, he feels part of old Austria's heritage. After attending the Music Conservatory in Prague, he took a Ph.D. at the University there and became assistant conductor at the Prague Opera. He then became conductor and program director for the Prague broadcasting station. Guest conducting took him to Edinburgh, Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna...
...Swoboda came to the United States in 1939. Although he became a U.S. citizen in the mid-'40's, Swoboda has appeared primarily in Europe, with tours of many continental orchestras. He also toured South and Central America, but did not appear in this country until he conducted at the Empire State Music Festival in 1960. Since then he has led the Symphony of the Air in New York and made recordings with them for Decca...
Concert management has enormous complexities in this country, and this hurdle indeed helped delay Swoboda's appearance here. But he subscribes to no program for changing the system. He remarks that the dangers which the whimsy of society patrons raise are the same as those brought on by government subsidy, where a failure to make selection rigorous could mean "any congressman's niece could get on stage." European state sponsorship has worked well because it has generally fixed strict standards for its grants, but Swoboda feels that American antagonism to active government has enough power to prevent state intervention...
...Swoboda feels himself a member of an older generation, but one who is trying to span the gap with the new one--"I have been a revolutionary all my life--always for the avant-garde." But if he has respect for the "abstract feelings" of modern twelve-tone music and for its distance from the "material world," this sympathy has its limits. Swoboda feels that "every system is in the end based on tonality," and ridicules the break with traditional training in composition of Karlheinz Stockhausen...