Word: tonal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Still, there is a problem with the music itself. Like some other composers of his generation, Bernstein no longer fully trusts his basically conservative musical convictions. The eclectic A Quiet Place is fundamentally tonal, but its melodies only infrequently blossom, as if Bernstein were inhibited by 30 years of modernism from writing the kind of straightforward, expressive music that obviously agrees with him. Instead, he has compromised with a bloated, percussive score that, stripped of its bluster and its "commitment," is too often little more than a plaintive bleat. Only in the orchestral interludes, affecting, purely musical ruminations that speak...
...thesis reflects Rockwell's skewed emphasis towards artists who will prove his points and away from those who won't. There are fully eight essays on classical composers devoted to developing his theory that American music is split up into two camps: formal academic serialism and the more popular tonal romanticism. Yet his treatment of jazz is skimpy, to say the least, and rock gets only two chapters, inexplicably devoted to Neil Young and Talking Heads...
...work at times frankly reminiscent of Beethoven and Mahler, Rochberg broke irrevocably from the dominant twelve-tone school of composition to write music that was more tuneful, more accessible and, in his opinion, more expressive. His apostasy puzzled and angered many of his colleagues, who felt that the tonal system used by the great classical and romantic composers was exhausted. "Why is George writing beautiful music?" Rochberg's wife Gene was asked. "We've done that already...
Rochberg has since refined his neo-tonal style in such works as the String Quartets Nos. 4, 5 and 6, known collectively as the "Concord" Quartets after the ensemble for which they were written, and the Violin Concerto, premiered by Isaac Stern. But his most ambitious rapprochement with the past has come not in instrumental music but in opera. The Confidence Man, with a libretto by Gene Rochberg based on Herman Melville's bleak, cynical novel, is currently on display at the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico...
...flourish at the box office, it was not the artistic flop that some local critics claimed it was either. Robert Ward's opera Minutes Till Midnight, which took as its theme the moral dilemma of an atomic physicist, is less than exciting, but it has a serviceable tonal score and a singable libretto. Albee's The Man Who Had Three Arms, though wordy, is an intriguing, often hilarious parable about the hazards of fame in the TV age, with excellent performances by Robert Drivas, Patricia Kilgarriff and Wyman Pendleton. Williams' A House Not Meant to Stand lacks...