Word: webern
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Electronist Stockhausen started out as a comparatively conventional rebel in the Anton von Webern atonal vein but soon felt he had "dried up" and started looking for new effects. At Cologne he can get just about any effect he wants with the aid of an array of recorders and filters plus generators that may rumble, screech, thunder, and produce other items of planned flatulence. By varying the signals sent to the 20 loudspeakers spotted about the auditorium, Stockhausen can make his sounds swoosh along a wall, tinkle in a corner or explode over the head of the audience. He first...
...most concentrated works (e.g., Five Pieces for orchestra, Six Bagatelles for string quartet, Three Small Pieces for cello and piano), Webern pulverized melody, harmony and rhythm. Schoenberg said that these pieces packed the art of "a whole novel in a single sigh." The result is music that drones at times with shrill insect insistence, rises to jagged, shrieking climaxes, lapses in midphrase into sudden silences that form a weird counterpoint to sound. Most listeners will be more attracted to Webern's songs, based on such idyllic poems as Goethe's The Perfect Match ("A flowerbell blossomed early from...
This is no album to be listened to all at once, or to be judged on first hearing. But after a while there emerges from Webern's works a kind of rhythmic logic all his own. There are the same echoes of a distorted reality that characterize Kafka -the sound of church bells (or is it thunder?), snatches of bugles and drums (but what living army ever marched to such a beat?), or a sudden hop and skip, as of a fragmented polka (but no belle ever danced to such measures...
...concert concluded with the late Anton Webern's Three Songs, Opus 23 (1934), excellently sung by Sarah Jane Smith. In them Webern applied his own refined pointillism to the atonal technique of Schonberg, with dubious success. I happen still to be old-fashioned enough to think that the human voice should not be asked to do everything an instrument can do. I find this disjunct kind of vocal writing, in which there are only angles instead of lines, highly ungrateful. The chief interest in these songs for me lies in rhythmic precision; and this in turn is best achieved...
Last week was enlivened by two rather unusual and entertaining concerts in the Houses. The first was at DunsterHouse on Wednesday night, and it presented the avant-garde among Harvard composers, plus some songs by Anton Webern, a very good name nowadays. Most of the student music has been or will be played at concerts of the Composers Laboratory, and the opportunity for two hearings is valuable as this music is often difficult to grasp at a single hearing. The Pieces for Prepared Piano by Christian Wolff, for example, seemed much more comprehensible than at the first performance; nonetheless their...