Word: webern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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PERHAPS ONCE in a season a concert presents a program which, regardless of the quality of the performance, lays bare with an unconscious genius the morphology of the musical art. The Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra's concert of last Friday evening did just that. The program of Webern's Six Pieces, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and Bartok's Violin Concerto was not just another variation of the workhorse-standard esoterica-classic modernist admixture. It penetrated the analytic encrustation of ten thousand musicologists, from the turbid intellectualism of Boulez to the ornithological rhapsodizing of Messeian to the volcanic dogmatism...
...point of fact almost all of today's music issues from the rigorous serialism of Anton Webern, with Bartok and Berg the universally ignored alternatives standing squarely in the mainstream of music...
...unutterable blasphemy that Webern is Procustes while Bartok is Dionysius requires a brief explanation. Bartok was an evolutionary genius who subsumed polytonality, atonality, impressionism, expressionism, and serialism according to his guiding principle of vigorous continuity...
...Webern, a forbidding set of pieces, was for me the Orchestra's finest effort, thanks to strong performances by the principals, especially the first horn. Apart from the low winds' curious timbre, the only real problems were relatively small ones: a lack of rhythmic incisiveness in number Four, a Westminster chime, and some languid contrasts...
...Aggressive. In his early critical writings, just published in Notes of an Apprenticeship (Knopf; $8.95), Boulez criticized almost every leading composer except his idols, Debussy and Webern. While praising Stravinsky's rhythmic innovations in Le Sacre du Printemps, Boulez rapped him for his unwillingness to surrender diatonic melody-and reliance on the tonic and dominant-in favor of serialism. As for the father of serialism, Arnold Schoenberg, Boulez took him to task for failing to apply the serialistic principle of melodic organization to other aspects of music like timbres and intervals between notes...