Word: webern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Some composers challenge posterity with a roar. Others woo it with seductive languor or graceful wit. Austrian Composer Anton Webern conjured it with a whisper. A shy, intense man who physically shrank from noise, he wrote spare, slight pieces filled with directions like "scarcely audible" and "dying away." Such was the understated economy of his scores that his life's work amounts to a bare three hours of playing time. Nearly all of his compositions take less than ten minutes to perform. He turned out works containing as much silence as music, and that was how an indifferent world...
This year, Dartmouth College's Congregation of the Arts, a summer program whose concerts normally concentrate on works of living composers, took the unusual step of devoting seven days to Webern. The performances demonstrated how much of Webern's vocabulary has passed into the everyday musical language. As such, they sometimes sounded like a lexicon of contemporary clichés: jagged leaps of melody, pointillistic instrumental textures, dryly intellectual twelve-tone patterns. At other times they underlined qualities in Webern's music that have remained fresh and inimitable to this day: delicacy, astringent lyricism, nearly inhuman purity...
Logical Extremes. Born of a solid landowner family in 1883, Webern was trained as a musicologist at the University of Vienna. In 1904, while still a student, he met Arnold Schoenberg and became his lifelong friend and disciple in the cause of overthrowing tonal music. In many areas Webern took Schoenberg's innovations and carried them to logical extremes. When Schoenberg dissolved traditional tonality but continued to work with late Romantic forms, Webern dissolved those too. He obliterated vertical harmonies, broke up melodies into one-or two-note fragments for each instrument and swept away all sense of development...
...WEBERN: Complete Works (Columbia K4L-232). The brief, vital lifework of one of the pivotal figures of 20th century music, conducted by Robert Craft...
...example, the series of electronic pieces that he recently presented in a special concert at the Electric Circus, a Manhattan discotheque. It was more carefully planned and carried out than most such performances, and it amounted to a kaleidoscope of the new Powell music. There were shim mering, post-Webern instrumental sonorities, crackling percussion, taped voices, and electronic twittering and rumbling-all interspersed with theatrical episodes such as a bearded man bouncing on a trampoline under flickering strobe lights...