Word: webern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...will take over the Philharmonic in the fall of 1971 for three years. It should be a lively reign. An enfant terrible of French music during his younger days, Boulez is capable of fighting desperately for what he believes in-primarily, Boulez's own precise brand of serialism, Webern, and the two most important "traditionalists" in his life, Stravinsky and Debussy. His own music (notably Eclat, Le Marteau sans Maitre, fresh, glittering, mobile works filled with a constant sense of surprise that belies their tight structure) reflects his individuality. An acknowledged egotist ("And you can be sure...
...against such a stark panorama that Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Debussy, their earlier counterpart in the reformation of sensibility, labored to form a musical, syntax of more penetrating and living poetry. Richard Strauss's famous boast that he could set a glass of beer to music contrasts sharply with Debussy's later response to his world...
...essence of Schoenberg, Debussy, Berg, and Webern was the acute, almost palpable response to the most minute patterns of life. They expressed this in a new voice of polychromatic sounds of momentary durations. The fluid immediacy of impresssonism and the starker psychology of expressionism began to lose their distinctiveness and prove permeable and complementary. The last magnificent statements of the musical expressionistic esthetic were Alban Berg's operas Wozzeck (1921) and Lulu (1935), and his Violin Concerto (1935), an elegy written upon the death on Mahler's daughter Manon. The neurasthenic romanticism of Mahler was transmuted in these works...
...composers began an impulsive dizzying concatenation of extreme experiments. Schoenberg himself continued writing masterworks until his death in continued writing masterworks until his death in 1951. The younger radicals seized upon his abstract serial period of the 1920's and upon the exceedingly astringent works of the meticulous Anton Webern astringent works of the meticulous Anton Webern (1883-1945), as their sources of inspiration. The genuinely revolutionary effect of the turn-of-the-century ferment, and the principle which has animated today's avant-garde, was that expressionism and impressionism were subsumed by a new language. Schoenberg had termed...
...master's name in a recurring cantus firmus: B flat, A, C, H (the German notation for B natural). Used by Bach himself in The Art of Fugue, the motif is a traditional tribute that has been paid by composers as diverse as Schumann, Liszt and Webern...