Word: webern
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
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...