Word: webern
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...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...
...written over the last five years. Bruce plays string bass. The other players are relatively unknown. "The whole album is serialized improvisation. I've written all the tops and bottoms and provided serialized rhythms and pitches for the others to improvise upon." Influences of Schoenberg? "No, probably more Webern than anyone else, especially since many of the cuts are so short. One is fifty seconds long. Webern, man, he was too much! Years ahead of his time. People still haven't caught...
Over the Cracker Barrel. Ruggles has had to struggle harder than any other composer for answers to 20th century musical questions. Nobody else's methods-not Stravinsky's, Bartok's, Webern's or Berg's-would suffice. And so, what he worked out for himself was a tone-clustered, highly contrapuntal and dissonant style. By his self-imposed rules, no note in a melodic line could be repeated until eight or so others had intervened. His work has an atonal quality that often sounds like Schoenberg's middle-period serialism. Yet Ruggles...
After the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, Webern's works were banned as "cultural bolshevism" and his activities were severely restricted. He withdrew more and more completely into mystical seclusion, poring over volumes of poetry and developing a passionate interest in that plant life around his suburban Vienna home. His calm perseverance as a composer in the face of ridicule and neglect gave him a saintly aura. To see him touch a single note on the piano, said Swiss Conductor Ernest Ansermet, was to see a man in an act of devotion...
Atonality for Children. Within a decade of his death, Webern's music was enthusiastically taken up not only by established masters like Igor Stravinsky but also by a whole generation of postwar avantgardists, particularly in Europe. Now the question that remains for the future is how well it will stand up in its own right. "His influence," suggests U.S. Composer Aaron Copland, "may turn out to be far greater than the intrinsic value of his music, which may some day seem too mannered in style and too limited in scope." Webern himself did not think so. "In fifty years...