Word: webern
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...contemporary styles and their still-emerging disciples. It includes such cornerstone composers as the French mystic Olivier Messiaen and American Serialist Statesman Milton Babbitt, plus a smattering of tiny, wispy recent Stravinsky pieces, as well as chamber works by Aaron Copland, some recently discovered early pieces by Anton Webern, performed by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra...
Squawking Steinway. Columbia's package concentrates chiefly on the broad spectrum of experimentation, most of it stemming from Webern's later pointillistic serialism and further shaped by the development of electronic sound producing and reproducing equipment. John Cage's Variations II required Pianist David Tudor to clip microphones at various points on his Steinway and to overtune them so that the amplifier-produced squawl and squawk become part of the composition; in Mikrophonie I. Karlheinz Stockhausen attached two microphones to an oversized gong, which was then hit with a variety of materials to produce a 26-minute...
...Darmstadt courses opened in 1946 as refreshers for Hitler-frustrated German musicians who wanted to brush up on their Stravinsky, Bartok, Hindemith and Schoenberg. In succeeding years, Darmstadt focused on the development of serial techniques in Schoenberg and Webern, and gave exposure to the works of such post-serial experimenters as Edgar Varese and Olivier Messiaen. Soon younger composers-notably Hans Werner Henze and Pierre Boulez-began unveiling compositions of their own at the festival's semiprivate "workshop" concerts...
Mahler, born in 1860, was one of the last great Romantics. Because of the way he transformed the symphonic tradition extending from Mozart to Anton Bruckner, he was also, in Steinberg's words, "the father of contemporary music-the forerunner of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern." Yet no composer was ever less interested in the objective development of musical form as such. For Mahler, composing was a highly subjective process of grappling with the deepest, most painful questions of life. "The creative act and actual experience," he said, are "one and the same...
Levy, 34, the son of a Passaic, N.J., candy-store owner, seems to be a composer in search of a style; the opera, his first full-length effort, has some swatches of straight classical writing, some Webern, some Stravinsky, some Britten. As a result, the operatic version of Mourning emerges as a compelling drama with polished incidental music. Last week, after two Mourning performances, Levy was busy cutting the three-hour opera by about 20 minutes. It will take more than emergency surgery and fine stagecraft to save a score that was dead to begin with...