Word: webern
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...Marteau created a mild sensation at its first performance three years ago. After an interval in which Webern's fame has grown tremendously, Boulez' piece has become more accessible, although it remains a rather tough puzzle. Certainly it has far more surface attraction than the Stockhausen recorded here: Boulez call for alto flute, xylorymba, vibraphone, guitar, viola, and several exotic percussion instruments. Four of the nine sections are settings of surrealistic poetry by Rene Char; the contralto Margery MacKay displays here an engagingly warm and sensuous voice. Practically all of the music moves at a furious tempo; this speed, coupled...
...Marteau one recognizes Boulez' individuality; it is far from being merely French Webern played at high speed. Many listeners will be charmed by the piece--few will be charmed by Zeitmasse ("Tempo"), for woodwind quintet (with English horn substituted for horn). Where Boulez is witty and Gallic, Stockhausen is ponderous and Teutonic. The piece is based on an exceedingly complicated schedule of ratios, educations, and formula borrowed from the forbidding world of electronic music. What the uninitiated listener hears is a strange web of sound, frequently frightening and dense as all five instruments sweep from one extreme of their range...
...Boulez, Tchaikovsky is "abominable," Brahms "a bore," Twelve-Tone Pioneer Arnold Schoenberg an arrested post-Romantic who "discovered the words but never found the proper syntax for them." Just about the only older composers for whom Boulez has a kind word: Schoenberg's late pupil Anton Webern, and France's 49-year-old Organist-Composer Olivier Messiaen, from whom Boulez sought composition instruction after giving Paris' traditionalist Conservatoire the back of his hand ("The composition professors were imbeciles"). From Webern, Boulez derived and refined Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique to its uttermost austerity, and from Messiaen...
Electronist Stockhausen started out as a comparatively conventional rebel in the Anton von Webern atonal vein but soon felt he had "dried up" and started looking for new effects. At Cologne he can get just about any effect he wants with the aid of an array of recorders and filters plus generators that may rumble, screech, thunder, and produce other items of planned flatulence. By varying the signals sent to the 20 loudspeakers spotted about the auditorium, Stockhausen can make his sounds swoosh along a wall, tinkle in a corner or explode over the head of the audience. He first...
This is no album to be listened to all at once, or to be judged on first hearing. But after a while there emerges from Webern's works a kind of rhythmic logic all his own. There are the same echoes of a distorted reality that characterize Kafka -the sound of church bells (or is it thunder?), snatches of bugles and drums (but what living army ever marched to such a beat?), or a sudden hop and skip, as of a fragmented polka (but no belle ever danced to such measures...