Word: webernism
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...Thompson's favorite points about modern music concerns contemporary sophistication. "Despite the heroic attempts for sublimity in the Berg Concerto, contemporary idioms in general lend themselves only with great difficulty to anything approaching the sublime. After all, though a tinkle-tinkle here and there in a Webern score may satiate one's thirst for the piquant and highly flavored, it does not quench the far more important thirst of the soul. Elevated feeling in the human spirit is generally ignored by modern composers, but it is an important response to the musical art. Any thinking person who made a list...
...demands on the attention not usually required of an audience, Christion Wolff's music was perhaps the hardest to grasp. There were two pieces, both for two pianos, the second running almost 15 minutes. From the surface of the music it is easy enough to catalogue the extensions of Webern's devices: only a few notes are played at a time; these are usually very soft (or else very loud); there is constant preoccupation with color: most of the music is very high or low, piano strings are plucked with the fingers, there are elaborate pedal effects...
Wolff's solution involves a number of techniques, the most important of which deals with an extension of the row idea. In Schoenberg and Webern only pitch is set in order. Now the concept of "total organization" puts other musical materials into a row: dynamics, time, tonecolor all have their own rows, frequently connected with one another...
...idea of the row, or series, has so taken hold that post-Webern composers might better be called serialists. Wolff's rows for these piano pieces involve, among things, serial ordering of units of time in seconds, so that the performers require stopwatches...
...concert closed with Webern, as many serialist concerts do; in this case the Three Small Pieces, Opus 11, superbly performed by Judith Davidoff and Rzewski. As usual, Webern made his successors seem rather tentative and shapeless (the exception was Mr. Rzewski's vastly self-assured piece), but he did not detract from their clear achievements, largely in the matters of color and dynamic subtlety. Whether or not the structural question has been answered is problematical. Wolff and others say that sense of direction should not necessarily be looked for in this music, that many works ought to be regarded...