Word: webernism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most concentrated works (e.g., Five Pieces for orchestra, Six Bagatelles for string quartet, Three Small Pieces for cello and piano), Webern pulverized melody, harmony and rhythm. Schoenberg said that these pieces packed the art of "a whole novel in a single sigh." The result is music that drones at times with shrill insect insistence, rises to jagged, shrieking climaxes, lapses in midphrase into sudden silences that form a weird counterpoint to sound. Most listeners will be more attracted to Webern's songs, based on such idyllic poems as Goethe's The Perfect Match ("A flowerbell blossomed early from...
...concert concluded with the late Anton Webern's Three Songs, Opus 23 (1934), excellently sung by Sarah Jane Smith. In them Webern applied his own refined pointillism to the atonal technique of Schonberg, with dubious success. I happen still to be old-fashioned enough to think that the human voice should not be asked to do everything an instrument can do. I find this disjunct kind of vocal writing, in which there are only angles instead of lines, highly ungrateful. The chief interest in these songs for me lies in rhythmic precision; and this in turn is best achieved...
Last week was enlivened by two rather unusual and entertaining concerts in the Houses. The first was at DunsterHouse on Wednesday night, and it presented the avant-garde among Harvard composers, plus some songs by Anton Webern, a very good name nowadays. Most of the student music has been or will be played at concerts of the Composers Laboratory, and the opportunity for two hearings is valuable as this music is often difficult to grasp at a single hearing. The Pieces for Prepared Piano by Christian Wolff, for example, seemed much more comprehensible than at the first performance; nonetheless their...
...sounds, he records them on tape and snips and joins and re-records until his composition is done. It took him a year and a half to complete a 17-minute composition. The result has many of the qualities of twelve-tone music by the late Anton von Webern, tends to make its listeners giggle at first, but then to be come absorbed in the fantastic world of unheard-of sound...
Refreshed, Puzzled. The concert's four works, written in strange and sometimes perplexing styles, might have left the crowd of 675 stupefied, but instead, left it refreshed. The most ear-cracking work. Webern's scintillant, fractured Variations for Orchestra, was so full of bewitching sonorities that listeners were just becoming adjusted to it when it ended. A nice antidote to this was Copland's durable old (1925) jazzy Music for the Theater. After the intermission. Hungarian Soprano Magda Laszlo. in her U.S. debut, sang solos in Dallapiccola's song trilogy, An Mathilde; its rich-hued. profoundly...