I don't know Rochberg all that well except for the violin concerto - I like bits of what I've heard without particularly having a sense of where each of them fits in to his overall career.
You're right up to a point about the judgement of posterity thing - Bach's eclipse was only partial and the revival started earlier than is sometimes thought - and yet it can take longer. Donne was disliked by both the Augustans and the Romantics and only thought of as great in the aftermath of Modernism; posterity appropriates material to serve its own purposes.
Serialism is not going to rule the world at any point - some of the people we currently discard may get revived for other musical purposes is the point I am making. I think we can agree that the historicist claims of serialism were bogus - it was not where music was heading, and it was a dead end. That would remain true even were something unexpected to be pulled out of the wreckage in 2080.
Which is also one of the things about the reputation of Bach - he is a master so huge that he can be appropriated by generation after generation to serve their own turn. The Bach on whom Chopin trained is not the Bach whom Mendelssohn promoted is not the Bach whom Busoni transcribed is not the Bach loved by the modernists and arranged by Schoenberg and Webern is not the Bach orchestrated by Stokowski is not the Bach of the authenticity movement is not the Bach of Glen Gould is not the Bach of operatic divas making that record. Or rather, he is all those things.
Schoenberg is getting his revival which is also his shakedown - obviously it is going to be the big Romantic Schoenberg mostly, but also the concertos and the chamber symphonies. I'd put money on the quartets including the two later ones. Of the hard core serial side of him, I think the Variations, the Violin and Piano fantasy and possibly the wind quintet.
In the end though, I don't like him as much as his pupils and I think he was probably a pretty baleful influence. Music departments in universities got caught up with a lot of bullying and in this country Radio 3 and the Proms were horribly dominated by a clique - I don't think great talents were destroyed by it all but some people did not get patronage that should have done. Yet one of the people most involved with the Radio 3 stuff, and the exclusion of so much good music from the canon, and a lot of verbal spite of the most tedious kind, was Boulez who for me is the one good thing in later modernism.
And of course he was not nearly serial enough for some of them, and what I like about him is often pretty rather than beautiful, which he would doubtless hate.
The thing I think we can agree on is that serialism squashed so much that was good - and we will spend the next decades deciding what petits maitres of C20 are better than we thought.
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Date: 2010-01-27 03:56 pm (UTC)You're right up to a point about the judgement of posterity thing - Bach's eclipse was only partial and the revival started earlier than is sometimes thought - and yet it can take longer. Donne was disliked by both the Augustans and the Romantics and only thought of as great in the aftermath of Modernism; posterity appropriates material to serve its own purposes.
Serialism is not going to rule the world at any point - some of the people we currently discard may get revived for other musical purposes is the point I am making. I think we can agree that the historicist claims of serialism were bogus - it was not where music was heading, and it was a dead end. That would remain true even were something unexpected to be pulled out of the wreckage in 2080.
Which is also one of the things about the reputation of Bach - he is a master so huge that he can be appropriated by generation after generation to serve their own turn. The Bach on whom Chopin trained is not the Bach whom Mendelssohn promoted is not the Bach whom Busoni transcribed is not the Bach loved by the modernists and arranged by Schoenberg and Webern is not the Bach orchestrated by Stokowski is not the Bach of the authenticity movement is not the Bach of Glen Gould is not the Bach of operatic divas making that record. Or rather, he is all those things.
Schoenberg is getting his revival which is also his shakedown - obviously it is going to be the big Romantic Schoenberg mostly, but also the concertos and the chamber symphonies. I'd put money on the quartets including the two later ones. Of the hard core serial side of him, I think the Variations, the Violin and Piano fantasy and possibly the wind quintet.
In the end though, I don't like him as much as his pupils and I think he was probably a pretty baleful influence. Music departments in universities got caught up with a lot of bullying and in this country Radio 3 and the Proms were horribly dominated by a clique - I don't think great talents were destroyed by it all but some people did not get patronage that should have done. Yet one of the people most involved with the Radio 3 stuff, and the exclusion of so much good music from the canon, and a lot of verbal spite of the most tedious kind, was Boulez who for me is the one good thing in later modernism.
And of course he was not nearly serial enough for some of them, and what I like about him is often pretty rather than beautiful, which he would doubtless hate.
The thing I think we can agree on is that serialism squashed so much that was good - and we will spend the next decades deciding what petits maitres of C20 are better than we thought.