musical discoveries

[calimac]

In my current listening, I've just discovered a passage by Schubert - Schubert! - that sounds uncannily like Philip Glass. I couldn't be more astonished if I tried. The instrumentation is right too: strings and organ, with soft creepy voices. I think it's from Satyagraha or Koyaanisqatsi. Franz, you didn't tell me you were a minimalist.

Current musical reading is Music Downtown, a collection of Kyle Gann's Village Voice columns that came from the UC Press booksale. I don't like all the composers Gann praises (assuming I know their work at all, which I often don't) nor dislike all the ones he dismisses - I was sorry to see him lump Michael Torke as one of a list of composers writing for "little old ladies" (a rather Ivesian turn of phrase, no?) - but much of the time he is right on. I'm still burning enough at a lot of old serialist propaganda that I cheer robust three-point shots like this:

But while bad 17th-century music is merely dull and bad 19th-century music is tediously grandiose, the late 20th century's bad music was pervasively ugly, pretentious, and meaningless, yet backed up by a technical apparatus that justified it and even earned it prestigious awards. Twelve-tone technique - the South Sea Bubble of music history, to which hundreds and perhaps thousands of well-intended composers sacrificed their careers like lemmings, and all for nothing - brought music to the lowest point in the history of mankind. Twelve-tone music is now dead, everyone grudgingly admits, yet its pitch-set-manipulating habits survive in far-flung corners of our musical technique like residual viruses.

Comments

[rozk.livejournal.com]

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.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"petits maitres," eh? I think they need to be re-evaluated more than that. I still resent Harold Schonberg's condescending statement that Sibelius "deserves to occupy an honorable place among the minor composers." He said that in 1970, when Sibelius was still at the trough of his posthumous dip. Since then, he's been properly recognized as a giant, the greatest symphonist of his generation.

And then Schonberg turns right around and reams out Grove 5 for its condescending remarks about Rachmaninoff! "O would some power the giftie gie us ..."

I may previously have inflicted on you my theory - I call it the Hidden City - that all the arts took a wrong turn into abstruse modernism in the early 20th century, which grew hermetic after WW2, and that only gradually in the last 40 years or so have the true great masters of that century, popular enough but largely critically scorned at the time, have been unearthed and given their just due. In music, look not just at Sibelius (and even Rachmaninoff) but even more Shostakovich, as vs waves of serialism. In literature, Tolkien as vs sterile realism. In architecture, Wright and Morgan as vs Bauhaus and allied schools. And so on.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

I have never understood the attempt to downgrade Sibelius. It isn't that I don't like him, just that I like some of his rivals for the title of greatest symphonist so much more than you that I can't slide a playing card between my love for them. But that is a different conversation which we have had before and on which we are never going to agree...Sibelius produced great work and he also suggested a way forward for art - the whole thing of planting small cells in the early part of work that accumulate to massive statement - that is often productive.

Rachmaninoff's only thoroughly good symphony is the one that doesn't call itself one - the Symphonic Dances. And at that I am not sure I don't prefer the two piano version. He is a good example of the minor composer one would never choose to be without - I listen to the Corelli variations and the second sonata perhaps more often than is good for me.

You haven't explicitly told me about the Hidden City though I had deduced something of the sort from your writing, and it is a theory I am far from dismissing. With the caveat that, for example, Shostakovich's late quartets draw on the sound world of serialism a little and that the relationship is complex. It works for architecture, on the whole, but I am not clear how it works for painting where figurative work never went away. It didn't really happen in poetry - Ashbery and Prynne, and the Black Mountain group, have their advocates but the Movement and the Martians were always more important really.

Also, I am not sure where you would put all sorts of people - where does a novelist like Pynchon fit your model, say?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

My claim of Sibelius as the greatest symphonist of his generation is based on general consent, not my individual judgment. In any case, while I like his work greatly, he's not my favorite in that category. I like Nielsen (selectively) and Vaughan Williams (unselectively) rather more.

The Hidden City never went away in any of the arts, but it was roundly dismissed. I'm not that familiar with painting, but representative art was sneered at by the higher critics - Wyeth, for instance, pushed aside as bourgeois at a time when art galleries were filled with ridiculous non-art. (I've seen Rothko paintings in person, including the famous chapel, and my only reaction was, "You've got to be kidding.")

Serialism is a technique, a notion to put in the toolbox and use selectively where it'd be effective. It's making it an all-encompassing rule in the teeth of all human feeling that's objectionable. So there's nothing wrong with Shostakovich trying a bit of it. But I note that whenever Shostakovich begins a piece with a declaration of "look, I'm being serial!", within a few minutes he forgets all about it and goes back to being Shostakovich.

In terms of the chronological development of the Hidden City, Pynchon sits in literature about where the early minimalists do in music: they come along a bit later, at just about the point where the cracks begin showing in the modernist hegemony, and fill an interest in something different if a bit weird.