Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw

[kernelbogey]

I don't think you or I or William Glock or anyone else can listen to a piece of music and ascertain how "twelve-note" it is.

I was merely reporting my experience as a teen learning about 'classical' music, Richard.

[RichardB]

I was merely reporting my experience as a teen learning about 'classical' music, Richard.

I don't really understand, then, what you mean by Glock "setting your musical appreciation of twentieth century music back decades." Besides promoting "avant-garde" composers like Berio, Birtwistle, Boulez and the rest, he also commissioned Arnold, Maw and Tippett for the Proms, as well as featuring music from the 17th century and earlier, while not neglecting composers of the "classical canon". And apart from all that, "twelve-note music" is a method of composition, not a style: you would never mistake Berg for Stockhausen for example, despite both using that method. If you feel that what was played on the BBC prevented you from having access to the kind of twentieth century music you prefer, then ok, that's how you feel, but it must be said that Glock's sympathies were far broader than he's often given credit for.

[kernelbogey]

I don't really understand, then, what you mean by Glock "setting your musical appreciation of twentieth century music back decades." Besides promoting "avant-garde" composers like Berio, Birtwistle, Boulez and the rest, he also commissioned Arnold, Maw and Tippett for the Proms, as well as featuring music from the 17th century and earlier, while not neglecting composers of the "classical canon". And apart from all that, "twelve-note music" is a method of composition, not a style: you would never mistake Berg for Stockhausen for example, despite both using that method. If you feel that what was played on the BBC prevented you from having access to the kind of twentieth century music you prefer, then ok, that's how you feel, but it must be said that Glock's sympathies were far broader than he's often given credit for.

Thank you Richard. Of the seven twentieth century composers you mention I know none at all well. I don't get on with much of Britten, either, barely know Tippett and have never heard a single note of Maw.

You rightly suggest that I have an ill-founded prejudice against Glock, and perhaps I used his name unfairly as a shorthand for 'how the Third Programme was run between 1958 and 19XX'.

Somehow I developed an early passion for Stravinsky (via the Rite), later for Messiaen (via Quartet for the End of Time - thank you Anthony Hopkins) and later Janacek (via Glagolitic Mass).

Nowadays I listen more to Baroque composers - J S Bach a late discovery, amazingly - and no longer am so fascinated by, say, the Tchaikowsky symphonies that as a teenager I was obsesssed with; I continue to love Bruckner and Mahler.

That's enough for me currently, in my late seventies, to lazily not bother to expand my knowledge of twentieth century rep. That may change, of course.

What I think I was expressing poorly in my #12 was that some aspects of music choices on the Third Programme led me to reject a lot of twentieth-century music and thus deprive myself of learning about it. Unfair to blame the BBc for that, of course, since it was my choice.

(Any apparent testiness in my #12 or here is nothing to do with the subject or you; it is a consequence of little and poor sleep in the last eight days.)

[Ein Heldenleben]

This is quite interesting from Glock’s wiki entry.

During his tenure, Glock arranged performances and commissions of works by many contemporary composers, such as Arnold, Berio, Harrison Birtwistle, Boulez, Carter, Dallapiccola, Peter Maxwell Davies, Gerhard, Henze, Ligeti, Lutosławski, Lutyens, Maw, Messiaen, Nono, Stockhausen, and Tippett. Davies dedicated three works to Glock: Symphony No. 1 (1976), Unbroken Circle (1984) and Mishkenot (1988). In Proms programmes Glock expanded as well the presence of music by past composers such as Purcell, Cavalli, Monteverdi, Byrd, Palestrina, Dufay, Dunstaple and Machaut, as well as less-often performed works of Bach and Haydn.[7]


That is quite a list. I wonder what modern Proms commissioners’ legacies will be ?

[RichardB]

Having said all I have, though, I would add that I’m not that keen on Schoenberg or Dallapiccola, whereas I have a lot of time for Berg, Webern and Gerhard. The extent to which these composers used twelve-note methods is really not an issue.

[richardfinegold]

I am feeling so heartened amid these times that people I wouldn't have expected here have given thumbs up to one of Schoenberg's most radical works, and a twelve-tone-based one a that! Atonal music opened up the universe of music to previously untapped formal and expressive possibilities, acknowledged even by composers of more conservative stamp, yet both it and the twelve-tone and broader serial musics which some composers would expand into from it have received short shrift from much of the critical musical establishment for the past four decades, indicating a more general loss of faith in modernism as a whole, I would argue - and look just where the world is now!

This could be a start to forum members discovering for themselves the huge and variegated pallette of music in all genres of his time this amazing pioneer composed between 1897 and his death in 1951.

I think the reaction against serial music is driven by the fact that there was a time when the advocates held a lot of sway in the political arena of the Classical World. To use modern terminology, they tried to cancel more traditional forms of expression, forced younger composers to accept the new orthodoxy and hectored audiences for decades, reducing the general audience to the level of philistinism for wishing to hear more audience friendly works.
One of my teacher in religious school, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, played the Schoenberg for his classroom of bratty pre pubescent American Jewish children of the 1960s,. It was certainly my first exposure to serialism. We all hated it and mocked the hapless teacher. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized what a powerful work it is

[kernelbogey]

Having said all I have, though, I would add that I’m not that keen on Schoenberg or Dallapiccola, whereas I have a lot of time for Berg, Webern and Gerhard. The extent to which these composers used twelve-note methods is really not an issue.

[RichardB]

I think the reaction against serial music is driven by the fact that there was a time when the advocates held a lot of sway in the political arena of the Classical World. To use modern terminology, they tried to cancel more traditional forms of expression, forced younger composers to accept the new orthodoxy

Many people think that, for sure, but actual evidence is strangely elusive. When is this supposed to have been?

[smittims]

I think a lot of people were out off listening to Schoenberg and Webern by being told 'you have to study the twelve-tone method first'. I just put on a disc of Webern's Five Movements, op. 5 and was thrilled by the music.

[Bryn]

Many people think that, for sure, but actual evidence is strangely elusive. When is this supposed to have been?

Before your time, I think.

[Barbirollians]

Many people think that, for sure, but actual evidence is strangely elusive. When is this supposed to have been?

There was some argument I recall that Glock's tenure at the Proms was marked by this . Not sure what the evidence if for it though but again well before my time .

The Leinsdorf disc coupled with his Beethoven 9 -is a treaurable one.

[Serial_Apologist]

I think the reaction against serial music is driven by the fact that there was a time when the advocates held a lot of sway in the political arena of the Classical World. To use modern terminology, they tried to cancel more traditional forms of expression, forced younger composers to accept the new orthodoxy and hectored audiences for decades, reducing the general audience to the level of philistinism for wishing to hear more audience friendly works.
One of my teacher in religious school, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, played the Schoenberg for his classroom of bratty pre pubescent American Jewish children of the 1960s,. It was certainly my first exposure to serialism. We all hated it and mocked the hapless teacher. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized what a powerful work it is

There certainly was an abiding mythology promulgated in the 1960s, and not only by reactionary critics and a few composers, to the effect that serialism sought or, at any rate, by virtue of its constructive methods and principles, destroyed "traditional methods of composition". A faction at Darmstadt had proclaimed their intentions as being to start all over again since the main line of development, seen as from Bach to Schoenberg, had been contaminated by association and the implications of its most radical changes compromised by not being carried through to potential fruition. For me the issue has always been a feeling that radically innovative music challenges the attention span, and for longer than I can remember I have used that challenge as a sort-of pathway to hightened levels of consciousness without resort in the main to narcotic substances. This seems to me to be the optimal way to appreciate "quality music" - one which confirms what Gerhardt wrote about creating an authentic bond between composer and listener, and the former's responsibility to hold the latter's attention. The aim is a form of sensory engulfment that succeeds in engaging and unifying the response mechanisms, unifying our whole given human endowment, intellectual, physical, emotional. This was something many of my generation got into let's say more adventurous areas of musical production and expression than the predictability of conventional procedures habitually demarcating areas of tension and release, classical and other, permitted. There are other means of creating and then releasing tension than moving through the keys. In short it seemed and seems the case that "atonal" music allowed this more than music consisting in the main of conventional resolving gestures, with their way of "snagging" listener expectations.

[RichardB]

I think a lot of people were out off listening to Schoenberg and Webern by being told 'you have to study the twelve-tone method first'.

By whom? Where?

It seems to me (having been thinking more about this since reading Richard Steinitz's book on Ligeti recently) that accusations of "twelve-tone dogma" dominating concert-giving and academic institutions is largely concocted by those for whom the consciousness-expanding innovations of post-1945 music needed to be seen as a historical anomaly. At least 99% of the music heard in most situations by most people is straightforwardly "tonal" and also was during the "dark ages" of the supposed serial dictatorship (which is somehow contrived to include composers like Ligeti, Xenakis, Cage and the entire musique concrète movement, who were variously indifferent or antagonistic to serial methods). Personally I happen to think that systematic compositional procedures (including but not limited to serial ones) constitute one of the most far-reaching and liberating evolutions in twentieth century music - for creative musicians and audiences.

[kernelbogey]

... accusations of "twelve-tone dogma" dominating concert-giving and academic institutions is largely concocted by those for whom the consciousness-expanding innovations of post-1945 music needed to be seen as a historical anomaly.

I don't remember thinking that in 1959. I just didn't like the music.

[smittims]

'By whom? Where?'

...well, admittedly, largely by unqualified and possibly prejudiced individuals, but I do recall it being said quite widely. Buying a book on Schoenberg, I was told, 'it's all very mathematical and intellectual, isn't it?' I said 'no, it's very passionate music'. And how about this, from a Webern review in 'Music on record: A critical guide' by Peter Gammond and Burnett James (Hutchinson, 1962):

'To the general music lover the rather erratic and often seemingly unconnected spatters of notes can mean nothing without understanding the theory behind it, without a deep study of the scores...'.

Wrong, of course and discouraging.Webern was surely one of the least 'erratic' of composers.