I like the largo of Schoenberg's 4th quartet, what else might I like?

[Mandryka]

This beast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pn0gYaIBbo

I know someone who put it like this: Sounding gorgeous but in a modern way. Not being afraid of sonority. Wonderful, imaginative gestures. Fresh textures. Great melodic ostinatos, stimulating repetition.

[Serial_Apologist]

The first movement's quite tough on first listenings, and, as with quite a lot of the mature Schoenberg, the going gets easier with progress, which might be to do with accustoming oneself with the new idiom, or it might be that the heavy concentrated structural stuff eases up. Certainly that is true of Op 29 as well; by the time of the 4th quartet I feel the composer "inhabits" his idiom more "naturally".

[smittims]

Well, first of all, you must listen to the whole work in order, to make the best sense of the slow movement by hearing it in its correct context. Then try the third quartet which also has a very moving slow movement.

I've often thought the best way to get to like Schoenberg's music is to listen to all fifty of his opus numbers in order. That will help you to get used to the changes and innovations in his style gradually .

[Mandryka]

Well, I'm at a loss to see how anyone who enjoys Mahler's slow movements won't also enjoy that Diotima interpretation of the Schoenberg Largo. I have a recording of a concert they gave in Paris with this quartet which is faster slightly, and may be even more successful in fact. PM me if you want it.

[Mandryka]

Listening to Roger Sessions' quintet. It is unbelievably like the Schoenberg quartet - I'm not saying it's plagiarism but the thought crossed my mind certainly!

https://open.spotify.com/track/4AHQRNASLQ5PbHZAlxzKrU

[Serial_Apologist]

Well, first of all, you must listen to the whole work in order, to make the best sense of the slow movement by hearing it in its correct context. Then try the third quartet which also has a very moving slow movement.

I've often thought the best way to get to like Schoenberg's music is to listen to all fifty of his opus numbers in order. That will help you to get used to the changes and innovations in his style gradually .

A picture exhibitions in Aix while on a school exchange, in which Picasso paintings were displayed chronologically, was probably as much responsible for my coming to appreciate composers by working right through their oeuvre as anything. Even in the 60s one did not get access to music in that way unless one was very fortunate, or had books describing changes from work to work, as I managed to obtain. Eventually I was able to build up a large enough collection of recordings on LP, CD, or from broadcasts, to end up with a pretty representative cross-section of 20th century music of all styles, periods and nationalities. I can only say it has given me untold pleasure and fulfilment and I wouldn't be without it; I've no idea how today's younger generations will be able to acquire this sort of collection, or the knowledge where to search.

[Serial_Apologist]

Listening to Roger Sessions' quintet. It is unbelievably like the Schoenberg quartet - I'm not saying it's plagiarism but the thought crossed my mind certainly!

https://open.spotify.com/track/4AHQRNASLQ5PbHZAlxzKrU

There weren't that many who practised the "Schoenberg aesthetic" - possibly because later 12-tone method adopting composers tended to become Berg or Webern adherents. Sessions was one, over in the States, and although this is not often mentioned it is quite clear from listening to most of his music from the mid-1930s on. Those who did tended to follow from the "Neo-Classical" works of the 1920s such as the Op 25 Suite and the Variations Op 31 as they seemed to offer fresh ways of conceiving melodies and organic development even for those with no original foothold in the Expressionist aesthetic - Dallapiccola and Petrassi being two cases in point, (why do we never hear the music of either of these two undoubted masters??). Two figures in Schoenberg's immediate circle who were closest in my view were Hanns Eisler (I would argue even in much of his American tonal output) and Skalkottas. I sometimes even feel that Skalkottas composed all the music Schoenberg never got around to writing! In Britain only Alexander Goehr came close to Schoenberg in method and spirit; others either following Elisabeth Lutyens down a Webernian path or, in the case of Richard Rodney Bennett, Hugh Wood and David Blake, closer to Berg.

[Mandryka]

There weren't that many who practised the "Schoenberg aesthetic" - possibly because later 12-tone method adopting composers tended to become Berg or Webern adherents. Sessions was one, over in the States, and although this is not often mentioned it is quite clear from listening to most of his music from the mid-1930s on. Those who did tended to follow from the "Neo-Classical" works of the 1920s such as the Op 25 Suite and the Variations Op 31 as they seemed to offer fresh ways of conceiving melodies and organic development even for those with no original foothold in the Expressionist aesthetic - Dallapiccola and Petrassi being two cases in point, (why do we never hear the music of either of these two undoubted masters??). Two figures in Schoenberg's immediate circle who were closest in my view were Hanns Eisler (I would argue even in much of his American tonal output) and Skalkottas. I sometimes even feel that Skalkottas composed all the music Schoenberg never got around to writing! In Britain only Alexander Goehr came close to Schoenberg in method and spirit; others either following Elisabeth Lutyens down a Webernian path or, in the case of Richard Rodney Bennett, Hugh Wood and David Blake, closer to Berg.

Yes I feel the same about some of the Skalkottas I've heard, the early quartets.

[Mandryka]

A picture exhibitions in Aix while on a school exchange, in which Picasso paintings were displayed chronologically, was probably as much responsible for my coming to appreciate composers by working right through their oeuvre as anything. .

I remember a Mondrian exhibition -- early realistic pictures of an apple tree, then cubist pictures of the same apple tree, then more geometric pictures of the tree and finally the sort of non-figurative pictures we all know and love.

[Mandryka]

I'm enjoying Krenek's 6th quartet.

It sounds very Schoenbergian to me.

Tremendous final fugue.

[Serial_Apologist]

I'm enjoying Krenek's 6th quartet.

It sounds very Schoenbergian to me.

Tremendous final fugue.

Yes I should have added Krenek to my list - he was one of the few Schoenbergians to take a later interest in electronics; Gerhard (if he can really be called a Schoenbergian!) was another. I was trying to remember Krenek's name!

[smittims]

I'd certainly call Roberto Gerhard a Schoenbergian. he was a personal friend (and there weren't many of those) and published a most interesting analysis of the op. 31 Variations.

[Serial_Apologist]

I'd certainly call Roberto Gerhard a Schoenbergian. he was a personal friend (and there weren't many of those) and published a most interesting analysis of the op. 31 Variations.

How fortunate you are to have known him! Way back when I was just starting to get into modern music I bought a book titled "Twentieth Century Music - a Symposium", editor Rollo Myers, published 1960 by John Calder. Included among essays by André Hodeir, Norman Del Mar, Anthony Milner, Humphrey Searle and Maurice Ohana is one by Gerhard titled "The Composer and his Audience" in which he beautifully sets out the deep listening in the now moment principle to be espoused by gurus for the trippie hippie generation six years further down the road. It was just a shame, if predictable one, that their idea would result in the coming of the highly profitable New Age Music phenomenon, all sugar candy and not much in the way of spice, even, in those western appropriations of Eastern spiritualities. I always felt that the new more abstract musical soundscapes (aha!) that ultimately emerged from atonality and serialism were far more suited to in-depth consciousness transformation in the modern age (as opposed to recreations of Gregorian chant and listening to Tallis's Spem in Alium on a loop while smoking weed) than Eno and Fripp along with the Krautrock and Ambient chill-out stuff that emerged from them, let alone the sensory overloaded Techno and subsequent genres looking to outdo Scriabin. And not a word about drugs! Here's one of many morsels of wisdom in the article:

"Attention - deep, sustained, undeviating - is in itself an experience of a very high order. There seems to be a direct relation between the quality of a work of art and the quality of the attention it elicits in the perceiver. We know that it is the works which have held out attention most strongly, that we can bear to experience most often. The work to which I can listen time and again with ever renewed freshness of approach and a seemingly inexhaustible sense of discovery, is also the work which seems to prove my capacity for inexhaustible attention. This is indeed a happy match, and not a little mysterious. I certainly do not profess to know what it takes to achieve this rare captivation. Yet I have often thought that, when it does occur, it is as if the listener in his turn has been able to achieve a degree of detachment in the act of perception matching that of the composer in the act of origination. The listener's mind is emptied of all the petty preoccupations of the day; on exceptional occasions it may even succeed in temporarily suspending that feeling of separateness which we call our individuality. Detachment in the composer, matched by detachment in the listener, thus results paradoxically in the strongest bond between the two.

"The social side of man has been defined as that part of the person which is entirely 'made up of other people', in other words, of borrowed patterns of behaviour, mostly unconsciously imitative. The feeling of being different - an oppressive feeling at most times - is perhaps what drove some people to become artists. Yet in that stage of perfect detachment which a great work of art can induce, both originator and perceiver seem, on the contrary, to find access to that part of ourselves where we are all essentially the same, but where the common ground lies far beyond the plane of superficial social conformity. I believe that this is one of the major aims of every true work of art".

[smittims]

... yes, indeed. Wise words there, and how sad that so few today in positions of influence (no hiding the fact that I mean Radio 3 management and the BBC generally) show no interest in encouraging this approach.

That was an excellent series. I remember especially Humphrey Searle's chapter on Constant Lambert, whom he had known personally.