Who Killed Classical Music?

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts
  • Serial_Apologist
    Full Member
    • Dec 2010
    • 37561

    Originally posted by ahinton View Post
    You may well do so as indeed I also do de temps en temps in other mature Webern works, but the Variations for Orchestra was the composer's penultimate, not his last, completed work and it was his Op.30, not Op. 40, his final completed work being Cantata II, Op. 31.
    Of course it was! - my laziness in not checking, I'm afraid.

    Comment

    • kea
      Full Member
      • Dec 2013
      • 749

      Originally posted by aka Calum Da Jazbo View Post
      please excuse my lazy ignorance but this thread has provoked my quietude and prompted some questions and observations [...]
      This post says pretty much everything I might have had to contribute to the discussion. Thank you.

      Comment

      • ahinton
        Full Member
        • Nov 2010
        • 16122

        Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post
        Of course it was! - my laziness in not checking, I'm afraid.
        Not a problem! But perhaps my partially tonal view of Webern is more of an issue than this, for all that I cannot help but listen to his work in the way that I do. His remarkable yet undoubtedly unSchönbergian ear for sonority and his closeness to Haydn (at least for me) alone mark him out as a very consierable figure (although when I write of his unSchönbergian ways, I'm not referring to some of his music from around 1903-05, some of which seems so uncomfortably close to Schönberg as possibly even to have influenced him)...

        Comment

        • Richard Barrett

          Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post
          I wonder if I'm alone in "hearing" minor progressions throughout Webern's ostensibly last-ever work, the Orchestral Variations
          Interesting... I really don't hear anything like that in that piece, I just had a listen to check! (But I think in general tonality is more like a foreign language I can speak, rather than being more like a mother tongue, somehow.) It strikes me as another good example of the point I was trying to make earlier about the consistency generated by constant serial permutation. Anyway I'm grateful that you mentioned it because I hadn't listened to it for years. This performance conducted by Robert Craft seems to me particularly well-shaped and colourful.

          Comment

          • ardcarp
            Late member
            • Nov 2010
            • 11102

            but do you find one in, say, the first fifteen bars of Tristan? There, F major, D minor, A minor, G major/minor all hover around as potential areas of resolution, and when F major does appear in bar seventeen, it's immediately rejected in favour of G major, and then C major and then G minor. Take away the consonant triads, displace the octaves in the chromatic lines - and you've got pre-serial "Atonality".
            Nice example Ferney, but one I first heard 45 years ago, and have passed on to others! But this is surely why Schoenberg felt the need to remove 'tonal anchors' as he himself had, up to that point, pushed the chromatic appoggiatura-laden, fast modulating post-Wagnerian musical language to its limits.

            Comment

            • Richard Barrett

              Originally posted by ferneyhoughgeliebte View Post
              it's not so much a "removal of tonal anchor points" as a replacement with other phrase and cadencial points which are a synthesis of procedures found in the works of Wagner and Brahms.
              This is an important point I think - even Webern's later music features structural turning-points that function in a similar way to tonal cadences, even if they couldn't be so described in harmonic terms. Here Varèse shows himself already in the early 1920s to be reconceiving musical structure from a more fundamental standpoint than the twelve-tone composers - another reason, returning to the thread topic, why it's silly to "blame" them for everything.

              Comment

              • Sydney Grew
                Banned
                • Mar 2007
                • 754

                . . . choosing a point of departure which . . . enables the composer to discover a music he . . . hadn't already thought of . . .
                So - good serial music is not the result of the composer's consciously applied skills and labour, but instead arises from divine intervention - rather like van Beethoven wandering through the woods seeking inspiration? It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing . . . ?




                .
                Last edited by Sydney Grew; 28-01-14, 01:58.

                Comment

                • Richard Barrett

                  Originally posted by Sydney Grew View Post
                  So - good serial music is not the result of the composer's consciously applied skills and labour, but instead arises from divine intervention
                  Woteva.

                  Comment

                  • MrGongGong
                    Full Member
                    • Nov 2010
                    • 18357

                    Originally posted by Richard Barrett View Post
                    Woteva.


                    Sid seems more confused than your namesake Sid was

                    Comment

                    • ahinton
                      Full Member
                      • Nov 2010
                      • 16122

                      Originally posted by Sydney Grew View Post
                      So - good serial music is not the result of the composer's consciously applied skills and labour, but instead arises from divine intervention - rather like van Beethoven wandering through the woods seeking inspiration?
                      ...or Sydney Grew determining to avoid seeing the wood for the trees...

                      Comment

                      • MrGongGong
                        Full Member
                        • Nov 2010
                        • 18357

                        I wonder who Sid will finally reveal himself as?

                        Comment

                        • ahinton
                          Full Member
                          • Nov 2010
                          • 16122

                          Originally posted by MrGongGong View Post
                          I wonder who Sid will finally reveal himself as?
                          Does anything in particular incline you to think that he will? Frankly, I doubt it. Anyway, his contributions to this thread reveal quite a lot about himself already, wouldn't you say?

                          Comment

                          • ahinton
                            Full Member
                            • Nov 2010
                            • 16122

                            Originally posted by MrGongGong View Post
                            I wonder who Sid will finally reveal himself as?
                            Forget my reply above; I've just thought of the answer to that question - and it's a kind of cancrizans of a Schönbergian invention; Brahms the Regressive!

                            Comment

                            • MrGongGong
                              Full Member
                              • Nov 2010
                              • 18357

                              Originally posted by ahinton View Post
                              Does anything in particular incline you to think that he will? Frnakly, I doubt it. Anyway, his contributions to this thread reveal quite a lot about himself already, wouldn't you say?
                              I do, but I do suspect that "he" is a fictional character (but that might apply to many of us ) created for amusement or even "research"?
                              I wouldn't be surprised to find "Sydney G-Rews Guide to Spectralism" appearing in the shops at some point

                              Comment

                              • ahinton
                                Full Member
                                • Nov 2010
                                • 16122

                                Originally posted by MrGongGong View Post
                                I do, but I do suspect that "he" is a fictional character (but that might apply to many of us ) created for amusement or even "research"?
                                I wouldn't be surprised to find "Sydney G-Rews Guide to Spectralism" appearing in the shops at some point
                                I think that I would be - but never mind that; it wasn't him who killed classical music, so perhaps we should move on.

                                Oh, wait abit; is that a copy of Syd Neygrew's Hespos for Dummies that I see on my shelves?...

                                Comment

                                Working...
                                X