Who Killed Classical Music?

[Serial_Apologist]

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.

[kea]

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.

[ahinton]

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)...

[Richard Barrett]

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.

[ardcarp]

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.

[Richard Barrett]

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.

[Sydney Grew]

. . . 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 . . . ?




.

[Richard Barrett]

So - good serial music is not the result of the composer's consciously applied skills and labour, but instead arises from divine intervention

Woteva.

[MrGongGong]

Woteva.

Sid seems more confused than your namesake Sid was

[ahinton]

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...

[MrGongGong]

I wonder who Sid will finally reveal himself as?

[ahinton]

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?

[ahinton]

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!

[MrGongGong]

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

[ahinton]

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?...