Mimi Ezust:

> One correction: Someone mentioned Berg's violin concerto as either atonal
> or serial...  forgive my vagueness.  I've been reading on the run.

I was that someone.

>This piece is neither.

Mimi's description of this wonderful music is eloquent and accurate-except-
it was in fact written as twelve tone music.  The tone row is shown in
the Wikepedia article on this work.  But it is a tone row which flirts
with onality and merges - with its last four notes, with the Bach chorale
which is quoted in the work.  But the work is as Mimi points out, rich
with tonality.  Berg himself claimed that he did not purposel;y quote
the Bach- it arose naturally from the tone row.  The American composer
George Perle, a Berg scholar, had a fanciful tale to tell- that Bach
wrote the chorale so that it would be available to Berg two and a half
centuries later.

Bernard Chasan

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