Joseph Sowa:

>When asked where he thought where music is going, Lowell Liebermann
>responded, "I wouldn't even presume to speculate.  I think a lot of
>composers, and artists in general, have gotten themselves into trouble by
>trying to second-guess their own places in music or art history.  I think
>this is dangerous.  One must let the art follow its own course and not try
>to force it into a certain mold because of a preconception that art must
>always be 'evolving' in one particular direction or another.  The history
>must follow the art, not the other way around.  Our century has been
>obsessed with 'historical perspective' and I think it's created a lot
>of questionable art."
>
>I agree with his observation.  Opinions?

Certainly it has produced questionable criticism.  History is always
after the fact.  Before the fact, it's clairvoyance or prophecy.  That is,
you usually never really know what the grand historical trends were until
you've passed the period in question by a couple of decades.  The view that
the Twentieth Century divided into tonalists and atonalists, antithetical
to one another and with one or the other representing The Truth, is
beginning to be seen on both sides as beside the point.  Twentieth-century
tonalists and atonalists have far more in common with one another than they
do with, say, Mozart.

Donald Mitchell has a very interesting article in his Cradles of the New
on the common ancestor of both Impressionism and Atonality -- believe it
or not, Wagner.  In Wagner, key changes are so much more frequent, their
structural function is weakened.  In Beethoven, for example, a key change
usually signals a new large structural piece.  When you modulate just about
every measure or every other measure, you've got to find another signal.
The Twentieth Century has long seemed to me the search for principles of
structure, other than those based on key change.  Another way of stating
this is how to prolong cadence points in a continuously modulating
environment.  Regardless of style, modern composers have to contend with
that issue.  There have been many successful solutions, from Strauss,
Mahler, Debussy, and Sibelius to Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams, Schoenberg,
Webern, and Varese.

Steve Schwartz