Today's N. Y. Times has a large section on music (explicitly *not*
classified into classical/jazz/pop/etc.) in its Arts & Leisure section
which list members would be very much interested in. Hopefully the paper's
web site has most if not all of the articles.
The general theme, as the title suggests, is that contemporary music is in
a stage of rapid change in which genre divisions are blurring and new music
and new ways of presenting it are seeking new audiences. I can't give an
overview of the whole section here, but I expect to be making comments on
various of the articles in the near future, as I digest them.
For now, I would like to refer to one, by the Oregon composer David Schiff,
"A New Measure for Heroes in Music's Valhalla." He discusses the way in
which a number of the classical great composers are being re-valued; for
each one, he gives a capsule "old values/new values" summary and elaborates
on it in a few paragraphs. I will give the summaries for each composer,
and the whole discussion of Schoenberg, since that name has been bandied
about here recently.
"Richard Strauss Old values: Traitor to the cause. New values:
Gender researcher, exhibitionist and cross-dresser." (Note: Schiff
doesn't mean "exhibitionist and cross-dresser" literally, of course--he
is referring to his claim that "More than any other male composer,
Strauss celebrated the varied erotic feelings of women. I like to
think that as a creative personality, he switched genders midway
through his career, going from masculine tone poet to feminine opera
maker.")
"The Tunesmiths (Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Cole
Porter, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen) Old values: Tinsel makers
unless they went classical. New values: The real Les Six.
"Louis Armstrong Old values: A great trumpet player and entertainer;
not a classical giant. New values: The man who reunited composition and
performance.
"Dmitri Shostakovich Old values: A conservative; maybe a bad guy,
maybe a good guy. New values: The J. S. Bach of the 20th century.
"Igor Stravinsky Old values: Great Russian, pretty good rootless
cosmopolitan. New values: Mr. Cool
"Arnold Schoenberg Old values: Terminator of tonality, emancipator
of dissonance, creator of the 12-tone method, the composer from hell.
New values: Action painter
"Serialism is dead, and Schoenberg should be the god that failed.
Performances of the music, like the recent 'Moses und Aron' at the
Metropolitan Opera, seem to strain the critical thesaurus for grudging
praise to the breaking point. Why didn't the critics just come out
and say they hated every minute? No one I read saw the unique quality
that keeps the music maddeningly alive: Schoenberg's music is really
tolerable only when it is extraordinary. Only when you get to the
impassioned violin line at the very end of 'Moses und Aron' do you
suddenly understand why you have been so bored by the hollow technical
bravura of the previous two hours.
"When Schoenberg was inspired, he could turn out a half-hour opera
in a couple of weeks. He was a volcano that erupted erratically and
incandescently; his music either singes your eyelashes or just lies
there, dormant. The writer of this century Schoenberg most resembles
is his fellow autodidact D. H. Lawrence, who was similarly pedantic
and preachy when uninspired, but unmatchable when the lightning
actually struck.
"Schoenberg's best music, for all his talk about the great German
tradition, is musical action painting, the notes flung on the page
white-hot. Schoenberg admitted as much when he wrote that he often
set texts to music as he read them, without knowing how they would
end. But the best single example of a Schoenberg thunderbolt is a
brief piano piece (Op. 23, No. 2). The Schoenberg who lives on is
the composer who could take such a flying leap and leave his parachute
at home."
The rest of Schiff's article is as perceptive and thought-provoking as this
excerpt, and the other articles are generally as good as his.
Jon Johanning // [log in to unmask]
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