I would like to thank Mimi Ezust most kindly for writing:

>It's a very silly discussion indeed that keeps going around and around
>over "what is music" ... at some point I'd rather see people sharing their
>favorite atonal compositions with me, and talking about how they came to
>enjoy them.  I'd appreciate as much specific information as possible!
>That way, perhaps my own musical life will be enriched.
>
>Let's focus on what's GREAT in music of all kinds.  Complaining about what
>we hate is too simple and easy, and far too general to take seriously as
>criticism.

This is beginning to sound like an oasis of sanity in a thread which is
starting to go berserk.

It made me realise above all that we are allowing ourselves to be dragged
into an overblown grizzly ideological battleground where we are destined
to remain as dogmatic about our prejudices than ever before.  Especially
worthless is when we start to spit venomous hatred towards various
composer.  Nothing could be more useless.  We are all here because we
want to enrich our lives with an ever deeper understanding of music, but
spitting venom does nothing to help this cause.  Similarly arguing about
the definition of music is equally futile.  Yes, so let's concentrate on
what's great and what's really wonderful about music.  That's what I had
started to do when I first posted on this thread and got dragged into an
ideological fight by Jocelyn Wang.  So lets put ideology away for the
moment and talk about the things we love so much about the sort of music
lumped together crudely as "atonal music".  Let us make music and not war.

It is clearly very important to discuss particular works rather than talk
in the abstract.  In doing so I am aware that in sharing a personal love
for certain works I leave myself wide open to callous and cynical people
who will tell me I am just imaging my emotional identification with
something "repulsive" (Jocelyn Wang's term).  I will start with a few
works but I am not going to produce some long list just to show that
there are more than three very modern compositions which I really love.

I will start once again with Berg's Lulu suite.  My recommended recording
is from Simon Rattle on EMI, 1989.  It is coupled with communicative
performances of Schoenberg's 5 Orchestral Pieces and Webern's 6 Orchestral
Pieces.  It is a superb introduction to the Second Viennese School.  There
is an attractive lyricism here which makes the work instantly appealing.
Many will be surprised at how listenable the music is.  From the first
note we find ourselves in a sleazy 1920's world of cabaret shows (complete
with saxophones in the score), with a dark, cynical atmosphere straight
out a painting from Grotz.  The work climaxes with the lesbian countess'
Liebestod.  She dies singing her eternal love for Lulu who lies dead after
a Jack the Ripper murder climaxed by an cataclysmic musical death scream.
Those who like the suite should listen to the complete recording by Boulez.

"I feel the air of another planet".  With these words by Stefan George
come from his poem "Entrueckung" (Rapture), Schoenberg achieves his final
transcendence of tonality.  As the soprano enters in the third movement of
Schoenberg's 2nd String Quartet I always get a shudder down my back.  There
is heartfelt emotional intensity barely veiled by the icy coolness of an
otherworldly radiance.  Adorno thought that this work was something he:

   may never have surpassed, the ascent to the breakthrough, above all
   in the finale with its message from 'another planet' has a power and
   authority which is equalled only by Mahler.

Adorno when on to also wrote (again quoted from Sacred Fragments:
Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron):

   In the quartet in F-sharp minor the individual, bereft of hope, breaks
   down and without any transition, the imago of his ecstasy answers
   him.

This is a masterpiece of transcendent beauty. Although provisionally in
F-sharp minor Schoenberg writes:

   Yet the overwhelming multitude of dissonances cannot be counterbalanced
   any longer by occasional returns to such tonal triads as represent
   a key.

This was the beginning of the end for tonality as an organising principle.

Next I would like to talk about Webern's Six Orchestral Pieces.  This is a
so-called "free atonal" composition.  It is perhaps the best introduction
to his musical language.  I must confess to having a real soft spot for it.
Although short, after listening to the whole thing it feels like you have
listened to a Bruckner Symphony.  I recommend Karajan in this work.
Boulez's recording of the earlier orchestration is also very good,
especially in the wonderful new transfer available on the recent boxed
set from DG.

This is a dark, Angst ridden work, punctuated by echoes of Mahlerian hammer
blows of fate.  Webern wrote that this music was a response to the death of
his mother.  It is a heartbreakingly emotionally intense work.When people
have stopped complaining that Webern is cold and intellectual they will one
day complain equally bitterly of his emotional excesses.  Yet so much of
what is found here typifies his musical 'language'.  The extraordinary
brevity of the third is matched by its heartbreaking poetic tenderness.
Someone once said of Webern:  "sagt wenig, sagt alles" (says little, but
says everything).  The central funeral march is the emotional core of the
work.  Hushed plaintiff brooding gives way to a climax of devastating
emotional power, with the relentless hammering of Mahlerian blows of
fate driving the piece on to its inexorable climax.  The fifth piece
demonstrates Webern's characteristic use of isolated sustained notes/chords
for intense expressive effect - much like the sostenuto on the word "Gott"
in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth, and not unlike the effect of a pedal
point.  This is something frequently copied by the post-war avant garde but
rarely found in Schoenberg or Berg.  The effect here is one of intense
meditation.

I will conclude with a work by Boulez.  I will start with Rituel in
Memoriam Bruno Maderna.  This is a very easy work to come to grips with in
many ways.  It has a forms which like Ravel's Bolero grows out of something
very simple which is allowed to grow and expand.  The work is an expression
of Death as something utterly primeval, a fundamental human experience.
The structuralist influence apparent in Boulez as a thinker on the
'language' of music is apparent in another way.  The work was written in
the heyday of social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and his comparative
structural analyses of so-called 'modern' and 'primitive' societies.  He
concluded that there was no difference.  Any claim to being more 'modern'
or advance was to him no different to the claim seen amongst tribes people
that they are THE people and that people down the river are backward.  In
this atmosphere Boulez wrote his Rituel.  It is a ritual, not a Rite in the
sense of 'un sacre', or a funeral march as for Siegfried or an abstract
Beethovian hero.  It is a ritual enactment of a ceremony of death, and
farewell to a friend and colleague.  It is something utterly primordial,
utterly fundamental to human experience.  It is Boulez the structural
equivalent of the shaman who enters into a trance like state of communion
with the ancestors to usher the spirit of the dead to the netherworld.
The rhythmic structure of the work is complex.  But it is not dance, in
the same way that "Le Sacre" is dance.  The rhythms are those of a complex
ritual, where even the timpani at the work's climax, reveal only the peak
intensity of this ritualistic event.  Its significance is ceremonial.  I
am reminded of Bruckner's farewell to Wagner:  "sehr feierlich" are his
markings in the slow movement of the 7th symphony.  This can mean "very
solemn" but the literal meaning of the word "feierlich" is "ceremonious".
But Rituel is not just a ceremony.  It is a ritual in the most primordial
sense.

At it's climax the impact of the work is enormous.  To hear Boulez
conduct the work on his Sony recording is to hear him take the role not
of mere conductor but that of shaman.  The work grows/develops in the most
systematic way, slowly but surely driving us to its inexorable emotional
climax.  The work has a stark simplicity which belies the complexities of
the work.  I wholeheartedly recommend this work for people to try.  It is
a great place to start with Boulez.  I must say I feel the same way as
Simon Rattle does, who once said on radio that there are few works by
Boulez he doesn't really love.

There are so many pantonal compositions which really are inspirational but
these should be a wonderful introduction to a brave new sound world for
those adventerous of spirit.

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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