Steve Schwartz wrote about Bruno-Heinz Jaja's Punkt-kontrapunkt:

>A notorious piece.  Not many people realize that the hoax was perpetrated
>by two ardent Schoenbergians, whose immediate point was that modern music
>was going to hell because so few people understood Schoenberg.  Little did
>they know that the hoax would be used against Schoenberg himself.

A bit of special pleading, i think.

Jaja was, of course, Humphrey Searle, who was an enthusiastic
Schoenbergian; but his on-stage Teutonic muiscologicist collaborateur
was Gerard Hoffnung, a supporter of new music of all stripes (not merely
the tone-rowed).

As a music composition (assuming that this statement makes any kind of
sense for a piece written under a comic pseudonym for a Hoffnung Festival),
Punkt-Kontrapunkt is a rather pleasing piece of aphoristic serialism after
von Webern (one of Searle's teachers); but the musicological analysis (by
Searle & Hoffnung, who also perform the parts during the Hoffnung concert)
which comically drowns the score declares an open season on all the sacred
cows of the Schoenberg school ("Music was invented when Arnold Schoenberg
created the tone row", is one of the more famous lines of attack).  The
total work (ie; piece + commentary) is therefore a skewering of the
pretensions of the Schoenberg school even more than it is a complaint
that noone bothers to see through these pretensions; & as such, this fifth
columnist attack is made more deadly by the fact that it came from the
sympathetic rather than the unsympathetic.

(Was pleased to see in the same MCML digest that Brave New Works are
performing two of Humphrey's Cat Pieces...  i wonder how long it will
take for two seriously muiscological types to take on Punkt-Kontrapunkt
as well?)

Live in peace
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