All posts tagged Alex Ross

The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross (2007) – the American chapters

Alex Ross’s the Rest is Noise is by far the most comprehensive and accessible introduction to the classical music of the long difficult twentieth century that I know of.

Born in 1968, Alex Ross studied classical composition, but was also a rock DJ at Harvard. He was just 28 when he was appointed classical music critic for New Yorker magazine, combining formidable technical and historical knowledge with a wonderfully clear and expressive prose style. He has a modern, unstuffy, relaxed approach to music of all sorts and sounds.

Having recently visited an exhibition of art from 1930s America and read the book of the exhibition, I decided to reread the relevant chapters of Ross’s masterwork to shed light on the musical highlights of the period. In the event this also requires reading one of the earlier chapters in the book, the one which describes the beginnings of 20th century American music.

Chapter 4 – Invisible men: American composers from Ives to Ellington

African American music

Slavery. Blacks. African Americans. The chapter opens by describing the way prescient critics and composers grasped that the one truly new and different element in American music was the black African element. It’s amazing to learn that when the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák went to New York in 1892 to teach at the new National Conservatory, he met a black composer, Harry T. Burleigh, who introduced him to African American spirituals, prompting the European master to write an article on ‘the Real Value of Negro Melodies’ in 1893 and predict that:

the future music of this country must be founded upon  what are called the negro melodies.

The early part of the chapter lists black composers who struggled to reconcile the European tradition with their background, and coming up against prejudice, racism, the difficulty of getting a full classical training and, if they did, of writing in a foreign idiom and getting performed. Ragtime classic Scott Joplin wrote an opera which was never performed. Harry Lawrence freeman founded the Negro Grand Opera Company and wrote two tetralogies of operas in the Wagner tradition, but which were never performed. Maurice Arnold Strohotte who Dvořák thought the most gifted of his pupils had a piece titled American Plantation Dances performed at the National Conservatory in 1894, but then couldn’t get any subsequent works performed and languished in obscurity. Will Marion Cook managed to get into one of the few colleges which accepted blacks and became a world class violinist, moving to Germany where – surprisingly – he was respected and taken seriously. Back in America he found his career blocked, began work on a classical adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but never completed it, and found himself driven to orchestrating and directing blackface musical revues, and then a bandleader founding the New York Syncopated Review, and hiring the young genius clarinettist Sidney Bechet as star soloist.

Cook’s career shows how the exclusion of black ‘serious’ composers from the mainstream pushed them again and again towards music halls, revues, popular music – and indirectly fuelled the creation of jazz. Once this had crystallised as a form, a completely new style of music, towards the end of the Great War, there was an explosion of long-suppressed talent. The Russian pianist, composer and conductor Anton Rubinstein had predicted, back in 1893, that within 25 years Negro musicians would form ‘a new musical school’.

Neither he nor Dvořák nor many of the wannabe black classical composers could have anticipated just how revolutionary the advent of jazz would be. As Ross puts it, with characteristic eloquence:

The characteristic devices of African-American musicking – the bending and breaking of diatonic scales, the distortion of instrumental timbre, the layering of rhythms, the blurring of the distinction between verbal and nonverbal sound – opened new dimensions in musical space, a realm beyond the written notes. (p.122)

Just reeling off the names of some of the masters of jazz is dizzying – Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet, Fletcher Henderson, Bix Beiderbecke, Paul Whiteman. As is the list of Broadway masters who came to fame in the 1920s – Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rogers, Cole Porter, George Gershwin. They invented rhythms, styles, timings, structures, tones and timbres, and wrote thousands of compositions which changed the nature of music all round the world.

Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Histories of modern American classical music generally begin with Ives. The son of a traditional marching bandmaster in New England, he grew up surrounded by the music of brass bands and church music but, after a successful university education, decided to work for an insurance company, composing in the evenings and weekends completely revolutionary works which experimented with novel musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements and quarter tones. An immediate flavour is given when you learn that Three Places in New England requires the orchestra to play orchestrated versions of two popular Victorian songs at the same time. That said, compared with most of what follows, a lot of Ives still sounds reassuringly familiar.

Edgar Varèse (1883 – 1965)

Whereas Ives was American through and through and incorporated snatches of hymn tunes, popular songs and classical references in works still titled Violin concerto and so on, Varèse was French and determinedly avant-garde. He travelled to New York during the Great War and pioneering a highly experimental sound, latterly involving tape recordings, which earned him the sobriquet ‘the father of electronic music’.

Coming from the world of Dada and cubism, Varèse was keen to incorporate non-musical sounds in a futurist attempt to capture ‘the sound of the city’ – look out for the fire siren in Amériques. His key works are Amériques (1918–1921), Offrandes (1921), Hyperprism (1922–1923), Octandre (1923), Intégrales (1924–1925), Arcana (1925–1927), Ionisation (1929–1931), Ecuatorial (1932–1934), Density 21.5 (1936), Dance for Burgess (1949), Déserts (1950–1954) Poème électronique (1957–1958).

Varèse broke down language and form into a stream of sensations, but he offered few compensating spells of lyricism. His jagged thematic gestures, battering pulses, and brightly screaming chords have no emotional cords tied to them, no history, no future. (p.137)

I like the YouTube poster who describes Amériques as like The Rite of Spring on crack.

George Antheil (1900 – 1959)

Antheil was born American, to German immigrant parents, who went to Paris determined to be the most avant of the garde, wowed modernist writers with his Dadaist/Futurist ideas, caused a riot at one of his premiers in the approved avant-garde style and brought back to New York his notorious Ballet Mécanique. This was originally intended to accompany an experimental film by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy with cinematography by Man Ray and which you can see on YouTube. To the kind of fire siren sounds Varèse pioneered Antheil added the use of several airplane propellers onstage. Sadly these tended to blow the audience’s programmes around and wreck ladies’ hairdos. The critics were underwhelmed at his ‘bad boy’ antics, and his reputation went into decline. After a spell in decadent Berlin writing for the stage, by the 1930s he was back in the States, writing film scores in Hollywood. Although it’s loud with four pianos and plenty of percussion, it’s striking how prominent the three xylophones manage to be. Xylophones suddenly appear in modernist music and have never gone away.

The Wikipedia article has a musical analysis of Ballet Mécanique.

Carl Ruggles (1876 – 1971)

A difficult, obstreperous, loudly racist and self-taught composer, Ruggles devised his own form of atonal counterpoint, on a non-serial technique of avoiding repeating a pitch class until a generally fixed number such as eight pitch classes intervened. He wrote painstakingly slowly so his output is relatively small. His longest and best-known work is Sun-Treader (1926–31) for large orchestra, a weighty 16 minutes long. As Ross sums him up:

If Varèse is like early Stravinsky with the folk motifs removed, Ruggles is like Ives without the tunes. (p.138)

Henry Cowell (1897 – 1965)

Cowell was another  highly experimental; American composer. He was the centre of a circle which included Ruggles, Dane Rudhyar, Leo Ornstein, John Becker, Colin McPhee, Varèse and Ruth Crawford. In the 1920s he founded new music magazines and organisations, published much new music, and reached out to incorporate South American composers such as Villa-Lobos. Among his many students were George Gershwin, Lou Harrison and John Cage.

George Gershwin (1898 – 1937)

The most glaring thing about Gershwin is how tragically young he died, aged 38 of a brain tumour. How much he had accomplished by then! A host of timeless songs, a pack of shows and revues, and then some immortal concert hall – Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928) as well as the opera Porgy and Bess (1935). He grew up in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family on the lower East Side of Manhattan, was intrigued by the music-making of some relatives, wangled piano lessons, got a job very young in Tin Pan Alley while the Great War was still on, churning out popular tunes and songs incorporating the latest sounds i.e. the arrival of jazz from the great mash-up of syncopated sounds which were in the air. His biggest money-spinner was the early song Swanee which Al Jolson heard him perform at a party and decided to make part of his black-face act.

As success followed success Gershwin took to the party high life of New York like an elegant swan. And beneath the stylish surface there was an enquiring mind, always questing to improve his musical knowledge. He continued to take musical lessons throughout his life and made several trips to Europe where he sought out the masters. He was particularly impressed by the serialist composer Alban Berg in Vienna. In Paris he studied with Maurice Ravel, who ended their lessons, supposedly by telling him, ‘Why be a second rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?’

Many commentators then and now have noticed how many of the popular ‘composers’ of 20s and 30s America were Jews – Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rogers, Cole Porter, George Gershwin – and how thoroughly they co-opted and expressed the African American idiom. This allowed a field day to anti-Semites like some of the Regionalists and ruralists. Scholars have pointed to the similiarities, both were ‘outsider’ groups liable to harsh discrimination. In our own censorious judgmental times, how would they have avoided the block accusation of ‘cultural appropriation’?

Ross is more relaxed and points to the notion of the Melting Pot – New York in particular was a massive mash-up of hundreds of influences, everyone – writers, poets, painters, composers, singers, comedians – was stealing from, remixing and contributing to a mass explosion of creativity. Also, as I read in a history of jazz decades ago, it is commonplace to say that jazz – and the vast ocean of sounds which come out of it, rock’n’roll, pop and the rest of it – is entirely due to African rhythms, syncopations and the blurring of voices and timbres Ross describes. But this history pointed out another truth so obvious nobody sees it – there isn’t a single African instrument anywhere in a jazz band. All of the instruments were invented by white Europeans as was the system of music notation used by all the big bands. Seen from this point of view, African American music ‘appropriated’ 500 years of European tradition – and gave it a good shake from which it’s never recovered.

Duke Ellington (1899-1974)

One of the prime shakers was Duke Ellington, the jazz big band leader who broadened its style and appeal into a large band capable of projecting a well-organised, full sound while still giving space to many of the greatest soloists of the day. With Ellington jazz moved out of low dives and bars and into the swellest of must-see nightclubs. His impeccable personal taste and style, his good manners and slyly intelligent way with reporters and interviewers made him a star, as did a steady stream of jazz standards. From the 1930s to the 1970s his band undertook wide-ranging tours of Europe and Latin America, helping to make him a household name around the world.

Chapter 8 – Music for All: Music in FDR’s America

A host of things led to decisive changes as the 1920s turned into the 1930s.

1. The Depression wrecked the country, destroying middle class savings and crushing the rural population. Somehow, eerily, there continued to be a market, in fact the market grew, for shiny escapist Hollywood fantasies of the high life, starring a new generation of movie stars Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Jean Harlow. As the country got poorer the Hollywood fantasies got shinier, the stars more glamorous.

2. Talkies And now they were in talking pictures. Sound completely transformed movies, in the obvious respect that you could hear the movie idols speak, but also because they could now carry extended soundtracks. Music. Short songs, extended show pieces or just background music. This music had to be accessible and comprehensible immediately. No place here for modernist experimentation – Varese, Ives, Ruggles, Virgil Thompson – no thank you. Opportunities opened for thousands of hack composers to mash up all the sounds they heard around them, jazz, swing, along with any useful bits of classical music, with a few geniuses standing above the crowd, most famously Erich Korngold (1897-1957), a child prodigy who produced the scores for many of Errol Flynn’s swashbucklers in the 30s, and Bernard Hermann (1911-65) who kicked off his career spectacularly scoring Citizen Kane (1941) before going on to score a host of famous movies, including a clutch of Hitchcocks, most famously the shower scene of Psycho (1960). Both the children of Jewish immigrants.

3. Politics Stalin’s Communist International issued the call for a Popular Front to be formed against the fascist powers at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 but the whole of the 30s are sometimes seen as the Popular Front decade, when working men and women, some politicians, as well as the intelligentsia all became politicised, all asked themselves how such poverty and misery could come to the greatest country on earth and, not irrationally, concluded there was something very wrong with the system. More than one composer decided to reject the intellectual allure of modernism – indelibly associated with ‘abroad’, with the big city specially New York – and realised it was their ‘duty’ to write about their own country, about its sufferings, in music which would be understandable to all.

4. The Exodus Also Europe came to America. The advent to power of Hitler in 1933 drove a wave of European emigrants – Jews or socialists and communists, or just people the Nazis described as ‘degenerates’ – to flee to the Land of the Free. And so half the great composers of the day landed up in America – Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Rachmaninov, Weill, Milhaud, Hindemith, Krenek, Eisler and many others. As Ross puts it, entire communities from Paris or Berlin settled en masse in New York or the Hollywood Hills (p.260). they were all welcomed into the bosom of Roosevelt’s New Deal America although, arguably, in pampered America none of them produced work of the intensity which brought them to fame in troubled Europe. But it had another impact: in the 1920s artists and composers went on pilgrimage to Europe to sit at the feet of the masters and bring their discoveries back to breathless audiences. But now the masters were here, living among us and regularly putting on concerts. The special role of the artist as privileged messenger from the other world evaporated. They had to find another role.

5. The Federal Music Project was set up as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1935. It created employment for a small army musicians, conductors and composers and led to the thousands of concerts, music classes, the establishment of a Composers Forum Laboratory, as well as scores of music festivals and the creation of 34 new orchestras! An estimated 95 million Americans attended presentations by one or other FMP body. A huge new audience was created for a type of accessible culture which increasingly came to be defined as ‘middle-brow’ (p.278).

6. Radio and records These new regional orchestras were able to reach beyond concert halls into the homes of many more people as radio stations were set up across America and mass production made radios available to even the poorest families (like television a generation later). Music (as well as news, drama, features and so on) now reached far beyond the big cities. Radio made stars of some of the big name conductors, namely Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini, whose regular radio broadcasts brought Beethoven and Brahms to huge numbers of new listeners. Simultaneously the plastic discs, 78 rpm records and then long players, were a whole new medium which could bring recordings of all sorts of music into people’s homes to be played again and again. A massive revolutionary switch from live to recorded music began to sweep the country in this decade.

How as the American composer, struggling to find a voice and a role, to respond to the clamour and confusion of this new world?

Aaron Copland (1900 – 1990)

Copland was another New York Jew who went to Europe to study music and composition for three years, returned and got only small audiences for his advanced pieces until, swayed by the changing social scene around him, and participating in communist meetings and agitation, he realised he needed to devote his talents to the common man, making his music as accessible, as uplifting, as optimistic as possible. His breakthrough came after a visit to Mexico (which often helps American writers, poets, composers, painters see their own country in a new light) and the syncopations of the Spanish tradition helped him escape from both the prison house of modernism but also the sounds of jazz and Broadway which dominated his native New York.

The result was the complex syncopations of El Salón México (1936) and there quickly followed the tide of his most popular works, which used big bold motifs, lots of brass and grandiose percussion, clear harmonies and slow-moving, stately themes which somehow convey the sense of space and openness – Billy the Kid (1938), Quiet City (1940), Our Town (1940), Fanfare for the Common Man (1942), Lincoln Portrait (1942), Rodeo (1942), Appalachian Spring (1944).

(Although he’s associated with soft American landscapes, if you look closely you’ll see that his most programmatic music is actually about the desert and the prairie, a distinctly non-European landscape. For me this echoes the way that Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings inspired by the deserts of New Mexico – for me – emerged as the most distinctive works in the recent exhibition of 1930s art, America after the Fall.)

Copland created a way of sounding big and brash and bold and confident, often poignant and moving, which somehow didn’t seem to owe anything to the stilted European tradition. To this day his sound lives on in the movie music of, for example, John Williams, the most successful Hollywood composer of our day. Copland is always mentioned in the company of other populist composers like:

Samuel Barber (1910-81) remembered for his haunting Adagio for strings (1936)

Roy Harris (1898 – 1979) From Wikipedia: “Johana and Roy Harris were a tour de force in American music. Their collaboration has been compared to that of Robert and Clara Schumann. The Harrises organized concerts, adjudicated at festivals, and in 1959 founded the International String Congress. They promoted American folksong by including folksongs in their concerts and broadcasts.” Harris wrote 18 symphonies in an accessible style and on grand patriotic subjects – Gettysburg Address, West Point, Abraham Lincoln. This passage from Ross gives a good sense of his easy confident often amused style:

The work that won Harris nationwide attention was his Third Symphony of 1938 – an all-American hymn and dance for orchestra in which strings declaim orations in broad, open-ended lines, brass chant and whoop like cowboys in the galleries, and timpani stamp out strong beats in the middle of the bar. Such a big-shouldered sound met everyone’s expectations of what a true-blue American symphony should be. (p.280).

Swing

To most of us the period was dominated by the form of jazz known as swing and the big band jazz of Duke Ellington (formed his band 1923) and Count Basie (formed his big band in 1935) alongside white bandleaders like Ted Lewis (1919), Paul Whiteman (1920) the rather tamer offerings of white band-leaders like Tommy Dorsey (1935), Benny Goodman and latterly Glenn Miller. It was an August 1935 concert at the Palomar Ballroom by Benny Goodman which is sometimes hailed as the start of ‘the Swing Era’ and the band’s ‘s confident smooth big band sound earned Goodman the moniker ‘the King of Swing’, a status when his band went on to play the prestigious Carnegie Hall in new York, previously the domain of the most high-toned classical concerts, and took  it by storm. After twenty years of hard work by black and white musicians across the country, it felt like their music was finally accepted.

The highbrows weren’t immune. Stravinsky, the great liberator of rhythm in classical music, had incorporated sort-of jazz syncopations right from the start and now, in exile in California, wrote a Scherzo a la Russe  for Paul Whiteman’s band (1944) and an Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman’s, Woody later commenting that the Maestro hadn’t made any concessions at all to the idiom of the big band – it was Stravinsky through and through.

But Stravinsky’s adventures in America belong to the next decade, the 1940s (he came from Paris to do a U.S. concert tour in 1940 and then the Germans invaded France, so he was stuck).

Imagine you were a student in 1938, what would you listen to? Copland’s serious but consciously patriotic and possibly left-leaning orchestra panoramas of the Big Country? Would you subscribe to Henry Cowell’s New Music and followed the ongoing experiments of Varese, Ruggles and Ives? Would you dismiss all that as European rubbish and tune into Toscanini’s Saturday night broadcasts of the old classics, dominated by Beethoven and Brahms? Would you know about the efforts of the Seegers and others like them to track down and record the folk songs of rural folk before they died out? Or would save your dollars to take your best girl to go see each swing band which came through your mid-Western city, and have an impressive collection of discs by the Duke, the Count, Benny, Tommy and Woody?

Another world, other tastes, other choices.

Related links

Reviews of books about America

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by Simon on May 16, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Books, Classical music, Contemporary classical music, History
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Posted by Simon on May 16, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/05/16/the-rest-is-noise-by-alex-ross-2007-the-american-chapters/

The Rest Is Noise 12: New World Order

To the South Bank for the twelfth and final weekend of the year-long festival about 20th century classical music, The Rest Is Noise 12: New World Order, designed to bring the story up to date, covering classical music from the 1990s to the present, and beyond.

As usual each day was stuffed with lectures and workshops and chamber concerts and film screenings so that at any one point you had half a dozen items to choose from, forcing you to make some pretty hard choices. I went to see:

Saturday 7 December

10-11am Breakfast with Adams Good-humoured Irish composer John Browne spent an hour explaining the background to, and musical structure of, John Adams’ opera-oratorio El Niño. JA is, apparently, very political, into issues of social justice, as referenced in his big operas Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer (which I went to see last year), Dr Atomic etc. El Niño is an opera-oratorio on the Christmas story, using classic Bible, but also Spanish and south American, texts, many by women, favouring the woman’s point of view.

Adams has joked that he is a ‘recovering minimalist’ and, on first hearing, sounds like a more adaptable version of Steve Reich, with the same highly repetitive ostinatos. His music tends to stay on one chord for a long time, underlain by a single repetitive pulse, but with constantly changing time signatures. He has openly stated that he wants to reconnect with popular music and the street, and so his music tends to be harmonic, the chords are simple triads and, when they do change, it’s often by simply changing one note in the chord. Happy to use pop rhythms.

Brown quotes Brian Eno who described the shift to musical minimalism as a shift from Narrative to Landscape, from arcs and lines of melody, to static, repetitive sounds. This echoes what we heard a few weeks ago about Philip Glass, his study of Indian music, the hypnotic affect of endless repetition. For the now traditional audience participation in these sessions Browne got half a dozen volunteers onstage to each play a different simple motif on a xylophone and then do it together to create our very own piece of minimalist music. My son did the same at school when he was 14. It was great fun, and really explained how this type of sound is created.

At the very end he got the pianist to play a minute of Schoenberg, partly to make the point that Adams wrote a riposte to Schoenberg’s 1911 Modernist treatise, Harmonielehre, also called Hamonielehre. To be honest I preferred the space and delicacy of the Schoenberg to any of the minimalism I’ve heard over the past few weeks.

11.15-12.15 Keynote lecture: Pankaj Mishra ‘One of the world’s leading intellectuals’, Mishra was young, relaxed and phenomenally wideranging, effortlessly using examples from the economics, politics, arts and media of just about every nation on earth, but tending to focus particularly on America, Europe, India, China, Russia and Latin America. His message: The Decline of the West has been much exaggerated (isn’t it always?); the West still leads the world on countless fronts. But western arrogance at ‘winning’ the Cold War led to hubris and arrogance and delusions. Only very slowly have we realised what the invaded countries of Iraq and Afghanistan really thought of us; meanwhile hundreds of thousands died in our crusades. The End of History rhetoric after the collapse of the Soviet Union was childishly naïve. (Yup.) In the twenty years since:

  • The liberal capitalist model of economics and society which American ideologues thought had triumphed has in fact been thoroughly rejected by China, Russia and left-leaning Latin America.
  • The widespread failure of the growth model, in fact the realisation that Globalisation leads to growing inequality and to the gutting of entire cities, regions or even countries (eg Greece), has led to a widespread sense of helplessness, powerlessness and disillusion.

Globalisation doesn’t lead to Utopia; a crowded world leads to greater repression, loss of freedoms. But what, asked voices from the audience, is the alternative to Vampire Capitalism? Well, in part, the reassertion of localism and for communities to take their destinies into their own hands. Ah, but then our politicians would have to want to help us…

12.30-1.30 Best of British Concert given by the Royal College of Music’s New Perspective ensemble conducted by Timothy Lines.

  • Mark-Anthony Turnage Two memorials for solo soprano saxaphone
  • Oliver Knussen Two Organa
  • George Benjamin Viola, Viola[unrelenting to begin with, this ended with quiet plucked strings]
  • Mark-Anthony Turnage On All Fours [chaotic, with jazz rhythms sort of emerging in the middle]
  • Oliver Knussen Elegiac Arabesques
  • Simon Holt Lilith

2.15-3.15 Alex Ross The man himself, author of The Rest Is Noise, the book which inspired this festival, gave the fourth of his keynote lectures, covering from the 1990s to the present day. In fact the simple message is there’s too much. No one person can encompass all the music the human race is making. No one person can even know about all the ‘classical’ and crossover music being made in the West, where anyone with a laptop can now write a concerto. Instead Ross gave us four individuals who strike him, told a little about them and played extended clips:

In an era when every piece of music has been bought up and turned into searchable databases, maybe contemporary classical music’s very exclusion from the mainstream guarantees that it is still a place with some kind of authenticity, some kind of ‘soul’. (You certainly can’t find some of the music he and other today mentioned (or played) anywhere on the internet, not on YouTube, no on Spotify; so if impossible to find or listen to, accessible only to the tiny numbers of people who go to see it live, means ‘authentic’, lots of this stuff has it in spades.)

3.30-4.30 Listen to This Oxford professor Jonathan Cross kicked off with a track from J Lo, music unmistakably for the body with cover art selling her hot body and alluring looks. Cut to Stockhausen or K Sto, as Cross wittily called him. Classic Modernist: a man, an intellectual, isolated, heroic, at the cutting edge, regardless of audience, a high priest, of a new religion whose work is to be performed in reverential silence in buildings created for the purpose by orchestras dressed in black. Compare Birtwistle whose Pan so upset the Proms audience back in 1995. Same set-up: an intellectual man, no compromises to the audience, in the setting of the patriarchal Albert Hall, dressed in centuries-old outfits, with a heroic male conductor at the helm.

Cross contrasted this with the growing situation since 1990, post-Modernism. Where there had been one master narrative, now there are countless stories. Where white western men dominated, now there are more women composers, and from all round the world. Globalisation.

Further – Digital technology enables anonymous, collaborative and vast outpourings of amateur music, as with the all-women collective Lappetites. Further still, modern technology puts the listener in charge. The ipod leads us to the edge of the ‘death of the composer’, as the listener chooses how where and when to consume music. No more Albert Hall except for die-hard traditionalists!

In the 50s Milton Babbitt published an article with the notorious title Who cares if you listen. Cross postulates a spectrum from Babbitt at one end representing the ne plus ultra of avant-garde extremism, the intellectual sound scientist trying to remove the audience from music; and at the other extreme John Cage who, with his techniques of indeterminacy, sought to remove the composer from the process and liberate sounds to be themselves.

5-6pm I should have gone to see a concert of Knussen and Weir but I needed a break so went to hear Professor Susan Greenfield deliver a high-speed version of the case she has presented in articles and letters, that the digital age presents real threats to the brains of the young. Environment stimulates brain growth, which is why even identical twins aren’t identical. Brains continue growing and making connections up to the age of 16 and beyond. These connections build up associations between thoughts, experiences, feelings, it is these associations which create meaning and significance. All this is threatened by flat screens which promote addictive, game-playing, immediately rewarded behaviour with no depth or significance, which prioritise information processing without finding depth of meaning. Information, not wisdom.

Read more on her website, which includes a long reading list of the scientific research.

6-7pm London Philharmonic Orchestra Foyle Future Firsts conduced by Paul Hoskins performed:

7.30-10pm London Philharmonic Orchestra: Classic Britannia Four classic compositions from the 1990s:

I liked the Turnage most because it was quiet. The other three were dominated by percussion, lots of banging, lots of glockenspiel, xylophone, wood blocks and tubular bells. The apparently random use of thin, weedy plinks and plonks is a cliche of modern classical music and, rather than be awed by the modernity of these pieces, I was dismayed by how much they embodied the worst cliches of the tradition, the reason so few people like this music.

Conclusion

A long and exhausting day but bursting with ideas and sounds which will take weeks if not months to digest. Sonically, the most obvious thing was the distinction between the British composers whose work we heard live, and the clips played by Cross and Ross. The clips were interesting and immediately attractive. I’m going to listen to more Haas and JL Adams.

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by Simon on December 8, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Concert, Contemporary classical music, European History, History
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Posted by Simon on December 8, 2013

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2013/12/08/the-rest-is-noise-12-new-world-order/

The Rest is Noise 4: Berlin in the 20s and 30s

The South Bank Centre is hosting a year long festival of 20th century music based on the book, The Rest Is Noise, by American critic Alex Ross. Part of the festival is a series of 12 weekends each focusing on an important time and place. This weekend the focus was on Berlin in the 20s and 30s, with big concerts on Friday (Liza Minnelli, the Berliner Philharmoniker doing cabaret), Saturday (‘The Threepenny Opera’), and Sunday (Berg’s ‘Violin Concerto’ in the afternoon, Weill’s ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ in the evening). During Saturday and Sunday there was a series of lectures, presentations and film showings, 20 on Saturday, 19 on Sunday. I attended the following:

Saturday 2nd March

Breakfast with Kurt Weill: ‘The Threepenny Opera’ – interactive workshop led by composer John Browne and voice coach Mary King, enthusiastically explaining, demonstrating and singing elements of Brecht and Weill’s 1928 smash hit, the centrepiece of the weekend. I learned:

  • The 20s a period of tremendous criss-crossing currents but the main trend towards Simplicity and Order: neoclassicism, Neue Sachlichkeit etc Schoenberg’s 12 tone method was a variation on the quest for Order. All of it disgusted by the bloated self indulgence of late Romanticism, associated with the windy rhetoric which led to the cataclysm of the Great War.
  • The two musical giants of between the wars are Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Stravinsky is about rhythm and the dance. Both incorporate unprecedented amounts of dissonance in their music; Stravinsky uses dissonance to release energy, to reconnect with the Primitive; Schoenberg uses dissonance to reveal new mystical landscapes.
  • One of Stravinsky’s less-known works, ‘The Soldier’s Tale‘, turns out to be crucial for between the wars music. Composed in 1918 for a small travelling ensemble resembling a stripped-down dance orchestra means you can hear the seven instruments very clearly, with all their individual roughnesses. (Having a big bank of strings as in a symphony orchestra smooths out the sound.) Weill uses just seven instrumentalists in the Threepenny Opera to create a deliberately rusty, ragged sound. Clarity. Honesty.
  • In vocal terms, Brecht-Weill pieces show the influence of Pierrot Lunaire (1912), Schoenberg’s far-out experiment with Sprechstimme or speech-singing. Mary explains that in speechsinging you speak – but on the pitch. You’re speaking to a note.
  • Weill is often categorised as a ‘crossover’ artist because he incorporated elements of popular music, from instrumentation (guitar, harmonium, mandolin, banjo), to length (mostly songs and song cycles), to rhythm (jaunty, bouncy and repetitive rhythms, to emphasise the melody) and mood – sentimental.
  • The abandonment of a “home key” – atonality, the liberation of dissonance – in so much 20th century music, especially avant-garde music, is cognate with the decline of other forms of certainty, moral, religious, social etc. Weill is poppy because he very much does use home keys to root his tunes in – but he often uses more than one, and there are no smooth transitions from one to another as in the symphonic tradition. Instead the whole tune just jumps to another key. Then jumps back again. John compares this with Montage, Eistenstein etc. Jerky unexpected cuts. And with the techniques Brecht uses in his plays to jerk his audiences out of their bourgeois trance – lights on, captions, addressing the audience, characters carrying captions.
Photo of Kurt Weill

Kurt Weill. Copyright The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music

Germany between the wars – lecture by Frederick Taylor. The Germans lost the First World War in part because their society collapsed. The Kaiser abdicated, the government resigned, there were would-be communist revolutions. Taylor goes through the history of events from 1918 to 1933 in detail, the sorry sequence of attempted coups and putsches, the devastation of the economy by ruinous reparations to the Allies, the collapse of the currency in the early 20s after France reoccupied the industrial Ruhr, a period of stability by 1924 which lasted until the Wall Street Crash when the American bankers wanted their money back, and the Germans couldn’t pay. Collapse of the economy. Massive unemployment. 1930 collapse of the coalition government. Revival of the street fighting of the early 20s. Everyone who lost out on the past 15 years looking for a saviour – Rise of the Nazis. I learned:

  • Berlin by 1914 was the centre of German industry, home to AEG, Siemens etc, with a population of 3 million the third largest city in the world after London and New York, with a notoriously stroppy industrial proletariat of 600,000. With a population of 3 million it was the third largest city in the world after London and New York.At Alexanderplatz began the vast Hinterhofer, enormous council blocks of apartments in which teeming thousands lived in squalor.
  • New Labour laws passed by the liberal Weimar government guaranteed workers an 8 hour day which led to a (relative) explosion of hobbies and activities and spectator events, such as sports – bicycle racing, boxing – and theatre and cabaret.

Brecht’s composers – presentation by composer Dominic Muldowney who has set over 200 Brecht poems to music. Dominic emphasises that Brecht was a poet first, playwright second and idealogue third (exactly the opposite to how he became known to British audiences.) Informal and informative Dominic read out his favourite Brecht poems, played musical settings of Brecht poems by his main collaborators – Hans Eisler, Kurt Weill – and performances by a wide range of artists (including David Bowie and Sting).

Photo of Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht (Photo: Jörg Kolbe. CC-BY-SA via Wikimedia Commons)

I learned that:

  • Brecht came from a strict religious background; early poems are titled psalm, hymn etc, and his work is fuelled by a deeply religious moralism, reversioned into fierce communism.
  • Brecht served as an ambulance orderly in the great War (like Vaughan Williams).
  • When he made a radio documentary about it, Dominic identified 158 versions of ‘Mack the Knife’ and played us the comedy version by Liberace
  • Hans Eisler started as a devout pupil of Schoenberg (Sunday lunchtime I heard Karim Said play Eisler’s thoroughly twelve-tone 4 Pieces, opus 3). But Eisler abandoned his teacher, adopted the cabaret style of the era, worked closely with Brecht and became a prolific writer of songs (over 500 songs, nearly as many as Schubert!).
  • Dominic characterises the power of Brecht’s poetry in its extreme simplicity of diction which nearly always leads to a sudden twist or insight.
  • Compare the settings of Brecht’s Nannaslied by Eisler and Weill.

Dominic makes the profoundest comment of the weekend: this music and this period are Nostalgic; it is safe, neutralised. In films and lectures throughout the weekend I sit completely surrounded by really old people, a sea of greyhaired old ladies. They listen to songs about sex and prostitution and murder and the overthrow of the system with a smile on their lips and a twinkle in their eyes. The savage satire on greed, power and corruption, Threepenny Opera, sold out almost immediately.

It is accessible and brilliant popular music, after all.

Why and how did music become so politicised lecture by Alex Ross, the man whose brilliant book started all this. Alex spends an hour taking us through composers of the era, moving beyond Weill and Schoenberg to play Hindemith, Krenek’s Jonny Spielt Auf, Kurt Schwitters’ Dada UrSymphonie, a 1930 setting of the Communist Manifesto, the Russian piece about an iron foundry and Popov’s big symphony which he thinks influenced Shostakovitch. I thought wandering into Soviet territory was a bit outside the scope of this weekend. There’ll be a separate weekend about music under Stalin. What Ross gives you is a really confident overview of a period with choice examples, many of them refreshingly off the beaten track.

Listen to this – South Bank’s Head of Classical Music, Gillian Moore played numerous samples of 20s and 30s music, explaining and commenting.

  • Berlin had over 30 studios and produced hits like Pandora’s Box, Nosferatu, The Blue Angel starring Marlene Dietrich. Of course, many luminaries of the industry emigrated to Hollywood after the Nazis came to power.
  • Schoenberg was attracted by the film industry and wrote a ten minute piece, Accompaniment to a Film Scene, convincingly portraying the familiar Expressionist emotions of Anxiety and Fear. As Gillian pointed out this wouldn’t be out of place in a Bernard Herrmann soundtrack to a Hitchcock film.
  • If film was one new technology which was impacting on composers, radio was another. Brecht and Weill collaborated on a 1929 radio broadcast of their cantata ‘Lindbergh’s Flight’ (Der Lindberghflug).
  • Gillian ended with the harrowing Song of a German Mother.

Nazism and the myth of progress – lecture by philosopher John Gray. Gray was promoting his as yet unpublished book on the writings of Central European intellectuals Arthur Koestler, Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig. He spoke for half an hour then took questions.

  • His main point is that whereas science shows real progress (remove four fifths of the scientists from the world and we wouldn’t go back to alchemy; the basics of evolution, modern medicine, astronomy, string theory, are established and written) politics and ethics don’t. ‘Civilisation’, if we mean the highest standards of morality and respect for human dignity, can easily slip, collapse, erode.
  • Gray singled out the disastrous impact of nationalism in Central Europe after the collapse of the multinational Empires in the Great War, which led intellectuals and political parties to identify essential members of the ‘nation’, and to marginalise and victimise all groups who didn’t belong for one reason or another, to the resulting narrow definitions of nationhood and citizenship: Jews, gypsies, homosexuals.

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Sunday 3rd March

A Beginners Guide to Serialism – lecture by Jonathan Cross. Best explanation of Schoenberg’s twelve tone method I’ve ever heard, starting with detailed analysis of examples from Bach to show that the key techniques of creating a tone row then manipulating it through transposition, inversion and retrogression, existed in the 1740s and could produce extremely palatable music. I learned:

  • The 1920s quest for Order: Schoenberg unveiled the twelve tone method in 1923 as a solution to the draining challenge of wrestling with the emotional content of Expressionism within the unstructured soundworld he created when he began to abandon traditional tonality around 1907. Serialism tries to impose mathematical order on the chaos which the Austro-German tradition had become.
  • By showing us the scores and playing us fragments by each composer Cross demonstrated how
    • Schoenberg chose tone rows which involvedlarge moves up and down the scale between notes (ie something like melody)and could incorporate tritone gaps and elements of repetition
    • Webern chose tone rows where there is very little space between contiguous notes, giving a costive, tightly wrapped feel of his pieces
    • Berg had a much more open attitude to quotes and influences from the tradition; hence he was able to structure pieces as big as his two operas

Karim Said: Twelve Tone Piano The young wunderkind piano player Karim Said sat at the joanna and explained aspects of the twelve tone system to Sara Mohr-Pietsch of BBC Radio 3. Fascinating to hear him play a baroque gigue – and immediately play part of the gigue movement from Schoenberg – and explain the difference. He played Schoenberg’s Five pieces, opus 23, two tiny Webern pieces, Eisler’s Four Pieces, opus 3, from his Schoenberg period, and then the work in which Schoenberg fully introduced serialism, the piano Suite, opus 25.

  • With Jonathan Cross’s contrasting of Schoenberg and Webern fresh in my mind, along with Karim’s explanations, I was able to detect quite a difference between Schoenberg, Eisler and Webern which was good – but found the Schoenberg pieces did go on a bit, which was bad.
  • For a start the piano is one instrument and so its tonal and dynamic range is obviously smaller than a small ensemble. Listening to unaccompanied piano music by anyone for 25 minutes is challenging. 
  • But there comes a point in atonal music where the initial pleasure, the novelty of the sound organisation, palls. At which point, maybe having it better explained, maybe even having a score, would help you continue your pleasure…

The festival fills its days by programming multiple events at the same time. You have to choose. I now faced the hardest choices I’ve encountered so far: at 3pm an hour of readings and singing of Brecht poems; a discussion of Christopher Isherwood’s classic novel, ‘Goodbye to Berlin’; or, the one I went for…

Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis an experimental black and white silent film from 1927. Although I suspected I could buy this or watch it on YouTube, I argued I’d never be able to see it on the big screen and with full sound. In the event the Spirit Level downstairs at the Royal festival Hall is quite a small room and it was quite a small screen. I regretted not going to the Brecht poetry, but it was a fascinating film.

Similarly, I really wanted to go and see a talk by Ruth Remus about the role of Germany artists in the Dada movement; but also really wanted to see Kuhle Wampe, a communist propaganda film written by Brecht with music by Hans Eisler, and again figured I’m never going to get the chance to see this on a big screen.

Kuhle Wampe turned out to be a talkie and so we had to stop the film to find the English subtitles! But it was also a deeply puzzling experience, the characters made of paste, behaving like robots, with almost no touches of kindness or feeling anywhere in it, and the final 10 minute orgy of healthy outdoor sports followed by singing from a communist agitprop group could, with a few tweaks, have come from the kind of Nazi propaganda film that was being churned out just a few years later.

A fascinating and informative weekend. Thank you very much to Jude Kelly, Gillian Moore and everyone else who made it possible.

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by Simon on March 3, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Classical music, Concert, Contemporary classical music, History
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Posted by Simon on March 3, 2013

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/berlin-in-the-20s-and-30s-the-south-bank/

The Rest is Noise 1: Here comes the 20th century

21 and 22 January 2013

When Jude Kelly, artistic director of the South Bank, finished reading American critic’s history of classical music in the 20th century, The Rest Is Noise, she was so impressed she rang up the author. “Hey Alex. How’s about we put on a year long festival of music at London’s premiere art complex in celebration of your book? We should be able to rustle up nearly 100 concerts devoted entirely to 20th century music, plus loads of spinoff events. And let’s scatter through the year a series of 12 study weekends, where we invite leading historians, art critics and musicologists to explore the cultural milieu of pre-War Vienna, Paris in the 20s, Weimar Germany, music under the dictatorships and other key moments. Whaddya say?”

Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 saw the first in-depth weekend, titled The Big Bang, designed to explore the music of pre-War Vienna, dominated by the giants Strauss and Mahler, but with the new sounds of Arnold Schoenberg beginning to disturb the peace.

Saturday 21 January

Here Comes The Twentieth Century The Right Honourable The Baroness Williams of Crosby (Shirley Williams to you or me) belied her 82 years to present a sweeping overview of the 20th century. Necessarily a high level review it was striking for on the one hand retreading some overfamiliar terrain – Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen from the Great War – on the other completely omitting the Bolshevik Revolution and the chaos all across central Europe after the Great War. Why, I thought as I sat in the splendid Queen Elizabeth Hall, didn’t they invite a historian to do this? But towards the end she surprised me again by choosing to focus not on our ongoing anxieties, but on three great moments of hope: Martin Luther King’s Civil Right movement; Gorbachev letting the Berlin Wall come down; Nelson Mandela walking free to seal a peaceful transfer of power in South Africa. Her point was, Change can happen, political processes can improve the world. This fed back to her dwelling on the post-war founding of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the time I thought it was light on historical detail, a week later I realise it was really about this positive, liberal vision.

Still, no denying the 20th century was the century of catastrophe; Leonard Bernstein called it the Century of Death. 20 million dead in the Great War. 60 million dead in the Second World War. 30 million killed by Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Without doubt the most catastrophic century in human history and also the most complex. Almost impossible to reconcile the billions of individual stories, achievements, discoveries and art works with the complex political and social movements all round the busy globe. It’s almost enough to make you ashamed to have been born into such a terrible century. Following Dame Shirley was…

Alex Ross, the man himself whose brilliant book started all this, Alex turns out to be a smart, suave, bullet-headed young American, personable, polite and dazzlingly knowledgeable. He delivered an hour and a quarter lecture which you can listen to on the South Bank website. I think he’s appearing four times over the year, so in each speech has to cover four of the twelve themed weekends, so this first address stretched long to cover Schoenberg, the nationalist and folk movements, and 1920s Paris. His key point is that listeners accept all the techniques of the supposedly difficult Second Viennese School, when it’s presented in film scores – but balk at them when presented in the concert hall, and then pondered why this should be. In this speech and the next day’s Q&A what emerged is the tremendous conservatism of the classical music world and its audience; as a rule of thumb classical music can be taken as about 60 years behind the times. Looking around at the grey-haired audience, and remembering the deep squareness of all the classical musicians I’ve ever known, I’m not surprised.

Alex mentioned the story about Schoenberg’s wife, Mathilde, leaving him to have an affair with the painter Richard Gerstl, but eventually returning at which point the distraught painter set fire to his paintings, stabbed himself and hanged himself in front of a full-length mirror in his studio. Schoenberg was finalising his Second String Quartet with its intense, angsty sound, so everyone can do some amateur psychology about this typical overwrought episode from the heart of Teutonic Expressionism.

After these two start-up lectures, we the audience had a choice of events to go to. For example, throughout the weekend they were screening the BBC’s new three-part series about 20th century music, The Sound and The Fury. I figured I can see this on  when it’s shown in February. There are ‘Sound bites’ – hour slots containing four x fifteen minute presentations about key figures of the (early) twentieth century eg the Wright brothers, Marie Curie etc. I chose:

The Birth of the Modern In a packed house in the Level 5 Function room in the Festival Hall for a presentation by art historian Tag Gronberg about art in prewar Vienna. This started with Gustav Klimt’s famous painting The Kiss and explored the tensions between Klimt and the Sezessionists, the Austrian wing of Art Nouveau known locally as the Jugendstil – and their opponents like the satirist Karl Krauss and the architect Adolf Loos, who rejected  Klimt’s fine decoration in favour of plain truth, Loos’s plain functional building anticipating the clarity of the Bauhaus and all 20th century Modernist architecture. The audience was old, as in most art galleries plenty of grey haired ladies looking at pictures of naked men and women and drinking in a lecture about sex, love and the decorative arts.

Lisa Appignanesi: Freud and the Modern Age Ms Appignanesi was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to literature. She has written widely on Freud and gender. A vivacious, laughing lady with big auburn hair like Rula Lenska, Ms Appignanesi gave a rather disappointingly basic introduction to Freud, skimming over the early publications and basic ideas, while recommending her books which were on bookstands located around the foyer.

Main points were that, though Freud prided himself on his ability in language and his works are often thought of as being more literary than scientific – he was musically null. He liked the obvious greats of the day but had little or nothing to say about music. If Ms Appignanesi had referenced any psychoanalyst who has applied Freud to music, or developed her own thoughts about psychoanalysis and music, it would have been useful. Instead we learned that prewar Vienna was awash with artistic movements, that Freud’s ideas have shaped the century, that he spent a few hours psychoanalysing Mahler on a famous walk, and learned that Schoenberg’s wife, Mathilde, left him during the composition of the Second String Quartet and, you’ll never guess what happened!!

Resisting the lure of a Sound Bites session including the Birth of Radio, I stayed in the foyer of the QEH for –

Listen to this – a listening guide to the weekend’s music presented by Head of Music at the South Bank, Gillian Moore. Either playing chords herself on the grand piano or introducing clips from CD, Gillian explained in detail the music of Salome (Richard Strauss’s radical opera which was being performed later that evening), its deliberate use of barbarism, atonal chords etc, before moving on to explain the hyperchromaticism which was turning into atonality in Schoenberg.

5.30 and I was full, and so didn’t go on to the evening concert, a concert performance of Strauss’s opera ‘Salome’, centrepiece of the first chapter of Alex’s book – let alone to the interesting-looking Ida Barr’s Music Hall Night Club which followed through till midnight. What a varied and interesting day, and all for £10!

Sunday 22 January

Breakfast with Schoenberg – Focus on Schoenberg’s 2nd String Quartet Back in the foyer at 10.15 for a very interesting hour-long explanation of the structure and technique of this transitional work. Presented by Fraser Trainer with an actual string quartet (musicians from Aurora Orchestra) on stage who played short fragments illustrating Fraser’s points. The cellist, Oliver, also added points of his own, including the interesting facts that Schoenberg’s music carries the most detailed instructions for the player; instructions to play notes in novel positions ie at the bridge on string instruments thus creating an eerie sound with strange overtones. Fraser’s enthusiasm was infectious. This was great!

Except. For some reason he and Gillian Moore from yesterday both tended to apologise for talking about keys and chords and scales; and when they demonstrated them tended to do so in a hurry, as if ashamed or embarrassed. Why? Who do you think is attending this weekend? It smacked of a very British philistinism and embarrassment, fear of being even a teeny bit intellectual or demanding. In fact both presentations would have benefited from a relaxed ten minute introduction explaining how basic triadic harmony works in classical music or pop songs, with a few easy examples. Once this is established it’s easier to show how the chording of Wagner, Strauss et al becomes more and more complicated – extended tonality, as it’s called – until it starts to compromise harmonic language and you begin to lose the sense of a tonal centre ie it’s hard for your ear to hear which key the music is in, where’s it’s meant to return ‘home’ to give the sense of completeness as in a Mozart piece. It’s this tonal drift which creates unease and anxiety, the predominant emotions of the broader cultural Expressionism of these years, and the angsty sound which the average listener associates with Schoenberg, Berg and Webern to this day.

Of course Fraser told us the story about Schoenberg’s wife, Mathilde, leaving him to have an affair with the painter, Richard Gerstl – and did you hear what happened when she finally returnd to composer? You’ll never guess!!!

Alex Ross in conversation with Jude Kelly Back in the sumptuous Queen Elizabeth Hall head of the Southbank, Jude, asked Alex a number of questions before questions from the floor. Among many points I remember:

  • the tragedy of America rejecting its black heritage, jazz – there was a crossover moment in the 20s and 30s but it was rejected, and America’s greatest folk tradition was fatefully barred from its classical composers
  • what is it about classical music that is so offputting?  Both discussed the offputtingness of the Concert Hall with its nineteenth century architecture, its intimidating dress codes etc. Jude asked if there were any black people in the audience? There was one Asian guy, no one of African descent. I didn’t see any black people all weekend apart from a few security guards and assistants.

You can hear the full conversation here.

Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire Back in the performance space behind the Royal Festival Hall bar, students from the Royal Northern College of Music performed Schoenberg’s half hour masterpiece, 21 poems spoken by the folk character Pierrot, divided into three thematic groups, set to music. Three different young ladies sang, wearing black outfits with white facepainting and makeup – Natasha Best, Rosie Middleton and Emma Stannard. The distinguishing thing about the music is Schoenberg’s deployment of Sprechstimme ie a style half way between singing and speaking where the voice swoops and dives between notes, creating a strange otherworldy affect, which matches the strange words of the deluded Pierrot looking up at the imaginary moon.

The Air of Other Planets: Understanding Schoenberg’s Journey into Atonality presented by Julian Johnson, Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. Suave and posh Professor Johnson once again told the story of Schoenberg’s wife running off, then returning and the distraught painter setting fire to his paintings then hanging himself. Fourth time I’ve heard this story. Is it really the only thing to say about Schoenberg?.

The professor assumed this great offputtingness in Schoenberg as the premise of his presentation before leading off into an exploration of the issues. To be honest I was full up and don’t remember much. the best moment was a question from the audience at the end: a youngish man said he’s no great musical expert but he doesn’t see what’s so difficult about Schoenberg!. To him Schoenberg sounds like the soundtrack to any number of horror movies, thrillers or psycho films; jazz incorporated atonality in the 60s, rock bands did it in the 70s. If you approach him like that you can swallow him whole without blinking. What Schoenberg problem?

It’s true. You have to approach the Second Viennese School from the extremely conservative, ears-closed, up-tight bourgeois classical position to be daunted by them. In other words, you have to be the typical classical music audience as described by Alex and Jude this morning. If, like me, you were brought  up on the Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, the Clash as well as The Exorcist, The Omen, Alien and so on, Schoenberg, Webern and Berg sound either pretty familiar or fairly easy to swallow. It’s only putting them into the antiseptic and reverential concert hall that their music begins to sound out of place.

You have to have lived a very sheltered musical life, in other words, to find these guys ‘difficult’. Much more difficult to listen to is something like Les Noces’ by Stravinsky. And hardest of all is something like the orchestral works of Bruckner or Nielsen or Sibelius at his worst. Incredibly long and awesomely boring, I’ve never made my way to the end of one. Whereas Webern with a whole suite in 5 minutes, was made for the ipod age.

Schoenberg’s daughter A major reason for attending Day 2 of this weekend was to see Ms Moore and Professor Johnson in conversation with Nuria Schoenberg Nono, 80 years old this year and not only daughter to the great Arnold but wife to the Italian Modernist composer Luigi Nono. Unfortunately she was too ill to attend. Maybe she would have told us the story about Mathilde running off with the painter Richard Gerstl but then abandoning him whereupon he… oh, but I don’t want to spoil the story for you…

Conclusions Ross is an amazing man who wears his encyclopedic knowledge with grace and elegance. The festival is an epic and unprecedented project. Why, in a year dedicated to embedding 20th century music into its historical context – are there no historians? The art lecture was so-so. The Freud one was disappointing. The musical analysis was riveting and I wanted it to be more confident and genuinely didactic, teaching me slowly and thoroughly how this music is made and how to appreciate it.

But for organising these and all the other events coming up during 2013 – Well done, South Bank!

The festival continues for the rest of the year.

Of course, an enterprise like this runs the risk of being accused of dumbing down or glossing over complexities. That’s certainly what I felt about the Freud lecture, and felt was being demonstrated in the repetition of the same tired stories about Schoenberg. See the comments on this Guardian page for quite fierce accusations of dumbing down.

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by Simon on January 27, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Classical music, Concert, Contemporary classical music
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Posted by Simon on January 27, 2013

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/the-rest-is-noise-the-south-bank/

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