Schoenberg's Sheen

Started by karlhenning, April 12, 2007, 07:35:28 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 2 Guests are viewing this topic.

Mahlerian

"l do not consider my music as atonal, but rather as non-tonal. I feel the unity of all keys. Atonal music by modern composers admits of no key at all, no feeling of any definite center." - Arnold Schoenberg

Mahlerian

#461
A wonderful article by pianist Pina Napolitano; her experiences with discovering the beauty and the power of Schoenberg's music are much like my own.

"an invincible combination of intellect and passion, discipline and expressivity"

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/feb/21/music-arnold-schoenberg-do-not-approach-with-caution-pina-napolitano
"l do not consider my music as atonal, but rather as non-tonal. I feel the unity of all keys. Atonal music by modern composers admits of no key at all, no feeling of any definite center." - Arnold Schoenberg

GioCar

^^^

Yes, an excellent article indeed.

Thanks for the link!

pjme

"The sentiments it conveys are the eternal sentiments of the human condition – the same as expressed in Romantic music – but the language is different"

Indeed an excellent article.

P.

Cato

Quote from: Thatfabulousalien on February 23, 2017, 01:08:35 AM
I don't see why someone that likes late (especially) romantic music would struggle with Schoenberg. If someone likes Brahms, Wagner, Berlioz and Mahler, why would they struggle with Schoenberg;

An example, which I have related elsewhere some time ago: When Georg Solti was rehearsing Moses und Aron for a recording, he was not getting the sound he wanted from the orchestra (Chicago Symphony, I believe).

According to the story I read, he began telling the orchestra to "think Brahms" while they played, and things began to go the way he wanted.
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

Monsieur Croche

#465
Quote from: Thatfabulousalien on February 23, 2017, 01:08:35 AM
Something sprung to mind from the beginning alone is "all you need to do is open your mind"

I wish I knew what it meant really....  I don't see why someone that likes late (especially) romantic music would struggle with Schoenberg. If someone likes Brahms, Wagner, Berlioz and Mahler, why would they struggle with Schoenberg; Arnold being a late romantic composer himself, less of a modernist than his students and less than his peers (like Stravinsky or Ives).

I'm nearly two full generations older than you (1 = 33 yrs), but when I was your age (younger, even), my music teachers and many of my student peers at the time felt the same as you do, i.e. had no trouble  or "difficulty" hearing this music as the late epoch manifestation of the (Germanic) romantic style and expression.

One very reasonable and real reason that someone might not care for it is a more general one... it is that some have, in general, no personal taste for the Fin de siècle / early 20th century expressionist style.  I'm certain this is a possibility because there are enough who find Mahler's vocabulary, and also works like R. Strauss' Salome and Elektra, as challenging or 'difficult' as they find Schoenberg, etc.  Other than that, all those who protest about the loss or absence of tonality really get me wondering just how much they actually hear of what makes up and is going on in later and late romantic era music to which they do readily and happily listen.

Add to the kerfuffle this known and well-acknowledged psychological dynamic: 
Like it or not (and consciously or not), many a person who really enjoys classical does equate their involvement and ability to appreciate it with some level of personal intellectual prowess; more than a few also equate their appreciation and consumption of 'high culture' as having to do with their social status and what they think gets / has them socially esteemed.  Place someone with those personal criteria as to their self-worth and social standing whom also feels 'they don't get' modern or atonal music amid a group of fellow cultural consumers who seem to be 'in the know' and have ready access to this one arena which the individual visiting that room feels they have no handle on at all, and they can and will feel excluded, self-conscious that they are (by their own standard, not the standard in the room) "intellectually and socially inferior."  This triggers resentment (a dynamic well-explained via Maslow's pyramid diagram of the hierarchy of needs.)  The resentment is what triggers a good deal of the hue and cry rally of accusations of elitism (with 'academic elite' often tossed in) against those proponents who love and are advocates of this music; the hue and cry against also brings on those various defensive (underlying = self-defensive) arguments about the more readily accessible and populist styles as superior to the more modern and atonal. 

We've seen it here -- proportionate to other fora, actually just a wee bit; you and I have seen it in spades on at least one other forum.  "At least this [retro conservative tonal] composer is writing music I can like," or "composers should write more like the music I can like and understand." -- that taken to the whack Nth degree of a statement like composing more in the manner of John Williams' Suite from Star Wars -- or in the style of that retro-pastiche Mozart/Schubert/Mendelssohn music being produced by a current prodigy darling -- is / should be the real future of contemporary classical music. [!!!!!]

Recall that so many of this kind of the more contentious and anti reactions are (wrongly) linked with peoples self-conceits about their self-worth and social prestige, and there you have some of the more bitter and angry comments against this music.  Without, a more normal reaction, as it is to so many other eras or composers people don't particularly care for, would be a simple "I don't care for it," and that would be that!

It is too easy to say, "Just open your ears, bro."  While I agree with that as the actual solution, it is much easier said than it is for many to do.


Best regards.
~ I'm all for personal expression; it just has to express something to me. ~

listener

His arrangement of Funiculi-Funiculà is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1V-Dxto74M&app=desktop
We heard the piano 4hands transcription of The Barber of Seville Overture this week with Pelléas.. in Vancouver.
"Keep your hand on the throttle and your eye on the rail as you walk through life's pathway."

Mandryka

#467
Some of the earliest performances seem to bring out the continuity with late romantic music -narrative, aim, memorable melody - and they seem to be very successful. An example is the Koldofsky Trio. More recently the Diotima Quartet have taken this approach I would say.

I'm not sure you'd ever guess the connection to late romanticism from Arditti or Juilliard.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mandryka

Quote from: Thatfabulousalien on March 04, 2017, 12:38:34 PM
Is it just me or does the fourth quartet sound almost completely uncharacteristic of Schoenberg? It sounds a lot like Bartok to my ears and lacks the gorgeous lyricism and fragmentary development he's known for, despite that it's one of my favorite Schoenberg works.

The Comodo seems not at all like anything by Bartok to me. And rather in the late Schoenberg mould.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mahlerian

#469
The chord ending the Violin Concerto is, like that at the end of the Piano Concerto, a big expanded C major chord.  More famously, Op. 42 ends with a major seventh chord in first inversion (which makes all of the notes consonant against the bass), but the Violin Concerto also ends with a C major seventh sonority, adding in the notes of D major (alternatively, a C major chord with an added quartal chord of F#-B-E-A-D with the factors rearranged).  It's actually broken up as C-G dyad in the bass, D-E-B in middle range, and F#-A in high treble, thus mimicking the arrangement of the overtone series more or less closely:
"l do not consider my music as atonal, but rather as non-tonal. I feel the unity of all keys. Atonal music by modern composers admits of no key at all, no feeling of any definite center." - Arnold Schoenberg

PerfectWagnerite

Has anyone seen these lectures by Bernstein on Schoenberg? Fascinating stuff. You will never see Schoenberg the same way again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olwVvbWd-tg

Mirror Image

Quote from: PerfectWagnerite on April 19, 2017, 08:25:49 AM
Has anyone seen these lectures by Bernstein on Schoenberg? Fascinating stuff. You will never see Schoenberg the same way again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olwVvbWd-tg

Yep, I've seen them, but one longs for a better quality upload from someone else.

Mahlerian

Quote from: PerfectWagnerite on April 19, 2017, 08:25:49 AM
Has anyone seen these lectures by Bernstein on Schoenberg? Fascinating stuff. You will never see Schoenberg the same way again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olwVvbWd-tg

I have.  They're frustrating and still hold to the false idea of atonality as representing a meaningful category distinct from tonality.  He doesn't go into enough detail on the actual music, and too much about theory.  Schoenberg's music should be approached like any other great composer's, but for some reason it's treated as distinct.
"l do not consider my music as atonal, but rather as non-tonal. I feel the unity of all keys. Atonal music by modern composers admits of no key at all, no feeling of any definite center." - Arnold Schoenberg

Cato

Quote from: Thatfabulousalien on April 19, 2017, 02:45:48 PM

I actually want to see Beethoven or Mozart for instance, approached like that because it is honestly irrelevant nonsense. Analyzers don't seem to care about how Beethoven inverts a melody, creates a canon, draws from the dominant scale (using pitch sets etc) and completely overlook the function of the music that you actually HEAR, lol  :laugh:

Have you checked the articles by professors in the academic journals?   All kinds of "irrelevant nonsense" there!!! 0:)
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

PerfectWagnerite

Quote from: Cato on April 19, 2017, 03:33:36 PM
Have you checked the articles by professors in the academic journals?   All kinds of "irrelevant nonsense" there!!! 0:)
Or just look at part 3 (or maybe Part 4) around the 4 or 5 minute mark where Lenny talks about serialism (or something similar) in the fugue of Bach, in the finale of Beethoven's 9th, or in Don Giovanni.

Anyway Alien's comment is a bit puzzling from someone who seems to have a sound musical education. When I was in school we spend an entire semester on Beethoven just analyzing stuff like that.

Mirror Image

Quote from: Mahlerian on April 19, 2017, 08:46:27 AM
I have.  They're frustrating and still hold to the false idea of atonality as representing a meaningful category distinct from tonality.  He doesn't go into enough detail on the actual music, and too much about theory.  Schoenberg's music should be approached like any other great composer's, but for some reason it's treated as distinct.

To the bolded text, still beating that dead horse I see.

kishnevi

Quote from: Thatfabulousalien on April 19, 2017, 04:53:31 PM
Sorry, what I mean is:

When Beethoven does it - He's a genius
but when Schoenberg (or insert serialist) - he's just a dry academic creating exercises nobody is perceived to actually listen to etc.

It's a major double standard I'm trying to get over. Same with Stockhausen for example, who was trying to achieve a Wagnerian sense of wonderment at these huge cosmological philosophies he was trying to convey and the root of the human experience, in artistic terms of course.

BOTH, still using age old composition techniques, using hierarchies, structures/forms just like every other composer, blah blah

I'm not really in the mood to discuss it today but whatever  ::)



Well I'll clarify again, the whole "academic" side of music exists as much in Beethoven or Bach as it does Schoenberg, Gershwin, Stockhausen, Babbitt or popular music, IT always exists but for some reason it is given way too much importance in 20th century composers (especially serialists and 12 tone composers) for some reason, when it is not important to the music itself.

Why would you study how he inverts tone rows etc instead of the way the music actually functions, on a systematic basis? like in Beethoven. Some notes take center stage, some notes stay in the back et all

To my ears, Stockhausen completely failed at doing what he said he was doing. (Note the reference to ears, and the subjectivity therein implied.)
Perhaps Schoenberg too failed.

(BTW, in my admittedly limited understanding, wasn't one of the aims of serialism the goal of having no particular note or group of notes take center stage?)

Mahlerian

Quote from: Mirror Image on April 19, 2017, 06:56:59 PM
To the bolded text, still beating that dead horse I see.

It's true, though.

If I need to bring it up, it's because people still make comments like this:

Quote from: Jeffrey Smith on April 19, 2017, 07:39:00 PM(BTW, in my admittedly limited understanding, wasn't one of the aims of serialism the goal of having no particular note or group of notes take center stage?)

No.

One of the aims of serialism is to distance the music from traditional triadic functional harmony and diatonic rhetoric.  It isn't meant to be in a key, but if the point was to avoid any kind of pitch emphasis whatsoever, none of the Second Viennese School composers got the memo, because their music always emphasizes pitches and groups of pitches.

I don't know how anyone got the idea that their music doesn't emphasize any specific pitches, because it's disproven just by listening to any of it, let alone by looking at the score.
"l do not consider my music as atonal, but rather as non-tonal. I feel the unity of all keys. Atonal music by modern composers admits of no key at all, no feeling of any definite center." - Arnold Schoenberg

Mirror Image

The term atonality will be around after we're all dead and gone, so Mahlerian you can continue to bang your head against the wall.

Mahlerian

Quote from: Mirror Image on April 19, 2017, 08:22:24 PM
The term atonality will be around after we're all dead and gone, so Mahlerian you can continue to bang your head against the wall.

I'm not arguing with the term, I'm saying that the concept is useless.
"l do not consider my music as atonal, but rather as non-tonal. I feel the unity of all keys. Atonal music by modern composers admits of no key at all, no feeling of any definite center." - Arnold Schoenberg