Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... The New Music, the Sense Behind the Soundby Joan Peyser
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |  no reviews | add a review
No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)780.904The arts Music Music Biography And History By Period 20th CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.75)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English
1
Joan Peyser's The New Music
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 5-9, 2019
For my complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1115446-old-timey-new-music?chapter=1
I've been seriously involved w/ studying 'New Music' for something like the last 52 yrs. As such, it seemed a bit redundant to read this bk, esp since it's copyrighted 1971 & is far from representing anything 'new' in terms of my own personal chronology. Nonetheless, I decided to read it because I'd read Peyser's Boulez, Composer, Conductor, Enigma (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/622967-pierre-boulez ) & had enjoyed it very much so I wanted to read something else by her. In my review of her Boulez bk I wrote:
"I was immediately impressed by Peyser's writing b/c she seems to've pursued Boulez rapaciously regardless of his resistance to her writing this biography & b/c she actually seems to have some significant understanding of the music so her pursuit doesn't just come across as that of a malicious gossip."
&, once again, I was impressed by Peyser & glad I read the bk. Even though I'm far from ignorant, I still had things to learn from her & generally enjoyed her telling of it. Nonetheless, by the time she wrote the bk, her choice of featured composers, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, & Varèse, was already out-of-date. By my reckoning, the flood-gates of innovation cd be sd to've opened in 1885 w/ the early days of Charles Ives & Erik Satie but we might as well throw Scriabin in there too, eh?!
"Apparently precocious, Scriabin began building pianos after being fascinated with piano mechanisms. He sometimes gave away pianos he had built to house guests. Lyubov portrays Scriabin as very shy and unsociable with his peers, but appreciative of adult attention. Another anecdote tells of Scriabin trying to conduct an orchestra composed of local children, an attempt that ended in frustration and tears. He would perform his own amateur plays and operas with puppets to willing audiences. He studied the piano from an early age, taking lessons with Nikolai Zverev, a strict disciplinarian, who was also the teacher of Sergei Rachmaninoff and other piano prodigies concurrently, though Scriabin was not a pensioner like Rachmaninoff." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Scriabin
But even those guys are not really my point. Obviously, all heck broke loose w/ John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Lejaren Hiller, & a zillion other people (for those of you unfamilar w/ the measurement term "a zillion", it means more humans than have been around on Earth for the last 134 yrs &, therefore, a ridiculous assertion on the part of the reviewer but meant to function here as an exaggeration for the sake of making a point).
The New Music has an Introduction by Jacques Barzun. Even though I've seen his name for many yrs (or, probably, decades) I haven't read anything by him & know close to nothing about him or his work. I'll speculate that he's an 'official' intellectual: i.e.: someone associated w/ academia & widely published & translated.
"Jacques Martin Barzun (/ˈbɑːrzən/; November 30, 1907 – October 25, 2012) was a French-American historian known for his studies of the history of ideas and cultural history. He wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and classical music, and was also known as a philosopher of education. In the book Teacher in America (1945), Barzun influenced the training of schoolteachers in the United States.
"He published more than forty books, was awarded the American Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was designated a knight of the French Legion of Honor. The historical retrospective From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000), widely considered his magnum opus, was published when he was 93 years old." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Barzun
Okay, ok, k, I'm impressed. He almost made it to 105. Couldn't he've held out 'til his birthday?
"I happen to think that only in music have truly new directions been found, and that these are two and only two: electronic music and the 43-tone works and instruments of Harry Partch." - p x
Wow! That's a very dramatic assertion! &, uh, more than a little overstated. There have certainly been all sorts of new directions in various areas by 1971: I'd name FLUXUS, Structuralist Filmmaking, OuLiPo, Performance Art, Conceptual Art, Mail Art, etc.. But aside from that, in music, certainly John Cage, Giacinto Scelsi, Conlon Nancarrow, etc.. deserve mention. & why stick to just Harry Partch? If you want microtonality why not mention the earlier Alois Hába, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Julián Carrillo, etc? Dare I guess that it's b/c Barzun didn't know their work?
The Prologue states that:
"The story of twentieth-century music is in great part the story of how different composers coped with the annihilation of tonality, that particular system of organizing tones that was assumed after several centuries to be the natural law in music." - p xiii
That seems fair enuf. I wonder how many people think of it that way anymore? 48 yrs after this bk was copyrighted? I feel like I sortof left that dichotomy behind as soon as I started (d) composing in 1974.
"In his Dissonance Quartet, Mozart bypassed certain rules of tonal logic and thus elevated "disagreeable" sounds at the expense of agreeable ones." - p xiii
Never heard (of) it.
"The first movement opens with ominous quiet Cs in the cello, joined successively by the viola (on A♭ moving to a G), the second violin (on E♭), and the first violin (on A), thus creating the "dissonance" itself and narrowly avoiding a greater one. This lack of harmony and fixed key continues throughout the slow introduction before resolving into the bright C major of the Allegro section of the first movement, which is in sonata form.
"Mozart goes on to use chromatic and whole tone scales to outline fourths. Arch shaped lines emphasizing fourths in the first violin (C – F – C) and the violoncello (G – C – C' – G') are combined with lines emphasizing fifths in the second violin and viola. Over the barline between the second and third measures of the example, a fourth-suspension can be seen in the second violin's tied C. In another of his string quartets, KV 464, such fourth-suspensions are also very prominent.
"The second movement is in sonatina form, i.e., lacking the development section. Alfred Einstein writes of the coda of this movement that "the first violin openly expresses what seemed hidden beneath the conversational play of the subordinate theme"." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_Quartet_No._19_(Mozart)
I wonder how many composers there were at the time who composed more innovatively but were written out of history as just too weird?!
"Schoenberg's first keyless movement ushered in the atonal period in Vienna in 1908." - p xiv
Peyser does specify "in Vienna". My immediate response to this was "Ives?", "Hauer?" — but Ives wasn't in Vienna & might be more appropriately linked to polytonality. Hauer she does get into in some detail & that's part of what makes this bk so good.
"Egon Wellesz, another early Schoenberg pupil, tells an interesting story about the development of the 12-tone technique in an August, 1961 issue of The Listener:
"It was in 1915 that a private in the Austrian army was sent to me because the military psychiatrists found that he was so neurotic and talked about music in such a peculiar way that they did not know what to do with him and wanted my advice. The man was Josef Hauer. Hauer had developed in his compositions the idea of 12-note rows which, according to his theory, had the same function as the nomoi, the type-melodies in Greek music. Though Hauer expressed his views in a very amateurish way, I found his ideas very interesting and his attitude toward music reminded me of Erik Satie. I think that my favorable report helped to get Hauer released from his work in an army office. Reti, of whose judgment Schoenberg thought highly, told him about Hauer's theories and compositions, and Schoenberg began to develop these ideas which led him to introduce the system of composition with twelve tones.
"There can be no doubt that Hauer was the first to construct rows of twelve notes—rather haphazardly—and to choose which one of them suited him best for a composition.
"Hauer, in fact, did not choose a single row for a musical work nor did he work w/ the "row" as we know it. Unlike Schoenberg, who insisted that one row provide all the material and thus ensure a sense of unitary perception, Hauer allowed that any number of 12-tone melodies could be combined within a single movement." - p 37
Maybe Hauer was doing something more interesting & inspired than working w/ a Schoenbergian "row". How wd we know? I just looked in my local library's catalog, whose music department is excellent & I found scores by him & at least one bk about his music theory but not one single recording of his work. Fortunately, my own collection at home succeeds where the library's collection fails.
The relevant record is called Wirkung der Neuen Wiener Schule im Lied featuring Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on vocals & Aribert Reimann on piano. It doesn't take much knowledge of Deutsch to translate the title as "Work of the New Vienna School in Song". There're 9 composers represented, Hauer is the 1st. His 2 songs are "Der gefesselte Strom" ("The Restrained Stream") & "An die Parzen" ("To the Fates") — both settings of Friedrich Hölderlin poems.
The liner notes of this record are mostly in German but the general essay is also provided in English. In it, Hauer is described as follows:
"Joseph Matthias Hauer (1883-1959) stood as a lone wolf in opposition to Schönberg. He claimed to have experimented with the twelve-tone series before Schönberg. Hauer worked with 44 basic patterns out of the 479,001,600 possibilities of com[b]ining the twelve tones. The soft mystic tone of his musical language was based on the conviction that music is "mathematics in its highest sense" and that atonal music represents the "personification of absolute musical objectivity". Hauer spent the end of his life in Vienna, half-forgotten, a recluse, misunderstood and outcast."
Hmm.. maybe I'm a reincarnation of Hauer.. who was he a reincarnation of?
Anyway, I like Hauer's 2 songs but it's not much to go on.
Peyser tells of Schoenberg writing a letter to Hauer on December 1, 1923:
""Let us write a book together, a book in whcih one chapter will be written by one of us, the next by the other and so on. In it let us state our ideas, exactly defining the distinctive elements, by means of objective but courteous argument trying to collaborate a little bit in spite of these differences: because of what there is in common a basis can surely be found on which we can get along smoothly and with each other."" - p 38
Nice one, Arnie. Too bad it didn't come to pass.
"Those opposed to dodecaphony, including such disparate composers as Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bartók, Milhaud and many Americans in the thirties and forties, found themselves thrust together under the large amorphous umbrella labeled "neoclassicism."" - p xv
I've always found Neoclassicism to be boring. It's odd to me that Peyser doesn't list Prokofieff in the above b/c I've always thought of his "Symphony No. 1" as a 'classic' of Neoclassicism (or is it pre-Neoclassicism?!). THEN came the "New Tonality" as part of Minimalism. Gag. Perhaps it's time to mention that I love Schoenberg's music but I'm not really that preoccupied w/ its dodecaphony b/c I'm not that preoccupied w/ pitch-specific work in general. For me, Schoenberg's a great 'Old Timey" composer. My big regret is that there aren't any Old Timey buskers who play "Pierrot Lunaire" or "Serenade" — maybe arranged for fiddle, banjo, & guitar. Heck O'Goshen, some harmonica & jaw harp wd be nice too.
"Schoenberg, by the age of twenty five, had heard each of Wagner's operas between twenty and thirty times and inherited Wagner's tyrannical mien." - p 4
I dated a woman who had seen "Harold and Maude" something like 113 times. What wd she have done if she'd been a filmmaker? I assume from the above that Schoenberg had witnessed the operas performed. That seems almost impossible. I admire his devotion but I think I might be satisfied w/ witnessing each of them once or twice. Imagine: If Wagner had met Schoenberg wd he've been less of an anti-Semite? As soon as I get my Time Credit Card bill pd off I'm going to take Schoenberg back to Wagner to see if I can nip Nazism in the bud.
"Several of Schoenberg's original group became disenchanted in the 1920's after Schoenberg proclaimed the 12-tone technique. Alfredo Casella accused the Viennese master of confining music in a narrow prison, and the Marxist Hanns Eisler, shifting to the principle of socialist realism, commented that his teacher had gone to the trouble of bringing about a revolution in order to be a reactionary." - p 7
I just listen to the music, ma'am. I've never heard anything by Casella, what I've heard by Eisler has some vitality but it ain't no Schoenberg by a long shot. As for Socialist Realism? Might as well call it death-to-creativity-by-propaganda. What exactly IS Socialist Realism Music? An 'impossibility' as far as I can tell. A picture of a tractor to try to get the farmers to update their farming techniques, ok. But music reduced to the LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) so that people who don't understand music in the least can 'like' it? BAD IDEA. There were already musics meant for specific work situations, why not stick with them? Waulking music, e.g., in Scotland.
"Waulking songs (Scots Gaelic: Òrain Luaidh) are Scottish folk songs, traditionally sung in the Gaelic language by women while fulling (waulking) cloth. This practice involved a group of women rhythmically beating newly woven tweed against a table or similar surface to soften it. Simple, beat-driven songs were used to accompany the work." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waulking_song
Or how about Bulgarian vocal music where tritones were used as piercing sounds to travel long distance between fields that people were working in? The point is, there's nothing organic or natural about Socialist Realism, it's just more control freaking imposed by idiots on people w/ imaginations.
Now Peyser depicts Schoenberg as thinking of hmself as having a divine mission. I think that's unfortunate but I still love the music & I've listened to almost all of it that I know of. For those of you who don't know his work I recommened the following:
1899 "Verklärte Nacht"
1901 "Brettllieder"
1902/03 "Pelleas und Melisande"
1903/05 "6 Lieder"
1906 "Kammer Symphonie"
1907/08 "String Quartet No. 2"
1910 "Fünf Orchesterstücke"
1909 "Erwartung"
1910 "Drei Kleine Stucke"
1911 "Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke"
1911 "Herzgewächse"
1912 "Pierrot Lunaire"
1920 "Mahler: Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen"
1920/23 "Serenade"
1921 "Suite for Piano"
1925/26 "3 Satiren Anhang"
1925 "Suite for Septet"
1930 "Begleitmusik zu Einer Lightspielszene"
1934 "Suite in G Major for String Orchestra"
1934/36 "Violin Concerto"
1942 "Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte"
1942 "Piano Concerto"
1945 "I am Almost Sure, When Your Nurse will Change Your Diapers"
1945 "Prelude to Genesis Suite"
1946 "String Trio"
1947 "A Survivor from Warsaw"
1949 "Phantasy for Violin and Piano"
1950 "Modern Psalm"
"RODRIGUEZ: In the beginning was the Word. . . .
"SCHOENBERG: What else? What else can I do but express the original Word, which to me is a human thought, a human idea or a human aspiration?
"Thus it can be seen that Schoenberg's theme was a musical translation of an idea which, in its origin, was the Word of God. Schoenberg was a profoundly religious man and his most ambitious works were religious subjects. His last great opera, Moses und Aron, which he worked on throughout his life, ends: "But even in the wasteland you shall be victorious and achieve the goal: unity with God."
"Although in conversation and in his letters, Schoenberg frequently indicated a sense of despair at being chosen God's emissary on earth, he never questioned the fact that he was." - p 8
In all my decades of listening to Schoenberg I don't recall running across this "God's emissary on earth" business — so, even though I believe Peyser is a sincere researcher, I have to wonder whether there's an alternate biography that doesn't emphasize this. I reckon Peyser's accurate, though. I try to block out religion like billboards.
"The 12-tone technique put an end to a several-hundred-year period in which music was devoted to a dramatic-expressive ideal." - p 10
I think not. If there's ever been a "dramatic-expressive" composer, it's Schoenberg. Listen to his concertos, listen to "A Survivor from Warsaw", listen to "Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte". I don't really think that tonality is necessary for a dramatic-expressiveness. A rubato, a crescendo anyone?
"And to the composer, 13 did represent the height of malevolent magic." - p 10
"This prompted him to number his measures, later in life, as 12, 12A and 14. "It is not superstition," he often said, "it is belief."" - p 11
Hey! I have a friend who will turn his car around if he sees a black cat crossing the street in front of him. So what if it's a Jaquar & the street's narrow?
"Arnold's parents arrived in Vienna shortly after the enactment of the 1867 Constitution which removed the legal inequities against the Jews.
"But anti-Semitism continued unabated. Sigmund Freud, for instance, was denied the post of associate professor at the University of Vienna although he had been teaching for seventeen years without a formal appointment. The world of music was also closed to Jews: Mahler had to renounce Judaism and be baptized in order to be eligible for the director's post of the Vienna Court Opera, a powerful organization administered by the Court Chamberlain." - pp 13-14
What. the. fuck?! Christians are such. a. drag. Take that president character for an example:
"Trump is a professed Presbyterian" - https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/21/politics/trump-religion-gospel/index.html
If Mahler had to be baptized to fill a position that he was obviously qualified for it seems only fair that Rump shd have to have his mouth washed out w/ soap everytime he lies if he's to stay president. At least we'd get the entertainment value of seeing him foam at the mouth. Of course, the thing about religious people, certainly about the ChristInane & the IsDumb, is that if you're religious you can commit ANY crime you damned well feel like & then back out of it unscathed by putting a really dumb & contrite expression on your face & telling 'God' you're sorry. Or lie — wch is more common. Then there's always God told me to do it.
"Forty years later Schoenberg described the reaction to Pelleas:
""The first performance, under my direction, provoked great riots among the audience and even the critics. Reviews were unusually violent and one of the music critics even suggested putting me in an insane asylum and keeping music paper out of my reach."" - p 20
For my complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1115446-old-timey-new-music?chapter=1 (