George Rochberg's critique of Schoenberg

[7/4]

QUOTE: "Fast forward to 1990, and the Times does a big article on the death of twelve-tone music (after it had completely emptied the concert halls), citing many of the leading composers of the day saying things to the effect of, 'Oh, it was all just a big mistake, and we won't do it anymore, if you'd just come back to the concert halls...'"

Can you supply a link or some specific text from this article. Frankly, none of it rings true. I don't believe that 12-tone "emptied the concert halls" or that such composers "begged" audiences to come back. Sounds like a spurious way to discredit some serious music.

Sounds like the Times was just having a slow news day.

[sgcim]

QUOTE: "Fast forward to 1990, and the Times does a big article on the death of twelve-tone music (after it had completely emptied the concert halls), citing many of the leading composers of the day saying things to the effect of, 'Oh, it was all just a big mistake, and we won't do it anymore, if you'd just come back to the concert halls...'"

Can you supply a link or some specific text from this article. Frankly, none of it rings true. I don't believe that 12-tone "emptied the concert halls" or that such composers "begged" audiences to come back. Sounds like a spurious way to discredit some serious music.

There are so many articles on this subject, it's difficult to just choose one, but here's one i found (though it's not the one I mentioned):

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/10/arts/classical-view-how-talented-composers-become-useless.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar

[Leeway]

Even Taruskin, the (self-described?) "pit bull" of modern music criticism, is a lot more measured that the original article you referenced. He seems mostly interested in taking shots at Donald Martino and Milton Babbitt, maybe side-swiping "academic composing" along the way. This seems to me to be a rear-guard action. It seems a little late in the game for that.

[Larry Kart]

I remember that Taruskin piece quite well. He has a point there up to a point — in particular "Because there is no structural connection [in Martino’s music] between the expressive gestures and the 12-tone harmonic language, the gestures are not supported by the musical content (the way they are in Schumann, for example, music Mr. Martino professes to admire and emulate).”

But when Taruskin goes on to say "Insofar as he seeks to be expressive, the composer [of such music] is forced to do without language altogether,” the indictment IMO begins to fall apart. Altogether? In the same paragraph Taruskin says, "Mr. Martino can be expressive only in essentially inarticulate ways, the way one might communicate one's grossest needs and moods through grunts and body language. Huge contrasts in loudness and register, being the only means available, are constant.”

I know Martino’s music, and while he is not my favorite modern composer, Taruskin’s claim that Martino "can be expressive only in essentially inarticulate ways, the way one might communicate one's grossest needs and moods through grunts and body language” is not my experience of that music at all, though it sure does make for a nasty-sounding indictment. The problem here, I would say, is twofold — first, in Taruskin's piece there is the lingering sense (see some of what has been said by and about George Rochberg above) that expressivity is something that is more or less separable from (tacked onto?) the work's "musical content." Second, Taruskin's air of irritation and bad faith, in particular an unwillingness to entertain the possibility that there might be kinds of expressivity that one is not already familiar with or are neither false nor broken but of a sort that is not to one’s own taste. (For me, that last option would be the case with much of Donald Martino's music.) Paraphrasing W.H. Auden, Taruskin often comes on like a man who faced with arguably imperfect works of art would prefer that they and their creators not exist at all and that decisions about which works and creators should survive be left exclusively in his hands. Given his ostensibly quite different political views, it's interesting that Taruskin has always seemed to me to have the mindset of a Soviet political commissar.

[Guy Berger]

I don't think anyone is proposing a return to classical tonality. Could be wrong but I think it is that romantic manipulation of tonality that is equated with expression. That said, who knows what they mean really. I don't think Rochberg wants to purge Schumann.

When I studied composition at a university in the late 70s under J. Lessard, he, along with all of the other teachers there, were all pushing the strict twelve-tone method of Schoenberg (whom Lessard disliked- he preferred Webern).

I switched teachers, and my new teacher disliked Webern (he said his music sounded like a bunch of little farts), and preferred Schoenberg.

Meanwhile, Lessard hated my new teacher's music (he'd slam the door shut if he heard him playing it on the piano, saying something like, "will you stop that infernal noise!"), along with jazz (I asked him what he thought of it, and he said, "I don't think of it").

At that point, I just decided to get my degree, and forget about academia.

Fast forward to 1990, and the Times does a big article on the death of twelve-tone music (after it had completely emptied the concert halls), citing many of the leading composers of the day saying things to the effect of, 'Oh, it was all just a big mistake, and we won't do it anymore, if you'd just come back to the concert halls...'

I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER?!?

[JSngry]

Second, Taruskin's air of irritation and bad faith, in particular an unwillingness to entertain the possibility that there might be kinds of expressivity that one is not already familiar with or are neither false nor broken but of a sort that is not to one’s own taste. (For me, that last option would be the case with much of Donald Martino's music.) Paraphrasing W.H. Auden, Taruskin often comes on like a man who faced with arguably imperfect works of art would prefer that they and their creators not exist at all and that decisions about which works and creators should survive be left exclusively in his hands. Given his ostensibly quite different political views, it's interesting that Taruskin has always seemed to me to have the mindset of a Soviet political commissar.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a couple of hardcore hardboppers back in the 1970s about a Cecil Taylore record (one of the New Worlds, maybe one of the Hats, Ramsey Ameen was on it and he was in town for a concert/recording and I was involved in the proceedings, so whoopdie-doo about all that). The intended damning critiques was that "there was no language, it was all just bleepsreechackBOOM", to which I said well hey, if enough people are saying "bleepsreechackBOOM" and understand amongst themselves what "bleepsreechackBOOM" means, then you pretty much DO have a language, correct? One guy was all like, hey, whatever, you're just trying to confuse the issue, and the other guy was, hmm...that's a good point.

Didn't change anybody's mind, but that's not the point. The point is are you going to not like something and move on about it, or are you going to not like something and create some persecution complex about it? Or do the same thing about liking it?

Things are only complex until they're not. Music is just sounds organized the way somebody(s) thinks/sounds like they think they should sound.

[Guy Berger]

Didn't change anybody's mind, but that's not the point. The point is are you going to not like something and move on about it, or are you going to not like something and create some persecution complex about it? Or do the same thing about liking it?

One other option, pursued by the OP, is trolling people who do like it. Persecution complex implies a level of sincerity not present here, IMHO. (Not the most original troll, granted...)

Edited August 2, 2014 by Guy

[7/4]

Didn't change anybody's mind, but that's not the point. The point is are you going to not like something and move on about it, or are you going to not like something and create some persecution complex about it? Or do the same thing about liking it?

One other option, pursued by the OP, is trolling people who do like it. Persecution complex implies a level of sincerity not present here, IMHO. (Not the most original troll, granted...)

Or simply make or more complex than it needs to be.

Edited August 2, 2014 by 7/4

[sgcim]

No Arnold, you shan't have the last word.

You were truly a master, but you sought to reduce music to an aurally meaningless mathematical formula consisting of twelve-tone rows, in which no note could be repeated until the row had been stated.

Though you composed master works outside of the twelve-tone system, you and no one else composed a master work using the STRICT, serial system.

Praise free atonality, but the twelve-tone enslavement is over!

Adrian Leverkuhn

[David Ayers]

No Arnold, you shan't have the last word.

You were truly a master, but you sought to reduce music to an aurally meaningless mathematical formula consisting of twelve-tone rows, in which no note could be repeated until the row had been stated.

Though you composed master works outside of the twelve-tone system, you and no one else composed a master work using the STRICT, serial system.

Praise free atonality, but the twelve-tone enslavement is over!

Adrian Leverkuhn

I.e. Adorno, who mentored Mann on this.

[sgcim]

I think I should've titled this 'popular' thread, "Rochberg's Critique of the Strict Twelve-Tone Method of Composition", rather than a critique of Schoenberg, whose music and genius Rochberg greatly admired....