I'm finished for a while, and return coming Monday (26 February). Please be welcome for reading and commenting, but I promised to myself and my family not to touch the blog for a couple of days. Thanks for understanding.
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About Me
Blog Archive
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2007
(125)
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February
(22)
- A nice weekend
- patience please...
- Gnothi seauton (know yourself)
- The beauty of decay
- Geese, meece, a dog and two ducks
- Evie on my pc
- Three billion matches
- Chewing gum for the mind
- Fair enough!
- Something about religion and thinking
- Nihil est in sensu quod non prius fuerit in spirito
- Dutch government: pea soup with sugar?
- Hospitality: care or shares?
- What's in a brandname?
- applepie
- Apple pie and Mozart
- Who is God?
- This week
- About alchemy
- A walk with the dogs
- The light is shining
- The meaning of meaning II
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February
(22)
1 comment:
What caused Schoenberg to move into atonality (be aware that all twelve-tone music is atonal, but not all atonal music is twelve-tone; Schoenberg did not develop serialism, as the twelve-tone system is called, until later in his career) should be relatively easy for you, as a European, to understand, at least in comparison to an American. Of course no one can say for sure what pushes art in any certain direction, but everyone was certainly feeling disillusioned and hopeless after the events of 1914-1918. In a lot of ways, the tonal system that had been in use for some time began to be seen as representative of the repressive bourgeois values which had started the war in the first place, and this, I believe, drove many composers to abstraction. World War II made it even more attractive, and one can notice in the music of the post-WWII generation (Boulez, Stockhausen, and their ilk) a true dedication to abstraction. Schoenberg stuck his toe in the water; the other jumped in head-first. Of course one cannot force people to like certain music, but they can encourage it. The first atonal pieces I really understood were Schoenberg's piano pieces, especially the Suite. The latter in particular owes a lot to Bach, and the similarity in everything but pitches used can help one to isolate that in one's mind for easier comprehension. I suggest obtaining a recording of Bach keyboard works--Glenn Gould playing the French Suites, perhaps--and Maurizio Pollini's recording of the complete Schoenberg piano works (if possible, get an edition of that recording also including Webern's Variations, as mine does). Listen to the first French Suite, then listen to Schoenberg's Suite. Maybe something will click. Or maybe not.
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