bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Webern's Sketches (III)
Authors: Smalley Roger
Published: February 2010

The most extensive sketches in the volume are of a third movement for the String Trio op. 20. Thirty-one bars were completed and are headed ‘planned as third movement ofthe String Trio op. 20 (August 1927 broken off in Hafning)’. The sketches cover five densely-packed pages and are transcribed as Ex. 18. Many passages exist in two, three or even more versions but usually the earlier, superseded, attempts have been crossed out and it is possible to trace the final form by following a path through the maze of vi – de signs, asterisks and arrows. Occasionally, however, there are several versions of a single bar or motive, none of which have been deleted. In the interests of achieving a continuity so that Ex. 18 can be read—and even, perhaps, played—as a torso, I have, in each of these ambiguous places, selected the version which seemsto me to be the most nearly definitive. For example, when one variant has the word ‘gilt’ by it, this is the one I have also chosen, even though the other versions may not have been crossed out.
Britten, Verdi and the Requiem
Authors: Boyd Malcolm
Published: February 2010

Verdi's influence on Britten's music is an important one, though recognizable in certain details of texture, accompanimental figures, and orchestration more than in any distinct similarities of melody and harmony. Not surprisingly it is especially prominent in Britten's full-scale operas, but it is in the likenesses between Verdi's Requiem and Britten's War Requiem that we find perhaps the most striking example of it. Both works were written for great public occasions, and in both a sense of public involvement is reflected in the sheer size of the works as well as in the large number of singers and players needed to perform them.
Kodály's Melody
Authors: Szőllősy András
Published: February 2010

It is a generally accepted view that the most striking features of Kodály's melodic structure may be explained by the influence of folk song. This is not borne out, however, by more detailed examination. It is true that there are certain features in his melodic types which later undergo a change, and of these a prime example is the precise periodic articulation of the melodies, which is much more consistent in his later compositions than in those of his youth. Such characteristics may indeed be attributed to the influence of folk music, but in general the typical Kodály melody existed before he could have come into close contact with folk music in the year when he made his first folk song collecting trip. Of his compositions from the years 1904–1906, the only work we can consider from the viewpoint of melodic structure is the ‘Adagio’ for violin and piano; the other two compositions, Evening for mixed voice choirs and Summer Evening for orchestra, are known only in their later revised form of 1930. This, however, is sufficient to convince us that the expansive declamation and the structural ornamentation which is an organic part of its idiom continue an instrumental tradition whose origin may well go back to chamber music of the Baroque age, with its broad-flowing slow movements. This also seems to be substantiated by the piano part, which replaces impressionistic harmonies with those which may be analysed in accordance with classical harmonic principles. This characteristic harmonisation requires mention here, although it is not closely connected with the problem of melodic structure, since even the most complicated of Kodály's harmonies, when stripped of their embellishments, reveal pure ‘classical’ chords as their basis. The role of the melody in this problem serves merely to emphasise that with Kodály, perhaps more than any other composer, harmony is never an end in itself, but is always the result of the movement of the melody. If the word did not have more significance than we wish to attribute to it here, we might say that Kodály's harmony is only secondary to melody. This word ‘secondary’, however, does not refer to expression, but merely attempts to shed light on the matter of origin, by stressing the supreme importance of melody for Kodály.
Folk Music and Art Music in Hungary
Authors: Kodály Zoltán
Published: February 2010

When searching for Hungarian character in music, we must start out from a wider circle, where we can still find some traces of it, and then work towards increasing density. A linguist pays attention to words which can be found scattered in Latin documents or words which were picked up by foreign authors in a distorted or misinterpreted form. Sometimes one finds a phrase of melody also in a foreign musical work, the rhythm of which we feel to be of Hungarian provenance. Therefore it is necessary for us to examine the works of foreign composers, which by title or by theme, contain some Hungarian characteristics. It is possible that they have preserved Hungarian melodies, the Hungarian source of which cannot be found. On the other hand there are certain works which can approach the Hungarian character in music without taking over melodies at all. The existence of a special Hungarian musical idiom is proved by the fact that also foreigners can learn it, and can use it, as a language, well or badly. However, the nationality of the composer may be superimposed—especially in more serious works—on the foreign melodies he has borrowed. Beethoven's works based on Russian themes cannot be called Russian music, nor his Turkish March Turkish. In his Scottish songs he adapted even Scottish melodies to his own musical language. Still there is a ‘cantus firmus’ and, in some cases, we can speak about bilingual music when accompaniment and melody belong to two different musical languages.
Kodály as Educationist
Authors: Young Percy M.
Published: February 2010

One day during the summer, after a long and widely ranging discussion, I left Kodály starting a Greek lesson. On another day we were to lunch together. Could I, he asked, walk to the restaurant? He, I discovered, had spent the earlier part of the morning walking in the Buda Hills. Kodály's physical activity and his zest for living are combined with a vivid intellectual energy, a splendid sense of humour, and an equal zest for learning. In analysis he is shrewd, in exposition direct. In short he has the qualities that one would look for in a teacher—in this context a school-teacher. That is what Kodály is, and as such he is, in the field of music, unique, for he remains at the same time a great composer.
Kodály on Records
Authors: Greenfield Edward
Published: February 2010

Kodály has done deservedly well at the hands of the record companies over the years, but it is very much a fluctuating success. One of the main problems of providing any comment on Kodály records is that they disappear from the catalogue almost as fast as they arrive. The latest list of deletions for example contains what I count the most impressive Kodály chamber music issue, the Second String Quartet played by the Hungarian Quartet (coupled with Villa-Lobos No. 6). Its disappearance leaves a bad gap in the chamber music representation. Similarly a fine account of the Psalmus Hungaricus from Berlin under Fricsay has disappeared recently without trace.
The Random Arts: Xenakis, Mathematics and Music
Authors: Butchers Christopher
Published: February 2010

The glib use of the terms ‘random’ and ‘chance’ in the contemporary arts is almost without exception thoroughly anachronistic. It has been a philosophical and mathematical commonplace since the Port Royal Logic in 1662 and Bernouilli in 1713 that there is no absolute polarity between chance and determinism; that there is, rather, a continuous spectrum between pure chance at one end and pure determinism at the other; that both pure states are rare; and that it is, moreover, possible to argue with as rigorous a logic, with as extended a mathematics and with as fruitful results at the chance end of the spectrum as at the deterministic end: to describe and manipulate degrees of disorder, or the movement from order to disorder and from disorder to order.
An Introduction to the Music of Zsolt Durkó
Authors: Walsh Stephen
Published: February 2010

Like most present-day Hungarian composers, Zsolt Durkó is scarcely known even as a name in this country, so for a start it will help to place him in a wider context. He was born in 1934, an exact contemporary of Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, and a near contemporary of Maw, Williamson, Bennett, Crosse and Goehr—a member, in other words, of that gifted generation whose formative years were post-war, and who now stand at the very centre of new music in the sixties. British composers have had their obstacles to surmount. In Hungary politics and music history have posed obvious problems. But in the music which is beginning to percolate into Britain, whether, by Bozay, Petrovics, Hidas or Durkó, they are seemingly mastered, and Durkó's work at any rate pays lip-service neither to ideology nor to the two great figures of twentieth-century Hungarian music, Bartók and Kodály.
John Ireland 1879–1962
Authors: Arnell Richard
Published: February 2010

John Ireland, one of our most distinguished Grand Old Men of music, died on 12 June, at the age of 82. His contemporaries were Vaughan Williams, Bax, Gordon Jacob, the neglected Cyril Scott, and Havergal Brian, whose Gothic Symphony was given its première here recently, some forty years after it was written! England is not an easy country to be born into as a composer, and Ireland had a hard struggle to support himself. He went to the Royal College of Music on a scholarship at the age of 14, and kept himself alive by playing at Smoking Concerts (he was a fine pianist), teaching and coaching.
A Conversation with Andre Jolivet
Authors: Cadieu Martine
Published: February 2010

In the drawing room there is the scent of hyacinth. Japanese lamps brought back from a distant journey alternate with subdued lighting from lace-covered lampshades in a characteristically French style. There is a grand piano, a leafy tapestry, like a wood at twilight, and on the walls a picture in red and black by Roger Bezombes inspired by the ballet Cinéma. A bust of Jolivet by Joseph Rivière stands on the mantelpiece. Both east and west have made their mark on this friendly apartment. Even before Jolivet took me into his study I felt the presence here of the African sun, and the memory of ritual songs. I knew that this great composer preferred lyricism to all other things.
Some Centenary Reflections
Authors: Mar Norman Del
Published: February 2010

It is now fifteen years since Richard Strauss, a legendary figure of 85 years of age, died a tired old man, though inconsequentially enough in the full flush of his third and last surge of fame and inspiration. In the course of a long life of virtually uninterrupted prestige and happiness he had enjoyed the rare experience of seeing the works of his earliest maturity become as much part of the standard orchestral repertoire as the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms. Yet it is perhaps a little sad to think how shocked the adventurous young composer of the Burleske of 1885, and of the deliberately provocative Aus Italien two years later, would have been had anyone suggested to him that he would one day be content to usurp Brahms's reactionary position as the Last of the Classics.
Thoughts on Rosen's ‘Schoenberg’
Authors: Maw Nicholas
Published: February 2010

The extent to which one regards as wishful thinking Schoenberg's claim that his invention of serialism would guarantee the supremacy of German music for another hundred years depends on one's attitude to the whole central 20th-century crisis of tradition. At several times since his death Schoenberg's claim has looked substantially like the truth, though whether it does so now is open to question. Or is it?
David Del Tredici and ‘Syzygy’
Authors: Knussen Oliver
Published: February 2010

One of the most refreshing and absorbing features of the American musical scene is the high proportion of ‘eccentrics’ among composers—Billings, Ives, Cowell, Partch and Cage to name but the most prominent. This can be accounted for, in part, by the proverbial nature of the place as a ‘cultural melting-pot’, forging what often seem to be diametrically-opposed styles and aesthetics together into new idioms which occasionally prove to be something more than the sum of their components. Another factor is the very size of the country: the convenient divisions of East-coast, Mid-west, West-coast, South and so forth can refer not only to different areas of the land mass but also to highly contrasted cultural tendencies. This is not terribly clear from our vantage point, as the (still) disgracefully scanty information which filters across the Atlantic does not allow us to piece the bits together into a satisfactory picture—and thus even the informed listener may be at a loss to place a composer of David Del Tredici's originality into some sort of context.
The London Sinfonietta and its World Tour
Authors: Vyner Michael
Published: February 2010

The London Sinfonietta has just returned from its first world tour, which took it to Germany, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S.A. and Canada. In seven weeks the ensemble travelled approximately 33,000 miles and gave 29 concerts with programmes ranging from J.C. Bach and Mozart to Henze and Ligeti. It was in fact the fulfilment of an ambition we had long held to take our kind of programmes round the Commonwealth and so make contact with a much wider audience—hitherto reached only by the gramophone record and radio tapes.
A Sacred Tetralogy
Authors: Routh Francis
Published: February 2010

These pieces, described as ‘meditations’, are in no sense religious programme-music. Their motivation (in the structural sense) is musical, not extra-musical. They seek to celebrate the Festivals of the Christian year not by direct representation (of bleating sheep, for instance, or sleigh bells, in the case of the first work), but by association; and not for any sectarian church only, but for the Church Universal. Partly for the unequalled richness of its sustained tone-colours, partly for its age-long association, the organ is uniquely able to meet this task, even if such a musical transubstantiation requires from the audience, for its fullest acceptance, a measure of rapport which can by no means be taken for granted in a secular age such as ours.
The Triangular Space: Peter Maxwell Davies's ‘Ave Maris Stella’
Authors: Pruslin Stephen
Published: February 2010

If one were seeking a metaphor for Ave Mavis Stella from among one's familiar musical experience, all the signs would point to a late Beethoven quartet. Of course the analogy between a string quartet and a sextet of mixed timbre is not literal, while the comparison of a work not yet two years old with some of the most visionary pieces ever written could be misconstrued, even if one swore it was only for analytical purposes as one was dragged screaming away to serve a five-year term for pretentiousness. But fortunately real affinity among composers and between pieces of music is not a function of our historical neuroses, and there are encouraging signs that sensitive and aware listeners can hear that it is not. One such friend of mine, having just heard Ave Maris for the second time, remarked that the first hearing some months earlier had thrown him into a kind of ‘2001’ outer space, while at the second hearing he realized he was listening to an absolutely classical piece of chamber music. In fact, as we will see, his two statements are very far from antithetical. At any rate, there is every reason to hope that such a listener, given a finite number of further hearings, would himself make the jump from ‘an absolutely classical piece of chamber music’ to ‘a late Beethoven quartet’ without any difficulty.
Roger Sessions and ‘Montezuma’
Authors: Harbison John
Published: February 2010

As Roger Sessions reaches his 81st year, he deserves as much recognition as we can give, certainly more than he has had. Yet his enterprise, however misunderstood or isolated, is no cause for lament; his achievement is cause for rejoicing, and he is still going. It seems like he is and always has been fifty, a middle-life sort of person, who had an uncanny foreknowledge of his life span and paced himself accordingly (as many artists have). He also has the artist's toughness, blindness, paitience, and ability to forge weaknesses into strengths. Much is written about his craftsmanship and solidity, but I hear more the abundance and sublime willfulness, Dionysian qualities, as characterizing his music and the development of his style. His music at its best is ecstatic, able to take flight. He has always proceeded in purely musical terms, and even his teaching has been antiacademic at its core.
Frank Bridge and The Land Without Music
Authors: Wood Hugh
Published: February 2010

Why the work of one composer survives and another doesn't remains a little mysterious. I myself incline on the whole to a Darwinian view of musical posterity: it is quality that chiefly determines the survival of the fittest, and some process of natural selection upon this criterion that ensures that the best are sorted out in the end. (If one throws in the other bit of evolutionist jargon—adaptation to one's environment—the limits to pursuing this metaphor become obvious). But temperamentally I distrust the endless discovery of Unjustly Neglected Composers. When the writer Mr. X is spoken of as ‘the persuasive advocate for’ composer Mr. Y, the phrase itself suggests the lawyer doing too good a job, and that the client so skilfully defended is in fact guilty—of lack of distinction anyway, if not lack of talent. There are so many Justly Neglected Composers. Every now and then, though, you make a discovery that upsets the comfortable applecart of this non-revisionist view of musical evolution.
A Pianist as Violinist
Authors: Rathbone Joyce
Published: February 2010

My subject is ‘What violinists and pianists can learn from one another, technically and musically’. Some people may be surprised at the idea that this is a subject at all! Their doubts will only underline what seems to me to be a very widespread and disadvantageous division between the two spheres of musical activity. All performers are specialists and it's very easy for specialists to overspecialize, to separate themselves from others who are, in fact, engaged in precisely the same activity, which is—music.
Symphony
Authors: Davies Peter Maxwell
Published: February 2010

When I started my Symphony in 1973, I had no idea that that was what it would grow into. The Philharmonia Orchestra had commissioned an orchestral work for 1974, and I wrote a moderately long single movement, provisionally called Black Pentecost. The title was taken from the end of a George Mackay Brown poem (which I had set for soprano and guitar, a short time before) concerning the ruined and deserted crofts in an Orkney valley—

The poor and the good fires are all quenched.

Now, cold angel, keep the valley

From the bedlam and cinders of a Black Pentecost.
Maw's ‘Personae’ Chromaticism and Tonal Allusion
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: February 2010

In progressing from the Lowell-like title of Life Studies to the Pound-like title of the three piano pieces that make up Personae, Nicholas Maw reinforces the importance he has come to attach to an element of enigma. Just as we are naturally curious about whether or not such titles allude, Elgar-like, to specific individuals, so the musical fabric itself intrigues by its range of reference, its hints, suggestions, implications. But whereas we might well be none the wiser if we knew to whom, if anyone, Maw's titles referred, a study of the music itself can teach us much about the power of individual pitches to create the widest structural perspectives, as they interact in elaborate chromatic configurations.
The State of the Symphony: Not only Maxwell Davies's
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

Peter Maxwell Davies's Symphony is substantial enough to have prompted an intensive study of the score, and problematic enough to have prompted this essay. ‘Problematic enough’ is not a tactful or cowardly euphemism for ‘bad enough’, though it might just be a euphemism for ‘uneven enough’: we shall see. In any case, to talk of problems here is the most objective approach as well as the most honest: initially, at any rate, it leaves the question open whether the problem is Peter Maxwell Davies's or mine or, most likely, a bit of both.
Alexander Goehr: The Recent Music (II)
Authors: Northcott Bayan
Published: February 2010

‘I have the greatest regard for Goehr, but I think his music gets worse and worse,’ one of our senior chroniclers of the avant-garde remarked to me some five years ago: ‘First it was neo-expressionism, then neo-romanticism, now it is neoclassicism—where will it end?’ To be fair, the same speaker has since endorsed with delight Goehr's setting of Psalm IV (1976). Moreover, any indictment of backsliding from historical necessity has been complicated, for instance, by the composition of the ‘expressionistic’ Symphony in One Movement (1970) two years after the ‘romantic’ Romanza for Cello and Orchestra (1968), and by Goehr's considerable success in approaching an ideal of piano writing as ‘a sort of Bach crossed with Debussy—polyphonic impressionism’ in Nonomiya (1969). And, as I have already argued, his reclamation of ‘historical’ procedures and genres could be seen as the necessary complement to the stability of the serial-modal, bloc sonore harmonic method he developed after the Two Choruses (1962)—in other words, as modifications and enrichments of a technique and aesthetic essentially deriving from the Modern Masters. Yet it must be admitted that any residual questions posed by such a synthesis would seem vastly more pressing in the light of his unexpected progress since the appearance of Psalm IV.
‘NALI’ Gruber: Private impressions by a friend
Authors: Zykan Otto M.
Published: February 2010

When Heinz Karl Gruber was growing up, it was still the time of church choirs and village wind music, of languidly arpeggiated harmonics on the harp, and promethean glissandi from heaven-storming violinists, of brilliant major keys and oh-so-doleful minor ones, of generous godfathers and old-fashioned aunties, of dying elves, bread-and-dripping, and the tragedy of breaking voices.
Music and Politics: Notes instead of a review
Authors: Gruber HK
Published: February 2010

I was afraid it would happen: after drafting only a page or two of the commissioned review, I see that I am already indulging in a kind of shadow-boxing, at the expense of the book and its author. The fact is that any thoughts I may have on the subject of music and politics find their natural expression in my own musical work. Putting them into words is, I discover, like trying to catch an eel with my bare hands: it tends to be somewhat cramping, and it does, of course, consume a great deal of time that would otherwise be spent on composition. If, nevertheless, I persevere, it is only because I am aware that the task may be of some use to me personally, in helping to clarify certain musical or aesthetic aims. But since the result cannot possibly be published as a review, I must ask myself whether observations and catchwords noted down for my own purposes are worth publishing at all, and whether in particular they have any point for readers who know nothing of my music. I am by no means sure of the answer. There is, however, one consolation. In the long run, a composer's pronouncements are relatively as insignificant as his creed or his party card. The only decisive factor is the music itself.
Carter in the Seventies
Authors: Schiff David
Published: February 2010

In the last ten years Elliott Carter has completed as many works as he had in the previous two decades combined. The increased rate of composition—A Symphony of Three Orchestras was written in six months—has been matched by even greater formal and poetic daring. Indeed the works from the Third Quartet onward are so adventurous in conception that there is little in the way of traditional musical terminology that can be used to describe their forms, harmonies, or even, as in the case of the most recent work, Syringa, their genre. And while Carter's continued exploration of abstract discourse in the Third Quartet, Duo and Brass Quintet was to be expected, the preoccupation with the voice and poetic subjects in the next three works seemed, at first, a surprising development. Carter turned to song composition in 1975 with A Mirror on Which to Dwell, a cycle of six poems by Elizabeth Bishop dedicated to the artists who gave its first performance 24 February, 1976: Susan Davenny Wyner, soprano, and Speculum Musicae. By the end of 1976 he completed A Symphony of Three Orchestras, a purely instrumental work stemming from the various projects for a choral setting of Hart Crane's ‘The Bridge’ that Carter had planned since the 1930's. A Symphony was premièred by Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic, to whom it is dedicated, on 17 February 1977. On 10 December last, the eve of Carter's 70th birthday, Syringa was given its première by Jan de Gaetani (mezzo-soprano), Thomas Paul (bass) and Speculum Musicae, conducted by Harvey Sollberger. Dedicated to Sir William and Lady Glock, this work superimposes John Ashbery's retelling of the Orpheus legend, ‘Syringa’, sung by the mezzo, upon fragments of classical Greek texts sung by the bass. It might be termed a polytextual motet, a cantata, a chamber opera, or a vocal double concerto.
Rene Leibowitz (1913–1972)
Authors: Maguire Jan
Published: February 2010

The name of René Leibowitz is widely known; but at the same time, rather like that of Ferruccio Busoni, it evokes general bewilderment, a reaction of ‘Yes, know the name, but who is he?’ This is due in part to his wide range of activities, but it is also due to the paradox which pervades his work, thought and life. Like Busoni, Leibowitz was the all-important link between one epoch in music and another. He has had a profound, deep-running influence over almost all musical endeavour today, through his profuse writings, his 35 years of teaching, his conducting and his compositions—but most, perhaps, through his profound beliefs and the way he lived them to their utmost expression. That influence, although it was and remains deeply felt, has gone to a great extent unrecognized because it is subtle, not sensational.
Points of View
Authors: von Schweinitz Wolfgang
Published: February 2010

If it is true that all art reflects the social, intellectual, and human conditions of its time, today's music cannot help being profoundly affected by the changes taking place in our advanced consumer society. We have seen the end of that belief in progress which for a whole century was the mainspring of cultural development. Rationalism has proved itself incapable of ordering the world rationally, and an over-developed materialism has led only to a self-perpetuating cycle of frustration. As we become increasingly aware of how the human spirit is alienated from a world governed by materialistic and rationalistic criteria, we sense a need for re-humanization. In the energy generated by that recognition lies a hope for the future; and so long as the realities are critically discriminated, there is no danger of an illusory flight into some idyllic never-never-land.
John Foulds and the String Quartet
Authors: MacDonald Calum
Published: February 2010

The Park Lane Group's recent concert series ‘The British String Quartet’ provided a useful conspectus of the various ways in which British composers have tackled the quartet medium; but at the Introductory Symposium on 6 November some members of the public seemed to think the series would have benefitted by the inclusion of more works previous to the year 1960: the quartets of Vaughan Williams, Frank Bridge, Van Dieren, Rubbra, and Alan Bush's Dialectic were all mentioned in this regard. One name absent from the discussion—because it is doubtful if the participants had ever heard it, and impossible that they should be familiar with a body of unpublished music that has lain virtually undisturbed since 1939—was that of John Foulds. Yet Foulds was a prolific writer of string quartets; and at least one of them, the Quartetto Intimo of 1931–2, seems to me one of the most exciting essays in the medium ever written by a British composer. Since that work is shortly to be heard in public for the first time, it seems appropriate to direct some attention to the achievement of a composer whose music is only just beginning to emerge from the shadows.
What the Conductor Owes to the Composer
Authors: Mavrodin Alice
Published: February 2010

The preceding article ended with a question. The title of this one contains an implicit reply—which is moreover a strictly foreseeable one. Indeed, an artist who has attained the fulness of his creative powers should be able to change his means of expression without altering its internal structure.

On leaving the stage, Markevitch the composer bequeathed all his experience to the conductor. Certainly, the conductor still had much to learn, and he was applying himself passionately to the task when, at the end of the war, the Allies in occupied Florence entrusted him with the conductorship of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. But the essentials he had known long since, because—as has been seen—his thought was essentially orchestral. This is why Markevitch, in deciding to become an interpreter, did not take up the familiar piano, but preferred orchestral conducting, of which he had scarcely more than an elementary idea and which he now had to manage in his own way, guided only by his pigheadedness, his tenacity, and … his experience as a composer.
Homage to Béla Bartók
Authors: Panufnik Andrzej , Ginastera Alberto , Xenakis Iannis
Published: February 2010

For me personally, Béla Bartók is the greatest composer of the first half of this century. I think that none of his contemporaries has so creatively enriched the three basic elements of music: harmony, melody, and rhythm, all three in balance, without neglect of any. And his range of expression extends all the way from gentle lyricism to violent, atavistic outbursts.
The Musical Language of Bartók's 14 Bagatelles for Piano
Authors: Antokoletz Elliott
Published: February 2010

Bartok's musical language may be approached from two points of view—one, in which the concepts and terminology are derived from folk-music sources, and the other, in which the concepts and analytical tools are derived from certain currents in contemporary music. The present essay is intended to demonstrate, through a study of selected pieces from the 14 Bagatelles for piano, opus 6 (1908), that the assumptions underlying both approaches are essential in understanding the evolution of Bartók's musical language, and that fundamental relationships exist between the diatonic folk modes and various abstract pitch formations commonly found in contemporary compositions.
The Chinese Song-Cycles of Brian Dennis
Authors: Hill Peter
Published: February 2010

Brian Dennis's output since 1973 is evidence of his fascination with Chinese poetry. During that time he has composed no fewer than nine cycles for voice and piano to his own versions of poems from the T'ang dynasty, showing a particular preference for the poets Wang Wei and Tu Fu. The musical development through these cycles owes as much to Dennis's response to the poetry as to any purely musical necessity. The poems became an obsession, the individual problems they posed the catalyst for each musical change.
Leopold Spinner: The Last Phase
Authors: Graubart Michael
Published: February 2010

Leopold Spinner died on 12 August 1980; and with him one of the few remaining direct links with the second Viennese school. Since the publication of my earlier two articles on Spinner's music, one or two more works have been published. There have been isolated performances; for example, the Sonatina for Violoncello and Piano has been performed, and it has also been broadcast in Austria; and the songs, op.8 and op. 16, were broadcast on BBC Radio 3 last year. But these serve only to emphasize the extent to which the musical world at the moment fails to notice the existence of a composer whose ideals are precision and economy of statement, development, and form; clarity of texture; and a syntax based on that ‘predominance and total engagement of motivic obligation as the structurally unifying factor in a complete fusion between traditional homophonic concepts and the strictest polyphonic presentation’ to which Spinner himself, speaking of Webern, referred. Not until we see that the communication of genuinely original musical thought and feeling is achieved by uncompromisingly personal extension of a tradition — and not by climbing onto one of the fashionable band-waggons (‘texture’, ‘systems’, allusion to or quotation of the more comfortable aspects of the 19th century, or whatever)—will we respond to Spinner's music. In the meantime, deaf to a significant individual voice and resistant to the possibilities of further development inherent in the language spoken by that voice, it is we who are the losers.
'Soirées de Barcelone'—A Preliminary Report
Authors: MacDonald Calum
Published: February 2010

Gerhard's first ballet-score,Ariel, came about in 1934 as a result of a meeting between the composer and Leonid Massine which had been engineered by Antal Dorati—though, in the event, Massine rejected the music for ballet purposes as ‘too symphonic’. Two years later, Dorati was the catalyst for a second time when he suggested to Colonel de Basil (for whose company he was then conducting) that Gerhard would be a suitable composer for a Spanish ballet. Wishing to hear some of Gerhard's work, de Basil visited him one evening in Barcelona with Massine and the lead dancer of his company, and Gerhard improvised various pieces in appropriate style for them at the piano. His friend the poet Ventura Gassol—Minister of Fine Arts in the Catalan Government—was also present, at Gerhard's request, to lend moral support. After Gerhard's rendition, the talk turned to possible Spanish subjects for a ballet and the desirability of incorporating traditional Spanish styles of dancing into the choreography; and Gassol proposed an expedition by car to the town of Berga, in the Pyrenees, to see—as a fine illustration of what they were discussing—the ancient folk festivities of ‘Saint John's Fire’ which would be in progress that night.
‘This Sporting Life’
Authors: Anderson Lindsay
Published: February 2010

I first met Roberto Gerhard when I was engaged in the writing of a book, ‘Making a Film’, about the production of Thorold Dickinson's film, Secret People, at Ealing Studios in 1950 or 1951. The scenario of Secret People called for a ballet, of undefined Southern European origin, in which one of the principal characters (played by the then unknown Audrey Hepburn) was a principal dancer.
György Kurtag: An Outline Study (II)
Authors: Walsh Stephen
Published: February 2010

Immediately after the composition of the Gulyás cycle, Kurtág seems to have run into a second period of uncertainty as to how to proceed: this time understandably, since the Bornemisza cycle must have completely exhausted the obvious possibilities of what had started as a reductive language of bold, succinct gestures. True, the cycle had developed ways of expressive extension, but they were mostly sui generis, closely involved with the special qualities of Bornemisza's sermons. To have continued that line without self-repetition would perhaps have been impossible. The one obvious gain from the work, apart from the music itself of course, was the discovery of Kurtág's affinity with the voice and his evolution of a superbly versatile repertoire of vocal techniques and treatments.
Prokofieff's Eighth Piano Sonata
Authors: Brown Malcolm H.
Published: February 2010

Prokofieff finished the Eighth Sonata in 1944. It is unusual among his mature ‘abstract’ works in its stylistic kinship with his theatre music of the period. In earlier years, before his return to Soviet Russia, Prokofieff had composed two symphonies (Nos. 3 and 4) which derived much of their musical substance from stage works written shortly before them, but later the styles of his ‘absolute’ and ‘theatre’ music diverged considerably. Guided by the notion that the theatre in all its guises reached the mass public more directly than any other means of artistic communication, he addressed his Soviet theatre audience in a tremendously effective idiom exemplified in such works as Alexander Nevsky, Peter and the Wolf, and Romeo and Juliet. In his ‘abstract’ works of the same period he did not feel the need to carry the pursuit of ‘accessibility’ of idiom so far, and the exceptional character of the Eighth Piano Sonata among his work in this form is in some part attributable to the untypical presence of these ‘theatrical’ elements in it.
Maxwell Davies's Second Taverner Fantasia
Authors: Pruslin Stephen
Published: February 2010

The relationship between the musical thinking of Gustav Mahler and Peter Maxwell Davies becomes ever more apparent, and in the ‘Second Fantasia on John Taverner's In Nomine’ it takes on crucial importance.

The connection manifests itself immediately in the two composers' attitudes towards ‘surface’. A musical image is an abstraction of psychic content and must be given corporeal identity before it is communicable. Musical composition is the crystallization of the image into specific note-configurations of pitch, rhythm, timbre, register, etc. which taken together comprise the surface of a work. The act of listening then reverses the process by going from the surface back to the image. Composition is translation and listening is retranslation.
Delius's Requiem
Authors: Payne Anthony
Published: February 2010

With the advent at the turn of the century of compositional techniques that depended to a large extent on nervous and sensual responses, great problems were incurred at the psychological moment when a composer found that his nerves were not quickening with their former vibrancy, or else became aware, as possibly in the case of Debussy, that he was no longer able to trust in his private sense-world. If such a crisis is not to lead to a psychological and artistic cul-de-sac, in the attempted recreation of a past condition, a realignment is needed of conscious intellectual workings and the composer's natural responses. In the case of Debussy this process led to a language in which elements whose sole original purpose had been to embody his sense-world were now intellectually reshuffled to shore his personality against ruin. In other words they were stripped of their sensuous meaning and combined to form a consciously constructed art which would fill the newly apparent void. To uncomprehending ears this artistic change merely represented a falling off in inspiration, for the ripe sensual response to life and the world about is commonly believed to be synonymous with inspiration. The lack of sensuality in late works like the piano studies was recognised but not properly construed, the heroic constructive effort ignored.
Aaron Copland (II)
Authors: Cole Hugo
Published: February 2010

Copland's earlier works seem to invite classification—almost to classify themselves—by virtue of the composer's tendency to attack problems singly, and because the situations that evoked them are clear and definable. In the Third Symphony, written between 1944 and 1946, he is writing to a new specification. For a wider, but partly hypothetical audience, that must be presumed to include both experienced listeners, and a new generation, brought in by radio and recording; emotionally ready, but technically less well equipped to follow where the composer leads. “This is not a time for poignantly subjective lieder but for a large mass-singing”, Copland had written in 1941; by now, he was ready to make the big, all-inclusive statement, in terms acceptable to the unknown public, comprising both expert and casual listeners.
Some Recent Works of Peter Maxwell Davies
Authors: Smalley Roger
Published: February 2010

The music of Peter Maxwell Davies has recently undergone a remarkable rebirth—a transformation all the more remarkable for taking place in a country (England, if anyone is unsure) where the breath of life rarely enters most composers' works from the start. There is widespread confusion among English critics and writers about music as to what constitutes originality in music, a confusion most succinctly and ludicrously summarised by Mr. Ernest Tomlinson in the first part of his article ‘Light Music in the Modern World’ (Composer, Spring 1967). Mr. Tomlinson's article was primarily about light music, but at this point, as I understand him, he was writing generally about all modern music:
Tona Scherchen
Authors: Schiffer Brigitte
Published: February 2010

In the summer 1938, as I was on my way to London for the 16th ISCM festival, a cable arrived in Cairo, where I then lived. It was from the conductor Hermann Scherchen and it said: ‘My Chinese daughter born yesterday. Come to Lausanne to see her.’ So I did, and this was the first of many encounters. I remember her mother, the composer Hsiao Shu-sien, singing her to sleep with Chinese lullabies.
Robin Holloway
Authors: Northcott Bayan
Published: February 2010

‘Ah, Holloway—simultaneously advancing and retreating!’ a friend once memorably hailed him. Whatever his voluble nervousness of manner, there is certainly nothing equivocal about the speed and conviction with which he composes. All the same, his mature works convey a peculiarly complex sensibility. Born in 1943, he started composing copiously during his years as a chorister at St. Paul's Cathedral (1952–7). After reading English and Music at King's College, Cambridge (1961–4), he did research on Wagner and Debussy at Oxford (1965–7), returning to Cambridge as a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College and, from 1974, as an assistant lecturer in the Faculty of Music. More important than any of this for his development, however, was the quickening of English musical life during his adolescence. If the release in 1957 of the first recording of Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces was perhaps his profoundest formative experience, this was soon to be followed by William Glock's most progressive years at the BBC and by the emergence of the brilliant new generation of Goehr, Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle, Maw, and Bennett; it was Goehr with whom he studied from 1960–66.
Crises in Asian Music the Manila Conference 1975
Authors: Sucharitkul Somtow
Published: February 2010

The Asian Composers' League Conference-Festival, held in Manila, the Philippines, last October, was only the third occasion at which large numbers of Asian composers had assembled to thrash out and try to solve their common problems. The League had evolved out of a new sense of regional identity, an explicitly stated desire to combat the dependence of isolated Asian composers on the distant European mainstream. The approach was one which could only have come from Asia; composers purported to ‘represent’ their country in a quasi-ambassadorial way, and the conference was opened officially by the Philippines' First Lady in person, accompanied by the President. The ‘national delegation’ status tended from the beginning to turn the conference into an uncomfortable hybrid.
The Apollonian Clockwork: Extracts from a book by Elmer Schönberger and Louis Andriessen
Authors: Schönberger Elmer , Andriessen Louis
Published: February 2010

What is most conspicuous about this book is what it isn't.

It isn't a biography. Even the question as to when the main character was born isn't answered. It certainly isn't a survey of ‘life and works’. There are enough of those books.

It isn't even a surveyable book, even though it is about a composer whose music is easily ‘surveyed’. Survey and summary are simplification, which in themselves aren't bad so long as it's apparent that that is the case. But because there have been so many surveys of Stravinsky already written, it appears as if something like a survey is possible. And that is just not true. The facts alone are too numerous for one to be able to write, with a good conscience, a surveyable book. A thorough investigation of the historic and musical relationship between Stravinsky and Schoenberg would supply enough material for a heavy volume.
Britten's Cello Symphony
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: February 2010

In a review of the Cello Sonata in these pages, I suggested that Britten had paid Rostropovich a musician's compliment in writing a cello part which assumed technical mastery yet provided little occasion for its ostentatious demonstration. Such a compliment aptly summarizes the basis on which so fruitful a chamber-music partnership as theirs must exist, but to repeat it before the wider and less intimate audience of the orchestral concert is to run the risk of being misunderstood. It may be for this reason that the composer has chosen not to give his new work, for Rostropovich's cello and orchestra, the customary title ‘concerto’; but at least as many initial misunderstandings are likely to arise from his decision, wholly justifiable though it is, to call it a ‘symphony’.
Britten's New Piano Piece
Authors: Waterman Fanny
Published: February 2010

The ‘Night Piece’ for solo piano was composed in the spring of 1963 in response to a request from the Committee of the Leeds International Pianoforte Competition for a work to be compulsory for all participants. The Committee, of course, regarded it a high honour that the country's leading composer should so generously accede to a request for such a piece of occasional music. In addition to adding to the prestige of the competition the piece was also invaluable in revealing the competitors' imaginative and interpretative powers as they had had no opportunity of hearing any previous performance or recording.
Nicholas Maw's String Quartet
Authors: Payne Anthony
Published: February 2010

The fusion of the textural complexity of ‘Scenes and Arias’ with the simpler procedures of ‘Chamber Music’ which marked Nicholas Maw's opera One Man Show also forms the basis of the language for his most recent work, the String Quartet, which was commissioned for this year's Harlow Festival. If, as in the opera, there is nothing so elaborate texturally as parts of ‘Scenes and Arias’, the formal processes are quite the most subtle and involved in any of the composer's work to date. This is not to say that any obscurity exists, indeed it is possibly the work's greatest achievement that for more than 35 minutes of continuous music the listener always knows where he is in a form which shows so many thematic relations and cross-references. As an adjunct to these methods there are sections and paragraphs which simultaneously perform different functions, and the whole forms a pattern of suggestions ansd statements which is of the utmost intricacy. Similar methods are sometimes to be seen in Sibelius, and this is emphasised by the melodic growth which often governs Maw's thematic connections, but the sheer scale of operations in the quartet makes it something new in this field. Alan Bush's Dialectic, for instance, which argues with similar rigour, occupies only half the time. Furthermore, the Bush and the Sibelius achieve their diversity through virtual monothematicism. Maw needs more material to fill his larger canvas, and this raises the additional problem of relating the different streams of thought thus engendered. The consequent interlocking of sections, together with the necessary anticipations and back references, could only have been achieved with considerable intellectual effort, yet the result is the most natural and musically felt structure Maw has so far conceived.