bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Brief Encounter: Ferruccio Busoni
Authors: Goldschmidt Berthold
Published: February 2010

It must have been in Hamburg during the winter of 1920–21 that I heard Busoni for the first time, as soloist in a concert directed by Werner Wolff-the son of the impresario Hermann Wolff, a former secretary of Hans von Bülow, who had also been at one time Busoni's manager. Werner Wolff, a fine musician and a conductor of the Hamburg Opera, was my teacher in harmony and counterpoint, and had invited me to be present during his rehearsals with the Hamburg Philharmonic. I was still at school - in my final year - and had to have special leave of absence for two days, something that was very rarely granted. But such was the reputation of Busoni as a world-famous virtuoso that the headmaster readily agreed.
Tanmatras: The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi
Authors: Freeman Robin
Published: February 2010

Giacinto Scelsi, last Count of Dayala Valva and one of the most extraordinary composers of this century, died in Rome on 9 August 1988 at the age of 85 in the Policlinico Gemelli after an attack brought on by the sweltering Roman summer: he who never went to the mountains to avoid it, thinking that warmth could do him only good. After the Naples earthquake of 1980, which flattened the mediaeval hill town of Valva and with it the family castle and its library, Scelsi said: crolla il castello, crolla il padrone. The castle falls to bits and so does its master. Those of us who knew him in his last years remember above all the frail figure sitting on a couch below the two portraits that Dali had given the Eluards for a wedding present, doing ironic and at times testy battle with the world and old age, there in his overheated house across from the Roman Forum. With such a view, he used to say, what one does must be quite splendid or else a very bad joke. During his lifetime Scelsi refused to be photographed, did his best to avoid programme notes, and gave information about his life only when he chose to forget himself in conversation. Few of us cared to violate these rules, knowing that for a man who had dictated the mémoires of his future life they represented a kind of defence against a finality imposed from without. He sought something like this in his music as well, hoping it would seem only a snatch of what had been going on long before, of what would be going on long after.
Octaves in Webern's Bagatelles
Authors: Busch Regina
Published: February 2010

Before Schoenberg's Harmonielehre was published in December 1911 by Universal Edition, Vienna, extracts from it were printed in various periodicals, among them the final chapter, ‘Aesthetic Evaluation of Chords with six or more Tones’ in the second June issue of Merker. Besides examples from works by Schoenberg, Schreker, Bartók and Berg, the chapter quotes a passage from ‘a string quartet by my pupil, Anton von Webern’: bar 5 of the first movement of op. 5, composed in 1909 and first performed in February 1910. There are some pointers as to how this quotation came about.
Gruber's Concertos
Authors: Driver Paul
Published: February 2010

The concerto evidently appeals to HK Gruber, as symphonies do not. He has so far written four works that are unambiguously in this form: ‘…aus schatten duft gewebt…’, a concerto for violin and orchestra of 1977–8; the concerto for percussion and orchestra Rough Music (Rauhetöne) of 1982–3; Nebelsteinmusik, for solo violin and string orchestra, of 1988; and the Concerto for Cello and Chamber Orchestra of 1989. Ambiguous examples of the form are his early Concerto for Orchestra (1960–64) – concertos for orchestra are by definition ambiguous – and Frankenstein!!, his ‘pan–demonium’ (rather than ‘concerto’) for baritone chansonnier and orchestra (on children's rhymes by H.C. Artmann), finalized in 1977. Then there are four works which remain in manuscript (withdrawn from circulation): Concerto No. l for flute, vibraphone, xylophone and percussion (1961); Concerto No. 2 for tenor saxophone, double bass and percussion (1961); ‘furbass’ for double bass and orchestra; and an unsatisfactory forerunner of the violin concerto, Arien (1974–5). The symphony he has not touched; and one is tempted to see in this reliance on solo/ensemble confrontation an attempt to hold together the self–splintered, all too globally diversified language of the late 20th century by an eloquent soloist's sheer persuasiveness, by musical force, so to speak, the soloist being dramatized as a kind of Atlas. In the same way Gruber's recourse to popular songs and idioms of ‘light music’ in these works can seem like a desperate attempt to find a tonal prop and sanction for a language so pervasively threatened by tone–deafness and gobbledygook.
Andrew Toovey
Authors: Finnissy Michael
Published: February 2010

Identifying points of reference in Andrew Toovey's work can present quite a challenge. Not only are his musical sympathies unusually diverse and deliberately unaligned to the readymade categories of our recent past (minimalism, neo-Romanticism, new complexity), but the fundamental stylistic ‘gesture’ can as readily be compared to the visual arts as to any music – to the work of Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg or Stanley Hayter.
‘The bird sang in the darkness’: Rautavaara and the voice
Authors: Moody Ivan
Published: February 2010

The biographical facts about Einojuhani Rautavaara are quickly told, but are highly indicative of two important aspects of both his character and his music; namely his thoroughness of technique and his cosmopolitan outlook. He was born in 1928, the son of an opera singer. He studied composition initially with Aarre Merikanto at the Sibelius Academy, and then went to the United States in 1955 on a scholarship (awarded at Sibelius's recommendation) to study with Copland, Persichetti, and Sessions. Later he went to Switzerland and studied further with Wladimir Vogel, and in Cologne with Rudolf Petzold. In his turn Rautavaara has become much respected as a teacher, and was awarded the honorary title of Professor of Arts in 1971. Since 1976 he has himself taught composition at the Sibelius Academy.
Dallapiccola: A Programme-Planner's Guide
Authors: MacDonald Calum
Published: February 2010

A catalogue raisonnée of the works of Luigi Dallapiccola is planned for the next issue of TEMPO, as a tribute to the memory of the Italian master a year after his death. The following instrumentation-chart is a preliminary measure designed to elucidate the practical problems of mounting performances of his vocal and non-vocal chamber music (from solo instrument to chamber orchestra—here defined as small orchestra without full string body).
A Footnote to ‘Dallapiccola and the Organ’
Authors: Vlad Roman
Published: February 2010

Rudy Shackleford has pointed out that in my (English) monograph Luigi Dallapiccola, published in 1957, I gave two different forms of the series on which Luigi Dallapiccola's Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera is based: a first, ‘erroneous’ form (quoted in Shackleford's Example Ia), and a second one, included in the ‘arc of melody’ in piece No. 6 of the Quaderno, ‘Fregi’. This second form, quoted in Shackelford's Ex. No. Ib (which is obviously the ‘right’ one) differs from the first in the placing of two notes — G and A. Shackleford's remark requires some clarification, not so much for personal reasons as for its bearing on the very nature of the 12-note method and serial writing.
Aleksandr Davidenko and Prokoll
Authors: Edmunds Neil
Published: February 2010

As a result of the October Revolution, the ideas and activities that had been confined to an artistic, intellectual, or aristocratic minority, became overnight the property of the masses. In September 1918, the musicologist and educationalist Nadezhda Bryusova spelt out the role of music in the new society – ‘Music should give a capacity to live and a capacity to build life’. Led by the musical departments of Narkompros (the Ministry of Education and Culture) and Proletkul't (the proletarian cultural-education organizations), concerted efforts were made to break down the barriers between professional musicians, composers, and the general public. Attempts were also made to raise the standards of musical knowledge amongst the new audience. However, it soon became apparent that there was a need for a new breed of composer who was in tune with the desires and aspirations of the new society. A group of politically-minded composers which soon fell into this category was formed at the Moscow Conservatory in January 1925 as a result of a competition to compose a work commemorating the first anniversary of Lenin's death. That group was known as Prokoll, an abbreviation of Proizvodstvennii kollektiv(Production Collective).
Symmetry and Dynamism in Bartók
Authors: Mark Christopher
Published: February 2010

Many words have been written on the subject of symmetry in Bartók, prompted by the abundance and variety of examples of the phenomenon to be found on the music's ‘surface’. As yet, however, the fundamental stasis of symmetry and the dynamism for which Bartók's music is noted have not been adequately reconciled, irrespective of what kind of symmetry has been examined – spatial, formal, or pitch-class. One of the problems regarding work in the first of these categories has been that analysts have tended to examine excerpts rather than complete spans of music. Thus while Jonathan Bernard proposes that there is in Bartók a ‘hierarchy of relationships in which smaller symmetries contribute to larger ones, which in turn contribute to even larger ones, and so on, across ever larger spans of time’ – a theory which has the potential, at least, to account for dynamic aspects of the music – his concern only with incomplete spans limits the effectiveness of his approach.
Peter Sculthorpe at 60
Authors: Matthews David
Published: February 2010

Peter Sculthorpe's career has been one of remarkable unity of vision and consistency of purpose. From the start, he set out to create a music which, while universal in content, would be specifically Australian in its idiom. At the time he was growing up, this was not an over-simplistic aim, especially when Sculthorpe looked at the music then being written in Australia and saw that, by and large, it was hopelessly dependent on European manners and cultural traditions that could only be acquired at second-hand. Australians were then, and still are, in the process of self-discovery; the best Australian artists have learned that their own country can provide them with richer material for their work than can distant Europe. Painters, especially, have found the extraordinary Australian landscape, where trees shed their bark instead of their leaves, and prehistoric animals roam in a red desert, a potent source of inspiration. Even in the 19th century the painters of the Heidelberg school, in responding to the glaring Australian light, produced work quite different in feeling from the French Impressionists who were their models. In the 20th century a true national school has come into being, whose major figures have all helped to define the Australian landscape's peculiar strangeness – Lloyd Rees, Russell Drysdale, Fred Williams, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan.
The Revival of Holst
Authors: Dickinson A. E. F.
Published: February 2010

A centenary celebration raises various questions and prompts some warnings. Any nostalgic gesture is suspect: there is never any compulsion to think back. A calendar-based revival must justify itself by the sort of recognized central appeal that conditions a case for amplitude. This granted, and performances organized, the questions arise as to what the artist signified in his time and immediately after it, and what attention he can command in the context of present events. There was, for instance, never any doubt about the demand for Beethoven in 1970 by almost every variety of audience and performing body. Even the neglected early cantatas were found acceptable in what was a well-nigh routine acknowledgement across the board. Nor had the cult of Beethoven's art needed much more than time and personal advocacy to spread from Austria abroad, as a priority for orchestras and pianists, as the outstanding embodiment of resolute musical thought and as a triumph of evolution with unparalleled influence on the future of music.
Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony: A Soviet Artist's Reply…?
Authors: Huband J. Daniel
Published: February 2010

The attempt to relate a nonmusical event to a musical phenomenon creates problems for the musicologist. Compelled to search beyond the mere notes on the printed page, one may try to gain more penetrating insights into a particular work by scrutinizing historical circumstances concurrent with the genesis of the music. In the case of Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, the social and political background to this piece has been greatly emphasized. Yet could the efforts to relate the composer's compositional style to his troubles with the Soviet regime obscure musical issues? The Fifth Symphony, frequently viewed by many music historians as an apologetic musical response to the Pravda attack on the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, does not present as drastic a change in musical style as is commonly believed. An analysis of the four earlier symphonies reveals that they function importantly in the composer's evolution as a symphonist; Shostakovich refines several compositional techniques employed in these works and incorporates them in the Fifth Symphony, his first fully mature piece. The most salient features of the composer's early works that most clearly relate to his development as a symphonist shall be discussed in this essay. This process aims to reassess the hypothesis which suggests Shostakovich suddenly mended his ways in light of official criticism.
A Visitor from an Unknown Planet: Music in the Eyes of Filipp Herschkowitz
Authors: Smirnov Dmitri
Published: February 2010

I have never in my life met such an extraordinary person as Filipp Moiseyevich Herschkowitz, nor am I likely to ever again. He was a man of sharp intellect and great learning; and he combined a deep love of true art with a merciless irony, which was directed at everything and everyone around him. His clever remarks, serious as well as humorous, would instantly become anecdotes that would go round the whole of Moscow. He lived in a minute oneroom flat with his young wife Lena and their cat Kisik, and could barely make ends meet. They refused to make him a member of the Union of Composers, Muzfond would have nothing to do with him, and those who could have helped to support him, or even just lend him some money steadily, became fewer and fewer in number. He would spend days poring over a volume of Beethoven sonatas, a Mahler or Schoenberg score, making ever more unique discoveries, which would one day, he thought, go to make up a book – his life's work.
Evidence from a fragmented musical history: Notes on Berthold Goldschmidt's Chamber Music
Authors: Struck Michael
Published: February 2010

In Germany during the last few years interest has at last been growing in composers who were forced to go into exile (and were still able to do so) in the age of National Socialism. Thus attention has been focussed again in the land of his origin – though pretty belatedly – on the composer and conductor Berthold Goldschmidt, born in Hamburg in 1903. Goldschmidt had to reach a positively biblical age before he received serious consideration: in 1987, on the occasion of the Berlin Festival ‘Music in Exile’; in Duisburg, Hamburg, Essen, and – with heightened intensity – in the most northerly region of the Federal Republic, Schleswig-Holstein. Some of his works were performed on these occasions, and received with amazement and perplexity. But above all Goldschmidt was constantly questioned in interviews and panel discussions, as a ‘witness of his time’. Of course he is, beyond doubt, the ideal conversational partner: he can describe and comment on German musical life in the 1920's and early 1930's most vividly and with a touch of irony; he can report movingly, yet apparently without any trace of bitterness, on the abrupt breaks in his life and his musical career – emigration to England, the struggle to make a fresh start in that country (of which he became a naturalized citizen in 1947), the attempt to establish himself as a creative artist. One learns a great deal about the numerous disappointments on the way to a viable and satisfying existence as an artist, and about his virtual silence as a composer for almost 25 years, from 1958 to 1982.
Brian Elias's recent music
Authors: McBurney Gerard
Published: February 2010

In the past ten years a remarkable change has come over Brian Elias. He has turned from being a miniaturist to being a composer on a symphonic scale and with symphonic aspirations. Not that he has written any work with so self-conscious a title as ‘symphony’ – at least, not yet. But in these few years he has given us two extended cycles for voice and symphony orchestra, a large-scale single-movement orchestral work that must certainly be called symphonic, a set of 49 Variations for piano inspired by Beethoven's set of 32 in C minor, and now an orchestral ballet in progress for Kenneth Macmillan and the Royal Ballet. All these, and some impressive chamber works too, have come from a composer whose earlier reputation was based on a tiny scattering of compositions including a rarified solo soprano piece (based on a particularly obscure bit of Browning), a piece for solo violin, and the microscopic Five Piano Pieces for right hand alone.
Stravinsky's Self-Concealment
Authors: Holloway Robin
Published: February 2010

‘Subjugation’ in Stravinsky's works on religious texts is conventionally taken to mean such things as the refusal to attempt ‘expression’ of the ‘Et resurrexit’ in the Credo of the Mass, or the awesome denial of depiction of or comfort from Stephen's vision of ‘the heavens opened’ in A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer. Nevertheless even in this ostensibly most impersonal branch of all his impersonal output, a pattern can be discerned by which self-expression is pursued and achieved. Stravinsky said ‘“In the beginning was the word” is, for me, a literal, localized truth.’ I take him at his word, and examine his florilegia of religious texts in six major works, with just such a literal and localized intention.
Alexander Tcherepnin at 75
Authors: Layton Robert
Published: February 2010

Musical dynasties, so common a phenomenon of the past, are relatively rare in our own times; but the Tcherepnin family boast four generations of composers, encompassing a wide variety of styles and diversity of language. The 18th-century ‘dynast’ flourished in a community strongly bound to tradition, in a climate where styles were slow to change. Musical horizons were circumscribed by narrower geographical limits and a shorter historical perspective. The young composer knew less music of the past, and his relationship with what he knew was therefore closer. In the 20th century, however, the advent of mass media has altered all that. The successful young composer can hear music of his own and other cultures in a profusion undreamed of by his fathers, and he can explore a far more remote past, for musicology has developed into an industry, pushing back the frontiers ever further.
Towards A Metamusic
Authors: Xenakis Iannis
Published: February 2010

Today's technocrats and their followers treat music as a message which the composer (source) sends to a listener (receiver). In this way they believe that the solution to the problem of the nature of music and of the arts in general lies in formulae taken from information theory. Drawing up an account of bits or quanta of information transmitted and received would thus seem to provide them with ‘objective’ and scientific criteria of aesthetic value. Yet apart from elementary statistical recipes this theory—which is valuable for technological communications—has proved incapable of giving the characteristics of aesthetic value even for a simple melody of J. S. Bach. Identifications of music with message, with communication and with language are schematisations whose tendency is towards absurdities and desiccations. Certain African tom-toms cannot be included in this criticism, but these are exceptional. Hazy music cannot be forced into too precise a theoretical mould. It may be possible later, when present theories have been refined and new ones invented.
Two Works By Benjamin Lees
Authors: O'Loughlin Niall
Published: February 2010

The two works are the Piano Concerto No. 2 of 1966 and the Symphony No. 3 of 1968, which, like Lees's earlier works, continue to show ample evidence of this composer's ability to extend his traditional vocabulary in new and meaningful ways, without compromising his hard-won, individual style. Both are written in a sharp and incisive style that is full of tension. Vigorous and irregular rhythms that leave the listener no chance to relax his concentration are combined with pungent harmonies that are always imagined with a careful ear for the larger context. Large-scale form is controlled with dramatic insight, especially in the symphony, which is a work that breaks much new ground in its approach to symphonic form, while the concerto is a full-blooded and compact virtuoso work, of great character and imagination, with a sharp and incisive wit and a symphonic tautness.
More Reflections
Authors: Simpson Robert
Published: February 2010

Any imaginative hypothesis must be seminal, and Jonathan Harvey's is no exception. As he points out, a number of composers have been fascinated by the idea of harmonic structures radiating above and below a central axis in reflecting intervals. He says ‘from either side’ rather than ‘above and below’, and perhaps advisedly, for as soon as the concept of ‘below’ is permitted, so is that of gravity. The thesis depends on the removal of gravity in what is essentially a placeless, directionless space, without perceptible ups, downs, or sides. Swedenborg's rarified and not altogether realistic ideas come from a mysticism that is unclear about the nature of space. There are relative directions in space; it has dimensions; it is full of energy and radiation; in it gravity is inescapable. A man floating between earth and moon may not be aware of it, but he will drift in one direction or the other, according to which gravitational pull is the stronger. We can estimate at least roughly the distances between the galaxies, and their relative positions, their rates of movement away from each other if they do not belong to the same group. If the theory that in music the bass has moved to the middle refers to the apparent absence of an absolute bottom to the universe, it can be regarded as at least plausible, though without much basis in actual experience, and scarcely susceptible to proof. Where is this axis from which things radiate? It is not, presumably, a fixed and all too audible persistent internal pedal. No doubt it was there at the beginning, like the Big Bang, to be afterwards detected only by means of some residual musical radiation. It becomes an imaginary, or remembered, point.
Berthold Goldschmidt: The Chamber and Instrumental Music
Authors: Matthews David
Published: February 2010

My previous article on Berthold Goldschmidt (in TEMPO 144) dealt with the basic facts of his career, a career that received a severe setback when Hitler came to power in 1933 and Goldschmidt's music was banned in his native Germany. There seems little doubt that, had the Nazis not taken over, Goldschmidt, an up-and-coming young composer with a publishing contract from Universal Edition and an opera about to be staged in Berlin, would have consolidated his early success and become a prominent figure in German musical life. As it is, his music is at present scarcely played at all, and the works I shall discuss here are either long out of print or unpublished. I believe Goldschmidt's music to be of high quality and his neglect totally unjustified, but only performances of his work—and especially of his two operas—will substantiate my personal conviction.
Simplicity in Early Britten
Authors: Mark Christopher
Published: February 2010

It may at first sight seem rather odd that Britten could feel justified in making this famous comment soon after composing the War Requiem (1961), which by dint of the interaction of three planes of experience alone might be construed as one of the most elaborate choral-orchestral compositions of the 20th century. Yet there is not really much of a contradiction here: the emotional highpoint of the work comes in a moment of great stillness in which an unaccompanied solo voice delivers a very simple line of text set to a very simple melodic contour and rhythm:
‘Westerlings’—A Study in Symphonic Form
Authors: Warnaby John
Published: February 2010

There is little doubt that the character of Peter Maxwell Davies's music has undergone a considerable change since he settled in the Orkneys. This can be explained in terms of the development of a mature compositional idiom allied to a virtuoso technique; but in his recent works, the composer has evinced a growing preoccupation with traditional forms. Elements of conventional sonata design can be traced through much of his recent music and there has been a tendency to revert to three– or four–movement structures in preference to his earlier more kaleidoscopic approach involving a series of shorter, interlinked sections. The music has therefore become more ‘symphonic’, and the trend extends beyond the symphonies themselves, Black Pentecost, or the recent Sinfonia Concertante and Sinfonietta Accademica.
Two Contemporary Viola Concerti: a Comparative Study
Authors: Uscher Nancy
Published: February 2010

During the last half decade two composers—Jonathan Lloyd and Jacob Druckman—were commissioned by major ensembles to write concertos for viola and orchestra. Each composer has interpreted the concerto form in his own way, but both have departed somewhat from the traditional concept of the concerto. (According to the Harvard Dictionary definition, the solo part of a concerto is written in a ‘highly virtuosic style’. Grove's Dictionary adds: ‘the name concerto [is] generally given to an instrumental composition designed to show the skill of an executant’.)
Benjamin Lees in Excelsis
Authors: Slonimsky Nicolas
Published: February 2010

American composers are at the crossroads—at an intersection of three roads, the serial, the neo-baroque and that of the intransigent avant-garde. The serial road, in the Schoenbergian direction, is rapidly growing over with cryptochromatic weeds. The neo-baroque road has been polluted beyond recovery by Stravinsky's acolytes. As to the third road, it has become an Escher print, in which giant ants are twisted on a Möbius strip, with the vistas literally ‘far-out’.
How Bartók Performed His Own Compositions
Authors: Garst Marilyn M.
Published: February 2010

Performers of 20th-century music have more information about how the music is to be performed than do performers of earlier music. Since the Baroque era, composers have become more explicit in their notation, greatly simplifying questions of interpretation. In addition to the advantage of explicit notation, performers can often have personal contact with a living composer about interpretative questions. In the case of Béla Bartók, there are also recordings of the composer performing his own works. Such recordings are useful adjuncts to the musical notation.
Antal Dorati: Recent Works
Authors: MacD C.
Published: February 2010

In tempo 143 we published a complete catalogue of Antal Dorati's original compositions and orchestrations up to 1982. In the year of his 80th birthday, we are pleased to issue an addendum, up-dating that catalogue with details of the music he has written since then.
Peter Maxwell Davies: The Early Works
Authors: McGregor Richard E.
Published: February 2010

No Composer Comes Fully-Formed into the world, and Peter Maxwell Davies is no exception; but many of the ideas and concepts on which his mature style rests are present in seminal form in the first published works. No compositions are available for general study before the Trumpet Sonata, op.l (1955), but those that have been seen by friends and colleagues are variously described as being ‘remarkably traditional’ and showing influences ‘such as Bartók’.
Holst and India (II)
Authors: Head Raymond
Published: February 2010

In an effort to discover a more personal style, free of Wagnerian overtones and more truly representative of English culture, Hoist took the curious step of studying the Rig Veda in considerable depth. The year was 1907, a time when others too were searching for different ideas. In America the young Henry Cowell, disillusioned with romantic harmonies, sought (about 1908) new rhythmic and melodic possibilities in Oriental music and studied it under Oriental teachers. The year 1908 was important for Schoenberg, then—with the support of his close friends—on the point of bursting the chromatic dam to release expressionistic torrents. Beset with similar stylistic problems, Hoist went instead to Luzac & Co, an orientalist bookseller, and bought the two volumes of Ralph Griffith's translations of The Hymns of the Rigveda, the most ancient literature in the world. Through these hymns he returned to the source of Indo-Aryan culture in the hope that a new type of music, free of former constraints, would be suggested to him.
On Receiving the Staatspreis 1986
Authors: Cerha Friedrich
Published: February 2010

Let me start off by thanking my friend György Ligeti for his generous words, and at the same time (contradiction being a part of my nature) putting the record straight: to do something as well as possible because one believes in it is a matter of course rather than a cause for gratitude. Herr Peymann replied to an interviewer's remark, that Thomas Bernhard was lucky to be promoted by him: ‘Well, I suppose that is another way of looking at it. For my own part, I have always thought I was lucky that these works existed and I was able to perform them’. Which touches upon one—just one—of the crucial points in the relationship between the creative artist and society.
Josef Matthias Hauer: A List Of Works
Authors: Gustafson Roger
Published: February 2010

The Austrian Theorist and Composer Josef Matthias Hauer evolved a system of 12-tone music which he felt would save music from what he saw as the excesses of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the years 1918–26 he formulated his ideas concerning 12-tone music into three short treatises: Vom Wesen des Musikalen: Grundlagen der Zwölftonmusik; Vom Melos zur Pauke: Eine Einführung in die Zwölftonmusik; and Zwölftonmusik: Die Lehre von den Tropen. In these three works Hauer presented his ideas concerning the interval as the point of departure for melody, rhythm, and timbre, as well as his concept of music as a ‘pure’ art, which the composer should only approach through a system of ‘tropes’ or ‘tone-constellations’—theories markedly different from those of his contemporary Arnold Schoenberg.
Richard Emsley: A View of his Music
Authors: Barrett Richard
Published: February 2010

Richarid Emsley's relatively small but vital body of work has perhaps not received its just deserts, either in terms of frequency of performances or attention from the world of commissioning and publishing organizations. The primary reason for this, I believe, is an all-too-common one: his work is not as readily categorizable as that of many other young composers active in this country at present. Keith Potter implies as much in the only other article published to date on Emsley's work. Potter is much concerned with a supposed division between ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ in contemporary music. I believe that to be something of a red herring in this context—functioning in many cases as no more than a way of efficiently marketing, under the ‘designer label’ of postmodernism, much that lies in the uncertain territory between ‘music about music’ (which after all goes back at least to Stravinsky) and lack of imagination manifested as pastiche (which goes back much further). In any case it seems more fruitful, in the context of an introduction to Richard Emsley's music, to see each composition as part of a gradually unfolding process within his oeuvre—an oeuvre which in fact has many features in common with the processes exemplified in the individual works themselves.
Lawrence Morton (1904 – 1987)
Authors: Heyworth Peter
Published: February 2010

Lawrence Morton's name is shamefully abstent from the new American Grove, but in a sense he was more remarkable for what he was than for what he did.

His achievements were none the less not inconsiderable. As readers of TEMPO will know, his infrequent writings had characteristic directness and style. His ‘Evening on Roof’ concerts brought new perspectives to Los Angles, as well as world premiéres of workes by Stravinsky and Boulez. At Ojai he created one of the most distinguished small festivals in America.
Elliott Carter's Harvest Home
Authors: Schiff David
Published: February 2010

ApproachingHisEightiethBirthday, Elliott Carter has acquired a new fluency, as if composing had suddenly—finally—become easy. In his middle years Carter felt compelled to exhaust a musical vocabulary with each composition. Since the solo piano Night Fantasies of 1980, however, he has based a series of widely different works on similar premises: after years of ploughing through rocky soil it was now time for the harvest. As an overflow of this bounty Carter has produced a new (for him) genre: short occasional pieces of three to six minutes in duration. Along with the five major works composed since Night Fantasies, there are seven new short works for media ranging from solo violin to large orchestra. The inventiveness and high spirits of his recent music may call to mind those other wonders of a secondyouth, Falstaff and Agon.
Further Thoughts on Schnittke
Authors: Rice Hugh Collins
Published: February 2010

If Schnittke's plundering of past styles brings to mind Stravinsky, important distinctions must be made. Schnittke does not quarry the past with Stravinskian detachment; his stylistic amalgams can be a deal more riotous (as for example in the First Symphony) than anything Stravinsky would have countenanced. It is in fact Shostakovich rather than Stravinsky who comes to mind as the more apparent influence, with his striking juxtapositions of the sublime and the banal, the diatonic and the chromatic. Schnittke's music can occasionally sound like listening to Shostakovich through an accumulated wealth of musical debris from the Western tradition. Another obstacle to any assessment of Schnittke's work lies in the apparent naivety of so much of his technique. Structures are often the most basic of designs, thematic techniques appear unsophisticated (transformations, canons, simple heterophonic devices). Climaxes are achieved by extravagant instrumental gestures, long pedal points are used to unify paragraphs (or whole movements, as in the opening movement of the Requiem of 1974–5), and serial devices amount to the simplest chromatic formulations. The Quasi una Sonata (1968) for violin and piano, for example, demonstrates that ten years before the Concerto Grosso No. 1 Schnittke was exploring the use of chromatic tetrachords in quasi-serial formulations.
Round and about Górecki's Symphony No.3
Authors: Mellers Wilfrid
Published: February 2010

Wagner's Tristan is often referred to as the beginning of modern music: justifiably, in that in it a thousand years of European consciousness, will, desire, aspiration, pain, renunciation and guilt implode and explode. Taking his theme from the twilight of Europe's Middle Ages when the modern world was born, Wagner created a mythic drama which anticipates the central myth-makers of our time – Freud, Jung, and Marx. In a concept appropriating Christian redemption to Greek-tragedy's pity and terror, the gods are ourselves; and what Hardy called the pain of consciousness, proving too great to be borne, seeks release in unconscious nirvana. Much of the then avant garde music of the early 20th century, notably the Second Viennese School, stems from that tortuously self-involved but verklärte night; and it is hardly surprising that so incestuous a notion should have been balanced by its polar opposite. In his Rite of Spring of 1913 Stravinsky, born in a White Russia that had bypassed the European Renaissance, effected a conscious cult of the barbarically unconscious: a fertility rite and sacrifical murder in tune with the elemental cycles of the year, but also with the impending ‘death of Europe’ in the World Wars. Bartók, living in a country where a folk culture was still active, had less need of Stravinsky's cosmopolitan self-consciousness, but could fuse primitive techniques with the European legacy of Beethoven. Janáček, in Moravia, could create operas that were allied to seasonal rites, while probing the depths of the modern, divided psyche.
Górecki in Interview (1968) – And 20 Years After
Authors: Marek Tadeusz , Drew David
Published: February 2010

Górecki lives in Katowice. He is a rare guest in Warsaw – usually he comes to the capital once a year, at the time of the Warsaw Autumn Festival. About his work, his plans and his achievements, he is reluctant to talk. By the same token, the promotion of performances of his works is not a matter with which he concerns himself, maintaining as he does that a score, and especially one that is published and therefore available to all who are interested in it, speaks for itself adequately enough to stimulate possible performers, or else leaves them cold.
Antal Doráti (1906 – 88): his final works
Authors: MacDonald Calum
Published: February 2010

Tempo 143 published a complete catalogue of Antal Doráti's original compositions and orchestrations up to 1982, and we issued an update to that list in Tempo 151 on the occasion of the distinguished composer-conductor's 80th birthday. Doráti's death on 13 November at his home at Gerzensee, Switzerland, has sadly put an end to the seemingly ever-increasing creativity of his last years; but herewith, as a small tribute to an outstanding musician of the 20th century, we detail the music he managed to write during 1986–8 (though occupied, as always, in a busy international conducting and recording schedule), with addenda to his long list of transcriptions of other composers.
Performer Indeterminacy and Boulez's Third Sonata
Authors: Harbinson William G.
Published: February 2010

With these words, Pierre Boulez opened the article entitled ‘Sonate, que me veux-tu?’ in 1963. Referring to his Third Piano Sonata – portions of which first appeared in 1955 – Boulez presented his arguments supporting compositions that contain ‘open’ or ‘mobile’ forms. ‘Fluidity of form must integrate fluidity of vocabulary’, Boulez stated.
Aspects of Zsolt Durkó's Piano Concerto
Authors: Hill Peter
Published: February 2010

Durkó is no pianist, but you would never know from the way he writes for the piano, with a meticulous feeling for what makes the instrument musical. This much was evident from a glance at the score of his Concerto when it arrived (‘on approval’, as they say) on my piano last summer. So, too, was the depth of character and nuance in those passages simple enough for me to read at sight - one especially seductive example being a little two-part invention for the soloist, pedantic and wistful, to which a third voice (scored, of all things, for timpani) lends an air of oafish charm.
Nicholas Maw's New Opera
Authors: Walsh Stephen
Published: February 2010

The Rising of the Moon is Nicholas Maw's second opera, and like its predecessor, One Man Show, it is a comedy. As far as subject matter and its treatment go, however, the resemblance ends there. One Man Show is a farce, based on a flimsy comic idea by Saki. The Rising of the Moon is a romantic comedy whose central situation—though necessarily presented in high theatrical relief—is essentially realistic and depends for its effect on the portrayal of a number of true-to-life three-dimensional characters. Beverley Cross's libretto, based on an entirely original idea, is set in Ireland in the year 1875. This was a tragic period in Irish history. After years of unavailing struggle for home rule and for the emancipation of a Catholic people from minority government by Protestants, Ireland had found herself in the mid-nineteenth century still bound in a most unfavourable union with England. Her economic and industrial growth was deliberately kept down by legislation in Westminster, prompted by fears of competition with home industry. The poverty of most Irish peasants was extreme, as it had been even before the potato famine of the late 1840s, and many were still suffering at the hands of unscrupulous landlords who were quite prepared to implement laws which made eviction the normal penalty for non-payment of rent. In these circumstances the English were naturally both hated and feared. Yet those who tried to stir popular feeling into action—Daniel O'Connell, the Young Irelanders, the Fenians—found their hands tied by Ireland's internal religious and social divisions, and by the listlessness of an underfed, underclothed, even underhoused people. Such revolutionary outbreaks as took place were isolated and poorly organised, and although the English executive in Ireland—including the army—might tend to regard all Irish peasants as potential rebels, they had long since learnt that the rebel bark was a good deal worse than the insurgent bite, and so they treated the natives accordingly.
Alexander Tcherepnin Septuagenarian
Authors: Slonimsky Nicolas
Published: February 2010

Sasha Tcherepnin, a tall boy for his age, was a familiar figure at the St. Petersburg Conservatory fifty-odd years ago, as he was seen walking down the corridors accompanied by his father Nicolas Tcherepnin, professor of composition and conducting, teacher of a generation of Russian composers, and himself a composer of stature. Paradoxically, it was Sasha's mother, not his father, who gave him his first music lessons. As soon as he learned to manipulate the piano keys, he began making up tunes of his own. There was so much music lying around the house that he picked up the rudiments of notation intuitively. He learned notes and the Russian alphabet at the same time. Now, at seventy, he cannot even remember when he could not read Russian words or musical notes.
The Contemporary Problem
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

“And now,” I said to a prospective pupil, 21, with an awe-inspiring thesis on his heart, “I've got to go home and write 750 words on chance. The editor of Tempo wants them by tomorrow.” “Chance?” he asked respectlessly, “that's not your subject. Musical determinism, yes.” He was right; in fact, as will be seen in seven hundred words' time, he had given the reason why I chose the subject. As long ago as 1966, I was struck by the philosophical and indeed musico-analytical naivety of Iannis Xenakis's (otherwise fascinating) piece ‘The Origins of Stochastic Music’ (Tempo 78), which defends the introduction of mathematics into music on the basis of the proposition that “by reason of its complexity, the strict, deterministic causality extolled by the neo-serialists was a lost cause”. I wrote my heart out when total serialism started, diagnosing the lost cause as it was born—but I never observed any complexity: a phrase of Beethoven needed far more complex analysis than a page of neo-serialism, whose saint-like simplicity seemed its only charm. What produced the illusion of complexity was inaudibility: ‘This must be very complex: I can't hear it’. It wasn't complex at all; you just couldn't hear it. Xenakis got nearer the truth when he said, “A contradiction exists between the linear polyphonic system and the result as heard (my italics), which is merely surface and mass”.
Maxwell Davies's ‘Songs for A Mad King’
Authors: Harvey Jonathan
Published: February 2010

Are you like George III? Has each of us a little of George III lurking inside? Judging by the wild applause and shouts of ‘rubbish’, many of us have. The work struck home with some, at least. Some said that it was a shame to hold the old boy up to ridicule; for others he was not a historical person but an element of the human psyche placed in a historical setting, a Beckett clown whose words and actions have less meaning as a historical person's than they do as a multi-level poetic-psychological fantasy.
Two Hamlets
Authors: Walsh Stephen
Published: February 2010

Although Shakespeare has in the past been freely plundered for musical settings of every kind—from song to opera—it still seems a fair generalisation to say that his best work does not lend itself to this kind of treatment. Perhaps the most successful of all Shakespeare operas in English is Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which follows closely the text of one of the less substantial comedies. Of The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, no satisfactory opera has apparently been made (though Berlioz's Béatrice et Bénédict contains charming music), and for much the same reason—namely Shakespeare's unrivalled genius for linguistic imagery—the great tragedies have resisted direct musical setting, Boito's Otello and Piave's Macbeth being, of course, free derivatives, not translations. Only in our own century has it become normal to set Shakespeare's tragedies in the original text, translated or otherwise.
The Piano Music
Authors: Young Douglas
Published: February 2010

With the exceptions of Bartók and Messiaen, modern European composers have not shown a particular preference for the piano as the natural vehicle for major works. It has been left to American composers to continue writing works for the piano with the same confidence as the nineteenth-century masters. The list is impressive, ranging from Ives's extraordinary sonatas to Elliott Carter's fine Concerto, via Piston, Sessions, Barber, Cowell, Foss and Copland. The reasons for this American dominance in modern piano literature are complex, although the purely economic factor, that it is cheaper to perform a piano work than an orchestral one, probably influenced Ives's and Copland's generations. To this must be added the use of the piano in jazz, that peculiarly American phenomenon. Indeed the piano, in its more percussive vein, seems to be the quintessential sonority of American music. Looking at Copland's work we can see that piano sound clearly influences the nature of his orchestrations, as it did Ravel's. Some works began life as piano scores (the ballet Billy the Kid for instance), most of the orchestral works include a piano, and many use typical piano gestures—the opening of El Salón México for example. Conversely Copland's piano writing, like that of Beethoven, is influenced by the sounds of the orchestra, although never to such an extent that it prevents truly pianistic writing. The piano works are brilliantly realized in terms of the instrument and are virtuoso pieces, particularly in their rhythmic and sonorous subtleties.
Shostakovich's Second Symphony
Authors: Lawson Peter
Published: February 2010

The appearance of Shostakovich's Second Symphony on a gramophone record some time ago, and its public performance at a BBC symphony concert in London last October, marked its emergence from a period of over forty years of almost total neglect. Bearing the subtitle ‘To October: A symphonic Dedication’, it was composed in 1927 (two years after the highly successful First Symphony, which had established the composer's international reputation) in response to a commission from the State for a work to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution. But while the score bears as its heading words from the Communist Manifesto, ‘Workers (Proletarians) of the World, Unite’, and the composer's avowed intention is ‘proletarian’, the musical idiom is often far removed from this. The symphony was given its first performance in Leningrad on the 6 November 1927, and as Dmitri Rabinovich, Shostakovich's Russian biographer, says in his book, “got a fairly good press but after a few performances disappeared from the repertoire”.