bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
H. C. Artmann and the Austrian Literary Renaissance
Authors: Watts Harriett
Published: February 2010

H. C. Artmann, multilingual poet, translator and Austrian Surrealist, was the most important member of the ‘Wiener Gruppe’. His range of style contributed significantly to a literary renaissance which has been in progress in Austria since 1950. Artmann's ‘Eight Point Proclamation of the Poetic Act’, published in 1953, was the first manifesto of an eclectic circle of Viennese poets and composers. Now known in the histories of literature as ‘die Wiener Gruppe’, this circle proved to be the vanguard of Austria's post-war avant-garde movement. Artmann was widely read, ten years older than the others and a bohemian ‘radical’ around whom the younger artists gathered. He represented the Surrealist and Romantic traditions, and was joined by Gerhard Rühm, a serialist composer who experimented with Constructivist procedures, such as the mathematical permutation of words, for the composition of poetry. During its most creative phase, 1952–58, the ‘Wiener Gruppe’ achieved a synthesis of the two divergent trends of post-war experimental art in Europe, Surrealism and Constructivism. Fluctuating between Artmann's Surrealist attitude and Rühm's Constructivist approach, the ‘Wiener Gruppe’ developed into the most diversified and innovative of the post-war experimental movements.
Conversations in Berlin
Authors: Gruber HK
Published: February 2010

Music, in the sense of a game played by society, assumes knowledge of the rules. I compose in a tonal idiom, and the basic rules of that ‘game’ seem to be instinctively grasped by almost everyone.
Rene Leibowitz (II): The Music
Authors: Maguire Jan
Published: February 2010

Leibowitz's Toccata for piano, op.62 (1964) is a particularly flagrant example of his mastery of the art of contradiction. It is based on a chapter from the book The Raw and the Cooked by his friend Claude Lévi-Strauss, where the author shows the basically identical origin of several myths which appear to be entirely dissimilar, and points out their similarities through a ‘coding’, or the recognition of repeated details. Leibowitz's Toccatais built upon two themes—by ‘themes’ I mean here a series of intervals in pre-determined order used vertically or horizontally. The first of these is based on a 12-tone row consisting of seconds and thirds exclusively. The second ‘theme’ is based on another 12-tone row containing fourths as well. When the two themes are first stated, simply, they appear as opposites. One proceeds stepwise, softly, or makes the easy, gentle move of a third; the other leaps boldly in fourths and fifths, or announces big chords, loudly (Ex. 1). The themes are reiterated backwards and come to rest in a third, common to both, at the conclusion of the initial period.
Variations, Fugue, and Envoi on a Theme of Handel
Authors: Mavrodin Alice
Published: February 2010

It was in 1942, at the age of thirty, that Igor Markevitch published in Milan the work which was to be his last: Variazioni e fuga su un tema di Haendel for piano. Modest in scale compared to the composer's more frequent deployment of choral and orchestral forces, this set of Variations is none the less one of his most robust works—and at the same time a profoundly lyrical one. Far from forecasting the end of a career, it marks on the contrary its high point, revealing a notable capacity for synthesis—synthesis both of his own style and of a pianistic tradition assimilated in an extremely personal manner.
The ‘Beautiful’ in Music Today
Authors: Lachenmann Helmut
Published: February 2010

In 1948, Pierre Boulez ended one of his articles thus: ‘I have a horror of dealing in words with what is so prettily called the aesthetic problem. Besides, I don't want to make this article any longer; I prefer to turn back to my MS paper.’

That attitude was to become characteristic of young avant-garde composers in the 1950's. A new world of sonic and temporal experience had been sighted from the standpoint of Webern's serial technique—a world centred on the organization of sound-material. Amid the bustle of striking camp and heading for the new Promised Land, the question of Beauty was not merely out of place; it was downright suspect. For it involved those criteria and taboos, value judgements and ideals, on whose ruins everyone was then standing. And yet—as Boulez's pronouncement show—a belief in the possibility of proceeding (yet again!) from neutral ‘sound-values’ involved a secret dialectic with the aesthetic considerations that had ostensibly been excluded from the discussion.
Serialism in the Works of Charles Ives
Authors: Schoffman Nachum
Published: February 2010

It has become a commonplace of musical historiography to point out that Charles Ives's experiments antedate the currency of most of the innovations of 20th-century compositional technique. But such a statement, when unsubstantiated by musical facts, understates the case, and leaves a vaguely derogatory impression of dilettantism. Ives accomplished more than merely experimenting with new techniques. He understood and assimilated the far-reaching implications of his innovations, saw their limitations and shortcomings, developed from them satisfactory and well-synthesized forms, and moulded them into a language to express his world view.
The Young Composer in America
Authors: Davies Peter Maxwell
Published: February 2010

Before going to the United States, I had only the vaguest notions of American music—a state of affairs not unusual in Europe, where the names of Copland, and now, increasingly, of Sessions, are respected, but of nobody else, unless one mentions Gershwin. To the European, American music is still obsessed with an overt nationalism, as it was indeed in the twenties and thirties, when the prime concern was American folk music, and above all, jazz. At that stage the American composer needed an easily assumed and recognizable identity to distinguish himself from the European, and he self-consciously set about finding it. In Europe the only countries then cultivating a specifically nineteenth-century style of Romantic musical nationalism, with the implied tinge of self-indulgent sentimentality possible in the lack of a sterner musical tradition, were the musically under-developed ones, or rather those which, for various historical reasons, had lost their musical traditions, perhaps even hundreds of years ago: Spain and England. The musical nationalism of Hungary, with Bartók and Kodály, was quite a different matter, indebted to the unique half-oriental character of her folk music, introducing rhythmic, melodic and harmonic progressions new to the symphonic concert hall; on the other hand, contemporary Russian musical nationalism, despite a wealth of similarly interesting folk music, lost its chances of comparable spontaneity when composers were obliged to follow an official ‘party line.’ Probably the American sort of nationalism combined something of a spontaneous interest in and reaction to the new possibilities of folk music and jazz, comparable to the Hungarian situation, with the self-conscious bandwagon jumping and the substitution for real musical substance of folksily wistful meanderings current in England at that period.
Regarding Electronic Music
Authors: de la Vega Aurelio
Published: February 2010

For a long time now—long when we consider the quick, changing time-scale of our days—electronic music has been with us. The public at large usually remains cold, confused or merely dazed when faced with any new aesthetic experience. Critics, musicologists and the like still seem, as usual, to be unable to predict what will happen to this peculiar, mysterious and often anathematized way of handling musical composition, while many traditionally-minded composers consider it a degrading destruction of the art of music. On the other hand, the electronic medium seems to attract a long, motley caravan of young, inexperienced and often unprepared ‘beatnik type’ self-titled composers, who believe that the world began yesterday and that you only have to push buttons and prepare IBM cards to obtain magical results. Probably not since Schoenberg proclaimed the equal value of the twelve semitones of our sacred but by now obsolete tempered scale has twentieth-century music been faced with such a bewilderment.
Metamorphosis in Modern Culture: The parallel evolution of music and painting in the twentieth century
Authors: Dennis Brian
Published: February 2010

To take a backward glance at the amazing kaleidoscope of change which has characterised so much artistic activity since the turn of the century, to look down from our present vantage point over the richly patterned landscape, indistinct and volatile, of the evolving ideologies, schools and styles, is to watch an inexorable tide of dark waters rising above a peaceful land, covering gardens, orchards, villages and churches, flowing in fast streams and eddies, linking and dispersing, fingers of flood groping forward, when unable to flow no further—dissipating, joining further washes pressing forward, swelled by secondary streams, a total immersion of previous landmarks, drowned in the rising waves, a saturation of ideas, a primordial cleansing, destruction, obliteration, finally—regeneration.
Stravinsky and Jazz
Authors: Mellers Wilfrid
Published: February 2010

Jazz was a product of the confrontation of two worlds. The African Negro, transported in slavery, took with him to his new land his native musical traditions, which were corporeally rhythmic and vocally modal; and these came into contact—and before long into conflict—with the harmonic conventions of the West (specifically those of the march and hymn). Out of this tension was generated the classic form of the blues, the traditional basis of jazz. During the first two decades of the twentieth century the black man in America created a music that expressed not only his powerful protest against dispossession, but also a nostalgia for ‘the beauty of his wild forebears’; and (which was more remarkable) the white man too came to recognize in the black man's music a vitality and spontaneity which he, in his modern self-consciousness, had lost.
Benjamin Lees's String Quartet Concerto
Authors: O'Loughlin Niall
Published: February 2010

Benjamin Lees's Concerto for string quartet and orchestra was written on commission for the Kansas City Philharmonic Orchestra, and was first performed by them under the conductor Hans Schwieger, with the Paganini Quartet as soloists, in January 1965. The unusual nature of the work arose out of the desire of Mrs. Louis Sosland who commissioned it, to help the Kansas orchestra while also continuing to foster the art of the string quartet, which was her own special interest. Lees, whose output includes highly successful works in both concerto and string quartet media, responded with a work which solves the difficult problem of combining the two with characteristic artistic mastery and inventiveness.
The Contemporary Problem
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

A tedious title, this, but a thought which will remain with us for a long time, and which I am therefore adopting as a permanent title for my regular feature. We have to cope with the problem so long as it exists. The two usual, alternative ways of escaping it are (1) to deny its existence, or (2) to regard it as unsolvable. The first route is usually taken by composers, the second by resigned music lovers. We shall see in the course of these quarterly notes whether there is, perhaps, a third.
Music for Chamber Ensemble (and ‘Scenes from Schumann’)
Authors: Matthews David
Published: February 2010

It would be a mistake to suggest that Robin Holloway's works for chamber ensemble form a coherent group. One cannot even unhesitatingly apply the term ‘chamber music’ to all the works under consideration here: Fantasy-Pieces, Evening with Angels and the Concertino No.3 are not significantly different in scope from the orchestral pieces to which each is most closely related—Scenes from Schumann, Domination of Black and the two earlier Concertinos respectively; that is to say, one can just as easily see them as orchestral pieces manquées. What can be stated with certainty is that among Holloway's chamber ensemble pieces are to be found some of his favourite forms and some of his most characteristic ideas, both musical and extra-musical. Garden Music and the Serenade in C, for instance, are divertimenti like the three works which bear that name: essentially, relaxed pieces for civilized enjoyment. Evening with Angels has affinities both with the tone-poem and the song-cycle—the latter such a beloved form of Holloway's that of his 41 opus numbers to date, no less than eighteen are song-cycles of various kinds. The Rivers of Hell is also a kind of tone-poem, as well as being Holloway's most ambitious exercise so far in purely chamber sonorities.
The Composer as a Young Person's Guide
Authors: Andrewes John
Published: February 2010

For good or ill, the day is past when the parental injunction that ‘children should be seen but not heard’ was heeded, if indeed it ever was. Our only concern is whether the sound they make shall be euphonic or cacophonic.
Benjamin Lees's Visions of Poets
Authors: Cooke Deryck
Published: February 2010

From the expressive point of view, as was shown in the first part of this article the special quality of Lees's music is that it is concerned with the emotional unrest of contemporary life—the sense of violence, the feelings of doubt, discouragement, even despair—but while voicing these unflinchingly, it confronts them with a natural vitality which is not devoid of humour, courage, and hope. Seattle therefore made an appropriate choice when they commissioned him to write a large-scale choral work to open the ‘Century 21 Exposition’ of 1962. The result, Visions of Poets, was performed at the exposition on May 15 and 16, by Adele Addison (soprano), Albert da Costa (tenor), the Seattle Chorale and Symphony Orchestra, under Milton Katims. It was a spectacular occasion, the stage of the new Seattle Opera House being filled with a chorus of 90 and an orchestra of 95; the work created a profound impression, and was generally voted Lees's outstanding achievement to date.
In Honour of Richard Strauss
Authors: Schuh Willi
Published: February 2010

We are met together on the eve of his eighty-fifth birthday to do honour to the Master whom Munich proudly and joyfully calls her own, but whom we must also designate as an European, no, a World Musician, for the world recognizes Richard Strauss as a classic writer. Between his birth in 1864—a time so long ago that it is almost legendary (the first performance of Wagner's Tristan only took place in the following year)—and the uncheerful present of 1949 is stretched the arc of a smooth life of immense achievement. Eighty-five years! The intellectual position of the Master, who, looking back on eighty-five years of favoured existence and seventy years of rich creativity, may regard himself as concluding a musical epoch that embraces centuries, is only to be compared with that of Goethe in 1830. Both men, living in periods profoundly disturbed by new ideas and tendencies, are to be seen as superior beings commanding the deep and general respect of the world at large, standing high above all the misunderstandings and envy that invariably accompany fame. Judged and condemned as ‘revolutionaries’ in their youth, decried as ‘reactionaries’ for the classicism of their maturity, both of them obeying their ‘daemon,’ have passed through and left behind various phases of public approval, in order, pursuing their own way, to create work after work on an ever higher level and leave to the world after them the exploration of their spiritual heritage.
Don Juan: Some letters about the first performance
Authors: Roth Ernest
Published: February 2010

On the 11th January, 1889, Don Juan was performed for the first time. It was in Weimar and the twenty-five year old Strauss, then Court Kappellmeister in Goethe's city, conducted himself. More than eight years had gone by since Hermann Levi, the conductor of the original Parsifal performance, had given Strauss's first orchestral work (the unpublished Symphony in D minor) and a number of scores had been completed since, the Violin Concerto Op. 8, the Horn Concerto Op. 11, the Symphony in F minor Op. 12, From Italy Op. 16 and a few which remained unpublished. Since October, 1885, Strauss had been conducting, in Meiningen first and then in Munich, both opera and concerts, and had acquainted himself with all the problems of orchestral technique and sonority. Moreover, his father, first horn in the Munich Court Orchestra, was a musician of thorough knowledge and a man of hard principles who saw to it that his son was not carried away by his amazing facility and wild temperament, but that he acquired the craftsmanship which in the last instance divides the genius from the gifted amateur. And this Richard Strauss did, with the same facility and unerring sureness with which he threw his music on to paper: in a clean and careful handwriting without corrections, without hesitation, quick but unhurried, strangely reminiscent of Mozart's implacable manuscripts.
Béla Bartók's Chamber Music
Authors: Seiber Mátyás
Published: February 2010

With a great master who excelled in many fields of composition, who created great works in orchestral, chamber and piano music, it is often difficult to assess which of these groups is most representative for the expression of his genius. Yet, in Bartók's case, it always seemed to me that his chamber music, even if less in quantity, expresses the essence of his creation. It is in his chamber music that he works with the greatest concentration, economy and clarity of detail, that he utters his most important and profound thoughts. Even if some of his orchestral and concertant works gained greater popularity with the public lately—I think mainly of the Concerto for Orchestra, the Violin Concerto and the Third Piano Concerto—the essential Bartók, I feel, can be found in his chamber music, and particularly in his String Quartets, which tower over contemporary chamber music like a range of high mountain peaks.
Italian Music Festivals
Authors: Gatti Guido M.
Published: February 2010

Just as the natural seasons have changed their character over a period of time, so, it may be said, have the musical seasons. Of recent years the emphasis has swung over from Autumn and Winter towards Spring and Summer, abandoning the great cities and theatres of ancient tradition for more picturesque abodes, which possess greater interest from the point of view of climate and local colour. Thus the opera and concert seasons which take place in Rome or Milan, Naples or Bologna, Palermo or Genoa begin to lose their appeal; and there is a growth of interest, on the other hand, in Spring or Summer festivals held in cities which are rich in every kind of artistic interest. Musical snobisme has suffered a change: whereas it was once considered fashionable to be present at the first night of the La Scala opera season, now it is even more so to attend the first performance of the “Maggio Musicale Fiorentino” and find oneself on the Lungarno Vespucci between the Hotel Excelsior and the Teatro Communale, or in Venice, in September, for the Festival of Contemporary Music, between the Caffè Florian and La Fenice. At bottom, however, if we consider well, the success of these festivals is due to less superficial and external causes, in as much as they satisfy the entirely modern need for summarising, condensing and intensifying the manifestations of the spirit in a brief space and limited time: for the man of to-day is always in a hurry and his curiosity cannot be kept awake for a long period. In consequence, these festivals are intended to give, in two or three weeks and in a single city, a kind of symposium of the most important musical happenings of the past year–in the fields of opera, ballet and concert–and, moreover, they are combined with the varied and famous attractions of places of touristic interest, thus realising the ideal of the utile dulci; care is taken of the health of the body, and substantial nourishment is provided for the soul.
Higher Musical Education in American Universities
Authors: Stevens Denis
Published: February 2010

A comprehensive knowledge of the workings of American universities can best be gained in two ways: by going into them, and by judging what comes out of them. I was able to pursue the latter course for many years by collecting and studying books and editions published in the normal manner or on microfilm, and by meeting and corresponding with American professors and students whenever the occasion arose. During the academic year of 1955–56 the award of a Fulbright Travel Grant and invitations to Cornell and Columbia as Visiting Professor of Music enabled me to enlarge my experience of higher musical education in American universities by actually working in two of them, and incidentally visiting a good many more.
Alberto Ginastera—Portrait of an Argentine Composer
Authors: Chase Gilbert
Published: February 2010

In February of this year the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, under the direction of Dmitri Mitropoulos, gave two performances of Alberto Ginastera's Overture to the “Creole” Faust, one of which was broadcast on a national network. In April of last year the famed Budapest Quartet, which seldom ventures into contemporary music, performed Ginastera's First String Quartet at the Coolidge Auditorium in the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.) and subsequently took this work on tour through South America. Last year, also, two important recordings of his music were released in the United States: one was the same quartet played by the Paganini Quartet, the other was the Variaciones concertantes played by the Minneapolis Symphony under the direction of Antal Dorati. Previously, the Louisville Orchestra had recorded his Pampeana No. 3, a score commissioned by that orchestra (in Louisville, Kentucky) for its contemporary music series. And in 1952 his Sonata for Piano was recorded by Johana Harris, who had performed it for the first time anywhere at the Pittsburgh Festival of Contemporary Music that same year. These, as viewed by an American, are some of the recent events that indicate recognition of the growing stature of this forty-one-year-old Argentine composer, as he appears on the musical scene to-day.
Tendencies and Contrasts in the Music of Henry Barraud
Authors: Rostand Claude
Published: February 2010

The most recent Festival of Contemporary Music at Venice brought to light a new work by Henry Barraud, a work the success of which was immediately established, not only at Venice itself but by virtue of various performances which it had during the Paris season that has just ended and which were given either as public concerts or for the “Jeunesses Musicales de France” or by radio. It is a Te Deum for chorus and instrumental ensemble dedicated to the memory of Serge Koussevitzky. Last winter, too, the Concerts Lamoureux of Paris gave the first performance of a new Symphonie pour cordes which was also received with like success by the audience and by the critics. Finally, during recent months, the Symphonie de Numance has had a number of performances on European radio stations. Here we are then, confronted by three works which bear witness to the rich and ripe maturity of a composer who is just now at the height of his powers, who has evolved an idiom which is strong and personal, a forceful and novel language of his own, an emotional climate of a very special nature, and who now exercises complete mastery in the handling of his means of expression.
About Opera
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: February 2010

We have not been so annoyed by a tendentious pronoun since Vaughan Williams used it in “Do we want to hear old music as its composers intended?”, for WE regard Cosi as Mozart's loveliest score, with its exquisite serenade-band trellised by the strings and its wealth of vintage lyricism; not even poor productions and bad singers have yet turned it into a long evening for US. Beethoven thought that Mozart wasted musical riches upon the improbable and immoral, but we excuse the narrowness of genius when it may be responsible for the ethical rapture of the best parts of Fidelio. (An improbable and immoral work, WE think. Speech days and open days arranged by prison authorities just to indulge a taste for choruses? And what a scurvy treatment of the lower sort of people! How these lofty democratic puritans kow-tow to the nobs!) WE do not share Mr. Kerman's moral values, and as he is not Beethoven we merely want to smack him when he is rude.
Berlioz and “The Trojans” I: Forward from Beethoven
Authors: Dickinson A. E. F.
Published: February 2010

Berlioz was the most romantic of composers, and The Trojans was the climax of a steady pursuit of music-drama of one sort or another, translating the struggles of the human spirit and the human race into a rich, vivid and expanding musical life. Let us glance again at this historical procession of works of double-edged impact; some of them are familiar musical experience, but many are not. At first the drama was little more than a matter of providing suggestive titles for movements, of supplying literary analogies, in the post-revolutionary style, for contrasts that Beethoven had displayed in sheer symphony to perceptive listeners. (1808: “The andante is very original and attractive, composed as it is of the most heterogeneous ideas—gentle reverie and warlike fierceness.” 1809: “… the ordinary sequence of movements … but they seem fantastically linked together.”) There might be analogies, too, for the conflation of movements of varying genres, matching the ultra-modern, Beethoven idea of a symphony of one great rhapsody of genius.
Gerald Finzi (1901–1956)
Authors: Walker Alan
Published: February 2010

It was the late Dean Inge who said, ‘There are two kinds of fools: those who say, “This is old and therefore good”, and those who say, “This is new and therefore better” ’. Finzi's great misfortune was to have lived and worked in an age when much music criticism tends to fly to one or the other of these two extremes. The result is that Finzi's admirers have often written as much critical nonsense about him as the most unsympathetic of professional critics; I have yet to see a single piece of sustained writing in which the strong reactionary element in Finzi's work is not made either the central virtue or the central vice of his entire style.
Ernest Bloch's Second String Quartet
Authors: Rimmer Frederick
Published: February 2010

The four string quartets* of Bloch are a convenient medium for assessing both the strength and weakness of his unusual talent, revealing, as they do, an imperfect endowment of those processes of thought and feeling from which, in the right amalgam, a masterpiece of musical expression can emerge. Only the second quartet represents him at his best. It is one of the few works where inspiration and emotion are under the control of the intellect. There are weaknesses in the other quartets largely brought about by preoccupation with cyclic procedures—a notorious and dangerous expedient for a composer unable by nature to accept the traditional usages and disciplines of sonata form.
Matyas Seiber 1905–1960
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

Seiber was a close personal friend of mine—all the closer for having been a close musical friend. Musicians are lonelier nowadays than people. And genuine musicians, those who don't lie to themselves, are loneliest, because in many ruling circles the self-lie has become a professional must—all the more frantic for remaining unacknowledged.
Andrzej Panufnik
Authors: Truscott Harold
Published: February 2010

Andrzej Panufnik was born in Warsaw on September 24, 1914. His father, Tomasz, was the most eminent Polish constructor of stringed instruments, and author of many scientific books concerning the construction of musical instruments. Some of his books are in the library of the British Museum. Tomasz influenced in many ways the early musical ideas of his son, and this influence has lived on in one way in Andrzej's mature musical output. His father at first designed his instruments on the old Italian model—‘Antica’ was his name for them. He also later designed a new type of violin which he called ‘Polonia’—the Polish instrument. Andrzej's mature music falls into three categories: ‘Antica’, music based on compositions by seventeenth-century Polish composers, ‘Polonia’, music based partly on original Polish folk tunes, and ‘Independent’, music which he calls unrelated, free, but which at times does reflect the other two in spirit, simply because he cannot alter his nature. The works in this latter class have no direct connection with either of the other two.
Notation—Interpretation, Etc.
Authors: Cardew Cornelius
Published: February 2010

1—What follows is notes, made at various stages and on a variety of topics. Few of these remarks make any pretence to completeness, and I have not attempted to fill in the gaps and ‘cover’ any particular field thoroughly. Few of these remarks follow on from one to the next, so they may be read at random.

Perhaps it will be helpful to imagine in what rôles the various remarks are made; whether as composer, listener, interpreter, critic, publicity man, or simply theoretician. I have discussed only those things which concern, or have concerned me directly (and this may be taken as an apology).
Who are you, Olivier Messiaen?
Authors: Messiaen Olivier , Gavoty Bernard
Published: February 2010

The following discussion between Olivier Messiaen and Bernard Gavoty, music critic of Figaro, took place at a Youth Music concert in Paris in February of this year immediately before a performance of Messiaen's Trois petites Liturgies de la présence divine. It was subsequently published in the Journal Musical Français to whom we are indebted for permission to print the following translation.
2. György Ligeti
Authors: Nordwall Owe
Published: February 2010

György Ligeti (b. 1923), who is now an Austrian citizen, left Hungary in 1956 and his links with his native country are now extremely tenuous. Nevertheless, as far as any nationality may be ascribed to him as a composer, it must still be Hungarian rather than anything else, and it may be enlightening in several ways to consider him alongside his contemporaries who remained behind. When his orchestral piece Apparitions at the ISCM Festival in Cologne in 1960 sensationally introduced a quite new compositional thinking in the post-Webern era, he was known only to a few ‘insiders’, and then only as a remarkably original talent in the electronic field. His Artikulation (1958), the last of three compositions for the electronic medium, still remains one of the peaks in this admittedly still experimental genre. It is also a key work in Ligeti's output, pointing far ahead, to Aventures, the Dies Irae movement in the Requiem and the opera Kylwiria now in progress.
The Contemporary Problem
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

In his editorial for the 50th Anniversary Issue of Music & Letters, Sir Jack Westrup regrets the journal's lack of articles on contemporary music: “so many people who write on contemporary music are guilty either of mere propaganda or analytical demonstrations, often accompanied by mathematical formulae and diagrams, which show quite clearly what has been done but do not explain why it was worth doing.”
Britten's use of the Passacaglia
Authors: Handel Darrell
Published: February 2010

Among twentieth-century composers Britten and Hindemith are those who have made perhaps the most notable use of the passacaglia—one of the few points of affinity between them. To Hindemith, predominantly a composer of instrumental music of sonata or symphonic proportions, the passacaglia is a confirming movement. It confirms a tonal centre, recalls earlier thematic material, and in general gives a sense of finality through its systematic progress and growth. Britten too has used the passacaglia as a confirming finale, but he also employs it to create a point of stability around which other movements can gravitate. More important, he has found its tension-building qualities a good means for expressing and intensifying certain moods in his operas and vocal works, where the passacaglia's persistent ground becomes a kind of animated pedal-point that supports the unfolding of the dramatic situation. The contrapuntal polarity between the ground and the expressive flow of the vocal line is one that is carefully controlled to convey the text's innermost expression. He often elevates the passacaglia to some crucial dramatic high point of an opera or song-cycle to reflect on a tragedy or intensify a dialogue. Several examples immediately come to mind associated with the subject of death. The well-known passacaglia in Peter Grimes, an instrumental interlude between scenes, depicts the derangement of Grimes and is, as it were, oppressed with the sense of his impending death. In The Rape of Lucretia there is a dramatic passacaglia after Lucretia's suicide, in which the other characters express their feelings on the finality of death.
Kodaly: Missa Brevis
Authors: Seiber Matyás
Published: February 2010

In the last days of January, 1945, the Russian troops cleared entirely the city of Pest from the Germans. The most bitter fighting, however, continued on the other side of the river, in Buda, until the middle of February. The surviving population of the city emerged from the cellars where they lived during the seven weeks of the most savage, 24-hours-a-day bombing and shelling, only to find their town half destroyed on the streets littered with corpses. Kodály lived through this hell in the cellar of the Opera house, after his flat has been partly destroyed by an aerial attack earlier in the war. It was against this background the Missa Brevis was completed early in 1942.
Massine's Return
Authors: Brahms Caryl
Published: February 2010

As far back as I am willing to admit that I remember, Leonide Massine, dancer, choreographer, innovator, has been the question-mark of the Ballet Russe. I find that already in 1936 I was writing in “Footnotes to the Ballet”:

“Massine is a stylist unrivalled by any dancer of his time…he has a faculty for getting the very best out of his partners, so that when he is dancing in a ballet the whole work becomes suddenly a live, important thing…something of the quality of the great stylist that is Massine the Dancer lies like a patina upon the surface of the roles he has created for himself, so that though other dancers inflect and modify them, the role remains the clue of the ballet.…If Massine had not been so fine a technician himself it is questionable whether his works would have borne so clearly the imprint of his personality. The present writer is of the opinion that as his powers as a dancer decline, the inventiveness of his choreography will decline also.”
Strawinsky as a Writer
Authors: White Eric Walter
Published: February 2010

Strawinsky's published writings are subservient to his work as a composer. Their prime purpose is to warn, to correct, to explain; and it has been necessary for him to do this, partly because his own music has been so often misinterpreted and misunderstood, and partly because he is an ardent believer in certain aesthetic standards and his life-time of music has been a continuous challenge to those he considers to be false and untrue.
Recent Works Examined
Authors: Stuart Charles
Published: February 2010

Average Strawinsky criticism in this country has for thirty years been drab and reach-me-down.

The formulae are as follow: “Strawinsky started brilliantly, much too brilliantly. Firebird and Petrouchka were a coruscation that burned out his genius before he was thirty. The slag was already beginning to show in The Rite of Spring. Thereafter, perverse man, he wrote not with his blood and nerves and basic impulses, as all true music must be written, but with a desiccated though agile brain. He had nothing to say and no style of his own in which to say it. Every new work since 1913 has been a futile academic experiment, form without ‘content’. There has been no creative continuity: only a restless hopping from trick to trick and mode to mode. The general effect is dust-dry, brittle, comfortless. He gives us not music but broken glass”‥
Progressive Tendencies in Rachmaninoff's Music
Authors: Yasser Joseph
Published: February 2010

Such was, in substance, one of the most typical replies of Rachmaninoff to his friends, acquaintances, casual visitors and press interviewers, who used to question him year after year about his attitude toward modern music. Naturally, the phraseology and the “tone” of his reply varied in each instance, but its essence remained, under all circumstances, the same.
Music in Belgian Broadcasting
Authors: Collaer Paul
Published: February 2010

In Belgium, broadcasting is taken care of by an organization under state control: the Belgian National Broadcasting Service. Owing to the fact that Belgium is inhabited by two peoples of different language and culture, the broadcasting service is managed from a cultural point of view by two literary and musical groups, one Flemish and the other French. In addition, some of the broadcasts to frontier towns, and to the provinces of Lièege and Luxembourg, are in German.
Delius: The Choral Music
Authors: Mitchell Donald
Published: February 2010

Appalachia, Delius's first choral work—for orchestra and chorus rather than chorus and orchestra—began life (in 1896) as a set of orchestral variations on an old slave song. In 1902, however, Delius had vocal after-thoughts; he added choral parts to some of the variations and concluded the whole with a rousing choral finale. Excluding the finale, the vocal contributions take the following shape: (a) a choral (a cappella) variation—a heavily chromaticized harmonization of the slave song (“After night has gone comes the day”); (b) choral punctuations of certain variations, codas by distant la-la-ing, chordal sighs on ‘Ah!’, or wordless presentation of the ascending first phrase of the slave song. Appalachia, despite the vocal contributions, remains largely instrumental, and need not long detain us as an example of Delius's choral music. The finale, for all its ingenious manipulation of thematic material previously heard in instrumental guise, amounts to little more than a picturesque summing-up of Delius's evocation of the sights and sounds of the Mississippi. Of more significance for the future are the always very brief but deeply poetical vocal interventions in the orchestral texture. In Appalachia these disembodied voices have only a small rôle—tail-pieces within codas, so to speak—but Delius thereby disclosed his instrumental conception of voices which was fully to materialize itself in the subsequent Song of the High Hills, the two a cappella and wordless choruses To be sung of a summer night on the water, and the dance sections of A Mass of Life.
Delius as Song Writer
Authors: Holland A. K.
Published: February 2010

In the ultimate assessment of Delius's art it is conceivable that his songs will occupy a somewhat minor place. In bulk, they do not loom very large in the catalogue of his works—a mere fifty or so in all, and of these perhaps a sixth were apparently not deemed by the composer worthy of publication. Yet it would be a pity to underrate them merely on the ground of their slender numbers or because Delius himself was apt in later life to deprecate, more especially, his early efforts. For it is sometimes the case that a composer will reveal himself and his idiosyncrasies in his first stumbling attempts and even more readily in the miniature than in the larger composition. Delius did not spring into the world fully armed but his basic idiom changed relatively little and no one can fail to find traces of the authentic Delius finger-print in his songs of all periods.
A Question of Style
Authors: Stevens James
Published: February 2010

An interesting new aspect in French musical activity has been the success of the two small Italian ensembles specializing in Italian music of the eighteenth century, I Musici and Arcangelo Corelli, who appeared respectively at the Aix and Menton music festivals. The two concerts given by the former at Aix were a sensation of the festival and they apparently created an even bigger furore in Paris; whilst the latter, the mainstay of the Menton festival, distinguished themselves less sensationally but with equal justification.
Notes on “The Tender land”
Authors: Everett Horace
Published: February 2010

Aaron Copland had the idea of composing an opera for a long time, and we had often discussed my writing the libretto for it. But as to any specific theme, or time, or locale, nothing seemed to materialise. I knew he felt, more or less, that opera was uncharted territory for him. “All those notes,” he would say, “and that awful bugaboo, dialogue.” Then one day he played me several musical sketches he kept in his note-book and with these showed James Agee's book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The photographs in this book related to the music he had played—photos of a sharecropper's family in the south. I knew that this was a signpost showing the direction in which he wanted to go, and an important one for me as librettist, for now, I had my point of departure for The Tender Land.
A “Little Orchestra” Pioneer
Authors: Lansdale Nelson
Published: February 2010

“The way a composer achieves popularity is as mysterious to me as the way a book becomes a best-seller,” says Thomas Scherman, 36-year-old founder and conductor of the Little Orchestra Society of New York. Music, especially unfamiliar music from the time of Gluck and Purcell to contemporary composers, is Scherman's absorbing interest. But it is natural for him to compare the musical and literary worlds, since in a sense he belongs to both: his father is Harry Scherman, president of the enormously successful Book-of-the-Month Club, the most successful organization of its kind in America.
The Holland Festival, 1954
Authors: Mitchell Donald
Published: February 2010

This year, as last, the Holland Festival was particularly strong on the operatic side. One could pick and choose between offerings from La Scala, Milan, and the Netherlands Opera; Rossini's La Cenerentola from the Italians, Otello, Die Zauberflöte and Janáček's last and posthumous opera Aus Einem Totenhaus from the Dutch. To take the Netherlands contributions first, and, in some unhappy respects, least, one must record the fact that Holland's Die Zauberjlöte was not at all up to festival standards, by no means as accomplished as 1953's Figaro, or Freischütz even. Singing was scratchy (neither Vroons/Tamino nor Adèle Leigh/Pamina was very adequate), the production (Georg Hartmann's) did not hang together, and, at the performance I witnessed, the ugly scenery (Emil Preetorius's) was suspended all crooked and awry. Perhaps it was that I chanced on a particularly unfortunate occasion (Gebouw voor K. en W., The Hague, 6th July) when the malice of inanimate objects—always a force to be reckoned with—would have despoiled any producer's plans, however well-laid. Nevertheless, the odd gremlin or two would not altogether explain the waste of inferior singing which depressed our ears, or justify an eccentric experiment of the conductor, Professor Josef Krips, who had the Three Boys impersonated by three boys. Even more astounding than the sight of these night-gowned infants—they each looked like a Christopher Robin about to fall down stairs—was the excruciating and unprecedentedly unmusical sounds they produced. It was the most complete massacre of Mozart's music I have yet come across.
Glazounov Revalued
Authors: van Amerongen Alex
Published: February 2010

Alexandre Glazounov is a personality known, perhaps, to those who at the present time frequent the concert-halls, but to most people little more than a name. In the opinion of many music-critics he is an “academic antiquated romantic,” and this verdict has not been without influence on conductors and soloists, who do not like to run the risk of being considered old-fashioned. The restlessness and superficiality of modern times is, without doubt, connected with this tendency, which has stifled much creative talent before its significance could sufficiently penetrate the world of music: the unfortunate result is that many well-known musicians of the present day have not even the slightest acquaintance with the best works of Glazounov.
In Memoriam Dylan Thomas: Strawinsky's Schoenbergian Technique
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

Music examples usually illustrate articles, but the present article is no more than an illustration appended to my analytic music example of the complete central song from Strawinsky's most recent composition (Spring, 1954), In Memoriam Dylan Thomas. I think that writers on music should be encouraged to keep to the music, and seriously contend that all the adverse critics of Schoenberg's serial technique, and most of the writers who pass for serial experts, are incapable of a serial analysis and have only the very vaguest notion of what makes a serial piece “tick.” They quote a bar or two—usually from the opening of Schoenberg's 4th Quartet—where the note-row is fairly obvious or, anyway, has previously been uncovered by someone else, and then proceed to let obscure theory take the place of clear if complex practice. The reason is simple: they don't hear the row, and if you are unable to imagine a row aurally, it is very difficult, usually indeed impossible, to trace it throughout a piece. Let me hasten to add that I should not dream of reproaching any critic with his tone-row-deafness if he left it at that: for all we know, he may otherwise be a musical genius. If, however, he professes to talk serial “shop” at the same time, I raise the strongest moral objections.
Bartók's Last Years
Authors: Balogh Erno
Published: February 2010

From his third visit to the United States Bartók never returned to Budapest. His remains, in a triple coffin, are buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of the City of New York. This New York represented much of what he sought to avoid all his life; noise, rush, many people and buildings, heavy traffic on the street with its accompanying gasoline, commerce and commercialism, tidal waves of opportunities for the practical-minded in any field, an Eldorado for the opportunist. He knew this New York, this America, from his earlier visits. The dictatorships which surrounded him in Europe, and which he hated—no matter from which side they blew their poisonous pollutions—compelled him to find refuge here.
Notes Concerning Bartók's Solo Vocal Music (II): The Twenty Hungarian Folksongs (1929)
Authors: Weissmann John S.
Published: February 2010

Accomplishments of a highly sophisticated European civilisation, and the simplicity and directness of peasant culture: the dilemma of these two modes of existence is never completely absent from Bartók's creative mentality. His dissatisfaction with urban civilisation produced an attraction to a social order where art is not merely a pleasing utilization of leisure or a highly personal and esoteric mode of expression, but is accepted as a valid response to a social need, as important and definite in its own sphere as any other manifestation in the life of the community. The music of this community must therefore be comprehensible to, must evoke responses and associations in, all who live in this society, and not merely appeal to the minority of an élite. For Bartók this community was represented by the peasant society.