When smart people say stupid things II

I have become completely dissatisfied with [serialism's] narrow terms.  I found the palette of constant chromaticism increasingly constricting, nor could I accept any longer the limited range of gestures that always seemed to channel the music into some form or other of expressionism.  The over-intense manner of serialism and its tendency to inhibit physical pulse and rhythm led me to question a style which made it virtually impossible to express serenity, tranquility, grace, wit, energy.
George Rochberg, liner notes for the 1973 recording of his Third String Quartet issued on Nonesuch Records LP  (italics mine).
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I happen to like Rochberg's 12-tone music (2nd Symphony, Piano Trio) and I have no problem with his decision to abandon serialism (by which he means only serial organization of pitch, not integral serialism of Babbitt, Boulez, and Stockhausen) in favor of (mostly) tonal composition.  But his attempted justification of this decision strikes me as borderline incoherent.

How history becomes "music history" ...

First, a bit of history in pictures:

A typical workday in a Soviet concentration camp ca. 1932

A typical workday in a Nazi concentration camp (Auschwitz) ca. 1942

Officers of Hitler's Wermacht and Stalin's Red Army enjoying a friendly smoke

in celebration of their joint invasion of Poland (1939)

Soviet Composer Dmitri Shostakovich 
 

9 years before the Pravda editorial attack:

Symphony No.2 "October" (1927)
(celebrating 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution)

6 years before the Pravda editorial attack: 
Symphony No.3 "First of May" (1930)
(glorifying the "proletarian holiday"
 and, again, the Bolshevik revolution)

7 years after Stalin's death:

joins the Communist Party (1960)

8 years after Stalin's death:

Symphony No.12 "The Year 1917" (1961)
(glorifying  the first Bolshevik mass-murderer Lenin 
and, once again, the Bolshevik revolution)

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And now lets take a brief look at how history is transformed into "music history":

... in the end [Shostakovich's] art, as it now becomes increasingly clear, remained for many years the only artistic phenomenon ... which actively resisted the totalitarian regime.  We can say without exaggeration that dissent was an integral part of this great composer's creative output.
Mark Aranovsky, Muzikalnaya Akademiya 4, 1997, p.3  (translation and italics mine) 

At a deeper level,  Shostakovich's works had spoken the truth about the tragedy of his times and the evils of the system of which he was himself a victim.

Alexandra George, Escape from "Ward Six", University Press of America, 1998, p.388 (italics mine). 
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Since verbose motherfuckers like these two are never in short supply, I am sure that soon we will be told that atheism was an integral part of Bach's creative output (with his Passions vividly condemning the mixture of lunacy and cruelty in religion); that Wagner fought antisemitism by exposing its irrationality in his deliberately outlandish antisemitic pamphlets; and that Stalin's  vicious 1948 attack on "formalism" in Soviet music was secretly engineered by the CIA...
  

SCHOENBERG: String Quartet in D minor, Op.7

After years of trying to like Schoenberg's Op.7 string quartet I still perceive it as a mildly irritating exercise in compositional excess.  Its forty five minutes densely packed with feverish thematic development, frenetic piling up of counterpoint, and restless harmonic motion simply refuse to sum up to an aesthetically rewarding experience.  (Despite a committed and technically superb performance by the Borromeo Quartet from a 2011 concert at the Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory, Boston.)
 
I even thought that perhaps "compositional excess" is an uncharitable way to describe what might be a case of compositional despair felt by a composer who wants to keep things fresh and interesting with compositional tools that have been badly worn-out by two centuries of heavy use.  What if Schoenberg's constantly varied asymmetric themes, his restlessly crisscrossing voice leading (with its constant spray of non-harmonic notes), his fluctuating rhythms, his refusal to punctuate his "musical prose" with musically meaningful pauses - what if all this is meant to divert my attention from the fact that the music's inner core consists of essentially triadic harmonies moving in familiar ways along the tonic-dominant axes of D minor and related keys?

If my guess is correct, then perhaps sympathy rather than irritation is an appropriate emotional response to Schoenberg's struggle with tonality -- the kind of sympathy one may feel for the desperate efforts of a long married couple to camouflage the boringly predicable and worn-out anatomical reality of their sex life with romantic getaways, Victoria's Secret underwear, and assorted contraptions delivered in plain wrapped parcels from Babes in Toyland...

When smart people say stupid things ...

Imagine you are a composer who is a pioneer of non-tonal music.  You already know from  violently scandalous premieres of your works that the general concert-going public is not receptive to significant doses of dissonance (at least outside opera) because it associates dissonance with psychological and physical discomfort as well as with ugliness in general.  You are convinced, however, that the public's attitude toward non-tonal music can change as a result of greater familiarity with and deeper aesthetic understanding of your compositional idiom.  So you decide that one way to promote your creative direction in composition is to come up with a catchy slogan which will sum up your aesthetic goals in a concise and attractively positive way.  And the slogan you finally settle upon is ... emancipation of dissonance. [1]

Now lets put this slogan in perspective.  You know that most people hate a certain thing with which they have a variety of strongly negative associations.  And you propose to emancipate the very thing that they hate?  As a public relations strategy this is no less doltish than it would be for gay rights advocates to employ 'emancipation of felonious sin' as the slogan which sums up the political, social, and moral aims of the gay rights movement!

Why not make excuses for Le Nozze di Figaro?

Listening recently to a beautifully performed broadcast recording [1] of Luigi Dallapiccola's Il Prigioniero I kept thinking that stubbornly conservative audiences and lack of public funding are not the worst enemies of modern music in America.  That distinction belongs to patronizing, condescending, and (as we shall see shortly) largely incompetent music critics who think that discussions of important non-tonal compositions must begin with (a) veiled excuses for the work's idiom, and (b) smarmy assurances that despite its idiom the music has much to offer to lovers of Chopin and Verdi.
     
One American music critic, who attended the very production of Il Prigioniero I've been enjoying so much, described this opera as

... a bleak, 12-tone, boldly modernistic work from the mid-20th century ... [whose] 12-tone musical style ... is certainly complex - tremulous with astringent harmonies and fraught with skittish thematic lines.

Then, to assure his readers that the music does not call for doubling their usual doses of Zoloft and Ritalin, he added that Dallapiccola

...used the 12-tone language in a sensually lyrical way ... [with] intervals that produce plaintively consoling sustained harmonies. [2]

(How the poor reader is to make sense of an incoherent description of the music's  harmonic language as being both "astringent" and "plaintively consoling" was left unexplained.)

This kind of writing makes me feel as if I'm being set up for a blind date with a woman of stern looks and uncompromisingly difficult personality, yet whose acquaintance I'm promised to find rewarding once I get to know her well enough.  Such attitude would be annoying even in the case of genuinely challenging music (e.g., Helmut Lachenmann's Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern), but with works like Il Prigioniero - and even in the context of a newspaper review for non-specialist readers - it is simply unintelligible.

Elliott Carter: Night Fantasies; Au Quai

This is the first live recording of Carter's Night Fantasies that I've come across so far.[1]  As one of the co-commissioners of the piece (the others being Ursula Oppens, Charles Rosen, and the late - and sorely missed - Paul Jacobs) Gilbert Kalish must have played this music for quite some time.   His Night Fantasies unfold at a much quicker pace and, as a result, are not nearly as dark hued as what I hear in Paul Jacobs' well-known studio recording (Nonesuch).  But the thrill of hearing this piece played live by one of the outstanding interpreters of 20th century piano music really makes comparisons with studio recordings irrelevant.
    Because almost at the same time I also came across my first live recording of Carter's Au Quai - performed by by members of London Sinfonietta [2] - I thought that it would be well also to add this charming short piece to the blog's collection of  Carter's music.
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1. Gilbert Kalish, November 2008, Lincoln Center, NYC.

2.  January 28, 2009 Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.