Opus Anyone who knows anything about music knows assuredly that Webern is one of the greatest composers of all time. More than most his music has the essential ingredient of greatness namely originality. It has been truly said that ignorance makes poor composers to be regarded as great composers and ignorance treats great composers with contempt and disdain so that they are not accepted as great composers whereas, in fact, they are.
Many people dismiss Webern because his music is difficult to perform. Others because it does not have pretty tunes that one can easily hum, which attitude shows a totally wrong concept of music. There are composers who wrote nothing but pretty tunes but their music lacks any sense of purpose or meaning.
It is shallow and superficial music. His songs are angular containing leaps of sevenths and ninths which are not easy to perform and yet for all this, his songs have an original and strange beauty.
It is sad to report that most people who say they dislike his songs are those who cannot perform them and are unequal to the task. Webern believed, and rightly so, that music had to change and move away from the diatonic system of major and minor keys. If you take the seven note of the major scale the eighth being a doubling of the first and arranged them in every possible order to make a theme the law of mathematics makes it evident that soon you will run out of original themes.
This is why listening to music in the diatonic system there are so many themes or tunes that should so similar. There some who assert that an original tune can still be written in the diatonic system. But consider the total works of Monteverdi , Handel , Haydn and Mozart. How many themes did they write between them? How many separate themes are there in a Monteverdi opera or in a four movement symphony by the great Joseph Haydn? Handel was acutely aware of this problem in the s which is why he regularly repeated existing themes.
Themes in the diatonic system over five centuries must run into thousands if not more. The system must therefore be exhausted. I would be glad to hear from any clever mathematician who gave work out the permutations of diatonality on the basis of say a 16 note theme and allowing two accidentals.
The other matter that concerned Webern was the longevity of music particularly that of the Romantic school much of which was repetitious and merely musical verbosity. If we are honest we can all say that some of the long symphonies have marvellous moments but a lot of it is less inspiring and perhaps even dull. We have often heard it said that some people use a lot of words when a few will do. Some years ago a stupid expression appeared which serves as a good example.
This is ghastly misuse of language. Why six words when one will do? But take the analogy into music. He also believed that enormous forces were not related primarily to music but to effect.
He certainly could. It is probably only musicians that can fully appreciate his incredible skill and talent. Through no fault of his a Webern cult sprung up and then another called post-Webernism, whatever that means. We must hail not only this great composer but also a real hero.
Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.
To some extent old values were being swept away in the arts. While Verdi had composed an opera about a prostitute it was concealed in that she was described a courtesan. Berg wrote a super opera, Lulu, which dealt with prostitution and sexual perversion.
Webern saw that truth, simplicity and economy of style had an elegance. Clear lines and a simple utterance was more appealing that sifting through pays of full score to find the subject. Conformity to fashion was a hindrance to creative impulses.
This spirit of the age was not only shown in music but also shown in the works of artists. Amadeo Modigliani painted a nude in which is notable for its simplicity and roundness, its elegance and immediacy.
Its directness is powerful with the curved breasts and pubic hair, the closed eyes and the elongated body. It states its message immediately and Webern believed his music should do that. The Six Bagatelles for string quartet, Opus 9, have been called melodies in one breath.
Every glance is a poem, every sigh a novel in a single gesture, a great joy and every trace of sentimentality correspondingly banished. He does not repeat to a tiresome tedium as does Schubert , Franck and Borodin where main themes are done to death.
He is not pompous or arrogant, seeks no praise, never bombastic or showy. His music is directly to the point and bitter sweet.
There are those who say that his music lacks emotion and is merely cerebral and clinical. While I can see how this point of view is arrived at, if his music is listened to with the same level of concentration that is presents in itself, the sheer content that can touch both the heart as well as the brain will be felt. As previously said, we all like to see and hear an orchestra in full flight like a big powerful locomotive. But in Webern there is music that is nothing more than a whisper as if a lover is telling you something very private in your ear.
It is this intimacy that has a great appeal to many of us. His music is aphoristic and could only further develop into silence. He was aware of this and by his opus 17, the Three Sacred Folksongs for voice, clarinet, bass clarinet and violin his form became more extensive. Twelve note music or serial music is ridiculed. It is dismissed as a system as if it was something decadent and merely mechanical.
To add to the dilemma there are those who do not know the difference between serial music and atonal music. Instead of taking the seven notes of a diatonic scale and perhaps a few accidentals to make a tune or theme, the serial composer takes all twelve notes of the chromatic scale and arranges them in an order and an initial rhythmic pattern to form his tone row, or note row, or series, and that could be called the theme. Each note is used once and no note has preference and so no key is indicated.
The series can be played backwards, known as the retrograde version, it can be played upside down, known as the inversion and be transposed. But each time the twelve notes appear. Let me quote an example. It makes for unconvential chords which someone beautifully called crunchy chords. Anton Webern was born in Vienna in His first music lessons were from his mother to whom he was especially devoted.
Many of his works are dedicated to her or her memory. His next tutor was Edwin Komauer in Klagenfurt and he composed his first works aroung —9. He went up to Vienna university in and had the distinction of studying with Guido Adler who is probably most remembered for being a critic and musicologist.
He had been a professor at Prague University and then joined the faculty in Vienna and succeeded Hanslick as professor in and remaining in that post until Adler also wrote a book on Mahler. Webern studied with Hans Pfitzner but felt that he was somewhat anachronistic in his approach and so from to he studied with Arnold Schoenberg.
Webern was not. He spent years editing and reviving the works of a 15th century Dutch composer Heinrich Isaak. Neither was he a sour puss. He conducted operettas at various venues from to Like his pupil Humphrey Searle , Webern had a wonderful capacity for friendship.
Nothing made him deviate from his chosen path. As to his personality it was simple, direct and charming. He had a remarkable ear which led him to produce effects of extraordinary beauty and subtlety.
He had a passionate love of nature. For four years after the end of World War One Webern assisted Schoenberg in his semi-private society devoted to new music and its performance. From to he conducted various orchestras mainly for the working people of Vienna.
He came to England five times to conduct for the BBC. This was in , , , and He was the conductor of the Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra between and In his conducting he presented standard works. He was a superb conductor of Brahms and when you think how vastly different his own music was from that Brahms this fact may surprise you.
He gave outstanding performances of Mahler and, again, when you think of his views on overblown music, he nevertheless did not despise it but scheduled such works in his concerts. It is wrongly assumed that a conductor only puts on works he likes but, of course, that is not true. But his own music was not liked. The Nazis called it cultural Bolshevism. In Germany and countries which were German speaking his music was not allowed to be played and he was forbidden to teach. He was compelled to be a proof reader for a Viennese publishing house.
But in February his Variations for orchestra, opus 30 were premiered in Winterthur by the great conductor Hermann Scherchen a work of simple but profoundly beautiful orchestral effects. The BBC gave Webern some opportunity but after his death his music fell into oblivion universally. Therefore many composers owe a debt of gratitude to Searle … composers like Stravinsky , Eimert , Stockhausen , Boulez and the very gifted Bruno Maderna.
Webern was a splendid teacher. He did not teach from his own work or serialism primarily. He would talk and demonstrate the property of the triad and refer to works of the so-called great masters. He was a humble man. Now, if you want to delve into the canonic complexities of Webern's symphony, or the subtleties of the way it manipulates its tone row, I refer you to composer George Benjamin's essay on the Symphony, as well as his thoughts on the piece in a collection of essays published for Alexander Goehr's 70th birthday.
George describes the idea of the canon in the first movement: "The simultaneous ramifications on past, present, and future inherent in any one creative decision provide a sustaining context, the sequential nature of canon literally pulling the music forwards, devouring empty manuscript paper ahead".
But he finds poetry in all this constructivism: this first movement of the Symphony seems "weightless - a complex, crystal-like object hovering in space".
And that's the greatest connection of all: between the way this music is made, and the sounds it makes. Benjamin's description beautifully captures the sense of stasis in this first movement of the Symphony , the uncanny feeling that time is not moving like an unstoppable arrow, but rather softly expanding and exploding in all directions, like the growth of a crystal - or, since it's nearly Christmas, a snowflake. The limpid clarity of the music, the spaces and silences around the musical material in the orchestration, the fact that Webern makes it impossible for you to miss a single note, and that each pitch has its own definite meaning and expression - it's all part of the articulation of the structure of the music.
Every line you're hearing is a usually symmetrical fragment of the grander design of the note row - itself symmetrically constructed - that the whole piece is based on. You literally hear time going backwards as well as forwards in this music, since Webern's canons play with the fact that the second six notes of the row are a transposed version of the first six, played backwards, and there are also bigger symmetries at work, to do with the shapes of both halves of the movement.
Keeping up? Not sure I am, but that's not the point! Rather, the thing is that all of this structural unity creates a symphonic form that sounds neither completely predictable nor totally random.
When you listen to the Symphony , you're taken in by the centripetal concentration of the music, and you're set out on a meditative journey in the first movement into a vortex of almost infinite musical connectivity.
This is an emotionally moving experience, too, in the range of expression Webern conjures, which includes heightened, violent lyricism as well as pointillist brilliance. The connections continue in the Variations movement , in which the second half of each tiny variation - from a march to a moto perpetuo, from a lyrical reflection to an enigmatic coda - contains the same notes as the first half, played backwards, and in which the whole movement pivots around its exact middle point, the 4th variation.
Webern himself was pretty thrilled with what he'd discovered in this piece: "Greater coherence cannot be achieved. Not even the Netherlanders [the Renaissance polyphonists like Ockeghem , whose music Webern had intensely studied] have managed this … The entire movement thus represents in itself a double canon with retrograde motion … What you see here retrograde, canon, etc. As many connections as possible should be created, and you will have to admit that there are many connections here!
But I think George Benjamin again gets closer to what it's like to listen to this Symphony: "Paradoxically, this product of hermetic constructivism seems infused with intense emotion, that emotion evenly diffused across the whole surface of the music.
Gone is the mono-directional thrust of Classical and Romantic music; in its place a world of rotations and reflections, opening myriad paths for the listener to trace through textures of luminous clarity yet beguiling ambiguity.
0コメント