20th century music...
G. Brown
Fascinating article in arts section of NY TIMES TODAY(12/27)by James
Oestreich on how 20th century music is likely to be viewed in the next
millenium....really a must-read....
Eric Schissel
I'm sorry, but wasn't it Oestreich who, some years back reviewing
a concert with Berg's violin concerto, called it the only work
produced by a serialist that was likely to be remembered? If so,
I'm not so sure I'm interested in what he has to say about what
20th-century music will be remembered...
-Eric Schissel
G. Brown
Eric Schissel wrote:
>
> I'm sorry, but wasn't it Oestreich who, some years back reviewing
> a concert with Berg's violin concerto, called it the only work
> produced by a serialist that was likely to be remembered? If so,
> I'm not so sure I'm interested in what he has to say about what
> 20th-century music will be remembered...
> -Eric Schissel
manages some good works for the piece this time around!
D.G. Porter
G. Brown wrote:
>
> Fascinating article in arts section of NY TIMES TODAY(12/27)by James
> Oestreich on how 20th century music is likely to be viewed in the next
> millenium....really a must-read....
Well?? Why don't you post some relevant excerpts for us outside of NYC?
G. Brown
the NYT is on the web at HTTP://www.nytimes.com/
...they usually have an interesting article or two on classical music in
the arts section...and today's as I said is worth a look(though it will
be quite controversial to many)...cheers,gb
Tony Movshon
In article <34A55B...@pacbell.net>, "D.G. Porter" <dgpo...@pacbell.net> writes:
>> Fascinating article in arts section of NY TIMES TODAY(12/27)by James
>> Oestreich on how 20th century music is likely to be viewed in the next
>> millenium....really a must-read....
>
>Well?? Why don't you post some relevant excerpts for us outside of NYC?
There's always the National Edition ... or try
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/arts/20th-century-music.html
(I assume this URL is only good for today, 12/27, but later you can
find the piece by searching the archives).
Tony Movshon
Center for Neural Science New York University
http://www.cns.nyu.edu mov...@nyu.edu
Tony Movshon
In article <34A55B...@pacbell.net>, "D.G. Porter" <dgpo...@pacbell.net> writes:
>Well?? Why don't you post some relevant excerpts for us outside of NYC?
Oh, what the hell, here it is. Is it legal to repost copyrighted material
like this? If not, apologies ...
[The New York Times, December 27, 1997]
20th Century Music May Get Some Respect -- In the Next Millennium
By JAMES R. OESTREICH
For timeliness combined with venerability, few anniversaries in the
new year can top the 900th birthday of the German nun and mystic
Hildegard of Bingen. In the last few years Hildegard's music, writings
and nostrums have ridden a crest of worldwide popularity that even
such a visionary as she could scarcely have imagined, let alone
desired. For the music world especially, this sudden leap into
antiquity, part of a larger boom in medieval chant, lends an
unexpected piquancy to the approach of the new millennium.
Yet in the rarefied precincts of classical music, the millennium is
almost too big to think about. The turn of the century may be more
interesting, and it provides plenty of food for thought in itself. For
in classical music, seemingly more than in the other arts, the very
notion "20th century" has taken on a heavy freight of meaning and a
life of its own.
Among the broader audience, at least in the United States, the term
has become an all-purpose pejorative synonymous with "modern." Such
listeners, sensing rightly or wrongly that composers had turned their
backs on audiences, came to see all 20th century music as something to
approach with caution or simply avoid. But for those involved in the
world of classical music, the 20th century carries many meanings, no
less powerful. And for everyone, those various meanings are likely to
shift subtly yet significantly with three more ticks of the yearly
clock.
"That will be very interesting," said Christoph von Dohnanyi, the
music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, who has always laid a
heavier stress than most mainline maestros on works of this century.
"Suddenly Brahms and his time will seem as remote to us as the era of
the French Revolution has always been to this century. And the music
of the 20th century will inevitably be seen in a different light."
It is fascinating if ultimately futile to speculate about how this
tortured century may look from that loftier perspective. Might its
modernism, blunted by an ever-thickening layer of newer sounds, appear
less forbidding to the average music lover, even quaintly
old-fashioned? And will the 21st century start with a clean slate in
the public mind or simply provide something else for most listeners to
fear or hate?
Then again, is any real break possible? Many suggest that classical
music in this century has been no one thing or even an orderly
progression but a sheer multiplicity if not a babel of styles and
idioms. It may in any case be time to start taking stock of just what
the idea of the 20th century in music includes.
Clearly, it is more than a chronological construct. The century began
as an extension of the last, with Puccini's "Tosca" and Mahler's
Fourth Symphony.
Ralph Kirshbaum, an American cellist who teaches at the Royal Northern
College of Music in Manchester, England, reports that instrumental
students there are required to include a work from the 20th century in
their final recitals but that Debussy's melodious Cello Sonata of
1915, for example, has pointedly been disqualified. "The faculty
wanted works that came to grips with the problems and complications of
the newer languages of Schoenberg and beyond," he said. "And in that
sense, the century began around 1920, with Stravinsky and Bartok as
well as Schoenberg."
Indeed, the thudding drums heard round the world came in Stravinsky's
primitivist "Rite of Spring," of 1913, which, with its dance to match,
incited the audience at the Paris premiere to near-riot. Although the
composer continued over the next six decades to evolve a career as
rich and kaleidoscopic as that of Picasso in the visual arts,
Stravinsky's name can still throw a scare into subscribers at major
orchestras and opera houses.
Here already, classical-music audiences appear to be out of step with
their counterparts in the other arts, who have largely embraced this
century's innovations. Picasso retrospectives routinely catch the
popular fancy; it is hard to imagine a Stravinsky festival that could
do likewise.
"There has always been a common path between painting and music," said
violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, who has specialized in contemporary
music over the last decade. "But today the culture is visually
oriented, and as this becomes stronger and stronger, it will be more
and more difficult for music, especially challenging music, to become
accepted into the ear and the soul."
With the innovations of Stravinsky and Bartok, much of the 20th
century sound was in place: harmonies freely laced with dissonances,
abrupt shifts and dizzying mixes of style, complex meters, percussive
rhythms and raucous sonorities. But the more severe challenges lay
elsewhere, with attempts to coin actual new musical languages.
Schoenberg's studied atonality, eventually codified in the 12-tone
system, came, with added complexities, to dominate the thinking of
academically based composers at mid-century and even to influence
Stravinsky.
Here the goal was to break down whatever expectations of melody and
harmony listeners might have retained though centuries of evolution of
an ever more complex tonal system. And here, many argue, it was the
art of music itself, with its dismantling of traditional musical
syntax, that was out of step with its literary and visual counterparts.
"The break with tonality is similar to the break with representation
in the visual arts and literature," said Eugene Drucker, a violinist
in the Emerson String Quartet, which is immersed in its second season
of concerts interspersing Beethoven quartets with works of the 20th
century. "James Joyce did much the same thing in literature. But what
would have happened if all writers had followed him and abandoned
sentence structure?"
These analogies, of course, are merely approximate, and they are
complicated by the fact that the different arts evolve at different
paces and times, with music often bringing up the historical rear.
"At the beginning of the century, music lagged behind poetry," said
Charles Rosen, the noted pianist and music historian. "It was a
natural development, music taking over from the poetry of Mallarme,
for example, with Schoenberg, and painting with Kandinsky. But already
in the 19th century music had developed a difficulty that the other
arts did not have, in the late works of Beethoven, which in their
tendency toward abstraction were themselves models for Mallarme and
others."
In all such discussions, Alex Ross, the music critic of The New
Yorker, cautions, false analogies among the various art forms may
arise.
"The idea of abstraction can be applied to the visual arts, and there
is still something that appeals viscerally," Ross said. "But when the
same idea is applied to music, something is lost in the translation.
When great music emerges from abstract idioms, it does so almost in
spite of itself, as in the case of Alban Berg."
Berg represents one example of what Ross calls fruitful contradiction,
so prevalent in the 20th century, in which composers who set out to
work within a style or system achieved their greatest triumphs at
least in part by resisting it. Berg tended to avoid strict adherence
to the 12-tone method of his mentor, Schoenberg, and even used a Bach
chorale tune in one of his finest works, the Violin Concerto.
Sibelius, a lingering Romantic who tends to be read out of the
modernist view of the century, is another of Ross' examples, having
arrived in his last works at consummately visionary and transcendent
ideas despite his traditional aims.
What has emerged from the century's "turmoil of possibilities," Ross
said, is "no composer on the level of Mozart but a wonderful profusion
of minor masters, great idiosyncratic masters, local greatness rather
than universal greatness." "Local" here may refer to composers working
within a limited style or medium, like the "mystical Minimalists," as
well as to composers other than those often deemed "universal" in
their appeal, like the 19th century Germans Beethoven and Brahms.
Richard Taruskin, who has written extensively about Stravinsky and
20th century music and is writing a general history of music, goes a
few steps further. The very search for great world-historical figures
along a single trajectory, he argues, is a carryover from Hegelian
attitudes of the 19th century, when those notions actually bore some
relation to the facts as great individuals in the Germanic musical
tradition succeeded one another.
"Now it's become a bedtime story," he said. "The 19th century was the
great musical century. The 20th has been the great century in the
visual arts. And now the littlest fragment of the music world still
thinks it's all that counts: a tiny vanguard continuing a great
flowering of liberation."
The eclectic composer Luciano Berio agrees that the classical-music
tradition has become just a small part of the larger world of music.
"My hope is that people become aware that the word 'music' is no longer
significant," he said, "but 'musics."'
His fellow European composer Krzysztof Penderecki, who established his
international reputation in 1961 with his "Threnody for the Victims of
Hiroshima," takes a less sanguine view specifically of populistic
trends among composers in recent years. He cites this, along with the
gradual disappearance of large musical forms like the oratorio and the
grand symphony, and the lack of a common musical language, as a
hallmark of the 20th century in music.
"For me," he said, "these are all weaknesses of our time."
The younger American composer Augusta Read Thomas, taking the matter
more in stride, agrees that "a common musical tongue has fragmented
into a whole collection," but she approaches Penderecki's concern
about populism.
"We live in a time when the arts are completely undervalued and
underestimated by the masses, and we are overwhelmed by the rituals of
popular culture," she said. "This does not leave one in the easiest
context to compose classical art music."
Whether they acknowledge it or not, Taruskin argues, composers of the
supposed mainstream have been swamped in a sea of change. The salient
influences on 20th century music, he suggests, have been the intrusion
of mass and totalitarian politics; the advent of recording and other
electronic means, allowing music to be created directly in sound
without need of paper, and a concomitant decline in musical literacy
among professionals as well as the public.
And here is a shift that is potentially millennial indeed, for what
Taruskin foresees is nothing less than the end of musical literacy,
which dates from about 1000 A.D.
But Taruskin himself has cautioned against predictions and big
statements. If this era has anything definite to say about the next,
it is that for good or ill, the 21st century, not to mention the third
millennium, will be full of surprises.
G. Brown
G. Brown wrote:
>
> D.G. Porter wrote:
> >
> > G. Brown wrote:
> > >
> > > Oestreich on how 20th century music is likely to be viewed in the next
> > > millenium....really a must-read....
> >
> the NYT is on the web at HTTP://www.nytimes.com/
> ...they usually have an interesting article or two on classical music in
> the arts section...and today's as I said is worth a look(though it will
> be quite controversial to many)...cheers,gb
HTTP://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/arts/20th-century-music.html
cheers,gb
G. Brown
cheers,gb
Mario Taboada
Oestereich didn't ask me, but I would like add that this has been a
great century for music. Indeed, a century that can boast talents as
different and great as a Bartok, an Igor, a Martinu, a Schoenberg, a
Webern, a Berg, a Bacewicz, a Villa-Lobos, a Malipiero, a Sessions, a
Lutoslawski, a Panufnik, a Ginastera, a de Falla, a Robert Simpson, and
on and on, will eventually come to be seen as a Golden Age.
In fact, for brevity's sake the case for this century's greatness of
musical production can be made by looking at the great quartettisti we
have had and have. Take away Beethoven (it's cheating a bit, but let's
anyway) and this century's quartettisti far surpass those of the
nineteenth century...
Lastly, I would flush everything that Taruskin has written, said, or
will write and say down the toilet. In my opinion, based on his frequent
jeremiads in the NYT and elsewhere, Taruskin's judgment cannot be
trusted. Only an oaf would consider Shostakovich to be the greatest
composer of the century - and Prokofiev a second-rate composer!
Regards,
Mario Taboada
Brian Newhouse
In article <34A539...@sprintmail.com>, Mario Taboada
<matr...@sprintmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Lastly, I would flush everything that Taruskin has written, said, or
> will write and say down the toilet. In my opinion, based on his frequent
> jeremiads in the NYT and elsewhere, Taruskin's judgment cannot be
> trusted. Only an oaf would consider Shostakovich to be the greatest
> composer of the century - and Prokofiev a second-rate composer!
>
Actually, in his scholarly fields (nineteenth-century Russian music and
fifteenth-century sacred polyphony) Taruskin is both erudite and pretty
trustworthy. It's when he gets into the 20th century that something goes
horribly wrong with his writing.
Personally, I blame his being a New York Intellectual (or at least coming
from that background). As such, he tends to wildly overestimate the
influence of totalitarian politics and ideological developments on music,
and underestimate the influence of anything more concrete. I'm reminded
all too often of Norman Podhoretz's pronouncement that he and his fellow
neocons belive in "nothing but ideas". It's not surprising that he would
consider Shostakovish the greatest composer of his century; if you regard
the rise and fall of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist totalitarianism as _the_
salient historical fact about the 20th century--and many intellectually
minded people have--you are going to have a predisposition in favor of an
artist who, like Shostakovich, embodied all the contradictions of that
regime; against such a figure, anything we do in the non-Communist world
was bound to seem trivial. (People were actually arguing that in the
1970s about the relative merits of Soviet-bloc vs. free-world novels--the
whole canard about how novelists write all the better for a little bit of
oppression.)
Naturally, he gets far too obsessed with topicality, as if people wouldn't
listen to music these days unless it explicitly concerned Major Historical
Issues--you know, like Podhoretz's abandonment of the novel on the grounds
that the novel was supposed to be "news that stayed news", and that
journalism was better suited to supply that need than the current novel.
Somehow, to praise Stefan Wolpe to high heaven because one of his pieces
contains secret references to the Holocaust seems to me to miss the point
of what Wolpe is all about; likewise with his extravagant praise of Steve
Reich as the first artist who, in the teeth of Adorno, in *Different
trains* successfully represented the horrors of Auschwitz in his art.
(And *Different trains* isn't even that good a piece for Reich--those
speech imitations become so cut and dried that even the Auschwitz bits
come off as, "I took the train to visit my folks in California, the Jews
took the train to be murdered in Auschwitz, isn't that special?" It's
chiefly of interest as a study for techniques used to much better effect
in *The cave*, IMHO.)
It's also not surprising that he would tend to drag out metaphors of
totalitarianism at the drop of a pitch-class set. To denounce the follies
of, say, academic serialism as some sort of wicked quasi-totalitarian
musical dictatorship rather than as, say, a passing whim of musical
fashion prompted by a major misunderstanding of the previous musical
generation isn't just intemperate; pace Mark Shulgasser, it trivializes
the suffering of the victims of totalitarianism to compare them to the
discomforts of an audience. Then, of course, there was his trashing of
Cage in The New Republic on the occasion of Cage's death using the very
same arguments--that's what really disillusioned me about Taruskin.
Then, of course, there's his dismissive attitude towards anything not of
that macho-intellectual milieu. I just loved his preview piece on *The
rake's progress*, in which he sneered at Auden's Christian existentialism,
denounced the whole bread-machine business as "anti-capitalist" (and I
always took it as anti-utopian!), and claimed that Auden and Kallman's
depiction of Anne Trulove as "misogynist" because, you see, they were
homosexual...
I mean, Taruskin is lively. He's well-informed. He describes what he
hears remarkably well when he bothers. I actually liked his early reviews
in Opus. If he weren't so busy trying to be a Major Musical Intellectual,
he could be classical music's answer to Pauline Kael--that brilliant,
partial, prejudiced, and thoroughly indispensible film critic who
described performances better than anyone, and who could tell you all
about a movie even when you disagreed with her. But his more pretentious
efforts prove cpnclusively that the intellectual equipment of a New York
Intellectual is thoroughly inadequete for understanding the 20th-century
musical scene.
--
Brian Newhouse
newh...@mail.crisp.net
piper
On Sun, 28 Dec 1997 05:21:28 GMT, newh...@mail.crisp.net (Brian
Newhouse) wrote:
[snip]
>Personally, I blame his being a New York Intellectual (or at least coming
>from that background).
[snip]
>But his more pretentious
>efforts prove cpnclusively that the intellectual equipment of a New York
>Intellectual is thoroughly inadequete for understanding the 20th-century
>musical scene.
And a hearty Bronx cheer to you, Brian! PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!
These prejudiced remarks aside, I've been impressed with several of
Taruskin's articles. What I've read shows him to be a thinker. And I
think I would have to read the entire articles at issue to see the
contexts in which he made the remarks that offended many of you.
Of course, I don't find Shostakovich to be a top-10 20th-century
composer, but who said I had to agree with all a critic's opinions to
respect his thinking?
Regards from a "New York intellectual" - and proud of it!
Michael
Simon Roberts
Brian Newhouse (newh...@mail.crisp.net) wrote:
: In article <34A539...@sprintmail.com>, Mario Taboada
: <matr...@sprintmail.com> wrote:
: [snip]
: > Lastly, I would flush everything that Taruskin has written, said, or
: > will write and say down the toilet. In my opinion, based on his frequent
: > jeremiads in the NYT and elsewhere, Taruskin's judgment cannot be
: > trusted. Only an oaf would consider Shostakovich to be the greatest
: > composer of the century - and Prokofiev a second-rate composer!
: >
: Actually, in his scholarly fields (nineteenth-century Russian music and
: fifteenth-century sacred polyphony) Taruskin is both erudite and pretty
: trustworthy. It's when he gets into the 20th century that something goes
: horribly wrong with his writing.
[snip]
That may or may not be true; but as an analyst of the philosophical
problems concerning the meanings of "authenticity", "original intent",
etc., he has, as far as I can tell, no peer in the music world and no
obvious superior in legal philosophy and other areas in which related
problems arise. His sense of humor doesn't hurt either (though perhaps in
some quarters maybe it does).
Simon
Samuel Vriezen
Mario Taboada <matr...@sprintmail.com>:
>Lastly, I would flush everything that Taruskin has written, said, or
>will write and say down the toilet. In my opinion, based on his frequent
>jeremiads in the NYT and elsewhere, Taruskin's judgment cannot be
>trusted. Only an oaf would consider Shostakovich to be the greatest
>composer of the century - and Prokofiev a second-rate composer!
Or heroically foresee the end of musical literacy for the umpteenth
time since the notion was first entertained. That people really can
make money sprouting such idiocies!
Samuel
Daniel F. Tritter
Funny how all these anniversary or fin de siecle [notre siecle]
scriveners manage to encompass 100 years of music without once
mentioning Richard Strauss [80-90% of whose work is of this century],
Benjamin Britten [all of his works] and Leos Janacek [most of his] and a
batch of less "experimental" composers never existed and did not retain
the public's [who the hell are they, anyway?] approval. Yes, fans, let's
all go downtown and hear an all-Ligeti recital! Oh, boy, an all-Milton
Babbitt evening! I can hardly wait! Who's singing left soprano computer?
It isn't that Taruskin and friends are merely talking to themselves.
It's preposterous that the Times is paying them to pontificate in public
with a finality that brooks no disagreement [that they will listen to]
from the unwashed, who pay to listen.
dft
This article was posted from <A HREF="http://www.slurp.net/">Slurp Net</A>.
Daniel F. Tritter
Brian, don't blame us New Yorkers for Taruskin, one of this generation's
most prominent poseurs. He's a professor at Cal-Berkeley. They can take
a measure of the blame. And to call him an expert is to devalue the
currency; that he gets a great deal of his cant published is more a
measure of the academic press and its failures. Credentials are a funny
thing: I see your posting on opera and assume that you read the
occasional "contributions" of Terry Teachout, who practically elevates
Taruskin to greatness by comparison. He writes for Dance and Commentary.
Samuel Lipman used to adorn the latter's pages with serious thoughts.
Now, to this we've come [to corn a phrase] in criticism?
Oy.
Jicotea
Simon Roberts <si...@dept.english.upenn.edu> wrote in article
<685irp$oej$1...@netnews.upenn.edu>...
> Brian Newhouse (newh...@mail.crisp.net) wrote:
> : In article <34A539...@sprintmail.com>, Mario Taboada
> : <matr...@sprintmail.com> wrote:
>
> : [snip]
> {snip, snip, snip}
[snip]
>... as an analyst of the philosophical
> problems concerning the meanings of "authenticity", "original intent",
> etc., he has, as far as I can tell, no peer in the music world and no
> obvious superior in legal philosophy and other areas in which related
> problems arise. His sense of humor doesn't hurt either (though perhaps
in
> some quarters maybe it does).
>
> Simon
Taruskin invariably goes for the jugular, using a tone of voice which
automatically offends or alienates a great many readers. I think he
deserves respect for the depth of his knowledge, and for his ability to
expound to the point, which is much rarer.
I further think he can be very funny, even when he is shelling areas of my
cherished beliefs.
John Wiser
g .
Brian Newhouse
Yes, indeed, to this we've come...
As an alumnus of the pre-Taruskin UC Berkeley music department, permit me
to take umbrage at your attempt to pass Taruskin on to Berkeley. Before
he came to Berkeley in the late 1980s, he taught at Columbia, where he had
done his graduate work earlier.
And please don't mention Teachout in my presence--I'm trying to listen to
Anne Sofie von Otter lamenting Eurydice's death in the Gardiner *Orfeo*,
and vomiting would be neither appropriate nor accurate in her company.
--
Brian Newhouse
newh...@mail.crisp.net
Brian Newhouse
In article <34a651a5...@news.xs4all.nl>, s...@xs4all.nl (Samuel
Vriezen) wrote:
Does that include lead sheets? Somehow I get the feeling that Taruskin
has no idea of how jazz or studio musicians actually work...
Actually, there may be a point there; it's possible that the fully and
exhaustively notated score that we've all come to know and love may be a
thing of the past a century from now. That doesn't mean, however, that
notation itself will become unnecessary. As long as performers transmit
music to each other, there will be notation; if nothing else, it makes
learning unfamiliar music more economical. However, notation as used in
the future may be more skeletal, more a shorthand giving the performers a
basis to do their thing rather than telling them what the thing is they
do. That, of course, is a return to the way notation functioned in
earlier centuries; think of continuo parts, for instance, or
ornamentation. That's why I brought up lead sheets.
--
Brian Newhouse
newh...@mail.crisp.net
D.G. Porter
Daniel F. Tritter wrote:
> Yes, fans, let's
> all go downtown and hear an all-Ligeti recital!
Cool! When!? Where can I get tickets!?
frupert
Well, I take your point to be that the more conservative
composers (at least they seem that way now!) and/or the more
conservative/familiar pieces have made it into the repertoire and are
accepted readily on concert programs -- Prokofiev, Shostakovich,
Britten, Copland, Stravinsky, etc etc. I think it's been easy, with
modern complexity of idiom, for second raters to hide behind their
rows and their dissonances. Since I'm a violinist let me give and
example.
Something like the Schonberg violin concerto is still a very severe test
for about 99.9% of listeners, and few violinists would essay it if a
20th century concerto was desired. Surely they would go instead to
Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Walton, Barber, Nartok, Berg, etc.
Why? Because these composers have written concertos with moments of
transcendent beauty. If that is there, then audiences will listen,
IMHO.
I recall as a young student, in 1959, reading probably my first record
review, in which Isaac Stern's 1958 recording of Bartok No. 2 with
Bernstein and the NY Phil was praised, but potential buyers were
stringly warned by the writer of the dissonances and the inaccessible
nature of the music. We have come a long way!!
Daniel F. Tritter
I'm glad to hear this musician's thoughtful observations. When I first
heard Vaughan-Williams' piece on William Blake poems in 1946, I was
angry...in the half century sonce, I've heard [many times] Schoenberg
and Berg pieces that are simply romantic tunes to my ears, premieres of
composers I have known, such as Argento and Corigliano, and learned to
take them or leave them, not dismiss them as impossibly advanced
[neither of the latter two are in that category], but to omit the less
experimental composers from a century's survey is like running a private
club that thinks a lay audience unimportant.
Eric Schissel
Daniel Tritter posted:
[bunch of peevish something-or-other, omitted.]
Time for music to become another popularity contest, I see. Taruskin
hasn't been much help to those less-experimental composers, either, for
all his badgering of (the great, to .my. mind) Milton Babbitt et al.
(actually, I'm only assuming he badgers Babbitt from the tone of your
post- has he actually done so???) If he .has. written anything positive,
or anything at all, about Brian, Lloyd, Ivanovs, Balakauskas, Holmboe,
Weis, Smalley, or Sutherland, please do inform me so.
-Eric Schissel
Opus47
I guess I'm just a big oaf Mario Taboada with over 400 Shostakovich CD's and
only a fraction of Prokofiev.
But those of us who have had our mind transport us beyond what is real seldom
do agree with the majority of the rest of you.
What? you find it hard to believe that I been transported beyond the real? I've
been the devil and I've been god and mind has bubbled with ideas that would
associate things which no one else would think of.
I have an enormous amount of energy inside me and only if you could talk my
psychiatrist to let it loose. I could become SUPER OAF. I could lose all my
inhibitions by which point I wouldn't care if I ate or sleep and I would easily
loose all those unwanted pounds. But by this time I probably would care about
my big old silly Shostakovich collection anyway. I would compose 104
symphonies, one a week, from the first week in 1998 till the year 2000 and
become the greatest composer of the 20th century!
Fred
Robert Fink
In article <34a7e...@news2.lightlink.com>, schi...@light.lightlink.com
(Eric Schissel) wrote:
Well, yes--a big piece on Holmboe. And of course, he did proclaim Steve
Reich the key composer of the late 20th century.
rwf
(And he was right.)
rwf
--
"I notice that I am still very hesitant to delve into the nineteenth century. All kinds of things happened in music then that I don't think are good. After Chopin and Mendelssohn, we landed in a mudbath that only got cleaned up with the _Sacre_" -- Louis Andriessen
Robert Fink
> Brian, don't blame us New Yorkers for Taruskin, one of this generation's
> most prominent poseurs. He's a professor at Cal-Berkeley. They can take
> a measure of the blame. And to call him an expert is to devalue the
> currency; that he gets a great deal of his cant published is more a
> measure of the academic press and its failures. Credentials are a funny
> thing: I see your posting on opera and assume that you read the
> occasional "contributions" of Terry Teachout, who practically elevates
> Taruskin to greatness by comparison. He writes for Dance and Commentary.
> Samuel Lipman used to adorn the latter's pages with serious thoughts.
> Now, to this we've come [to corn a phrase] in criticism?
> Oy.
>
>
OH PLEASE!!! Will you people shut up about things you obviously know
little about? Richard Taruskin was born and bred in New York, and did
undergraduate and graduate work at Columbia, as well as a long stint there
as a junior faculty member. Berkeley bears no responsibility for his
intellectual development; trust me (as a Berkeley grad), the "Berkeley
Intellectual" is quite a different animal.
As for all the hysterical denunciations of Taruskin as an "idiot,"
"poseur," etc., go read his 1800-page book on Stravinsky. res ipse
loquitur.
D.G. Porter
> (Eric Schissel) wrote:
>
> > Daniel Tritter posted:
> >
And that mediocrity Elton Groan has become a Knight of the Realm, next
to Sir Pauly and Sir Andrew.
English Peerage sucks as much as English food!
dtritter
1. The idiot part was not mine. Poseur, yes.
2. I didn't think necessary to know his life history. He has been
identified many times and places as a Berkeley professor. Who spent
money to pay him earlier is beyond my interest and irrelevant to the
thread.
3. If you think that after a dozen or more of his articles have
crossed my path, each more tendentious and soporific than its
predessors, that I would invest my energies to read 1800 pages of
Taruskin, then you deserve his company. If you are holding this out
to your students as the voice of authority, rather than the acme of
tedium, I pity them. Eastman students deserve better.
Roger L. Lustig
dtritter wrote:
>
> 1. The idiot part was not mine. Poseur, yes.
How would you know? You don't know even a tenth of the man's work.
> 2. I didn't think necessary to know his life history. He has been
> identified many times and places as a Berkeley professor. Who spent
> money to pay him earlier is beyond my interest and irrelevant to the
> thread.
Sure, as long as invective (as opposed to, say, enlightenment) is your
goal.
> 3. If you think that after a dozen or more of his articles have
> crossed my path, each more tendentious and soporific than its
> predessors, that I would invest my energies to read 1800 pages of
> Taruskin, then you deserve his company. If you are holding this out
> to your students as the voice of authority, rather than the acme of
> tedium, I pity them. Eastman students deserve better.
Well, thanks for clearing that up. Dismissing a book one hasn't read
tends to speak, um, volumes about the one doing the dismissing.
In case you really believe what you're writing, and haven't ever
heard of a scholar who wrote one way for the popular press, another
way in academic venues, let me assure you that you're barking up
the wrong tree. Taruskin's work on Stravinsky is erudite, carefully
done, and highly interesting to those who care about Stravinsky.
Tell me, what works on Stravinsky do you consider better than
Taruskin's, as long as you're recommending books to them? Don't
limit yourself to ones you've read or anything...
Richard Taruskin can make a colossal ass of himself, especially
in the New York Times. On the other hand, he can also write
critiques, commentaries, and satires far more insightful than
those by the Hacks of Record. And as a scholar he has few peers.
Get to know his scholarship. Don't just imagine it.
Roger Lustig
Brian Newhouse
In article <34ADBFA4...@ix.netcom.com>, juli...@ix.netcom.com wrote:
> dtritter wrote:
[snip]
> > 3. If you think that after a dozen or more of his articles have
> > crossed my path, each more tendentious and soporific than its
> > predessors, that I would invest my energies to read 1800 pages of
> > Taruskin, then you deserve his company. If you are holding this out
> > to your students as the voice of authority, rather than the acme of
> > tedium, I pity them. Eastman students deserve better.
>
> Well, thanks for clearing that up. Dismissing a book one hasn't read
> tends to speak, um, volumes about the one doing the dismissing.
>
> In case you really believe what you're writing, and haven't ever
> heard of a scholar who wrote one way for the popular press, another
> way in academic venues, let me assure you that you're barking up
> the wrong tree. Taruskin's work on Stravinsky is erudite, carefully
> done, and highly interesting to those who care about Stravinsky.
>
> Tell me, what works on Stravinsky do you consider better than
> Taruskin's, as long as you're recommending books to them? Don't
> limit yourself to ones you've read or anything...
>
> Richard Taruskin can make a colossal ass of himself, especially
> in the New York Times. On the other hand, he can also write
> critiques, commentaries, and satires far more insightful than
> those by the Hacks of Record. And as a scholar he has few peers.
> Get to know his scholarship. Don't just imagine it.
>
> Roger Lustig
Well, that was my point, sort of (though I don't think he controls his
anger enough to make a good satirist). But all too often, when he writes
for a general audience, particularly on post-WWI music, he seems to feel
the need to make all sorts of crude binary distinctions, invoke any manner
of pseudo-political metaphors with surprisingly little contact with
real-life politics, affect a hostile and defensive manner, and assume
rightly or wrongly that his audience is above all interested in
generalized political-topical matters (music for the man who enjoys The
New Republic). It's as if he deliberately turns aside from all that makes
him a superior musicologist--though it may be that he feels too strongly
about certain subjects to handle them with the proper care, as much as
assuming that a general audience will only listen if he apes, oh, Norman
Podhoretz as much as possible. It's not as if we were talking about,
say, Bernard Holland, who can't do any better. That's what I can't
stand.
--
Brian Newhouse
newh...@mail.crisp.net
Matt
In article <34ADBFA4...@ix.netcom.com>,
Roger L. Lustig <juli...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>Richard Taruskin can make a colossal ass of himself, especially
>in the New York Times. On the other hand, he can also write
>critiques, commentaries, and satires far more insightful than
>those by the Hacks of Record. And as a scholar he has few peers.
>Get to know his scholarship. Don't just imagine it.
Funny, that's just what I say about Schenker's parsing method among
his cultural critiques... and Wagner's music amid his social commentaries.
Some assholes are really great when they're on their own turf.
Matt "Don't get me started on medical info tech" Fields, composer
--
Matt Fields, A.Mus.D. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~fields/TTTB
Featured addresses: birth...@INAME.COM us...@REPLAY.COM trav...@XS4ALL.NL gru...@NETROX.NET mra...@MAGG.NET bdr...@PONYEXPRESS.NET
ni...@cyberxpress.net, ro...@clever.net postm...@array.ca ME...@HOME.NET j...@pornlord.com johnyc...@HOTMAIL.COM Postm...@worldOnline.nl
The Melsons
>In article <34A539...@sprintmail.com>, Mario Taboada
><matr...@sprintmail.com> wrote:
>
>[snip]
>
>> Lastly, I would flush everything that Taruskin has written, said, or
>> will write and say down the toilet. In my opinion, based on his frequent
>> jeremiads in the NYT and elsewhere, Taruskin's judgment cannot be
>> trusted. Only an oaf would consider Shostakovich to be the greatest
>> composer of the century - and Prokofiev a second-rate composer!
>>
>
>Actually, in his scholarly fields (nineteenth-century Russian music and
>fifteenth-century sacred polyphony) Taruskin is both erudite and pretty
>trustworthy. It's when he gets into the 20th century that something goes
>horribly wrong with his writing.
I question his trustworthiness in 19th-century Russian music - he has
been highly critical of Tchaikovsky scholar David Brown, whose
insights into Tchaikovsky's life and music make him, for me, the most
trustworthy of all who have written about the composer.
Mark Melson
>Personally, I blame his being a New York Intellectual (or at least coming
>about a movie even when you disagreed with her. But his more pretentious
>efforts prove cpnclusively that the intellectual equipment of a New York
>Intellectual is thoroughly inadequete for understanding the 20th-century
>musical scene.
>
>--
>Brian Newhouse
>newh...@mail.crisp.net
Roger L. Lustig
The Melsons wrote:
>
> On Sun, 28 Dec 1997 05:21:28 GMT, newh...@mail.crisp.net (Brian
> Newhouse) wrote:
>
> >In article <34A539...@sprintmail.com>, Mario Taboada
> ><matr...@sprintmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >[snip]
> >
> >> Lastly, I would flush everything that Taruskin has written, said, or
> >> will write and say down the toilet. In my opinion, based on his frequent
> >> jeremiads in the NYT and elsewhere, Taruskin's judgment cannot be
> >> trusted. Only an oaf would consider Shostakovich to be the greatest
> >> composer of the century - and Prokofiev a second-rate composer!
> >>
> >
> >Actually, in his scholarly fields (nineteenth-century Russian music and
> >fifteenth-century sacred polyphony) Taruskin is both erudite and pretty
> >trustworthy. It's when he gets into the 20th century that something goes
> >horribly wrong with his writing.
>
> I question his trustworthiness in 19th-century Russian music - he has
> been highly critical of Tchaikovsky scholar David Brown, whose
> insights into Tchaikovsky's life and music make him, for me, the most
> trustworthy of all who have written about the composer.
How does that affect his trustworthiness? All you're saying is that
you prefer to believe Brown's version. For that matter, how do insights
translate into trustworthiness?
I find Taruskin's view of Tchaikovsky to be fascinating and well-
informed. His discussion of the Second Suite in his Gauss Lecture
series (which I believe has been published) opened my eyes to this
work.
Roger
Alan Swindells
In article <34A6F6...@pacbell.net>, "D.G. Porter" <dgpo...@pacbell.net>
wrote:
> Daniel F. Tritter wrote:
> > Yes, fans, let's
> > all go downtown and hear an all-Ligeti recital!
>
> Cool! When!? Where can I get tickets!?
Come to England during the next couple of years and you will get
several opportunities. His complete works are being done over a
three year span in London (started about 12 months ago.)
--
Regards: Alan * alan...@argonet.co.uk *
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Alan Swindells
In article <34AAF0...@pacbell.net>, "D.G. Porter" <dgpo...@pacbell.net>
wrote:
>
> >
> > > Daniel Tritter posted:
> > >
> > > Time for music to become another popularity contest, I see.
>
> And that mediocrity Elton Groan has become a Knight of the Realm, next
> to Sir Pauly and Sir Andrew.
Yuk! Just got back from Switzerland and heard the news. Can't say
that I was surprised, though, after the funeral and all.
> English Peerage sucks as much as English food!
Agreed on the peerage. However, three points should be answered:-
1) Being a 'Sir' ain't entering the peerage
2) Hasn't Andrew Lloyds Bank already gone one further? and
3) have you ever had a good English Steak and Kidney pie? A lot
of it is foul but in the hands of a good cook English food can be
wonderful.
Alan Swindells
> Only an oaf would consider Shostakovich to be the greatest
> composer of the century - and Prokofiev a second-rate composer!
Perhaps, but I would rate Shostakovich somewhere in the top 10 and
Prokofiev as perhaps scraping into the top 50. I wouldn't like to
think that that qualifies me, too!
Robert Fink
In article <newhouse-030...@t1-48.crisp.net>,
newh...@mail.crisp.net (Brian Newhouse) wrote (about Richard Taruskin):
"But all too often, when he writes for a general audience...he seems to
feel the need to make all sorts of crude binary distinctions, invoke any
manner of pseudo-political metaphors with surprisingly little contact with
real-life politics, affect a hostile and defensive manner, and assume
rightly or wrongly that his audience is above all interested in
generalized political-topical matters..."
Sounds like a perfect description of...George Bernard Shaw. (Remember his
Perfect Wagnerite? And his brutal dismissals of Brahms, the late
nineteenth ct analogue to Wuorinen?)
And Shaw's is the best music journalism I know.
piper
On 4 Jan 1998 16:55:24 GMT, rf...@frontiernet.net (Robert Fink) wrote:
>In article <newhouse-030...@t1-48.crisp.net>,
>newh...@mail.crisp.net (Brian Newhouse) wrote (about Richard Taruskin):
>
>
>"But all too often, when he writes for a general audience...he seems to
>feel the need to make all sorts of crude binary distinctions, invoke any
>manner of pseudo-political metaphors with surprisingly little contact with
>real-life politics, affect a hostile and defensive manner, and assume
>rightly or wrongly that his audience is above all interested in
>generalized political-topical matters..."
>
>Sounds like a perfect description of...George Bernard Shaw. (Remember his
>Perfect Wagnerite? And his brutal dismissals of Brahms, the late
>nineteenth ct analogue to Wuorinen?)
[snip]
Interesting thoughts, but: How is Brahms the 19th-c. analog to
Wuorinen? For one thing, I don't think Wuorinen can shine Brahms'
shoes! Nor do I think Wuorinen is a composer of Brahms' originality.
But so much about my opinions. What's yours?
Michael
Eric Schissel
piper (pi...@interport.net) wrote:
>On 4 Jan 1998 16:55:24 GMT, rf...@frontiernet.net (Robert Fink) wrote:
>>In article <newhouse-030...@t1-48.crisp.net>,
>>newh...@mail.crisp.net (Brian Newhouse) wrote (about Richard Taruskin):
>>Sounds like a perfect description of...George Bernard Shaw. (Remember his
>>Perfect Wagnerite? And his brutal dismissals of Brahms, the late
>>nineteenth ct analogue to Wuorinen?)
>[snip]
>Interesting thoughts, but: How is Brahms the 19th-c. analog to
>Wuorinen? For one thing, I don't think Wuorinen can shine Brahms'
>shoes! Nor do I think Wuorinen is a composer of Brahms' originality.
>But so much about my opinions. What's yours?
Erm... I think Mr. Newhouse meant that Shaw's dismissals of Brahms are the
late 19th century analogue to Wuorinen's dismissal (probably hastily
written, imho, considering the tonal qualities of his music) of modern
tonal composing.
.Especially. since it's gotten so that Wuorinen is better known,
apparently, for that one sentence than for the body of his music, good
though it is.
-Eric Schissel
Brian Newhouse
In article <34b06...@news2.lightlink.com>, schi...@light.lightlink.com
(Eric Schissel) wrote:
> piper (pi...@interport.net) wrote:
> >On 4 Jan 1998 16:55:24 GMT, rf...@frontiernet.net (Robert Fink) wrote:
>
> >>In article <newhouse-030...@t1-48.crisp.net>,
> >>newh...@mail.crisp.net (Brian Newhouse) wrote (about Richard Taruskin):
> >>Sounds like a perfect description of...George Bernard Shaw. (Remember his
> >>Perfect Wagnerite? And his brutal dismissals of Brahms, the late
> >>nineteenth ct analogue to Wuorinen?)
> >[snip]
>
> >Interesting thoughts, but: How is Brahms the 19th-c. analog to
> >Wuorinen? For one thing, I don't think Wuorinen can shine Brahms'
> >shoes! Nor do I think Wuorinen is a composer of Brahms' originality.
> >But so much about my opinions. What's yours?
>
> Erm... I think Mr. Newhouse meant that Shaw's dismissals of Brahms are the
> late 19th century analogue to Wuorinen's dismissal (probably hastily
> written, imho, considering the tonal qualities of his music) of modern
> tonal composing.
I didn't write this; Robert Fink did. What I actually wrote was the
"perfect description" itself, which got snipped out.
And I believe Fink's analogy was that Taruskin is to Wuorinen as Shaw was
to Brahms--a bit of exaggeration actually; it was mostly the German
Requiem that Shaw loathed. In fact Shaw considered Wagner more an end
than a beginning, and thought that the music of the future was more likely
to proceed along Brahmsian lines (i.e. absolute-music-oriented), even if
contemporary representatives of such lines such as Parry and Stanford were
unpromising. And I hate to think that Fink would reduce Brahms to
Wuorinen's level, especially after writing at least one fine analytical
article on the third symphony--unless he means to raise Wuorinen to
Brahms's?
(Moreover, Shaw's political references are generally precise and relate to
the real-world politics of his time--as one would expect from a political
activist, a vestryman, and a founding member of the Fabian Society.)
--
Brian Newhouse
newh...@mail.crisp.net
Robert Fink
> And I believe Fink's analogy was that Taruskin is to Wuorinen as Shaw was
> to Brahms--a bit of exaggeration actually; it was mostly the German
> Requiem that Shaw loathed. In fact Shaw considered Wagner more an end
> than a beginning, and thought that the music of the future was more likely
> to proceed along Brahmsian lines (i.e. absolute-music-oriented), even if
> contemporary representatives of such lines such as Parry and Stanford were
> unpromising. And I hate to think that Fink would reduce Brahms to
> Wuorinen's level, especially after writing at least one fine analytical
> article on the third symphony--unless he means to raise Wuorinen to
> Brahms's?
>
It was on the first, actually. (_repercussions 2-1, 1992)
And although Shaw did slam the Deutches Requiem pretty hard, he also
attacked Brahms more generally. Ironically, the attacks characterize
Brahms as a dreamy, undisciplined, self-indulgent spinner of prolix,
bloated forms, sort of a hyper-Schubert if Schubert were guilty of the
most sentimental canards about him.
For instance, in an article about chamber music called "Brahms: Music
without Mind" [see what I mean?] (The World, 7 Feb 1894), Shaw describes
how "Brahms, feeling his way from one sensuous moment to another, turning
from every obstacle and embracing every amenity, produces a whole that has
no more form than a mountain brook has, though every successive nook and
corner as you wander may be as charming as possible." The difference
between this picture of Brahms and the musicological CW on him today is,
of course, amusingly total.
I simply meant to hold up Brahms as the example of a "composer's composer"
that a noted critic iconoclastically, er, well..."clasts". I didn't mean
to imply a comparative judgment of the two, and I am also aware of the
fact that Shaw's attack on Brahms (not intellectual enough) is exactly the
opposite of Taruskin's on Wuorinen (too intellectual).
> (Moreover, Shaw's political references are generally precise and relate to
> the real-world politics of his time--as one would expect from a political
> activist, a vestryman, and a founding member of the Fabian Society.)
>
And Taruskin's are not? It would seem that reading Soviet politics
through Shostakovich symphonies is less willful than tracing the history
of 19th-ct capitalism through the Ring.