Author: brycon
Date: 2020-07-03 22:59
Quote:
What I feel doomed the avant-garde, just to be the devil's advocate:
1. Its ideological tabula rasa position: making a clean break with music of the past.
If by "avant garde" you mean Boulez and his disciples, you may very well be right. But I'm speaking more broadly about Modernist music. And Schoenberg and Stravinsky were very much avant garde composers of the early Modernist period who were steeped in the past. Schoenberg, of course, drew a line from himself back through Brahms to Bach. And aside from Stravinsky's obvious borrowings in his Neoclassical period, The Rite uses two of the main elements of Russian opera--that is, equal division of the octave into minor thirds and descending "Russian" tetrachords--that date back to at least Glinka (see Taruskin's essays on Russian music).
In Boulez's early writings, he thinks that Schoenberg couldn't fully let go of the past, especially with regard to form and rhythm (as a fun experiment, take a Schoenberg 12-tone piece, recompose the pitches so that the music becomes tonal, and the result sounds oddly similar to Mozart). Boulez saw Webern as the great prophet of the second Viennese school. But Webern too was steeped in the past, writing his dissertation on Heinrich Isaac, orchestrating Bach ricercars, using older forms, etc. And even Boulez, despite his efforts to destroy the past, still draws on it. His lush orchestrations, for instance, recall those of Messaien and Debussy.
Quote:
2. Its lack of accessibility: try singing Boulez or Luigi Nono in the shower! I'm not just being frivolous-though, admittedly, I am a bit. The Rite of Spring, on the other hand, is one of the most tuneful works you could imagine. Modernist music is deemed too cerebral; lacking in any emotion and feeling in music came to be regarded as a maudlin value of the past by avant-gardists of the 60s and 70s.
Perhaps, but try singing a "tune" from the Symphony in Three Movements! I think you're right, but I think it's more nuanced. The "issue" with 12-tone music or total-serialized music is that it gives up the ability to differentiate. What I mean is that in a Haydn sonata, for instance, a raised scale-degree 4 signals a transition into the secondary key area; the tiny move from, say, an F to an F# triggers a formal division. Because 12-tone music lacks the intervalic pull of tonality, however, it cannot make this differentiation between formal divisions. That is, 12-tone music is so over-saturated with variation and difference (all tones and intervals being equal) that the repetition and patterning necessary to make changes of expression, character, form, and so on aren't really available to it (at least not on a level that's within most people's perceptive abilities). For some listeners, then, the music becomes a wash of atonality.
As far as Modernist music being too cerebral, I find that a lazy argument. As though Bach is any less cerebral than Webern. Or as though Schoenberg's Erwartung, Berg's Wozzeck, or Messaien's quartet don't reach profound expressive depths.
Quote:
3. The fact that members of the avant-garde began to wield a lot of power and received a lot of funding: the revolutionaries became the new potentates and orthodoxy,as so often happens. Things come full circle. I am French and for a long time, it was hard to take a decision regarding the musical life here in France without getting Pierre Boulez's approval
Yes. And one of the funny things about the situation is that as the early-Modernist period moved toward completely autonomous artworks (framed earlier as "art pour l'art"), the works themselves became so highly technical that only a few experts and fellow artists could make sense of them. It was left to governments, universities, and other forms of patronage to commission Modernist artists as a sign of cultural prestige. And therefore, things circled back around to where they were several centuries prior.
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