"Variations" for a friend — Pianoconcerto Forum

Member

Posts: 1,032
City: Castel San Pietro Terme

May 1, 2013, 18:32

«Since music is also made of code and syntax, I find it appropriate to speak of language, even if it must be said that it connotes but does not denote; it can have multiple senses but no meaning» (Frank)

«In my opinion, to appreciate something, one does not necessarily need to know its mechanism» (Frank)

Daniele says "wonder". I can share his impression, while specifying mine a little. For me, it is the wonder of someone who, in a completely dark environment, is attracted here and now, there, by a noise or a smell they have never heard before. And they feel a bit uneasy. (Luca)

But look. Schoenberg's piece is exemplary in the canonical sense of the term and is a must for anyone who wants to know dodecaphony and its history. He also had his reaction, there are other more recent works to dig through...

I take the liberty of asking you what struck you most to make you use the adjective: "Wonder" (not that I disagree) (Frank)

So let's start from the fact that the writer is, first and foremost, a musical semi-illiterate and that, even more so, is absolutely ignorant regarding the mechanisms of dodecaphony.

Since I was a child, when my father gave me the first two classical music records – they were, imagine that, two 78s, one with two pieces from Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" and the other containing the "Polovtsian Dances" from "Prince Igor" and the symphonic sketch "In the Steppes of Central Asia" by Borodin – I entrusted everything to how my ear transmitted those sounds to my brain, and from this, my judgment emerged.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge but, despite everything, what still prevails in my judgment is linked to this instinct of mine.

Even more than Luca, when I first listened to dodecaphonic music on the radio, and even more post-Weberian music, I found it absurd and unlistenable. But at the same time I thought: if great performers, starting with Abbado and Pollini, dedicate so much space to it, evidently I am the one in error.

In those years, among us, there was much talk about the phenomenon of Luigi Nono, who, through his music, had centered his ideological and militant commitment.

My stubbornness therefore forced me to persevere, but I must confess that before arriving at them, I had to face and fully and broadly digest the Beethovenian "third style," which at the time "terrified" me. Beethoven, from listening to the Fifth at age nine, was and is the musical love of my life, but until about age 25, for me, Beethoven—apart from the Ninth and the Missa Solemnis—was essentially that of the first and second style. Like the Romantics, in short!

To cut a long story short, do you know what else makes me cry out "wonder" today? It is the wonder of how this music... rather, of how so much of last century's music conveys to me that enormous pleasure I feel when listening to music from other centuries. Today, this music is accepted by my ears with the same ease with which I might listen to a great work from the remote past.

Today, I need this music, at least as much as I needed to listen, for however many consecutive times, to Bach's "St Matthew Passion" on vinyl conducted by Karl Richter and the Nine Symphonies, also on vinyl, in the 1977 edition conducted by Karajan, in recent months.

This, Frank, is the "WONDER" for me: discovering that this music, despite its difference in rules and language, moves me as much as all the rest! I have made it my own and I am so happy about it! I don't know...? I almost have the impression, every time I manage to make something my own that until that moment seemed difficult to me, of moving a millimeter closer to that truthhhhhhhh of which the great Cesare Zavattini spoke in one of his films in the 80s.

Bye and thank you all!

danielescarpetti

Member

Posts: 1,032
City: Castel San Pietro Terme

May 1, 2013, 19:27

1) My ignorance of previous posts in this forum (or of music criticism!) does not allow me to identify that “someone” you put in quotation marks. (Luca)

Irrelevant, a highly accredited musicologist maintains that the 20th century is dominated by two great poles: Schoenberg and Stravinsky, described in an extreme synthesis as progress and reaction. (Frank)

Could my prediction be Adorno? (Gerardo)

I do not think it is irrelevant to address this topic, precisely because it constituted one of the biggest blunders that, at least a good part of the left-wing intelligentsia, made regarding music and its evolution.

My advice to Luca is this: get this book as soon as possible, which has finally been reprinted: Massimo Mila “Compagno Stravinsky” Bur saggi. With it you will be able to not only clarify exactly the eternal and absurd quarrel between the supporters of Schönberg and those of Stravinsky, but you will also be able to begin entering the musical world of this great genius of the last century.

For my part, I like to quote here a part of Pietro Gelli's introduction. This book:

«It was released in early 1983, almost to close the celebrations of a centenary that in reality, at least in Italy and I would say in Europe, passed almost unnoticed, just as the death of him who despite everything remains the greatest composer of the 20th century, in 1971, had aroused little critical enthusiasm. (...) Mila notes this clearly: «When Stravinsky died at eighty-nine, the shares of his fame were perhaps at their lowest point. Not from the standpoint of success, mind you, but from that of critical standing within the musical world. The offensive of expressionism, unleashed in the second post-war period, was triumphant, attributing to this single artistic tendency all the merit of the painful resistance to Nazi degradation. Playing on dates and the contemporaneity of facts, Stravinskian neoclassicism was almost branded as fascism, and in any case as escapism».

(...) Mila, although a man of the left, for intellectual honesty and for that typical and somewhat anarchic intolerance toward submitting to every established camp, to every party dictate, since 1959 (...) had warned against Adorno and his followers—among them our composer Giacomo Manzoni—who tended to identify moralistic judgment with aesthetic judgment. (...) Adorno (...) has with a factional aggressiveness made and unmade, and then imposed a hegemonic antinomy, to which Italian culture, for decades from the post-war period onwards, ended up largely submitting. Not so much the musical one (...) Fedele D'Amico, for example, in an article from 1958 (...) speaks of the «squalid theory of Adorno according to which Stravinsky and Schönberg would be the two poles of modern music, one directed toward the past, the other toward the future».

(...) And if the latter was indicated not as a revolutionary of an obsolete or inadequate musical order, but as a progressive, an emblem of modern radicalism and the most acute interpreter of the contemporary crisis, capable of resolving the magical essence of music into human rationality, on the contrary Stravinsky, especially from the neoclassical turn until his approach to dodecaphony, was seen as the symbol of the most alienating conservatism. (...) the anti-Stravinskian lashes were so acidic and fierce as to provoke even the defenses of the supposed antagonist, irritated with the philosopher mentor, toward whom curiously Schönberg felt little sympathy (...).»"