Musical Portraits : Interpretations of Twenty Modern ComposersRosenfeld, Paul
History
Musical Portraits : Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers
Rosenfeld, Paul
Composers; Music -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Music -- 20th century -- History and criticism
theme that commences the work and sweeps it before it, one might easily
include the composer in the company of the masters of musical art.
Unfortunately, the magnificent passages are interspersed with unmusical
ones. It is not only that the work does not quite "conceal art," that it
smells overmuch of the laboratory. It is that portions of it are
scarcely "felt" at all, are only too obviously carpentered. The work is
full of music that addresses itself primarily to professors of theory.
It is full of writing dictated by an arbitrary and intellectual
conception of form. There is a great deal of counterpoint in it that
exists only for the benefit of those who "read" scores, and that
clutters the work. There are whole passages that exist only in obedience
to some scholastic demand for thematic inversions and deformations.
There is an unnecessary deal of marching and countermarching of
instruments, an obsession with certain rhythms that becomes purely
mechanical, an intensification of the contrapuntal pickings and peckings
that annoy so often in the compositions of Brahms. It is Schoenberg the
intellectualist, Schoenberg the Doctor of Music, not Schoenberg the
artist, who obtains here.
And it is he one encounters almost solely in the music of the third
period, the enigmatical little pieces for orchestra and piano. It is he
who has emerged victorious from the duel revealed by the D-minor
Quartet. Those grotesque and menacing little works are lineally
descended from the intellectualized passages of the great preceding one,
are, indeed, a complete expression of the theoretical processes which
called them into being. For while in the quartet the scholasticism
appears to have been superimposed upon a body of musical ideas, in the
works of the last period it appears well-nigh the generative principle.
These latter have all the airlessness, the want of poetry, the frigidity
of things constructed after a formula, daring and brilliant though that
formula is. They make it seem as though Schoenberg had, through a
process of consideration and thought and study, arrived at the
conclusion that the music of the future would, in the logic of things,
take such and such a turn, that tonality as it is understood was doomed
to disappear, that part-writing would attain a new independence, that
new conceptions of harmony would result, that rhythm would attain a new
freedom through the influence of the new mechanical body of man, and had
proceeded to incorporate his theories in tone. One finds the
experimental and methodical at every turn throughout these compositions.
Behind them one seems invariably to perceive some one sitting before a
sheet of music paper and tampering with the art of music; seeking to
discover what would result were he to accept as harmonic basis not the
major triad but the minor ninth, to set two contradictory rhythms
clashing, or to sharpen everything and maintain a geometric hardness of
line.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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