#webern

[jgthirlwell]

01.25.25 In honor of what would have been Pierre Boulez's 100th birthday, the NY Philharmonic presented a tribute concert, performing works by Bach, Schubert, Webern, Stravinsky and Boulez himself. It was a magical afternoon at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. Thanks Tim Dahl!

[senfonikankara]

Visit Original Link

Webern | Passacaglia

[opalid]

Anton Webern - Symphony Op. 21 (1928)

[hawkmoths17]

[creamofthecrap]

Oct 11, 1968: Jack at the New Haven Arena [Photo: Steve Potter]

Bruce

Jack Bruce is an incredibly serious musician. His face is young and calm but up close it hardens around intense eyes. During performances, he sings with that intensity of his eyes and then retreats to a corner while Clapton takes his solos. His conversation was the most egocentric of the three. But, after all, the man can hear four-part harmony in his head. His is unquestionably the unifying force of the group, writing most of the songs, doing 90 per cent of the singing and responsible for harnassing the explosive energies of Clapton and Baker.

While Clapton and Baker are entirely into their own virtuosity, Bruce's musciality is inexhaustible. At present he is working on the Bach Cello Suites ("the most perfect music ever written.") His art on the cello is well documented in "As You Said" on the last album. He may have the most extraordinary taste of any rock musician. "My favorite of the contemporary composers is Olivier Messiaen. I have this tape of the 'Turangalila Symphony' that I made off a radio broadcast and I keep returning to it. It's great music. I went to some of his (Messiaen's) lectures in Brighton. He's very much underrated."

Bruce also spoke of a new record he had just finished cutting called "Things We Like." All the selections on it are compositions of his written over the last five years. Bruce plays string bass. The other players are relatively unknown. "The whole album is serialized improvisation. I've written all the tops and bottoms and provided serialized rhythms and pitches for the others to improvise upon." Influences of Schoenberg? "No, probably more Webern than anyone else, especially since many of the cuts are so short. One is fifty seconds long. Webern, man, he was too much! Years ahead of his time. People still haven't caught on to him."

Bruce doesn't feel that rock will change greatly. "Rock depends very much on certain cliches. They're the essential vocabulary of rock. When-ever you add something new like, for instance, electronic sounds, you always risk destroying it." He is also anxious about whether he will be recognized apart from his Cream identity. "I had a terrible hassle just trying to find a company willing to produce my new disc." Meanwhile, Bruce continues his struggle to increase his musical powers by writing inventions in the style of Bach. "Two part inventions are hard, but it's the three-part ones that are a real gas." He does all this without the help of a piano. His songs are always conceived as total entities. Most of the cuts on "Fresh Cream" were written out in full score, again without the aid of a piano. I asked him the meaning of the title to one of these songs, "N.S.U." "That stands for nonspecific urethritis which is a disease of the urethra you catch from women... from fucking. We dedicated it to a mutual friend."

~ Interview by John C. Adams for 'The Harvard Crimson', Oct 18, 1968

[mikrokosmos]

Anton Webern ( 3 December 1883 - 15 September 1945 )

Happy Birthday, Anton!

[affirmation--negation]

Schönberg, Berg, Webern

It suffices to say that ‘Berg’ and ‘Webern’ are only two names for sequential components of the subject ‘serial music’. Accordingly, the genius of openings (theatrical continuities) and that of points (mystical discontinuities) are both incorporated into the same subject. Were it otherwise, we wouldn’t know whether the Schönberg-event really constituted a caesura in the world ‘tonal music at the beginning of the twentieth century’, since its consequences might then reveal themselves to be too narrow or incapable of successfully treating difficult strategic points. The local antinomy of ‘Berg’ and ‘Webern’, which is internal to the subject, constitutes the essential proof of ‘Schönberg’; just as, in the case of the subject that Charles Rosen has named the ‘classical style’, the names ‘Mozart’ and ‘Beethoven’ prove with quasi-mathematical rigour that what inaugurally presented itself under the name ‘Haydn’ was an event. 8. The sequential construction of a subject is easier in moments of opening, but the subject is then often a weak subject. This construction is more difficult when it is necessary to cross points; but the subject is then much sturdier. Allow me a commonsense remark. If, like Berg, you subtly negotiate with the theatricality (or lyricism) inherited from the post-Wagnerian facet of the old world, the construction of the sequential subject ‘music wrested from tonality’ is easier, the public less restive and consensus more rapidly obtained. Berg’s operas are today repertory classics. That the subject which is thereby deployed in the openings of the old world remains fragile can be seen from the fact that Berg gradually multiplied his concessions (the purely tonal resolutions in Lulu and the violin concerto) and, above all, from the fact that he did not open the way to the resolute continuation of this subject, to the unpredictable multiplication of the effects of the musical body newly installed in the world. Berg is a towering musician, but he is almost always referred to in order to justify reactive movements internal to the sequence. If on the contrary, like Webern, you work on points, and therefore on the discontinuous peaks of the becoming-subject, you are faced with considerable difficulties. For a long time, you’re deemed to be an esoteric or abstract musician, but it is you who opens up the future, you in the name of whom the constructive dimension of the new sonic world will be generalized and consolidated. Alain Badiou

[serialcomposer]

I will never not love Webern’s music <3