Stravinsky vs Schönberg

Huge "Rite of Spring" and "Petrouchka" fan but it's not fair to vote since I've never heard any of Arnie's works, even though I keep intending to, just 'cause he irritates Geir so much.

Start with Verklärte Nacht and the 1st Chamber Symphony.

and the 5 Orchestral Pieces

^^

the scherzo fantastique is really pretty great, if not quite first tier stravinsky

http://www.amazon.com/Glenn-Gould-Plays-Schoenberg-Webern/dp/B000025VDL
http://www.amazon.com/Schoenberg-Piano-Works-Arnold/dp/B0000028O6/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1300324409&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Schoenberg-Webern-Berg-Orchestral-Works/dp/B000083LR4/ref=sr_1_3?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1300324610&sr=1-3

Gould plays Schoenberg Piano -- First link is the earlier CBC recordings, really ruffneck & adrenalized. Second is slightly more elegant / linear & more like Bach. I said upthread that 5 Orchestral Pieces were my favorites but I've listened to these two discs more than my copy of Simon Rattle doing the Pieces.

and this is a good rec. of the two chamber symphonies (No. 1 is in his "atonal" period, No. 2 is a reworking of an early piece he did late in life) and verklärte nacht — all are very accessible imo, and the recording is extremely clear so you can hear all the instrument-doublings and color combinations

I think you can try "Pierrot Lunaire" too. Something like really demented cabaret music. And the third string quartet has a pretty great riff.

If you're going to credit any classical work with the tendentious distinction of Inventing Metal it's Holst's "Mars" fullstop

(I was making Schoenberg recommendations for Myonga, to be clear, not making any claims about the invention of metal.)

Sorry Sund4r that was an xp
Also I've never heard the guitar sonata (!) thanks for the recommendation

For good or ill Stravinsky didn't break as decisively with Classical harmonic tradition or rhythm, until under Schonberg's influence.

This makes no sense to me. How do Le Sacre and Les Noces NOT break decisively with classical rhythm?

Appreciate the recommendations, everybody, thanks.

And hahaha I think I made that "Mars" --> metal connection myself in a Holst thread a few months ago! (Or somebody else did and I agreed)

Even before Mars, there was Liszt in doom mode -- check "Funerailles" and "La Notte". And the third Mephisto Waltz supplying the tritones for the first Sabbath album and King Crimson's Red.

...plus King Crimson's cover of Mars

Plus that Mars quote in the British Nuggets box set-- I think it's "Listen To The Sky"?

Plus Led Zep's "Friends"

Plus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SB-3TUEcQU&feature=fvwrel

Frogman Henry here. Old account unworkable on this pc.

In this contest it's undeniably Schoenberg, actually it would be Schoenberg up against most 20c composers for me, only Webern, Mahler and Bartok would seriously challenge him for me, but I'm happy to concede that says something about my listening experience, there are many composers of whom I have only a cursory hearing.

I'm going to make some enemies here maybe, but I find Stravinsky soulless in most of his catalogue.
I like the symphonies (in C, 3 moves, Psalms etc) precisely because some anger and some personality seems to come out in them, but an awful lot of Strav in the middle/later ballets and the widdly neo-classical pieces seems to me to be note-spinning with little feeling or commitment( I listened to Dumbarton Oaks the other day; wow was that ever inconsequential). This is very pleasant somtimes, I love chilling out to the colours and pungent sensuality of Apollo or Pulcinella, but they move me not a jot, and they leave me feeling like you do when you listen to music by minor composers of Haydn's time. Stravinsky is often ravishing to the ear, but strangely empty.

With Schoenberg, as you can guess, it's jsut the opposite. Completely agree with this "I get the same searing hanging-off-a-cliff-edge-by-your-fingernails romanticism that he was overtly pursuing in his early pieces, it's all completely feverish & heart-rending when it's done right" to the extent that it's probably redundant for me to add to it cos I can't expresss it better, but I will do anyway - I feel I am involved with AS, with him on his journey, and subject to the the same perils. Of course there are times where you can feel lost, where you don't know if you trust the old Trickster/Nemesis, like around the middle of the Variations for Orchestra op.31, which I struggled with, and where you really do feel the 12-tone bogeyman of classical music start to confuddle and maybe repulse you. But repeated listenings allowed me to unravel the musical logic as well as be enraptured by the sound, and now I do see how it's one of his masterpieces, and one that I can feel (relatively) comfortable with. I got into AS via Webern, so the comparative heaviness, struggle and as it seemed imperiousness were hard to reconcile with what I conceived about 12-tone at first from AS's pupil, but I like all these things now, and AS seems - once again to use this divise term - more human, more afraid, more subjective, maybe more interesting.
I've immersed myself in the string quartets and the orchestral pieces - Erwartung (I noticed no one mentioned that, don't know why) the Chamber Symphonies, the Five Pieces and the Variations.
Verklate Nacht is also great of course.

It's weird how there's so much baggage around these two as well, I guess that's why nakh slected them, they're both constantly mentioned in context of 'greatest' or 'most conterversial' 20c composer.
They both make people very scared and wary. All this stuff is quite a barrier to appreciating their music, particularly so with AS. The bollocks surrounding his life and legend is almost imprenetrable sometimes.

He's kind of the villain of "The Rest Is Noise"

alex ross is a retard

his heart's in the right place but he likes a lot of crap

and he's not really a retard

Yes, that was a bit harsh, the crap bit was OTM

It's weird how there's so much baggage around these two as well, I guess that's why nakh slected them, they're both constantly mentioned in context of 'greatest' or 'most conterversial' 20c composer.

― glumdalclitch, Friday, 18 March 2011 13:22 (5 minutes ago)

totally

i don't think adorno was the first to counterpose the two but he virtually enshrined it as an either/or binary

the answer to which is 'both'

ya i used to read ross' blog and his enthusiasm and scholarship are exemplary, which is why he really ought to be careful legitimizing the 'schoenberg fucked it up for the rest of us' narrative to the new yorker crowd

he likes too much new orchestral fluff for me to take his taste seriously — like recent music textbooks that feel compelled to include John Corigliano in "recent developments"

'schoenberg fucked it up for the rest of us'

Wait, I just read The Rest Is Noise recently and I didn't get this out of it at all. (I think I would have noticed since I'm a huge Schoenberg fan.) He does seem to have perverse taste when it comes to Schoenberg though. I've never read anyone else who focuses so much on Schoenberg's operas (!) when it comes to 12-note music, at the expense of the piano music or last two string quartets. Or are you talking about the blog rather than the book?

I loved the book by the way. It was wonderfully written and the historical detail was incredible. His taste in 20th century music mostly just seems like the mainstream American Norton Anthology-style canon to me, which is fine. He at least covers a broader range of music than Griffiths does and seems to try to engage with it on its own terms. His adoration for Sibelius was the one really surprising thing for me. The focus on Strauss is also a little striking but I actually agree with him there!

Why was it surprising that he rates Sibelius so highly? It took a long time for CM criterati to check whether there was anything beyond Finlandia and Symphony #2, but at least for a couple of decades now I think you'll find plenty who'll inveigh that Sibelius' symphonies and most of his sym poems are every bit as formally interesting as Schoenberg-- his achievement was simply "masked" by the fact that he worked entirely in the tonal system and without the use of any signature 20c sound sources (one symphony has bass clarinet and harp, that's about as wild as the personnel gets. But he achieves incredible klangfarbenmelodie anyway).

(Cards on table, Sibelius is my favorite of all).

Anyhow. Ross' best chapters were the ones on Feldman, SIbelius, Strauss, and Berg, all amazing pieces of writing. He's full of shit re: schoenberg though.

'schoenberg fucked it up for the rest of us'

Yeah, not at all. ADORNO fucked it up for the rest of us. H8 that fucking guy, seriously.

he likes too much new orchestral fluff for me to take his taste seriously — like recent music textbooks that feel compelled to include John Corigliano in "recent developments"

So what's Simon Reynold's favourite rock band these days? (that comparison probably doesn't work but I'm not even gonna spend too much time on it) Really can't trust him.

Schönberg, no hesitation - had much more of a trip w/him than anything. Also it helps that he had Webern and Berg (a 2nd viennese poll would be much more difficult) and that he taught John Cage etc etc. Strav just doesn't offer enough to compensate for that.

And he seems more of a chameleon to me. Gets bored, try another thing and move on, is my impression - an interesting quality for a composer to have (suited more to pop than anything.) I like the Rite of Spring and some of the brutal sounding minimalism that it sorta gave birth to.

Ross:CM /= Reynolds:Rock in any way shape or form, i mean let's not get hysterical here.

Ross is an excellent, sometimes even brilliant, writer with some big blind spots and some odd POVs, is all.

Trying to think of who would be the Reynolds of CM writing. It's definitely a blogger, not someone in any of the magazines...

Well for me I went on a similar curve with both writers. SR => liked his MM stuff (collected in his first bk) then the turn to dance and the like. The moment he said he didn't get the Dead C and write stupid stuff about Madonna (another Chameleon) was the moment I stopped.

w/Ross I read via a blog. Quite good at a time when I was figuring out.

Both were good for that 'figuring out' stretch. After a point its 'no more' thanks.

Whereas Adorno is a writer 4 life, etc. May fall out but will always go back to.

Maybe I just haven't read that many contemporary critics. I'd never really read or studied a 20th-century music history that placed so much (or, frankly, much) importance on Sibelius. (I'm not a historian or musicologist, mind.)

Ross's writing really persuaded me to listen to more Sibelius btw.

LOVED the Britten chapter too. Also, the discussion of music in Nazi Germany and the CIA's consequent promotion of radical avant-gardism in Europe as a way to break away from the Germanic tradition that the Nazis had so prized.

I recommend starting with symphonies 4,5,6 and the final symphonic poem Tapiola. The sym poem with soprano Luonnatar will also blow da mind.

THE BARD

THE OCEANIDES

Also, the discussion of music in Nazi Germany and the CIA's consequent promotion of radical avant-gardism in Europe as a way to break away from the Germanic tradition that the Nazis had so prized.

See a lot of that is being debated right now as to how those first few Darmstadt music courses came about in the first place, in terms who paid and ran, and if any ideology was consciously promoted.

A few researchers are digging into the archive and a history of Darmstadt has got to be written.

From the scraps I've heard and gathered Darmstadt certainly didn't start as an oasis of the avant-garde. This box set has some of the works played in the early years.

Amy Beal's book on music in postwar Germany, New music, new allies, is an important part of that research, a key source for Ross, and a generally engaging read.

http://www.ucpress.edu/img/covers/isbn13/9780520247550.jpg

(As its subtitle makes clear, Beal's book focuses on the American role.)

Sounds like a must read.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

closer than I thought it would be!

huh, i was pretty confident schoenberg would win. some rite of spring-lovin-ass classical listeners in here.

that's why I thought it would be higher — lots of people essentially voting for rite

i voted for stravinsky bcuz i felt bad that he wasnt going to get any votes

i used to like 'rite' but it never seemed all that primally whatever

once I read somewhere how much his harmonic language was influenced by Debussy that changed my hearing of it forever — now it seems lush rather than brutal/primitivistic.