Arnold Schoenberg: Classic or Dud?

Schoenburg allegedly had to work for hollywood upon escaping germany -- presmably work he would not wish to acknowledge with his name -- and he even taught john cage, but pronounced him an 'inventor' -- how much (unacknowledged) work did SY do for DGC, the definitive new-money californan hollywood crossover co. ?

I don't see how 'getting to know' webern is an arg for schoenberg.

personally i think S. had the better hooks, W. a certain discipline and almost exhaustively rigid way, a guy not worth argung with as he'd just go on and on and be correct in his little 12-tone "did you hear this vignette" way, one of those musicologist types that has to have the things the right way, observe a discipline or pioneer a new one, like academics try to do -- well that's how he sounds to me,.. very quaint and cunning, but S. is all the while devising ways to confine his obvious prolific melodic talent and avoid the "heard it too often" syndrome that we all experience and so devising his compression system for all his licks and hooks to be merged into (that the young acadenic protege has designs on of course). Again julio, just my perverse imagination with yet more probably bogus explanations, but that's what i think right now.

Actually i think what i said about 'getting to know' in the other post was self-explanatory julio, even if it includes silly grammar.

as for SY & Geffen, well we had to wait almost a decade for this SYR stuff, which may have been a periodic contract renewal with a different artistic freedom clause (more akin to jazz labels that where musos seem to have dates sometimes all over the place). Would Geffen allow sy to run a parallel label if it was going to compete with it's own SY outout ? Doubt it. To me that leaves that SY in a no-mans land with DGC cheques for the stoner-metal and SYR possibly paid out of own money & points money for Nirvana and even perhaps Use Your Illusion ?
i mean who knows, but it does guarentee DGC will not allow anything melding rock with avant to happen unless it's on DGC, kinda voiding out SYR. Why would DGC risk missing a killer crossover like DV69 ? This hypothesis admittedly confines SYR to a ghetto of sorts, improv, low percentage free-20thc, whatever, as long as it doesn't hit DGC negatively. OK perhaps there's a kick-back provision for a run-away hit on SYR.

Julio, this is all speculation because there is no transperancy here, no real insight into what corporate compromises are being made and where. Who pays for what. But not many indie cult bands could have afforded to make it 20 years, losing half their fanbase when changing labels and temporarily influencing youthful minds to seemingly tune in and drop out all over again (as presented on "The Year That Punk Broke"), to tell your parents "punk U" and spazz out. Those days are over and the older fans were not impressed. Do they still play Xpressway Skull ? Do they play old faithful hits from their early period ? Aren't they like the greatful dead.

Whatever happened, the DGC deals must have been interesting deals. Look at what happened to Neil Young trying to be artistic. Hasn't the record industry just got more stingey than ever with this MP3 thing ? Cutting costs and downsizing. Of course Geffen exited the company he'd used other peoples' money to set up for aroun $US1Billion, just ten years after creating the company that still bears his name (of course). What's your angle on what i said about Neil Young and artistic freedom, julio. How did SY know they were gonna be around long enough to pull off the SYR thing, however lame ?

When you see a painting on the wall & you buy it you know how much the atist and how much the dealer makes. But this is still the record industry. It's a Geffen experiment like the similarly art-cred named "Asylum" all over again. Geffen has carried Joni Mitchell through most of his career even if he sold DGC some time ago. Maybe he just likes the Gordons in an informal way for some of their ideas back in the day of nu-metal like Nirvana and G&R.

Kim Gordon asks something like "are you gonna save us girls from corporate male/white oppression" to Chuck D on the first DGC album, right in the middle of the projected hit single, to which Chuck, from the band that did the Clash thing, a deal actually pricing down their albums for their public, mumbles answers ambiguous some yeah right as though he's a session token-token black in the wrong studio or maybe enjoys the inference that black men aren't any better but thinks to admit loudly would be counter-productive etc. or maybe he doesn't like the record company contra deal or didn't know he was being set 'up by' SY in the best example of "bad sampling" or recording (a tribute i suppose), .. but who knows.

Not knowing is fun until the quality starts wobbling from side to side, from DGC to SYR in this case, with plenty missing inbetween.
If you wanna take this to another thread julio fine, and i'll breakdown all sy songs musically to show the patterns, how the rot set in, how a certain carefully defined subset of real assonance and dissonance has been used template style for most of the DGC period. A real big subset (yeah, it's really just 10%) of the interesting extended tonal music of both S, W and even of the easy-going Berg.

As far as the band is concerned (and maybe some of the fans they target that i've met) the book does one thing right, alligning the sludge/ wtf angle with groop mindsets. I mean, what a great book title.

(promise to return with more Schoenburg material soon, but it desrves fresh listens i realise in some cases i've neglected 'cause it's on vinyl)

to add to paul's '03 post I tracked down another perf (as tribute) of pierrot lunaire -- zorn's wonderful 'chimeras' disc -- there are slight variances (11 not 12), perc, organ, the vocals are screechy, not so speech-like and there is, wait for this...a. bluddy. WIND MACHINE...now add that manic energy he usually brings to his (ugh) "projects".

How many tributes actually work in referencing and at the same time divorcing themselves from the orig and STANDING on their own right (has there been a thread about this)? 'cause this is one.

you never kept your promise, george gosset!

Worst thing to happen to music. Ever. Even worse than rap.

― Geir Hongro

http://i.imgur.com/rFtJ0.gif

First few minutes of this are just astounding

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw2uTW0mdSs

Serialism: Playing all the wrong notes, but not necessarily in the wrong order

Dodecaphony was still some ways in the offing when he put the finishing touches on his Gurre-Lieder.

Unless you weren't replying to mfktz, in which case, I approve.

... it's a reference to a Morecambe & Wise sketch which featured Andre Previn which, like, 99.9% of the UK population at the time watched.

some good george gosset material in this thread, RIP.

julio desouza too, where's that guy these days?

I believe he is posting as xyzzz?

I never really knew what george was talking about, or why Sonic Youth came up on a Schoenberg thread, but if the point was that Thurston Moore is a pseud because he didn't play Wuorinen and Babbitt, that is definitely an important opinion that needs to be heard.

Schoenberg one of the all-time greatest, though.

serialism is certainly fortunate

Not sure what I meant by this. Maybe something like 'in retrospect, serialism writ large has yielded more interesting results than its integral variant (à la Boulez, et al.)'? In which case, I haven't really changed my mind on that front. (Tbf I was considerably more ESL-ish in my teens.)

I still think Berg > Webern > Schoenberg, but it's much closer now.

Old ILX was wild.

Personally offended and sickened that these wretched poseurs sonic toof didn’t cover philomel in their supposedly definitive history of 20th Century music. PS Rap sux.

lapsed indie kids protest too much

schoenberg > berg > webern for me. berg's oeuvre probably more consistently excellent but he didn't write pierrot lunaire or a survivor form warsaw and as great as his operas are i prefer moses und aron. webern's whole miniature thing gets on my nerves somehow though i admit the 2nd movement of the piano variations slaps hard

Moses and Aron needs way more love. Surprised that the Met did it once.

too late to ask george what he meant now unfortunately

didn't he ramble

i think some connection to that album of 20th cent composers stuff they did, i dunno

You know what's really good, though, is the third string quartet.

been listening schoenberg as pop

I don’t know from 12 tone or theory in the slightest but this guy has so many damn tunes its incredible, in every phase of his career

piano suite and serenade for strings I’ve seen dismissed as dry academic experiments but they’re both hooky as hell, and potentially danceable

3rd quartet grabbed me first with that riff but all the others are great too, no 2 especially moving me atm. string trio is pretty intense even by his standards though i think that’s sort of the point (probably the intense emotionality of his work bothers some people more than the “atonality” or whatever?)

this all comes from an utterly superficial overview of his music instead of the kind of hardcore intellectual investment you’re supposed to need to appreciate him at all. which I’m sure would be very rewarding in many ways. but I feel like I’ve been lied to about this by the classical gatekeepers. no one told me about the tunes man

^^^ gets it.

No, you should not need heavy intellectual investment to appreciate his work imo - he himself had very little formal training and was mostly self-taught. He was an Expressionist and a Romantic. (Analysis can certainly help but it is not and should not be the only way his work can be approached.)

To Kandinsky, he wrote (from Ross, The Rest Is Noise):

Art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill. 

To Busoni (from Auner, Music of the 20th and 21st Centuries):

It is impossible for a person to have only one sensation at a time. One has thousands simultaneously. And these thousands can no more readily be added together than an apple and a pear. They go their own ways. And this variegation, this multifariousness, this illogicality which our senses demonstrate, the illogicality presented by their interactions, set forth by some mounting rush of blood, by some reactions of the senses or
the nerves, this I should like to have in my music.

Don't get me wrong, he (despite his lack of formal training) became a famous theorist and teacher (and then professor) as well and there is a lot going on formally - but he would have definitely been happy with people appreciating his music in a visceral, immediate way.