Anton Webern Fünf Sätze 1

[Tobias15111985]

Diese Musik baut einen so richtig auf!



[lilmateo91690]

It sounds so human

[TheDavid2222]

I came in with the wrong attitude and I still managed to love this! Cool.

[lzurich70]

I suppose that this may be "difficult" if your whole concept of classical music runs with the more accessible baroque compositions that are so often placed at the top of the list. This is quite enjoyable and very interesting, and actually makes a lot of sense.

[arwidcool]

This is quite horrible,

[chiledofthekorn]

this is amazing

if you like this you might like

gabriel williams - dancing with the schizophrenic

[paolosilv]

It's very spare. You have to listen to it several times to let it grow on you. It's understatement.

[RandomTask3000]

I must confess that this has no meaning for me.

[monkeysinfezzes]

Man oh man, you folks seem to have this fetish for categorization! Why don't we put the method aside and just close our eyes and be washed in the extreme, pure intensity of this composer? Unlike some other lovey-dubby composers who bum around for about an hour trying to evoke an instant of time, Webern gets straight to the point, like a knife.

[44skulz]

why?

[luannabuman62]

supa ich glaube gott liebt mich ! hab heute ordentlich kohle gemacht schaut mich an wird euer leben verändern

[jhg123456]

IS THIS POST-MODERN MUSIC? IS THIS WHAT DERRIDA LISTENS TOO? questions

[physphilmusic]

@jhg123456 Definitely not. This is modern music, not postmodern, perhaps even the very antithesis of what Derrida believes. I think for postmodern music, that would be minimalism or totalism?

[desirante]

@jhg123456 post-modern = lady gaga, also, Derrida isn't "post-modern".

[ckenzieMitchell]

huhuBin total kuschel bedürftig aber niemand da ;(

[saintvingt]

It's really funny. It IS THE funniest playing I have ever heard.

[MusicOnTheFly]

Anton Webern: Fünf Sätze für Streichquartett, Op. 5 (1909) (5 Movements for String Quartet)

I don't know this ensemble, they play well, but it's much better with quartet :-P The tempos are a bit too slow and the sound/expression/atmosphere (in my opinion) should reflect on the the time before the WWI. (or nowadays) so not romantically nice or beautiful. Rather scary, frightening, crazy, mad, elfish, querulous, and, and, and... and all these ridiculously exaggerated!

[b0ttomzone]

i don't understand the 12-tone process very much.... at around 0:33 the contrabasses play a repeating figure, placing more emphasis on those notes... and at 2:40 there is also some blatant repetition, and there's probably more examples of this throughout the movement. this defeats the atonal purpose, doesn't it?

i'm fascinated with this type of music, but can't quite really get the shift from tone row to piece of music around my head... perhaps someone can clarify?

[Doug19752533]

@b0ttomzone basically, its a series of tones in a set pattern. there are 12 tones in the western scale. you arrange these tones in a predetermined order, and you cannot repeat a tone (say an e flat) until the other 11 have been played. the tones can be arranged in any order, and you can play the sequence backwards, forwards, upside down, ect. that is in a very basic sense what 12 tone (also called "serial" because its a series) is. and yes its hard to understand!!

[MrvlZmb]

@Doug19752533 No more difficult to understand than Haydn. Composers don't care whether you understand their work; they only want it to sound appealing. The people who generally criticize atonality are the ones who struggle most to comprehend it.

[seejaybee71]

@b0ttomzone

This music isn't really 12-tone, it's from before Webern adopted that technique, so it's just highly chromatic, and occasionally sounds like it might cadence into a "proper" key - but it never does. For 12-tone Webern, try the Symphony Op 21 and later pieces.

[wildnites558]

I can see where von Webern was an influence on later composers. This piece sounds like it could be part of a modern movie soundtrack. Parts of it are reminiscent of the "Psycho" soundtrack. What's amazing about this piece is not so much the muscianship of the players as the erratic timing and tempo of the piece. They all pull it off with remarkable ease.

[clasicalfan]

Contrabass-LEGEND Guy D. Tuneh is part of this Ensemble, From Today you will be even better!!

Congratulations!!

[MrAkihiros]

Webern is so much more interesting than Shoenberg's which bores me to lethargy. Berg's on the other hand is just so moving.

[MidnightSon]

I have some questions for all you fans :)

1. Who is the composer/ Who is the performer

2. What is the piece of music, opus number/info?

3. When was it written/When was it recorded

4. Where was it written (if known)/

5. Whats your opinion

Thanks :)

[Cantabilex33]

This is the most beautiful piece I ever heard in my life!

[regcom]

I know I am not single-handedly defeat musical ignorance with this comment, but saying that all you hear are that notes in this composition clashes only serves to illustrate your poor hearing.

[bgoodger]

This music takes me deep into the sea.

[wefasdf23]

Oh how it diabolical it sounds!

[Naproxenum]

cats music....

[jeanhaliburtonwills]

Well o.k. Serialism can produce nightmares in the hands of second string composers and there does seem to be some natural basis for tonality...there is no reason for composers now to write like Schoenberg and Webern but can't we give at least the latter some credit for writing truly beautiful and expressive music like Funf Satze? an experiment that fails overall can still produce good work in the hands of a genius....

[wbarco]

agreed

[GlimpseInTheLife]

i didn't get it..... :(

[lifeisart37]

I'll have to check those out then. Thanks! BTW, was Le Marteau Sans Maitre in Structures 1? There are a few movements I thought were alright, but some just bored me to no end. Like you said, a dead end. I felt they went nowhere and never arrived either.

[lifeisart37]

This is gruesome and beautiful! did AW use the serial technique in this work?

[Gwailo54]

@ lifeisart. Among all the stuff above it says this is not serial.

Incidentally, so called modern music (these pieces were written as recently as 1909!) is old. Webern's studied old masters like Ockeghem, which informed his later music. The opening of the Symphony Opus 21 is two canons, but so beautifully written.

Stravinsky's late "serial" music (it doesn't obey strict rules though!) culminated in Requiem Canticles, one of the greatest compositions of the 20th century. Try that!

[lifeisart37]

I have heard the Requiem Canticles, but I didn't know they belonged to the serial era of Stravinsky's work. I love Stravinsky. I love Atonality and Expressionism, but I am still not sure about serialism, much less Total Serialism (ie. Pierre Boulez) The thought of such strictly controlled music seems to deviate from the original idea of free Expressionism, which sought to abandon rules. Correct me if I am wrong...

[Gwailo54]

Total serialism in Boulez only existed in Structures Book 1. Structures Book 2 is not the same. What he learned from Structures was the strict control of all elements was a dead end. Répons and Sur Incises (more recent stuff) is amazing. I have heard both of them under his direction in Paris. The audience loved it!

[EMPERORMIKI]

All music is ruleless if concerned with sound, which is informed by intention which is an act of hearing.

[lifeisart37]

could you paraphrase that please?

[largemoose]

(I'm speaking of serialism here, not free atonality)

[largemoose]

You can create whatever system of creating music you like, that's the beauty of art. The argument here is which is going to tend to be more appealing to people, or the human race in general, rather than just to be a musical exercise for those trained.

[largemoose]

"And since tonality is not a "natural" phenomenon, but rather a complex set of human-made hierarchies, then it follows that *alternate methods of constructing pitch hierarchies are also valid*...."

There is a whole host of cognitive science research pointing to the fact that the human ear is hardwired to prefer things which have hierarchichal relations, which is why a good number of people prefer tonal music and find atonal music unsettling or agitating.

[eoghdes18]

It could well be argued that our ears are conditoned to prefer so called 'tonal' music.

Of course, the concept of 'a'tonality is absurd.

[yangerron]

Aesthetic rationale aside, this music is depressing as hell. It is soulless. It sounds like it was written by a malfunctioning computer on another planet. Just as Vaughan Williams, Delius and Debussy uplift and invigorate the spirit, Schonberg and his ilk have quite the opposite effect.

[young5ever]

Cultural Bolshevism.

[WhiteMinority2040]

In Hell, this noise is played over the intercom.

[Ormaaj]

I do actually find this music enjoyable to listen to, but this is not where my criticism lies. I think Gareth Loy in his book "Musimathematics" has the right idea in saying that "The best view of musical composition is provided by a study of methodology", and that "the analysis of methodology can reveal the aesthetic agenda of its creator."

A conflict therefore arises when the resulting musical effect does not follow logically from the aesthetic motivation from which the methodology is derived.

[Ormaaj]

In this case, the error is in the decision to represent pitch classes by axioms of sets upon which some formal operations can be performed to derive a result - then taking that result and injecting it into an arbitrary system of classical tonality. This argument is based upon the idea that tertian harmony has an inseparable relationship with classical tonality which is more than simply historical, but is deterministic, at least to a high degree by a properties intrinsic to that harmonic system.

[Ormaaj]

To put it another way, Webern could probably have given a similar treatment to some visual art and achieved pleasing results. This means that the medium of representation is not fully justified and should in my opinion be considered a limitation of this music. That is not to say however that formal systems cannot provide a highly accurate description of music, or be a useful compositional tool.

[Ormaaj]

Harmony itself, and the analysis of harmony within a historical context are two completely different things. Classical harmony has a very limited set of harmonic functions in contrast to the domain of possible functions in all of harmony. Further, our "system of formal analysis" for classical harmony is not a complete formal system at all, but is nothing but an artificial semantic for representing ideas within that historic context, and not for generalizing all of the possibilities of harmony.

[Ormaaj]

This is why set theory, combinatorics, group theory, category theory, graph theory, computational complexity, etc are still valuable tools. It is unfortunate that they are not used properly in the compositional process. It is even more unfortunate that music theory is taught completely outside of this axiomatized context, but rather from a strictly historical perspective. Granted, that is something which is important to understand, but don't call it "theory" - call it what it is - history.

[danillys]

che genio !!

[AK50324]

I typically hate the 12-tone stuff, but this is actually pretty cool.

[WrestlingHeretic]

Skroff's above comment is correct. This is not a twelve-tone piece. It is, however, organized just as rigorously as a twelve-tone piece, but instead employs the discrete orderly use of specific interval combinations that post-tonal theorists call "sets."

[Ormaaj]

To look at why harmony is used we have to look at the context in which it appears - the equally tempered western scale, which is itself based upon the ratios of the overtone series. Aesthetic rules for tertian harmony follow from this quite naturally. Because of this, post-tonal music is in my mind very much invalidated by the fact that you are taking and abstracting what is in itself a very elegant logical system (set theory) on top of the completely unrelated concept of classical tonality.

[WrestlingHeretic]

But you admit below that you find it "enjoyable to listen to."  That's all the justification for its existence that is needed.

You view music as something to hold up to a metric and evaluate against that metric whether or not it is "valid" or "invalid." How unimaginative, limiting and soulless a binary construct that is.

Your argument is invalidated in *my* mind because you can't "invalidate" an inherently subjective art form in the first place.

[scsteeldrums]

and yet here you are trying to invalidate someone else's metric... unless you think that calling it unimaginative isn't doing so... but that would still be a binary construct eh?

[WrestlingHeretic]

Your argument supposes as self-evident that tertian harmony and "naturally occurring" acoustic phenomena are the right and proper basis of aesthetics. Why? Harmonies that leap out from the overtone series are inherently superior to harmonies that don't?

Why not just listen to an overtones series all day, running up and down, ad infinitum? If all that is required for aesthetic satisfaction in music is some connection to the overtone series, this should suffice.

[WrestlingHeretic]

Where does the minor triad occur as a contiguity in the overtone series? It doesn't. Yet, we would still call anything in a minor key "tonal music" by definition. There is much more to tonality than connection to the overtone series.

Tonality refers to the existence of one note out of twelve that is hierarchically more important than the eleven others. But that hierarchy comes from the human-invented context of historic musical evolution, not ordained by the overtone series.

[scsteeldrums]

all notes occur within the overtone series. it's infinite. the idea is that ratios which are simple are most pleasing to the ear as they are easiest for the mind to process. a minor third approximates the ratio of 5/4 very closely by the model 2^(3/12)=1.189. this is also why minor triads sound better when the third is slightly sharper than in an even-tone system. sorry to burst your academic bubble and the self-expression gravy train... but you fail :/

[WrestlingHeretic]

And since tonality is not a "natural" phenomenon, but rather a complex set of human-made hierarchies, then it follows that *alternate methods of constructing pitch hierarchies are also valid*....

...insofar as I would ever concede the legitimacy of "measuring music with the valid-stick" as any kind of useful expenditure of time at all.

[eoghdes18]

Hear hear!

[P3313]

sounds like the original planet of the apes. I've never heard of Webern before, this is some good stuff. From afar it may seem somewhat stochastic, but when it is broken down into it's most basic components, there arises order. It is brilliant

[babyGirlKelli]

Webern was great! every composition of his is extremely well put together.

[EleanorRigsby]

there's one mf that knew a tu ne when he saw one...!11!"1

[Thanatherion]

Maybe too little chaos for my taste but still pretty fucking impressing! Great dissonance and an atmosphere more disturbed than myself. This is art!

[clayLavl]

Most excellent! High honors!

[p0lyph0ny]

Stravinsky on Webern: "Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge."

And it's so true....

[Thanatherion]

Awesome chaos jazz.

[clayLavl]

it's not technically jazz but you can interpret it this way I suppose. this is 12-tone music.

[Skroff]

I don't know what you mean with the term "12-tone music" but just to be precise I have to say that this particular piece is from Webern's freely atonal phase and is not built with 12-tone rows. There are, though, times when the music reaches total chromaticism or at least is very close to it.

[bwhahrhr]

thats not Jazz, infidel! ;)

[francello75]

...it must be a very hard job without conductor!!

[ExMachine]

I honestly don't understand why these pieces in particular and some of his piano works are considered 'difficult' works (to listen to). I find some of his songs challenging, but this piece is brilliant, intense music regardless of how it was composed. Besides which, half the horror film genre relies on musically apeing Webern. So that must make him a seminal pop culture figure!

[clayLavl]

I agree with you.

[hinneinisannidanni]

There seems to be a very limited set of emotions "permissable" in pop music. It's basically "love, happiness, love, slight melancholy and love". Write something scary, intense, weird or emotionally complex and people start to frown.

Unless they're watching a horror movie, of course.

[findingusernamesucks]

yeah 'cept the best pop music is music that is a pop format but is outside the pop mainstream . . . it can be any emotion and implements any type of instrumentation . . . I love classical music and pop music; jazz and blues etc. etc. . . . not all pop music is the best is what I mean to say . . .

[Philosophaster]

You forget to put anger in your list of emotions. Record companies rake in millions of bucks every year from signing loud, angry rock bands whose music caters to disgruntled teenagers.

[Larwood61]

Sorry I should have said "HE was shot by an American soldier". Please forgive my typos!!!

[Larwood61]

I had a splendid LP of thia work, called I believe, Masters of the Vienna School, with Schoenberg's Enchanted Garden and also a piece by Anton Berg. I had to give up playing it when I married my presnt wife. she was not a great fan of the 12 note technique, to put it mildly: in fact she threatened to leave me and burn my car if I played it again in her presence. She was delighted to hear that she had been accidentally shot by an American soldier in 1945. I eventually sold it on ebay.

[Leibo07]

Man, what tragedies one can find on YT...

I certainly would have divorced that woman !

PS. After the war the GI drank himself to death, in a short period ...

[Leibo07]

O, I think you sold the CBS-LP with Glenn GOuld, I would have payed some good money for that !

man o man

[MingoCity]

Alban(!) Berg actually...

[JarusYarus]

There's no need to downvote what he said.

Webern was still brilliant.

Lots of power metal bands rip off Mozart or Bach in their use of harmonies. Am I saying Mozart and Bach are foolish because of this?

[CSV1]

Hi Heydrich

[klippdachs]

Great music and extraordinary performance!

Thanx for the vid, fasculin!!!

Greetings Leo

[bwhahrhr]

too much vibrato :(

still good performance

[platero55]

I first heard this music when I was 18 years old. I didn't understand it at all, but I was in awe. It was like music from another world. Great performance and video - thank you for posting it.

[9567456345]

I could make more pleasant sounds by dropping forks on concrete.

[Naturality]

This wasn't written to be 'pleasant', it was written to show the extent of music and how far it can be stretched. It's also partially modern so it's complicated

[tankermottind]

Webern's predecessors, from early classical music, laid down rules of keys and harmony for a reason.

[Naturality]

True, but does that mean that they are the only rules to be followed? This is just another possible set of rules.

[chubsoffire]

And every composer pushed the tonal boundries with each new composition. This is merely another step on the journey.

[what567]

Because it fit the types of music they were composing.

[WrestlingHeretic]

That's not true. "Rules" of keys and harmony weren't laid down by anyone. They evolved of their own accord, were accepted by emerging historical consensus, and music theorists analyzed them after the fact. Mozart's pieces are often cited in textbooks as quintessential examples of "sonata form," but Mozart himself would not recognize the term. "Sonata form" was simply the formal parlance of his period. The term "sonata form" was coined by theorists after being in unnamed use for some time.

[scsteeldrums]

evolution => survival of the fittest. that which is most liked by audiences survives while everything else is forgotten. give it a few million more years... you'll see :) the "rules" will begin to emerge. to deny any inherent attachment the human mind has to the "rules" of music is to deny that music has any inherent link to the human psyche... which as a musician i find heretical.

[tacojohn69]

Not trying to disrupt your 'Woe is me' comment here, but wouldn't most people remember "Strawberry fields" more than this. I'm not saying that because its the beatles, I'm saying this because people will remember words more than dissonant notes clashing together. Human's minds will remember what is familiar to them: their language.

[scsteeldrums]

I completely agree. But I think most people would also agree that music can communicate on a deeper level than even language.

[tacojohn69]

To be honest I just can't listen to this and enjoy, like its not that I'm trying to be close-minded, but all it is, is notes clashing together to me. Is this an acquired taste? idk, I just feel like I can't connect to this piece.

[scsteeldrums]

I can't either. blech.

[CzarDodon]

Go ahead, but remember that you'll very outdated, such things have already been done a long long time ago.

[SamnJohnson]

dropping forks on concrete could be quite interesting.

[Chopinco]

Theres actually music that uses that kind of elements haha, so this idea is old already :P

[reotnu]

Incredible, Awesome, Pure, Nuts, What can I say?

[biggugly0402]

yes sir ree study your Pythagorean Numbers

[damildlyshreddah]

Wow! Which opus is this? I must have missed this pearl

[Skroff]

Fifth. There is also an earlier version that is for string quartet.

[offlineyr]

It is also known as "Five Movements for String Quartet", No.1, Heftig Bewegt. Some people had called it "The Quiet Quartet", as I heard but it may not true.