Anton Webern, Fünf Stücke, Konzert, Gilbert Amy, Pierre Boulez Domaine Ensemble

The avant-garde music of Webern and Amy -- Pianissimo Prophet: Some composers challenged posterity with a roar. Others wooed it with seductive languor or graceful wit. Austrian composer Anton Webern conjured it with a whisper. A shy, intense man who physically shrank from noise, he wrote spare, slight pieces filled with directions like scarcely audible and dying away. Such was the understated economy of his scores that his life's work amounts to a bare three hours of playing time. Nearly all of his compositions take less than ten minutes to perform. He turned out works containing as much silence as music, and that was how an indifferent world received them with silence. Yet today, the man whom the Viennese called the master of pianissimo has a resounding worldwide reputation. Probably, says Conductor Robert Craft, there isn't a composer writing now, or hardly a composition written even electronic in which his influence cant be traced.

When [Webern's teacher Arnold] Schoenberg dissolved traditional tonality but continued to work with late Romantic forms, Webern dissolved those too. He obliterated vertical harmonies, broke up melodies into one or two-note fragments for each instrument and swept away all sense of development and climax. Once stated, [Webern] said, a theme has expressed all it has to say. In Five pieces for Orchestra and Six Bagatelles for string quartet (both 1913), he notes are scattered like stars in the night sky: tiny fire points in an icy black void.

When Schoenberg discovered how to organize atonal music by creating a new scale for each composition an arbitrarily arranged series of the twelve chromatic notes Webern extended the serial principle to such areas as rhythm and dynamics. Here he approached a state of total abstraction in which a piece would unfold entirely in accordance with the runes invented for it in advance by the composer, much as a computer responds to its mathematical programming.

[Weberns] life ented in an explosion of violence. One night in 1945, while visiting his son-in-law in the Austrian resort of Merrersill, he stepped outdoors for a cigar, unaware that U.S. occupation forces were at that moment closing in on the house to arrest his son-in-law for black-market activities. Somehow he encountered a U.S. soldier in the dark. He was shot, staggered inside and died. He was 61.

Within a decade of his death, Weberns music was taken up not only be established masters like Igor Stravinsky but also by a whole generation of post-war avant-gardists, particularly in Europe. Now the question that remains for the future is how well it will stand up in its own right. His influence, suggests U.S. composer Aaron Copeland, may turn out to be far greater than the intrinsic value of his music, which may some day seem too mannered in style and too limit in scope.* Webern himself did not think so. In fifty years at the most, he told a friend shortly before his death, everyone will experience this music as THEIR innate music. Yes, even for children it will be accessible. People will sing it.

Jean-Pierre Guezec, notes from the original 1968 LP, for the sound quality of which we apologize most humbly.

* Re: the Aaron Copland quote, we kind of like some Copeland pieces we may even post a few of them here --, but we believe that in the end what Copeland said about Webern may prove to be more applicable to Copeland himself to Billy The Kid, for example.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Webern
• Five
• PIeces
• Concerto
• Gilbert
• Amy
• Boulez
• Domaine
• Schoenberg
• Guezec

[RobertSchilman]

A few words about that description: Webern did not "dissolve" vertical harmonies, actually just the opposite: the vertical dimension is in great balance with the horizontal; there IS a sense of development and climax in Webern's work and definately the 12-tone rows are NOT arbitary. Whoever wrote that text hasn't studied Webern enough. I can't elaborate this further in this medium, but anyone interested should look up texts from eg. RILM.

[Timrath]

What are these images? They look very musical.