"The variety of paths and direction that are being pursued by the younger generation today would seem to justify asking whether a further development of twelve-tone music is possible, or whether the methods used by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern have been completely exhausted. In a conversation with the composer René Leibowtiz, who has been promoting twelve-tone music in Schoenberg's style in France since 1937 and is now th leader of the dodecaphonic composers in Paris, the composer addressed this question. For René Leibowitz, Arnold Schoenberg is a great genius of a composer of the sort that appears only once in a century. Schoenberg is was the first to achieve clear and precise organization of musical ideas using the means of twelve-tone technique and thereby renew large-scale form, which had been lacking in atonal music. René Leibowitz rejects attempts to give prominence to Berg or Webern alone, as many composers have done, even though he himself was a student of Webern and has analyzed all of his works. Leibowritz composers in a style that had been mapped out by Schoenberg, and he has no interest in electronic sound experiments, which he views as a phenomenon outside of musical tradition." .
[Excerpt from an article of Ingrid Schlösser, published in the Darmstädter Echo of 27 August, 1954.]
After 1945, René Leibowitz was one of the leading European advocates of the works of the Second Viennese School, in Paris above all but also at the Internationale Ferienkurse in Darmstadt starting in 1946. What is less known, however, is Leibowitz's compositional œuvre, comprising over 90 works in practically all genres. Even though he always insisted on the necessity of an interplay between theory and practice, composed continuously for forty years, and was not indifferent to the success of his works, he was remarkably circumspect as a composer. His first works date from the 1930s; his firth opera, "Todos caeran," based on an originally libretto, was completed in 1952, shortly before his death. Both his musical philosophy and his works are indebted to the œuvre of Arnold Schoenberg. Throughout his life, Leibowitz held Schoenberg up as his model and honored the unyieldingness with which Schoenberg spurred on musical developments from the spirit of tradition. In the center of Leibowitz's interest in Schoenberg was the twelve-tone technique which he clung to even though it meant isolation from his contemporaries. Leibowitz saw the uniqueness of this compositional method in the synthesis of constructive discipline and inventive freedom. It was the task of the followers of the Schoenberg school to plumb the depths of this method's possibilities, which were far from exhausted.
After World War II, young composers like Pierre Boulez and Hans Werner Henze went directly to Leibowitz to learn about the twelve-tone technique. In the "zero hour," young composers hoped that the then widely unknown method would lead to a new beginning. However, Leibowitz's reliance on a traditional access to music soon came in conflict with the zeitgeist. This had become obvious to all at the latest in 1951, when Pierre Boulez, the spokesman of the French avant-garde, gave his lecture "Schoenberg is dead" in Darmstadt. It was a symbolic farewell to this traditional-mindedness. Serial music came to dominate contemporary musical development, forcing Leibowitz to withdraw from the public eye.
The weak resonance produced by Leibowitz's compositions must be attributed in part to his excessive faithfulness to Schoenberg. He remained convinced of the immediacy and modernity of the works of his revered father figure until his death in 1972, and he devoted his public commitment above all to them, and not to his own music. We can see his closeness to Schoenberg in his own compositional style. Adorno once allowed himself the critical observation: "If I were to cautiously voice a serious reservation, it would apply to the characters which sometimes seem derivative to me in a subtle and almost indefinable way, though there is no clear borrowing of any kind of palpable similarity."
[above is excerpted from notes by Sabine Meine. the views expressed are entirely her own and to not necessarily reflect those of the management. in other words, ymmv]
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Claude Ballif, Concerto 'Haut les Rêves' Part 1 of 2by lendallpitts545 views
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