Stravinsky vs Schönberg

As much as I love Stravinsky, Schoenberg's oeuvre is the more essential — Stravinsky wrote a lot of stuff in the inter-war years to pay the bills.

stravinsky invented metal. therefore stravinsky wins.

surely Wagner invented metal?

it may be argued that wagner invented iron maiden. but stravinsky invented black sabbath and meshuggah.

I like schoenberg too, but rite of spring is such a towering achievement that it's no contest, really.

ooooohhh good one

(the thread idea, I mean)

Schönberg got less Romanticism into his Modernism so I'm voting for him.

Or to think about it another way, good as Stravinsky is I would probably choose Mahler over him whereas I would find that a much more difficult choice vs Schoenberg

I think Schoenberg is more "important" (despite Stravinsky having much greater immediate-term impact & massively influential don't get me wrong, Schoenberg is forever associated with 12-tone, and 12-tone I think is really the big door through which latter 20th-c music walks; when Stravinsky gets to 12-tone, it's because he's been studying Schoenberg) but I listen to Stravinsky a lot more & am more moved by his music

Theodor Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music probably deserves to be mentioned on this thread. He comes out fairly strongly in favor of Schoenberg.

I like Pierrot Lunaire as much as any single thing Stravinsky ever did, but taking all in all this is Stravinsky by a mile. There are at least 15 Strav works I would be gutted never to hear again.

Schönberg got less Romanticism into his Modernism so I'm voting for him.

― The north-east's Number 2 children's party magician (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 15 March 2011 17:50 (1 hour ago)

this is wrong, i think.

the serial method was supposed to assure the supremacy of german music, to find a form that could organize dissonance and thus be better capable of expressing individual suffering than the overwrought decadence of many of the composers succeeding wagner. it is more a rehabilitation than a fundamental rejection of romanticism.

the rite of spring is a more immediate rupture with subjective poetics and nationalist/pastoralist rhetoric, a score of anti-rationalist rituality and discontinuities. and then his neoclassical years were rife with pastiche, formal play, and foursquare neatness contra the excesses of late romanticism.

^^^OTM, Stravinsky was the anti-romantic of the first half of the 20c if anyone was.

(Sorry that display name was only amusing last Friday)

and Schoenberg's late pieces pieces seem to incorporate some romanticism after he'd mastered the new technique — and they're the better for it xxp

I see Schoenberg as a hyper-romantic all the way through his career, with his formal strategies a way for him to try to keep the monster on some kind of leash.

really? even stuff like the Serenade and 3rd SQ?

No Stravinsky, no J.G. Thirlwell. Gotta vote Stravinsky.

xpost Hmmm. Well, okay there are exceptions. Actually I kind of feel like the neo-classicism of the first several things he wrote after codifying twelve tone are kind of (meta-musically) expressions of joy at having won his inner structural battle. Like, they are twelve-tone celebrating the arrival of twelve tone!

:)

Actually I kind of feel like the neo-classicism of the first several things he wrote after codifying twelve tone are kind of (meta-musically) expressions of joy at having won his inner structural battle.

I don't get an intellectual vibe from Schoenberg's early 12 tone pieces at all either, 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. Most of the time the reason why the music would come off as intellectual is because of the difficulty in playing the music -- if the performer is restrained or too precise or formal in his execution, you're not going to get that feeling like someone who has jumped off a cliff and is spending the whole trip down having changed their mind

stravinsky's sense of harmony = my fave part about him, and at least in the early ballets + les noces, not something I've ever had to think about. It just *sounds good*, like he was writing something he knew would program my brain before I was ever born. Early Schoenberg very much in this vein, and I guess I can hear the structure of his later pieces as continuing the same kinds of emotive shapes-- but I can't honestly claim to get anywhere near as much out of them as I do w/Strav.

once you tipped me to Les Noces I definitely felt like I had a deeper understanding of all the time I've spent listening to Magma

looking forward to the two-piano & chorus reduction of Noces you're doing in a month or two with the gang in Berkeley, Dominique

dear god it's not that soon is it??

how difficult could that piece possibly be

LOL

(also, wish I could come!)

just two pianos? is that recessionary pressure

yeah, and the space only has two. I've recorded the first movement in two-piano reduction, and I think it can work! now, if anyone knows any ridiculous amazing singers who can count...

sounds awes regardless

where is this? Maybeck? Mills? Elsewhere?

maybeck, july 29-30

I wld be ready for this reduction, having just been to a performance of Ginastera's "Cantata Para America Magica" for soprano and percussion orchestra, which really does use too god damn much percussion to the point of diminishing returns.

Do u guys know this piece?

No, that seems to be like all the Ginastera I've heard — parts cribbed from Ravel and Stravinsky, all flash, little substance.

I just... there might be some kind of event horizon for massed percussion beyond, say, a dozen players?

Oh wait 77 Boadrum was my favorite musical event of the decade, maybe I should stfu.

xp Wish I could be there, Noces is amazing.

This is an impossible debate. These two composers have divergent approaches, to my mind, too divergent to compare them. Schoenberg is like Palestrina-- or Bach, or Ligeti, or Hindemith (in Hindemith's dreams! lol)-- in that he successfully applied a theoretical concept to the harmonic language. In contrast, Stravinsky, in Schoenberg's own words, "was a composer who writes at the piano". Stravinsky's own explorations in pan-tonality, not to mention his genius orchestration, resulted in some of the greatest works of the first half of the 20th c. But he was still an intuitive composer; Schoenberg was a conceptual one, and his impact was far greater in my estimation.

Far fairer fights here would be Stravinsky vs. Bartok; Schoenberg vs. Ligeti. Right now 'this does not compute'

was a composer who writes at the piano

otm!! his harmony constructed just like two hands on the keyboard, and you can "see" it progress in a manner that would lend itself really well to solo piano

tho I say Ligeti had a fair amount of this happening as well, or at least struck a good balance of intuitive music vs conceptual structure

the serial method was supposed to assure the supremacy of german music, to find a form that could organize dissonance and thus be better capable of expressing individual suffering than the overwrought decadence of many of the composers succeeding wagner. it is more a rehabilitation than a fundamental rejection of romanticism.

the rite of spring is a more immediate rupture with subjective poetics

"Overwrought decadence" strikes me as being kind of extreme language, so I'm wondering which composers we're talking about.

Reminds me that Milton characterized Satie as "deprogramming for centuries of classical music sentimentality" the other day. Sorry to be argumentative, but I think that's also very extreme language.

Also don't think The Rite of Spring is any less "subjective" than late Romantic music.

xp @ Dominique: The fact that his harmony is constructed just like two hands on the keyboard, in the case of his ballets and Les Noces, was because he was writing piano reductions in advance of the orchestration.

When Schoenberg made that "at the piano" comment, I think he was referring specifically to the fact that Stravinsky was primarily interested in intuitive composition. The sounding out of chords and contrasting colours. Something that Schoenberg maybe felt was somewhat decadent? Passe? At any rate, it was Stravinsky's first and last lesson with the dude. (Source? I can't locate it...)

But instead, a great article by Robert Craft about Stravinsky's adoption of serialism, and later, 12-tone: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/82dec/craft82.htm

Also don't think The Rite of Spring is any less "subjective" than late Romantic music.

― timellison, Tuesday, 15 March 2011 22:20

how is one piece of music more subjective than another? if it helps, read as /intrasubjective poetics/

I'm happy to call a bunch of my favorite composers of that era 'overwrought decadence'!

Bax, Szymanowski, Suk, early Schoenberg...

Also re: 'subjective' it depends on which scalpel you use to seperate Romantic from Anti-Romantic. In most of the above usage Romantic would prob be meant to denote highly chromatic tonal music with an emphasis on grand passion and grandeur in general.

If you take the idea of Romanticism at a more abstract level then there are a hell of a lot of 20c avant gardists who still have to be called Romantics in the sense of "here's the great adventurer deep inside unexplored territory, bringing back visions to polite society'

transfigured night is certainly my favourite schoenberg and one of the most affecting pieces in all of music. it's perfectly excessive.

the s/s binary still works, if not entirely on adorno's terms or in his favour. they still seem like foundational figures for tracing the years since, whereas bartok while comparably great still seems very much individuated and without a distinct and arguable lineage overshadowing his successors, for all that he may have influenced them.

And wonderfully well-argued, as rhapsodic as it seems to be and as is unusual for pieces with a similarly fin-de-siècle apocalyptic aesthetic — the harmonic language might be post-Wagner, but the construction is definitely post-Brahms.

xp

ya, admittedly i don't know brahms very well but i can see parallels with his symphonies. schoenberg saw him as the last great master of the tradition, i think.

that is to say, previous great.

actually that's probably the reason I rate Schoenberg over Stravinsky — every detail seems essential to the whole, contra Stravinsky's Debussyian use of impressionistic "sound-images" that are more or less non-reflective (which are still interesting). Also upthread otm about Stravinsky's harmonies — those spacious quartal chords hit something deep in me

like this is irresistibly gorgeous:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1ZI4SIAuMA

youtube fight yall

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFT6NIYMF1I

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.

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

So that's the only reason ppl would vote for stravinsky over schoenberg?

obviously not, but it might explain the numbers.

the amirite of spring

a very, very condescending person would call it the fantasia factor. i am not that person.

should give ilxors more credit than that imo

Yeah some of those votes MIGHT be cuz Strav has a list of masterpieces longer than my arm, who knows, stranger things have happened.

so touchy about my glib messageboard yammering! i'm sure stravinsky is very masterful, my impression is just that schoenberg means more to Now.

i stand outside of history, listening to records on my iphone

closer than I thought it would be!

― corey, Wednesday, 23 March 2011 00:37 (Yesterday)

same, thought those fairweather disneyites would give a large margin to igor

voted for him, will try to explain later

the symphony of psalms third mvmt is an outlier and not representative of what i like about stravinsky, but i return to it more often than anything else

agon

the whole tilson thomas 'stravinsky in america' lp, really

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/300x300/63126525.jpg

the chailly agon is maybe more real tho

http://www.toptenz.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/schoenberg-242x300.jpg

This was such a great thread.

Also:

agon

― A.R.R.Y. Kane (nakhchivan), Saturday, August 18, 2012 7:38 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM

There is an awesome Erich Leinsdorf recording of Agon that rly needs reissuing.

http://i.imgur.com/70MTKGr.jpg

1907

have had the strav conducts strav box forever but have never really been systematic about working my way through it. it is however really good for randomly selecting an unheard disc and being transported to new worlds

http://www.city.ac.uk/events/2015/march/ian-pace-and-ben-smith,-pianos

Should be a cracker.

Really interesting little Schoenberg snippet from this Boulez interview on the occasion of his 90th birthday last week:

"There is very little debate [of his stature], but very few performances. I don’t understand why conductors are not really performing these works constantly. You have these wonderful pieces that are conceived for the theater but you can play in concert also, like Erwartung, and Die glückliche Hand. And then you have an opera like Moses und Aron, which should be in the repertoire of all of our houses. It’s a little more difficult than Parsifal but not that much. The works are composed in 1910 or 11, and 90 years later it shouldn’t be a problem any more, but when people hear only the name of Schönberg they say, “Oh, I can’t do it.”

Our century is supposed to be the fastest, the quickest, the one which reacts instantly and likes progress —and sometimes in music, you find it’s the slowest of all centuries. If you compare with Wagner, take Tristan und Isolde for instance, around 1860—90 years later, that’s 1950, Wagner is no longer a problem. I don’t want to criticize my century, but the process of absorbing what is composed during this century is a very slow process, much too slow for me.

http://soundcheck.wnyc.org/story/10-great-works-20th-century-pierre-boulezs-90th-birthday

(The interview is from 15 years ago)

the process of absorbing what is composed during this century is a very slow process

wow Boulez otm! People are quick to be aware of something and move on, but very few go in for the depth of anything, and subsequently, only the most immediately rewarding music gets played.

Schoenberg is a really weird dude who kind of has one foot in each world, a heaving late-late romantic disciplining himself with pitch games-- i have to wonder if this oddness has to do with his "difficulty" for listeners, like with Webern, Lutoslawski, Birtwistle, Boulez you immediately know this is a new world and go into sci fi traveller mode. IDK.

Yeah I think one of the reasons why Schoenberg can be difficult is that while the harmonic language is different to anything that came before, his instrumentation is still closer to that of late romanticism, the orchestral pieces in particular feel heavy heavy heavy in a particularly Germanic way and aware of their place in a particular German canon. The Webern I've heard has a similar heaviness that I don't hear in Boulez and other later serialists/atonal composers.

wow Boulez otm! People are quick to be aware of something and move on, but very few go in for the depth of anything, and subsequently, only the most immediately rewarding music gets played.

― Dominique, Monday, 30 March 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not feeling that Boulez quote - there are always anecdotes from idiots who don't want to play something. However for the most part the stuff is played, to be reckoned with.

I think stuff from the 70s on is hard to see although concerts in the last couple of years have tried to address that.

Actually, I was reading it as a comment on music in general, starting in the 20th century. I think it's insightful, and the way most music is discussed on messageboards like ILM is a good example of this. A rolling stone of music consumption gathers few repeat plays (especially if it's a little on the "indigestible" side to begin with).

Schoenberg can be a bitch and a half to sing because the harmonic language flies directly against everything your ear has been trained to recognize as a logical musical line.

At least it's in standard tuning!

ah ok fair enough Dominique.

Just come back from the concert:

Evan Johnson sounds p/substantial composer to me. The idea seems to me that he has taken something akin to Feldman's intuition (perhaps how the same sounds appear and disappear and don't have a very definable mid-point???) and bought it to his music. Unlike Feldman Johnson isn't shaping his music in these blocks the way Feldman did. An original sensibility, god knows if I'll ever get a CD by him - or anyone - ever again.

Hoban's music I love but this felt a bit like odd one out for him. Took me a while to see that the pianists were almost playing some of the passages in parallel to one another. Couldn't quite get into it, though its mostly my fault. Again a recording would be useful.

Ligeti and then following this up with Stravinsky was a masterstroke. I don't care for anything of Ligeti's after about '68 or so. This is from '76. Ligeti mentions Reich and Riley but Nancarrow plays as much of a role in the 2nd section, which makes his remarks on automation (in the concert notes) ever more relevant in the way this is used to wage war on the worker. Thought I'd find this as useless as the Etudes but not at all.

I need a version of The Rite for two pianos. It was, ahem, a riot. Can anyone recommend?

I don't know what your skill level is but if you've any, get the sheet music and a friend to read it through, prob the most fun you can have at a piano

No skills :-(

Loved watching although the looks the piano players were giving each other while performing the Ligeti were just as good. For a second you thought they wouldn't make it.

The recording of the two piano rite on rca by tilson thomas and another guy is very very good

Thanks.

Thinking also as to whether this could be the version of the Rite for me but effect has worn off a bit in the morning.