I was listening to Faure's Pelleas and Melisande work the other day hard upon getting out my old diskettes of the Debussy opera by that name. The world seems somewhat awash in Pelleas music - a good story and the French occupation with mythology perhaps stirring that pot. All that French music, with its soft edges and evocative colors...well it is my musical feast and I don't tire of it ever.
Years back the Toronto Symphony came to our town for a concert. It was the dead of winter in northern Michigan. The musicians came in by bus and I just got out of basketball practice and rushed across to the auditorium to catch a rehearsal. I can remember the program to this day - 60 years later, a piece called In Sommer, Beethoven's Fidelio Overture #3, Brahms 2nd Symphony and Five Pieces for Orchestra by Anton Webern. This was my first introduction to Webern, an Austrian who died in 1945 after near starvation in Vienna during the war years where he was in Nazi disfavor (putting it mildly).
Webern was a "serialist". There was a compositional school that pretty much broke down the traditional harmonic and melodic vocabulary and it started in Vienna just prior to the First World War and continued for the first half of the century. A simple example would be that if you took a piano keyboard you would note that there are a series of white keys 7 different ones before one repeats an octave (8 notes) higher or lower. do re mi fa sol la ti and back to do (think Sound of Music). Interspersed in that octave are 5 black keys in a group of 2 and a group of 3. In all, you can go any direction on a piano keyboard and play 12 different notes in a row without repeating any. 12 tones. With me so far?
I mention all this because when taken to more of an extreme all kinds of aspects of music can be "serialised" - the louds and softs for instance and music composition becomes very "mathematical but what it really does is remove the fluff - the filler - so they thought or philosophised. A sentence like "The bird flew over the big red barn" would reduce to "bird over barn"...of course it flew and who cares what the color of the barn was, the bird didn't land there type of thing. Serialism had a way of leading to minimalism - the bare essence opposed to the endless colors and tone palettes of the Debussy or Faure's Pelleas for instance.
Schoenberg wrote like Debussy or Brahms more accurately at the beginning and evolved into the 12 tone/serial style. Webern did as well. The following two pieces show the night day of this Viennese School of composition. The yin and yang. The first is Schoenberg's treatment of Palleas and it could have been written by anyone in 1903...very traditional (well not by anyone - Schoenberg was a pretty gifted composer). After that is Webern's 5 pieces for orchestra written 10 years later. Think of that. Schoenberg was a mentor to Webern. Schoenberg writes this lush work and re-tools his craft and mentors Webern who writes in the opposite of what was just written.
I'm amazed and have been since I first heard that piece in the dead of winter in Northern Michigan.
Webern was a "serialist". There was a compositional school that pretty much broke down the traditional harmonic and melodic vocabulary and it started in Vienna just prior to the First World War and continued for the first half of the century. A simple example would be that if you took a piano keyboard you would note that there are a series of white keys 7 different ones before one repeats an octave (8 notes) higher or lower. do re mi fa sol la ti and back to do (think Sound of Music). Interspersed in that octave are 5 black keys in a group of 2 and a group of 3. In all, you can go any direction on a piano keyboard and play 12 different notes in a row without repeating any. 12 tones. With me so far?
Some Austrians, including Webern, a student of Arnold Schoenberg - the most famous of the lot - thought, in essence what if I make a rule that I can use any of those 12 notes in any order - just set them out in a row of 12 notes and my rule is that I must use all 12 notes before I can repeat any one of them. That would mean that all notes were of equal value in a composition and that is the complete antithesis of all music that went before it. I mentioned serialism earlier - well this 12 tone 'row' is the basis for serialism or series music.
I mention all this because when taken to more of an extreme all kinds of aspects of music can be "serialised" - the louds and softs for instance and music composition becomes very "mathematical but what it really does is remove the fluff - the filler - so they thought or philosophised. A sentence like "The bird flew over the big red barn" would reduce to "bird over barn"...of course it flew and who cares what the color of the barn was, the bird didn't land there type of thing. Serialism had a way of leading to minimalism - the bare essence opposed to the endless colors and tone palettes of the Debussy or Faure's Pelleas for instance.
Schoenberg wrote like Debussy or Brahms more accurately at the beginning and evolved into the 12 tone/serial style. Webern did as well. The following two pieces show the night day of this Viennese School of composition. The yin and yang. The first is Schoenberg's treatment of Palleas and it could have been written by anyone in 1903...very traditional (well not by anyone - Schoenberg was a pretty gifted composer). After that is Webern's 5 pieces for orchestra written 10 years later. Think of that. Schoenberg was a mentor to Webern. Schoenberg writes this lush work and re-tools his craft and mentors Webern who writes in the opposite of what was just written.
I'm amazed and have been since I first heard that piece in the dead of winter in Northern Michigan.