Kyle on Webern

Me again;

Sorry for mixing up Kyle and Kraig...it just goes to show that I have no credibility whatsoever, which is perfectly obvious anyway...I'd blush, but I'm inured to my own follies through long repetition, so I'll just offer my apologies to both of you!

Kyle, thank you for your lengthy and careful explanation of your position on Herr Von Webern. I greatly appreciate your having taken the time to produce it. I can also understand that your appreciation of his work has evolved over the years, and that you now find it, as you said, "thin and arbitrary and uninspired". Obviously, I cannot agree with you at present, but I certainly bow to your experience in analysis and teaching. Equally obviously, if I had not also found myself "wanting to listen to Ives and Partch more and more" I would not have wound up here in the first place. But Ives did not disdain _any_ method which would give whatever inspirations he was hearing their appropriate life (including 12-ET), and I suppose my plea for 'sympathy for serialism' was based on a wish to not see arbitrary restrictions placed on compositional methods in a list which is supposed to be embracing and exploring wild new frontiers!

In this context, and in gratitude for your taking the time to explain to me, I possibly should mention that I myself have never had a similarly enthusiastic response to the music of Schoenberg or Berg, or the countless host of dreary imitators. But I, personally, feel that Webern's experiments were beginning to enter a whole new tonal universe (what if he'd had another twenty years?), and their inspiration should not be disdained merely because they happened to be 'serialistic'.

What you experience as "thin and arbitrary and uninspired" I experience as an audacious intellectual act and an austerity and rigour in its enactment which borders on the ferocious, and which I still rarely find in the limited amount of listening to contemporary music which I can do. But your personal distaste for his music based on lengthy acquaintance is equally valid, of course! Quite probably _more_ valid, because at least it is informed.

I can also understand why various members of this list should have a profound distaste for serialism based on having it forced upon them, just as I can thoroughly sympathise with the decisions of those who have experimented with it and abandoned it as unsatisfactory. But the general tenor of the remarks to which I was mildly objecting, as I remember them, were more of the nature of a total dismissal of serialism as a valid compositional method than such a carefully reasoned argument as yours.

But then, I may be mistaken, and if I can't even tell one list member from another, I probably am...

->Zx<-

Oh, BTW: "the best I can say for [Webern] is, he was an awfully good composer for a musicologist." You mean like Bartok?

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Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

- Lewis Carroll
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Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

- Democritos

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