Word: schoenberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Austrian Parliament nearly balked at completing the job, partly because of concerns that Abraham's design was too challenging for an official building. They had a point. The design is severe and saw-toothed, with nothing Sound of Music about it, unless the music you have in mind is Schoenberg. It harks back instead to the angular daring of Adolf Loos and Otto Wagner, the great figures of Viennese modernism, and even further, to the first principles of building that modernism rediscovered. "I try to connect to the origins of architecture," says Abraham. "Digging a hole, making a mound...
Schulte, along with pianist James Winn, opened with Arnold Schoenberg's Phantasy for Violin with Piano Accompaniment. The pair played with near-perfect coordination. One immediately noticed how Schulte's idiosyncrasies, like his rather unusual handling of the bow, were used to effective ends. His attack was extraordinary, and he released his bow with a preciseness and rapidity that seemed both risky and impossible...
...next played Anton Webern's Vier Stcke, op. 7, a work the composer wrote in 1910 under the influence of his teacher, Schoenberg. These pieces reveal how quickly Webern embraced his teacher's concept of a completely atonal music, which had only fully materialized a year earlier with Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces, op. 11. Webern's pieces, however, already point to a more abstract atonality and are characteristically Webernesque in their brevity and obsession with detail. Schulte and Winn played the faster movements especially well, again showing a real sense of musical unity...
...talk about Bach, sometimes you feel like you need to genuflect. It's just that good. I often speak of classical music as philosophical. It's not necessarily in terms of personal preference. I like Debussy's music, Ravel was a genius orchestrator, but there are many. Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, so many great composers...
...Throughout these years, besides writing music that he describes as a "beautiful amalgam of Stravinsky and Schoenberg," Schuller followed closely the fascinating developments in jazz. "In those days, you could hear a tremendous amount of jazz on the radio. This was the heyday of the swing era; jazz was the total popular music of the United States...When I first heard [Duke Ellington], I knew right away, and declared that he was just as great as Beethoven. I still stand by that. If you analyze that music, in terms of the quality and the inspiration of the music, you come...