Word: nineteenth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...heart of the composer's predicament is the problem of what to do with his inheritance from the nineteenth century and the last few hundred years of Western music in general. How much shall he keep, and how shall he replace what he discards? If he decides to preserve tonality (which might be defined briefly as a system in which one tone, or a chord built on that tone, acts as a sort of aural home base) he has the advantage of manipulating the vocabulary of musical relations and tensions with which most of us are familiar since we have...
...suggested that further changes were necessary; twelve-tone music needed a language of its own--not one borrowed from a previous system. The solution was not to be found by Schoenberg's famous pupil, Berg, who frequently used tonality, and whose arch-romantic operas stand far closer to the nineteenth century than to Berg's twelve-tone colleagues. In time it became clear that the major influence on the succeeding generation of twelve-tone writers was Anton Webern, another Schoenberg pupil who has been the subject of a major renaissance in the past few years...
...certain sense, Webern's music was a reaction to the nineteenth century elements that flooded Berg's music and kept on pushing into Schoenberg's. And so a Webern score is extremely economical with notes: most of the pieces are short (some last only a few seconds); virtually every work is full of silence; the sounds heard are frequently very soft and are clearly the result of delicate calculation. There are few mass effects--rather, the attention is concentrated upon a succession of single tones. There is formal economy, too: the care Webern spent in organizing his structures finally resulted...
...called Gertrude his ideal student. She participated animatedly in his seminars, as well as in those of George Santayana, who gave her new reading in the English philosophers. Other subjects she took included history, modern languages, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and zoology. "I came out of the nineteenth century," she wrote, "you had to be interested in evolution. I liked thinking.... I liked looking at everyone and talking and listening...
...size him up, cleverly tossed in the requisite bons mots and deliciously designated one of his characters "Fabrice." (Who could ever forget La Chartreuse de Parme!) That the piece was a hopeless tangle of words strewn in a thousand directions, indeed, that few could or would understand its nineteenth century affectations, mattered little. There was a beauty in words...