Contemporary Music in Evolution; 6; 1912

This is the second of two programs on the series devoted to the nine thousand nine hundred twelve. I am.

You are. If you weren't actually familiar with that piece I doubt if you could guess what it was who

composed it. Well it was a work called The tides of Manono on composed in 1912 by Henry COWAN The American composer. Khalid was 16 when he wrote this work and introduced it and other pieces at a recital in San Francisco. The low rumbling sounds that recur as a kind of pedal point throughout the piece are called tone clusters. The name first applied to this idea by Henry Cow although the musical idea itself had been already used earlier than 1912 by Charles Ives. Curiously enough as these things sometimes are in the arts Cowal was not aware of the fact that I had used a similar tone clusters but neither cow nor I made the term famous. That occurred a few years later when Leo on Stein a second rate Ivan guard composer gave virtually whole piano recitals with music consisting largely of clusters. I've had discovered

clusters on the piano one day while writing a March when he wanted to imitate the bass drum. Using his fist on the piano in the lower register he had gotten the desired effect. Cowal similarly came upon the cluster idea as an impressionistic musical idea and also as he himself has stated. Because at the time he was entirely self trained and simply didn't know that such sounds were not thought to be legitimate at the conservatories it was only later when he studied conventional theory that cow discovered that as he put it the rules of music favored Concords and dissonance. Later cowl concertizing with his new piano music using not only clusters but plucking the strings inside the piano. Khalid became famous as Peck's bad boy of music piano manufacturers were congratulated in the press and building instruments capable of taking such a beating as his music seemed to demand to them. And on one occasion a sports

critic sports critic covered a concert describing it as a bout between kid and battling Cowal. On the other hand composers like Schoenberg and Raeburn defended Cowles approach and Bela Bartok politely asked Cowal for written permission to use their own clusters. The performance incidentally was by the composer. In Russia about 7000 miles away another composer was writing piano music of an entirely different sort. While Carl wrote music without any reference to any piano tradition scribing was struggling to go beyond the very tradition that had shaped his musical style in 1200 of scree haven't wrote three very interesting etudes comprising his opus 65 taking show parents famous idea of the Etude in thirds one step further skeery having wrote the first Etude in Opus 65 in

the second in seventh and the third one in fifths. By that I mean that as in the famous Chopin Etude the right hand plays entirely in those designated intervals while the left hand plays free accompaniments not committed to those intervals. The Etude in ninth is an extremely difficult piece demanding an ability to play with control while the hand is stretched to encompass the large interval of the ninth. It is said that himself a famous pianist of the day had enormous hands with which he could reach a fifteenth which accounts for the enormous stretches all his piano music requires the Etude in once by scribbling. In the second day tude the right hand plays major sevenths throughout a dissonant

end of O which according to conventional harmony was always to be resolved here screen have been by using the dissonant seventh unresolved is leading towards the state of at anality where it tones and intervals have an independent life of their own not determined by a key center or a tonality. Oh.

The Etude in fifths follows. It is a curious piece and I wish I had a better recording to make my point clearer. The right hand plays nothing but fifths which are as you know a bare and open sound was no particular directional harmonic implication. The last few notes where the right hand part of the first bar

of this etude in the left hand screen uses the exact opposite of a bare and open sound. Namely dominant seventh Corps whose quality is rich and which unlike the static fifth imply a harmonic progression. The mixture of these two elements one could say the Apollonian and the DI and Asian elements makes this a fascinating piece especially if seen as a signpost along the way to a harmonic expansion. Of thing. 5000.

Ft. Screen Havins 3 Opus 65 etudes the first played by either cream and the other two by Samuel Yancey. Next we encounter the first work on this chronologically conceived series by Al Bell who said his ballet music fest earned 11 ye the spiders feast. Russo although already forty three years old at the time he wrote this work had not really up to that time created any major works. This piece of course does not rank with the great innovation of the works of the period like the Rite of Spring or Debbie Caesar Schoenberg's works but it is a solid achievement hoing a careful and rather difficult line between two forces one of a ballet music with a specific scenario to follow the other. Absolutely. Music an area in which was ultimately was to write his best music. In

the spider's feast there are no set ballet forms like Potter there is and so on. The music being organized broadly along the free pantomime outlines of the scenario which deals with the cruelty of the insect world. In this work to also showed first glimpses of an idea which he was to develop later in other ballets namely that of the musical substance in certain dance passages being predominantly rhythmic and not melodic. A modern idea which found its first full realisation in works like Stravinsky's lay not us. Let us listen now to who sells spiders feast. You're. You're. You're.

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Emma were conducted by Dino in 1912. Debbie S. wrote his great but sadly neglected masterpiece. But just prior to it he composed a short two minute work for flute alone. The well-known searing a rhapsodic freeform piece summing up so to speak the whole modern French concept of flute writing which had begun with the opening phrase of Debussy's afternoon of a phone almost 20 years earlier. Searing bank load the ABC as played by the French flutist.

I have never been able to understand why a CS J has suffered such extreme neglect. Until very recently it was ignored quite completely at least in this country and countless critics and writers and music managed to give the impression that the work somehow was meaningless or didn't even exist in their minds when in fact it is not only a beautiful and masterful work but it represents historically a milestone you know orchestral music because it is the first major work which breaks away from the 19th century concept of music as an art capable of descriptive powers or statements of specific emotions. It treats music as what it really is we realize now the most abstract of the Arts an organization of sounds per se. It is the beginning of all that even the previous works of Stravinsky Bartok were if you recall not entirely free of the romantic concept of music as meaning

something specific beyond itself. Patricia was still in part tied to the apron strings of the scenario Schoenberg's music was an attempt to create specific emotional states within an overall expressionistic style. I have spoken a great deal about the specifically musical developments that change music in this period. Their role as an emancipated of music not only took in those aspects but the philosophical as well. For it was obviously a totally different philosophical concept to think of music simply as music and not to load it up with all sorts of literary and pseudo literary connotations. And I believe it is this factor as much as the radical changes in the technical language which have shocked so many people to this day into rejecting contemporary music. The damage done by the perversion of music into a subsidiary art in the 19th century will be a long time in being repaired and overcome. Whenever anyone speaks about

music being only the logical organization of the world of sounds or whenever anyone says that music has no specific nameable meaning beyond itself. Lots of people immediately think that that person is trying to make out of music cold mathematical and completely meaningless music. I'm not saying that nor am I advocating cold mathematical music and I think it would be the last person in the world to do that. But what I am saying is that a tone poem by Richard Strauss would have no specific story content for you as a listener. If you were not told that story before hand by the composer in the program notes. Music simply cannot describe a tree or a house or a person or even accurately. An emotion because an aged listener could probably associate a given passage of music with several emotions or various degrees of a certain emotional state. But all of that is not to say that music therefore has no meaning. It does

but its beauty is that it is not a definitely categorize a BL meaning. It remains mysterious and secret and the power of music is precisely that the number of its meanings are infinite and mutable. All that by way of introduction which is the perfect piece to introduce this point on the series for it would be difficult for anyone to say that this is called music. In fact the warmth and sensuous beauty of some of its passages especially in this particular recording are I think beyond equivocation is remarkable too because it almost does away with the theme. Certainly in the Beethoven or sonata form sense of the word and certainly no one theme has a prominent form defining position in this work. Yet the music is highly and subtly organized on a more internal rather than external basis. All done with a startling economy of means in terms of the actual musical material. Notice too

the continual fragmentation of form and the 19th century concept of continuity is strongly challenged in this work. It is rare that I am able to wax so enthusiastic about a work. But it is even rarer when I can become equally enthusiastic about a recording of such a work. But such is the case tonight for the recording of it by Victor the Sabbath and the orchestra of the day of Rome is a perfect realisation of the work in terms of its structure its musical language and its sound and technically in terms of the orchestral playing and the recorded sound. I hope you enjoy it. Why.

The A.

Thank

you.

OK. I am. I am. Yeah. You just heard by Claude Debussy played by Vic to the

seventh conducting the I'll go stale August of Rome. I hope you will join me again next week for another in this series. This has been Gunther shoulder.