Customer Reviews

The Atonal Music of Anton Webern

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The youngsters here making.taking quips at Herr Forte should read/lead with the book,not offering perfunctory commentary based on appriasals and gut wrenches somewhere below the belt. One cannot speak enough about this diamond cutter as Igor Stravinsky had mentioned. When Igor's creativity had run out.

The high points here are the orceshtral music the Cantatas, and the scourings of miniature form. The "bagatelles" for string quartet was quite literally timbres from another sphere,perhaps the sulphur still in the air to be from European bourgeois wars. Forte has plenty of historic data situating each work within a context beyond the tablatures and pitch configurations he is known for. If you are a composer Webern continues to be a viable source for discovery. The first generation, the Darmstadt people, as Nono, Boulez, Stockhausen,Kurtag are all spent,their creativity has run its course. Yet there is/still beauty to be discovered if you know where to look. If all one finds are arrays, and fractal permutations of chordal dyads,hexa.tetra well, please brethren Look Again!, it's all there.

This is certainly an improvement over "The Structure of Atonal Music", but nevertheless a very grudging one. It backs away from some of the absurdities of the earlier book (which received a barrage of just criticism), whereas it ought simply to abandon them.

I complained (to Stephen Dembski, John Schaffer, and others--it may have got back to this author) about the earlier book that it uses "tetrachord" to mean "any set of four notes", whereas "tetrachord" really means a four-note contiguous segment of a scale or tone row. The same complaint applies, of course, to its use of "trichord". This new book at least acknowledges my complaint. It says, "`Trichord', incidentally, is preferred over `triad,' since the latter is associated with a familiar type of configuration in tonal harmony."

This is like saying, "Since `fork' is associated with the thing with which I eat roast beef and mashed potatoes, if ever I am served lasagna I will eat it with my hands." No: We can use language in a civilized manner. A triad in general is a set of three things. A triad in music is a set of three notes. (A set--in both the general and the mathematical senses--by definition is unordered.) The "tri" in "triad" refers to the number of notes ONLY; it does NOT refer to the interval by which a chord is constructed. Thus we can speak of quartal triads as well as of diatonic tertian triads ("a familiar type of configuration in tonal harmony"). Note, for example, that a chord built in fifths is quintal, which is Latin, whereas a five-note scale is a pentatonic scale, which is Greek. We use Latin for the interval of construction (tertian, quintal); we use Greek for the number of notes in the scale (pentatonic), chord (triad, pentad), or contiguous scale, melody, or tone row segment (trichord, pentachord). The metric system makes an analogous distinction: decimeters, centimeters, and millimeters (Latin) are little, whereas decameters, hectometers, and kilometers (Greek) are big. (That the Romans were rather like "Star Trek"'s The Borg, intent on assimilation, has unfortunate small and large consequences: 1) We can't make this distinction between octal chords and octads, and "tri" actually passed from Greek to Latin--essentially it's Greek, though. 2) The Roman Catholic Church.)