Alban Berg’s Dissonances
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Alban Berg’s Dissonances
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Re: Alban Berg’s Dissonances
#2Re: Alban Berg’s Dissonances
#3Lyric Suite is probably the most accessible of Berg's. The Andante at 3:09 is lovely.
Wozzeck is also a pretty brutal opera if you listen while reading the lyrics.
Re: Alban Berg’s Dissonances
#4When I see Alban Berg on the front page of HN, it really tells me I'm in the right place. I consider him, Webern, and Schoenberg as the "end" of western classical music. It's like the whole field ran into the brick wall of their work and never made it past.
Re: Alban Berg’s Dissonances
#5When I see Alban Berg on the front page of HN, it really tells me I'm in the right place. I consider him, Webern, and Schoenberg as the "end" of western classical music. It's like the whole field ran into the brick wall of their work and never made it past.
There's this joke in the movie "Amadeus" where the emperor (Joseph II?) remarks that Mozart's music has "too many notes". He explains that the human ear can only hear so many notes. That might have a element of truth. Our perception is (obviously) limited, and beyond a certain point, complexity becomes overbearing.
But on the other hand, minimal music is a much more recent development, and it is certainly part of the "classical" tradition. There might be a bit of room left before we find the end.
Re: Alban Berg’s Dissonances
#6Great post!
Re: Alban Berg’s Dissonances
#7When I see Alban Berg on the front page of HN, it really tells me I'm in the right place. I consider him, Webern, and Schoenberg as the "end" of western classical music. It's like the whole field ran into the brick wall of their work and never made it past.
There's this joke in the movie "Amadeus" where the emperor (Joseph II?) remarks that Mozart's music has "too many notes". He explains that the human ear can only hear so many notes. That might have a element of truth. Our perception is (obviously) limited, and beyond a certain point, complexity becomes overbearing. But on the other hand, minimal music is a much more recent development, and it is certainly part of the…
I sometimes think of the flood of notes in a bebop solo as being akin to the dots of color in a pointillist painting. As in, you can take them in as a continuous whole as well as discrete points.
There's no end.
Re: Alban Berg’s Dissonances
#8When I see Alban Berg on the front page of HN, it really tells me I'm in the right place. I consider him, Webern, and Schoenberg as the "end" of western classical music. It's like the whole field ran into the brick wall of their work and never made it past.
Many of the composers today who would have continued in the so-called classical tradition instead turned their talents towards movies, and some very exceptional orchestral music is scored for films around the world, despite that those names are often not widely known.
Re: Alban Berg’s Dissonances
#9When I see Alban Berg on the front page of HN, it really tells me I'm in the right place. I consider him, Webern, and Schoenberg as the "end" of western classical music. It's like the whole field ran into the brick wall of their work and never made it past.
The Second Viennese School feels like the termination of the long tradition probably because they were the last generation who felt an direct connection to their immediate predecessors. Schoenberg, despite being mostly an auotdidact, thought of himself as the heir of Brahms and Wagner. He was pretty adamant on mastering the old forms using his new language and demonstrate his place in the tradition.
Stravinsky by contrast, and to a lesser extent the post war avant-garde such as Boulez and Stockhausen work in a completely different manner. To them the entire music history is "flattened", instead of a sequence of styles where the most recent is the most important, they plucked whatever they pleased from any period which pleased them. It's pretty difficult to follow any of these composers in that regard and now almost every composer has a personal eclectic style. It's a blessing and a curse, since I don't think any previous period had as much variety to encompass the likes of Ferneyhough and Reich and everything in between. On the other hand the loss of a "centre" is definitely a downside, at least when it comes to writing a history of the period :).
Re: Alban Berg’s Dissonances
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's this joke in the movie "Amadeus" where the emperor (Joseph II?) remarks that Mozart's music has "too many notes". He explains that the human ear can only hear so many notes. That might have a element of truth. Our perception is (obviously) limited, and beyond a certain point, complexity becomes overbearing. But on the other hand, minimal music is a much more recent development, and it is certainly part of the…
I sometimes think of the flood of notes in a bebop solo as being akin to the dots of color in a pointillist painting. As in, you can take them in as a continuous whole as well as discrete points. There's no end.
I had that experience with some pieces in this work: https://mikiplayspiano.bandcamp.com/releases
A lot of it is sparse, and then there are moments that remind me of the black MIDI genre.