Modern but Not Avant-Garde

From my point of (disad)vantage, it's hard to guess where, if anywhere, this series will go, but it begins fittingly with those composers whom the avant-garde is inclined to view as the Old Masters: the chief movers and shakers of the Second Vienna School (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in that mythology, if I may risk blasphemy), and a late-repentent sinner who saw the Light.

Once again I remind my readers that I am a musical dilettante and that my truly musical friends whisper behind their hands about my taste. In my heart of hearts, I suspect I incline toward the "Poet and Peasant" Overture and "Valse Triste. '' But I keep trying. I admit to hours in mortal combat with Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and even Stravinsky. I've moved on to Cage and Berio and Stockhausen and Kagel. (Actually Kagel is my barber, but sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.) I've sat almost unflinching through pieces for amplified cymbals, electronic feed­back, and a tape recorder left running for twenty-five minutes on a French beach. And after all that, I have to admit that Schoenberg is almost hummable, Berg sometimes very moving, and Webern's is a fascinating mind. (One of the recorded projects whose incompletion I actually regret is Columbia's complete Schoenberg which had got up to Vol. 8 before whoever that rock-genius was abandoned it for masterpieces by the like of J. Marks.)

SCHOENBERG: SUITE, "Gavotte da capo"

Mind you, I am merely reporting my reactions. Far be it from me to try to persuade those who don't like twelve-tone music that they ought to or that it's good for them. For those who have diatonic ears, it is bound to be difficult since it is based on an arbitrary mathematical scheme that has little or nothing to do with the facts of musical acoustics. In part it was an outgrowth of a tendency in the nineteenth century (I almost said "from Bach on!") for music to become more and more chromatic and less and less keycentered. In part it stemmed from the same sort of rebellion that led to Expressionism in painting--against "pretty," nice-Nellie, bourgeois music in which nothing happened but sweetness and light. Berg, of course, often mixed it with tonal music. Webern and Schoenberg knew how to make the most of it. That the system led to excesses and eventually to a dead end was perhaps not their fault.

What is at first sight rather surprising is that all four composers wrote so little piano music. The Berg and Webern examples are the only such works they published; Schoenberg turned out four other opuses. Stravinsky (not then a duodecaphonist) did better, but a good deal of what he produced amounts to teaching-pieces and relatively trivial things. None of the four was primarily a pianist. The twelve-tone thing had been in part a protest against the acoustical artificiality of equal-temperament tuning of the piano. And the piano was anyhow past its heyday. Take your choice. Or make up your own reason.

The Schoenberg suite is designed to show that new wine may be poured into old bottles, for the form is that of the baroque dance-suite. The Webern variations are something of a tour-de-force-­actually a sonatina that seems to explore all meanings of "variation." The Berg sonata is an early work, full of a passionate malaise, and obviously written under his teacher's spell. The Stravinsky is pure, perky, quirky Stravinskian neo­classicism, haunted by Pergolesian melo­dy and Bachian drive.

The performer is David Burge, who has established a reputation as pianistic high-priest of the avant-garde. He turns up too rarely on records, and it is good to see this seminal material entrusted to him.