No big essay here. I just wanted to say that when I started listening to classical music four years ago, I could find no point of purchase in the Second Viennese School (in effect, Arnold Schoenberg and his two best-known pupils Berg and Webern). The music it produced – based on math, in effect – seemed clinical to me, drab and colorless. It seemed like it was deliberately off-putting. It didn’t help that from my reading I’d come to associate Schoenberg (and still do) with methodical, emotion-devoid people like Boulez and Stravinsky.
But… I found a way in, somehow or other. So I suppose it was really just (another) case of ignorance overcome, sort of the way it took me several years to disassociate Prokofiev from Peter and the Wolf, since I’d assumed he was a dunce based on that piece alone.
My road into the Second Viennese School was Gustave Mahler, just as it was 120 years ago for the composers associated with the movement. (There was no “First Viennese School” – the term alludes to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, composers who knew one another in late-8th C. Vienna but never constituted a “school.”) When I learned that Mahler was sort half god/half human to the Second Viennese School, I found something I could relate to. As with Debussy, it is important to at least recognize that most, if not all, of the composers who contributed real art to the first half of the 20th Century considered Mahler to be both a radical and a font of genius. For my part, Mahler’s 9th Symphony had been a mind-changer vis-avis classical music in general back in the ’80s when I heard it for the first time, and so thinking of the SVS as a Mahler fan club made it easier to approach. (I included an excerpt from my favorite recording of that symphony, but it is the sort of work that is so profoundly beautiful and haunting that it deserves focused and repeated listening, even if it does take up most of two CDs.)
I also found that reversing the chronological order regarding the Second Viennese School was useful in developing an appreciation of these composers. For me at least, starting with Webern and then moving back to Berg (a year younger than Webern, but appreciated sooner) and finally back to Schoenberg was easier than following the timeline forward. Both Webern and Berg wrote music that is (again, for me) much more engaging than Schonberg’s pivotal pieces. I hear melodies in their most uncompromising pieces, but most of all serialism is about the moment. As for Schoenberg, I’ve found pieces of his I listen to and enjoy, though I still associate him with a gray gravity that is not too inviting.
Webern was (I’ve read in several places) a Nazi sympathizer, which was, until recently, one main reason I refused to listen to him at all. I can barely deal with the concept of Germany, let alone its 20th C. history. What makes it too weird is this: Most of his friends and cohorts were Jewish, and the Nazis had labeled his art – like his peers’ – as “degenerate” and, thus, forbidden. It is true Webern paid for his sin in karma bigly: in 1945, an American G.I. saw him light a cig outside his back door, got spooked, and shot him dead. (“What’djado in the war, daddy?”) Finally, I just read enough about Webern’s enormous influence on composers I love that I developed a rationalization that has allowed me to listen to Webern’s music. In sum, I think that, like many transcendent artists, Webern was a peripheral soul, detached, perhaps on the autism spectrum, and so I give him a pass. Tacit Nazi sympathizer is not a star on his resume, certainly, but then the last few years here in the U.S. have brought home the fact that it is not really fair to blame artists – at least lesser-known ones like Webern (his reputation as a great master came about posthumously, in the ’50s and ’60s) – for the actions of their political leaders.
I’ve come to really like Webern. (The Nazi thing keeps me from saying “love.) He’s a miniaturist and should be approached that way. His pieces are short – his lifetime’s work would fit on a couple CDs – and so they’re easy to listen to repeatedly, which is sort of what it took, for me at least. The Naxos CD from which the Webern piece on this mixtape derives was what finally sold me on Webern. A Japanese guy conducting a Northern Ireland orchestra… go figure. Somehow it is perfect. It feels like a Joy Division album – maybe from back when they were Warsaw – inky dark and gritty.
The Alban Berg violin concerto is the first long 2nd Viennese School work I really took to, and it leaves no doubting the composer’s genius. It uses serial methods in the service of real anguish (it was dedicated to the dead daughter of Alma Mahler, but melodies take shape in flits and shards. I’d also recommend watching part or all of Wozzcek, his opera, on Youtube.
The works of lesser-known SVS people were also enlightening. Egon Wellesz is one such, a man whose name I learned via Youtube. There is a group of channels on Youtube – one guy? twenty? – called Wellesz; all these sites do is present much or most of the 20th Century’s greatest works by the greatest composers you’ll never hear on a radio into Youtube videos. I have been able to find 80% of the music I’m looking for, no matter how obscure, on a Wellesz site. (Wellesz (and some other classical Youtube stations) and Wikipedia are about the only positives I can draw from the internet at this point…) So I was favorably prepossessed to appreciate the composer whose name (I assume) inspired such an effort, and the payday was in fact immediate: The piano piece herein, the first thing I heard by him, is insanely beautiful. Wellesz is yet another composer who should be far better known.
The later artists on this mixtape are ones I’ve been fans of for some time – G.F. Haas (b. 1953) and Beat (pronounced Bay-yacht) Furrer (b. 1954), founder of the premier new music ensemble Kangforum Wien, are the two Austrian Masters working today. Peter Jakober (b. 1977, the year punk died) is a younger man, a student of Haas’s, with a new album on Kairos, the great contemporary Austrian record label.
Finally, a word about these “Mixtapes.” They are not meant to be definitive of anything or any composer. They are not supposd to be educational, particularly. They are just comps of pieces that resonate with me. I approached this music at the outset with nothing but the ears on my head and the brain in between them. The music has changed my life for the better in ways it would be pointless to try to describe. It’s become my place of refuge from the shrill, keening tornado of shit the world has become.
Some years back, in the early part of this bleak century, I was (and remain) deeply impressed by a series of, in effect, “mixtape” CDs – Deep Soul, volumes 1-4 – by the British soul music aficionado Dave Godin (RIP). I’ve tried to take the same approach to modern classical music. Godin did not select “greatest hits” for his (totally essential, if you’re a fan of ’60s Southern soul) mixes necessarily, although he included “hits” when they fit. Rather it was the unworldly nature of the particular piece that warranted its inclusion. In the case of a lot of these pieces, the rest of the record – even the other movements in a piece – might be vastly less interesting, and the composer may have few or no other works in his or her discography one fifth as interesting… but that doesn’t diminish the piece (or the movement within a piece). It’s the art – the music – that counts. It makes no real difference whether you’re familiar with the technical terms. You can enjoy paintings without knowing the theories of light and color the artist was trying to manifest, and nobody calls you a layman. Same goes for all the other art forms. The main point of these collections – aside from keeping alive (in a wee, wee way) the names of geniuses who are, in many cases, fading into oblivion – is just the music. I’m not saying learning and knowing about some music theory is a bad idea, just that it’s not the point.
I hope you can listen to and enjoy all or most of the music on this and other Mixtapes in that context.
0:00:55 Arnold Schoenberg: Pierrot Luniere; 1. Mondestrunken
Anne-Lise Bernsten w/ Christian Eggen: Borealis Ensemble
(Victoria)
0:02:52 Egon Wellesz: Der Abend, I. Pastorale
Margarete Babinsky
(Capriccio)
0:06:04 Beat Furrer: Enigma 1
Nils Schweckendiek: Helsinki Chamber Choir
(Toccata)
0:09:24 Gustav Mahler: Piano Quartet
Kremerata Baltica
(Deutsche Grammophon)
0:20:24 Zemlinsky: Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano in D Minor, Op. 3; II. Andante
Othmer Muller (c), Ernst Ottensamer (cl), C. Hinterhuber (p)
(Naxos)
0:29:32 Alban Berg: Violin Concerto, II.
Anne-Sophie Mutter w/ James Levine: Chicago Symphony Orchestra
(Deutsche Grammophon)
0:46:30 Anton Webern: 6 Pieces
Takuo Yuasa: Ulster Orchestra
(Naxos)
0:58:19 G.F. Haas: last minutes of inhumanity
Ilan Volkov: BBC Proms Orchestra
(Youtube)
1:06:03 Peter Jakober: Puls 2
Bas Wiegers: Klangforum Wien
(Kairos)
1:14:53 Mahler: Ninth Symphony, IV. (excerpt)
Carlo Maria Giulani: Chicago Symphony Orchestra
(Deutsche Grammophon)
1:22:33 Furrer: String Quartet No. 3, bar 500-679
KNM Berlin
(Kairos)
1:40:30 Mahler: Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, Resurrection; IV. Urlicht
(arr. for voice and organ)
Anne Sophie von Otter (mezzo soprano) w/ Bengt Forsberg
(BIS)
Concentration Camp 