MSM CPP Survey EC 9. New… Romanticisms Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) ''In the beginning, I composed in a distinct style,'' Mr. Schnittke said in an interview in 1988, ''but as I see it now, my personality was not coming through. More recently, I have used many different styles, and quotations from many periods of musical history, but my own voice comes through them clearly now.’' He continued, ''It is not just eclecticism for its own sake. When I use elements of, say, Baroque music,'' he added, ''sometimes I'm tweaking the listener. And sometimes I'm thinking about earlier music as a beautiful way of writing that has disappeared and will never come back; and in that sense, it has a tragic feeling for me. I see no conflict in being both serious and comic in the same piece. In fact, I cannot have one without the other.’' NY Times obituary. Concerto Grosso no. 1 (1977) “a play of three spheres: the Baroque, the Modern and the Banal” (AS) String Quartet no. 2 (1980) Concerto for Mixed Chorus (1984-1985) Wolfgang Rihm (*1952) String Quartet No. 5 (1981-1983) Vigilia (2006) Jagden und Formen (1995-2001) MSM CPP Survey EC Morton Feldman (1926-1987) Rothko Chapel (1971) ‘In 1972, Heinz-Klaus Metzger obstreperously asked Feldman whether his music constituted a “mourning epilogue to murdered Yiddishkeit in Europe and dying Yiddishkeit in America.” Feldman answered: It’s not true; but at the same time I think there’s an aspect of my attitude about being a composer that is mourning—say, for example, the death of art. I mean, remember that I'm a New Yorker, and a New Yorker doesn't think about Yiddishkeit. You think about Yiddishkeit if you live with only five thousand other Jews in Frankfurt, so I haven't got that problem, I mean, I don't think of myself as Jewish in New York. But I do in a sense mourn something that has to do with, say, Schubert leaving me. Also, I really don't feel that it's all necessary any more. And so what I tried to bring into my music are just very few essential things that I need. So I at least keep it going for a little while more. I don't think this explains anything, does it? It does help explain Rothko Chapel, written the previous year.’ Alex Ross. MSM CPP Survey EC George Rochberg (1918-2005) “If all you end up with is an awareness of the intellectual structure, you can't really think about that too long without beginning to wish that there was something more warm and warming about the experience. So I found myself in the early '60s beginning to turn violently away from all of this.” Rochberg with Terry Gross. String Quartet No. 3 (1972) "If George Rochberg can do something like that, there's nothing that I can't do and get away with it. I don't have to write 12-tone music; I can if I want to. I can write stuff that sounds like Brahms. I can do anything I want. I'm free. And that was an extraordinary feeling in the late 1960s for young composers, I think, many of whom felt really constrained to write serial music” James Freeman, Swarthmore College, NPR. “One of the biggest problems about 20th century music in terms of modernism is that very little of it can be remembered. It struck me a long time ago what a painful thing to be involved as an artist--how painful to spend a lifetime producing work which, let's say, leaves nothing on the retina of memory.” String Quartet No. 6 (1978) MSM CPP Survey EC Complexities Brian Ferneyhough (*1943) ''I didn't set out to write difficult music. I was interested in music that mediates: between the notated score and the listening experience, between our perception of time and a sense of pulse, between our inner self and the world outside.'' He envisioned the performer as an extension of the piece itself, he explained, so the goal was ''not virtuosity but a sort of honesty, authenticity, the exhibition of his or her own limitations.’’ ''I write for people who are on this spiritual quest,'' he added. The relationship between a score and a performance is, in the best case, both decisive and mysterious. Beethoven's scores, for example, are surely precise, yet they invite -- compel, actually -- a performer to interpret the music, not execute it. Over hundreds of years composers have become increasingly specific in their notations. Once new modes of expression become part of the common musical vocabulary, composers have more choices, and at the same time they must ensure against ambiguity. But as scores became more specific, the vital attribute of interpretation diminished. Composers often valued accuracy above all. Performers became increasingly focused, justifiably, on getting it right. A counterintuitive but undeniable result of Mr. Ferneyhough's approach, with an immense wealth of detail cascading on a player, is in fact to restore and reinvigorate the balance that historically existed between music as a theoretical set of instructions and music as a living, unrepeatable entity. — Matthias Kriesberg, NY Times ,Dec. 8 2002. Cassandra’s Dream Song (1970-71) “The notation does not represent the result required: it is the attempt to realise the written specifications in practice which is designed to produce the desired (but unnotatable) sound quality. A “beautiful”, cultivated performance is not to be aimed at…. Nevertheless, a valid realization will only result from a rigorous attempt to reproduce as many of the textural details as possible: such divergencies and “impurities” as then follow from the natural limitations of the instrument itself may be taken to be the intentions of the composer.” String Quartet No. 2 (1980) In nomine a 3 (2001) Purcell: In Nomine a 7 Michael Finnisy (*1946) Mississippi Hornpipes (1982-1997) Necessary and More Detailed Thinking (2000) MSM CPP Survey EC James Dillon (*1950) The Book of Elements (1997-2002) "It's musical poetry. Not cod-liver oil that's supposed to be good for your brain, not music for specialists, but music for poets.” Steven Schick on Dillon. also see: Richard Barrett Jason Eckardt Matthias Pintscher Joël-François Durand René Wohlhauser MSM CPP Survey EC Simplicities John Cage (*1912) Cheap Imitation (1969) “In the rest of my work, I'm in harmony with myself… But Cheap Imitation clearly takes me away from all that. So if my ideas sink into confusion, I owe that confusion to love…. Obviously, Cheap Imitation lies outside of what may seem necessary in my work in general, and that's disturbing. I’m the first to be disturbed by it.” “Cheap Imitation turned out to be the key to the manifold production of Cage’s last two decades, for it embodied a truth that became inescapable as the 1960s receded: the truth that new ideas were no longer going to be so easy to find. Cage mentioned with approval Gunther Stent’s conclusion that ‘everything has been thought; all the fundamental discoveries have been made’, and added: ‘That doesn’t mean we don’t need to compose new music, but new ideas on music are no longer necessary.” Griffiths, Paul. Modern Music and After, p 286. Howard Skempton (*1947): “the emancipation of consonance” MSM CPP Survey EC Suite from Delicate (1996) for 2 cellos and percussion Lento (1991) Wolfgang von Schweinitz (*1953) Plainsound Glissando Modulation, Op. 49 (2006-2007) “RAGA in just intonation for violin and double bass” Walter Zimmerman (*1949) Schatten Der Ideen (1993) for piano quartet Cologne school, also see: Peter Eötvös, Clarence Barlow, Kevin Volans, Ladislav Kupkovič, Hans Abrahamson (*1952) Four Pieces for Orchestra (2000-2003) Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1999) Danish school, also see: Poul Ruders, Henning Christiansen, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen.