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Recommended book
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Mar 1 15:17 UTC 1994 |
_The Companion to 20th Century Music_, by the British music critic
Norman Lebrecht, published by Simon & Schuster. This book is fun
to read. Lebrecht believes the chief glory of music in the 20th
century was its diversity, and he tries to cover every important
composer and musical style in his book. In doing so, he admits
for the first time into such a compendium a number of first rate
composers who have been hitherto locked out by doctrinaire
modernist critics and academics.
Lebrecht's erudition is awesome. Not only does he seem to have
read all the major and minor sources - from biographies and
histories to old LP liner notes and defunct German periodicals -
but he writes so evocatively about his subjects that he actually
seems to have listened to it all, too.
Lebrecht is catholic in his inclusiveness, but not in his tastes.
He's quite opinionated and outspoken. There's an eyebrow-raiser
on practically every page:
"Like the corruptions of communism, the abuses of modernist
hegemonism would be exposed in its latter-day collapse."
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"Roger Sessions switched US compositional emphasis from
Copland's naive nationalism toward a naive internationalism."
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"Vladimir HOROWITZ Magical pianist whose plangent tone
provoked allegations that he tampered with the strings.
Renowned for idiosyncratic Mozart, inimitable Skryabin and
composer-endorsed Rachmaninov, he performed only at 4 o'clock on
propitious afternoons."
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"[John Corigliano's] oboe concerto opens with a movement called
'Tuning Game'. As expected, it involves the sound of an
orchestra tuning up, ha-ha."
Three qualities Lebrecht prizes and writes approvingly of over and
over again are "moral force," "refinement," and an indefinable
something which enables certain composers to sound like themselves
from one piece to the next, and which Lebrecht feels is an
indispensable requirement of greatness. (He's right. While a
distinctive style alone doesn't necessarily indicate greatness,
any fan of literary parody will tell you that writers who *can't*
be parodied generally aren't very good.)
The prime exemplar of moral force, he says, was Mahler. An over-
the-edge Mahlerite (chelsea please note), Lebrecht concludes his
long essay on his idol with: "He stamped his personality on a
formative epoch in Western art and science. More than just a
musician, he was a monumental force in the 20th century,
comparable to Einstein, Freud and Lenin."
Refinement, the more musical but ironically less important virtue,
is exemplified in such composers as Sibelius and Stravinsky.
Lebrecht credits Samuel Barber with bringing refinement to
American music, in a surpisingly enthusiastic essay in which he
praises "Vanessa," Barber's 1958 grand opera, as "the American
'Rosenkavalier.'"
The book is well researched, but it seems hastily written. I
found many errors of fact and many more errors of language. The
book is so engaging, however, that finding these mistakes became a
kind of "Where's Waldo?" exercise for me. Anyway, no great harm
is done, that I can see: everybody knows that Barber's Adagio was
used in "Platoon," not in "The Deer Hunter," and nobody cares that
"Antony and Cleopatra" premiered on September 16, 1966, not
November 16, 1966.
Highest recommendation.
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