160th anniversary year

From the Autumn 2004 Musical Times,
available now

On the one hand, we’re told, if we fall into the trap of using ‘vague metaphorical language’ we will say too little. The music will be lost in the verbal shuffle; its formal, genuinely musical identity will go unacknowledged. So warns Peter Williams in a recent critique of cultural musicology. On the other hand, if we fall into the trap of relying on ‘metaphysics’, the ensemble of fixed assumptions, values, and principles that no interpretation can ever avoid, we will say too much – much too much. The music will again be lost; both its material, acoustic presence and its susceptibility to varied realisation in performance will go unacknowledged. So warns Carolyn Abbate in a recent critique of – cultural musicology. One error fails to meet the stringencies of form, the other fails to acknowledge the contingencies that unsettle or undo form. Whatever is said is said wrongly.

Using scenes from Ingmar Bergman and August Strindberg, Lawrence Kramer examines the complementary roles of metaphor and metaphysics in the critical interpretation of music.

Schnittke would have been 70 on 24 November 2004. Probably not since Britten’s final years were musicians more aware of the effects of illness on a still-active composer than they were during Schnittke’s last decade or so. Since his death, there has been less inclination to make allowances, to argue that his heroic resistance to adversity enabled substantive musical values to be maintained. [...] It is always shocking to hear dissonances and detunings intrude on the saccharine purity of Silent night – even when one knows that they are coming – and it is maddening to have G minor triads hammered out as mindlessly as in the Second Violin Sonata. This is certainly not the ‘absence’ of history which so worried Adorno in 1955: yet the superficiality of Schnittke’s confrontation with the past is less unnerving than the disorientation found in compositions which ‘in their inner organization measure themselves by the fullest experience of horror’. With Schnittke the ‘inner organization’ is less likely to challenge convention, and what is genuinely shocking – or saddening – in the later works is that sickness-fuelled melancholy has almost driven out the desire to shock by means of surface confrontations and collisions. Almost but not quite: for example, in the last violin sonata (no.3, 1994) some of the old energy survives, perhaps stimulated by the knowledge that sympathetic performers were ready and willing to bring the music to life. But even if we conclude that the lack of any meaningful confrontation between new and old, whether on the surface or in its ‘inner organization’, is shocking, we can still be moved by the elements of expressiveness that remain. In the end it was his own past that Schnittke mourned, and the irony is that his last works were probably the most unified, if not the most rootless, that he ever composed.

Arnold Whittall celebrates a diversity of 20th-century composers whose anniversaries fall in 2004.

plus

Christopher Fox introduces the recent music of Thomas Adès

Seth Brodsky, in the first of two articles, surveys the protean oeuvre of Wolfgang Rihm

Eva Mantzourani celebrates the achievement of Nikos Skalkottas

Also in the Autumn MT probing reviews of

Peter Horton: Samuel Sebastian Wesley: a life
Michael Musgrave, ed.: George Grove, music and Victorian culture
Ian Woodfield: Salomon and the Burneys: private patronage and a public career
Nicholas Temperley: Bound for America: three British composers
Michael Kassler, ed.: Charles Edward Horn’s Memoirs of his Father and Himself
Austin Clarkson, ed.: On the music of Stefan Wolpe: essays and recollections
Raymond Fearn: The music of Luigi Dallapiccola
Paul Griffiths: Sea of fire: Jean Barraqué
Malcolm Macdonald: Varèse: astronomer in sound
Ivan Hewett: Music: healing the rift
Fred Plotkin: Classical music unbuttoned
Marianne Williams Tobias: Classical music without fear
WJ Henderson: What is good music?

and

a comprehensive listing of UK undergraduate music courses

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