INSPIRING IMPASSE?
Noble, David B.
Commonweal: 182 Music INSPIRING IMPASSE? POLYMORPHOUS ECLECTICISM A CLEAR description of the state of the art of composing "classical" or "serious" music has been provided by Gunther Schuller,...
...The finale put a march-fanfare through a dazzling array of instrumental and character transformations (the last was a scurrilous sort of big-band jazz), then returned to slow material of the sort that opened the symphony in a sonic swell of such intensity that one's whole inner ear resonated, and sense of balance wavered until the conductor's cutoff...
...This situation is particularly painful by comparison with the two-and-a-half centuries that preceded World War I, when triadic harmony was in universal use in the West...
...Our mainstream concerts still offer mostly music of that era, and give the major composers of this century marginal status, mostly because of the growing language gap...
...In the context of these remarks, which Schuller has given formally and informally several times, considerable interest attended the recent East Coast premiere of his Symphony No...
...In the meantime, he and many others keep on composing, and do what they can in the present situation, with the answer not in clear sight...
...in some passages Schuller was inventing several new sonorities a second, all structural to the magical, haunting flavor of this remarkable work...
...POLYMORPHOUS ECLECTICISM A CLEAR description of the state of the art of composing "classical" or "serious" music has been provided by Gunther Schuller, the extraordinary composer cum conductor cum historian who may receive more commissions to write new music than anyone else in the country...
...An impassioned, dissonant outburst led to an eerie, haunted passage reminiscent of Schoenberg at his most atmospheric, and then to the implacable, lovely elegy again...
...But no one's winning...
...22 March 1985: 183...
...Perhaps, if the current impasse can inspire works on this level, we should not resolve it just yet...
...All this was composed in some version of the twelve-tone method, which originated with the Schoenberg school but which Schuller has made a pan-stylistic tool par excellence...
...Music, says Schuller simply, no longer has a universal language that all composers employ and that all audiences can follow...
...The second movement, an elegy to the late composer Alec Wilder, began with a somber evocative chorale, atonal but fluent and neo-Romantic, its Alban Berg harmonies heightened by a dry, Stravinskian orchestration to almost unbearable intensity...
...don't stay withdrawn into the purity of your own approach...
...Still Schuller foresees, or at least hopes for, some kind of convergence of musical usage, even if not as complete a unity as existed a century ago...
...This rose dramatically from low register to mid-range, then leapt into a rapid, reedy theme resembling the energetic but anonymous ideas typical of American composition...
...Schuller urges young composers: Give your listeners a way into the music you provide...
...DAVID B. NOBLE (DavidB...
...But under this facade of conventional band music, a wealth of inner relationships was quickly drawn out of the two subjects and expanded into ghostly, visionary vistas again suggestive of the Romantics but with remarkable magic of their own...
...Schuller composes with legendary rapidity, and the weight of his music varies from work to work, but his previous symphonies, the First for brass and percussion dating froml950, and the Second for orchestra from 1965, are imposing works and classics of their periods...
...Even more his own was the inexhaustible coloristic invention of the piece...
...But the real spectacle was the polymorphous eclecticism, the remarkable array of styles donned and discarded, mimicked and mocked, as this vast, creative intelligence thrashed on the hook of its own self-defined dilemma about musical language...
...Noble, who writes regularly on music, previously contributed an article on the Oxford Movement to Commonweal's issue of July 13, 1984...
...Various schools of musical style or language have competed for dominance in this century, Schuller points out...
...The scherzo movement passed itself off as a hyperactive waltz, the imposture made hilarious by melodic digressions that turned dipso through acoustical sleight of hand — some of these moments were physically dizzying to a listener...
...the composer took the podium after a brief, businesslike bow...
...3, "Laudi Ventorum (In Praise of Winds)," written four years ago for the University of Michigan concert band...
...A slow introduction swelled darkly, something like a Romantic symphony's, but laced with sharp melodic and harmonic corners and sonically intense instrumental combinations...
...Ninety-five wind players (actually, a few were percussionists) assembled in Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory in Boston to perform Schuller's Third...
Vol. 112 • March 1985 • No. 6
