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The Path to the New Music
1963 THEODORE PRESSER CO SOFTCOVER
- GenresMusic
67 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1960
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84 people want to read
About the author
Anton Webern
179 books2 followersAustrian composer Anton Friedrich Wilheim von Webern, using twelve-tone techniques, wrote many works, noted for their brevity and sparseness of musical texture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_W...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_W...
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 26, 2023
Un libro folgorante, da studiare ed approfondire sempre più a fondo.
January 15, 2025
According to Anton Webern, two important factors to the new music:
* The conquest of the tonal field
* The presentation of ideas
(Other random notes: Bach represents the desire for maximum unity. Everything is derived from one basic idea from the one fugue-theme.)
* The conquest of the tonal field
* The presentation of ideas
(Other random notes: Bach represents the desire for maximum unity. Everything is derived from one basic idea from the one fugue-theme.)
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July 24, 2022Stimolante
September 28, 2016
Anton Webern was a genius in what he did and if you are interested in twelve tone music go for this book.
However as a musician I expected from such a genius a more solid theoretical approach to why twelve tone music was, in his opinion, the natural and only evolution of music.
The problem is that these are lectures for a public made by non musicians, so Webern could not really go deep in the subject.
One of the main point is that of Schoenberg, who justified the use of extreme dissonances by saying that music progressively used what was already in the harmonics of a fundamental note, so dissonances were therefore justified by Nature.
I think that this point can be contested by saying that, although dissonances are present in the harmonics, they are really not in the audible range of the harmonics.
But dissonances are not the main point , the main point is the use of all the twelve tones of a scale before a tone can be repeated, such a strict rule really made dodecaphonic music difficult to understand.
We now know that the human brain is not able to understand dodecaphonic music because of limitations in our memory of sounds.
The structure is there in twelve tone music, but our brain can not grasp it, so it is an art to the eye of a musician who can read it printed but is beyond what we can hear as an organized art form, which is what music, for the most part of its history, has been.
Another very interesting part of the book are the Webern's letters that are included in it, here he himself says that they are navigating in a stormy sea, that only the faith in "the idea" made the twelve tone music school progress,
that they felt like pioneers in a new world,
and they were,
except that the human brain is not able to organize this new world of sound.
Webern knew that the understanding of this music was a problem, but never realized that it really was not solvable. He thought that ,like Beethoven and Wagner, who were disputed at their time, the twelve tone music school finally would have won its battle with history.
It did not, but it enriched Music and gave us new ways to compose it,
even if not in the "purist" way that Webern would have liked, twelve tone music techniques are still in use in music today.
However as a musician I expected from such a genius a more solid theoretical approach to why twelve tone music was, in his opinion, the natural and only evolution of music.
The problem is that these are lectures for a public made by non musicians, so Webern could not really go deep in the subject.
One of the main point is that of Schoenberg, who justified the use of extreme dissonances by saying that music progressively used what was already in the harmonics of a fundamental note, so dissonances were therefore justified by Nature.
I think that this point can be contested by saying that, although dissonances are present in the harmonics, they are really not in the audible range of the harmonics.
But dissonances are not the main point , the main point is the use of all the twelve tones of a scale before a tone can be repeated, such a strict rule really made dodecaphonic music difficult to understand.
We now know that the human brain is not able to understand dodecaphonic music because of limitations in our memory of sounds.
The structure is there in twelve tone music, but our brain can not grasp it, so it is an art to the eye of a musician who can read it printed but is beyond what we can hear as an organized art form, which is what music, for the most part of its history, has been.
Another very interesting part of the book are the Webern's letters that are included in it, here he himself says that they are navigating in a stormy sea, that only the faith in "the idea" made the twelve tone music school progress,
that they felt like pioneers in a new world,
and they were,
except that the human brain is not able to organize this new world of sound.
Webern knew that the understanding of this music was a problem, but never realized that it really was not solvable. He thought that ,like Beethoven and Wagner, who were disputed at their time, the twelve tone music school finally would have won its battle with history.
It did not, but it enriched Music and gave us new ways to compose it,
even if not in the "purist" way that Webern would have liked, twelve tone music techniques are still in use in music today.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews