Will’s Reviews > The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century > Status Update

“The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives, the people who you think are conservative might really be radical” (Morton Feldman, 1984) He began to hum the Sibelius Fifth.

- duke ellington creating a new musical voice, not becoming the “black beethoven”
- Rachmaninov: “I cannot cast out the old way of writing and i cannot acquire the new…I cannot cast out my musical gods in a moment and bend the knee to knew ones” (written in 1939

“I don’t feel I’ve really scratched the surface of what i want to do.” (George Gershwin before his death in 1937)

kern let white Americans know that there was more to black music than bouncing syncopation (in regards to Show Boat)

Young aesthetes went off to the trenches of the Great War hoping to acquire a manly finish; the survivors were shattered rather than invigorated by the ordeal. Perhaps for this reason, those who had earlier attempted to escape the temple of “pure musical now tried to find their way back in.

Cocteau (librettist of satie’s Parade): “we need music on the earth, MUSIC FOR EVERY DAY. Enough of hammocks, garlands, gondolas! I want someone to make me music that i can like in like a house” (Les Six, and the state of music after World War One)

Viennese school - Schoenberg, and his disciples Webern, and Berg.

the Parisians were moving into the brightly lit world of daily life. The Viennese went in the opposite direction, illuminating the terrible depths with their holy torches.