The Rest Is Noise Series: Brave New World: The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties
Реклама. ООО «ЛитРес», ИНН: 7719571260.
Оглавление
Alex Ross. The Rest Is Noise Series: Brave New World: The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties
BRAVE NEW WORLD. The Cold War and the Avant-Grade of the Fifties. From The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross
11. BRAVE NEW WORLD. The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties
Radical Reconstruction: Boulez and Cage
Copland Under Fire
Stravinsky Defects
Darmstadt
Kennedy’s America: Twelve Tones and Show Tunes
NOTES. Abbreviations Used
Brave New World
SUGGESTED LISTENING AND READING. Five Recommended Recordings
Brave New World
Read the full book. The Rest is Noise
Copyright
About the Publisher
Отрывок из книги
This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise.
It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you’re attending concerts in the episode
.....
What could replace Schoenberg’s antiquated paradigm? Messiaen supplied the beginning of an answer. Back in 1946 he had planned a “ballet on Time”—a piece in which he would “develop timbres, durations, and nuances according to the principles of serialism.” In the summer of 1949, he set to work on a piano piece called Mode de valeurs et d’intensités, or Scale of Durations and Dynamics, which became the springboard for a new compositional technique known as “total serialism.”
In the interest of cultivating rhythmic variety, Messiaen decided that the lengths of notes—sixteenth, eighth, quarter, and so forth—should be arranged in a scale parallel to the scale of pitches. He also made rows of dynamic levels (ppp, fff, pp, ff, and so on) and of attacks (accented, staccato, legato, and so on). A particular note is always assigned the same values. Thus, the high E-flat is always a thirty-second note, is always played ppp, and is (almost) always slurred. The idea of “scales of rhythm” was not new, having already been theorized by two American experimenters, Charles Seeger and Henry Cowell. Messiaen was, however, the first to coordinate all the variables in one system.
.....