A VW quote of interest...

[Alan Howe]

Writing in 1955 in a ninetieth birthday tribute to Sibelius, Vaughan Williams wrote:

"Great music is written, I believe, not by breaking the tradition, but by adding to it."

Any comments? (FWIW I thoroughly agree!)

[thalbergmad]

I think it is difficult to break tradition with music. I remember a quote by Bartok along the lines that as a composer, it is impossible not to be influenced by what has gone before.

In the World of art, it seems to be much easier. Now a man pushing a peanut along the motorway with his nose is considered an artist producing a great work.

Thal

[Alan Howe]

I think it is difficult to break tradition with music.

Unless one develops a totally new language...

[Amphissa]

I don't know. Serialism was a pretty nauseating break from tradition.

[Alan Howe]

I agree. It's the break from tradition that's the problem...

[eschiss1]

Some of us think it wasn't all that much of a tradition at all.

[Christo]

Only after reading Peter Gay's book on Modernism, I realized that there are basically two `schools' of music in the 20th century. One could call them the Modernist and the Neoclassical, without claiming the distinction is always sharp and clearcut, of course.

Modernism was all about `experiment' and originality, a huge effort to do away with `tradition' and creating a new musical world of its own. But the mainstream (even if not always acknowledged as such) related itself to tradition. Indeed, tradition was growing much larger and reaching further back in time, with especially the example of Bach - he's after all the most influential composer of the 20th century - looming large.

The 20th century was not only the Age of Modernism. It was even more dominated by the discovery of ancient music. Blessed were the composers who did their advantage with so much richness and newly discovered `tradition' at their disposal.

(BTW, another RVW quotation below)

[eschiss1]

correction: "not (all that much of ) a break from tradition" at all, not "all that much of a tradition". Gads, the things I write at - whenever that was...

[vandermolen]

It strikes me that Vaughan Williams is a good example of this himself - building on the example of the great Tudor composers and that of his teachers Stanford and Parry - developing his own style in the process, with the assimilation of folk-music influences and Sibelius himself (especially in the 5th Symphony).

[Alan Howe]

I quite agree. Would Schoenberg be an example of the opposite?

[Dundonnell]

I have a personal policy of trying NEVER to say anything about Schoenberg

My good friend, Malcolm MacDonald, has written books about both Havergal Brian and Arnold Schoenberg

(I like the Guerrelieder though )

[Alan Howe]

(I like the Guerrelieder though )

Me too! The problem comes when, instead of building on tradition, he attempts to create a new one. Discuss...

[eschiss1]

Well, it is disputable, certainly; certainly that's not how the composer himself saw it - like some others (Liszt comes to mind as an inexact analogy) before him,

(i) he thought that there was only so much that could be done in 19th century techniques (he or someone else wrote that if Louis XIV? and his era had been content with Louis XIII style there would be no talk of etc.- itself an inexact analogy but then again- analogy is inexact or it is not analogy)
(ii) that the forms used by most of the masters of the 18th and 19th century required much more harmonic and tonal stability than could be guaranteed by the increasing harmonic and tonal range one starts to encounter late in those centuries - that Wagner's symphonies and sonatas are the products of his early career (mostly?) is not, e.g., from this point of view, a matter of coincidence (and I agree with this. Reger tried to find one solution, I think, opposing blocks and masses, it seems, rather than key-areas, since key varies so much within his melody-groups, making it hard to distinguish the three large areas exposition-development-recapitulation from the smaller areas within those areas on those grounds -alone-. As in other ways, key instability risks formal coherence in such works.)
So Schoenberg after leaving/reducing tonality wrote mostly brief works until he could find one of the possible somethings to replace that with.
Not the best explanation, and might be a little better if I wrote it after lunch - ... not likely, but there it is...

[Alan Howe]

I think it's interesting that you use the word 'replace', Eric. That's the key to the problem. IMHO there was and is no need to 'replace' anything - serialism should never have been the be all and end all, but simply another tool in the box, as it were.

[eschiss1]

and he later came to agree with you, alternating tonal and serial works. As do I; I misspoke - miswrote. I'm more a believer in writing clearly than I am actually good at it, much of the time