Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T22:24:19.937Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

30 - Instrumental performance in the twentieth century and beyond

from PART VII - THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2012

Colin Lawson
Affiliation:
Royal College of Music, London
Robin Stowell
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
Get access

Summary

Modernism has released its icy grip. During the latter decades of the twentieth century composers seemed able again to breathe Stefan George's ‘Luft von anderem Planeten’ (‘Air of another planet’), the opening soprano line of the last movement of Schoenberg's Second Quartet (1908), an iconic phrase emblematic of a newly extended or saturated chromaticism. These revolutionary beginnings of atonality (a negative term not favoured by Schoenberg) were hastened by the need to broaden the compositional palette, expressing and exploring a newly liberated emotional inner life. As Schoenberg memorably writes in his first letter to Kandinsky, ‘art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one's taste, or one's upbringing, or one's intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but what is inborn, instinctive.’ Kandinsky's initial letter to Schoenberg, after hearing his music in 1911, which provoked the composer's enthusiastic response, in a sense clinches the movement towards expressionism: ‘In your works, you have realised what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.’ And so that particular strand of the complex story begins.

The neat but arbitrary use of 1900 as the starting point for many twentieth-century music histories no longer seems to obtain. Invoking Dahlhaus, the Romantic nineteenth century might be seen to end with the death of Wagner, and the twentieth to start with the earlymodern period in German and Austrian music: Mahler, Wolf, Zemlinsky, early Strauss and tonal Schoenberg straddling the two centuries up to the beginnings of atonality in 1908 and perhaps further to the end of the Great War. As Dahlhaus suggests, this periodmight even end as late as 1920 as the ‘revolution in musical technique around 1910 was succeeded by a profound transformation of aesthetic outlook around 1920’: here he is looking to Stravinsky and the twelve-tone Schoenberg. For the subject of this chapter, performance practice and instrumental exploitation, the twentieth century is not ‘long’ but, I would suggest, quite short, covering the mid-century from the 1950s to the late 1980s.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×