Norman Lebrecht has written a big piece about Korngold. Taster:
Korngold, 110 next month and 50 years dead, richly deserves to be welcomed back to the concert hall. But he deserves even more to be recognised as a pioneer of an allied art, an art that now cries out for a new Korngold to rejuvenate its methodology. The time has come to erase the line between movie and concert music, to encourage the likes of John Adams, Thomas Ades and Mark Anton Turnage to try their hand at lifting film tracks out of the Korngold groove and into 21st century modalities.
Read the whole thing here.
And in The New Republic, Richard Taruskin has published a philosophical tract in the guise of a book review, declaring that classical music's problem is its defenders... and in the 24 online pages, I reckon he makes some very pertinent points. Rather than summarising it here, I suggest you read it and make up your own mind...
Taster:
...The discourse supporting classical music so reeks of historical blindness and sanctimonious self-regard as to render the object of its ministrations practically indefensible. Belief in its indispensability, or in its cultural superiority, is by now unrecoverable, and those who mount such arguments on its behalf morally indict themselves. Which is not to say that classical music, or any music, is morally reprehensible. Only people, not music, can be that. What is reprehensible is to see its cause as right against some wrong. What is destroying the credibility of classical music is an unacknowledged or misperceived collision of rights. The only defense classical music needs, and the only one that has any hope of succeeding, is the defense of classical music (in the words ofT.W. Adorno, a premier offender) against its devotees.
PS - apologies for lumping all these different meaty topics together. I am up to my eyeballs at present with 400 pages of novel proofs plus preparations for Korngold event on Saturday.
4 comments:
Hi Jessica,
I'll kick off your discussion by plugging my own posts on the Taruskin piece. My respect for Taruskin is profound, but it's impossible to condone what he's done here. I intend to spend the next few blogging days spelling out why. For one thing, his apparent notion that the Teutonic dominance, and people's love of composers like Schoenberg, MUST be the product of academic brainwashing. Unless I'm so brainwashed that I don't know how brainwashed I am, he's wrong in my case, as well as my wife's. She says she's always enjoyed the 2nd Viennese sound, before, during and after her college and graduate musical training.
Taruskin's waffle is largely incomprehensible to me. Music can't be morally bad? How about certain rap music, full of hatred and incitement to violence? I think, despite a number of notorious examples tending to prove the reverse, that music can make one a richer, more sentient and better (or less bad) person.Mr Taruskin's examples of the sort of music Nixon liked are biased: Nixon was trying to give a populist image of himself. In actual fact he had a much deeper love of music.Taruskin also tends to the populist view, if I understand him right: that the Beetles are as great as Schubert. Indeed, yes. And my cat sings as well as Callas.The 'morally superior tone' adopted by lovers of classical music has nothing to do with its loss of credibility. It has always been so in certain cases yet the Proms flourish..
For one thing, his apparent notion that the Teutonic dominance, and people's love of composers like Schoenberg, MUST be the product of academic brainwashing
Yes, that's infuriating. I own more recordings of Birtwsitle's great Earth Dances than *anything* by Hadyn, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Brahms combined, so, while it's a still a radical notion to some, some of us *gasp* actually like that kind of music.
It's like the loons who think the Apollo moon landings were staged in the Arizona desert/a Hollywood soundstage. If you tell them they're wrong, then [cue spooky music] you're part of the conspiracy. Um, no.
Interesting...to me it seems that Taruskin is stating the obvious with coruscating brilliance and courage. And of course nobody will like it. I haven't much to add, beyond my usual favourite platitude 'it takes all sorts to make a world'.
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