A hearty thanks to the Aspen Festival of Ideas for sending me a link to this fascinating discussion about "iconic" works of the 1930s. Last year I interviewed Gil about his project surveying the great violin concertos of those times: it was extraordinary to realise that a dizzying number of the 20th-century pieces in the genre that can justifiably be called "iconic" were written during one eight-year timespan from 1931 to 1939, among them some by Walton, Barber, Bartok's Second, Berg, Britten, Szymanowski, Schoenberg and more.
Now a note from Aspen tells me I got "name-checked"... It is very sweet of Gil to credit me for switching him on to the term "iconic", which has provided the central tenet of this discussion. I can't help wishing I'd found a more original expression, but I'm glad it proved appropriate and came in handy.
The discussion is about an hour long and if you are fascinated, as I am, by the culture, atmosphere, style and general zeitgeist of the Thirties (if there was such a thing), and how these relate to our own times, it is very well worth a listen.
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I enjoyed that very much, Jessica. Thank you. Having said that, I did have a problem with it, and I put it that way to make it clear that this is not intended as a criticism. I found Gil's presentation interesting and Alan's illuminating -- things to think about there. But by the time Heidi had finished I had to remind myself that the violin concerti of the 30s were putatively central to this, and I was hard put to know how to place them in the context of the discussion as a whole.
But I think Alan, coming back toward the conclusion, put his finger on the problem that I already had in mind: that there was not really a general zeitgeist of the 1930's. His answer to the question re the abstract seemed to suggest that he had very wisely steered of that in his comments -- if you get into abstraction in the context of music in the 30s, I think it is there that the zeitgeist idea might really start unravelling, although the comments on architecture in Germany, Italy and the US already suggested a rather big snag in the thesis. But, as I say, it was very enjoyable and certainly stimulating for me, an historian of ideas, now retired, who in childhood and early youth studied with Webern's last pupil. The 30s were not the focus of my own work, but they have inevitably, I should say, always been an avocation.
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