Epilogue

HOW SHOULD WE ASSESS ALBAN BERG’S PLACE IN MUSIC OF THE modern era? In the present day—far more than in the past—the question defies any broadly acceptable answer. Serious music from Berg’s time to our own has undergone such radical and continuing changes that any ideology supporting its critical evaluation seems temporary and arbitrary. The riots that greeted the Altenberg Songs at the Musikverein in 1913 or the Chamber Concerto in Paris in 1928 are unthinkable at performances in the present day. Equally unimaginable at present is the chartering of a train to bring audiences from New York to Philadelphia to hear a new opera, as happened for the American premiere of ...

International Acclaim, 1923–25

Shortly after completing the opera Wozzeck, Berg emerged from relative obscurity to international prominence through performances of his earlier music. The premiere of Wozzeck in Berlin in 1925 was a huge success, reported in newspapers throughout the world. But Berg still faced challenges in the development of his career. His health remained poor, and a new taste in modern music had appeared, often called “neoclassicism,” that was different from the type of music that he had until then composed. Following the end of World War I, Schoenberg and others began to develop twelve-tone methods of composing, later termed “dodecaphony,” to control and systematize the appearance of the full chromatic. Berg began to adapt aspects of Schoenberg’s new method in his Chamber Concerto, a programmatic work that celebrates the three leading figures in Schoenberg’s circle—Webern, Berg, and Schoenberg—in addition to using elements of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method.

Compositional Flourishing (1967–70)

Having codified a repertoire of personalized techniques, Ligeti deployed them in many new combinations in an extremely productive period at the end of the 1960s. Works composed in this period include Continuum, Two Études for Organ, String Quartet no. 2, Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet, Ramifications, and the Chamber Concerto. This chapter looks at the contrapuntal techniques that built on the composer’s previous practice as well as those derived from harmonic networks. The latter allowed Ligeti to move away from the cluster-based harmonic palate characteristic of his earlier works. In these works Ligeti looked for diverse means of expression and presentation, and he founds ways of composing transitions between techniques, putting patterns derived from harmonic procedures into polyphonic combinations and deriving static harmonic fields from material generated as a melody.

Satellite Gamelan: Microtonal Sonification Using a Large Consort of Mobile Phones

This paper describes an approach to sonification based on an iPhone app created for multiple users to explore a microtonal scale generated from harmonics using the combination product set method devised by tuning theorist Erv Wilson. The app is intended for performance by a large consort of hand-held mobile phones where phones are played collaboratively in a shared listening space. Audio consisting of handbells and sine tones is synthesised independently on each phone. Sound projection from each phone relies entirely on venue acoustics unaided by mains-powered amplification. It was designed to perform a microtonal composition called Transposed Dekany which takes the form of a chamber concerto in which a consort of players explore the properties of an microtonal scale. The consort subdivides into families of instruments that play in different pitch registers assisted by processes that are enabled and disabled at various stages throughout the performance. The paper outlines Wilson’s method, describes its current implementation and considers hypothetical sonification scenarios for implementation using different data with potential applications in the physical world.

Civic Hall, Stratford-Upon-Avon: John McCabe's Trumpet Concerto ‘La Primavera’

Although John McCabe's Rainforest II, of 1987, is in effect a chamber concerto for trumpet and 11 strings, his extensive body of concertante works has lacked an official trumpet concerto. La Primavera, which had its première on 15 June 2012, now happily fills that gap. The subtitle derives from McCabe's consideration of two aspects of the approach of Spring: the vitality of burgeoning growth and the flowering of the new or refreshed life as it expands.

Thea Musgrave round-up

‘Pierrot Dreaming’. MUSGRAVE: Canta! Canta!; Ring Out Wild Bells; Threnody; Pierrot; Chamber Concerto No. 2. Victoria Soames Samek (cl), Gabrielle Byam-Grounds (fl), David Le Page (vn/va), Matthew Sharp (vc), Mark Troop (pno). Clarinet Classics CC0038.‘The Fall of Narcissus’. MUSGRAVE: Serenade; Narcissus; Impromptu for flute and cello; Wind Quintet; Impromptu No. 2 for flute, oboe and clarinet; Four Portraits for baritone, clarinet and piano. Victoria Soames Samek (cl), Members of English Serenata, David Le Page (va), Matthew Sharp (vc), Stephen Varcoe (bar), Rachel Masters (hp). Clarinet Classics CC0039.MUSGRAVE: Memento Vitae; Helios; Night Music; The Seasons. Nicholas Daniel (ob), Scottish Chamber Orchestra c. Nicholas Kraemer; BBC Symphony Orchestra c. Jac van Steen. NMC (ANCORA+) D074.‘Oriental Landscapes’. MUSGRAVE: Journey Through a Japanese Landscape. CHEN YI: Percussion Concerto. ZHOU LONG: Out of Tang Court. HOVHANESS: Fantasy on Japanese Wood Prints. Evelyn Glennie (perc), Singapore Symphony Orchestra c. Lan Shui. BIS CD 1222.