Vanguard News Network
VNN Media
VNN Digital Library
VNN Reader Mail
VNN Broadcasts

Old November 26th, 2016 #1
NewsFeed
News Bot
 
Post Where Have All the Great Composers Gone?

In each nation of importance for Western music during the first half of the twentieth century, there thrived a handful of potentially “great” composers: authentic candidates for recognized greatness in fine art music. In England, Ralph Vaughan-Williams, Benjamin Britten, Gustav Holst, and William Walton loomed large. In France, Maurice Ravel was still composing, while the “French Six” arose—among them Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, and Darius Milhaud, with Eric Satie as their mentor. Igor Stravinsky was an expatriate in Paris.

Precommunist Russia had produced Sergei Rachmaninoff, who was then active in Europe and America, and under communism Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergey Prokofiev were at work. In Italy, Giacomo Puccini was working on one of his greatest operas, Turandot, until his death in 1923, and Pietro Mascagni’s creative period continued past the Second World War. In Germany, Richard Strauss was prolific, and Paul Hindemith became an international figure. In Vienna, the expressionist avant-garde gained intellectual supremacy through Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. In Spain, a late-blooming nationalism produced a school of composers that included Manuel De Falla, Enrique Granados, and Joaquín Turina. Eastern Europe brought forth Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, and Leoš Janácek. And from Finland, Jean Sibelius’s massive symphonic works began to conquer Europe and America. In the same period America also produced significant musical talent: Charles Ives, George Antheil, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Roy Harris, and Howard Hanson.

Composers of fine art music who have appeared after 1950, however, have never rivaled in stature their counterparts of the first half of the century. Elliot Carter and Milton Babbitt did not become household names. Even less known have been the names of recent Pulitzer Prize winners. We seem to be experiencing a drought of musical greatness, a drought which has now lasted two generations or more.

It will likely be surprising to those who are not professional musicians that the above composers, whether from the first or second half of the century, all relate to one of two parent schools of modern musical composition: the Parisian and the Viennese. The modern Parisian school grew out of the impressionism pioneered by Claude Debussy in the late nineteenth century, and the Viennese out of late German Romanticism pioneered by Wagner. Some composers who were not French by nationality owed a great deal to Paris in spirit—especially Stravinsky. The Spanish and American schools were trained in Paris, and the English, Italians, and Russians also owed much to French music.

The French school was capable of many moods and forms—naïve, cheerful, and humorous—and it did not abandon either melody or tonality. The Viennese style, on the other hand, proved restricted in terms of emotional expression and difficult for the creation of form. It abandoned tonality (being called “atonal”) and develope

----- snip -----


read full article at source: http://www.theimaginativeconservativ...ter-young.html
 
Reply

Share


Thread
Display Modes


All times are GMT -5. The time now is 04:13 AM.
Page generated in 0.51876 seconds.