Music at the Turn

If Arnold Schoenberg had little taste for percussion ensembles or airplane propellers, he had his own visions of musical sounds hitherto unheard. Six months before Stravinsky’s bombshell had gone off in Paris, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire had earned a comparably hostile — if less vociferous — reception in Berlin: music in which a solo voice keened, wailed and whispered poetry about a moonstruck madman, joined by a chamber-music ensemble enhancing the spooky atmosphere with music devoid of any clear sense of harmonic progression or key. Standing aloof from all the jazzy razzmatazz, Schoenberg sought to codify his wholesale revision of traditional musical values with his "method of composition employing all 12 tones," which he perennially explained as the logical extension of principles reaching back to Bach. His 1923 Suite for Piano, his first "pure" piece employing all 12 tones in strict serial order, did indeed link hands with Bachian models. But it was Schoenberg’s disciple Alban Berg, in his harrowing, immensely powerful operatic setting of Georg Büchner’s Wozzeck, who proved the expressive potential of the Schoenbergian style, moving in and out of 12-tone writing, also in and out of the Mahlerian shadows, as the moods of the intensely moody story dictated. Just by themselves, The Rite of Spring and Wozzeck were enough to prove that the new century had not lost the ages-old power to produce masterpieces.

26. BARTÓK: Quartet No. 4 (1928)

27. WALTON: Viola Concerto (1929)

28. WEILL: Mahagonny (1929)

29. STRAVINSKY: Symphony of Psalms (1930)

30. VILLA-LOBOS: Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1 (1930)

31. CRAWFORD SEEGER: String Quartet (1931)

32. RAVEL: Piano Concerto (1931)

33. WEBERN: Concerto, Opus 24 (1934)

34. THOMSON: Four Saints in Three Acts (1934)

35. GERSHWIN: Porgy and Bess (1935)

36. BERG: Violin Concerto (1935)

37. SCHOENBERG: Quartet No. 4 (1936)

38. McPHEE: Tabuh-Tabuhan (1936)

39. ORFF: Carmina Burana (1936)

40. HARRIS: Symphony No. 3 (1937)

41. SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 5 (1937)

42. PROKOFIEV: Alexander Nevsky (1939)

43. CAGE: Second Construction (1940)

44. MESSIAEN: Quartet for the End of Time (1940)

45. BARTÓK: Concerto for Orchestra (1943)

46. BERNSTEIN: On the Town (1943)

47. BRITTEN: Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943)

48. COPLAND: Appalachian Spring (1944)

49. SESSIONS: Symphony No. 2 (1946)

50. BARBER: Knoxville, Summer of 1915 (1947)

In attempting to force any aspect of artistic history into the listmakers’ Procrustean bed, you inevitably end up with a dualism, "then" versus "now." The musical "then" is a vast, safe area of sure-fire masterpieces, beloved by audiences and by concert managements as well: two centuries, give or take, bounded at the far and near ends respectively by, say, Bach’s "Brandenburg" Concertos and Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. You wouldn’t mistake one for the other, yet there are aspects they share: They are both entertainments composed for performing forces that are required to exhibit a certain amount of solo virtuosity; their harmonies honor the assumption that listeners like the security of the music being in a specified key; their rhythms can, if you’re so inclined, set your toes to tapping in regular patterns of twos, threes or fours. (There had been music before Bach, of course, and one of the great events of recent decades has been its accession to popularity in something close to its original sounds.) Over the 200 or so years of music’s "then," the works that best exemplify the ideals of those years were developed in a certain few countries of Central Europe — France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy — plus an occasional outsider from England, Spain or the Slavic lands who, most likely, had studied music within the inner circle.

The crumbling of that tradition which began right after the First World War — the invasion of that inner circle by aliens from (horror!) the United States, by alien styles (jazz, Asian gamelan, Appalachian folk song) and sounds (percussion ensembles, junkyard salvage, silence) — brought about a vast expansion of the means by which a composer might achieve uniqueness of musical language. This in turn meant that the differences among the works composed during music’s "now" tend to be far wider than in any previous century or even two centuries. Not all the aliens, of course, carried the seeds of revolt. Britain’s William Walton and Benjamin Britten, and America’s Samuel Barber, found plenty of new things to say within the old conservative language. One of the first Americans to respond sympathetically to Arnold Schoenberg’s principles, the still-underappreciated Ruth Crawford Seeger (stepmother of folk singer Pete), blended the atonal manner into her own powerful outlooks in her vibrant, intense String Quartet, music which has only now, 67 years later, been accorded worldwide masterpiece status. Stravinsky alone among music’s towering role models never handed down a legacy for others to follow.

With the expansion of sources and resources available to musicians practically from the start of this century, new music maintains its power to intimidate far longer than before. People still flee the concert hall during Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring(of 1913!) and probably always will. Béla Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet, 70 years old, still strikes me as a very "daring" work, with the needle-sharp pizzicatos of its scherzo and the shiver-inducing nocturnal sounds of its slow movement. So does much other music as it approaches respectable dotage: Crawford Seeger’s Quartet (1931) and Schoenberg’s Quartet No. 4 (1936), with their slow movements that seem suspended in outer space while holding us spellbound here on Earth. So does the searing beauty in the 1935 Violin Concerto of Alban Berg, his last completed work, which — as in his Wozzeck of a decade before — explores the "romantic" potential in the 12-note serial technique. And so, from 1943, does the interplay of deep mystery and sublime wit in Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra — the most recent large-scale work on this list to achieve permanent repertory status — music by a composer desperately ill and impoverished, but driven by that indefinable force that makes music happen against all odds.