It is not that fugues and concerti in the olden
style cannot be written to-day, that modern music and the antique forms
are incompatible. It is that Reger was very little the artist. He
mistook the material vesture for the spirit, thought that there were
formulas for composition, royal roads to the heaven of Bach and Mozart.
Something more of humanity, sympathy for man and his experiences, inner
freedom, might have saved him. But it was just the poetic gift that the
man was lamentably without. And so, freighted with too much erudition
and too little wisdom, Reger went aground.
Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg of Vienna is the great troubling presence of modern
music. His vast, sallow skull lowers over it like a sort of North Cape.
For with him, with the famous cruel five orchestral and nine piano
pieces, we seem to be entering the arctic zone of musical art. None of
the old beacons, none of the old stars, can guide us longer in these
frozen wastes. Strange, menacing forms surround us, and the light is
bleak and chill and faint. The characteristic compositions of Strawinsky
and Ornstein, too, have no tonality, lack every vestige of a pure chord,
and exhibit unanalyzable harmonies, and rhythms of a violent novelty, in
the most amazing conjunctions.
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