Alex Ross has a great piece on the late composer Morton Feldman (1926-1987) in the June 19 New Yorker:
[Feldman] loved to challenge students’ assumptions about what ideas were au courant, about which composers were radical and which were conservative. He proclaimed, for example, a love for Sibelius, who had long been derided in progressive circles as a retrograde Romantic. When I visited the small archive of Feldman papers at SUNY Buffalo, I came across an exam paper in which the composer asked his students to analyze Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony alongside Webern’s Concerto Opus 24. How the would-be revolutionaries of the day must have scratched their heads over that!
I’m no would-be revolutionary, and I’m not an expert on classical music, but I’m scratching my head as well, and I must say Feldman’s essay question makes for wonderful listening. The Fifth of Sibelius (1914-19), for full orchestra, is half an hour long; the Webern Concerto (1931-34), for nine instruments, is just under seven minutes. Both consist of three movements, the first being the longest. My references are the London Symphony Orchestra’s Sibelius recording of 2004, Sir Colin Davis conducting; and the 2005 Webern collection on Naxos, Robert Craft conducting.
The harmonic language is vastly different: Sibelius, indeed, comes out of Romanticism, Webern out of serialism, the latter being far more severe and strange. Loosely speaking, there is a moderate movement, a slow movement and a fast finale. In the Sibelius there is a preponderance of 3/4 meter, first emerging in the hidden scherzo of the first movement. The third and final movement, Allegro molto, ends with “a series of sledgehammer chords punctuated by long silences… then a brusque two-note cadence brings the Symphony to an abrupt close” (from Stephen Johnson’s liner notes). In the Webern, the rhythms are far more disguised, but there is a distinctly similar ending—not chords and silences, per se, but a puzzling staccato sequence leading to a final clipped shout, closing off further discussion.
Feldman, in juxtaposing these two pieces, reminds us that music is music—an attitude shared by some of today’s most inspired jazz musicians. While researching a story for Jazz Times on artist-run education, I had the pleasure of speaking with the bassist J. A. Granelli, co-director of the School for Improvisational Music in Brooklyn. The school’s mission? To teach improvisation “beyond stylistic restrictions.” Like Morton Feldman, Granelli and co. know that in high-level music, “style” doesn’t explain very much.
Webern, by the way, had a really freaky death. From Robert Craft’s liner notes:
When the U.S. Army occupied the region [Austria], during the summer of 1945, a detachment was assigned to curtail black-marketing activities in Mittersill between the people and its own forces. On 15th September, 1945, after Webern had dined at the home of his daughter, Christine Mattel, he stepped outside to smoke what chould only have been a contraband cigar provided by her husband, Bruno Mattel, whom the Americans arrested on charges of illicit trafficking in food. Apparently not understanding a “hands-up” order by an American soldier posted outside the building, Webern lighted a match, whereupon the guard shot him three times in the chest and abdomen. But several contradictory versions of this unwitnessed brutality have been published. A Gregorian Requiem Mass was held in Mittersill’s small church, and five persons followed the coffin to the cemetery. […]
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