🧵 3/3

Babbitt claims that the gulf between "contemporary serious music" and the sensibilities of what one might term the common listener

>> is a result of a half-century of revolution in musical thought, a
revolution whose nature and consequences can be compared only with, and in many respects are
closely analogous to, those of the mid-nineteenth-century evolution in theoretical physics .<<

The "revolution" mentioned by Babbitt is the break with the preceding tradition of tonality led by Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg.

That last composer crops up in an anecdote related in the NY Times article:

>>. I once asked a conductor what contemporary music he was interested in. He mentioned a piece by Alban Berg, who died in 1935.<<

The author comments:

>> Let’s try to at least reserve the word “contemporary” for music of this century.<<

Although the conductor's failure to "keep up" is amusing, his classification of Berg as "contemporary" does obliquely make the same point that Babbitt asserted with his talk of a "revolution" in music. Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School in general inaugurated a musical modernism with that the larger listening public still finds it difficult to come to terms with.

Why this difficulty persists constitutes an important and fascinating question, one to which I do not know the answer.

#Modernism #Schoenberg #SecondVienneseSchool #20thCenturyMusic