• Home
  • About
    • What’s going on here
    • Kyle Gann
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

More Classical Heresies

Apropos of nothing, and only because I’ve had a virtual 17-year hiatus in writing about classical music (limited as I’ve been to postclassical music at the Voice and living composers in Chamber Music and the Times), here are some more of my classical music views considered heretical in my academic milieu:

– Greatest piano work between Schubert and Ives: Liszt’s Annees de Pelerinage, three hours’ worth of remarkably sustained inspiration, with innovations that had an obvious impact on Debussy and thus helped jump-start the 20th century. In fact, given the size of the work and its consistently superb quality, one could make an argument for it as the greatest piano monument since Bach’s W.T.C., equalled in ambition only by works patently less perfect like Sorabji’s Opus Clavicembalisticum – and yet only a handful of pianists play more than a “Sonetto del Petrarca” or two from it. Similarly, Liszt’s Christus is the 19th century’s greatest oratorio, an opinion in which I am backed up by no less than the great musicologist Karl Dahlhaus, whose revisionist views of the 19th century have bracingly clarified our image of that era. And yet, a couple of years ago at a conference I told an ambitious ivy-league musicologist that I was teaching a Franz Liszt course, and from the look of disdain with which she recoiled from the news, you would have thought I had said Lawrence Welk.

– Greatest romantic piano concerto: that of Ferruccio Busoni, 1905.

– We’re supposed to find Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto far superior to his First, and I don’t. Brahms wrote some of his best large works in his youth (the Horn Trio, for instance), and the First Concerto’s opening movement, with its slow chromatic slide in the basses from D down to A, and its surprise recap of the theme a tritone away from where we’ve been led to expect, is one of the 19th century’s most vivid examples of large-scale tonal structure made audible and expressive. I hear nothing nearly so powerful in the Second Concerto.

– As a grad student, I took as my project for a rhythmic analysis class the Adagio of the Bruckner Seventh Symphony. My classmates were disdainful, but I found a convincing example of Bruckner’s large-scale rhythmic displacement masterfully supporting the overall harmonic resolution. To this day, academia remains condescending to Bruckner, not generally acknowledging him, as I do, as at least an equal symphonist to Brahms and certainly above Mendelssohn and Schumann. One of those cases in which the critics and record collectors diverge from the musicologists, and I side with the critics. Also the minimalists – a surpising love of Bruckner is found among Downtown composers like Glenn Branca.

– Mozart is overrated. Actually, despite the scorn Woody Allen heaps on the idea in Manhattan, this is a less rare opinion than is often admitted. Quite a few composers I know think that Mozart’s perfection is greatly overstated. That’s not to deny that there are quite a number of perfect pieces, like the late piano concerti. But so many passages in his music (as Charles Rosen mentions) can be transferred from one piece to another with no change in meaning, like interchangeable musical bricks, a shortcoming that modern composers don’t easily forgive. In my sonata class I analyze Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven alongside tremendously underrated composers like Clementi, Dussek, and Hummel, and side by side, Mozart’s hastily-composed piano sonatas don’t always fare well next to the lyric perfection of late Clementi or the daring innovations of Dussek.

I know, I know, this is classical music, not postclassical – but I’m getting it out of my system. And if the postclassical era is going to draw on the classical, it will need to reinterpret it to suit its own needs, as well.

What’s going on here

So classical music is dead, they say. Well, well. This blog will set out to consider that dubious factoid with equanimity, if not downright enthusiasm [More]

Kyle Gann's Home Page More than you ever wanted to know about me at www.kylegann.com

PostClassic Radio The radio station that goes with the blog, all postclassical music, all the time; see the playlist at kylegann.com.

Recent archives for this blog

Archives

Sites to See

American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)

Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects

Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station

New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking

The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross

William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer

Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation

Eve Beglarian's Home Page- great Downtown composer

David Doty's Just Intonation site

Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site

The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer

Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license