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Education: Rotterdam Conservatory, Cambridge University // Activities: composition, writing

Monday 23 April 2018

Schönberg still alive

On the website of 'Slipped Disc' (Norman Lebrecht) again a fiery discussion was provoked by Norman's invocation of Schönberg's music. It shows that postwar ideological nonsense has gradually dripped-down through music life to compensate for exploring musical reality, like, for instance, the idea that what 'drove' music history was 'the line' Mahler - Schönberg - Webern into post-1945 modernism, as if the richness of early 20C music simply did not exist: Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Scriabine, Prokofiev, Szymanowski, Hindemith, the late Strauss, Poulenc, etc. - music which has entered the regular repertoire, in contrast with Webern and the later Schönberg.




Also interesting to see how famous performers are referred to with their entirely unthinking conventional repeating of nonsense, like Simon Rattle, thereby legitimizing a serious distortion of what really has been written.

It comes down to misconceptions about 'nature', a typical Western problem, where rational thought is considered as the only way to connect with reality - desastrous in the arts and especially in music.

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