Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Evil Empire
Since I was in high school I've been encountering people talking about the evil twelve-tone thing and it's awful hegemony. The clamor seems to get louder in direct proportion to the waning prestige and power of the twelve-toning set. I'm beginning to think lately that it involves people having some early traumatic experience, like toilet training.
Nobody has mentioned that for a long time during the 50's and into the 60's, twelve-tone, or at least non tonal composers were generally thought to be heterosexual, while the people (sissies?) who wrote tonal music (Copland, Thomson, Cowell, Bowles, Bernstein, Blitzstein, Rorem, Britten, Henze, Tippett, Poulenc) were gay. (Shostakovich wrote tonal music--maybe--but he was Russian, so didn't count) There's a story of Virgil meeting Ben Weber (famous down-town twelve-tone composer and gay man) and saying, "Which is it? Do you write twelve-tone music or are you queer? You can't be both." (or something like that.) I don't exactly remember when that dissappeared as an issue.
One question regarding Kyle Gann's recent posting, though:
Does anybody seriously think that Schoenberg is a less good composer than Henry Cowell? Or even equally good?
posted by Rodney Lister
9:21 AM
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