Question
I have a vague recollection of an article in the Sunday Times sometime in July of one of the last ten or so years which compared the decline of twelve-tone music (or maybe atonality or maybe modernism in general, but I think it was twelve-tone music) to the fall of the Soviet Union. I wonder if anybody remembers it and can possible cite its date and author.
Thanks
Actually, I found it. “Tonality Is Dear: Long Live Tonality” by Michael Beckerman. July 31, 1994. “…A similar process has been going on in American academic music departments in the last decade, as the ideology of Serialism has lost its straglehold. The parallel between Marxists and Serialists is more than superificial. Each group tended to argue with almost incontrovertible power that its view of the world represented the inevitable working out of a process mandated by history. People who realized this truth were considered intellectually and morally progressive, while those who tried to avoid it were slackers, reactionaries or just plain lunkheads. Like you know Who, capitalism and tonality were dead.”