![]() The equivalent in literature would be the alienating, “existential” dramas of Jean-Paul Sartre or the Verfremdungstheater of Berthold Brecht, which again aimed at pulling up any traditional orientation-to morality, to the classical canons of beauty, to ordinariness-from its roots. Non-melodic, rhythmically jagged music would subvert the “bourgeois complacency,” as radicals always call it, which refused to come to terms, as the accusers saw it, with the guilt and wretchedness of Western civilization. The musical vocabulary of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), Anton Webern (1883–1945), and to a lesser extent Alban Berg (1885–1935) seemed to Adorno to do this best, so it became a mandatory mode of expression to be taught to upwardly mobile young composers in the schools of music. ![]() Influential figures like Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno (1903–1969) persuaded large numbers among the European and North American intelligentsia that, in the aftermath of the war, ennoblement and aspiration were out, and the only legitimate object worth representing in music was the horror of humanity recoiling from its own bloody deeds. The term “musically correct”-my coinage, not Simmons’-refers to the strange, dogmatic predominance of the serial method of atonal composition in academic departments of composition and of musicology in the decades after World War Two it also refers to the doctrinally motivated banishment of music not conforming to the prescriptive model. In serial music, which arose somewhat spuriously in an intellectual (read elite) reaction against the original Austro-German Romanticism, which had supposedly exhausted itself, tonality stands entirely abolished. Now the French and Slavs tend to observe a less rigorous musical formula, but they too understand that musical catharsis depends on an awareness of harmonic departure and return. When the composer reasserts the home key in the coda, he creates the equivalent in music of the catharsis in Athenian tragedy. The development then moves farther and farther away from the “home key,” creating dramatic tension that every sensitive listener feels, as one says, in his gut. Think of the way in which the opening paragraphs, so to speak, of a Beethoven sonata-allegro movement draw the audience into acceptance of the dominant chord. The formula achieves its effect by three stages: familiarization, alienation, and return to the familiar. According to the conventions of the Austro-German tradition, a sonata movement is supposed to end in the same key with which it began, as in a Haydn or a Beethoven symphony. ![]() Neo-Romanticism (let us remove the quotation marks) relies on the tonal organization of large-scale musical structures, using harmonic modulation for dramaturgic rather than for purely constructive or formal purposes. Is it a conspiracy that so much fine music should have retreated beyond the horizon of even the musically educated? It is something like a conspiracy. Avant-garde music never established itself with the music-loving public and has mostly disappeared from concert schedules, but the accessibly contemporary scores that avant-garde music initially displaced have not returned to their previous status in season programming. ![]() It is an important element of Simmons’ presentation that the composers he takes as exemplars of the genre, although popular in their era, are today almost unknown to concert audiences or to the casual purchaser of classical music recordings. The topic of “Neo-Romanticism” and its currency thus resonates with the larger issue of elite control over the common cultural vocabulary in the latter half of the Twentieth and again in the first decade of our own Twenty-First Century. Simmons insists on the genuineness of “Neo-Romanticism” because “Neo-Romantic” music not only aims at a direct affective connection with a non-specialist audience, but, in a remarkably consistent way, achieves such a connection when given the chance. Under a title rich in allusion Voices in the Wilderness asserts that the “Neo-Romantic” musical aesthetic constitutes the genuine core of significant Twentieth-Century American composition and that American composers working in that line do so rather more in continuity with the French and Slavic, than with the Austro-German, strand of Nineteenth Century music. In this persuasively argued and passionately committed book, musicologist Walter Simmons makes his discussion of six American composers the occasion for rebutting a full half-century of the musically correct denigration of a compositional style-or school or tradition-whose main purpose was and is direct emotional communication with the audience. Voices in the Wilderness: Six American Neo-Romantic Composers ![]()
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