Chamber Music +

As Europe approached the twentieth century mark, the harmonic and rhythmic fabric of European music – woven during the 300 years that we call the 'common practice period' – was beginning to unravel. American musicologist Charles Seeger put it this way: Since sometime before the First World War there has been a general realization among both conservatives and radicals that the great romantic tradition of nineteenth-century Europe was in difficulties. It had become encrusted with so many bypaths that some sort of revision seemed inevitable, either to set it upon its feet again or to form from its honored remains a new style. ... Certainly a revolution began, but a gradual one – perhaps a series of small revolutions: first Satie, Debussy, Strauss; second Scriabin, Schönberg, and Stravinsky; then the deluge. In the midst of nascent revolutions in music, and before the deluge, there was just enough time left for one more genuine romantic voice. Antonín Dvořák was cert...

Mountains in central Hokkaido Composer Toru Takemitsu begins his essay “Nature and Music”  [i] with these words: This summer [1962], walking through the fields of Hokkaido, I could not help thinking that my own thoughts have come to resemble the sidewalks of a city: rigid and calculated. This is a fascinating sentence. Like a “good theme” in music, [ii]  it holds a potential composition like a seed holds a potential plant. It’s tempting to take the first half of the sentence, This summer [1962], walking through the fields of Hokkaido, I could not help thinking ..., as colorful but superfluous – a kind of grace note attached to the  real  theme expressed in the rather gray analogy, ... my own thoughts have come to resemble the sidewalks of a city: rigid and calculated. But the seemingly superfluous “information” in the antecedent – season and location – actually offers a perspective helpful in understanding Takemitsu’s  genius...