Slightly OT - "Who Killed Classical Music?"

[Penny]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b03q6f00/

I hope the above link works - I wondered whether members of this forum might be interested in this half-hour radio programme from BBC Radio 4 (available until 1 February), in which Gabriel Prokofiev discusses twentieth-century and more recent developments in “classical” music.  Mahler is not mentioned directly, but there was a thought-provoking discussion about Boulez and the Darmstadt School and their distaste for Late Romantic music.  What I can’t quite get my head round is this – Boulez is a renowned conductor of Mahler, and wasn’t Mahler a Late Romantic?   Perhaps someone could enlighten me?

[barry guerrero]

Penny,

I haven't listened to this yet - and I will - but I would just chalk it up to one of those ironic contradictions that life is full of. Who would ever figure Dennis Rodman and Kim Whatever-his-name-is from North Korea, as being big buddy-buddies. It's a 'go figure' situation. Boulez explains that he simply wasn't exposed to Mahler in France. We have to keep in mind that Mahler was still the providence of 'experts' and enthusiasts in those times. He simply wasn't standard rep'. His music was a huge challenge for most orchestras in the '40s and '50s, and his music would still be hugely challenging today, if it weren't for the fact that prospective orchestral players have to know ALL of their Mahler excerpts before they ever take an audition.

As for Darmstadt or Donaueschingen music, what's there to say? The vast majority of concert goers simply don't want to hear it. I actually think that Boulez's best works will probably survive. They'll never become popular, but there will always be enthusiasts who'll drag them out from time to time. Then again, there were probably plenty of people who said just that about Mahler's music.

Anyway, I'll give this a listen soon. Thanks for posting it.

[Penny]

Thank you Barry - that's interesting.  I suppose the Mahler boom, certainly in Britain, happened after the beginnings of Darmstadt in the late 40's to early 50's, so Pierre Boulez might have caught up with Mahler at a relatively late stage.

The other thing I remembered afterwards is that Leonard Bernstein said something about Mahler "straddling" the late 19th to early 20th centuries, so perhaps (if it's possible to categorise him at all) he could be described as late romantic to early modern.

[barry guerrero]

I would say that Mahler is a thoroughly modern composer who used a harmonic language that stretches from mid-Romantic to late romantic. The melodies are often times folk like, as we all know. Of course, there's a fairly big progression from his early works to his late works though.

By the way, Boulez conducted quite a bit of Mahler with the BBC S.O. back in the early '70s. A lot of that came out on Italian 'pirate' labels. And a lot of it was quite good too - more extreme than his relatively 'streamlined' performances for DG.

And by the way #2, I did listen to the attachment and found it pretty darn interesting. I had never considered the idea that the Darmstadt people were trying to break from anything and everything that could be consider 'old school', pre-war European music for largely political reasons. Interesting.

p.s. - a final thought: given the 'spatial' elements in some works of both Mahler and Boulez, it's a bit surprising that Boulez has never taken an interest in the music of Charles Ives. It seems to me that Ives was trying to do much the same sort of thing that Mahler was - connecting the past with the present and future - only in a more modern vernacular.