Geez, a few weeks on the road and I miss on all the fun around here!

Anyhow, after reading through the "what is art" stuff over in the "unmusical age" thread, I was reminded of a few links that someone sent to me recently. I thought I'd pass them on for others here who might be interested. One of them covers Schoenberg's music. FWIW, I've liked Schoenberg's music since discovering it as a teenager. I didn't get to start working on it until music school (I couldn't convince a teacher before then that it was worth spending time on). The other link is to something on Janacek' music, one of my top 10 20th century composers, and the last is to an article on Stockhausen/electronic music.

Schoenberg - link: http://www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Calendar-0!ArticleDetail-45475,00.html

"Schoenberg's time may finally have come. His music has an enormous amount to say to us. When it takes on extramusical themes, they are the big ones—love, madness, murder, good and evil, God, our ties with the past and quest for the modern. When it doesn't deal with such themes, it is abstract music pure as Bach and as emotionally expressive as any ever written."

Janacek - link: http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=822029

"He was inspired less by abstract musical systems than by human events, personal and political. Few composers have chosen a demonstration as a subject for a piano work, but Janacek's “Sonate, 1-X-1905” was prompted by a street protest in his hometown of Brno, in which Austrian troops killed a worker calling for the establishment of a Czech university. "

Stockhausen - link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/0,3605,564112,00.html

The shop is playing boring stuff - Mozart, Beethoven, Bach. You know, tunes. The sales staff say they do have more Stockhausen and whip out a stacked box from under the counter. Why do they keep them here? Two reasons, they say. First, they don't have that many requests for them. Second, when they do put him on show, he tends to get nicked.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by netizen:
[QB] FWIW, I've liked Schoenberg's music since discovering it as a teenager. I didn't get to start working on it until music school (I couldn't convince a teacher before then that it was worth spending time on). The other link is to something on Janacek' music, one of my top 10 20th century composers, and the last is to an article on Stockhausen/electronic music.

I agree several thousand percent! I can understand why Schoenberg's music is not widely played, since -- let us be honest -- it really does put most people off (although, although, come to think of it, their are parts of "Moses e Aaron" that sound almost like Puccini). But why Janacek is so little known is beyond me.

FWIW, several years ago my wife and I saw a performance of Jenufa at the SF Opera, with two extraordinary singers in the two main roles -- Gabriela Benackova and Leone Rysanek. This is very, very heavy stuff. People in the audience were so moved that they wept unashamedly.

Finally, re Stockhausen: when I was a college boy Stockhausen gave a lecture at our college. Talk about German! Very stiff, very proper in manner, and the substance of what said was so weirdly conceptualized as to be incomprehensible.