The Chicago-based pianist and composer Easley Blackwood, son of the noted bridge player, died on January 22.
His works up to age 50 are in an atonal style, although listening to some of them tonight they seem more highly chromatic than truly based on tone-rows. Call them freely atonal, like late David Diamond.
But in the 1980s he would have a change of heart and began a sort of chameleon-like existence, writing works in the style of other composers, though without actually sounding like imitations or pastiche. Thus, his two clarinet sonatas sound like Reger, while his Fifth Symphony and Third String Quartet recall Sibelius. His Second Viola Sonata suggests Bartok, and his massive 40-minute Cello Sonata sounds for all the world like something written in Robert Schumann's day. His goal, he said, was to write something that Schubert might have written had he lived into the 1840s. Of all his works, it's the one that fits most comfortably into our remit, followed by the clarinet sonatas.
2022?...
Quote from: eschiss1 on Tuesday 31 January 2023, 05:052022?...
Oops! 2023, of course. That will require a moderator edit to fix.
No need to now :). I have a Cedille recording pairing Blackwood's First and Fifth Symphonies and the contrast is certainly very stark with the latter, as John writes, for me a much more palatable listen. It's still clearly a work of the 20th century but is tonal and the harmonic language and restless string writing certainly do recall Sibelius. Thanks for the Cello Sonata tip, John.
How many composers went down the cul-de-sac of serialism before selecting reverse to write music that audiences can actually relate to? After all, we remember a certain composer stating 'there is still plenty of good music to be written in C major'!
Schoenberg, for starters... (edit: if you mean "turn their back on 12-tone music with a big self-congratulatory flourish and went and never sinned again", no, but Schoenberg's late output has a number of tonal works in't.) (Edit 2: I'm looking at you, George Rochberg...)
Quite so.
Quote from: Alan Howe on Tuesday 31 January 2023, 12:23How many composers went down the cul-de-sac of serialism before selecting reverse to write music that audiences can actually relate to? After all, we remember a certain composer stating 'there is still plenty of good music to be written in C major'!
In the notes to the Cedille recording of the Cello Sonata, Blackwood made these very telling observations on the subject during a chat with James Ginsburg:
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James Ginsburg: Despite your history of composing radical atonal works, you now refer to Arnold Schoenberg as the Karl Marx of music. What do you mean by that?
Easley Blackwood: Like Marx, Schoenberg spun out an array of theories that have now been proven historically incorrect. Though not a Marxist, Schoenberg's ideas sprang from the same source as Marx's: Hegelian philosophy. Schoenberg saw the evolution of music as a combination of theses and syntheses, with each synthesis bringing music to a higher plateau. He believed there would be a liberation from the tyranny of tonality which would bring something akin to a musical utopia, although he doesn't actually use that word. He thought audiences and musicians would come to accept his new dissonant language if they listened to it enough and became familiar with it, and that his music would come to be played at least as often as the music it was intended to supersede. Eighty years after Schoenberg first enunciated these beliefs, it has not happened. This despite considerable efforts by many musicians, composers, and even the Rockefeller Foundation. There is a small body of established, purely non-tonal music which consists almost entirely of dramatic pieces depicting degradation, mayhem, the ravings of a madman, and people cast into grotesque or abnormal roles -- the limit of what atonal music portrays effectively. The number of first-class, large-scale, entirely non-tonal works that are abstractions can be counted on the fingers of one hand. So as with Marx, history has proven Schoenberg wrong.
James Ginsburg: Are you concerned that some may complain that your "conservative" Cello Sonata lacks "cultural relevance"?
Easley Blackwood: I think the people who believe that music must have cultural relevance are looking at a very narrow aspect of musical expression. What is the cultural relevance of Mozart's cheerful last piano sonata, written during a very turbulent time in Europe? The pieces Beethoven wrote in 1814 and 1815 don't reflect the upheavals of that Napoleonic era. Nor does music become more tranquil between Napoleon's defeat and the revolutions of the 1840's. This notion that music must be culturally relevant is really a post-WW2 phenomenon invented largely, I think, to justify the emerging body of dissonant atonal music. I can't tell you how many times I have heard the argument advanced that because we live in an ugly, decadent age we need ugly, decadent music. As you can see, I don't agree with that. Even in my most radical atonal works my goal was to create something attractive. And, just as with my reactionary Cello Sonata, those works express only musical ideas -- a perfectly legitimate objective for a composer as far as I'm concerned.
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It's important to note that Blackwood did not disown his earlier dissonant pieces -- he was happy to see them recorded along side his newer tonal pieces.
You can hear samples of the conservative sonatas for cello and clarinet, along with the similarly conservative 3rd Quartet at the Cedille website -- and the dissonant stuff, too. : )
The subject is not really in our remit but I believe Blackwood factually mistaken about the range of 12-tone music, especially since no two composers understood the idea the same way...
QuoteHe believed there would be a liberation from the tyranny of tonality
...by imposing (à la Boulez?) a different kind of tyranny? That way lay madness.
Given that Schoenberg never taught his students twelve-tone composition, afaik, unlikely.
(A lot of beliefs are attributed to people that they don't seem to have had, or about which one might say "... it's complicated". I've read a large selection of essays by Schoenberg and another book (and part of another) and can only remark that Blackwood's remarks at best apply to the composer at one point of his career- in his 50s, on the verge of solving a problem* and probably only in part.)
*Brief edit-- see next comment.
*Important edit: the thing about twelve-tone is that it came, for Schoenberg, out of a problem. Continuing to write tonal music wasn't for him, at the time, but just writing free atonal music produced only - for him - brief works - longer works only happening where a text was present to, as he put it later, help him in finding a source of (short and long-term) coherence. Tonality and common-practice - even stretched, as by Wagner and Reger - harmony - was a means to that end of coherence, but it, not tonality, was the goal. (And he never claimed that using a twelve-tone set magically achieved it, either. But it helped him try to find new means to obtain it. As he noted in at least one essay meant for teachers, a list could be prepared of things that aided and things that worked against coherence, however tonal a piece might otherwise be - like suddenly jumping register, or dropping an instrument and bringing it back -in- another register (without bringing some similar instrument back nearby), contrasting similar enough themes and dissimilar themes (e.g. in a rondo, if varying the rondo theme, not making one of the variations too similar to the contrasting refrain unwittingly), ...)
(As (the much-missed, imho) Professor Claudio Spies once pointed out in a class I took, Mendelssohn even at a very early age knew a number of these things- the orchestral arrangement of his 8th string symphony is careful to bring the winds back near where they were dropped after long rests, e.g., for continuity/coherence...)
QuoteGiven that Schoenberg never taught his students twelve-tone composition, afaik, unlikely.
He didn't have to. But it seems that Boulez came to the same sort of conclusion about where music
had to go. Now, that
is tyranny.
I'm not just thinking of Berg and Webern qua students; and agreed .
Schoenberg thought the glorious revolution would come of its own. Boulez and his disciples wanted to impose it by force.
But returning to Blackwood, his disillusion with atonalism is understandable.
And if one's looking for composers who went from 12-tone/serial music to more consonant practice, the late Einojuhani Rautavaara (whose 7th symphony, for example, is certainly no one's idea of a 19th-century work but is unlikely to be mistaken for Bruno Maderna either, and is undeniably, comparatively, much more tonal and consonant than his somewhat serial yet also aleatoric (an odd combination!!) 5th symphony was...) belongs in the list...
Quote from: Alan Howe on Tuesday 31 January 2023, 18:00QuoteGiven that Schoenberg never taught his students twelve-tone composition, afaik, unlikely.
He didn't have to. But it seems that Boulez came to the same sort of conclusion about where music had to go. Now, that is tyranny.
But not uncommon in the French intellectual
milieu of the time, where such ideological machismo seemed to be
de rigueur for a while.
Well, so much for the Second Viennese School and French Existentialism! Honh, Honh! Those intellectuals, no?!
Coming back to Easley Blackwood, I simply would recommend those who have not heard his later tonal music to give it a try. And if perchance you like the Second Viennese School (full disclosure: I do) then you won't be harmed by the rest of it either.
The Cello Sonata is a good place to start, as is the disc of piano works "Blackwood Plays Blackwood", since neither contains anything atonal.
What do people think of his 5th symphony (meant to sound somewhat like Sibelius if he became interested in some of the impressionism of Casella or Szymanowski)? I think I heard the premiere on the radio around 1991, and I see that there's been a recording on Cedille...
Quote from: eschiss1 on Friday 03 February 2023, 22:40What do people think of his 5th symphony (meant to sound somewhat like Sibelius if he became interested in some of the impressionism of Casella or Szymanowski)? I think I heard the premiere on the radio around 1991, and I see that there's been a recording on Cedille...
Mark mentioned liking it earlier in this thread. I enjoy it too.
The Fifth is clearly a 20th century symphony, but it's really quite approachable for those of us with 19th century sensibilities. It's tonal, its harmonic language becomes less of its time (1990) as the three movements progress, so that the long central slow movement is a thoroughly romantic outpouring and the perky finale too could have been written at the end of the 1800s. There are memorable melodies and the often busy string writing does indeed remind one of Sibelius, although I wouldn't say that the work "sounds like" Sibelius at all. That said, if you're looking for Blackwood in 100% 19th century vein then follow up on John's recommendations of the Cello Sonata and the piano music, as I did (thanks again, John). The Sonata is a big 40 minute piece which could have been composed in the 1850s whilst the piano music (the CD includes his Piano Sonata) is similarly approachable. One wouldn't guess that this was music composed in the 1980s and 90s.
I've ordered his extraordinarily romantic-sounding Cello Sonata. What a stylistic journey he went on over the course of his life! Thanks for all the pointers to his best music.
Quote from: Alan Howe on Saturday 04 February 2023, 13:05I've ordered his extraordinarily romantic-sounding Cello Sonata. What a stylistic journey he went on over the course of his life! Thanks for all the pointers to his best music.
I think you will like his clarinet sonatas, too. Or more accurately, clarinet sonata and a clarinet sonatina. These are also in a very much in a 19th century idiom. They are coupled with the Reger Third Sonata, which most of us know. The Reger is the most modern sounding of the three, to give you an idea of the conservative idiom of the Blackwood sonatas.
I just listened again to the Fifth Symphony and agree very much with Mark's assessment, except that I do hear more Sibelius in this work than Mark does. Not that you would mistake it for Sibelius, as Mark points out, but it does sound like the work, say, of one of Sibelius's colleagues, though one with a slightly more modern bent. There are many passages, both in orchestration and tonal color, that made me think of Sibelius's Fourth Symphony, which I've always felt was the most forward-looking of the seven, although it was in a direction that Sibelius backed away from in his subsequent works. Anyway, it was the perfect accompaniment to the ritual of brewing coffee on this very cold morning: 6 below zero Fahrenheit.
Blackwood himself comments on this in another excerpt of that interview with James Ginsberg:
JG: But why write in obviously older idioms? Why not take advantage of all the advances in tonal musical vocabulary?
EB: I don't see that that is necessarily advantageous. The entire body of altered chords that make up the harmonic vocabulary of tonal music had been discovered by 1905, and I don't think there is anything left to be unearthed. So a composer writing tonally today is consciously or unconsciously choosing a harmonic style whose vocabulary has been with us for nearly a century. Having taught traditional harmony since 1958, I feel at home in a wide variety of styles and really cannot write without thinking about the idiom in which I am working. Moreover, I am fascinated by the idea of recreating styles, like the one I imagine Schubert would have discovered had he lived until 1845. Of course, I think it would be presumptuous to compose in an idiom where there already exists a large number of successful works. For example, to write a string quartet in the style Beethoven was using around 1800 would really be gilding the lily.
Having chosen a style, my own muse then takes over and the work is very much my own. For example, I conceived of my Fifth Symphony [being premiered by the Chicago Symphony in May 1992] — which, incidentally, does use the full range of the tonal harmonic vocabulary and even has some non-tonal passages — as the kind of piece Sibelius would have written in 1915 if had he experimented a bit with the kind of modernism that was prevalent in Europe at that time (he never did). Having recently listened to some of Sibelius's major works, I would have to say that as an imitation of Sibelius my Symphony is not a success. But that is not how it should be judged. The work should be evaluated on its own merits as a new composition written in a carefully chosen style. I just happen to be more interested in working entirely within set idioms than creating Stravinskiesque reflections on older styles.
That's really fascinating and enlightening - thanks, John.
It's worth mentioning his interest in the musical, harmonic, etc. properties of microtonal/other-subdivision scales, to which he applied a lot of time and which, unlike the other music of his we've discussed, was - especially in the form in which he approached it (not just bending tones of a 12-note scale like Haba) - was probably almost unique to him (maybe/just about/at first.)
Thanks, Eric. He was obviously a fascinating and independent personality. By the way, his Third String Quartet is also composed in a thoroughly 19th century idiom - not so the very much earlier first two, however.