Notebook per
Roger Scruton sull'avanguardia
Citation (APA): riccardo-mariani@libero.it. (2017). Roger Scruton sull'avanguardia [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Parte introduttiva
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 3
THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE SIR ROGER SCRUTON
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 12
In 1860 Wagner published a now famous pamphlet entitled The Music of the Future– Zukunftmusik. In it he expressed his view that it was not enough for music to be merely contemporary– zeitgenössisch; it had to be ahead of itself, summoning from the future the forms that already lay there in embryo.
Nota - Posizione 14
x VISIONE DI WAGNER
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 16
We should not forget, however, the wider context of Wagner’s argument. The obsession with the future comes from Ludwig Feuerbach, and ultimately from Hegel’s philosophy of history, which represents human events as motivated by the always-advancing logic of the dialectic. For Hegel history has a direction,
Nota - Posizione 17
x FUTURO E HEGEL
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 19
Feuerbach
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 19
the belief in progress,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 20
The future, Feuerbach believed, is not merely a development of the past; it is better than the past.
Nota - Posizione 21
x SEMPRE MEGLIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 22
the belief survives.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 23
We spontaneously incline to the view that each artistic form and style must be superseded as soon as it appears, and that the true values of art require constant vigilance against the diseases of nostalgia and pastiche.
Nota - Posizione 24
x PROGRESSISMO E FUTURISMO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 24
each claims originality, authenticity,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 25
each tries to avoid repeating
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 27
Wagner’s emphasis on the future of music was influenced by the Hegelian theory of history and Feuerbach’s use of it. But it was also rooted in a real sense of tradition and what tradition means.
Nota - Posizione 29
x RUOLO DELLA TRADIZIONE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 29
grew organically from the flow of Western music,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 30
affirmed the basic chord-grammar of diatonic tonality.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 30
Wagner was aware of this, and indeed dramatized the predicament of the modern composer in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which is his own striking reflection on ‘tradition and the individual talent.’
Nota - Posizione 32
xx DOVE W AFFERMA IL SUO LEGAME
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 35
This is nothing like the radical avant-garde departures
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 36
Right up until Schoenberg’s experiments with serialism, musical innovation in the realm of ‘classical’ music proceeded in Wagner’s way.
Nota - Posizione 37
x S SULLA LINEA DI W
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 37
new rhythms and time-signatures were adopted, and with Stravinsky and Bartók organisation was inspired more by dance than by the classical forms.
Nota - Posizione 38
x STR E BART
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 38
Debussy’s
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 39
Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 42
None of that involved any rejection of the classical tradition:
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 44
Both the continuous development of the romantic symphony in Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, and Shostakovich, and the incorporation of modernist devices into the tonal language, lay within the scope of the existing language: these were developments that issued naturally from the pattern of musical discovery that has characterised Western classical music from the Renaissance.
Nota - Posizione 46
x DUE TRADIZIONI OSSEWUIOSE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 48
A radical break seems to have occurred,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 49
modern works of music tend to be self-consciously part of an avant-garde, never content to belong to the tradition but always overtly and ostentatiously defying it;
Nota - Posizione 50
x PRIMA CONSEGUENZA: SFIDA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 50
these works seem to be melodically impoverished, and even without melody entirely, relying on sound effects and acoustical experiments to fill the void where melody should be.
Nota - Posizione 51
x SECONDA CONSEGUENZA MENO MELODIA PIÙ EFFETTI SPECIALI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 52
Nathan Davies used live filtering to give the effect of resonators, extracting tones from white noise, and turning those tones towards music. The effect was undeniably striking, at times entrancing:
Nota - Posizione 54
x UN ESEMPIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 55
outside the reach of our musical affections.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 55
It is only the loved and repeated repertoire that will ensure the survival of music,
Nota - Posizione 56
DURARE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 56
Music exists in the ear of the listener, not on the page of the score, nor in the world of pure sound effects.
Nota - Posizione 57
x TESI: AFFETTO E NON EFFETTI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 59
a new kind of music has emerged which is less music than a reflection upon music, or perhaps even a reflection on the lack of music,
Nota - Posizione 60
x NON PIÙ MUSICA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 60
THE FIRST DEVELOPMENT
Nota - Posizione 60
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 61
the radical attack on tonality by Theodor Adorno and his immediate followers. Although Adorno linked his argument to his advocacy of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone serialism, the force of the argument is largely negative.
Nota - Posizione 62
x PRIMO RESPONSABILE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 65
Adorno’s critique of tonality was part of a systematic theory of the death of bourgeois culture. Tonality had to die because the bourgeois order had to die.
Nota - Posizione 65
x CRITICA ALL ORDINE BORGHESE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 66
the desire nevertheless to cling to tonality, in the manner of Sibelius or Copland, even in the manner of the neo-classical Stravinsky, is bound to lead, Adorno thought, to empty clichés or sterile kitsch.
Nota - Posizione 67
x TONALITÀ UGUALE CLICHÈ
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 73
Thomas Mann wrote a great novel about this, Doktor Faustus, meditating on the fate of Germany in the last century. Mann takes the tradition of tonal music as both a significant part of our civilisation, and a symbol of its ultimate meaning.
Nota - Posizione 74
x MANN E ADORNO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 79
SECOND DEVELOPMENT
Nota - Posizione 79
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 80
the invention of serialism. I call this an invention, rather than a discovery, in order to record the wholly a priori nature of the serial system.
Nota - Posizione 81
x SERIALISMO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 84
serial organisation was an invention– a set of a priori rules laid down by Schoenberg and adapted and varied by his successors. These rules were to provide a non-tonal grammar for music,
Nota - Posizione 85
x INVENZIONE NN SCOPERTA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 92
Serialism asks us to hear in another way, with the brain rather than the ear in charge.
Nota - Posizione 93
x CERVELLO E NN CUORE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 95
In a great serial composition, such as the Berg Violin Concerto, we hear harmonies, melodies, sequences, and rhythmical regularities, just as in the great works of the tonal tradition, and we do so because we are hearing against the serial order.
Nota - Posizione 96
x CAPOLAVORI SERIALI CONTRO LA SERIE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 97
THIRD DEVELOPMENT,
Nota - Posizione 97
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 98
the move towards total serialisation.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 98
Composers decided to serialise time values, unpitched sounds, and timbres, hoping thereby to exert total control over everything.
Nota - Posizione 99
x LA MACCHINA MODERNISTA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 101
Randomisation had the same effect as serialisation, which was to deprive musical elements of their intrinsic ways of relating to each other.
Nota - Posizione 102
x CASUALITÀ E IPERORDINE ASTRATYO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 114
The effect of such innovations was to replace the experience of music by the concept of music.
Nota - Posizione 115
x CONCETTO E ESPERIENZA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 116
Stockhausen’s Gruppen:
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 120
The score is not a notation of musically organized sounds, but a mathematical proof, from which the sounds can be deduced as theorems.
Nota - Posizione 120
x GRUPPEN
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 121
The eclipse of art by the concept of art occurred at around the same time in the visual arts, and for a while the game was amusing and intriguing.
Nota - Posizione 122
x PITTURA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 125
FOURTH DEVELOPMENT,
Nota - Posizione 125
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 126
the replacement of tones by sounds, and musical by acoustical hearing.
Nota - Posizione 126
x QUARTO ELEMENTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 126
Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer and their immediate successors awoke composers and audiences to the many new sounds, some of them produced electronically, that could enter the space of music without destroying its intrinsic order.
Nota - Posizione 128
x PREDECESSORI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 130
Sounds are objects in the physical world, albeit objects of a special kind whose nature and identity is bound up with the way they are perceived. Tones are what we hear in sounds when we hear the sounds as music.
Nota - Posizione 131
x TONI E SUONI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 132
They exemplify a special kind of organisation
Nota - Posizione 133
x TONO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 136
Music goes up and down, it leads and follows; it is dense, translucent, heavy, light; it encounters obstacles and crashes through them, and sometimes it comes to an end which is the end of everything. Those metaphors, and the order derived from them, are shared by all musical people. The order that we hear is an order that we– the musical public– hear, when we hear these sounds as music.
Nota - Posizione 138
x L ORDINE DEL DISCORSO MUSICALE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 145
Of course there are sound effects too: sounds from the real world intrude into music, like the unpitched sounds of the percussion section, or the recorded bird-song that intrudes into Respighi’s Pines of Rome. But when we hear these sounds as part of the music they change character.
Nota - Posizione 147
x EFFETTI IN MUSICA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 151
The intrusion of acoustical ways of thinking into the practice and teaching of music is something we owe to Boulez and Stockhausen, and to the educational practises that they established.
Nota - Posizione 152
x INSEGNAMENTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 153
Momente,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 154
As Stockhausen himself says, this work has no real beginning and no end: like all his works it starts without beginning and finishes without ending.
Nota - Posizione 155
x SENZA CAPO NE CODA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 156
The same is true of Boulez’s Pli selon pli, in which the exotic instrumentation and serial organisation do not conceal the fact that no moment in this work has any intrinsic connection to the moment that comes next.
Nota - Posizione 158
x ALTRO ESEMPIO DI DISCONNESSIONE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 159
Music (music of our classical tradition included) has until now consisted of events that grow organically from each other, over a repeated measure and according to recognizable harmonic sequences.
Nota - Posizione 160
x LA MUSICA FINORA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 168
ALL THOSE FOUR DEVELOPMENTS
Nota - Posizione 168
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 171
If avant-garde music is ever to step down from the world of concepts into the world of tones, then it will be because the audience exists in whose ears this transition can occur. Take away the audience and you take away the concrete reality of music as an art. You turn music into an arcane exercise in the acoustical laboratory, in which groups of patient instrumentalists pump out sounds according to formulae which mean nothing, since meaning lies in the ears that have fled from the scene.
Nota - Posizione 173
x IL RUOLO DEL PUBBLICO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 176
Adorno may have been right that the old grammar was exhausted,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 179
We all know Schoenberg’s remark, that there is plenty of music still to be written in C major. But where is that music?
Nota - Posizione 180
x IN DO MAGIORE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 182
One is the insistent presence of easy music;
Nota - Posizione 182
x PRIMA DIFFICOLTÀ X UN RITORNO ALLA TRADIZIONE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 183
By easy music I mean the ubiquitous products of pop and rock, which influence the ears and the attention-span of young people long before they can be captured by a teacher.
Nota - Posizione 184
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 185
To offer serious music to such an audience you must also attract their attention. And this cannot be done without rhythms that connect to their own bodily perceptions. Serious composers must work on the rhythms of everyday life. Bach addressed listeners whose ears had been shaped by allemandes, gigues, and sarabands
Nota - Posizione 186
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 193
Adams lift the ostinato four in a bar of the Rock group into an orchestral empyrean, where the flat-footed dance gives way to a gravitationless rhythm that moves and develops with the harmony. Adams uses the tonal language, not to make the kind of profound statement of a Beethoven or a Bruckner, but nevertheless to lift the young ear out of its groove and to make it listen. There is a lesson to be taken from this, which is that music is tested in the ear of the listener and not in the laboratory, and the ear of the listener is plastic, moulded both by the surrounding culture and by the everyday sounds of life as it is now.
Nota - Posizione 197
x LA LEZIONE DI ADAMS
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 202
the dictatorship of the difficult.
Nota - Posizione 202
ALTRO OSTACOLO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 202
Bureaucrats charged with giving support to the arts are, today, frightened of being accused of being reactionary. I suspect that everyone in this room is frightened of being accused of being reactionary.
Nota - Posizione 203
x SUSSIDI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 203
The history of the French salons in the 19th century, and of the early reactions to musical and literary modernism, has made people aware of how easy it is to miss the true creative product,
Nota - Posizione 205
x ES DEI DANNI DEL REAZ.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 208
In a book published in 1995: Requiem pour une avant-garde, Benoît Duteurtre tells the story of the steady takeover by Boulez and his entourage of the channels of musical and cultural communication, and their way of establishing a dictatorship of the difficult at the heart of the subsidy machine. At the same time as vilifying his opponents and anathematising tonal music and its late offshoots in Duruflé and Dutilleux, Boulez achieved a cultural coup d’état, which was the founding of IRCAM.
Nota - Posizione 211
x AeS LA PRESA FI POTERE DI BOULES
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 216
only if it sounds difficult, disturbing, ‘challenging,’ ‘transgressive’ could a bureaucrat dare to provide it with a subsidy.
Nota - Posizione 217
x LA HIA SICURA DEL BUROCRATE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 218
addressed to the musical public:
Nota - Posizione 218
x DARE PIÙ IMPORTANZA AL PUBBLICO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 226
It seems to me that, if there is, now, to be a music of the future it will, in that way, belong with the music of the past.
Nota - Posizione 226
x IMPERATIVO: NON ROMPERE COL PASSATO
