Romantic Revival Redux
Or How a Book was Plagiarized and Distilled into an Article and Conference Presentation My book Two Centuries in One has been finding a number of interested readers around the world since it first became available on the web through the University of Rostock Library in 2014. And with this positive attention has come another kind of attention which I had not quite expected. It turns out that my work has received the dubious compliment of being plagiarized on a very extensive scale. It has had large sections cut and pasted into a substantial article, complete with a scholarly presentation at an international musicological conference - all by an Assistant Professor, no less. Dr. Andreea Bratu, a pianist and scholar from Ovidius University in Constanta, entitled her article and conference presentation "The XXth Century Romantic Revival Issues. Scriabin's and Glazunov's Cases." The full version of the article is dated Oct. 25, 2015. An oral version was presented at the Glazunov/Scriabin International Symposium held at Herzen University, St. Petersburg, Oct. 29-31, 2015. The full Symposium booklet, in Russian and English, can be found here. Bratu's lecture information can be found on pages 13 and 27 of the booklet. Following the conference, the article was published on the internet by the European Skryabin Society in their Skryabin Bulletin, which is hosted by the musicology website componisten.net in Amsterdam. The secretary (composer Rolf Knap) and the president (Dr. Elvira van Domburg-Okuneva) of the European Skryabin Society also served on the organizing committee of the St. Petersburg symposium. Publication of the article in the conference proceedings is pending. But what to do? The first recourse was to approach the guilty party and state my case. Unfortunately, Andreea Bratu did not own up to what she did, despite having been given the opportunity in a couple of email exchanges. No apology was forthcoming. Furthermore, Dr. Bratu indicated her intentions to pursue and eventually publish her research, possibly by next year. This, I was told by the well-known plagiarism expert Debora Weber-Wulff (Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin), was a typical response of plagiarists when confronted with their deeds. As one legal expert emphasized to me, "If you don't protect your intellectual rights, you have none." And so, upon the advice of Weber-Wulff, I have set up this web page. It explains the problem in full and is simply intended as a public form of self-protection: One simply cannot take twenty pages of another scholar's work, sign one's name to the result, and publish it. Meanwhile, Dr. Bratu's article is still floating around the web. I have asked for it to be removed and trust that one day this will be accomplished. 1. The title The problem starts with Dr. Bratu's title. It refers to a 20th-Century Romantic Revival within the classical music world. I devoted 40 or 50 pages of chapter two of my book to this Revival, which was well-known in 1960/70s music journalism but was (and remains) seriously under-acknowledged in the academic world for complex reasons which are too involved to discuss here. Within academia, one can find numerous discussions of romantic revivals in literature, but such revivals are something altogether different. From a purely musical context, one can search JSTOR and Google in vain trying to find academic discussions of the late 20th Century revival of rare romantic music. That, of course, was partly why Bratu's article title immediately caught my eye in a routine google search. I am not used to getting search results such as this. As a rule, one has to really dig through books and articles to find even scattered references that directly acknowledge the late 20th Century Romantic Revival. Bearing this in mind, the proper academic thing to do would be for Dr. Bratu to credit my pioneering discussion of the Romantic Revival and build on my work. She owes the scholarly community an explanation as to how my analysis helped provide her with an academic framework for her article. That is how things are supposed to be done in the world of academic research. 2. The abstract The second problem is found in the abstract for the article. Although reworded significantly, one can still clearly see the extent to which a portion of Dr. Bratu's abstract was plagiarized, borrowing phraseology, thought sequences, and content from my abstract and introduction: |
From Dr. Bratu's abstract for her article "The XXth Century Romantic Revival Issues. Glazunov's and Scriabin's Cases":
pg 1 Controversial and problematic in the extreme may seem even a slight connection of the term “Romantic” to major Twentieth Century new works, creations of a predominant all -way -around musically Modernism Era. What kind of revitalized, unusually strong Romanticism presence in the Modern times may signify for future new musicological examination of the first Russian Mid XX Century music, not least, how could be define the crucially idea of Modernism itself A sincere attempt, for this First Mid of the Twentieth Century to be formulated a series of new introductive arguments that could give particular reasons to take more seriously, a valid link to a romantic-sounding stylistic stream major trend of this particular musical era. |
The original texts as they appear in the abstract and introduction to Two Centuries in One: Musical Romanticism and the Twentieth Century:
pg x The term “romantic” has been controversial for over two centuries, and for twentieth-century music its application becomes problematic in the extreme. pg x I have also offered a few thoughts on what romanticism’s unusually strong presence in the modern era may signify for future historians, not least in how they define the crucially important idea of modernism itself. pg 9 Rather, it is about a more positive kind of romanticism, and is a sincere attempt to formulate a series of arguments and illustrations that give us reasons to take traditionally romantic-sounding twentieth-century composers seriously as a stylistic stream in their own right. |
3. The main body of the article Except for about four or five pages, the main body of Dr. Bratu's 24-page article consists almost exclusively of sentences, paragraphs, and other large sections (including quotations I made) directly cut and pasted (with numerous very slight alterations) from Two Centuries in One. Upon close examination, one can see that the plagiarism was done very methodically. Every single sentence was adapted, using a variety of recurring techniques. In general, the word order might be changed, or single words dropped or added, especially in cases where I had a list of names or a group of adjectives or other descriptors. Sentences might be filled out with an additional descriptive clause of some kind, or a clause in the original might be removed. Often, words were replaced with synonyms. You can read a sample parsed sentence on my blog posting here. By continuously making slight changes in these ways and other ways, it is next to impossible for internet plagiarism detectors to properly pick up on the full extent of the plagiarism. It is clear that Andreea Bratu went to a great deal of time and effort to adapt and rewrite close to 20 pages of my text, footnotes, and bibliography. |
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Dr. Bratu's adaptation
pg 2 paragraph 2 Prior and culminating to the early romantic generation of Schumann, Liszt and Chopin, music had been considered the most romantic of the arts because - unlike verbal utterances painting or sculpture– it was the human creativity‘s best vehicle to express Emotion. It was a conceptually and artistically idyllic Era when human feeling was an indispensable element of musical composition and performance, as recent historians like James Day, Peter le Hurray, Julian Rushton and Leonard Ratner have readily affirmed. Specifically, music was able to awaken human feeling and emotion even more effectively than visual images or words. An older historical position by summing up what was by then already a long tradition of theoretical thinking, was echoing in the very Romanticism literature of writers like E. T. A. Hoffmann and Schilling‘s Encyclopedia as it stated in 1838 in a very convincing manner. pg 2 paragraph 3 In this particular analysis we will use the expression “romantic” to describe a certain direction of twentieth century composers. It is an imperfect and notoriously imprecise label that we will gradually attempt to define as we proceed. pg 2 paragraph 4 Right from the first decades of this controversial musical century, Emotion had become something that many composers with cutting-edge aesthetics felt pressure to avoid. The Neue Sachlichkeit (New Simplicity)ii for example it was a movement which had a persistent effect not only on composition but also on performance as well. Dynamics became less exaggerated, even among performers who were not necessarily sympathetic to the avant-garde. By post-1900, however, some had obviously distanced themselves from the age-old idea that music was intrinsically romantic, and therefore so well suited to express the full spectrum of emotional states. In the early twentieth century, ironically, no composers had distanced themselves from this expressive aesthetic totally than those who betoken to be recuperating the classical era – the so-called neoclassicists. The early twentieth-century anti-romantic resistance therefore, was at its most extreme when composers attempted to compose a so-called neoclassical music, that resulted to be about “nothing at all,” as Stravinsky himself stated. pg 2 paragraph 5 Basically stated, many new compositions and arrangements which used classical forms, did not finished as being part of the neoclassical movement for the good reason that they did not make use of spiky and dry sound textures. They did not urge to separate the formal idea from the original emotional context. pg 2 end, to pg 3 first two paragraphs For a musicological point of view it is not curious for a 1933 reality that Edward Joseph Dentiv, as one of the most influential figures in the Second Viennese circle, invited as a well esteemed scholar addressed the prestigious Royal Musical Association in London on the topic of Romanticism. As advocate of his colleague musical views and confidant enough to lecture for the public opinion, he wrote: “At the present day it is generally considered that the romantic composers are, of all composers, the most remote in feeling from our selves; there are many musicians who cannot contemplate them without positive disgust. That is perhaps a very good reason for studying them in a spirit of scientific analysis. Nothing can be disgusting if we approach it in a scientific spirit, and the dissection of romantic emotion may teach us much about the psychology of musical expression. ” pg 3 paragraph 3 For now on, for long decades the term‘s general connection of Romanticism trend with “conservative,” “backward-looking” or “regressive” composers will be sufficient to sort the issue. The Romantics included composers as diverse in style and nations as Elgar, Sibelius in Finland, Rachmaninoff and many other Russian composers in Russia (as the harmonically extended romanticism of some Scriabin works, Glazunov‘s, some Prokofiev‘s, Shostakovich, , N. Medtner Vladimir N. Drozdoff, Gliere, Khachaturian‘s and Kabalevsky‘s in the later Soviet Union), Gustav Mahler Richard Strauss and Korngold in the Austro-German territories, G. Puccini, Ottorino Respighi in Italy, Vaughan Williams in England, Granados and Turina in Spain. pg 3 paragraph 4 Contradictory, their presence in the twentieth century constituted an extended phenomenon of the large musical life, and many scholars referred to their persistence in the performance repertoire- in the face of critical marginalization- as the Gleichzeitigkiet des Ungleichzeitigkeiten (the contemporaneousness of the non contemporaneous). pg 3 paragraphs 5 and 6 Looking back, it should have been no such of revelation that an widely-listened twentieth-century music of the Persistent Romanticism owed a direct homage to the kind of common practice harmonies that had once been prevailed in nineteenth century music. In reality, this was happened because musical language, actually in the loose social sense continued to evolve and to be transformed at a gradual rate and alongside to the very slow musical tastes changes. In conclusion the ―dissonant‖ revolution hardly affected the kinds of music that the general public liked, heard, sang and played on a daily basis performance‘s preferences. Wrongly or rightly, all along the Century, Dissonant Modernism‘s overall prominen more as an occasional (and perhaps irritating) inclusion to the concert repertoires. pg 3 paragraphs 6 and 7 How did we wind up with a large, incredibly miscellaneous group of self-consciously modern musical languages over the last one hundred years that very few music adepts and lovers ever managed to “speak?” And how was it that so much musical glossary that actually subsist in the common today musical practice of the Twentieth Century finished up being entrusted to the Nineteenth – which in common colloquialism is still and recurrently called the “Romantic Century?” Was there truly something nearing a conventional musical language in 1980, a language (or, if you choose, a category of related languages) that handily crossed cultural and class borderlines, as was the case in 1880 or 1780? Thirty or forty years ago, these types of inquiry was not seriously welcomed by scholars and musicians who were actively defending and pursuing the most appealing esoteric paths of modernist or ―new‖ music. As diverse historical overviews of Twentieth Century music testified over the last half a century, the narrative progress of musical evolution densely influenced the sorts of Twentieth-Century music that were assumed most reliable of scholarly consideration. The ruling academic assumption, long since debauched into a cliché, was that the tonal structure of European musical language was increasingly weakened during the Nineteenth Century. That termed common practice -tonality, conclusively broke down at the first Decade of the Twentieth Century, or, as some renditions of the story have it… died. pg 4 paragraphs 3, 4, and 5 The accelerated evolution of Science, said Daniel G. Mason, had determined people “to feel skeptical of all values not expressible in rigorously intellectual terms [...] as long as Science maintained its Nineteenth-century materialism, emotional values could not breathe.” Mason also observed that post-World War One cynicism played a good part. Such bitterness had made people skeptical of all sentiment, and putted in motion the cult of anti-Romanticism. The consequence was the ultra modernist approach toward emotion. As he continued, instead of this fecund naiveté, innocence, we reach in ultra-Modernism “an elegant sophistication even sterile, a restless itch for experimenting „formulas‟. Music can no longer be just music; it must be atonal, or polytonal, or polyrhythmic, or primitive, or Impressionistic, or Symbolist.” pg 4 Paragraph 6 As two of the glorious representatives of late Romanticism in the generation leading up to 1950, Richard Strauss and Sergey Rachmaninoff were by any nondiscriminatory measurement among the musical dominions of their time. As two of the top ten standard repertoire composers of the Twentieth Century, they not only had an undeniable presence in the concert life from their earliest years onward, but were also obviously superior in many basic facets of sheer musical dexterity to pioneers like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ives and Varèse. Some but few important early Twentieth-century romantics like R. Strauss, S. Rachmaninoff and I. Sibelius had never actually lived their public popularity recession to any discernible degree. Slightly less popular Twentieth century romantics were not so lucky. After their deaths, composers like Glazunov, Scriabin, Bax, Medtner, Korngold, and Dohnányi all cast off the future decades memory almost completely, although their revival is happening at a rapid rate today. Many others could be cited as well. (pg 4 Paragraph 7 is not from Two Centuries in One) pg 5 paragraph 1 The Soviets until and after Mid-Century still had many composers of an overtly tonal and even outright romantic approach, including Al. Glazunov, Al. Scriabin, R. Glière, S.Prokofiev, N. Metner, V. N. Drozdoff, Shostakovich, A. Khachaturian and D. Kabalevsky, to mention the most known. pg 5 paragraph 2 Although the most famous and loved by musicians and public one, Sergey Rachmaninoff was slightly the kind of a much appreciated romantic ‗iceberg‘ in contemporary music, he somehow finished being seen as a stylistic aberration in his era. The pianist-composer who “drove a car for thirty years, enjoyed speedboats, had a distinctly 1930s house built for himself, met Walt Disney, lived among movie stars in Beverley Hills, and died two years before the dropping of the first atomic bomb,” supposedly did not belong to the twentieth Century(!) pg 5 paragraph 3 Rachmaninoff was also universally praised (even by those who slandered his music) as a literally without peer pianist. His memorization abilities and score reading measured up to the greatest in his times, and it was partly because of this dexterity he was able to master an impressive overnight performing repertoire, after fleeing the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and embarking on an worldwide career as a pianist at a late age of forty-five. Rachmaninoff was now able to impose himself as an undisputable piano master, which had previously been a side line during his Russian years when he had outshined the musical scene as a composer and conductor. (Note: The following snippet is not in quotation marks but is at least given a footnote, incorrectly citing pg 56 instead of pg 94 in Two Centuries in One): Deliberately or not, the Romantic Revival, has managed to emphasize the natural stylistic, harmonic and melodic continuity that linked the two centuries, despite the fact that such obvious links were sometimes downplayed by advanced commentators and composers. pg 5 paragraph 4 “ Rachmaninoff‟s position in the daily music business has always stood in the greatest possible contrast to his treatment by the academic world. Indeed, his case is very similar to Puccini in this regard. Considering his truly immense public stature today. “ (Note: the rest of pg 5 and the beginning of pg 6 are not from Two Centuries in One) pg 6 paragraph 3 From the Russian contingent, there was worthy to be mentioned also the expatriate virtuoso pianist and composer Nicolay Medtner (1880-1951), who came from a family of intimidating intellectuals and was himself an exceptionally exponent of the Russian intelligentsia. It was one of the strongest anti-modernist polemics of the time and owed its existence to the generosity and open-mind professional views of none other than Rachmaninoff himself. In 1935 published his ideological statements in a volume with the title The Muse and the Fashion. Medtner deplored the loss of the old expressive ways as much as any other fellow composer of his era: “Sometimes it seems that we have completely estranged ourselves from the emotions and thoughts that are alone capable of begetting and fructifying Art.” pg 6 paragraphs 4 and 5 After all, the “dissonant” Musical Revolution hardly touched the kinds of music that the general public heard, played and sang on a daily basis. Dissonant modernism‘s overall reputation among the public was more as an occasional addition to the concert menu. That happened also because most of the leading performing musicians of the century also saw no need to renounce for shaping their standard concerts repertoire of musical styles of the Nineteenth Century and of tonal expressive one of the Twentieth‘s. Included in this illustrious company were major figures like Wilhelm Furtwängler, Leonard Berstein Sir Thomas Beecham, Arturo Toscanini, Herbert von Karajan, David Oistrach, Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, Pablo Casals, Andrés Segovia, Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels or Arturo Benedetti Michelangelo – to name few of them. Even those few performers who did display a drop of curiosity regarding recent modernist experiments rarely felt the urge to ignore the traditionalists. Some famous performers like Leopold Stokowski or Walter Gieseking, for example, occasionally promoted Schoenberg but it is important to point out that they nevertheless remained even tenacious supporters of recently-composed romantic music by living composers. pg 7 paragraphs 1 and 2 Along with the rise of all sorts of musical streams, a parallel historical evolution also gathered and it is equally important to our general speech of the Romanticism in the Twentieth Century. In the 1960s, a young pianist and scholar, Frank Cooper matured a devotion for rare romantic music. He pursued his passion in a pragmatic way, and became one of the prominent theoreticians and organizers of a very non-academic important musical movement well- known in late Twentieth Century music written musicological research called as the Romantic Revival. pg 7 paragraph 3 He began his university career as a young professor of piano at Butler University, where he founded the Festival of Neglected Romantic Music in 1968. This was the first public concert series to systematically present lost or rare scores from the Romantic Era, and many performers associated with the new Romantic Revival appeared at Cooper‘s festival. Regular guests were: Jorge Bolet, Lewenthal, Gunnar Johansen and violinist Aaron Rosand.During the 1960s, the same era that regular twentieth century music history textbooks usually were reserved for aleatory and serial music, Cooper and Lewenthal discovered that the time was right for a Resurgence of Romanticism, and thenceforth they became key figures in the Romantic Revival of the 1960s and 70s. pg 7 paragraphs 5 and 6 Vladimir Horowitz, the leader pianist after Rachmaninoff‘s death, maintained the repertoire priorities of the previous generation and the colorful singing tone. Unlike some of his contemporaries (such as R. Serkin, C. Arrau), Horowitz had no problem in keeping a salon composer like Moszkowski alive in his concerts. Nor was he ashamed of determinedly insisting that Liszt and Rachmaninoff were still worthy of appreciation and respect. In addition, he was also one of the few in his generation (another were Cziffra, Bolet, Cherkassky) to keep alive the older custom for concert use of composing virtuoso transcriptions. Nothing odd because this venerable and long tradition had still been in practice until the 1940s when pianists like Friedman, Hofmann, Moiseiwitsch and Rachmaninoff, ruled the international stage. Horowitz and the most acclaimed musicians of the century became very powerful symbols for the survival of expressive romantic values in an era when so often elitist critics and major scholars fought against them. (Note: The final paragraph on pg 7 and the first three paragraphs on pg 8 are not from Two Centuries in One, although Bratu borrows my wording for part of her section heading): II.3.2. Initial LP explosion of the 1950s to thematic CDs collections of the most important record labels pg 8 end of paragraph 4 No wonder one of Bartók scholar, Elliott Antokeletz accused the recording industry as one of the major cause for the collapse of the first major avantgarde revolution of the 1910s and 1920s. pg 8 paragraph 5 American pianist Raymond Lewenthal (1923-1988), as one of the most qualified Martin Cooper‘s truffle hunters and ‘new musical archaeologists‘ did much to provoke and pave the street for future explorers. At the age of 20 he had his orchestral debut in 1948 and immediately started to perform and to record the standard repertoire. Among his recordings were Beethoven sonatas and Gershwin and Rachmaninoff Concertos, and central piano works from Chopin to Prokofiev. pg 8 paragraph 6 and 7 to pg 9 beginning He as many of other important names was that kind of musician that taught students, rebuilt his instrumental technique and devoured rare nineteenth-century romantic music with the passion of someone newly in love. He scoured second-hand shops of the world and libraries for rare scores like the complete operatic transcription of Sigismund Thalberg. In 1962, he gave a two-hour lecture broadcasted recital, dedicated to a composer in less than 50 years from his death- in total oblivion- Charles V. Alkan. Besides resurrecting Alkan‘s Symphonie for Piano Solo and the Grand Sonate, Lewenthal also defended the much denigrated now Liszt, who was the spiritual center of the late-twentieth-century Romantic Revival. His audience could once again hear Liszt‘s Hexameron and a re-creation of the famous Liszt-Thalberg duel of 1837. pg 9 paragraph 2 Michael Ponti was just then embarking on his first concert tour of America, having already established himself in Europe after winning the 1964 Busoni Competition. It was Vox Records who helped establish Michael Ponti as an international name to be reckoned with. The Vox recordings (from Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Scriabin music) went on the market in extensive and systematic repertoire collection at budget price and were purchased in large quantities by curious music lovers and libraries. One by one complete cycles of a long series of rare romantic concertos of Rubinstein, Medtner, Balakirev, Reinecke, Lyapunov, and d‘Albert came out of obscurity. And so it came to pass that he was another recording pianist who was helping the spread of the Romantic Revival into everybody‘s living rooms across Europe and North America. pg 9 paragraph 3 From the mid 70‘s now on besides covering a great deal of the standard repertoire, many of the leading classical music entrepreneurs in the recording business were very conscious of their role as ground-breakers in the industry and tended to focus on composers of various periods who are considered by informed music lovers to be unfairly neglected. Indeed, calls for the need to redress such historical injustice are repeated constantly and will certainly be familiar to all readers of the major review magazines. pg 9, paragraph 4 (a very long paragraph in Bratu's article) The 1980s and ‗90s and nowadays are by definition already, the decades of The Great Rehabilitation in history and culture. Again and again over the past decades, a composer previously considered marginal, has been fully restored to a position of public appreciation. For many listeners and critics interested in traditionalist twentieth-century romantic composers, recordings of this underrated segment of the repertoire have been eloquent. Composers representing musical idioms that had been long counted unimportant, because they did not break new ground in an evolutionary and progressive sense, have been replaced in titles in large quantities. Martin Anderson‟s record label Toccata Classics, Ted Perry of Hyperion‟s larger Catalogue (more than 1500 CDs), Ralph Couzens of Chandos Records- as some of the most popular segment companies- joining the ranks of revival-oriented record labels ongoing projects of rare romantic piano, violin, and cello concertos, many of which were written by composers who were still active long after 1910- the time of the Atonal Revolution. Hyperion‘s large catalogue (about 1500 CDs) fairly burgeons with traditionalist repertoire along the traditionalist lines. When Hyperion began their now-famous Romantic Piano Concerto series, they expressly sought to continue in the spirit of the Ponti‘s Vox recordings, but with better orchestras and less hasty production values. Almost entirely absent from Hyperion‘s catalogue, however, are composers representative of High Modernist streams were absent, except some B. Bartók music they already have some traditionalist roots. Michael Spring, the planner of the Hyperion series concluded: “Obviously, I‟m working very broadly through the whole range of material, starting from about 1820-ish up until, well, any time, as long as stylistically it fits. The latest we‟ve done is the Dohnányi Second, which is 1947, I think. […] The Hyperion project is far from over, and due to its financial success, is projected to continue for years to come. The reason we got to Volume 50 is fundamentally, because it sells,” pg 9 last paragraph, to pg 10 beginning Besides covering the rich early and mid-nineteenth-century repertoire (Weber, Herz, Rubinstein, Moscheles,) the Romantic Piano Concerto series has also encompassed many works by composers of the Rachmaninoff Schoenberg-Stravinsky Generation. The fact that these late romantic composers are contemporaneous with early twentieth-century avant-garde is very important to focus once again as we continue our task of establishing a position for romanticism in the apparently alien modernist musical atmosphere, that many thinkers claimed had exclusively catalogued the early Twentieth Century. pg 10 paragraph 2 In 1982, was founded Marco Polo Music Label. At a glance Marco Polo‘s current 900-CD catalogue still confirms this. It is dedicated above all to romantic, late romantic and early twentieth-century composers with special emphasis placed on several anti-modernists from the Schoenberg era: Medtner, Respighi and Pfitzner. The man under Marco Polo‘s brand, Klaus Heymann, went on to start a second classical music label in 1987. Naxos Records was the result, and it is now one of the largest classical record label in the world (with about 5500 items in its catalogue). Naxos focuses on establishing complete cycles of the standard composers, supplemented with an equally vast range of rare material as well. pg 10 paragraph 3 Recording products have evidently convinced a significant number of present-day connoisseurs that the romantic works tradition was still in much better shape during the early modern era than academic conceits like ―the death of romanticism‖ would seem to indicate. pg 10 To start with the most influential written products- Encyclopedies and Dictionaries- the 1954 edition of the Grove‘s Dictionary was part of a long attitude of late Romantic dismissal. In 1940, Paul Henry Lang had voiced the opinion, already common in many circles, that Rachmaninoff‘s music would not survive. Musicologist Arnold Whittall joint but sweeting up concluded that Rachmaninoff‘s music was ―both utterly personal and also entirely persuasive in its revitalization of traditional essences. The twilight of Romanticism has been long and eventful, nor is it over yet,” pg 10 paragraph 6 Another commentator who had his own view of the early Twentieth Century was the critic and composer Virgil Thomson. In 1961, Thomson framed the dissonant composers on the left, the late romantics (Strauss, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff,) on the right, and the neoclassicists in the middle, together with the impressionists. The neoclassicists, Thomson concluded were by far the largest group. Interesting for us is the fact that within his center group, Thomson also made place for a small Neo Romantic group which included composers like Sauguet and himself. Revealing is also the fact that Thomson, in using the word “romantic,” nevertheless tried so hard to distance himself from what he catalogued as “embarrassing” terminological associations with the Romanticism of Rachmaninoff and Sibelius pg 10 paragraph 7 A modernizing trend was started back in the 1970s by Carl Dahlhaus, one of the greatest German musicologist of his time. At that time, Dahlhaus had taken the bold musicological step of referring to the years 1890-1910 as a Modern period instead of the Twilight of the Romantic Era. pg 10 paragraph 8 In his major written work “Nineteenth Century Music”, Carl Dahlhaus undoubtedly acknowledged what had long been a cgeneral belief when he wrote: “In the everyday speech of our century the aesthetic of feeling is automatically called „romantic.‟” The problem of how to legitimate an “out of fashion” musical language still surfaces when one is arguing for the musicological legitimacy romantic period – that is, apparently nineteenth-century-sounding – streamed already loudly on long decades of Twentieth Century worldwide compositions. pg 11 paragraph 1 Glenn Watkins while describing the 1970s New Romanticism of Rochberg, concluded “It would be well to recall once again, however, the healthy strain of romanticism that had flourished everywhere and in virtually every decade of the twentieth century.” He generously mentioned the violin concertos of Alexander Glazunov, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovitch and Gian-Carlo Menotti, stylistically so diverse and multinational group of composers. pg 11 paragraph 2 More respectful than Whittall was Robert Morgan in 1991. Morgan began by stating that around 1900, Russian music ―enjoyed special prominence in Western musical composition,‖ and further, that Scriabin and Rachmaninoff were the country‘s most important figures. This sounds like a promising beginning to what could be a chapter or two of solid coverage for these two composers, especially considering the overall prominence of Russian music in the twentieth century standard repertoire. pg 11 paragraph 3 In reality, however, they were adopting a musical attitude that an even larger number of consistent traditionalists like Samuel Barber and William Walton had been following all along. The ample presence in the 1950s and 1960s of romantic-sounding tonal composers easily demonstrated the issue- via today‘s record catalogues and public performances (despite Simm‘s protestations that 1970s neoromanticism was reviving a long-gone romanticism that had finally faded away in the1940s with the deaths of Richard Strauss). pg 11 paragraph 4 Varèse scholar, Jonathan Bernhard, was one of the most unfavorable among critics who were less than willing to salute a late twentieth-century neoromantic movement. pg 11 paragraph 5 The real truth of the matter was that (along with Barber and Walton) many composers like Ernest Bloch (1880- 1959), Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968),Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007), Leonard Bernstein (1918- 1990) or Nino Rota (1911-1979) had imposed themselves never leaving the tonal ground- during the post- 1945 glorious days of serialism and aleatory music. pg 11 paragraph 6 Burkholder courageously state for the year 2006 “while some music by composers of this generation may sound late Romantic in spirit or technique, what makes all of it modern is this overwhelming sense of measuring oneself against the past.” pg 11 paragraph 7 The 1500-page Penguin Guide to Classical CDs- an extension of Gramophone mark- strongly reflects this matter. With very few exceptions the Penguin Guide‘s lists are filled with a twentieth-century repertoire that is often drastically to the general ideology of musical Modernism. The fact that so much old fashion repertoire proved to be -even today -of such strong interest to connoisseurs and music lovers speaks for its ultimate historical importance. pg 11 paragraph 8 Public popularity was also an objective to which the more modernist composers ultimately aspired. Frequency of performance has always been a measurable and pragmatic way of measuring popularity. As we have already even the most radical avant-garde like Boulez or Stockhausen insisted had their favored repertoire be given a central place in the programming of concert organizations. pg 11 end to pg 12 beginning This is not to say that the emancipation of the dissonance will no longer be reveling in musicological point of view, as an interesting and luxurious notion in its own right. It will continue to have at least some currency, but it will now be seen in a larger historical context. Even if it cannot explain Glazunov‘s, Medtner's, V. N. Drozdoff‘s (to name a few) and Rachmaninoff‘s piano pieces, it will remain useful for helping explain certain esoteric and specialized sections in compositional technique that, for some musicians in the early modern period, at least, seemed to promise a new level of creative extravaganza. Despite the fact that the general way of looking at the twentieth century has changed greatly over the last decade ( Cook, Taruskin, Ross). pg 12 paragraph 2 However, a recognition of such “emancipated” historical developments implies that they can no longer for a retrospective view, to be used as a weapon to underground late Romanticism into the Twentieth Century realities in a good neighborhood and conviviality with the extreme dissonance. pg 12 paragraph 3 consists solely of the following quote: “To define Modernism in terms of dissonance is to ignore the fact that a composer can be original in dimensions other than harmonic novelty.” (The rest of page 12, as well as all of pages 13 and 14 are about Scriabin and Glazunov, and are not taken from Two Centuries in One) pg 15 paragraphs 1 and 2 It is clear by now that Twentieth-century Romanticism is near linked with a very wide stylistic range of composers. Many advocate scholars of this type of Revival agreed that the main criteria seemed to be that these composers still used tonality and the long melodic line, and, especially, were outstanding symbols of avant-garde resistance. In a word, they were seen as conservatives but for some other point of view as another type of innovative creational music side of expression‘s continuators. These features will be approached – tonality, conservatism, the long melodic line, and the resistance to the avant-garde – because are of the utmost importance to keep in mind. |
My original text
pg 303 Prior to the early romantic generation of Chopin and Schumann, and during so-called “classical” times, music had been considered the most romantic of the arts because – unlike sculpture, painting or verbal utterances – it was the medium of human creativity that was best able to express emotion. It was an era when human feeling was an indispensable component of musical composition and performance, as recent historians like Dahlhaus, Peter le Huray, James Day, Leonard Ratner and Julian Rushton have readily confirmed. pg 304 Specifically, this meant that music was able to awaken human emotion and feeling even more effectively than words or visual images. Echoing writers like E. T. A. Hoffmann, and summing up what was by then already a long tradition of thinking on the matter, Schilling’s Encyclopedia stated in 1838: pg 94 For better or worse, we are using the word “romantic” to describe a certain stream of twentieth-century composers. It is an imperfect and notoriously imprecise label that we will gradually attempt to define as we proceed (see especially chapter three). pg 305 Now, and rather suddenly, neoclassicism was in and old (romantic) emotion was out. Emotion had become something that many composers with cutting-edge aspirations felt pressure to avoid. The Neue Sachlichkeit (New Simplicity) had finally come of age, and it was an aesthetic movement which had a long-term effect not only on composition but also on performance as well. Rubatos became less exaggerated, even among performers who were not necessarily sympathetic to the avant-garde, and string portamentos were gradually weeded out. pg 304-305 By post-1900 times, however, some had greatly distanced themselves from the age-old idea that music was inherently romantic, and therefore unusually well suited to communicating the full gamut of emotional states. Ironically, no composers in the early twentieth century had distanced themselves from this expressive aesthetic more completely than those who purported to be recovering the classical era – the so-called “neoclassicists.” The early twentieth-century anti-romantic backlash, therefore, was at its most extreme when (rather than following atonalism) composers attempted to write a so-called neoclassical music that purported to be about “nothing at all,” as Stravinsky himself so famously stated. pg 306-307 Basically stated, a great many new compositions and arrangements which used classical forms did not end up being part of the neoclassical movement for the simple reason that they did not utilize a dry and spiky sound surface. They did not attempt to divorce the formal idea from the original emotional context. pg 310 The distinguished British musicologist Edward Dent also sought to put the old romantic emotion in its place. In addition to being a great classical scholar, Dent was also one of the most influential figures in the Second Viennese circle in his capacity as co-founder (together with Schoenberg) and president (from 1923 to 1938) of the radical International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). In 1933 Dent addressed the distinguished Royal Musical Association in London on the topic of romanticism. Feeling confidant enough to speak for everyone, he wrote: “At the present day it is generally considered that the romantic composers are, of all composers, the most remote in feeling from ourselves; there are many musicians who cannot contemplate them without positive disgust. That is perhaps a very good reason for studying them in a spirit of scientific analysis. Nothing can be disgusting if we approach it in a scientific spirit, and the dissection of romantic emotion may teach us much about the psychology of musical expression.” pg 94 For now, the term’s general association with “regressive,” or “conservative,” or “backward-looking” composers will be sufficient to set the stage. The romantics included composers as diverse in style and national mileau as Puccini and Respighi in Italy, Elgar and Vaughan Williams in England, Sibelius in Finland, Rachmaninoff in Russia, (and the harmonically extended romanticism of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian in the later Soviet Union), Granados and Turina in Spain, and Strauss and Korngold in the Austro-German world. pg 94 Their presence in the twentieth century constituted a very broad phenomenon in general musical life, and German scholars sometimes refer to their persistence in the repertoire, in the face of critical marginalization, as the Gleichzeitigkiet des Ungleichzeitigkeiten (or, the contemporaneousness of the non-contemporaneous). pg 94-95 Looking back, it should have been no real surprise that nearly all widely-consumed twentieth-century music of the “serious” variety owed a direct debt to the kind of common practice harmonies that had once been so prevalent in nineteenth-century music. In reality, this was because musical language in the wider social sense actually continued to evolve and change at a rate roughly parallel to the very gradual changes in spoken language, as we will see more clearly in chapter six. In sum, the “dissonant” revolution hardly touched the kinds of music that the general public heard, played and sang on a daily basis. Rightly or wrongly, dissonant modernism’s overall reputation among the public was more as an occasional (and perhaps irritating) addition to the concert menu. pg 361-362 How did we end up with a large and incredibly varied group of self-consciously modern musical languages over the last one hundred years that very few music lovers ever learned to “speak?” And how was it that so much musical vocabulary that actually survived in the common day-to day musical practice of the twentieth century ended up being relegated to the nineteenth – which in common parlance is still often called the “Romantic Century?” Was there truly something approaching a common musical language in 1980, a language (or, if you prefer, a group of closely related languages) that easily crossed cultural and class boundaries, as was the case in 1880 or 1780? Thirty or forty years ago, these kinds of questions were not seriously entertained by musicians and scholars who were actively pursuing and defending the more esoteric streams of “modernist” or “new” music. As numerous historical overviews of twentieth century music demonstrated over the last half a century, the progress narrative of musical evolution heavily influenced the kinds of twentieth-century musics that were deemed most worthy of scholarly consideration. The reigning academic assumption, long since degenerated into a cliché, was that the tonal structure of European musical language was progressively weakened during the nineteenth century. That language, often termed common practice tonality, ultimately broke down at the beginning of the twentieth century, or, as some versions of the tale have it, died. pg 328-329 Mason blamed some of this repudiation of music’s essential qualities on science. Science, said Mason, had made people “skeptical of all values not expressible in rigorously intellectual terms...as long as science maintained its nineteenth-century materialism, emotional values could not breathe.” Mason also noted that post-World War One cynicism played a part. For him, such cynicism had “made us suspicious of all sentiment, and launched the cult of anti romanticism. The result was the ultra-modernist attitude toward emotion conveniently summed up in the story of Stravinsky’s thanking Josef Hofmann for playing a work of his absolutely to perfection – exactly as he wanted it – completely without expression.” Mason believed that “the path from emotion to expression is direct, and the creative act naive and unselfconscious.” But, he continued, “in place of this innocence, this fecund naiveté, we find in ultra modernism a sterile sophistication, a restless itch for formulas. Music can no longer be just music; it must be atonal, or polytonal, or polyrhythmic, or primitive, or impressionistic, or symbolistic. pg 100 As two of the most famous representatives of late romanticism in the generation leading up to 1950, Strauss and Rachmaninoff were by any objective measurement among the musical powerhouses of their time. As two of the top five repertoire composers of the twentieth century, they not only had an unassailable presence in the daily concert life from their earliest years onward, but were also clearly superior in many basic facets of sheer musical ability to pioneers like Schoenberg, Ives, Varèse and Stravinsky. pg 123 A few important early twentieth-century romantics like Rachmaninoff, Sibelius and Strauss had never actually seen their public popularity decline to any appreciable degree....But slightly less famous twentieth-century romantics were not so fortunate. After their deaths, composers like Korngold, Medtner, Bax and Dohnányi all slipped off the musical radar almost completely, although their revival is occurring at a rapid rate today. Many others could be mentioned as well pg 335 The Soviets at mid-century still had many composers of an overtly tonal and even outright romantic approach, including Glière, Prokofiev, Miaskovsky, Khachaturian and Shostakovich. pg 102 Although he was merely the tip of a much larger romantic iceberg in contemporary music, he somehow ended up being seen as a stylistic anomaly in his era. The composer who “drove a car for thirty years, enjoyed speedboats, had a distinctly 1930s house built for himself, met Walt Disney, lived among movie stars in Beverley Hills, and died two years before the dropping of the first atomic bomb,” supposedly did not belong to the twentieth century pg 101 Rachmaninoff was also universally admired (even by those who denigrated his music) as a pianist literally without peer. His score reading and memorization abilities measured up to the greatest in history, and it was was partly because of this facility that he was able to master a large performing repertoire seemingly overnight after fleeing the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and embarking on an international career as a pianist at the astonishingly late age of 45. As the awe struck Percy Grainger later remarked, Rachmaninoff was now able to pose as a specialist in piano performance, which had previously been a side line during his Russian years when he had dominated the musical scene as a composer and opera conductor. pg 94 Intentionally or not, the Romantic Revival, has served to emphasize the natural stylistic, harmonic and melodic continuity that linked the two centuries, despite the fact that such obvious links were sometimes downplayed by advanced commentators and composers. (The passage opposite is accurately reproduced and is footnoted as being written by me but is incorrectly cited as pg 14 instead of pg 101) pg 339 From the Russian contingent, there was the brilliant expatriate virtuoso pianist and composer Nicolas Medtner (1880-1951), who came from a family of intimidating intellectual brilliance and was himself an exceptionally articulate member of the Russian intelligentsia. In 1935 his The Muse and the Fashion was published. It was one of the strongest anti-modernist polemics of the time and owed its existence to the generosity and like-mindedness of none other than the towering Rachmaninoff himself. Medtner mourned the loss of the old expressive ways as much as anyone of his era: “Sometimes it seems that we have completely estranged ourselves from the emotions and thoughts that are alone capable of begetting and fructifying art.” pg 95 In sum, the “dissonant” revolution hardly touched the kinds of music that the general public heard, played and sang on a daily basis. Rightly or wrongly, dissonant modernism’s overall reputation among the public was more as an occasional (and perhaps irritating) addition to the concert menu. pg 96 Most of the leading performing musicians one could name also saw no need to renounce the musical styles of the nineteenth century. pg 96-97 Included in this illustrious company were figures like Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Sir Thomas Beecham, Pablo Casals, Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz, Andrés Segovia, Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, Benjamino Gigli, and John McCormack. Even those few performers who did show a measure of curiosity concerning recent modernist experiments rarely felt the need to snub the traditionalists. Some popular performers like Walter Gieseking, Leopold Stokowski, and Dimitri Mitropoulos, for example, occasionally championed Schoenberg but it is important to point out that they nevertheless remained even stronger advocates of recently-composed romantic music by living composers. pg 122 Along with the rise of Rochberg’s neoromanticism, a parallel historical development also gathered steam, and it is equally vital to our general discussion of Romanticism in the Twentieth Century. In the 1960s, a young pianist and scholar named Frank Cooper developed a passion for rare romantic music. He acted on his passion in a practical way, and became one of the leading theoreticians and organizers of a very non-academic grassroots musical movement widely-known in late twentieth-century music journalism as the Romantic Revival. pg 134 Cooper began his university career as a young professor of piano at Butler University, where he founded the Festival of Neglected Romantic Music in 1968. This was the first public concert series to systematically present rare scores from the romantic era, and many performers associated with the new Romantic Revival appeared at Cooper’s festival. Lewenthal, of course, was a regular guest, as were other specialists in the literature such as Gunnar Johansen, Jorge Bolet, and violinist Aaron Rosand...During the 1960s, the same era that standard twentieth-century music history textbooks usually reserved for serial and aleatory music, Lewenthal and Cooper burst on the music scene with the counter-claim that the time was ripe for a resurgence of romanticism, and the two musicians thenceforth became key figures in the Romantic Revival of the 1960s and 70s. pg 344 Horowitz carried on the singing tone and repertoire priorities of the previous generation, who still operated at a time when concerts of more serious and heavy musical works were typically leavened with lighter fare. Unlike some of his contemporaries (such as Serkin, Arrau, or Curzon), Horowitz had no shame in keeping a salon composer like Moszkowski alive. Nor was he ashamed of stubbornly insisting that Liszt and Rachmaninoff were worthy of respect. His audiences agreed. In addition, he was also one of the few in his generation (another was Cziffra) who kept alive the older custom of composing virtuoso transcriptions for concert use. This long and venerable tradition had still been in place during the 1930s and 1940s when pianists like Hofmann, Rachmaninoff, Friedman and Moiseiwitsch ruled the international stage....However, his enormous prestige as a legendary virtuoso in the grand tradition going all the way back to Clementi, Dussek and Mozart ensured that he (Horowitz) became a very powerful symbol for the survival of expressive romantic values in an era that so often fought against them. pg 132 ...Westminster, a new and very prolific record label that had just sprung up during the initial LP explosion of the 1950s. pg 123-124 In a negative sense, the textbook writer and Bartók scholar Elliott Antokeletz blamed the recording industry as one of the major reasons for the demise of the first major avant-garde revolution of the 1910s and 1920s: pg 131-132 Lewenthal, then, most certainly qualified as one of Martin Cooper’s truffle-hunters and musical archaeologists. In giving the Romantic Revival of the 1960s and 70s so much glamour, Lewenthal did much to inspire and pave the way for future explorers.... He gave his orchestral debut in 1948 at the age of 20 and immediately set about performing and recording the standard repertoire. Among his recordings were Beethoven sonatas and Rachmaninoff and Gershwin Concertos for Westminster, a new and very prolific record label that had just sprung up during the initial LP explosion of the 1950s pg 132 It was during this time that Lewenthal took the opportunity to travel and work abroad. He taught piano students, rebuilt his piano technique and devoured rare nineteenth-century romantic music with the ardour of someone newly in love. He scoured the libraries and second-hand shops of the world for rare scores like the elusive Reubke Piano Sonata and the complete operatic transcriptions of Thalberg. With all this preparation behind him, Lewenthal finally reentered the music world in the early 1960s in spectacular fashion. In 1962, he gave a two-hour lecture recital devoted to the completely forgotten Alkan.... Besides resurrecting Alkan’s Symphonie for solo piano and Grande Sonate, Lewenthal also defended the much maligned Liszt, who was the spiritual center of the late-twentieth-century Romantic Revival. Thus, listeners could once again hear Liszt’s Hexameron and a re-creation of the famous Liszt-Thalberg duel of 1837. pg 136 Ponti was just then embarking on his first concert tour of America, having already established himself in Europe after winning the 1964 Busoni Competition. pg 137 and 138 It was Vox Records who helped establish Ponti as an international force to be reckoned with. Consisting of extensive and systematic repertoire surveys at budget price, the Vox recordings were purchased in large quantities by libraries and curious music lovers everywhere. One by one, complete cyles by the above-mentioned composers, and much else – including a long series of rare romantic piano concertos (always a favorite genre of record collectors) by Raff, Rubinstein, Reinecke, Medtner, Balakirev, Lyapunov, Henselt, D’Albert, Goetz, and Litolff – came tumbling out of obscurity and onto the record players of hungry, noveltyseeking connoisseurs in far-flung locations And so it came to pass that Ponti become known to collectors far and wide, helping spread the gospel of the Romantic Revival to turntables in living rooms across North America and Europe. pg 143-144 Besides covering a great deal of the standard repertoire, many of the leading classical music entrepreneurs in the recording business are very conscious of their role as ground-breakers in the industry and tend to focus on composers of various periods who are considered by informed music lovers to be unfairly neglected. Indeed, calls for the need to redress such historical injustice are repeated constantly and will certainly be familiar to all readers of the major review magazines. pg 144 (This first passage is actually a quotation taken from Martin Anderson) the 1980s and ‘90s are proving to be the decades of The Great Rehabilitation. Again and again over the past decade or so, a composer previously considered marginal, a quasi-private enthusiasm, has been restored to a position of genuine public esteem. One of them is Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a man at whom it was once de rigueur to look down your critical nose. pg 144 For many listeners and critics interested in traditionalist twentieth-century romantic composers, recordings of this academically underrated segment of the repertoire have been revelatory. Composers representing musical idioms that had been long been counted unimportant because they did not break new ground in an evolutionary and progressive sense have been recovered in large quantities. pg 145 Anderson also later founded the record label Toccata Classics for purposes similar to his Toccata Press venture, thus joining the ranks of revival-oriented record labels. Hyperion’s large catalogue (about 1500 CDs) fairly burgeons with traditionalist repertoire along the traditionalist lines of the composers mentioned in the above obituary. We have already mentioned the company’s ongoing project to record rare romantic piano, violin, and cello concertos, many of which were written by composers who were still active long after 1910, the time of the atonal revolution. When Hyperion began their now-famous Romantic Piano Concerto series, they expressly sought to continue in the spirit of the Ponti’s Vox recordings, but with better orchestras and less hasty production values. pg 145 Almost entirely absent from Hyperion’s catalogue, however, are composers representative of High Modernist streams, unless, like Bartók they already have one foot firmly planted in the traditionalist camp. pg 146 Michael Spring, the planner of the Hyperion series, explains: “Obviously, I’m working very broadly through the whole range of material, starting from about 1820-ish up until, well, any time, as long as stylistically it fits. The latest we’ve done is the Dohnányi Second, which is 1947, I think.”108 The Hyperion project is far from over, and due to its financial success, is projected to continue for years to come. “The reason we got to Volume 50 is fundamentally because it sells,” says Spring. pg 146 Besides covering the rich early and mid-nineteenth-century repertoire (Herz, Moscheles, Weber, Rubinstein, Goetz, etc.), the Romantic Piano Concerto series has also encompassed many works by composers of the Rachmaninoff-Schoenberg-Stravinsky generation. The fact that these late romantic composers are contemporaneous with early twentieth-century radicals is very important to highlight once again as we continue our task of establishing a place for romanticism in the apparently alien modernist musical climate that many thinkers claimed had so exclusively defined the early twentieth century. pg 150 In 1982, Heymann founded Marco Polo “as a hobby. Given Heymann’s background, it was not surprising that the initial focus of his “Label of Discovery” would be romantic music. A glance at Marco Polo’s current 900-CD catalogue still confirms this. It is dedicated above all to romantic, late romantic and early twentieth-century composers. Of great significance is the fact that special emphasis is placed on several outspoken anti-modernists from the Schoenberg era: Respighi, Pfitzner, Furtwängler and Medtner pg 152 Heymann went on to start a second classical music label in 1987. Naxos Records was the result, and it is now the largest classical record label in the world (with about 5500 items in its catalogue). Naxos focuses – if one can call it that – on establishing complete cycles of more or less all the standard composers, supplemented with an equally vast range of rare material as well. pg 147 Hyperion has evidently convinced a significant number of present-day connoisseurs that the romantic concerto tradition was still in much better shape during the early modern era than academic conceits like “the death of romanticism” would seem to indicate. pg 102 The 1954 Grove was part of a long tradition of dismissal. In 1940, Paul Henry Lang had voiced the opinion, already common in many circles, that Rachmaninoff’s music would not survive. pg 106 Whittall concluded that Rachmaninoff’s music was “both utterly personal and also entirely persuasive in its revitalization of traditional essences – an achievement that makes the failure of so many other attempts to repeat the trick the more obvious. pg 111 “The twilight of romanticism has been long and eventful, nor is it over yet,” wrote Arnold Whittall at the end of his Romantic Music, a 1987 survey of the nineteenth-century scene. pg 290 Yet another commentator who had his own rather unique view of the early twentieth century was the critic and composer Virgil Thomson (1896-1989). In 1961, Thomson put the late romantics (Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Strauss) on the right, the dissonant composers on the left, and the neoclassicists in the middle, together with the impressionists. The neoclassicists, Thomson felt, were by far the largest contingent. Interesting for us is the fact that within his center group, Thomson also carved out a place for a small neoromantic group which included composers like himself and Sauguet. Equally revealing is the fact that Thomson, in using the word “romantic,” nevertheless took pains to distance himself from what he described as “embarrassing” terminological associations with the romanticism of Sibelius and Rachmaninoff. pg 183-184 Ironically, as Strauss scholars like Bryan Gilliam and Morten Kristiansen observe, this modernizing trend was started back in the 1970s by none other than Carl Dahlhaus, the greatest German musicologist of his time. At that time, Dahlhaus had taken the bold musicological step of referring to the years 1890-1910 as a modern period instead of the twilight of the romantic era. pg 302 In his formidable NineteenthCentury Music, Carl Dahlhaus (d. 1989) uncontroversially acknowledged what had long been a common belief when he wrote the following: “In the everyday speech of our century the aesthetic of feeling is automatically called ‘romantic.’” pg 362 The problem of how to justify an “outdated” musical language still sometimes surfaces when one is arguing for the musicological legitimacy of a traditionally romantic – that is, apparently nineteenth-century-sounding – stream of twentieth-century composition pg 113 While describing the 1970s New Romanticism of Rochberg, Penderecki and others, Watkins observed that “It would be well to recall once again, however, the healthy strain of romanticism that had flourished everywhere and in virtually every decade of the twentieth century.”51 By way of illustration, he listed the violin concertos of Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovitch, Gian-Carlo Menotti, and William Walton, a stylistically diverse and multinational group of composers. pg 106 More respectful than Whittall was Robert Morgan in 1991. Morgan began his coverage by stating that around 1900, Russian music “enjoyed special prominence in Western musical composition,” and further, that Scriabin and Rachmaninoff were the country’s most important figures. This sounds like a promising beginning to what could be a chapter or two of solid coverage for these two composers, especially considering the overall prominence of Russian music in the twentieth century standard repertoire. pg 118 to119 In reality, however, they were adopting a musical attitude that an even larger number of consistent traditionalists like Samuel Barber and William Walton had been following all along. The ample presence of romantic-sounding tonalists in the 1950s and 1960s is easily demonstrated via today’s record catalogue, despite Simm’s protestations that 1970s neoromanticism was reviving a long-gone romanticism that had finally faded away in the1940s with the deaths of Strauss and Pfitzner. pg 119 Varèse scholar Jonathan Bernhard is one of the most hostile among those writers who were less than enthusiastic about the late twentieth-century neoromantic movement. pg 119 The real truth of the matter was that (along with Barber and Walton) many composers like Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007), Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968), Ernest Bloch (1880-1959), Ned Rorem (1923- ), Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), Malcolm Arnold (1921-2006), Nino Rota (1911-1979) and George Lloyd (1913-1998) had made a point of never leaving the tonal fold during the post-1945 heyday of serialism and chance music. pg 186 Burkholder boldly writes that “while some music by composers of this generation may sound late Romantic in spirit or technique, what makes all of it modern is this overwhelming sense of measuring oneself against the past.” pg 173 The 1500-page Penguin Guide to Classical CDs, a de facto arm of Gramophone, strongly reflects Steane’s outlook. With very few exceptions (see appendix), the Penguin Guide’s listings are filled with the type of twentieth-century repertoire that is contrary (often drastically so) to the general philosophy of musical modernism. pg 175 The fact that so much rare repertoire of this kind is of such strong interest to connoisseurs even today in the twenty-first century speaks for its ultimate historical importance. pg 188 And public popularity, we repeat, was also a status to which the more self-consciously modernist composers ultimately aspired. To state the obvious, frequency of performance has always been a standard way of measuring popularity. As we have already seen in chapter one, even the most radical avant-guardists like Boulez, Wuorinen and Stockhausen insisted in word and deed that their favoured repertoire be given a central place in the programming of concert organizations. pg 188 This is not to say that the emancipation of the dissonance will no longer be important in musicological discourse as an interesting and fruitful notion in its own right. It will continue to have at least some currency, but it will now be seen in a larger historical context, as one of a great many historical trends that were being played out in the music world of the early twentieth century. Even if it cannot explain Sibelius piano pieces or Bolero or 1920s radio music, it will remain useful for helping explain certain esoteric and specialized departures in compositional technique that, for some musicians in the early modern period at least, seemed to promise a new level of creative freedom. pg 363 Despite the fact that the general way of looking at the twentieth century has changed greatly over the last decade (cf. Taruskin, Ross, Cook and Pople), the Norton contract was given to a musicologist whose general hard-line stance in favour of the traditionally high historical ranking of Schoenberg and atonality has been apparent right from the beginning of his career. pg 188 However, a recognition of the essentially rarefied nature of such “emancipated” historical developments naturally implies that they can no longer in good conscience be used to undergird the highly specialized view that the twentieth century was a time dominated by extreme dissonance. pg 191 The quote given in the opposite column was culled from my longer quotation of Albright pg 114 It is clear from the composers mentioned above that Watkins, like Simms, associated twentieth-century romanticism with a very wide stylistic range of composers. For him, the main criteria seemed to be that they still used tonality and the long melodic line, and, especially, were outstanding symbols of avant garde resistance. In a word, they were seen as conservatives. These features – conservatism, tonality, the long melodic line, and resistance to the avant-garde – are of the utmost importance to keep in mind as we gradually formulate our definition of romanticism in the twentieth century. |
...I will stop here. Suffice it to say that the remaining pages of Andreea Bratu's essay proceed in the manner of the above examples. About 80 percent of the article is directly taken from Two Centuries in One.
As far as the article's documentation is concerned, I am cited only four times in the endnotes in addition to the bibliography (which, except for a couple of items, consists of material from my bibliography). The endnotes themselves consist mainly of more material directly taken from either the footnotes or the main text of Two Centuries in One. In conclusion, it saddens me immensely that a fine musician with good credentials and an academic position would risk plagiarizing on such an extensive scale. Clearly, Andreeas Bratu is very sympathetic to the more romantic and tonal repertoire from the 20th Century and has played much of it herself. For example, she has given good public exposure to the works of the composer Vladimir Drozdoff (1880-1960) who, like so many other mid 20th-Century tonal composers from Eastern Europe and Russia, is still far too little known outside his native land. Ironically, I was alerted to exploring Drozdoff because Dr. Bratu had slipped his name into the modified texts she had borrowed from me. There is even a Drozdoff Society. Before her ill-fated article, this was a name that I must confess was not on my screen. Now I look forward to getting to know the work of yet another 20th-Century composer-pianist. There is no reason why the rest of her work could not be geared to such positive ends. Dr. Bratu surely has enough personal knowledge about the 20th-Century Romantics to write her own paper. Plagiarism on such an extensive scale not only reflects badly on her, but also on the reputation of Ovidius University (Universitatia Ovidius) in Constanta, Romania. In late January, 2016, Dr. Daniela Hanţiu, the dean of the University's Faculty of Arts, promised to refer the case to higher academic authorities for serious investigation. This page will be updated further when and if that investigation is followed through. I sincerely hope the matter is resolved soon. |