Volume 25, Number 14 · September 28, 1978
Sour Notes
By Robert Craft
A Concise History of Avant-Garde Music: From Debussy to Boulez
by Paul Griffiths
Oxford University Press, 216 pp., $6.95 (paper)
The illustrations in The Concise History of Avant-Garde Music include several 1950s and 1960s score pages that, considered as graphic art, compete favorably with the stage designs by Picasso, Leger, and others. Thus the blocks and ziggurats of an electronic piece by Ligeti may be compared, as a composition, to the cones of a Boccioni cover, and perhaps the book's most impressive picture in this sense is Stockhausen's Refrain, with its concentric arcs and transparent oblong diameter. The visual attractions of this music are an important compensation, moreover, since the sound cannot be imagined from the notation, and since Mr. Griffiths's text is unhelpful, a gamma-minus term paper, crammed with meaningless statements,[*] ineptly written, inaptly titled—more than half of the book is devoted to modern classics from the 1890s through the 1920s—and never redeemed by novelties of perspective or musical percipience.
Review, 1352 words
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