Volume 11, Number 5 · September 26, 1968
The Genius Type
By Virgil Thomson
Notes of an Apprenticeship
by Pierre Boulez, translated by Herbert Weinstock
Knopf, 398 pp., $8.95
Penser la musique aujourdhui
by Pierre Boulez
Editions Gonthier (Mainz), 170 pp., 4.95 francs
Sémantique Musicale
by Alain Daniélou
Hermann (Paris), 118 pp., 24 francs
That the concept represented in popular aesthetics by avant-garde is applicable to music today, or in our century for that matter, would be hard to demonstrate. The idea that art has a continuous history that moves forward in both time and exploration is no less a trouble for dealing with the real artifacts, though a bit of it is required for explaining short-term developments like the classical symphony—Haydn through Schubert is only fifty years—or the growth of nontonal music from its germinal state of 1899 in Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht to the completed formulation of the twelve-tone method around 1923.
Review, 4284 words
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