Berg Piano Sonata, Op. 1: an Explanation (and Homebrew!)
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- čas přidán 28. 07. 2024
- Alban Berg's Piano Sonata, Op. 1 is one of his greatest works- and also the very first piece he ever wrote! What makes this piece tick, and what gave Berg the inspiration, and motivation, to get these ideas onto paper? In this video, we'll discuss a bit of Berg's life and the theory of his Sonata.
We've also paired this piece with one of our homebrews: Captain Lawrence's Liquid Gold, a Belgian style ale. We think it fits perfectly- but what beer would you pair with Alban Berg?
Alban Berg: Piano Sonata Op. 1, an Explanation
Illya Filshtinskiy, piano, film, editing, and all of the hard things
Katha Zinn, moral support, talking, research and hand gestures
atonalhits.com/
open.spotify.com/album/1mcV9d...
itunes.apple.com/us/album/bac... - Hudba
A talented musician and pedagogician which understands modernist/atonal music that is also an CZcamsr?
We are blessed.
I have known this piece since high school, which means a long long time ago, and always loved it very much. Thanks for the words, they add to my good memory of the piece!
Idit Shemer thank you Idit. Finally got a moment to reflect on this in some other ways. Will we meet at Avaloch by chance this fall?
Berg is a favorite of mine, especially the Altenberg Lieder. Thanks for filling in the background gaps in my knowledge of Berg.
thomas jones thanks for watching. This is really only the tip of the iceberg. Berg is an amazing composer!
Berg and Beer - Bravo!
Greg beer will go great with most music!
LOL....A goddamn beer commercial!!! 🍺🍺🍺🍺🍻🍻🍻
I need to try that beer!
Alfonso Molina you must! But come to NYC first! Will make it worth your while.
aTonalHits sounds like a plan!!, that would be amazing.
Berg composed MANY pieces before Op. 1, of which the Sieben Frühe Lieder are only the best known. The sonata was merely his first *published* work.
czcams.com/video/g8cxKPRGFIs/video.html The Lieder, here sung by Von Otter. Any recommendations?
@@wramrobertodecamargoaccors4679 That one is great, but Von Otter is even better when backed up by the Vienna Philharmonic and Abbado in Berg's luminous orchestration (made many years after the songs were composed): czcams.com/video/BmVSlH1qgsM/video.html
And I just ran across this, which is pretty amazing: czcams.com/video/bE85ldyYfZM/video.html
4:06 sounds like wagner
Isn't it lovely? A totally underrated piece!
It is said that the twelve-tone system was developed not because tonal music had reached a final point of exhaustion (as music history might lead us to wrongly believe), but in order for music to avoid expressing ideas or feelings and being emotionally descriptive, concentrating instead on the "pure" aesthetic sounds of notes themselves and their aural effects upon listeners. While no doubt innovative and nice, the introduction of the twelve-tone system precipitated the "end" of symphonic tonal music as we know it, and prematurely so perhaps, diverting the natural course of musical history. One wonders which paths tonal music might have taken were it not for the emergence of the twelve-tone music mainly from Schoenberg and Berg, taking music to the route of the "iceBergs" (pun intended) in my estimation, though Berg's Sonata 1 constitutes wonderful music and a delight to hear (the same can't be said of many of the atonal works which followed it though). Therefore, while I acknowledge that atonal music is no doubt interesting, it did cut traditional tonal music short ahead of time. Isn't it that, in the end, the twelve-tone system's goal was almost the same as Brahms' in tonal music, that is, to compose music that would not be made up of sound description landscapes and mood-attached music? What was the price paid for twelve-tone music? It didn't let traditional tonal music come to its end in a natural way. Keep up the good work, congrats for your channel, from Brazil.
But of course, this piece was composed over a decade before Schoenberg's discovery (as pianist Eduard Steuermann described it) of the twelve-tone system.
Btw, whoever said "it is said," etc., it was not Schoenberg. Schoenberg wrote that "You use the row and compose as you had done it previously. That means: Use the same kind of form OR EXPRESSION [emphasis added], the same themes, melodies, sounds, rhythms as you used before." ("Schoenberg's Tone-Rows," 1936, reprinted in "Style and Idea."
@@absinthesizer That's correct indeed. Maybe Schoenberg himself didn't really intend to put an end to tonal music, but the fact is that a whole cultural mindset did change and composers gradually started to look away from tonalism for new directions in their compositions, forever changing the course of music and perhaps precociously stifling that which the tonal system still had to offer.
@@wramrobertodecamargoaccors4679 What undermined the creative commitment to tonality was a pair of world wars, which caused people to question the values of the Western culture of which they were the climax. (And it was obviously correct to do so, although a number of babies got thrown out with an immense amount of bathwater.) Before WWII, only a handful of Germans composed serial music; afterwards, it had an enormous international vogue for about 30 years. The fact that the Nazis actively persecuted modernist composers was probably a plus.
(Btw, Richard Cohn's "Audacious Euphony" is a magnificent, although off-puttingly dense, study of late pre-Serial tonality.)
I was a composition student as "The Age of Webern" was ending in the 1970s - and it was probably the worst academic classical music ever. A terrible time to study composition, but eventually I got over it. ;-)
@@absinthesizer Well said! I forgot to take WWII into account and it surely was the main driving force behind such a radical change. I had never thought about that as an influence, and there is no doubt that the Nazis have been central to this. BTW, are you an atonal composer? I can only enjoy atonal music (such as this fantastic piece by Berg) if it somehow manages to relate to and stir my emotions in a meaningful way as tonal music does (And perhaps Berg's Sonata 1 even stays on the brink between tonal and atonal vocabularies and that is why it is so interesting to listen to). Atonal music should not be just a "cheapo" version of its tonal counterpart. It must be elaborate and refined and rely on its own terms and resources (again, such as it happens in this piece by Berg). In fact, if I were able to compose, I'd try to do it like they used to in Mozart's time. And for those who say that this can't be done (as they claim that moods and culture have changed) I beg to disagree, as I think there is no such thing as not being able to resource from a given era's moods and style; what happens is that there certainly are good and bad composers out there, either tonally or otherwise. Composers that either know or don't know how to be creatively productive in their idioms of choice.
@@wramrobertodecamargoaccors4679 Thanks for your reply. I'm a composer, but almost never atonal. My only mature 12-tone work is the 3rd movement of "Ludlow," and I used it here in order to simplify the process: I wanted to "draw" the piece, creating curves and arcs, and using a tone-row relieved me of the task of thinking a lot about the individual notes.
soundcloud.com/marnest-1/ludlow-3-fire
Berg's 12-tone works continue to fascinate people because they keep reminding us of tonality without lapsing into actual tonality - it's like looking at something familiar from an unfamiliar angle. One reason for this is the kinds of sets he uses: Large portions of three of his final four works - the Lyric Suite, "Der Wein," and "Lulu" - are based on sets in which the first six notes are a Guidonian hexachord (e.g., C-D-E-F-G-A, the maximum number of diatonic notes not contaning a tritone) and the last six notes are ANOTHER Guidonian hexachord transposed by a tritone. (e.g., F#-G#-A#-B-C#-D#). This results in music that's not tonal but also is not extremely dissonant, and full of chords we recognize but within a context that makes them seem new.
Your response to atonal music is fairly common and completely valid - hard-core atonality is an acquired taste, and for 99.99% of people there's no need to go to any trouble seeking to acquire it. I recently introduced a student to 12-tone music, and his response surprised me, but probably shouldn't have:
The opening of Schoenberg's "Moses und Aron": "Meh. It sounds like the scary music in every horror movie I've ever seen."
The adagio from Berg's "Lulu": "That interests me A LOT!"