No abstract
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Music Library Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Notes.The sound-world of Berg, Mahler, and Zemlinsky, once the height of "ultra-modernity," has now perhaps lost some of its edge because of its increased familiarity; there is even the occasional appearance of Berg's Lulu (in the Met production) on public television. Yet something remains of the novelty of this music-with its unparalleled idealism and frenetic striving for ecstasies of enlightenment-many years and many cultural revolutions after it was written. Something remains of the personalities of these composers and their belief that Art, Life, Love, and Death are all part of the same overwhelming continuum. This is so because these composers' most characteristic musical idioms are inseparable from a world-view that invests every motive, every gesture with quasi-totemic meaning. Bergwhose compulsive and encyclopedic crossreferencing of musical symbols is documented byJarman, Perle, and Reich-seems in particular to have been farther removed from the concept of "absolute music" than virtually any other Western composer before or since.Into this all-encompassing universe of sound-philosophy and metaphysical rhythms steps R6bert Wittinger, whose Intreccio attempts to recapture the sound of crackling fire without its heat or its cauterizing force. Subtitled a "Sinfonietta per orchestra," this work suffers gravely from the ill effects of its own successes. Like a character from a medieval legend whose barter with the devil results in the all-too-literal realization of a cherished wish, Wittinger buys unity at the price of flexibility and momentum. Within a few moments of the opening measures his carefully wrought textures fall into a dull routine. Fourths, neatly stacked, alternate with pseudo-tonal successions in a lifeless parody of Berg's more accessible moments. Afaux-naif melody-the kind of thing that too often passes for folk music in the symphonic literature-enters at the end of the "Preludio" and further constricts the composer's painfully reptilian grasp of his materials. The melody, which forms the basis of the extended variation movement to follow, limits Wittinger even further in that the number of plausible interfaces between its "neo-tonality" and the "pan-chromati-
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