Page 16 - Weiss, Jernej, ur. 2018. Nova glasba v “novi” Evropi med obema svetovnima vojnama ?? New Music in the “New” Europe Between the Two World Wars. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 2
P. 16
nova glasba v »novi« evropi med obema svetovnima vojnama
but also by the rapid alternation of compositional techniques and the intro-
duction of numerous new ones. From this moment onwards, practically all
composers – to the extent that they were convinced by what appears to have
been the only truly significant indicator of the “modern” or progress at that
time – would attempt to establish their own compositional rules.
At the same time, however, one might ask whether all innovations, if
observed in closer detail, are not for the most part old things that are from
time to time simply dressed in new attire or placed in a different context. As
an example, we could cite Schönberg – one of the greatest innovators of the
first half of the twentieth century – who sought the new above all in an al-
tered context, by looking at the old from a different point of view, as he ex-
haustively demonstrates in his essay Brahms the Progressive.
For new music, a re-evaluation of values thus seems important – or
indeed essential in the case of Schönberg’s compositional approach. This
means that the “conservative revolutionary” observed the “rules” of com-
position from a different starting point and actually derived them from old
postulates. What was truly new thus came into being as a result of a shift of
relations between the vertical and horizontal and because of the changed
requirements of structuring the two fundamental principles of building.
This gives rise to a legitimate doubt about the logic of the polarisation
between “old” and “new” music, which gained particular currency when
Adorno developed his “philosophy of new music” in 1949 and the latter,
as an ideological/national construct from intellectual history, more or less
uncritically adopted the concept of “development” versus “restoration”. If
clear value-based dividing lines between “traditional” and “new” music ex-
ist in the historiographical tradition that has prevailed to date – which ac-
cording to Bekker’s definition of New Music is characterised above all by a
post-Adornian mentality – it will be necessary, in the light of the most re-
cent and increasingly unanimous views of various theorists with regard to
the earlier interpretation of the history and philosophy of twentieth-centu-
ry music, to subject its postulates to a thorough shake-up and perhaps base
them on different premises.
Last but not least, innovations always appear to depend on the context
in which they emerge, or the choice of parameters by which we define them.
It would be difficult to rank the Slovene composer Slavko Osterc among the
central innovators of the first half of the twentieth century in the broader
European context, yet we probably cannot deny him this role in the context
of Slovene music. This leads to a unique paradox originating in the question
14
but also by the rapid alternation of compositional techniques and the intro-
duction of numerous new ones. From this moment onwards, practically all
composers – to the extent that they were convinced by what appears to have
been the only truly significant indicator of the “modern” or progress at that
time – would attempt to establish their own compositional rules.
At the same time, however, one might ask whether all innovations, if
observed in closer detail, are not for the most part old things that are from
time to time simply dressed in new attire or placed in a different context. As
an example, we could cite Schönberg – one of the greatest innovators of the
first half of the twentieth century – who sought the new above all in an al-
tered context, by looking at the old from a different point of view, as he ex-
haustively demonstrates in his essay Brahms the Progressive.
For new music, a re-evaluation of values thus seems important – or
indeed essential in the case of Schönberg’s compositional approach. This
means that the “conservative revolutionary” observed the “rules” of com-
position from a different starting point and actually derived them from old
postulates. What was truly new thus came into being as a result of a shift of
relations between the vertical and horizontal and because of the changed
requirements of structuring the two fundamental principles of building.
This gives rise to a legitimate doubt about the logic of the polarisation
between “old” and “new” music, which gained particular currency when
Adorno developed his “philosophy of new music” in 1949 and the latter,
as an ideological/national construct from intellectual history, more or less
uncritically adopted the concept of “development” versus “restoration”. If
clear value-based dividing lines between “traditional” and “new” music ex-
ist in the historiographical tradition that has prevailed to date – which ac-
cording to Bekker’s definition of New Music is characterised above all by a
post-Adornian mentality – it will be necessary, in the light of the most re-
cent and increasingly unanimous views of various theorists with regard to
the earlier interpretation of the history and philosophy of twentieth-centu-
ry music, to subject its postulates to a thorough shake-up and perhaps base
them on different premises.
Last but not least, innovations always appear to depend on the context
in which they emerge, or the choice of parameters by which we define them.
It would be difficult to rank the Slovene composer Slavko Osterc among the
central innovators of the first half of the twentieth century in the broader
European context, yet we probably cannot deny him this role in the context
of Slovene music. This leads to a unique paradox originating in the question
14
