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Inventing Tradition: Webern's Piano Variations in Early Recordings


Type

Article

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Authors

Cook, Nicholas 

Abstract

jats:titleABSTRACT</jats:title>jats:pWebern's Piano Variations Op. 27 were first performed two years before the outbreak of the Second World War, but it was only after the war – and in very different aesthetic and ideological circumstances – that a performance tradition developed. Through a combination of computer‐assisted close reading and contextual analysis of the first movement, this article traces the competing stylistic and ideological directions of early performances – one deriving from the pre‐war tradition of the Schoenberg circle, the other from the European avant‐garde associated with Darmstadt and jats:italicDie Reihe</jats:italic> – and the processes of negotiation through which a more or less consensus interpretation emerged around the end of the 1960s. My aims are to explore ways in which empirical approaches can be deployed for musicological purposes, to relate recorded performances to their historical contexts and to link the story of Op. 27 to the development of music‐theoretical approaches that see performance as a function of compositional structure. Key recordings on which the article is based are presented online as Sonic Visualiser session files coordinated with the text.</jats:p>

Description

Keywords

3603 Music, 3604 Performing Arts, 36 Creative Arts and Writing

Journal Title

Music Analysis

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0262-5245
1468-2249

Volume Title

Publisher

Wiley
Sponsorship
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/J003417/1)
This article is an output of the project "Shadows of meaning: Webern's Piano Variations on record," funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose assistance is gratefully acknowledged.