The Leamington man Robert Simpson wrote but destroyed four entire symphonies before he got going. It reminds one of Brahms does it not? Here is his conclusion:
"Schönberg is far from being my favorite composer, but it so happens that the idea for a new treatment of tonality came to me from listening, not to Nielsen or any other composer I love, but to Schönberg's Piano Concerto, many years ago. It struck me that in spite of the serial technique the work was fixed to a tonal centre, which loomed periodically behind the murk, and was deliberately avoided at the end - as if Schönberg had finally made a fearsome effort to exorcise a ghost. I thought then, though I didn't know how, that it might be possible to make a positive use of this phenomenon. I didn't want, as Schönberg did, to deny tonality - I wanted to find a way to make tonal centres react against each other, not make non-tonality react against tonality. I felt (and still feel) that to try to anaesthetise the listener's tonal sense was to deny oneself a powerful means of expression. So atonality was not for me."
But the thing is "atonality" was not for Schönberg either. He rejected it as absurd and promoted pantonality which is a procedure very different from both "atonality" and "non-tonality."
Do members agree that his Piano Concerto is fixed to a tonal centre and contains that looming ghost? Whose music do they prefer - Simpson's or Schönberg's? And by the bye how could any one possibly love Nielsen?
I don't think Schönberg recognised atonality as something that existed but was absurd, did he? He rather found the word an absurd label for what he was doing. I tend to take the view myself that it's not such a problematic term once we get into his serial period; however, I'd also agree that the ghost of tonality is often present in the works of that period. In the Piano Concerto it's so conscious (and in a way, so contrived) that this is less interesting than in certain other works.
As for Simpson, he's much
less of a 'tonal' composer than is often thought. His way of putting pitches together in a piece like the Ninth Symphony is not very far from Lutoslawski's or Carter's. But I usually find the middleground and background activity in his symphonies more interesting than the foreground, and I think you could certainly see the influence of a notional dialogue between tonal and non-tonal organising principles there.
'By the by', isn't it? And why was the Leamington man Robert Simpson spelling 'favourite' like an American?
