Vanessa-Mae has a personal fortune of £32 million. Last year she was listed as Britain's wealthiest "young" (I assume that means "under 30") entertainer.

Considering the split of CD revenue between performer and record company, I assume she was very profitable for EMI!

I'm still mystified as to why EMI dropped her contract, but it was at a time when they were shedding artists like they had the plague so she was by no means singled out as a liability. And considering they've recently invested quite a bit in advertising a compilation set of her EMI recordings, she must still be pretty profitable for them.

Richard,

Please don't think I am Schoenberg-bashing.  (Whilst some on this forum would, I wouldn't!)

Thanks for your last message - it gives the broader view and makes it clear (or at least puts a very good case) that there was no one off event at the start of the 20th century that could be seen as a watershed - the other side of which was music of a completely diffferent language that people could not related to.  I am won over by the concept of a gradual transition - thank you for describing it so clearly.  And also for reminding me that 'classical' music was never the preserve of the masses.

I think where I have spent a long time struggling to get to is here:


Really?  Does the 12-tone method espouse that each note of the western chromatic scale is equally as important as the other and none should be played less often than another?  Isn't this a 'rule'?  If following this rule has taken music in a very different direction from following an internalised reference to an existing  familiar sound world, it is becoming a different language (to use my loose terminology from before).

Where have rules directed music?

Tommo

It's a "rule" in the same way (and indeed for a closely similar reason) that consecutive fifths and octaves "shouldn't" occur in renaissance counterpoint. Which is to say, it's a general principle, instituted for entirely musical reasons, which in practice can bend and stretch according to the composer's requirements - don't forget that Berg's music is just as "serial" as Schoenberg's, in fact more so, since Berg's application of the 12-tone method is much more complex and systematic than Schoenberg's: nevertheless the music sounds as he wanted it to sound.
Well, the history of Western music is basically a history of changes, while the histories of other musics tend to focus much more on continuity - to take one example, the gagaku music of Japan didn't change between about 1000 AD and the 20th century, by which I mean neither the instrumentation nor the repertoire!

I wouldn't for a moment wish to doubt your word, but where did you get this information from? It seems hugely inflated to me, I mean she isn't really that well-known, is she, in comparison with the most successful pop artists? Maybe I have my head buried in the sand...

And... ta-daaa!

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/specials/rich_list_2006/

I can't give the direct link, but click "Young People" and "Full List". She's at number 10 (equal with their highnesses William and Harry  )

But seach by the "music" keyword and she doesn't even make the top 100 (how many people do you recognise who do?)

I am inclined to think that it could be argued to be both. Schönberg had to remain in control of his material (Schönberg was especially conscious of this, I think, although I would stop well short of describing him as a control freak, for all his obsessive intensities), even if he could not be in so much control of where his burgeoning imagination was inevitably leading him. The "free atonal idiom" of which Ian writes here had itself grown out of the "sometimes terrifying, hyper-intense results" of such tonal works as the first two numbered quartets and the first chamber symphony. The problem seems to me, however, to be that, when Schönberg had more or less established his dodecaphonic method of composition, he often seemed to feel impelled to simplify other aspects of his style lest the result be deemed too unapproachable and I cannot help but feel - however sacrilegious my admission may seem to some - that he never again reached the dizzy heights that he had scaled in his earlier music up to and including Erwartung, but that's another matter. So, in sum, I think that Schönberg saw his 12-note method as a logical extension of what he had been up to previously but that it was also seen by him as some kind of necessary leavening factor to maintain his cotrol over what he was creating.

I'm by no means sure that this is the case, but at the same time I'd need you, Ian, to go into rather more detail of what you mean by it before being certain as to whether or not I agree with you!

Best,

Alistair

Hi tommo

I don't really understand the syntax of Richard's sentence that you quoted there, but wanted to reply to your question about '12-tone music', and also to pick up on something you said about Schoenberg not following the rule against parallel fifths even in his earlier work (sorry, started typing this an hour and a half ago then got interrupted, some of this is now duplicated by other people's comments in the meantime):

What Schoenberg called 'composition with twelve tones' was never really as standardised as you seem to imagine. Part of the trouble is that it's often 'explained' without reference to actual pieces of music. Much of what you describe (the notion that no note should be sounded again before the other 11 have been worked through, etc.), while not entirely without foundation, doesn't really capture the diversity and flexibility of application of the technique even within Schoenberg's own work, where he's often much more concerned with things like relations of harmonic complementarity between hexachords of the row, the relation of a given row-form to specific 'preferred' (though piece-specific) inversions/retrogrades, etc. etc. Sure, it's in some ways quite an abstracted technique, but its application can also contain surprisingly intuitive features.

As for the so-called 'rule' against parallel fifths, that might more usefully be understood as a codification (after the fact?) of a number of overlapping 'standard practices', and I don't think it's particularly accurate to say that any given C20th composer 'wasn't following written rules', and to pit that idea against the idea of 'something internalised and subconscious'. Rather like sonata form, the rule only got written down in the first place at the point when it was no longer 'internalised and subconscious', i.e. no longer came naturally to composers ...

I'm not disagreeing at all and indeed bang on about this same point myself (er, on those social occasions where it seems apt anyway) but there do seem to be the odd exceptions. Fond as I am of Dvorak (and increasingly so, actually, somewhat to my surprise) I can't help thinking he does do just that at times. It's very difficult to hear a Dvorak symphony without thinking he has an Ikea template called 'The Rules of Sonata Form' by his side. It's lovely stuff but you just know what he's going to do next ('Locate Second Subject and Modulate to the Dominant.)  -  and then he does.

(Ducks behind sofa waving 'But I still like Dvorak' flag to placate irate members of the Dvorak Society.)