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A New Romanticism?
| Article
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10136 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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8 / 1986 |
2,182 Words |
| Author
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Kenneth LaFave
Ken LaFave is music editor of the Kansas City Star. |
Musicians and music-lovers who are looking for signs of Modernism's end and Romanticism's return (I suspect there are more of us than even we imagine) have lately been thrown a bone in the form of a curiosity called, deviously enough, "New Romanticism." Neither really new nor at all Romantic, "New Romanticism" is a twist on Modernism, a continuation of the familiar death march for Western music that certain mainstream composers and critics have been beating out for half a dozen decades.
Like most handy aesthetic or moral labels, this one was born in the press, its purpose being the lumping together of certain composers who didn't fit anywhere else. The movement is supposed to have incubated in the 1960s and is now said to be everywhere. (Or perhaps it has even peaked.) The "New Romantics" are said to include avid Del Tredici, George Rochberg, Frederic Rzewski, George Crumb, Joseph Schwantner, John Harbison, Christopher Rouse, and Tison Street, among the virtually countless others who have been so labeled. By extension, one could also include composers such as Joan Tower and Oliver Knussen, who have come to prominence since the "New Romanticism" emerged, and older composer like Hans Werner Henze and Ned Roared, who have always had flashes of Romanticism in their work. All of these composers are highly skilled, often deeply gifted, people. Some of them may even actually be romantics. But together, they do not constitute "New Romanticism
If they did, then surely the seasons in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and so forth would be resounding with populous, happy symphony audiences pouring forth praise for young Schumanns, new Liszts. After all, audiences show up in spades for the "old Romantics" - Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff,
... (1996 of 13289 Characters)
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