Editing Anton Webern (section)

====Contested canonization====
Webern's legacy, contested in the "serial wars",{{efn|This was Michael Broyles' term.{{sfn|Broyles|2004|loc=153–175}}}} remained subject to [[polemic]] vicissitudes. [[Musicologist]]s quarreled{{sfn|Adamson|2003|loc=415}}{{efn|Robert Fink described a "general disciplinary crisis". In [[new musicology]] and [[postmodernism]], canons were questioned, and pluralism was promoted. [[Lawrence Kramer (musicologist)|Lawrence Kramer]] and [[Susan McClary]] emphasized musical meaning. Taruskin criticized the canon's [[Eurocentrism]], Germanism (especially in Schoenberg's, Webern's, and Dahlhaus's work), and [[colonialism]].}} amid the "Restoration of the 1980s", as Martin Kaltenecker termed a [[paradigm shift]] from structure to perception within musicological discourse.{{efn|Johnson also described several shifts.}} [[Charles Rosen]] scorned "historical criticism ... avoiding any serious engagement with a work or style ... one happens not to like".{{sfn|Rosen|2012|loc=246}} Andreas Holzer warned of "[[Post-truth|post-factual]] tendencies".{{sfn|Holzer|2019|loc=293–308}}{{efn|In relation to post-Webernism more generally, Holzer slammed attempts "to place [[Darmstädter Ferienkurse|Darmstadt]] in a fascistoid corner or even identifying it as a US propaganda institution amid the [[Cold War]]" ({{lang|de|"Darmstadt in ein 'faschistoides' Eck zu stellen oder es gar als Propagandainstitution der USA im Kalten Krieg auszuweisen"}}) via "unbelievable distortions, exaggerations, reductions and propagation of clichés" ({{lang|de|"unglaublichen Verdrehungen, Übertreibungen, Verkürzungen und Propagierungen von Klischeebildern"}}).{{sfn|Holzer|2019|loc=294}}}} Pamela M. Potter advised considering "the complexity of ... day-to-day existence" under Nazism, partly in considering the relevance of composers' politics to their [[Western canon|canonic]] status.{{sfn|Potter|2005|loc=446}} Meanwhile [[Allen Forte]] and Bailey Puffett formally [[musical analysis|analyzed]] Webern's atonal and twelve-tone {{lang|fr|œuvres}} respectively.

[[Tim Page (music critic)|Tim Page]] noted less formalist readings of Webern's work at his 1983 birth centenary.<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/30/arts/critic-s-notebook-re-evaluations-of-webern-s-music.html |title=Critic's Notebook; Re-evaluations of Webern's music |newspaper=The New York Times |date=30 Jun 1983 |last1=Page |first1=Tim |archive-date=3 March 2024 |access-date=3 March 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240303055146/https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/30/arts/critic-s-notebook-re-evaluations-of-webern-s-music.html |url-status=live }}</ref> The occasion "went almost unmarked", [[Glenn Watkins]] observed in the United States, "a fate hardly imaginable for Berg [on his] 1985 [centenary]". After Webern's mid-century "meteoric ascension and ultimate canonization",{{sfn|Watkins|1988|loc=390–391, 528–529}} Watkins described "quick shifts of interest" tapering to neglect.{{sfn|Watkins|1994|loc=465}} Webern's music was established but infrequent in [[Standard (music)|standard]] (repeating) orchestral [[repertoire]].{{sfn|Bols|2020|loc=205}}{{efn|In a survey of five prestigious British and French orchestras, his music was played 121 times{{sfn|Bols|2020|loc=265}} and Beethoven's 1,198 times between 1967 and 2017.{{sfn|Bols|2020|loc=250}} In a US orchestra survey of the "top 100 composers in terms of works performed", his music was played 175 times and Mozart's 7,103 times between 2000 and 2009.{{sfn|London|2013|loc=85}}}} His {{lang|fr|œuvre}} was played at the [[Venice Festival of Contemporary Music]] (1983),{{sfn|Fontana|2023|loc={{lang|it|"Non è triste Venezia"}}}} [[Juilliard]] (1995), and the [[Vienna Festival]] (2004), echoing six international festivals in his name (1962–1978).{{efn|Surveying institutions and performers, [[Ian Pace]] described New Music and its performance institutions as [[subcultural]] within [[classical music]].{{sfn|Pace|2022b|loc=396–397}}}} In some obscurity (1941 or 1942), Webern had been quietly sure that "in the future even the postman will whistle my melodies!"{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=540–543}} But many did not acquire such an [[aesthetic taste]].{{sfnm|Bols|2020|1loc=207–208|Kramer|2016|2loc=38, 41, 55–57}}{{efn|"[A]tonal music is [like] random notes" in its [[macroharmony]], [[Dmitri Tymoczko]] suggested as one reason.{{sfn|Tymoczko|2011|loc=181–186}} Building on Tymoczko's work, Joshua Ballance described Webern's Opp. 1–31 partly in its macroharmonies, emphasizing the already [[Chromaticism#Types of chromaticism|totally chromatic]] macroharmonies of the pre-dodecaphonic mid-period {{lang|de|Lieder}}.{{sfn|Ballance|2023|loc=Abstract, 39–42, 69–74, 103–104, 107–108, 232–234}} J. Kramer believed such music as Webern's required the listener to learn more about it in order to understand it and noted that only some listeners did.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=41, 43, 47–48, 53}} In this sense, he wrote, it is elitist music.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=41}} While he asserted that Schoenberg and Stravinsky were "generally understood to be well within the cultural mainstream" by contrast to avant-garde radicals like Satie, [[Henry Cowell]], or [[Luigi Russolo]],{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=43}} he considered that Ives and Webern straddled radical and progressive sensibilities.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=38, 47–48}} He also noted that modernism fared better in Europe than in the US, which he ascribed to differences in education and also to the commercialization of increasingly unsubsidized art music particularly in the US.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=56–57, 201–204}}}} He remained polarizing and provocative.{{sfnm|Ahrend and Münnich|2018|Clampitt|2009|2loc=195|Erwin|2020|3loc=93–94|Kramer|2016|4loc=38, 47–48, 55–57|Miller|2022b}}{{efn|J. Kramer noted that audiences gradually became less shocked and more indifferent, at least in the US.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=47–48}}}}

Noting this aspect of his reception, Johnson described Webern's "almost unique position in the canon of Western composers".{{sfn|Johnson|1997|loc=61}} Christian Thorau argued Webern's innovations impeded his "{{lang|de|exoterischen Kanonisierung|italics=no}}".{{sfn|Thorau|2013|loc=549}}{{efn|"exoteric canonization"}} By contrast to the "concert canon", Shreffler considered Webern's better standing in a "separate canon" of technical and formal innovation.{{sfn|Shreffler|2013|loc=617 (German), 11 (English)}}{{efn|"Don't write music entirely by ear", Webern told Searle: "Your ears will always guide you ... but you must ''know'' why" (emphasis in original).{{sfnm|Kozbelt|2016|1loc=46|Searle and Webern|1940|2loc=405}} Webern's music was associated with "intellectual order".{{sfn|Johnson|1997|loc=61}} He innovated musically and conceptually, challenging audiences.{{sfn|Kozbelt|2016|loc=32–35, 44–47}} Julian Johnson argued that criticisms of composers' innovations were a "constant of musical modernity for four hundred years", from {{lang|it|[[seconda pratica|il nuove musiche]]}} to {{lang|de|die neue Musik}}. He quoted [[Girolamo Mei]] writing to [[Vincenzo Galilei]] in 1572: "[N]ot to appear ... inferior ... these musicians precipitated themselves at breakneck speed ... to discover always new styles and new forms of song [which] were not understood [or] felt".{{sfn|Johnson, J|2015|loc=32–33, 57–58, 320}} Mei wrote Galilei that in these innovations composers followed their ears, not their intellects.{{sfn|Mei|1998|loc=494–495}}}} Burkholder argued that music of the "historicist tradition",{{efn|For [[J. Peter Burkholder]], [[musical historicism]] as a mainstream intellectual tradition proper began in Brahms's generation's ''[[l'art pour l'art]]'' and more introverted musical experience. It intensified in Schoenberg's generation with increasing engagement with [[Classical music#History|stylistic history]] as impetus to compositional innovation. Distantly and obliquely echoing [[Charles Burney]]'s work, it flowered amid [[Hegelianism]] and theories of [[History of evolutionary thought|biological]] and [[Sociocultural evolution|social]] evolution or [[progress]]. Burkholder distinguished between more progressive historicism (Schoenberg's ''[[Erwartung]]''), more emulative cases (Strauss's ''[[Ariadne auf Naxos]]''), and mixed examples (Berg's ''[[Wozzeck]]''). He noted the assimilation of peripheral [[nationality|national]] [[Musical nationalism|music traditions]] for novelty but emphasized that innovation occurred even within those contexts.{{sfn|Burkholder|1983|loc=118–124}}}} including Webern's, was secure in "a musical museum", "for that is what the concert hall has become".{{sfn|Burkholder|1983|loc=116–118, 127–134}}{{efn|Burkholder and [[Lydia Goehr]], among others, traced the history of orchestras' (and other institutions') [[museum]]-like function in producing and presenting "civilized", "elite", or "important" (if sometimes "difficult", "serious", or "unpopular") music as artwork, not without regard to audiences.{{sfnm|Burkholder|1983|1loc=116–118, 120, 125–131, 133–134|Goehr|1992|2loc=7–8, 13, 55–56, 60-61, 117–119, 120–122, 172–175, 178, 190–216, 232–257, 264, 273–286}}}} Mark Berry described Webern, already among Boulez's "big five", as one of five "canonical pillars of classic historical early twentieth-century modernism".{{efn|The others, in both cases, were Bartók, Berg, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky.{{sfnm|Berry|2019|1loc=43|Nattiez|2004|2loc=74–75}} In Joseph N. Straus's account of how modernists recast tradition,{{sfn|Straus|1990|loc=16–17}} they were "the exemplars" on whom he focused.{{sfn|Straus|1990|loc=vii}} [[Ensemble intercontemporain]] played them often at Boulez's [[IRCAM]] as "classics" in the 1980s, which [[Georgina Born]] argued contributed to their canonization.{{sfn|Born|1995|loc=172–175}} In considering the US context, J. Kramer wrote that Bartók, Stravinsky, and especially Schoenberg and Webern were not often played or widely understood but nonetheless backed as central to canon of [[20th-century classical music]] in terms of theory and analysis by academics with a shared perspective (who constituted a significant plurality of composers).{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=38–40, 199–200}} He considered Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Webern "quintessential modernists of the early twentieth century".{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=47–48}}}} David H. Miller suggested Webern "achieved a certain kind of acceptance and canonization".{{sfn|Miller|2022b|loc="Epilogue; or, it matters how you flop"}}

Taruskin prioritized [[audience reception]], not "musical utopianism".{{sfn|Taruskin|2009c|loc=xiii–xiv}}{{efn|For Taruskin, pitch sets did not "conform to the physics of sound", and "optimism about human adaptability ... is the same ... that drives all utopian thinking."{{sfnm|Taruskin|1994|1loc=¶7–8|Scherzinger with Hoad|1997|2loc=127–128}}}} He excoriated the Second Viennese School's "idiosyncratic view of the past", linking Webern and Adler to [[Eduard Hanslick]] and "neo-[[Hegel]]ian" [[Franz Brendel]];{{sfn|Taruskin|2011|loc=3–4}}{{efn|J. Kramer characterized early modernists (e.g., Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Webern) and even the early modernist avant-garde (e.g., Satie, Cowell, Russolo, [[Edgar Varèse]]) as "trapped" in continuous historical development.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=14–15}} Seeing themselves as innovators entailed both conceiving of history as linear progress and rejecting prior concepts of music, he explained.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=14–15}} Modernists engaged and competed with the dominant music of the past, which they reinvented.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=15}}}} he criticized [[historical determinism]], "the natural ally of totalitarian politics."{{sfnm|Taruskin|2023b|1loc=518–519|Taruskin|2009a|2loc=413}} Martin Scherzinger noted that Taruskin's criticisms sought "active complicity with undesirable politics".{{sfn|Scherzinger with Hoad|1997|loc=63–65, 147}}{{efn|For Taruskin, "the legacy of fascism is an inseparable ... facet of the lofty legacy of modernism".{{sfnm|Adlington|2019|1loc=217, 231n9|Taruskin|2009f|2loc=212}} Krasner told ''[[Fanfare (magazine)|Fanfare]]'' Webern "packed me off quickly" upon the Anschluss "for my safety but perhaps ... to avoid ... embarrassment ... had his family arrived, or friends celebrating ... Nazi entry".{{sfn|Krasner and Seibert|1987|loc=343}} Taruskin cited Krasner to claim Webern joyfully welcomed the Nazis upon the Anschluss.{{sfn|Taruskin|2009f|loc=211–212}} In his "How Talented Composers Become Useless" postscript, Taruskin wrote, "The Nazis had every right to criticize Schoenberg ... . It is not for their criticism that we all revile them."{{sfnm|Taruskin|1996b|Taruskin|2009d|2loc=92}} He compared Leibowitz to [[Goebbels]], found "Nazi resonances" in Eimert's "only composers who follow Webern are worthy of the name," and likened Boulez's "[s]ince the Viennese discoveries, any musician who has not experienced ... the necessity of dodecaphonic language is USELESS" to the [[Zhdanov Doctrine]].{{sfnm|Holzer|2019|1loc=305|Taruskin|2009a|2loc=18–19}}}} Noted for his [[polemic]]ism and [[Historical revisionism|revisionism]],<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/arts/music/richard-taruskin-dead.html |title=Richard Taruskin, Vigorously Polemical Musicologist, Dies at 77 |newspaper=The New York Times |date=1 July 2022 |last1=Robin |first1=William |archive-date=2 July 2022 |access-date=24 September 2022 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20220702000313/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/arts/music/richard-taruskin-dead.html |url-status=live }}; {{harvnb|Bolcom|2004|loc=52}}; {{harvnb|Bolcom|2016}}; {{harvnb|Forte|1986|loc=321}}; {{harvnb|Ho|2011|loc=200}}; {{harvnb|Kosman|2014}}; {{harvnb|MacDonald|n.d.}}; {{harvnb|Mitchinson|2001|loc=34}}; {{harvnb|Pace|2022a}}; {{harvnb|Schuijer|2008|loc=23}}</ref>{{efn|"Of all in the volumes in this series," Taruskin referred to his ''Oxford History'', "this one, covering the first half of the twentieth century, surely differs the most radically from previous accounts".{{sfn|Taruskin|2009b|loc=xiv, xx}}}} Taruskin described his "dubious reputation" on Webern and [[Neue Musik|New Music]]{{sfnm|Eichner|2012|1loc=28|Taruskin|2009e|2loc=397|Taruskin|2011|3loc=3–4|White|2008|4loc=203}} and was praised and criticized{{efn|Rosen charged Taruskin's "hostile presentation ... does not result in historical objectivity".{{sfn|Rosen|2012|loc=246}} Max Erwin considered Taruskin's work on the ''Darmstädter Ferienkurse'' "passionately negative"{{sfn|Erwin|2021|loc=71}} and "thoroughly discredited",{{sfn|Erwin|2020|loc=119}} particularly that "Adorno or Leibowitz officiated with near-dictatorial power".{{sfn|Erwin|2019|loc=45}} Rodney Lister wrote, "Taruskin's purpose ... is to bury Webern, not to praise him", noting "the increasing importance of 'motivization' over the course of the 19th century and of the 'collapse' of (traditional) tonality [is] something which Taruskin flatly states never took place."{{sfnm|Lister|2006|1loc=52|Taruskin|2011|2loc=3}} Larson Powell found "Taruskin's ... references to Webern's politics ... to discredit the music."{{sfn|Powell|2013|loc=3}} {{ill|Christian Utz|de}} agreed with {{ill|Martin Zenck|de}} that Taruskin's claims were "simplifying and distorting", granting "authoritarian rhetoric ... in ... the 1950s and 60s" and the nonexistence of "'apolitical music'".{{sfn|Utz|2021|loc=114}} Holzer also sympathized with but found Taruskin inappropriate and simplistic.{{sfn|Holzer|2019|loc=305}}}} by many. For [[Franklin Cox]], Taruskin was an unreliable historian who opposed the Second Viennese School's "progressivist [[Musical historicism|historicist]]" [[emancipation of the dissonance]] with a "reactionary historicist" ideology of "tonal restoration".{{sfn|Cox|2011|loc=1, 36–38, 53}}