I went to the Proms the other day and heard a selection of modernist pieces: Stravinsky; Berg; Bartok. The Alban Berg was the least popular with both my neighbours on either side of me. with whom I had separate conversations in the interval. The Berg piece, his violin concerto ‘To the memory of an Angel’ was written in 1932 and is dedicated to the first performer of the piece and an 18-year-old girl who had just died, the daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius, the girl being the angel of the dedication. It is a fairly difficult atonal piece compared to the rhythmic delights of Stravinsky and Bartok. I said to my neighbour that when I heard the Berg piece it evoked for me the Vienna of the early century, the Vienna of Freud, the sudden massive presence of the unconscious and the deep repressiveness of the culture, especially for women. Berg’s concerto evokes all of this in a shimmering nightmare world. My neighbour said he was frustrated that he couldn’t hear the violin clearly enough, it being drowned out by the orchestra. He blamed the conductor. I said that was the point maybe. The orchestra was suffocating the individual (in concertos the orchestra often seems to represent society and the solo instrument the individual). Consciously or unconsciously, Berg would be referring to the girl or to himself, who had harboured a secret lover and secret illegitimate daughter for years.
I had a similar different understanding of a piece of music another time after a concert of Mahler’s 6th symphony. In the toilets at the end of the concert I heard a man speaking to his friend saying it was a frustrating piece of music because a good tune starts but then keeps getting interrupted and sidetracked. We were in the urinals at the Royal Festival Hall at the time and, despite the inappropriateness of the location, could not help piping up. That was the point, I said. It’s a disjointed, fragmented new world that Mahler is in. The old romatic world is dead. Mahler is evoking the altered sensibility.
I suppose it is what you want from music. A purely musical experience or a formulation of psychological or cultural material.
peoplearerubbish 