Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Musical Examples
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Schoeck and the Swiss
- 1 Childhood and Youth
- 2 Wolf amidst the Sheep
- 3 Leipzig, Munich, and an Awful Little Moustache
- 4 Back in the Fold
- 5 Hermann Hesse, via the Dentist
- 6 Look Back in Melancholy
- 7 Chamber Music
- 8 The Art of Counterpoint
- 9 Busoni
- 10 The Picture on the Wall
- 11 Touch of Venus
- 12 Silent Bronze
- 13 Sucking Sweet Folly
- 14 Self Portrait, with Sandwich
- 15 Elegy
- 16 Goodbye to Geneva
- 17 The Bee in the Rose
- 18 Raging Queen
- 19 Storms in the Pigeon Loft
- 20 Into the Vortex
- 21 Wrong-Note Rag
- 22 Hildebill
- 23 Variations and Fugue on an Age-Old Theme
- 24 Put to the Wheel
- 25 Gisela
- 26 Lost in the Stars
- 27 Whores and Madonnas
- 28 “… he can write music all right…”
- 29 Tea with (Ms.) Hitler
- 30 Aryanizing Music
- 31 Arms and the Man
- 32 Castles in the Air
- 33 Goering's Bullshit
- 34 Collapse
- 35 The People at Home
- 36 The Reckoning
- 37 Transfigured Summer Nights
- 38 Silent Lights
- 39 Fair Measure
- 40 Rather Nice Horn
- 41 Sleepless in Wollishofen
- 42 Echoes and Elegies
- 43 Running on Empty
- Epilogue
- Othmar Schoeck: Concise Work Catalogue and Discography
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
Epilogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Musical Examples
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Schoeck and the Swiss
- 1 Childhood and Youth
- 2 Wolf amidst the Sheep
- 3 Leipzig, Munich, and an Awful Little Moustache
- 4 Back in the Fold
- 5 Hermann Hesse, via the Dentist
- 6 Look Back in Melancholy
- 7 Chamber Music
- 8 The Art of Counterpoint
- 9 Busoni
- 10 The Picture on the Wall
- 11 Touch of Venus
- 12 Silent Bronze
- 13 Sucking Sweet Folly
- 14 Self Portrait, with Sandwich
- 15 Elegy
- 16 Goodbye to Geneva
- 17 The Bee in the Rose
- 18 Raging Queen
- 19 Storms in the Pigeon Loft
- 20 Into the Vortex
- 21 Wrong-Note Rag
- 22 Hildebill
- 23 Variations and Fugue on an Age-Old Theme
- 24 Put to the Wheel
- 25 Gisela
- 26 Lost in the Stars
- 27 Whores and Madonnas
- 28 “… he can write music all right…”
- 29 Tea with (Ms.) Hitler
- 30 Aryanizing Music
- 31 Arms and the Man
- 32 Castles in the Air
- 33 Goering's Bullshit
- 34 Collapse
- 35 The People at Home
- 36 The Reckoning
- 37 Transfigured Summer Nights
- 38 Silent Lights
- 39 Fair Measure
- 40 Rather Nice Horn
- 41 Sleepless in Wollishofen
- 42 Echoes and Elegies
- 43 Running on Empty
- Epilogue
- Othmar Schoeck: Concise Work Catalogue and Discography
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
Summary
The compositional development of Othmar Schoeck mirrored that of many of his contemporaries, from Strauss to Bartók: Romantic beginnings in the wake of Wagner and Brahms led inexorably to the cusp of atonality (and occasionally beyond it), from which there was then a retreat (an admittedly loaded word) into an aesthetic variously neoclassical or neo-Romantic or both. The return to tonality of Bartók, Strauss, Stravinsky, and others has been much investigated, and in the case of those composers who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s it has often been postulated that it was the need to make a living in the New World that encouraged them to write in a more accessible idiom. But this is tantamount to asserting that American audiences are less cultivated, less intelligent than European ones. While this arrogance matches perfectly the anti-American cultural chauvinism that has long been latent in Europe, we must not forget that every composer has to earn a living, and a composer who is compelled to find his feet in a new environment—be it New York, California, or anywhere else on the globe—will probably endeavor to ingratiate himself as quickly as possible in order to meet his basic needs. For a composer to “remain true” to his art and end up starving in a Bohemian garret rather than compromise his modernity and live, is a concept far more attractive to romanticizing musicologists than it ever has been to composers themselves.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Othmar SchoeckLife and Works, pp. 317 - 326Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009