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Leopold Spinner: The Last Phase
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
Extract
Leopold Spinner died on 12 August 1980; and with him one of the few remaining direct links with the second Viennese school. Since the publication of my earlier two articles on Spinner's music, one or two more works have been published. There have been isolated performances; for example, the Sonatina for Violoncello and Piano has been performed, and it has also been broadcast in Austria; and the songs, op.8 and op. 16, were broadcast on BBC Radio 3 last year. But these serve only to emphasize the extent to which the musical world at the moment fails to notice the existence of a composer whose ideals are precision and economy of statement, development, and form; clarity of texture; and a syntax based on that ‘predominance and total engagement of motivic obligation as the structurally unifying factor in a complete fusion between traditional homophonic concepts and the strictest polyphonic presentation’ to which Spinner himself, speaking of Webern, referred. Not until we see that the communication of genuinely original musical thought and feeling is achieved by uncompromisingly personal extension of a tradition — and not by climbing onto one of the fashionable band-waggons (‘texture’, ‘systems’, allusion to or quotation of the more comfortable aspects of the 19th century, or whatever)—will we respond to Spinner's music. In the meantime, deaf to a significant individual voice and resistant to the possibilities of further development inherent in the language spoken by that voice, it is we who are the losers.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981
References
page 2 note 1 ‘The Music of Leopold Spinner’ (TEMPO 109, June 1974); ‘Leopold Spinner's Later Music’ (TEMPO 110, September 1974).
page 6 note 1 It is noteworthy, incidentally, that the envelope of sketches includes a neatly-written fair score and a cello part in ink. Both of them contain pencil emendations (which were observed in the Austrian broadcast of June 1974); but in the full score many of these have been erased, and other pencillings added which bring it to the condition of the final printed score.
page 12 note 1 Other calculations abound. Dynamics, for example, are often controlled by permutations of groups such as pp - p - mp - p (from no.V). But it is interesting to see from the sketches that many of these structural and textural restrictions emerged gradually: the fifth song, for instance, was at one time thought of in six voices, two homophonic trios moving polyphonically against each other in two streams of block chords.
page 16 note 1 I have already discussed this problem at length in the second of my articles on Spinner's music; see TEMPO 110, pp. 24–25. I should like, however, to take this opportunity to correct a small misunderstanding on my part. On p. 18 (op.cit.), I referred to the semiquaver rest in Ex. 5 as a slight license. It is now clear to me from my analyses of Spinner's later works that, as indicated in the present article, this is already an example of Spinner's predilection for introducing rhythmic variety and establishing new motivic connexions by the use of literal rather than perceptual retrogrades: the rest belongs to the duration of the following note.