Contents

Music in the Late Twentieth Century

POLARIZATION

Chapter:
CHAPTER 1 Starting from Scratch
Source:
MUSIC IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Author(s):
Richard Taruskin

All of this can be seen in the ultimate statement of the Stunde Null position: “Schoenberg est mort” (“Schoenberg is dead”), a manifesto published in February 1952, seven months after Schoenberg's death, by Pierre Boulez (b. 1925), a young French composer who had studied officially with Messiaen, and with Leibowitz on the side. The violence that Leibowitz had predicted certainly came to the fore in Boulez's frantically coercive and intolerant rhetoric. No one who has read the article has ever forgotten its frightening climax, expanded in a somewhat later squib into a battle cry: “Since the Viennese discoveries, any musician who has not experienced—I do not say understood, but truly experienced—the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is USELESS. For his entire work brings him up short of the needs of his time.”24

Citation (MLA):
Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 1 Starting from Scratch." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 7 Feb. 2025. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-001007.xml>.
Citation (APA):
Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 1 Starting from Scratch. In Oxford University Press, Music in the Late Twentieth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 7 Feb. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-001007.xml
Citation (Chicago):
Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 1 Starting from Scratch." In Music in the Late Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 7 Feb. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-001007.xml
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