Stravinsky vs. Schoenberg: Who Was More Gangsta?

...though they both did live in Beverly Hills...so...there is that going against general gangstaness... ;)

We gave Schoenberg the win in the "Who's More Gangsta?" round. No better diss in classical music until Bartok blew a raspberry (literally, it's in the score) at Shostakovich's 7th Symphony in Bartok's own Concerto for Orchestra.

Schoenberg's "Accompanying Music" was written in 1930, 3 years after The Jazz Singer electrified American audiences with its soundtrack. The German film industry began making movies with sound in 1929. 

Prior to that, composers did write scores for silent films, which were performed by the local theater orchestras. Early talking pictures used the same type of underscoring that had been used in the theater and opera for decades before that.

The operative thought-stream to connect Schoenberg's influence to Young is not 12-tone music, but serialism. Jeremy Grimshaw, in his new book on Young noted, "In fact, the elements of his early works that seem most radical and most characteristic—the extremely long tones, the sometimes wildly impractical (for the performer) or audaciously indiscernible (to the listener) performance instructions—result not from the iconoclastic, rebellious iden- tity so often attributed to Young, but rather from an unusually zealous adherence to serial principles..." His use of serial techniques extends through much of his music, including his seminal work, The Well Tuned Piano. 

And, as for Cage's influence on Young - and the rest of us - it should be noted that Cage studied with Schoenberg in LA. In fact, Cage event went so far as to knock on his door demanding to study with him. Stravinsky's proto-minimalist moments are present, surely, but the line from Schoenberg to Cage to Young to Riley and Reich is a much more clear musical genealogy.

The seminal Minimalist work, Young's Trio for Strings, was written using 12-tone techniques, true. But by stretching notes out so long, Young obliterated any sense of order the 12-tone system was meant to provide to the music. Instead, you hear a succession of chords that appear to have little to do with each other.  It's a subversive work in that it creates repose and a meditative state using a compositional system focused on exhausting all the 12 notes in a chromatic scale, which for many 12-tone works creates a feeling of anxiety or vigor. He quickly abandoned 12-tone thought after discovering the music of John Cage, whose compositions and philosophies were far more influential on Young and Riley than Schoenberg ever was.

Stravinsky is a proto-minimalist. Listen to the Shrovetide Fair scene in Petrushka, "The Five Fingers," or the 1st of the Three Pieces for String Quartet. Steve Reich is on record as saying that classical music for him begins with the medieval composer, Perotin, up through the music of J.S. Bach. Then, it jumps ahead to Stravinsky (effectively wiping out the core repertory of what most listeners call "classical music").