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Can We Go Home Again? at Bloomingdale School of Music (Site)

Friday March 21, 2025, 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Free
Can We Go Home Again? at Bloomingdale School of Music

Program Notes

Less than twenty years separates Brahms’s last piano composition and Schönberg’s first venture into free atonality. Brahms was an heir of the tonal language, and dramatic possibilities, of Beethoven. Schönberg proposed to remove that harmonic motivation.

If you remove the musical concept of “home,” what is left? I believe these two works, side by side, illustrate an astonishingly rigorous programme of motivic developments, in which a sensitivity to imitation, distortion, return, and prolongation illuminates a surprisingly similar manner in which Brahms and Schönberg organize the emotional paths of these little piano pieces.

Schönberg’s opus 11 looks ahead, stylistically, to the compositional developments that it succeeded in effecting, but emotionally and dramatically, they feel quite retrospective, as if their gaze is backward at Brahms, the aesthetic precursor, as his pieces inwardly contemplate the end of their own tonal language.

Details

Date:
Friday March 21, 2025
Time:
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Cost:
Free
Event Category:
Event Tags:
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Website:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/can-we-go-home-again-tickets-1003124862467

Venue

Bloomingdale School of Music
323 West 108th Street
New York, NY 10025 United States
Website:
https://www.bsmny.org/space-rental/recital-hall.php