Music from Bauhaus to our house

John Borstlap says:

Very interesting.

The idea of functional austerity which was at the heart of the Bauhaus movement and which led to the devastating ugliness of the ‘modern city’, was born in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century, when the city was overrich in beauty and ornament – mostly 17C, 18C and 19C architecture – and when ornament was seen, by the then avantgardists, as representing the dominant bourgeois class, which was considered conservative and reactionary, stopping all development towards improvement of society. In 1913 the architect Adolf Loos wrote his influential essay ‘Ornament and Crime’….

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime

…. after having designed, in 1909, the notorious Michaelerhaus, which did away with the ‘immoral’ refinements of traditional decoration:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looshaus

The ‘new functionalism’ (form follows function) was entirely politically motivated and its sources thoroughly neurotic, ripe for Freud’s suffering-drenched divan, located nearby. Namely, decoration, beauty, refinement, artistic elaboration are also functions, but not material funtions. They symbolize the relationships as perceived by the human eye and heart. The entire Bauhaus movement and everything that followed in its wake was (and still is) thoroughly materialistic and thus, anti-civilisational.

Schoenberg was strongly influenced by Loos’ theories about function (= morally good) and decoration/ornament (= morally bad). How is this reflected in music? Avoid padding and pattern making, and make everything functional. So, no flesh on the bones, but offer only bones. Hence the constipated music of 12-tone music where everything is ‘functional’ because being derived from the series. Even in the early First Chamber Symphony Schoenberg tried to make everything ‘functional’ with the result that the textures are over-written and too dense. Ironically, by trying to arrive at a spiritualized music without the ‘debris’ of non-functional, sensual ornament, the result was a thoroughly materialist sound art without any spiritual or psychological dimension. Which explains the ‘florishing’ of modernism in the last century, which is so much easier to produce than music.

Hence the similarity of character between the Parisian quarter La Défense and the Boulezbian aesthetic.

Petros Linardos says:

Erwin Ratz is mentioned in the review as the “hugely controversial editor of the Mahler symphonies.” Maybe that’s what made him famous among Mahler afficionados. (Should we call Claudio Abbado a Mahler conductor?)

Among students of music, his book Einführung in die musikalische Formenlehre (“Introduction to Musical Form”) is very stimulating book, “devoted primarily to the work of Bach and Beethoven and strives to find commonalities in their compositional principles. Ratz’s explanation and expansion of Schoenberg’s notions of the “basic idea” and the typology of themes (period and sentence) form the foundation of William Caplin’s theory of formal functions.” (Wikipedia)