Hype Machine, 1926

I’m going to keep posting these examples as they arise.  Hope that’s okay (they’ll be under this tag).  For those times we all have that make us go “these kids/these days.”  Here, we have Bartók, in the midst of the Modernist revolution:

To be frank, recently I have felt so stupid, so dazed, so empty-headed that I have truly doubted whether I am able to write anything new at all anymore.  All the tangled chaos that the musical periodicals vomit thick and fast about the music of today has come to weigh heavily on me: the watchwords, linear, horizontal, vertical, objective, impersonal, polyphonic, homophonic, tonal, polytonal, atonal, and the rest…

From Alex Ross’s magisterial “The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century“

Filed under: Alex Ross  Bartok  Hype Machine