• 2 Ibid.

2The Viennese critics in attendance noted that an incident of this kind had “never before occurred in a Vienna concert hall,” according to the Transcript, “and Viennese critics do not use superlatives so freely as Americans.”2

• 3 Calico Joy H., “Noise and Arnold Schoenberg’s 1913 Scandal Concert,” Journal of Austrian Studies, (...)

3The concert in question was, of course, the infamous Skandalkonzert (Scandal Concert), also known as the Watschenkonzert (Slap Concert) and Ohrfeigintermezzo (Ear Boxing Intermezzo). Though it is sometimes referred to as the “Schoenberg scandal,” the concert was just as trying for Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who for the first time endured the public rejection that with which their teacher was so familiar.3 Several accounts of the incident, in fact, suggest that Webern was the composer who “shouted remarks at the audience.” He had good reason to be angry. The world premiere of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6 had precipitated a nasty spat between audience members. According to the Transcript reporter, Webern had it coming:

• 4 H.K.M., “‘Hearing’ a Futurist Concert in Vienna”.

4At one point, the reporter continued, “a pretty American student” in the audience “‘got the giggles’ and attracted to her shamed face the righteous hisses of the earnest young men.” Webern had gone “a little ‘further’ than even an ‘advanced’ musical public would tolerate.”4

• 5 Calico, “Noise and Arnold Schoenberg’s 1913 Scandal Concert,” p. 48.
• 6 Auner Joseph, “Proclaiming the mainstream: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern,” in The Cambridge history (...)

5The Skandalkonzert has been interpreted not only as evidence of the public’s rejection of the Second Viennese School, but also as a precursor to the Second Viennese School’s rejection of the public. The most commonly cited example of the latter is the formation of the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen (Society for Private Musical Performances) in 1918. Joy Calico, for example, argues that Schoenberg founded the Verein in response to his experience with the Skandalkonzert.5 Yet the members of the Second Viennese School continued to seek new audiences for their work. “Although music by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern undoubtedly occupied a minority position on the concert stages during these years,” Joseph Auner points out, “their works were widely performed and they themselves were active in speaking and writing about music to ever-broader audiences.” Even the Verein was meant to serve a broader purpose beyond a “rejection of the mainstream,” as Schoenberg and his followers sought “to reform concert life and ultimately increase the audience for modern music.”6

• 7 Oja Carol, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 1 (...)
• 8 Moldenhauer Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Work, New (...)
• 9 Letter, Anton Webern to Adolph Weiss, March 21, 1934, Anton Webern Collection, MF 110.1-1293, Paul (...)

6For Webern, attempting to cultivate new audiences increasingly meant looking to the United States. US music culture saw an explosion in the performance of modernist music in the early part of 1920s, as newly established groups like the League of Composers, International Composers’ Guild, and Franco-American Musical Society commissioned a host of new works by European and US composers while simultaneously introducing US audiences to works from the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, whose arrival in the country had been delayed by the First World War. Technological advances meant that “a geographically dispersed modernist movement was possible in a way that could not have been the case even a decade earlier,” resulting in what Carol Oja terms an “international bazaar for modernist music.”7 This phenomenon was especially evident in New York, where the majority of the performances I discuss below took place. Webern was enthusiastic about the opportunities afforded by what he saw as a “land of unlimited opportunities,” and wondered whether “only [the United States] could provide a fertile ground for his ideas and intentions.”8 In a 1934 letter to US composer and former Schoenberg student Adolph Weiss, he noted how glad he was to hear that Schoenberg had found success in the United States after emigrating there the previous year. Webern concluded the letter by expressing his desire to follow in Schoenberg’s footsteps and emigrate himself, emphasizing the point with no fewer than three exclamation points; a postscript clarified that he would also be happy simply to visit.9

• 10 In fact, the Skandalkonzert was soon reported on by news outlets across North America, in places l (...)
• 11 Oja, Making Music Modern, p. 54.
• 12 Metzer David, “The New York reception of Pierrot lunaire: The 1923 premiere and its aftermath,” Th (...)
• 13 Auner, “Proclaiming the mainstream: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern,” p. 229.

7Unfortunately for Webern, his reputation preceded him. The Boston Evening Transcript report on the Skandalkonzert in 1913 was the first appearance of Webern’s name in a major US newspaper, and while his music would not be performed in the United States for another decade, his name continued to appear in reports on trends in modern music.10 He was frequently branded a “futurist” or an “ultrist,” often in connection to his role as a “disciple” or “favorite pupil” of Schoenberg. This process, in which Webern’s music was discussed and reported on before it was ever heard, was not atypical. As Oja argues, “ideas about European modernism often had as much impact as the music itself.”11 David Metzer describes, along similar lines, how US press coverage of the 1912 premiere of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire in Berlin “disseminated the revolutionary reputation that the work had gained in Europe” and “propagated [Schoenberg’s] reputation as a radical even before his compositions were known” in the United States.12 By the early 1920s, Auner notes, “Schoenberg and his school had become associated with the most extreme radicalism and hypermodernity.”13

• 14 Ibid., p. 229.
• 15 Calico, “Noise and Arnold Schoenberg’s 1913 Scandal Concert,” p. 34.

8Auner also notes that “the relatively small circle of listeners” who had heard the music of the Second Viennese School could not compare to “the considerably larger numbers who knew them only by reputation.”14 That reputation was almost always some version of “avant-garde composers whose music audiences dislike”; discussion of the music itself was harder to come by. Consider, for example, the Boston Evening Transcript report quoted above, which deploys some very colorful language to describe Webern’s music but does relatively little to relay how that music actually sounds. A similar phenomenon was evident in European coverage of the Skandalkonzert, as Calico describes: “reviews said little about the music, and virtually every headline featured some variation of ‘scandal concert’; clearly the noisy, brawling scandal was the real news and not the music.”15

• 16 Mueser Barbara, “The Criticism of New Music in New York: 1919-1929,” Ph.D. dissertation, City Univ (...)
• 17 I briefly touch on one notable exception, the 1938 world premiere of the String Quartet, op. 38 in (...)

9But all that changed once Webern’s music finally reached the United States. The first US performance of a work by Webern took place in 1924. By 1929 – after just five years and fewer than a dozen performances – he had earned himself a reputation. More often than not, his works flopped just as badly as they had in Europe. In this, he was not unusual; the explosion in performances of modernist music in the early 1920s, notes Barbara Mueser, was met by a “massive and complete” rejection of that music on the part of most critics by the end of the decade.16 More notable was how Webern’s music flopped. No longer just a “futurist” or student of Schoenberg, he quickly became known as the composer of pieces that were very short and very quiet, qualities that led critics to describe his music via a host of memorable analogies. As I document below, this mode of reception coalesced around Webern’s works almost instantly, and critics rarely strayed from it. Though it skewed negative and lacked for nuance, it helped Webern’s music stand out. US performances of Webern’s music slowed after 1929, with few additional works heard beyond the seven performed between 1924 and 1929 until a new flowering of interest in Webern’s music in the 1950s.17 Until then, the reputation that Webern developed in these five years was critical to sustaining awareness of (if not necessarily interest in) his music among the concertgoing public. Webern had made a name for himself, and a name was enough to weather the flops.

• 18 Note that this number does not include repeat performances in the same city on consecutive days, s (...)
• 19 Gilman Lawrence, “Music: New Music by Franco-Americans and Others at Aeolian Hall,” New York Heral (...)

10There were eleven performances of Webern’s music in the United States between 1924 and 1929 (Table 1).18 The first two made little impact. Greta Torpadie’s performances of op. 4 no. 5 (“Ihr tratet zu dem Herde”) and op. 4 no. 4 (“So ich traurig bin”) in January 1924 and January 1925 barely registered amidst programs overstuffed with modern works; in addition to the Webern songs, the two concerts featured music by Berg, Caplet, Casella, Debussy, Griffes, Le Flem, Leginska, Rieti, Ruggles, Salzedo, Stravinsky, Szymanowski, and Varese. Across reviews of the two concerts, Webern’s name appeared just once, when the New York Herald Tribune’s Lawrence Gilman – a generally open-minded critic when it came to modern music – dismissed “So ich traurig bin” and an accompanying song by Berg as “tame and feeble triflings.”19

• 20 Gilman Lawrence, “Music: More New Music from the International Composers’ Guild,” The New York Her (...)
• 21 Rosenfeld Paul, “Musical Chronicle,” The Dial, April 1925.

11Over the course of the following two years, Webern emerged from this pack of contemporary composers thanks to several US performances of two works: the Five Movements for String Quartet, op. 5 and the Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 10. Unlike the op. 4 songs, these works are typical of the “aphoristic” style of instrumental composition that Webern and other members of the Second Viennese School cultivated in the years prior to the First World War. They are brief, and they tend towards extreme sparseness and quiet. These qualities could be interpreted positively, as in Schoenberg’s famous claim that Webern’s music was able to “express a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a breath.” At the time, however, they were more often viewed negatively. The responses to the Letz Quartet’s performance of op. 5 at an International Composers’ Guild concert in February 1925 demonstrate these divergent interpretations. Gilman reacted more positively than he had in his previous encounter with Webern’s music, deeming the pieces “remarkable studies in the effect of sustained pianissimi,” “tenuous yet haunting,” full of “an otherworldly tenderness” and “fragile loveliness” (see fig. 1.)20 Paul Rosenfeld described the same qualities, but reached the opposite conclusion, quipping that Webern’s music was “less heard than overheard,” with only the second piece possessing “colour and movement.” The four other pieces, Rosenfeld concluded, bored with their “painfully sustained understatements,” “unrelieved pianissimo espressivos,” and “thoroughly static” textures.21 In spite of this evaluation, Rosenfeld would deliver one of this period’s most impassioned defenses of Webern’s music the following year, as I discuss below.

• 22 The Five Pieces for Orchestra were scheduled to be performed in October 1926, at a performance of (...)
• 23 L.A.S., “From Zurich to Boston,” Christian Science Monitor, November 20, 1926.

12The Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 10 received their US premiere in November 1926, at a performance of Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.22 Koussevitzky had conducted the work’s world premiere in June of the same year, at the International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Zürich; though the work was composed between 1911 and 1913, its premiere had been delayed by the war. The Boston program included three other works premiered in Zürich, by Tansman, Krása, and Walton, before concluding with a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5; the latter, a critic from the Christian Science Monitor noted, was included “for obvious reasons.”23 The reception of op. 10 echoed the reception of op. 5 in its emphasis on sparse textures, pervasive quiet, and brevity. As at that earlier performance, the response to Webern’s music was mixed. The critic from the Christian Science Monitor, for one, did not know what to make of it:

• 25 Hale Philip, Boston Herald, November 20, 1926, quoted in Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Inv (...)
• 26 P.R., “Modern Music at Symphony Concert: Pieces by Webern, Krasa, Tansman, Walton Heard,” Boston D (...)

13The Boston Herald’s Philip Hale, in a similarly equivocal evaluation, deemed them “dabs of pale colors expressive of the inaudible.”25 But a critic from the Boston Globe was more positive. Though the piece almost never strayed from the pianissimo that was already “said to be a mannerism of the composer,” they reported, each one conveyed “clearly and delicately a poetic mood, with the utmost concision.”26

• 28 Gilman, “Music: Week-End Dallyings.”

15Despite the vagaries of Webern’s style, Gilman contended, the music contained real “pathos” that was “discernible to the probing eye – or ear.” Though this assertion and the language used throughout suggest that Gilman possessed at least some affection for the op. 10 pieces, he ultimately arrived at a damning conclusion: Webern’s music – “so incontestibly [sic] sincere, so sensitized, so anxiously alembicated, so touching in its pitiful questing” – was the product of “the despair of all those betrayed suppliants who have been given sensibility instead of genius.”28

• 29 Thompson Oscar, New York Evening Post, December 19, 1929, quoted in Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical (...)
• 30 Gilman, “Music: Week-End Dallyings”; Downes Olin, “Music: Boston Symphony Orchestra,” New York Tim (...)
• 31 Downes Olin, “Placing the Critics,” Modern Music, April 1925. This article also contains the remar (...)
• 32 Program, November 27, 1926, League of Composers/ISCM records, JPB 11-5, box 8, Music Division, The (...)

16For the New York Evening Post’s Oscar Thompson, Webern’s five pieces “scarcely approached the stature of even miniature compositions,” which “passed before the senses as little grimaces of tones” and “evoked frank laughter.”29 The New York Times’ Olin Downes described Webern’s music as “palpably imitation Schönberg,” and an apparent effort to outdo Schoenberg “in conciseness and fewness of penstrokes.” “The music is… labored, anemic, and without an ounce of creative impulse,” he continued, “an example of how curiously an artist can reason himself into anything, any procedure, however fantastic, and completely lose sight of a real objective.” While Gilman had described the six-measure-long fourth piece (fig. 2) as “Lilliputian,” Downes deemed it “commendably short.”30 Reviews like this were typical for Downes. Just one year earlier, in a manifesto on music criticism published in Modern Music (the League of Composers’ in-house publication), Downes had rejected the “fallacy” of “the genius ahead of time,” contending that the greatest composers had “seldom failed to secure emphatic recognition” during their lifetimes. In the same article, he argued that “conservative” critics – of whom, he implied, he was one – were “an indispensable element of artistic progress.”31 Both Downes and Thompson’s responses to Webern’s music may have been influenced by the program note accompanying the performance, which described the brevity of Webern’s pieces as a “peculiarity,” employed adjectives such as “pale” and “tenuous,” and conceded that the final piece contained “only the slightest tangible melodic content.”32

• 33 Storey Smith Warren, Boston Post, November 20, 1926, quoted in Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invec (...)
• 34 Downes, “MUSIC: Boston Symphony Orchestra.”

17Both Gilman and Downes called on references to non-human creatures to describe op. 10, a trend that had in fact begun one week earlier at the Boston performance of the work. “Inevitably these faint rustlings, these tiny squeaks and tittering,” argued the Boston Post’s Warren Storey Smith, “called to mind the activities of insects.”33 Whether or not Downes and Gilman read the Post review, both critics played on this theme when op. 10 was performed in New York. Downes argued that “the strokes become so few” in several of the pieces that “the music loses even its skeleton.” “Now,” he continued, “if audiences and critics were Cuviers who could reconstruct from a single bone the entire anatomy of an animal, they might be able from this sketch of a sketch to reconstruct the musical architecture Webern had in mind.” Seeing as they were not, he concluded, “the music is meaningless.”34 Gilman went further than either Storey Smith or Downes by likening the op. 10 pieces neither to insects nor skeletons, but to microscopic organisms. He noted that “unsympathetic” listeners might view Webern’s music as “a sort of tonal glorification of the amoeba,” a sentiment he understood:

• 35 Gilman, “Music: Week-End Dallyings.” The figure Gilman refers to, in m. 4 of the fourth movement o (...)
• 36 Metzer, “The New York reception of Pierrot lunaire,” p. 675.

18A few paragraphs later Gilman brought the analogy full-circle when describing “a tearful minor ninth” played by the trombone in the fourth piece: “the amoeba weeps.”35 The analogies drawn by Storey Smith, Downes, and Gilman can be understood as the products of a Victorian-era “moral dichotomy” that distinguished the “human” from the “animal.” As David Metzer describes, this distinction was operative in many facets of European and US cultural life well past the end of the Victorian era proper. On one side were “religion, education, and the arts”; on the other “forces that threatened propriety.”36 To characterize Webern’s music as animalistic or skeletal or “protozoic” was thus to characterize it as non-human. These reviews – especially Gilman’s, with its references to the single-celled amoeba – presented the most unusual features of Webern’s musical style as evidence of an absence rather than a presence. At the same time, of course, they were skillfully crafted digs, designed to elicit laughter at Webern’s expense.

• 37 Frankenstein Alfred, “America Stars in Modernist Concert,” Chicago Tribune, January 1, 1928.
• 38 Fisher Marjory M., “Jurgen is Given in San Francisco: Taylor’s Scores Receives Plaudits as Best of (...)

19A similar response met performances of the Four Pieces for Violin and Piano, op. 7 in New York and San Francisco in 1927 and 1928. Following the former, the Chicago Tribune’s Alfred Frankenstein wondered why the violin “scarcely seems to play” in a work in which the violinist was ostensibly the soloist. Every time things “got going,” Frankenstein complained, the piece was almost immediately over. “From both instruments,” he concluded, “the sound waves went out in the shape of question marks.”37 In a review for Musical America following the San Francisco performance, Marjory Fisher made a similar reference when she offered up a title for the fourth piece: “A Questioning and a Caress.”38 In spite of occasional hints towards a more positive reception, then, Webern’s music mostly flopped during its first few years in the United States. But along the way it acquired a reputation that helped it stand out amidst a crowded field of modern music offerings. Time and again, critics emphasized the music’s brevity, quiet, and sparseness. For Storey Smith, Downes, and Gilman, these qualities suggested that Webern’s music was not human; for Frankenstein and Fisher, Webern’s works posed questions that could not be answered. In the following section, I consider the response to two works whose musical qualities made it difficult to interpret them along the same lines as opp. 5, 7, and 10, making them exceptions to this “aphoristic” reception of Webern’s music. Thereafter, I will turn to one final example that demonstrates just how influential that reception truly was.

• 39 Martin Linton, “Stokowski Shows Brand New Tones,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 5, 1927; Gilman Law (...)
• 40 Downes Olin, “Music: The Philadelphia Orchestra,” New York Times, March 9, 1927. Downes’ descripti (...)
• 41 While Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer would later unearth several more tonal works by Webern that pr (...)

20Webern’s Passacaglia, op. 1 received its US premiere at a March 1927 concert in Philadelphia. Leopold Stokowski led the Philadelphia Orchestra, who reprised the work to New York the following week. Two critics rejected the work’s designation as a passacaglia; curiously, both employed analogies to alcohol. Linton Martin claimed that “this particular Passacaglia bears about the relation to a Bach Passacaglia that bootleg brews bear to pre-war brands,” while Gilman expressed his distaste for “passacaglias that have not aged in the wood.”39 The conservative Downes was more positive in his evaluation of what was by then a nearly two-decade-old work. He acknowledged that the Passacaglia might be “considered a little passé by our advance guard,” presumably a reference to groups like the League of Composers and International Composers’ Guild, as well as critics more sympathetic to new music (one of whom, Paul Rosenfeld, I will discuss shortly). Yet he proudly proclaimed himself “old-fashioned enough to think highly of the sweep and the passionate mood” of the work’s closing measures.40 Whether because it was considered a modern distortion of the passacaglia genre or an outdated example of modern composition, there in a sense across all three of these reviews that the Passacaglia was not considered “real” Webern. And how could it be? Not only is the Passacaglia one of only two Webern works with opus numbers that are tonal (the other being the op. 2 chorus Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen), but its ten-minute-plus duration also made it easily the longest Webern composition performed in the United States to that point.41 Interpreting it along the same lines as works like opp. 5, 7, and 10 was simply impossible.

• 43 Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern, p. 267.
• 44 An unnamed critic from the Christian Science Monitor made the same mistake. See: “The Standards of (...)
• 45 Downes Olin, “Music: More of the Ultra-Modern,” New York Times, November 29, 1926.
• 46 Straus Henrietta, “N.Y. Music World Stretched on Rack of Ultra-Modernism: League of Composers and (...)

22Thompson’s review contains some dubious claims. Though the op. 15 songs are all relatively brief, it is not accurate to say that they exhibit “the same economy of notes” as the op. 10 pieces. The songs possess a much fuller texture than Webern’s pre-war instrumental works; as Webern once explained in a letter to Schoenberg, the many vocal works he composed between 1914 and 1924 tend towards “homogenous sounds” and “long themes” (see fig. 3).43 While op. 15 was inspired by Pierrot lunaire, furthermore, it does not employ Sprechstimme.44 Downes also linked the work to Schoenberg, repeating his criticism of op. 10 by referring to the songs as “copies of Schönberg.” The songs “lack contrast as they do originality,” Downes asserted, “they are dull and ugly music.”45 Henrietta Straus went even further, arguing that they contained “neither melody, harmony, or rhythm.”46

• 48 Oja, Making Music Modern, p. 303. As Mueser notes, “florid, impressionistic writing was becoming u (...)
• 49 Rosegger is not cited in the first edition of op. 15, published by Universal Edition in 1924, and (...)

24The passage is typical of Rosenfeld’s tendency towards “painting a wash of images rather than specifically describing music,” a trait that sometimes drew criticism from his peers.48 He also appears to have made the same mistake as Thompson with regards to Sprechstimme, describing Hager’s performance as “half spoken, half intoned.” Yet it is clear that Rosenfeld was paying attention, and much of his review belies the notion that he was incapable of describing music with precision. While other critics ignored the songs’ texts beyond designating them “religious,” Rosenfeld’s review is filled with oblique references to the various subjects of the songs. He noted the presence of “sweat and anguish,” perhaps a reference to Jesus carrying the cross in “Das Kreuz,” the first song in the set. He mentioned children, to whom the second song, a setting of a text from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, is addressed. He deemed the tone of the songs “ethereal and popular,” an apt characterization of the work of Peter Rosegger, whose texts Webern set in the first, third, and fifths songs.49 And he spoke of death and rebirth, key themes across all five songs. Rosenfeld’s description of music “freed from self-conceit and the tyranny of the individual will” is a particularly insightful summation of the peaceful death and ascension into heaven that take place over the course of the final two songs.

• 50 Johnson Julian, Webern and the transformation of nature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 19 (...)

25Rosenfeld also paid close attention to the music of op. 15. He likened the high notes of the flute to the morning star described in the second song; as Julian Johnson notes, high-pitched instruments such as the celesta and the glockenspiel are frequently associated with the angelic and the heavenly in Webern’s music.50 Whereas “tenuous” had been deployed as an insult by other critics, Rosenfeld praised the “great variety of tenuous sound” Webern summoned to set his chosen texts. “Like scars gape the wide intervals” is one of the most succinct-yet-effective descriptions of Webern’s music anywhere. Most crucially, Rosenfeld noted that the op. 15 songs lacked “sudden dynamic volumes” found in Webern’s “other characteristic pieces” (presumably a reference to the recently performed opp. 5 and 10), acknowledging the presence of the “homogenous sounds” and “long themes” that Webern spoke of in his letter to Schoenberg. After all this, Rosenfeld arrived at a key insight: op. 15 was “sweet and warm as in no other composition of Webern’s shown in New York” (emphasis added). It is simple enough to observe that op. 15 does not sound like Webern’s pre-war instrumental pieces, but it is an observation that other critics failed to make.

• 52 Oja, Making Music Modern, p. 303.
• 53 Bailey, ““For the serious listeners who swear neither at nor by Schoenberg”…” p. 284.

27While critics like Downes lumped Webern in with Schoenberg as a means of dismissing him, Rosenfeld was sensitive to those ways in which Webern did not follow in his teacher’s footsteps. For Rosenfeld – and perhaps for the first time in the United States – Webern was neither a one-trick-pony nor a “disciple” and “favorite pupil” of Schoenberg, but a multifaceted artist in his own right. Yet Rosenfeld was, in Oja’s words, “the period’s most illustrious critic of new music.”52 He advocated openly for modern works in a way that other critics seldom did. The vast majority of his writing, furthermore, appeared in specialty magazines like The Dial, whose “small but influential audience of the intellectual and artistic elite” were more likely to be open to modernism than the greater number of readers who took in Downes’ reviews in the New York Times or Gilman’s in the New York Herald Tribune.53 The fact that Rosenfeld heard something in Webern’s music that other critics missed, or at least that other critics failed to comment on, is thus the exception that proves the rule.

• 54 Ibid., p. 46.
• 55 Perkins Francis D., “Season Opened by Composers’ League Here: Offers Contemporary Music for Variou (...)
• 56 King Joan, “Gotham Reception of Old Verdi Opera Is Enthusiastic,” Chicago Tribune, December 29, 19 (...)
• 57 Metzer David, “The League of Composers: The Initial Years,” American Music, vol. 15, no. 1, 1997, (...)
• 58 Downes Olin, Music: The League of Composers,” New York Times, December 19, 1929.

28On December 18, 1929, Alexander Smallens conducted the world premiere of Webern’s Symphony, op. 21 at a League of Composers concert in New York. Though the premiere of a new work by a major European composer was emblematic of the United States’ arrival as a “major international center” of modern music, the country was still just a few years removed from being “years behind in hearing the newest European compositions.”54 So while the New York Herald Tribune’s Francis D. Perkins claimed that “the League audience must be the most progressively-minded and the most favorable to latter-day music of our various concert gatherings,” it is not surprising that Webern’s work was too much even for them.55 Joan King of the Chicago Tribune reported that “even those who were sufficiently advanced in modernism” to appreciate the first half of the program, consisting of music by Casella, Hindemith, and Goossens, “had had enough” when it came to op. 21.56 The performance was reportedly met with “jeers,” “periodic bursts of mirth,” and a “little hissing.”57 “The audience laughed it out of court,” Downes reported, “and this laughter could not be restrained,” to the point that it “nearly drowned the sounds of Webern’s whimpering orchestra.”58

• 59 Ibid.
• 60 Thompson Oscar, New York Evening Post, December 19, 1929, quoted in Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical (...)
• 61 Perkins, “Season Opened by Composers’ League Here.”

29Critics were likewise displeased. For Downes, the Symphony was “one of those whispering, clucking, picking little pieces which Webern composes, when he whittles away at small and futile ideas, until he has achieved the perfect fruition of futility.” The proper title of the piece, Downes argued, would be “the ultimate significance of nothing.”59 Thompson suggested that the work called to mind “odd sounds in an old house when the wind moans, the floor creaks, the shades rustle and the doors and windows alternatively croak and croon.” He did admit – sarcastically, it would seem – that the work at least possessed “Webern’s cardinal merit of brevity.”60 Perkins’ assessment was the most generous, as he contended that there was “undoubtedly a form and a significance in the work,” and that identifying either “probably would call for much more study and acquaintance with the music of this school.” But even he felt that, for the time being, the Symphony “seemed mainly acrid and disjointed, and suggested that the Austrian composer had forgotten that certain sounds are, almost inevitably, ludicrous.”61

• 62 Letter, Anton Webern to Claire Reis, October 31, 1929, League of Composers/ISCM records, box 7, Ne (...)

30The program note accompanying the performance could not have helped matters. In a letter to League of Composers co-founder and president Clare Reis a few months prior to the performance, Webern had suggested that he might have time to write something for the League’s program.62 Yet the note’s vague language, inaccurate details, and questionable stylistic comparisons all suggest that its author could not have been the composer:

• 64 Chotzinoff, Samuel, New York World, December 19, 1929, quoted in Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Inv (...)
• 65 Downes, “Music: The League of Composers.” Nearly a decade later, a young composer named Elliott Ca (...)

31Webern did not write the Symphony at the request of the League, nor does it particularly resemble his two sets of orchestral pieces, opp. 6 and 10. The inscrutable phrase “tonal fractions,” meanwhile, provided fodder for one critic: Samuel Chotzinoff echoed the animal analogies used to describe op. 10 in referring to op. 21 as “the fractional sounds uttered at night by the sleeping inhabitants of a zoo.”64 Downes kept up the animal theme, too: “Webern’s little orchestra suggested nothing so much as a cat that, arching its back, glared and bristled its fur, and moaned or growled or spit.”65

• 66 Martin Linton, “It’s Not to Be Sneezed at, So Stokowski Halts Music: Gurgle Followed by Giggles Ca (...)

32While it is tempting, then, to view the world premiere of op. 21 as the culmination of a half-decade of performances of Webern’s music in the United States, there is little evidence to support such an interpretation. In many ways, the reception of the work was indistinguishable from the reception that met earlier performances of Webern’s instrumental music. Critics gravitated towards the music’s brevity and sparse textures, characterizing it in terms of absence rather than presence; there were references to animals. There was even a fracas in the audience, a repeat of the Skandalkonzert in miniature (a similar disturbance occurred at an October 1931 performance of the work in Philadelphia: “It’s Not to Be Sneezed at, So Stokowski Halts Music: Gurgle Followed by Giggles Causes Conductor to Halt Orchestra, Depart in Wrath; Returns and Finishes Concert.”)66 It seems not to have mattered much that the Symphony actually differs from Webern’s other instrumental works heard in the United States in several key ways. Like the op. 15 songs, it features a denser and more consistent texture than those earlier works. Though not long in absolute terms, its two movements are meaningfully longer than most of Webern’s other orchestral pieces. It was also Webern’s first twelve-tone work to be performed in the United States. That all this was ignored in favor of replicating the reception of Webern’s other instrumental works shows just how pervasive that reception had grown over the course of the preceding five years. To critics and audiences alike, op. 21 was just another strange, short, and quiet piece from the composer of strange, short, and quiet pieces.

• 67 Rosenfeld Jay, “Reunion at South Mountain,” Christian Science Monitor, October 4, 1938.
• 68 For more on this performance, see my recently published work on the intersection of Webern’s music (...)
• 69 Swed Mark, “Maximal Minimalist Composer’s Year,” The Wall Street Journal, March 1, 1995.

35Rosenfeld returned to familiar topic of brevity. Unlike earlier critics, however, he registered no surprise at this aspect of Webern’s music. Webern’s “musical surrealism,” he concluded, would be “remembered only, we believe, by its violent contrast.”67 But audiences at least knew what to expect. Two decades later, the same musical qualities were evaluated more positively when Leonard Bernstein featured the Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6 as part of his Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, praising the work as “so delicate and so deep inside” that “if you even sneeze or cough you’re liable to miss it.”68 Almost four decades after that, in 1995, the Wall Street Journal’s Mark Swed reviewed a Webern festival at the Juilliard School. “It seems,” wrote Swed, “that we Americans not only killed [Webern], but worse, after 50 years, have made him irrelevant.” Swed’s conclusion came after a long complaint about how the “busy, young, career-minded, big-city virtuosos” who populated contemporary US concert halls possessed neither the time nor the inclination for the “Zenlike focusing on musical minutiae” that Webern’s works demanded.69 Even amidst a grimly pessimistic review, there was no doubt as to what the distinguishing features of Webern’s music were.

• 71 Downes, “Music: More of the Ultra-Modern.”

37Slonimsky’s timetable was formed in response to developments in the reception of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring following its infamous 1913 premiere – an event that took place just two months after the Skandalkonzert. Some may quibble that none of Webern’s works have achieved “musical masterpiece” status in the same way that the Rite has. But to be in the canon – and several of Webern’s works are – is to be considered a masterpiece, at least by some. What’s more, Slonimsky’s maxim underscores an enduring truth borne out by the trajectory of Webern’s music in the United States: in the long run, it is better to flop spectacularly than to receive a polite but unremarkable reception. Consider, for example, the names of eight composers featured on League of Composers and International Composers’ Guild concerts held on consecutive evenings in November 1926: Bartók, Chávez, Goosens, Gruenberg, Krása, McPhee, Still, and Webern. Following the International Composers’ Guild concert, as noted above, Olin Downes referred to Webern’s op. 15 songs as “dull and ugly music.”71 Needless to say, other composers’ music received warmer receptions. With the exceptions of Bartók and Chávez, however, none of those composers had a similar level of influence and staying power, or is better known today than Webern. Would the same be true if critics like Downes had responded to Webern’s music more positively but with less vigor? Beyond Slonimsky’s formulation, examples like these could also serve as evidence of other truths – the idea that “all press is good press,” for instance, or the so-called “Streisand effect,” in which attempts to remove, censor, or denigrate certain content only serves to ensure that it receives further attention.