Charles Spencer

Antidote to Berio

I was going to devote this column to the wilder shores of music, by which I mean not the latest hip sounds zooming up the charts but the dire drivel modernist composers, writing for orchestras and chamber ensembles, have seen fit to inflict on their audiences for many decades now.

issue 18 April 2009

For reasons that need not detain us here, I have recently had to endure more than my fair share of Luciano Berio and other blighters of that ilk, and I wanted to consider how the glorious Western classical music tradition of structure, harmony and melodic invention could have descended into plinkety plonk rubbish and the kind of sounds foxes make when copulating.

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