Alban Berg - 4 Lieder (1910) 

I really can feel the complex, eerie feelings of the harmonies. Modern music can be beautiful and wholesome after all.

Leo, wouldn't you do a violin transcription? I also can't help hearing a clarinet and piano rendition, maybe because of a tonlos ''Stirb"

Funny. As Berg means mountain in German.

@@OrlandoBBass oh well... maybe a pierrot ensemble arrangement :) but indeed clarinet is a tempting issue when it comes to this subtly tonal beast that is early Berg! ;) I feel like the melodies these are closest to are the Ravel Mallarmé

There were so much to express in his Piano Sonata and Lieder. Unfortunately and fortunately, we did not get to listen to Berg's exploration in this magical soundscape more.

His last work, the violin concerto, isn't very atonal

no coment

yeah i caught myself thinking jimmy hendrix a little too many times lol.

Gotcha!

This is sort of pre-atonal music, so there are a lot of accidentals here. Haven’t studied this score before, but the note must’ve had an accidental in a previous measure, and Berg or the music editor restated the flat in the next measure that note appears as a courtesy reminder to help the performer keep track of what the note is supposed to be. Keeping track of accidentals is especially tricky when there are as many as in this piece.

This was the whole Second Viennese's school convention by that time: Writing accidentals for basically every note (except immediate repetitions), even if it was diatonic to the key. This likely originated from how their music was so chromatically restless by that point that it became extremely difficult for readers to tell whether a pitch was altered or unaltered so they just said screw it, we'll notate everything. As for why keys? Probably because this was in the awkward transition years where they still considered what they were doing to be tonality and it was tonal convention to write the tonic key at the beginning of each system. They probably thought that telling performers what the tonic was meant to be would in some way assist reading and performance. Berg never fully gave up the tendency since there are a few key signatures written in the Violin Concerto, even though it has zero bearing on how to read the music.

not at all

Szymanowski like.

@@helenamarie4337 You are right. More Germanic-ally structured.

William Frazier get new earbuds? it works fine for me.

can hmmmmm I'm not using ear buds. I've never had to with anything else. But worth a try

@@williamfrazier5314 problem is with your audio. Works fine for me.

Just to remind us of the assault on tonality? (I do love this piece 😂)