Please join us in the Bundy Reading Room, Avery Hall, WSU Pullman, on Thursday, March 14, at 3 p.m. for a lecture by David Miller, Cornell University.
In an April 1962 article previewing the First International Webern Festival, musicologist Hans Moldenhauer promised that Webern’s music would one day be known as “the music of the space age.” Moldenhauer’s words were carefully chosen. The Webern Festival was set to take place in Seattle at the same time as the World’s Fair, an event so focused on futuristic technologies that its central building was named the Space Needle. By evoking the aesthetic of the World’s Fair, then, Moldenhauer sought to elevate the profile of the Webern Festival.
Yet the two “W.F.s” made for an awkward pairing. The opening night of the Webern Festival was held on the grounds of the World’s Fair and featured the world premiere of Webern’s Im Sommerwind. An orchestral tone poem composed in 1904, Im Sommerwind had been unknown until its discovery by Moldenhauer in 1960. Far from space-age music, Im Sommerwind’s lush textures and sweeping gestures revealed a young Webern rooted in late nineteenth-century Romanticism. The work’s nature-worshipping program, furthermore, contrasted sharply with the fair’s technological urbanism. The remainder of the Webern Festival took place on the forested campus of the University of Washington, a site better suited to the premieres of several other early Webern works that followed. But the tension between the Webern Festival and the World’s Fair was an indication of the shape that Webern reception would take in the ensuing decades. For some, Webern was the last of the Romantics; for others, he was the first space-age composer.
Please join us and enjoy some strong coffee and Sisters cookies. Trevor Bond, tjbond@wsu.edu
