Composer Conrad Susa gave an amusing talk entitled "In Wagner’s Musical Forge: Das Rheingold" on Saturday afternoon. The focus was very much on the music itself, as evidenced by the beginning of the score taped to the wall. Susa played recordings of Bach's F Major Toccata and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, and demonstrated how Wagner stole from these composers. He also extolled the virtues of Pythagoras, having proved music mathematically and elevating music to a sublime and divine art. Entertainingly enough, Susa called atonal music inhuman and political.
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5 responses to “Conrad Susa at WSNC”
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I wish I could have gone to this talk now. Susa sounds like he was very interesting & very opinionated. Was it Susa or Pythagoras that called atonal music "political"? What political viewpoint is espoused by atonal music? Communism?
I've heard about Schubert motifs being used in the Ring, but I know nothing about how Bach & Beethoven were sources for Rheingold. Sounds intriguing.
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It was interesting! It was Susa that called atonal music political, I think he meant something different than specifics of government.
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"Susa called atonal music inhuman"
Considering how boring and generic Susa's "Dangerous Liaisons" was, his opinion about anything to do with music is irrelevant. He sounds like one of those dreary "Waaah! Waaaah! When I was a composition student, they held a gun to my head and forced me to write tone rows! Wahhh! I just wanted to write TUNES!" sorts. Gawd, who cares if someone likes atonality or serialism, to nudge an aesthetic choice in to something that has a moral component is really lame. It's like the people that claim that atonality is wrong because the brain is wired for tonality……
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So TypeKey hates quotations marks in addition to HTML?
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Susa was interesting when he was actually talking about Das Rheingold. It is a bit weird that the WSNC talks often have a part in which the speaker puts down composers other than Wagner. Though to be fair in this case this was during the question and answer segment of the talk.
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