Music and Philosophy Volume Two

Jan Holcman was born in Lodz in 1922 and fled to Moscow after Germany's invasion of Poland. He studied at a conservatory with Grigory Ginsburg and began researching pianists' recordings found in the conservatory's library. In 1947, Holcman relocated to the United States after teaching and performing in Palestine under General Anders's Polish Army. He enrolled at Julliard and taught private lessons while also researching pianism. The Legacy of Chopin (1954) was Holcman's first book. His articles also appeared in newspapers like Saturday Review and Musical Courier. Holcman died in 1963 in New York. André Gide (1869-1951), winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize for Literature, was a celebrated novelist, dramatist, and essayist whose narrative works dealt frankly with homosexuality and the struggle between artistic discipline, moralism, and sensual indulgence. Born in Paris, Gide became an influential intellectual figure in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature and culture. His essay collections Autumn Leaves and Oscar Wilde, among others, contributed to the public's understanding of key figures of the day. He traveled widely and advocated for the rights of prisoners, denounced the conditions in the African colonies, and became a voice for, and then against, communism. Other notable works include The Notebooks of André Walter (1891), Corydon (1924), If It Die (1924), The Counterfeiters, and his journals, Journal 1889-1939, Journal 1939-1942, and Journal 1942-1949. Arnold Schoenberg (13 September 1874-13 July 1951) was an Austrian and later American composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. He used the spelling Schönberg until after his move to the United States in 1934 (Steinberg 1995, 463) in deference to American practice (Foss 1951, 401) though one writer claims he made the change a year earlier (Ross 2007, 45). Schoenberg was known early in his career for successfully extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic traditions of both Brahms and Wagner, and later and more notably for his pioneering innovations in atonality. During the rise of the Nazi party in Austria, his music was labeled, alongside swing and jazz, as degenerate art. In the 1920s, he developed the twelve-tone technique, a widely influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation, and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea. Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, is among the major landmarks of 20th century musical thought; at least three generations of composers in the European and American traditions have consciously extended his thinking, and, in some cases, passionately reacted against it.