Morawetz: holdout among the music radicals
[...] Morawetz has won against the odds of being a conservative in
a world of musical radicals. [...]"Avant garde composers seem to divide music
into only two styles [...] Everything that is not serial, they consider to be
tonal and old-fashioned. I feel this is ridiculous. [...] I use all the freedoms of tonal music, including polytonality, as well as
the rhythmical freedom which goes with the twentieth century. I'm about as avant
garde as most avant garde composers were before serial music was invented. [...] "Brahms was terribly old-fashioned for his time. What he wrote in his last
symphony was no more modern than Beethoven had written 80 years before. Bruckner
and Liszt were much more modern and original, but today there are very few
people who'd give them preference over Brahms."
[...]
