DEGENERATES

Half a century ago, Los Angeles teemed with Germanic art, as refugees from Adolf
Hitler’s persecution moved their creativity westward. Now, with the
“Degenerate Art” show at the County Museum currently drawing crowds and a
corollary “Degenerate Music” show about to open at the Music Center, that
episode in Los Angeles’ cultural history takes on a whole new perspective.
The community at large is contributing handsomely to the observance of these
strange and disturbing pages from history. This week, for example, there have
been concerts at both U.S.C. and the County Museum, specifically devoted to
examples of what Hitler’s minions had earmarked as “degenerate,” and the
results have been illuminating and rewarding.
On Tuesday night a too-small audience at U.S.C.’s Hancock Hall heard a program
by the school’s own Contemporary Music Ensemble under Donald Crockett, with
music fromn the 1930s by Anton Webern and Ernst Krenek that had certainly
aroused Nazi anger, and a brilliant new piece that attests to Germany’s musical
rebirth. On Wednesday, the superb New York-based American String Quartet played
a mostly thrilling program of music by four proscribed composers: Webern again,
Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith and Viktor Ullman, this time before a
properly large and responsive audience at the County Museum.What did all this music have in common, such as to arouse the ire of the German
censors? Seriousness and intricacy, for one thing. The complex unravelings in
Schoenberg’s Third Quartet of 1927 no longer intimidate listeners; the gorgeous
long melodic lines in the slow movement of Hindemith’s Opus 22 Quartet of 1922
pose no problems; the visionary nature painting in Ernst Krenek’s 1931 song-
cycle “Durch die Nacht” positively glow in the warm lighting of late
romanticism.But there was a time when this was the newest new music of its day, and a lazy
cultural consumership might find reasons, or invent reasons masked in some
high-flown propaganda about race and nation, for shoving all this aside. Among
the many things that these exhibits in town, and the accompanying musical
events, prove, it is the damage the arts can suffer when those in charge cannot
begin to comprehend the artistic material at hand. That message, unfortunately,
is timeless.On the U.S.C. program, planned by the Schoenberg Institute’s Leonard Stein,
there was also a new commissioned work, Berthold Tuercke’s Octet for winds,
brass and strings: strong, abrasive music touched here and there by the ghost
of Webern, but speaking throughout with its own voice as well. Thirty-three
years old and currently teaching in Berlin, Tuercke is a find. The Kronos
Quartet, among others, has taken up some of his music.Viktor Ullman’s short Third Quartet, eloquently played by the Americans, owes
its fame to its historic circumstance: composed in 1943 while its composer, a
former Schoenberg pupil, was in the notorious Terezin concentration camp in
Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. For all this, however, it remains stillborn,
note-spinning at romanticism’s death-throes, competent and correct. Its value
as a document is beyond question; its value as music is beyond redemption.