ABSTRACT
The visual arts and, even more so, music have the ability to express only the nature of the medium: the interplay of colour, surface, and shape, or of tone, rhythm, texture, and harmony. They do not, of course, always do so. When a vogue for figurative painting supersedes abstraction, or when thickly laidon whorls and splatters of paint bespeak muscular application and suggest emotional states, the art critics can allude confidently to ‘expression’, and everyone understands what they are talking about. When the New York Philharmonic presented its ‘Horizons ’83’ concerts, a catalogue and four symposia examined the issues implicit in the festival’s subtitle: ‘Since 1968, a New Romanticism?’ To perceive the swing away from the intellectuality of twelve-tone music towards what the Philharmonic’s then composer-in-residence Jacob Druckman called ‘acoustic sensuality’ (in the work of Luciano Berio, George Crumb and others) did not require highly trained ears.
