Sony’s Fromm Collection: Ben Weber

Photograph of Ben Weber on the original cover of the recording being discussed

The sixth CD in Sony Classical’s ten-CD box set of the Twentieth Century Composers Series of recordings again focuses on a single composer. While I recognized the name of Ben Weber, I have to confess that this was only through my reading about both twentieth-century music and American composers. He was born in St. Louis in 1916 and died in New York City in 1979. He was largely self-taught; but, on his Wikipedia page, he is cited by Anthony Tommasini as “one of the first Americans to embrace the 12-tone techniques of Schoenberg.”

The Tommasini article says nothing about whether Weber ever met Arnold Schoenberg. After moving to New York in 1945, Weber kept company with the likes of Milton Babbitt, John Cage, and Leonard Bernstein. One way or another he came to the attention of Paul Fromm, resulting in a Fromm Foundation commission that he applied to composing his Opus 46 “Serenade for Strings,” scored for string quartet and bass, which was first performed at Tanglewood in the summer of 1956. That composition and the Opus 45 concertino, scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, and string quartet and also composed in 1956, are the two major compositions on the Sony CD. They are preceded by a solo piano fantasia, Opus 25, composed in 1946 and performed by William Masselos, who gave the premiere performances of most of Weber’s piano compositions.

Reading Tommasini’s account, I found my eyebrows rising at the following sentence:

In Three Capriccios for cello and piano (1977), one gets the sense that his adaptation of the 12-tone technique was his way of ensuring that his music would keep its cutting edge and not slip into Romanticism.

My own opinion is that, even if Weber never met Schoenberg, it would not surprise me to learn that he knew that composer’s Opus 29 suite, scored for two clarinets, bass clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano. This is a perfect example of Virgil Thomson’s observation that Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music, “though radical in its interval relations, is on the inside just good old Vienna.” (Thomson wrote this in an extended article about John Cage, which appeared in the April 23, 1970 issue of The New York Review.) Like Schoenberg’s Opus 29, Weber’s Opus 46 evokes traditional forms and structures, embracing nineteenth-century traditions rather than trying to avoid “slipping into” them.

As a result there is a delightful transparency of expressiveness that cuts across all three of the selections on this CD. That transparency is as much the product of clarity on the part of the performers as it is of Weber’s approach to invention. Like Schoenberg, he had no desire to consign the music of past composers to the “ash heap of history;” but he also knew how to find his own way without proceeding down well-worn paths.

Tommasini’s article was a review of a concert entitled Ben Weber Remembered, which took place on the twentieth anniversary of the composer’s death. I have the uneasy feeling that the numbers of those around at that time to remember Weber have declined significantly. Perhaps this revived interest in compositions supported by the Fromm Music Foundation will reverse that trend.