Schoenberg. Why?
It seems paradoxical that Arnold Schoenberg was simultaneously the originator of the most relentlessly dissonant style of music, 12-note serialism, and also a person with the most comprehensive mastery and knowledge of every permutation of tonal harmony.
I admire Schoenberg, take every chance I can to perform his music, and love doing so. I am in no way an opponent of his music. But that does not prevent my ears from understanding how Schoenberg’s music is baffling and hateful to most lovers of classical music. Not all; but his admirers are a distinct minority.
For such perceived hostility in artworks to endure for 100 years is a prodigious achievement. Most new music becomes familiar after a while. Sooner or later Stravinsky and Bartok don’t sound so bad; nor do Berio or Ligeti, Berg or Webern. Even Stockhausen has a sort of quaintness, and Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître is positively yummy. But people in general do not get used to Schoenberg. As Philip Larkin put it, writing of Charlie Parker, it sounds crazy when it is new, and then after you get used to it, it still sounds crazy.
To achieve that, Schoenberg must have hit upon the very taproot of normal musical meaning. The chromatic scale of 12 notes is the universe from which music from Monteverdi through Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, and Schoenberg is drawn. It is a product of nature, derivable entirely from the two intervals of octave and 5th. That is all you need, the ratios 1:2 and 2:3, plus a little practical fudging. The glory that is western harmony, (pre-Schoenberg,) involves selecting from these 12; never having all 12 of them in play at the same time. Chords, scales, modes; all these arise from excluding some of the notes for a while. Hence “wrong notes.” Schoenberg’s inspired depth-charge was to require that all possible “wrong notes” be in play all the time. That very quickly shatters any emerging harmony of a tonal or modal type. Why did he do this? It seems odd, perverse, especially considering his huge harmonic skill, as demonstrated in Verklärte Nacht, Gurrelieder, etc.
The standard explanation is historical determinism: - the argument that musical style inescapably evolves through time, and tonal music was “worn out”, not valid any longer.
A moment’s reflection shows that all this is pure nonsense. If tonality doesn’t work anymore, why do musicians and listeners (and even composers) still adore Mozart and Bach? Is Mozart a clear advance on Bach? Why do Wagner’s Music Dramas leave ever-increasing audiences spellbound and emotionally transported? Why are Schubert’s melodies still so perfect? Why does the three-chord trick still win hearts, and the chain of 7ths, effective in Corelli, still make us swoon in Mahler’s 6th?
From the point of view of a composer, however, there are pressures to innovate of quite a different type. It is not because we need to advance the art, but because, on a personal, private level, repeating things we already know everything about is boring. A cook changes the menu, a painter wants to paint new things. We take a walk along a different path. And these impulses are personal; normal needs of any individual. A creative artist is an explorer, and you cannot explore a place you already know too well.
My conjecture is that, although for most of us, tonal music still holds unplumbed mysteries, Schoenberg had, as a result of his unique talent, so internalized and codified virtually every procedure in tonal harmony that it was all, for him, cliché. For him! But he was convinced that his private diagnosis of cliché was a cosmic perception about the entire art of music, and its state in history. Not all that surprising perhaps, mixing in Vienna with Mahler, Zemlinsky, Strauss, at the assumed epicenter of Art Music. And he was a powerful polemicist, author, and teacher.
Historians and critics jumped on the bandwagon since, whatever proletarian audiences may have thought of the new music, it perfectly meshed with the evolutionary theory of music, and soon the standard doctrines of: - this is the music of the future – composers are ahead of their time – Beethoven was hated at first – listen to it more and you’ll grow to love it – music will die if we do not support living composers - : all these tired old propaganda slogans, clichés every one, started to swirl. I humbly submit that all these slogans are patently untrue. I also believe that Schoenberg was a composer of genius.
I admire Schoenberg, take every chance I can to perform his music, and love doing so. I am in no way an opponent of his music. But that does not prevent my ears from understanding how Schoenberg’s music is baffling and hateful to most lovers of classical music. Not all; but his admirers are a distinct minority.
For such perceived hostility in artworks to endure for 100 years is a prodigious achievement. Most new music becomes familiar after a while. Sooner or later Stravinsky and Bartok don’t sound so bad; nor do Berio or Ligeti, Berg or Webern. Even Stockhausen has a sort of quaintness, and Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître is positively yummy. But people in general do not get used to Schoenberg. As Philip Larkin put it, writing of Charlie Parker, it sounds crazy when it is new, and then after you get used to it, it still sounds crazy.
To achieve that, Schoenberg must have hit upon the very taproot of normal musical meaning. The chromatic scale of 12 notes is the universe from which music from Monteverdi through Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, and Schoenberg is drawn. It is a product of nature, derivable entirely from the two intervals of octave and 5th. That is all you need, the ratios 1:2 and 2:3, plus a little practical fudging. The glory that is western harmony, (pre-Schoenberg,) involves selecting from these 12; never having all 12 of them in play at the same time. Chords, scales, modes; all these arise from excluding some of the notes for a while. Hence “wrong notes.” Schoenberg’s inspired depth-charge was to require that all possible “wrong notes” be in play all the time. That very quickly shatters any emerging harmony of a tonal or modal type. Why did he do this? It seems odd, perverse, especially considering his huge harmonic skill, as demonstrated in Verklärte Nacht, Gurrelieder, etc.
The standard explanation is historical determinism: - the argument that musical style inescapably evolves through time, and tonal music was “worn out”, not valid any longer.
A moment’s reflection shows that all this is pure nonsense. If tonality doesn’t work anymore, why do musicians and listeners (and even composers) still adore Mozart and Bach? Is Mozart a clear advance on Bach? Why do Wagner’s Music Dramas leave ever-increasing audiences spellbound and emotionally transported? Why are Schubert’s melodies still so perfect? Why does the three-chord trick still win hearts, and the chain of 7ths, effective in Corelli, still make us swoon in Mahler’s 6th?
From the point of view of a composer, however, there are pressures to innovate of quite a different type. It is not because we need to advance the art, but because, on a personal, private level, repeating things we already know everything about is boring. A cook changes the menu, a painter wants to paint new things. We take a walk along a different path. And these impulses are personal; normal needs of any individual. A creative artist is an explorer, and you cannot explore a place you already know too well.
My conjecture is that, although for most of us, tonal music still holds unplumbed mysteries, Schoenberg had, as a result of his unique talent, so internalized and codified virtually every procedure in tonal harmony that it was all, for him, cliché. For him! But he was convinced that his private diagnosis of cliché was a cosmic perception about the entire art of music, and its state in history. Not all that surprising perhaps, mixing in Vienna with Mahler, Zemlinsky, Strauss, at the assumed epicenter of Art Music. And he was a powerful polemicist, author, and teacher.
Historians and critics jumped on the bandwagon since, whatever proletarian audiences may have thought of the new music, it perfectly meshed with the evolutionary theory of music, and soon the standard doctrines of: - this is the music of the future – composers are ahead of their time – Beethoven was hated at first – listen to it more and you’ll grow to love it – music will die if we do not support living composers - : all these tired old propaganda slogans, clichés every one, started to swirl. I humbly submit that all these slogans are patently untrue. I also believe that Schoenberg was a composer of genius.
©2004 AJM
posted by Andrew Massey | Thursday, December 16, 2004
1 Comments:
I think most of what you state as untrue here, is true enough to be worth saying. For example that tonal music was "worn out" is a relative truism when you look at the music of the 2d Viennese School crowd. All of them had stretched the rubber band of harmony until it was indeed "worn out." Webern's "Summerwind," and Schoenberg's own "Pelleas und Melisande" are essentially exercises in continuous climax with no... well, whatever leads up to a climax! The dominants get so suspended and piled up higgledy-piggledy with secondaries and what not - it is an amazing achievement. But when you then look at Webern's little imploded star miniatures from not that many years later, you can see what such tortured use and abuse of functional harmony hath wrought! As to Mozart being an improvement on Bach? Absolutely, from the point of view of functional harmony. Mozart's time, (and Haydn's) saw the expansion of the suspension-bridge-like design of harmonic relations, where whole movements can have the kind of harmonic inevitability impossible in Bach's day. And that lends an incredible tension-driven engine to symphonic sonata-form structures and all their progeny.
And of these axioms: This is the music of the future - composers are ahead of their time - Beethoven was hated at first - listen to it more and you'll grow to love it - music will die if we do not support living composers! I think every one has at least some truth in it! (Though the last might be truer thus: music will die if we don't stop supporting living composers : ) I'm kidding, but Beethoven had to pay the bills in between grosse fugues, too! The ivory tower has got to have a cocktail lounge in it. One of the ways Schoenberg was ahead of his time was to see the changing role of the composer, or at least to see *that* it was changing. Sadly, and to his endearment in my eyes, he honestly believed people would leave the hall humming his tone rows, and that the liberated dissonance would render moot such chatchinesses as the Woolite jingle.
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