Weihnachtsmusik

.

A Quarry for Melodies

The following quotes are from Rosen's brilliant little book,
Arnold Schoenberg.  Italics are mine.

The series:

The series, in fact, is not an order of pitches but of what is called pitch-classes.  For example, in the first two notes of the series of [Schoenberg's] opus 25 . . . as long as some E, high or low, is followed by any F, the serial conditions are satisfied.  Tonal music had gone only part of the way to asserting the equivalence of all octaves, but Schoenberg's serialism went much further, and made it the structural foundation of his music. (p.82) 

The series is not a musical idea in the normal sense of that phrase.  It is not properly speaking something heard, either imaginatively or practically; it is transmuted into something heard. The motif, on the other hand, is an idea heard, and Schoenberg's development of motivic material . . . is remarkably sophisticated . . . . (p.78)

The waltz [no. 5 of opus 23] breaks open the previous aesthetic with great consequences for the future by its nonmelodic conception of the basic motif or set: except at the beginning, the order of twelve notes is not a melody, but a quarry for melodies. (p.77)

All the music of this immense work [Moses und Aron] is drawn from the transformations of a single series: it is the triumph of Schoenberg's ideal of drawing a wealth of themes from a single source.  The series is no longer conceived in any way as melodic, but the main interest still lies in the creation of melodies. (p.94)

Unit of composition:

The periodic nature of serialism means, too, that the fundamental unit of music composed in this form is not the note but the series as a whole, a larger unit and harder to grasp–for composer as well as listener. (p.104) 

The series has a rhythm of its own opposed to the classical forms in that it is periodic, constantly recurring.  By this quality it transcends its inner organization.  The periodicity is of an exceptional sort in that it is totally independent of pulsation, unrelated to a measurable tempo. (p.103)

Counting notes:

Schoenberg . . . wished the public to remain unaware of the serial techniques. (p.88)

Charles Rosen

Post Script to Lewin on Babbitt on Schoenberg

I confess that I ignored David's suggestion to add this manuscript to the Milton Babbitt Collection, and it now resides where it belongs, in the Library of Congress' David Lewin Collection.

To my knowledge this lecture has never been published. And it's quite possible that it won't be published in its entirety any time in the foreseeable future. I say this for two reasons.

First, at a superficial glance, everything here is covered in various other sources in the relevant literature.  While the lecture is a brilliant condensed description of the dodecaphonic big bang creating a universe-within-a-universe that still awaits further exploration and colonization, there is nothing really "new" here to the cognoscenti.

Second, the current comfort zone for music analytic studies, at least in the U.S., is Schubert, not Schoenberg. Today, while atonal and "post-tonal" theory may harbor areas that hold some interest, serial theory per se is somewhat démodé in academia. At least this is what that environment feels like to me, a few possible exceptions notwithstanding. But I must admit that I am speaking here as a total outsider.

So why bother with this little lecture in honor of Milton Babbitt's contributions to serial music theory? Well, in one sense it's a gentle reminder that David Lewin's musical soul – the composer inside – is fundamentally Schoenbergian.  Some sense of this can be gained by reading a tribute by his former friends and colleagues. 

Those familiar with Lewin's Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations will easily recognize this lecture as an earlier, condensed version of a large chunk of that book's Chapter 6, so much so that it's tempting to go back and read GMIT from the middle out rather than from beginning to end.  In fact, over the past decade, this is exactly how I have come to read GMIT, probably the primary cause of my intensely personal, heterodox (and certainly wrong-headed) approach to contemporary music theory/theories.  Things may possibly have changed for the better lately, since I have not been in touch with the post-Lewin/Clough generation.  But last time I looked, the music academy was trapped within a tonal comfort zone where the game is to over-justify the already over-determined triad.

Rameau is dead.  Long live Rameau!

Basta!

Entr'acte

It is essential that one not succumb to the fallacy of completeness in either of its guises–namely, either in the sense that one claims completeness with respect to evidences employed, or in the sense that one requires completeness in the use of evidence.  Some degree of specialization is essential.  The question is this, however: Has the specialized employment of evidences determined the omission of important areas of experience which may in fact be seasonally relevant in our period of cultural activity?  To respond affirmatively to this question involves one in the criticism of the manner in which the inertial character of the past has overdetermined the nature of the cultural present.

David L. Hall

Eros and Irony: A Prelude to Philosophical Anarchism 

As I said before, I am not proclaiming the virtues of any one mode of perception over all others.  I am only concerned that our society encourages us to ignore some of those modes.

David Lewin

"Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception"

reprinted in

Studies in Music with Text 

Added December 9th:

The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.  This narrowness arises from the idiosyncrasies and timidities of particular authors, of particular social groups, of particular schools of thought, of epochs in the history of civilization.  The evidence relied upon is arbitrarily biased by the temperaments of individuals, by the provincialities of groups, and by the limitations of schemes of thought.

Alfred North Whitehead

Process and Reality

Lewin on Babbitt on Schoenberg

In October 1998, I received a surprise package in the mail from David Lewin. It was a 12-page manuscript, 7 pages of which were a single-spaced typescript and 5 pages of which were musical examples, charts, and a mathematical proof. It was accompanied by this note:

Following are 12 excerpts from Lewin's 1983 lecture.

I have numbered these excerpts for reference in any future discussions or commentary.

My thanks to June Lewin for permission to reprint this material here.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

< 1 >

< 2 >

< 3 >

< 4 >

< 5 >

< 6 >

< 7 >

< 8 >

< 9 >

<10 >

< 11 >

< 12 >

The Critic ~ Part 4: Schoenberg's Tone-Rows (1)

"What I feared, . . . . . . . . . .

"... melodic segments played against harmonic accompaniments; one note of a chord followed by a melodic segment in a different part, with the row then bending back to fill in the rest of the notes of the first chord; and, in the last statement of the third row (crab of the untransposed prime), a melodic segment in the bass accompanied by three chords. ...  Examples could be multiplied indefinitely, but ... most of them would boil down to some similar types of random distribution of the row-notes ....  Obviously, such distributions of the row could not be sensorily perceived and intelligently grasped as motival structures however much practice the listener may have had in hearing such music.  ...  The significance - even the importance - of the row as an abstract concept is easy to appreciate, but the utter disregard with which Schoenberg at times twists it about renders it totally meaningless as either a harmonic or melodic structure."

- Richard S. Hill (musicologist, librarian), 1936

"The most notorious serialist technique is 12-tone music, which creates a musical phrase by combining all 12 notes of the chromatic scale in a fixed order, and then uses that phrase as the basis of a musical work."

- Anne Midgette (critic), 2011

"12-tone music was an attempt at a new musical language in which all 12 pitches of the scale were used in a complexly rotating order."

- Kyle Gann (author, musicologist, composer), 2011

"12-tone row:  the 12 chromatic tones of the octave placed in a chosen fixed order and constituting with some permitted permutations and derivations the melodic and harmonic material of a serial musical piece."

- Merriam-Webster.com (Internet dictionary), 2011

"[The 12-tone technique] is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any through the use of tone rows, an ordering of the 12 pitches."

- Wikipedia (Internet crowdsourced encyclopedia), 2011

"... 12-tone technique, which means that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are permissible at any time, and none are emphasized over and above the others."

- David Byrne (composer, performer, director,
producer, photographer, author, etc.), 2008

"Term where all notes in the chromatic scale are to be used before one is repeated.

a. serialism.

b. sprechstimme.

c. aleatory music.

d. 12-tone row.

"Term where timbres, registers, rhythms, durations, dynamic levels were organized in 'rows.'

a. serialism.

b. sprechstimme.

c. aleatory music.

d. 12-tone row."

- Music 103 Last Section Flashcards (Internet student study aid)

"Twelve-tone music introduces each of the 12 tones of the Western chromatic scale in  a predetermined order called a 'tone row,' which serves as the melodic line.  Pioneering works using this method are Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (1912), Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto (1935) and opera Wozzeck (1922), and Anton Webern’s Augenlicht (The Light of the Eye, 1935) ...."

- The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge, 2004, 2007, 2011

From the dust jacket of the 2011 edition: "The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge provides information with matchless accuracy and exceptional clarity." 

"Etc. etc. etc."

. . . . . . . . . . happened."

- Arnold Schoenberg (composer)

Links:

=>  Richard S. Hill.  "Schoenberg's Tone-Rows and the Tonal Systems of the Future"

=> Anne Midgette. "Contemporary classical: a guide for the perplexed."

=> Kyle Gann.  "Is it music if nobody hears it?"

=> David Byrne.  "Modern Music - Die Soldaten."
 => [Flashcards]

=> "The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: a desk reference for the curious mind."

=> Arnold Schoenberg. "'Schoenberg's Tone-Rows'"

On Arnold Schoenberg's birthday ~ Just a thought . . .

 "A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." (Walter Benjamin)

Leverkühn ~ Thomas Mann's Schoenberg

. . . the difference between his existence and that of those striving and high-purposed youths. It was the difference of the life-curve between good, yes, excellent average, which was destined to return from that roving, seeking student life to its bourgeois courses, and the other, invisibly singled out, who would never forsake the hard route of the mind, would tread it, who knew whither, and whose gaze, whose attitude, never quite resolved in the fraternal, whose inhibitions in his personal relations made me and probably others aware that he himself divined this difference.

- Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

The Critic ~ Part 3: A critic has an insight

At Queen's Hall in London on 3 September 1912, Sir Henry Wood conducted  the first performance anywhere of Arnold Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16.  Here is a review from the London Times (4 September 1912) quoted in Nicholas Slonimsky's article in Schoenberg.

"It was like a poem in Tibetan; not one single soul could possibly have understood it at a first hearing.  We can, after all, only progress from the known to the unknown; and as the programme writer, who had every reason to know, said, there was not a single consonance from beginning to end.  Under such circumstances the listener was like a dweller in Flatland straining his mind to understand the ways of that mysterious occupant of three dimensions, man . . . .  At the conclusion half the audience hissed.  That seems a too decisive judgment, for after all they may turn out to be wrong; the other half applauded more vehemently than the case warranted, for it could hardly have been from understanding."

 Here is the classic 1884 novella to which this unknown critic referred.  It was written by Edwin Abbott, writing pseudonymously as "A Square."

About the book (from Open Library):

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, though written in 1884, is still considered useful in thinking about multiple dimensions. It is also seen as a satirical depiction of Victorian society and its hierarchies.  A square, who is a resident of the two-dimensional Flatland, dreams of the one-dimensional Lineland. He attempts to convince the monarch of Lineland of the possibility of another dimension, but the monarch cannot see outside the line. The square is then visited himself by a Sphere from three-dimensional Spaceland, who must show the square Spaceland before he can conceive it. As more dimensions enter the scene, the story's discussion of fixed thought and the kind of inhuman action which accompanies it intensifies.

Today Abbott's underlying social commentary seems to be ignored in favor of the book's more obvious practical value in helping students understand and become comfortable working in higher dimensions in mathematics.  But surely the Times critic's metaphor in 1912 was stretching beyond the mathematics to the problems surrounding "fixed thought and the kind of inhuman action which accompanies it" as the summary in Open Library put it ~ or, as it might be further honed, the problems surrounding a fixed mind in any age.  We may no longer live in that particular "Victorian hierarchy," but we do live in hierarchies ~ social, political, musical ~ that we have invented for our own age.

So, in your own "Present Age," how does Op. 16 strike you today?  Listen again.

[As a post script, when Flatland was first published it had only moderate success.  It was not until Einstein's theories of special and general relativity were published, positing higher dimensions and non-Euclidean geometries as uncommon-sense realities, that Flatland took on a second life.  For further connections see the previous post in this blog, annus mirabilis.  And it must be noted (as I now realize I neglected to do back then)  that I am certainly not the first to note the co-incidence of so many related new ideas "in the air" in just a 5-10 year span just around the turn of the century connecting what were previously thought to be entirely unrelated - and unrelatable - areas.]

Once upon a time on the shoulders of giants

The following lengthy quote is taken from Schoenberg's 1931 essay, "National Music" (published in Style and Idea).  Today we might easily dismiss this as a bit of jingoism, and, indeed, in other parts of the essay he opposes the tradition of German music to "Latin and Slav hopes of hegemony."  And the date is not inconsequential.  That's how the historian might be tempted to chew it up and spit it out.  And that's certainly how I dismissed the essay when I first read it years ago.

But since my first reading, I have noticed -- especially recently in the proliferation of web sites of young composers -- the practice of listing "influences."  For a single composer's web site these influences can range from Monteverdi to Zappa and Josquin to Radiohead.  It seems important to list as many divergent influences as possible (on one composer's site I stopped counting at around fifty names -- I'm not making this up).  Evidently it is now important to leave the impression that one has absorbed the entirety of the last half millennium of western civilization in one's music -- and of course ending by leaving the impression that all of it is somehow absorbed and molded (with the aid of Garage Band (TM)) into a unique music that is Relevant.  Indeed, it may be.  But listing Varese as an "influence on my music" is not the same as to claim you've ever heard a single note of his music -- the name, perhaps: it's impressive.

But gentle sarcasm to one side, there is a significant difference between Schoenberg's list quoted below and virtually every list of "influences" I've seen from contemporary composers.  Schoenberg is able to say what he learned from his influences in terms specific and concrete enough that, if challenged, they could be expanded and tested.  He didn't hear Brahms and somehow, magically -- maybe by osmosis -- take in the (clouds parting) "spirit of Brahms" that then showed through in his music.  Here is Schoenberg's list.  And then I will be back for a final comment.

*

My teachers were primarily Bach and Mozart, and secondarily Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner.

From Bach I learned:

1. Contrapuntal thinking; i.e. the art of inventing musical figures that can be used to accompany themselves.
2. The art of producing everything from one thing and of relating figures by transformation.
3. Disregard for the 'strong' beat of the measure.

From Mozart:

1. Inequality of phrase length.
2. Co-ordination of heterogeneous characters to form a thematic unity.
3. Deviation from even-number construction in the theme and its component parts.
4. The art of forming subsidiary ideas.
5. The art of introduction and transition.

From Beethoven:

1. The art of developing themes and movements.
2. The art of variation and of varying.
3. The multifariousness of the ways in which long movements can be built.
4. The art of being shamelessly long, or heartlessly brief, as the situation demands.
5. Rhythm: the displacement of figures on to other beats of the bar.

From Wagner:

1. The way it is possible to manipulate themes for expressive purposes and the art of formulating them in the way that will serve this end.
2. Relatedness of tones and chords.
3. The possibility of regarding themes and motives as if they were complex ornaments, so that they can be used against harmonies in a dissonant way.

From Brahms:

1. Much of what I had unconsciously absorbed from Mozart, particularly odd barring, and extension and abbreviation of phrases.
2. Plasticity in molding figures; not to be mean, not to stint myself when clarity demands more space; to carry figures through to the end.
3. Systematic notation.
4. Economy, yet richness.

I also learned much from Schubert and Mahler, Strauss and Reger too.  I shut myself off from no one....

*

There was a time,
if I can believe what's written in a thousand books,
when we learned from giants we called great.
Now it is enough (more than enough) merely to name them,
reducing them to gnomes like us.

.

Berg analyzes Schoenberg

I've known about the site Open Library for quite a while, but only recently did I begin to discover some of the riches it contains.  Here is one, Alban Berg's 1913 analysis of the Schoenberg Gurrelieder.  The web presentation comes complete with various magnifications, page turners and fast forward/backward.  Contemporary analyses (especially by someone with close access to the composer) are rare, but can be very instructive.  Study of Berg's analysis would be a great exercise for the composer or advanced theory student who wishes to understand late romantic-era harmonic practice.

`

The Critic ~ Part 2

"I once had a pupil who had started harmony with me.  About two months later he stopped taking lessons.  He had been offered a position as second music critic on a great newspaper and was afraid too much knowledge might have unfavorable influence upon the spontaneity of his judgement.  He made a career as a critic and even as a pedagogue."

Arnold Schoenberg,

"The Blessing of the Dressing"

in Style and Idea

The Critic ~ Part 1: Old thoughts for new critics

critic  1580s, "one who passes judgment," from M.Fr. critique (14c.), from L. criticus "a judge, literary critic," from Gk. kritikos "able to make judgments," from krinein "to separate, decide" (see crisis below). Meaning "one who judges merits of books, plays, etc." is from c.1600. The English word always had overtones of "censurer, faultfinder."

          A perfect judge will read each work of wit
          With the same spirit that its author writ;
          [Pope, "An Essay on Criticism," 1709]

– Online Etymology Dictionary

And then how tame and weak has life itself become . . . .

Where do we now meet an original nature?

Where is the man with strength to be true,

and to show himself as he is?

– Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann

. . . when I reflect that the discovery of book-printing has resulted in virtual extinction of illiteracy, my optimism returns.  On the other hand, when I reflect on the power and influence of many who have just about managed, painfully, to master the alphabet, then indeed my pessimism starts coming back again.  [Schoenberg, Style and Idea (SI ), p.148]

 . . . experts are as rare as good judgement.  [SI, p.125]

Mozart was told, after the first performance of his Don Giovanni in Vienna, by Emperor Joseph II: "This is no music for our Viennese."  "No music for our Viennese?"  At that time already it was not the highest quality of art Mozart should produce, but he was supposed to express himself as broadly as popular understanding required. *  [SI, p.128]

It is a natural temptation for critics to engage in speculations more calculated to display their learning or virtuosity than to give a clear, dispassionate and accurate idea of their subject.  ... Critics, to my mind, should be missionaries and prophets whose function is to discover and share with humanity the delightful secret that is music.  Good missionaries are rare; good dissectionists are a drug on the market. 

– Jose Rodriguez,

in Schoenberg, ed. Merle Armitage 

. . . negative criticism, because it lacks generative power, is wrong ninety times out of a hundred . . . .  [SI, p.140]

. . . the aim of the critic,

beyond that of saying what he thinks,

is to make two thoughts grow

where only one grew before.

– Jacques Barzun, Science: the glorious entertainment

crisis   early 15c., from Latinized form of Gk. krisis "turning point in a disease" (used as such by Hippocrates and Galen), lit. "judgment, result of a trial, selection," from krinein "to separate, decide, judge," from PIE base *krei- "to sieve, discriminate, distinguish" (cf. Gk. krinesthai "to explain;" O.E. hriddel "sieve;" L. cribrum "sieve," crimen "judgment, crime," cernere (pp. cretus) "to sift, separate;" O.Ir. criathar, O.Welsh cruitr "sieve;" M.Ir. crich "border, boundary"). Transferred non-medical sense is 1620s in English. A German term for "mid-life crisis" is Torschlusspanik, lit. "shut-door-panic," fear of being on the wrong side of a closing gate.  (see critic above)

– Online Etymology Dictionary

. . . there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain.  Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.

– G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

 Ah! What avails the classic bent
  And what the cultured word,
Against the undoctored incident
  That actually occurred?

                              – Rudyard Kipling, "The Benefactors"
                                    (in The Years Between [1919])

Thus we may understand Schopenhauer's story of the surprise of one ancient Greek orator who, when he was suddenly interrupted by applause and cheers, cried out: "Have I said some nonsense?"  [SI, p.114]

_____________________
* This quote featuring the well known "reception story" about Don Giovanni is included here in order to credit Emperor Joseph II as possibly music's very first "new critic." It is ironic (or a fun fact, if you prefer) that an 18th century monarch should provide what is arguably history's first example of  ad populum criticism. Sensing what was coming, Postmodernism decided to get a head start.

.

"Sensuality and Decay"

I just received word of a Schoenberg recital in New York on February 20th featuring soprano Claudia Friedlander, tenor Matthew Tuell, and pianist Lloyd Arriola.  The recital is titled "Arnold Schoenberg: Sensuality and Decay." On her blog, The Liberated Voice, Ms. Friedlander writes:

While I enjoy an extremely wide and varied musical appetite, Arnold Schoenberg's pre-twelve tone works have a visceral impact on me that is completely unlike anything else I've ever heard or performed. Schoenberg's early tonal compositions and his free atonal works evoke complex psychological and emotional states with such beauty – at moments luxuriously ecstatic, at others intolerably painful…and frequently both at the same time.

On Sunday, February 20 at 3pm, tenor Matthew Tuell and pianist Lloyd Arriola will join me for a program featuring two of Schoenberg's major song cycles. Matthew will perform the 8 Lieder Op. 6, and I will sing Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens). If you're in the New York area, I hope you'll join us and and see for yourself why I love this music so much. 

Please go to Ms. Friedlander's blog for more information and venue location.

Anyone who attends this recital is encouraged to return to this post afterward and leave your impressions of the music and performance in the Schoenberg blog's Comment section.

( about this blog )

If you have read a few of the previous entries, you may have guessed by now that this blog, entitled simply "Schoenberg," is not just about Schoenberg-the-composer or Schoenberg-the-painter or Schoenberg-the-thinker or even about Schoenberg-the-man.  It is meant to be about Schoenberg-the-Idea.  It is meant to be taken and used as a token or pointer or, better, a kind of springboard.  This project ~ a work in progress ~ will take some time to unfold.

There will continue to be entries here with Schoenberg's music (always his music!) as well as the music of others ~ and a few words about that music from time to time that are calculated more to stir your interest in listening than merely to "inform" you.  But "the real meaning" of this blog is intended to point to connections.  Well beyond Schoenberg's music, many things which he experienced and expressed a century ago remain vital concerns today, not just in the little corner of the world called music that you and I inhabit, but in our entire fragmented, centerless culture.

Now back to work.                 Here's a brief interlude while I finish the next entry :

Arnold Schoenberg

String Quartet No.2 Mvt.4

LaSalle Quartet

Margaret Price (1941-2011), soprano

(Image: Schoenberg, Blauer Blick / Blue Gaze)

.

The Old Order Changeth

Milton Babbitt

May 10, 1916 – January 29, 2011

The Old Order Changeth (1998)

Ursula Oppens, piano

I am somewhat sad that people talk so much of atonality, of twelve-tone systems, of technical methods when it comes to my music.  All music, all human work, has a skeleton, a circulatory and nervous system.  I wish that my music should be considered as an honest and intelligent person who comes to us saying something he feels deeply and which is of significance to all of us.

– Arnold Schoenberg

(in Schoenberg, edited by Merle Armitage)

[Other composers] would say to me, "This twelve-tone thing seems interesting.  I've tried working with it but it gives me problems.  I'm okay for the first seven or eight notes, but then for the last four or five notes – I don't know what to do with them."  The temptation always was to say, "Well, stick them in the contrabassoon and nobody will notice!"

This kind of misapprehension however reflected a much deeper one: the notion that twelve-tone music involved counting up to twelve.  There were all kinds of strictures that people imagined were associated with this . . . .  People imagined that you couldn't repeat a note until all twelve had been sounded.  Well obviously such people had never looked at a piece that anybody called twelve-tone.  Such a terrible confusion of the representation of a ... row with the whole conception of the structural function of ordering was pathetic and led to fundamental misunderstandings, many of which, I'm afraid, still persist.

– Milton Babbitt

(in Milton Babbitt : Words about Music

edited by Stephen Dembski and Joseph N. Straus)

Schoenberg's Primitive Sea-Animals

From a Pre-Concert Presentation 
by Stephen Soderberg 
National Gallery of Art

Washington, DC
January 23, 2011

The first sounds you hear in today’s concert will be Arnold Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces, opus 11, which I’m supposed to say something about.  But I’m not going to talk about this piece this evening;  I’m going to talk around it.

When Steve Antosca asked me several months ago if I would like to be part of this pre-concert presentation, I didn’t know – when I said “yes” – that I would have about ten minutes to say something meaningful about a work that I consider to be possibly THE most important piece of the 20^th century by THE most important composer of the 20^th century.  Just that statement alone would take me at least an hour to justify (unsuccessfully, I might add) to all those who would hoot and holler at me for making such a wild claim.  And I admit that I said it in the spirit of what is passing for meaningful discourse in the world today – in other words, just to get your attention.

Anyway, rather than calling up Steve and backing out of this gig, I asked myself, How does one go about expanding ten minutes into an hour? – or into ten hours or a hundred hours that the subject demands?  My solution came in two parts.

The first part, not very original I'm afraid, is the usual solution-of-our-times:   I created [this] web page.  That way, I could suggest to anyone whose interest might be  tickled by these ten minutes – and, more, the 15 minutes or so to come listening to the opus 11 piano pieces played by Audrey Andrist in this concert –  that there is MUCH more available on this web site, including how Kandinsky plays into this, Schoenberg’s own paintings, the original 1911 concert, interviews with Schoenberg made available from the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna, … and, of course,  the music itself – a LOT of music which, after all, is the point of talking about music at all.  This “Schoenberg Project” is already beginning to focus on much more than Arnold Schoenberg – and more than just my own opinions.  Soon I will be asking some of my friends and colleagues to add their own thoughts to this web site as it expands beyond Schoenberg.  We shall see if they accept the offer (and challenge).

Now, so much for the advertisement … I see I’ve used up about 4 minutes – not much time left.

The second part of my solution for how to use my time this evening came from asking myself:    “If I was sitting in the audience with you rather than up here behind this podium, who would I rather hear up here talking about Schoenberg?”  The name that immediately came to my mind is probably one you’ve never heard:  David Lewin.

David was a composer and music theorist, known by many in the scholarly music community as the father of modern mathematical music theory.  He died in 2003.  I was privileged to call him friend.

But what does David Lewin have to do with the music being performed here this evening? One of David's "favorite subjects" and most important influences was the music of Arnold Schoenberg.  (Wagner was another fascination, but that for another time.)  He wrote about Schoenberg often and at great length.  One article, in fact, was a 22-page technical essay about just four measures in the second of the three opus 11 piano pieces.  It’s fair to say that David Lewin gave more thought to those four measures than Arnold Schoenberg ever did.

What I have for you this evening are a few extracts from David’s correspondence with another Schoenberg scholar, Oliver Neighbour.  This correspondence is now in the David Lewin Collection in the Library of Congress.  I’d just like to read these extracts to you as if I were interviewing him. *

First question: How can verbal explanations (such as pre-concert talks) help us understand Schoenberg’s music? – or any music, for that matter?

David’s answer:

“Only the music does justice to the music.  All that we who write about it can do, whether as 'historians' or 'theorists' or 'historicotheoreticocriticotragicocomicopastoralistructuralists' is to try to get as many potential performers and listeners as turned on as possible to the immense experience that is sitting there waiting for them, did they but play it and listen to it like human beings.  Now, as to what the best strategy is for making that happen, we can differ and argue; the more tacks the merrier is my motto.

. . . . [Y]ou can’t ‘just deal with sounds’ when you are talking (or writing) about them.  The words come in, and one can’t then escape the whole snare of language – least of all by supposing there is no snare.  Well, one can compose without talking or writing about what one is doing.  But I don’t think many composers can do completely without sketching (I’ve succeeded only in one piece).  And sketching – even sketching “the notes” – is one way of reifying.”

Second:  The question of “how to listen” to music – what does it mean, what does it represent, what "should" it represent, and so on – has been around for a long time.  It could be said that Schoenberg in particular made this problem even worse when he went into his atonal period and then into twelve-tone.  Oliver Neighbour gave you his way of hearing Schoenberg as many actually teach it today, as a string of overlapping boxes and rectangles and regions identifying particular chords and forms of the row – as if only music theorists could properly listen to and "understand" this stuff.  David, how do YOU listen to Schoenberg??

David’s answer:

“I don’t hear it like [Neighbor’s overlapping boxes].  But there is something that I (and I gather [he]) hear[s] going on.  The problem perhaps is in devising a suitable symbolism for discussing it ... or perhaps not attempting to do so symbolically at all.  The piled-up rectangles suggest Bracque, Gris, etc. rather than Blaue Reiter, so they already “look wrong” before one has a chance to ask what the symbolism might be asked to project about the music.  Rather than a rigid rectangle, I fantasy a sort of primitive sea-animal that lives in colonies, basically one-celled, with very amorphous & undulating ‘skin’-boundaries, that can sort of merge in and out of the surrounding waters to pick up & discharge matter, and also merge in and out with the boundaries of various of its fellows.  (Have no idea whether any such creatures actually exist or could exist.)  The sort of musical articulation corresponding to such a ‘boundary’ is not metric to my ear; nor do I hear it as ‘phrasing’ in any sense I find intuitively pertinent.  I think it is of a different sort, for which no received term is particularly apt.  Under the circumstances ... I think it’s best simply to describe what one does hear as best one can without worrying about what terms or symbols to use; specifically avoiding, however, terms and symbols that are definitely misleading.  (In fact, I regard the whole point of music theory, so far as it has any, to be exactly that of avoiding misleading terminology when one talks about music ... as one has to in any number of practical situations, particularly pedagogic.  Up to a point, one can just sit at the keyboard and say ‘like this’; beyond that, one has to use intellectual & symbolic constructs, and the damage & confusion that can result from poor ones makes it worth some effort to find good ones.)

. . . .

“The listener (this one anyway) does, I think, hear a certain kind of  intervallic ‘canvas’ . . .  and hears what [Schoenberg] does ...  with that canvas ...  as a context.  One way of saying that is to say that the system ‘makes everything motivic (automatically).’  I think it’s fair to say that this was a desideratum which obsessed [Schoenberg] for quite a time prior to his development of the [12-tone] technique ....    In doing so, though, it also radically changes the meaning of the word ‘motivic’ in the musical context.  ...   That is, the ‘meaning’ of motivic work in a [12-tone] piece is of a substantially different sort from the ‘meaning’ of such work in either a tonal or ‘atonal’ piece.  Just as the chords at the beginning of the Palestrina Stabat Mater don’t ‘mean’ what chords ‘mean’ in a Bach chorale (one of the things that makes the former so beautiful to me, in fact).”

And finally:  Since you mentioned Bach and Palestrina, how do you compare Schoenberg with composers such as  Bach or Palestrina or even Beethoven?

David’s answer:

“A Bach/Schoenberg parallel which has interested me at times: both come on with the impression of tremendous logic, rigor and organization; while both are essentially rhapsodic improvisational types.  This seems an interesting piece of creative psychology ... hiding oneself behind such an image.  For me, Beethoven is exactly the opposite in this respect ... his come on is that of a wooly anarchist and iconoclast, while actually his music is the most logical and tightly organized of any I know, from any point of view one examines it.  These notions I think contribute to my sense of tension in the works of these composers, in a positive way.”

____________________________

* Many thanks to Mrs. June Lewin for permission to quote from this correspondence.

.

Connections: John Cage

                iMitations

            invErsions

                    reTrograde forms

             motives tHat are varied

          Or

not varieD

        once Music

            bEgins

                iT remains

                        He said the same

            even variatiOn is repetition

               some things changeD others not (schoenberg)

– John Cage

X:  writings '79–'82, 126

Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles.  I studied counterpoint at his home and attended all his classes at USC and later at UCLA when he moved there.  I also took his course in harmony, for which I had no gift.  Several times I tried to explain to Schoenberg that I had no feeling for harmony.  He told me that without a feeling for harmony I would always encounter an obstacle, a wall through which I wouldn't be able to pass.  My reply was that in that case I would devote my life to beating my head against that wall – and maybe that is what I've been doing ever since.

 – John Cage to Jeff Goldberg

"John Cage Interviewed" (May 1976)

reprinted in Conversing with Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz