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 20th century by THE most important composer of the 20th 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.”
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* Many thanks to Mrs. June Lewin for permission to quote from this correspondence.
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