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.

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