Why do I even need to write a diary about Schoenberg when there are great albums like this for sale? You should buy it just for the pootie on the cover!
Okay... wait. I get it, it must be a joke. (I still wish I could order it, but it's not on Amazon, FUCK..) The website referenced in the commercial, schoenberg.at, really does exist, and is for the Arnold Schoenberg Center, founded, I presume based on the .at extension, in Atlantis.
Arnold Schoenberg should be a name familiar to anybody who ever got lost on the campus of UCLA and had to pray for search and rescue to save them. And God forbid you ever went to Schoenberg Hall on the UCLA campus to listen to chamber music. The best way to get there and back is to go by bicycle or use a flying jet pack. Still, it's a very famous concert hall, if only because of how many have gone and never reported back. Looking at the Google Satellite photo, we can see that it's not very far from St. Alban's Episcopal Church, the first church named after Schoenberg-student, friend, and fellow atonal-composer, Alban Berg, whom I didn't even know was canonized! Maybe I'm wrong about that. I'll get back to you on it.
Trying to explain atonal music and serial music is a little like entering THE TWILIGHT ZONE.
Finally, I have an excuse to post that! If you're ever on Jeopardy and asked what is the most famous piece of atonal music in the world, ring that buzzer and yell What is the Twilight Zone Theme, Alex!" Some people might say Berg's opera Woyzeck, but they are surely wrong, because I don't know many people who can hum a couple of bars of Woyzeck, and yet almost everybody knows the deedle-deedle music!
We can thank Arnold Schoenberg for popularizing atonal music with, if not the general public, at least, we can say, with a generation of twentieth century composers. But let's go back in time to review the genesis of this. If you remember my diary last November on Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, you may remember the clumsy graphic I made to illustrate the nature of the game of tonal music:
"Normal" Music
The music that you and I identify as music follows certain rules of harmony. Each of the Roman numerals above represent a different chord in the home key, lower case numerals being minor. I could have drawn it as a finite automata digraph, as we might have done in a math class, but it was easier to steal and Photoshop a maze from a Denny's placemat. Traditional music, everything from "She'll Be Comin' Around the Mountain" to Beethoven's Fifth, starts out in a chord close to the home key, wanders through different chords (different numerals), before ending on a cadence: a V chord followed by an I chord. That V-I cadence expectation keeps us in suspense, as if we are waiting for the period at the end of a long
sentence. And just as English syntax has rules about the use of periods and commas, subjects and predicates, normal music has rules. Wagner, as a creative Romantic composer of the nineteenth century, revolutionized music by ignoring the rules and doing it without shame or deceit, basically erasing some of those little walls in the maze graphic. Wagner's music, which was outrageously bold for its time, seems almost traditional to us now. But he had started a harmonic arms race that would lead to wilder and wilder harmonies that stretched the definition of tonality.
When Arnold Schoenberg began his musical career, he was a Wagnerian composer, like Mahler and Bruckner and Strauss. His most popular piece, even today, has to be his first published work, a masterpiece of Wagnerian harmony, Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night) (1899), his Opus 4 work.
Verklarte Nacht (excerpt)
I chose this excerpt rather than the actual whole piece because we don't really need to hear the whole thing and the middle part is more illustrative, especially with the student film that accompanies it. Verklarte Nacht illustrates the intense Romanticism of early Schoenberg. It's tonal, it's Romantic, it's harmonically complicated. It stretches our harmonic expectations but doesn't exceed them by too much for modern ears. (There are more difficult parts of it that I could have quoted that might have baffled you; let's skip that for now.) If you like Verklarte Nacht, you would probably love Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, which it most reminds me of.
I once wanted to do a whole diary or two on another great Schoenberg tonal masterpiece, Gurre-lieder. If Verklarte Nacht was reminiscent of Wagner, Gurre-lieder (1911) is reminiscent of Gustav Mahler's enormous choral symphonies, like the Eighth.
Finale of Gurre-lieder, Seht die Sonne!
This is program music, so I should explain. Zombies have been attacking a castle. Now as the sun rises, they disperse and the good guys win, Hooray! It's an enormous work, some hour and forty minutes long, requiring about 400 paid musicians to perform, a very expensive work to rehearse and perform. It required an enormous effort of composition from Schoenberg, who started it in 1900 and didn't finish it until 1911, it's first performance in 1913.
I'm going to resist the temptation to post more Gurre-lieder clips. We have a lot of turf to cover still. But just listen to that section above. Besides Mahler, I think I hear Debussy influence. There were quite a few composers in the early twentieth century trying to compose music in this style, and some of them are quite good -- I post them from time to time -- but this, the Gurre-lieder, stands out. If Schoenberg had wanted to, he could have stayed with this style, have been the king of the late Romantics, the greatest of an art style that was on its last legs, the biggest, baddest T. Rex at the end of the Cretaceous.
Hyperbolic much? Maybe. I used to know, online, David Levine, the music editor for our local paper, the Press Telegram. I got into a chat with him, one time, telling him what a fan I was of Bartok's quartets (remember last week?) He expressed the opinion that Bartok would eventually be remembered as the greatest musician the twentieth century produced, something we can't possibly assess this soon, being too close to events. When I mentioned how much I liked Mahler, David also tried to turn me on to Schoenberg's early music, in particular, Gurre-lieder, which he raved about. It's totally unlike Schoenberg's later works.
Indeed, the 1913 premiere of Gurre-lieder was a huge success. It received multiple standing ovations. It is reported that Schoenberg finally came on stage for an ovation, but rather than bowing to the audience, he bowed to the orchestra and walked way.
What happened?
Thirteen years had passed since he had first begun composing it. He felt contempt for the audience that applauded Gurre-lieder but had rejected his first atonal works composed in the meantime.
From Wikipedia, about the incident:
"I had, during these thirteen years, developed my style in such a manner that to the ordinary concertgoer, it would seem to bear no relation to all preceding music. I had to fight for every new work; I had been offended in the most outrageous manner by criticism; I had lost friends and I had completely lost any belief in the judgement of friends. And I stood alone against a world of enemies."[3] At the première, Schoenberg did not even face the members of the audience, many of whom were fierce critics of his who were newly won over by the work; instead, he bowed to the musicians, but kept his back turned to the cheering crowd. Violinist Francis Aranyi called it "the strangest thing that a man in front of that kind of a hysterical, worshipping mob has ever done."[4]
And the musical world was moving on. The harmonic arms race that Tristan und Isolde had begun (or at least accelerated) was reaching a crisis point. The rules of the game, those little lines in my maze graphic that separate one chord from another, that create the syntax of music, were stretched so far by the increasing use of artistic license that for music to be new, it would either become more formal through the creation of new forms and syntaxes, as (happened with the neoclassical composers like Stravinsky), or it would free itself from the tonality altogether. Schoenberg had begun to free himself from these shackles in what he described as a "liberating experience."
His first openly atonal work was the String Quartet #2, which we are going to listen to last because it is my favorite atonal Schoenberg piece. So, instead, let me give you Peripatie, the fourth movement from his atonal work, Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 16 (1909).
Peripatie from Five Pieces for Orchestra Op. 16 by Arnold Schoenberg
I hope you take notice of the paintings the uploader chose to illustrate the music. They are examples of German expressionism, which we will talk more about in my next diary.
You have to try imagining hearing this for the first time, what the audience must have thought. Although there are many tonal works so vague (cough BARTOK cough) in their tonality that they may seem atonal, actually breaking the tether, deliberately breaking the tether, brings a new and scary freedom to the music. As we hear, here, it can be very emotionally expressive, even if those emotions are not the comfortable, familiar ones of Romanticism. The lack of a tonal game plan (remember my maze graphic) means that there is an unpredictability to it. Our expectations of a lovely V-I cadence are dashed. Form, in Peripatie, is created through the contrast of violence and calm.
Next up, we have a segment from Pierrot Lunaire, Opus 12 (1912), another atonal work composed before that first performance of Gurre-lieder. Pierrot is probably Schoenberg's most popular atonal piece .
Der Kranke Mond (The Crazy Moon) from Pierrot Lunaire, Opus 12, performed by Lucy Shelton and Thomas Blair & Co.
From a great comment at the Youtube site for this clip:
what amazes me is the time this was written...and still, almost 100 years later, in the 21st century you have people saying this is "straight up freaky weird" and "the worst/scarriest thing I've ever seen". Schoenberg changed the face of music but it is yet to be totally accepted by mainstream musical society. Does anyone consider, maybe this is supposed to be freaky and weird?
Well, yes, it does seem to me to be freaky and weird and, yes, intentionally so. Let's give Schoenberg credit for it. As Salvador Dali said, "The only difference between me and a crazy man is that I'm not crazy!" You can't help but wonder about that sometimes, what was going on in Schoenberg's head, when listening to music like this, because it does appeal to a dark, disorganized, what Nietzsche would call Dionysian part of our personality. And this is very much in the spirit of what was happening in many areas of German art, and not just in music, during the years before and after World War I. Atonal music turned out to be perfect for that!
Arnold Schoenberg self-portrait. Seriously.
The story of Pierrot Lunaire is, well, I can't remember anymore and don't want to look it up because I'm lazy and don't really give a shit. It has something to do with an insane clown raving about the moon a lot. "Der MoooOOOoooOOnd!"
Another short clip (1 minute) from Pierrot:
Der Mondfleck (The Moonfleck) from Pierrot Lunaire
There are better audio quality recorded performances of Pierrot on Youtube that I could have choen, but I'd rather pass them up for these small ensemble live cabaret performances. Much more entertaining, don't you think?
My first exposure to Schoenberg was when I was a kid. My oldest brother, Richard, was a beatnik and a student at UCLA. Think Maynard Krebs. Got it? He even looked like Maynard. Schoenberg was ne plus ultra with beatniks with pretensions who liked classical music, and hell, if you liked jazz, like Richard, you also liked atonal jazz, as well, like Coltrane. I can imagine him now in a bar snapping his fingers and going "Cool, Daddie-O!" to something like Pierrot Lunaire between poetry readings about toe cheese. Richard even had bongos, like Maynard.
Dumbo's depiction of his brother circa 1960.
Richard had the complete Robert Kraft collection of Schoenberg works, which I appropriated when he joined the army. My biggest memories of Richard are of him saying various versions of, "You touch my stuff I'll kill you, you little shit." Well, I touched your stuff, Richard, and I'm even writing a diary bragging about it.
Just as a matter of reference, I should mention that Bob Denver graduated from the same high school as I did. It made us all very proud. "Gilligan graduated here!" We didn't have much else to be proud of, really.
The Second Viennese School
This is the name given to Schoenberg and his friends and fellow composers who joined him in the move to atonalism. The most famous two students, the one I learned about in college, were Alban Berg and Anton Webern, although there were many more, some of them students of Schoenberg's, some of those just friends of Schoenberg who was a very social creature, scary self-portraits and kranky moons notwithstanding. In the post World War I years, he immersed himself in the German Expressionism movement and became deeply engaged in newsletter debates on the subject of the modern arts. He was godfather to a movement.
Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Compositions
I don't want to get too technically involved in the details of this. It's rather geeky stuff, so you can dig into it yourself as you please. However, there is a distinction between serialism (twelve-tone compositions), and atonal music. You might need to know this some day, if you're on Jeopardy.
Beginning in 1923, Schoenberg began to change his style. It turns out that writing atonal music and KEEPING it atonal isn't as easy as it sounds. Our ears try to make sense of atonal music by finding tonalities where none may be intended, just because we're humans. This is a fact that other composers, like Bartok, took advantage of when they composed rather loose and free tonal music that at times sounds like it's atonal but isn't. However, deliberately avoiding tonality requires a little more effort!
Schoenberg devised a system whereby all twelve notes of the chromatic scales (that's the seven white keys plus five black keys on your piano) are used exactly once in the main tone row, or series, as it's called. Thus there is no unfair emphasis on any subset of notes that might lend one to hearing it as if it's in C major by accident. This would be quite embarrassing. "I started out writing an atonal rondo but somehow I screwed up and it came out as a C major waltz!" The other members of the Second Viennese School would laugh you out of town.
The series of twelve notes then became the basis for what was still an atonal work, but one with more rules and order. Indeed, a movement that had started out as a dirty hippy nonconformist rejection of the establishment's rules had become The Man. Oh, the irony! Once they had their twelve-tone series, they could monkey with it creatively.
However, new rules were added. It turns out that just any twelve-tone series won't necessarily be atonal! For instance, there are some intervals (remember our diary on intervals) like a fifth interval (do and sol in do-re-mi-fa-sol...) that can set up a tonal center just by being too close or played too loudly or simultaneously, so close fifth intervals were to be avoided. And more rules were added. Nobody really enforced them, but they took on a certain formal life of their own. As the twentieth century progressed, an education in musical composition would inevitably require a budding composer to compose a piece of serial music by the rules as an exercise. This was even more likely if you studied music at UCLA, where Schoenberg eventually taught music after Hitler rose to power. (And thus Schoenberg Hall!)
Burt Bacharach on his experiences with serialism:
Kansas City-born, unlikely as that might seem for the archetypal sophisticate, Burt studied composition with celebrated French composer Darius Milhaud at a time when the owl-strangling sounds of serialism dominated American classical music.
"l liked Berg and I liked Webern . . . I hung out in New York watching Cage and Lou Harrison. I was aware of the angular side of music but I liked tunes too. There were five of us in Milhaud 's class and for an exam we had to write a piece and I wrote a sonatina for oboe, violin and piano which had one particular movement that was highly melodic and quite differ ent from what everyone was writing. And I felt ashamed, or should I say self-conscious at having written something that wore its heart on its sleeve so obviously. But Milhaud said, Never be ashamed to write something that people can whistle. I learned that and how to eat Mexican food from him. He was a very decent man."
That's a very telling anecdote about what went wrong in the twentieth century, and there are many like it.
Let's move on to the main course now, the show-stopper, the Schoenberg String Quartet #2 in F sharp minor! I want to look at this work in depth for a few reasons, one of them being that it's my favorite Schoenberg atonal work. Another is that it's Schoenberg's first openly atonal work. His atonal coming out. And he accomplishes it in phases in the course of a four movement quartet. The first movement, tonal and traditional although very difficult, is in F sharp minor, as the title suggests. The second movement is tonal and even more difficult. The third movement is somewhere in between. And the fourth breaks the tether completely.
In fact, for the fourth movement, a very beautiful movement, unlike the owl-strangling sounds of Schoenberg's later Expressionism, he introduces a soprano singer, a rather strange thing for a quartet, certainly. A third of the way through this other-worldly movement, the soprano enters with a song, which in English is, "I feel the air of another planet."
When I first heard this quartet, it was sung in English, and it made my hair stand up. It is so unlike the over the top craziness of Pierrot Lunaire.
Big confession time. I've never been a big fan of atonal and serial music. As if you couldn't tell already, huh? But this is one of the very few that I can say that I love. If you want some place to begin, some place to really give it a try, then start with this one. It isn't dominated by the monster movie style of much of expressionism and is more Romantic in its sentiments. And it has those tonal-in-the-atonal "weaknesses" I described under serialism: you can hear it tonally. Schoenberg hasn't gone the last mile to sabotage all traces of consonance. There are traces of the kindness of mother's milk here.
String Quartet #2 in F# minor, final movement Entruckung (Rapture), by Arnold Schoenberg. Performed by the New Vienna String Quartet, Evelyn Lear Soprano
The movement opens with a relaxed sequence of four repeated notes. Pleasant. This four-note motif become the basis for most of the movement and appear in different forms. This continues until a dissonant chord at 1:18. Now the bass instruments (cello and viola take over), creating a deeper, darker, repeating pattern, gradually getting louder, which again is broken up by a dissonant chord at 1:49.
Again, the cello and viola, but gentler now, working up towards the introduction of the soprano at 2:45, unutterably beautiful, singing, (in German), "I feel the air from another planet." And indeed, I do. It too is built from the four-note motif. Here, it feels very tonal, almost like a cadence. My guitar says it's a C minor chord, dropping down to an F#major chord.
From this point, the Soprano sings of friendly faces, beautiful paths. As the music becomes frenzied around 5:58, she sings of surrendering to the great breath of wind that surrounds her
At 7:48, she sings her final words:
"I feel as if above the last cloud
Swimming in a sea of crystal radiance--
I am only a spark of the holy fire
I am only a whisper of the holy voice."
The last line trembles with a kind of sexual ecstasy as the music reaches its climax.
The strings finish the quartet without words. And I love this part, too, because after all the proceedings, even though it is atonal, it sounds as if it is speaking directly to us in a human voice, bringing us down gently to a soft landing. This is not like the violence of Peripatie.
At 9:28, the strings play a series of chords, intensely beautiful, almost religious, in a second mini-climax, this one setting us up for the coda. As the strings trail off from this. we end the movement on, -- EGADS! -- an F# Major chord. Schoenberg actually ended the quartet in the same key as he started it! However, he just preceded it by a completely atonal movement that makes a mockery of the title.
Next week: Zenbassoon has offered to write next Thursday's diary on Percy Grainger. Zen writes me:"It will be sometime between 9 and 10 Eastern time." Is that AM or PM? Anyway, you can find it Thursday by just looking for the usual CMOPUS tag.
I offer big thanks and big applause to ProudToBeLiberal for writing last week's wonderful diary on Hovhaness, which you can still read here if you missed it.
Week after next, I'll be back with a diary about Germany, music and film and art before WWII. It won't be about atonal music.