The Ellington Century (36 page)

The second hexachord never sounds its final C, so we are left hanging both tonally and serially.

I am not trying to prove here that all music is in some sense tonal; music also needs a sense of risk and free fall; sometimes, as the old jingle goes, you feel like a nut. Or like Schoenberg. The piano piece Op. 23 no. 2 (written in 1920) is a two-part invention recast as a tantrum. Expressionist music employed two metaphors for portraying psychosis: the roller coaster for bipolar disorders and the assembly line for obsessive compulsion. On its surface Op. 23 no. 2 is a lurching roller coaster, a series of steep rises, gut-churning dips, and sudden swerves separated by deep breaths of anxiety. The meter and tempo constantly change; phrase lengths are unpredictable; nothing is repeated literally. Beneath the surface, though, it is a diabolical mechanism. Schoenberg plundered the first six bars to construct the music for the remaining sixteen. (The piece usually lasts around ninety seconds, though Glenn Gould stretched it almost to two minutes.) The rigor of the piece seems both obsessive and guilt-ridden. Everything comes back, but in unrecognizable forms, a perfect crime with a perfect cover-up.

The piece alternates two ideas so its formal plan could be likened to classical style alternating variations, although few listeners would detect the structure because the two themes are mainly defined by their pitch content but not their rhythms or textures. The only other hint that Schoenberg provides to make the contrast audible is in dynamic gesture; until the coda all the appearances of A are rising crescendos.

In a classical variation piece the harmonic progression would unify the structure. Op. 23 no. 2 has a lot of chords, but are they harmony? I've just backed into the central question about atonality, which, back in the day, also seemed like the central question about twentieth-century music. Theorists offer three different types of explanation for music like Op. 23 no. 2, which bears little recognizable relation to the harmonic practices and conditions of the tonal period. On one side Hindemith and Ulehla argued that any combination of tones produces a hierarchy; any music made from tones is tonal. Schoenberg actually made a similar point in 1923 in defending himself against the rival twelve-tone system of J. M. Hauer: “With tones, only what is tonal, in keeping with the nature of tones, can be produced; there must at least be that connection of tones based in the tonal, which has to exist between any two notes if they are to form a progression that is at all logical and comprehensible.”
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At the other side are the aesthetic arguments of Cage and Stockhausen. In their view the emancipation of the dissonance was just a first step toward a general emancipation of sounds; differences in harmony were mere statistics. And in the middle fall the Schoenbergian
theorists, mainly American scholars influenced by the ideas of Milton Babbitt, George Perle, and Allen Forte. They see Schoenberg's harmonic development as evolutionary, but with a crucial turning point with the move, around 1921, from an idiom they term either “free atonal” or “contextual” to the twelve-tone method that Schoenberg developed in composing, simultaneously, the piano pieces Op. 23, the Serenade op. 24, and the piano suite Op. 25. The earliest twelve-tone piece, or at least the one with the lowest opus number, is the Waltz, op. 23, no. 5.

In much of his writings Schoenberg used the reasonable, omniscient voice of the teacher, claiming that the goal of his music was not revolution but comprehensibility: “I have not discontinued composing in the same style and in the same way as at the very beginning. The difference is only that I do it better now than before; it is more concentrated, more mature.”
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But he would also break into a religious and even mystical kind of discourse to defend his music in terms of divine inspiration. He alternatively portrayed himself as the successor to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms, and, as in his 1911 essay on Liszt, compared himself to “Plato, Christ, Kant, Swedenborg, Schopenhauer and Balzac.”
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The twelve-tone method was not a logical path but a divine intervention: “The Supreme Commander had ordered me on a harder road.”
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In practice Schoenberg's deep-seated dualism (style and idea, Moses and Aaron) rests on an unsteady foundation of jostling ideas. From the classical repertory Schoenberg derived an idea of organicism, in which all details of a piece are connected. “When one cuts into any part of the human body,” he wrote with Kafkaesque imagery, “the same thing always comes out—blood.”
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From romantic music he derived an idea of unmediated, inspired writing, particularly in relation to a text. He claimed that he composed songs “inspired by the first word of the text…straight through to the end without troubling myself in the slightest about the continuation of poetic events, without even grasping them in the ecstasy of composing.” Even though he had formulated the identity of compositional logic and spontaneous inspiration in 1912 at the moment of his decisive involvement with Kandinsky, he restated the argument in more concrete terms for a radio broadcast in 1932.
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Schoenberg here explained his Four Orchestral Songs, op. 22 in terms of “the unconscious sway of musical logic.” The first song, “Seraphita,” begins with a long melody for the clarinets. Schoenberg shows first how it opens (like the bridge of “Prelude to a Kiss”) with a series of minor seconds. This series ends, though, with a minor third. The combination
of a rising minor third and a descending minor second produces what Schoenberg calls a “gestalt,” but that shape immediately mutates to a rising minor third and a
rising
minor second, outlining a previously unstated interval, the major third. Pretty soon similarly inspired tropisms turn minor seconds into major sevenths, combine minor thirds into the tritone, and somehow generate “variations” that include the interval of the perfect fifth, which was not present in immediate succession in the initial phrase. Schoenberg here includes within the techniques of variation not only repetition and transposition and recombination of intervals but also their enlargement, so that a minor third can swell to become a major third. Inspiration knows no limits.

This radio lecture nicely illustrates the technique that Schoenberg termed “developing variation.” When he cited this technique in the music of Brahms, it referred to the use of thematic elaboration rather than repetition. At the beginning of the Fourth Symphony Brahms followed his initial statement of the theme not with the usual repetition or counterstatement, but with a variation that introduced a new contrapuntal element to the phrase. Similar kinds of elaboration appear in Mahler's later symphonies. Both Brahms and Mahler, however, worked within the classical notion of a variation, which is also the basis of jazz improvisation—the rearticulation of a harmonic structure through melodic ornamentation. In his description of melodic development in Op. 22 no. 1, however, Schoenberg makes no mention of harmony, even though the melody is accompanied by chords of three to six pitches. In a music appreciation-style radio talk, such oversimplification may just be the nature of the beast, but Schoenberg certainly gave the impression that the rapid free-associational expansion of the melodic line was not constrained or contained by any notion of harmony.

This brings us to a third foundational idea, the emancipation of the dissonance, for which Schoenberg had to claim divine origins. Here too, though, Schoenberg offered a logical explanation. He described the history of music as a gradual expansion of the field of permitted harmonies, from perfect intervals, to triads, to seventh chords. Harmonies that once seemed dissonant, Schoenberg argued, later became consonances. Since dissonances created musical tension and heightened emotional expression, composers had to find new dissonances as the old ones lost their potency. Post-Wagnerian composers, like Wolf, Strauss, and Schoen-berg, often created chords provocatively out of dissonances, in appoggiatura chords. In his early songs
Erwartung
, op. 2 no. 1, Schoenberg constantly restates such a brazen nonharmonic harmony in a five-pitch
chord that looks like it is constructed in fourths rather than thirds (from the bottom up: E
-A-D-G
-C
Heard on its own, this combination of pitches would seem tonally illegible, but Schoenberg preceded it and followed it with an E
triad. The four upper pitches in his strange chord are neighbor tones to the notes of that triad. Heard as accented but passing dissonances they are both logical and pretty. And if they are so pretty, why call them dissonances? The richly expressive songs in Schoenberg's Opp. 2, 3, and 6 show a wide variety of techniques for avoiding, but ultimately confirming, the tonal structure. Schoenberg thought that he had attained a mature synthesis of advanced harmonic and melodic thinking in his
Kammersinfonie
, op. 9, written in 1906, which conspicuously absorbed whole-tone and quartal harmonies associated with his French rivals, into the synthesis of Brahmsian and Wagnerian ideas he had already achieved in his First String Quartet. The comforting idea that he had finally arrived at a personal style, however, “was as lovely as a dream as it was a disappointing illusion.”
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The next step, the result of an “unconscious process,” was to abolish the distinction between dissonances and consonances; from now on all harmonies were to be created equal. Even before Schoenberg portrayed his role as musical emancipator in the operatic figure of Moses, the phrase “emancipation of the dissonance” carried a lot of baggage from the book of Exodus, and in particular the lesson that emancipation itself would be just the beginning of a long and difficult journey, a painful cultural revolution. As in Orwell's parable, after emancipation some intervals would have to be more equal than others. Schoenberg and his students increasingly emphasized the previously dissonant intervals of the second, fourth, seventh, and tritone while repressing the older consonances like the octave, fifth, and major triad as emblems of the previous enslavement.

Schoenberg's new harmony would grow out of this unpromising mix of academicism, genius worship, and utopianism, but perhaps the confluence of these ideas only looks strange if you expect the results to sound like normal music. To my ears the Waltz that ends Op. 23 and announces the twelve-tone method sounds all too normal, neither expressive nor ironic nor even, as it unfolds, particularly interesting, let alone divinely inspired. It seems more perishable than Irving Berlin's contemporary
valse triste
“What'll I Do?” Op. 23 no. 2, on the other hand, shows what Schoenberg could do when the lightning really struck. The system is not necessarily at fault here. Like other superfluent composers (Strauss, Hindemith, Shostakovich), Schoenberg couldn't
always distinguish works that were merely competent from those that hit the bull's-eye.