For the most part, in the discussion of dodecaphonic music, Joseph Matthias Hauer has been little more than a footnote to the work of Arnold Schoenberg. Here, Schoenberg may be seen as little more than a footnote to Hauer. Even if Hauer was the first dodecaphonic composer, most who followed afterwards did not follow after him, but after Schoenberg, who left his stamp and extraordinary influence on the subsequent development of serialist technique. Schoenberg is therefore is another central player in this game of tones. But before we get to the music, we need to take a look at what was happening in the world of painting in Austria at the end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th. Schoenberg was also an accomplished painter, and the two worlds had considerable overlap. 
In 19th century Austria the art scene was dominated by the Academy of Visuals Arts from the Kunstlerhaus, a massive piece of architecture in the style of an Italian villa designed by August Weber that was built as a gift from Emperor Franz Joseph to the artists of Austria, whereafter it became a major exhibition space. Historicist painting held sway within the Kunstlerhaus, and as the 1890s rolled in resentment began to creep into the younger generation who felt their expression was being held under the thumb of the old school. When these fuddy-duddy’s refused to put up works by the younger generation, the youth went into revolt.
Barred from having their work shown in the state palace of the muses, they did what later generations of young people did when their wills were thwarted: they broke with the stifling traditions of their elders and started their own movement. It was 1897 and Gustav Klimt led the revolt. He was joined by a number of graphic artists, sculptors and architects who included Josef Hoffman, Koloman Moser, and Otto Wagner. This new group was variously called the Secession, or the Jungenstil, a German term for Art Nouveau. Within the movement were many artistes of various skill. Richard Wagner’s notion of the “gesamkunstwerk” or total work of art had fired their imaginations. They held that one discipline was not more important than another and they united in the cause for the unity of arts, for their combination and synthesis. Besides uniting the arts, they had other aims which included reviving the decorative arts which would allow for beauty to permeate living spaces and life. They wanted to have dialogue with their contemporaries outside of Austria, and they wanted to be a thorn in the side of the Vienna Association of Visual arts and establishmentarian art salons. But if they were to be considered serious, they needed their own space. To this end they found an ally in the mayor who gave them a plot of land. The generosity of steel tycoon Karl Wittgenstein, father of the famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, gave them the financial backing needed to build a temple of art that would be a more than worthy rival to the Kunstlerhaus. 
Above the entrance to their building was their motto, “Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit” (To every age its art, to every art its freedom). Below this were sculptures of the three gorgons, Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa, here representing painting, sculpture and architecture. These gorgons were used to ward off the profane, to ward off the philistines. Amazon and Theseus flanked the door, accepting those who were brave enough to enter.
The group also started up an arts journal named Ver Sacrum (“Sacred Spring”). Hermann Bahr, a playwright, director, critic and otherwise member of the Austrian literati, wrote in the journal, “Our art is not a combat of modern artists against those of the past, but the promotion of the arts against the peddlers who pose as artists and who have a commercial interest in not letting art bloom. The choice between commerce and art is the issue at stake in our Secession. It is not a debate over aesthetics, but a confrontation between two different spiritual states.”
The Sacred Spring referenced by the journal is not the same as the one at Castalia. It is better understood as a practice of specifically ancient Italian paganism. The sacred spring was a ritual traced back to the Sabellic tribes. When things were going bad, they would consecrate livestock and harvest produced gathered between the beginning of March and the end April (and sometimes even from the whole year) and sacrifice it to one of their deities, often Mars. In addition to animal sacrifice, it is probable that humans were also sacrificed. Later, as the age of human sacrifice wound down, sending the young children who had been devoted to Mars off on their own into foreign lands was substituted in the place of their ritual killing, and they would leave their communities at around the beginning of their twenties. The gods were thought to protect them as they left their natural territory for the border. When they reached their destination, this group set about to expel the original inhabitants or force them into submission. They would then make their own home there. The fact that Vienna Secession named their journal after this ancient practice relates to their own voluntary expulsion from the Kunstlerhaus and the establishment of their own artistic settlement. In effect, the Vienna Secession can be seen as the sacrifice of the young to build a new community outside of the place where things had grown stagnant. Soon, when the building was opened, and the journal was circulating they were in a position to host exhibitions of their own work and invite their neighbors from across Europe to join them. The transition into atonal composition can be seen as a similar secession, moving further away from the strictures of the past with their tonal centers, to what Schoenberg called “the emancipation of dissonance.” Arnold Schoenberg, the poster child of dissonance and future father of the Second Viennese School, was born in 1874 (about nine years before Hauer) into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. His father worked at a shoe store while his mother taught piano. He took counterpoint lessons from his future brother-in-law, the composer Alexander Zelminsky, but beyond that, he was mostly a self-taught composer. He earned a living in his early twenties by orchestrating music for operettas, these perhaps best being thought of as operas lite. In his free time Schoenberg started composing his own pieces, such as Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) from 1899. This is considered his first significant work, and he later rendered an orchestral version that became a favorite among his listeners. Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss were among his early boosters and recognized his prodigious talent. Mahler even went so far as to take on Schoenberg as something of an apprentice, even as Schoenberg sauntered away from tonality and into a musical language the elder composer found incomprehensible. 
In October of 1901, Schoenberg married Mathilde Zelminsky, the little sister of his counterpoint teacher. The couple had two children together before the artist Richard Gertsl entered the scene in 1907, striking a chord of disruption in Schoenberg’s harmonious family.
Gertsl appears to have been something of a handful in his early years. He couldn’t hack it at the prestigious Piaristengymnasium school in Vienna, and was kicked out as a disciplinary measure. Yet Gertsl showed promise as a painter and was accepted to study under Christian Griepenkerl at the Academy of Fine Arts. Griepenkerl was a man with a reputation for being a cantankerous curmudgeon and took a classical view to the tradition of painting. His area of focus was on mythical themes and allegory. A number of his students thought his ideas were outdated. Egon Schiele was among them, and though Schiele was appreciative of Gustav Klimt and Art Nouveau, he went on to help found yet another crew of artists, the Neukunstgruppe (New Art Group) which was in part a retaliation to Griepenkerl. To this day, historians most remember Griepenkerl for his rejection of Adolf Hitler’s application to attend the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. They also remember him for being the guy Schiele rebelled against. Gerstl was rejected by his teacher who proclaimed of his student, “The way you paint, I piss in the snow.” But Gerstl didn’t find a home in the Vienesses Secession either. He thought their work was as high minded as the old guards was rigid. So he did his own thing and explored his own capacities, foregoing further training and apprenticeships, for two years, before studying with a few other teachers, situations which soon fell apart again. Gertsl liked to hang out with musicians more than his fellow painters, and attended the concerts of Schoenberg and Zelminsky. Schoenberg was something of a painter himself, and Gertsl gave him some instruction. The two became so close that Gertsl moved into the same apartment building as the Schoenberg’s. While there he painted portraits of their family, including the woman who would become his lover, i.e., Scoenberg’s wife. He also painted her brother, her husband, and the children. Composer Alban Berg also sat for his visage to be captured in paint. Gerstl’s style and use of pastels has been considered a precursor to German Expressionism. 
Mathilde Schoenberg was six years older than him and soon the lines between friendship and something more became blurred as they engaged in an affair, a lot of suffering ensued. When Mathilde left to travel to Vienna with Gertsl for the summer in 1908, Schoenberg was sent into a crisis.
Schoenberg had already been working on his Second String Quartet when she ran off with her paramour. Spurred on by pain, he started to experiment in more depth with atonality, the first glimmer of which was seen in the inversions used in his Transfigured Night. The second-string quartet oscillates between tonality and atonality, showcasing his growing conviction to break away from the established norms of western music. He also featured a soprano singer in the quartet, which was a highly unusual move for the time. The lyrics were a setting of the German Symbolist and mystical poet Stefan George from his book published in 1907 The Seventh Ring. Schoenberg wrote of this that, “I was inspired by poems of Stefan George, the German poet, to compose music to some of his poems and, surprisingly, witho[1]ut any expectation on my part, these songs showed a style quite different from everything I had written before. … New sounds were produced, a new kind of melody appeared, a new approach to expression of moods and characters was discovered." “I feel air from another planet,” George had written. Those words, it turns out, were also picked up and used as the title for a Stereolab song. It doesn’t get more mystical than the final sung lines, translated into English as: “In a sea of crystal radiance— / I am only a spark of the holy fire /I am only a whisper of the holy voice.” He dedicated the finished work to his beloved wife.
All this suffering Schoenberg endured seemed to open him up to the further break with tonality. Gertsl however didn’t survive the affair. Already on the fringes, he had become further ostracized by his few musician friends. When Mathilde went back to her husband in October, he became distraught and committed suicide the following month. He was only twenty-five.
Schoenberg also managed to squeeze a short musical drama out of these harsh experiences. The result was Die glückliche Hand (The Hand of Fate), a drama in four acts. It had some similarities to Erwartung which he had written the previous year, a one-act mono drama that had been influenced by his reading of the book Sex and Character by Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger, which made a claim that all people are composed of a mixture of male and female substance. Beyond that it raised some arguments that would now seem contentious about gender roles and the nature of genius. Slighted as he was by his wife’s infidelity, it seems Schoenberg took these ideas to heart, specifically that it is the nature of the male aspect of the psyche to strive towards becoming a genius. In doing so they must give up sexual expression in favor of the love of the absolute or God. Perhaps this is why Weininger too, committed suicide. In the summer of 1910 Schoenberg devoted himself to writing. What came out of his pen was one of the twentieth centuries most influential books of music-theory, his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony). By this time Schoenberg had taken on musical pupils in the form of Alan Berg and Anton Webern. Berg moved in the gilded circles of fin de siecle society, and Webern was of minor nobility with a blue bloods education. It seemed everyone was forming a school or a clique, and so the Second Viennese School was born by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, with the latter becoming its central autocrat in later years. Schoenberg and his disciples preferred the term pantonality to atonal. I kind of get that. Pantonality has a positive vibe whereas atonal sounds negatory. Music with no key. Keys had tonic. But with pantonality, all notes should be a note unto itself. If the word pantonality had come into greater use, the music itself might have been adopted with less hate. And people did hate it. Premieres of new works were lively events in those days and people weren’t afraid to let their views about a piece be heard, even while it was still being played. In some respects this was a marketing issue. The word atonality sounds a bit anal, while the word pantonality is rather all embracing, and didn’t demarcate such a dividing line between the musical past and the future. Schoenberg loved the music of the past. He saw himself as a pivotal figure, but he didn’t see his role as a severer of past Western musical traditions. He wasn’t out to destroy. Twelve tone theory was an expansion of what was already there in the musical tradition. When he wrote the melodrama Pierrot Lunaire it had no key center. He also mined the musical past for forms, using the passacaglia, for instance, to ground his work in tradition even as it broke new ground. He also mined the musical past for forms, using the passacaglia, for instance, to ground his work in tradition even as it broke new ground. The work is scored for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and a vocalist. This set-up became known as the Pierrot ensemble and was used by a number of other composers afterwards. Pierrot focused on numerology in the composition, as this was a subject he was obsessed with. Seven note motifs are used throughout, and with the addition of the conductor, seven people are making the music. The lyrics come from a setting of a cycle 21 poems by Albert Giraud, translated from the Belgian to German by Otto Erich Hartleben. 21 is a multiple of seven, but it is not the only instance of numerology. Each of the poems is made up of thirteen lines and the first line of each poem occurs three times, with the repetitions happening on the seventh and 13th lines. Stylistically, he used the “drop out” method common in recording artists -letting one instrument take a break so another can come to the fore. It also employs sprechstimme, or speech song, a cross between speaking and singing. 
After the artistic success of this piece, Schoenberg wanted to keep going in a similar direction, but he didn’t know what way to go to keep moving forward. WWI intervened, and he spent the intervening years putting together his musical society. Contemporary composers were being vilified by the public for not playing things they happened to like, for daring to go outside the bounds of traditional tonality and music structure. To remedy this and continue to give those who did appreciate the new music a place to hear it, he founded the Society for Private Musical Performances in 1918. This was to be a forum where composers could work with musicians who were willing to play these pieces for a small audience outside the dictates of commercial and popular appeal. As anyone who has been to a noise or experimental music show, at least in the midwest, has known, the situation remains the same. A small dedicated audience coming to hear the works of new music makers.
In 1926 wrote an article that was to become something of a banner for the disciples he had begun to gather around him in the Second Viennese School. Titled “Opinion or Insight?,” he wrote about dissonance as becoming a tool for the emancipation of humanity. When looked at in one way, dissonance became a factor in the breakdown of society. If the power of music is conceded than the music itself, then dissonance becomes a means for breaking down power structures. Dane Rudhyar wrote in his book Dissonant Harmony: A New Principle of Musical and Social Organization, that “Dissonant music is thus the music of true and spiritual Democracy; the music of universal brotherhoods; music of Free Souls, not of personalities. It abolishes tonalities, exactly as the real Buddhistic Reformation abolished castes into the Brotherhood of Monks; for Buddhism is nothing but spiritual Democracy.” Jazz composers like Duke Ellington and Sun Ra made use of atonality. Duke Ellington wrote that, “That's the Negro's life ... Hear that chord! Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part.” Schoenberg continued to compose tonal pieces throughout his career. It was only the school of serialism as came through Anton Webern that became dogmatic in applying twelve tone techniques to all aspects of the composition. Schoenberg used his technique more as a way to come up with new ideas. He didn’t necessarily stick with everything just by the rules. He allowed his ear and artistic intuition to help guide him through the path of pantonality. In this respect, his use of twelve tone techniques could be considered in some ways akin to the use of the cut-up method by writers such as William S. Burroughs, and especially those who followed. The cut-up didn’t need to be used exactly as it came out. It could be considered as a creativity tool that allows for a jumping off point for writing. In the same way, using the twelve tone technique for Schoenberg was a way to get into a composition. It was his students who at once both expanded on its potential and looked at it with an unnecessarily strict dogmatism, much stricter than he himself had ever intended. There is also a misconception regarding Schoenberg. People seem to think that after he discovered his version of dodecaphonic music, that he completely abandoned tonality. It just isn’t true. He wasn’t afraid of tonal music, and he used it throughout his work. Atonality was just another tool on his composers toolbelt, even if it was one of the big tools. Another difference between the serialists who followed Schoenberg and his own work was the way they drove audiences away from the concert hall. Schoenberg had wanted to mend the fences between the audience and the composer, even if that meant keeping some people out of the concert hall, as in his Society for Private Musical Performances. That society had only been formed because of the aberrant disruption of their concerts by people who were opposed to the sounds. Schoenberg eventually fled Europe for the United States as the Nazi’s came to power. He had gotten baptized as a Lutheran, but not because he had a deep seated conviction to be a Christian, but more as a political chess move to keep him somewhat safe. Whatever safety his baptism conferred didn’t last. His music was deemed degenerate. Later, he reaffirmed the faith he had been born into. In California, Schoenberg became good friends with Gershwin and the two composers would often play tennis with each other. He continued to teach and write new music. One of his students happened to be John Cage. Schoenberg was very superstitious, especially with regards to the number thirteen, which he had a strong fear of. He would consult astrologers about his fate whenever the last two digits of a year were the multiple of 13. He happened to have been born on September 13th and he died on July 13th of 1951. This latter may have been brought on by his triskaidekaphobia, or fear of thirteen. Furthermore it was a Friday the 13th that he died on in his 76th year. From a numerological standpoint the age 76 can be reduced to the number thirteen by adding seven plus six. The Italian composer Gioachino Rossini also died on a Friday the 13th, which by the 19th century had begun picking up connotations of being an unlucky day.
***
A new essay of mine, For the Love of the Amateur, has been published in the inaugural issue of the journal Symphonies of Imagination, edited by John Engelin.
Symphonies of Imagination is a magazine that imagines a realistic, hands-on Tomorrow... it explores our exciting, naive and inspiring futures that await our society here on this planet. It does so through stories of fiction and reports of facts to paint a picture that leaves you with the inspiration and the practical knowledge to go out and contribute to this amazing journey. After all, it is a manual for tomorrow. In print and digital, featuring 10 beautiful imaginative stories, 2 essay and 3 poems, more details are below:
With illustrations by Gregor Schop, Aly Elsayed and Elmakhina. The cover illustration was done by Cindy Tran. Get your copy here: https://symphoniesofimagination.com/issue1/
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Justin Patrick MooreAuthor of The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music. Archives
August 2024
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
