The rather stern-looking guy in the photo to the left is not Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of 12-tone music, but his younger disciple, composer Anton Webern. If you don't know who he is, you will in a moment. For those who have read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (all six of you) the death of Webern, shot by a trigger-happy American GI when he stepped outside to have a cigarette after dinner in the spring of 1945, is a key episode in that novel. And it happened for real.
But to understand what the heck I'm about to talk about, you have to know who Arnold Schoenberg was, and Webern too. They were partners in a particularly significant cultural enterprise.
I'm going to put up the caveat here that I usually add to my blog when I'm writing about baseball: non-baseball fans are excused. And if you have no musical training and no understanding of, or interest in, the meaning of the term, "12-tone," you are similarly excused.
I'm regularly in the habit of smoking a cigar in my library before turning in at night. And my evening smoke is almost always accompanied by music. I've found that certain kinds of music are best at certain times of day. For instance, before 9 a.m. I don't want to hear anything from the Romantic period. It's just too damn noisy. From dawn to about the time the breakfast dishes are done, all I want to hear is stuff from between about 1590 and about 1800. Monteverdi. Dowland. Telemann.
Late night is the best time for music of an intimate nature, by which I mean music for small enembles which requires you to pay attention. The kind of music that cannot be background noise. Beethoven's late string quartets never sound better to me than they do after 11 p.m.
Lately I've been listening to music of the so-called Second Viennese School over my last cigar of the day. Or I should say, the Second Viennese School and its adherents. I mean of course, atonal or 12-tone music. Now, I'm not crazy about this kind of music as a rule, and yes, there is a sort of eat-your-vegetables thing going here; 12-tone reigned supreme for most of the 20th century. To simply ignore it would be like trying to pretend that T.S. Eliot never wrote, even if Eliot isn't your cup of tea, and he's seldom mine.
So. For the past few nights I've been listening to stuff like Schoenberg's Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto; Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra Op. 6 and Alban Berg's Lyric Suite.
Now, I'm going to assume that anyone who's still reading at this point already knows what all of this music is about and doesn't need it explained. So I'm not going to go into trying to explain dodecaphony. Besides, I'm a non-musician myself and not really qualified to explain it. If you put a page of sheet music in front of me, I can point out the treble and bass clefs; the leger lines, the whole note, the half note, the quarter note and the symbols for sharp and flat. But as far as looking at it and hearing something in my head, forget it. I sang bass in the choir when I was in high school, and I once took a few guitar lessons but had to drop them when my money ran out. That's the extent of my musical training. My only qualifications for talking about music are a lifetime of listening to it and reading about it. I think I'm the only person I know who has watched Leonard Bernstein's 1973 series of lectures at Harvard, The Unanswered Question all the way through at least six times on VHS over the years.
But for those who would like a thumbnail explanation of what I'm talking about, 12-tone or dodecaphonic music emerged before, during and after World War I. A group of composers led by Arnold Schoenberg, most of them Austro-Germanic (hence, "Second Viennese School") decided to dispense with the whole idea of writing in keys. 12-tone music is constructed using "rows" instead of keys, a "tone row" being a certain arrangement and/or permutation of the 12 tones in the chromatic scale.
Atonal or 12-tone music has a distinctly weird, interplanetary sound to people who have never heard it before. Because there are no keys, there are no "tunes" as we understand them, unless like Alban Berg in his Violin Concerto, you snitch a tune from Bach or someone else and work it in there somewhere. Because 12-tone music dispenses with keys, it also pretty much dispenses with the whole idea of melody. That means you have to listen for something else when you're listening to it, which gets me back to that business about late night being best for intimate music, which I consider 12-tone to be, because it really taxes your attention. You have to pay attention if you're going to get anything out of it at all; it's not going to come and caress your ear with Che gelida manina.
To put it bluntly, to the uninitiated 12-tone sounds like so much random banging, honking and screeching. I know, because that's what it sounded like to me when I first heard it.
Serialism (so called because a 12-tone row is also called a "series")as I said, held sway in musical circles for practically the entire 20th century. For a generation or so between the 1920s and the end of World War II, there was something of a split in the classical music world between Schoenberg, Webern and Berg's followers, who were all writing atonal and serial music, and followers of Igor Stravinsky, who resisted the new style until after Schoenberg's death in 1951. Rather than abandoning tonality, e.g. the idea of writing in keys, Stravinsky kept it alive by applying one innovative twist after another to it, in works as varied as Le histoire du Soldat, Oedipus Rex and the Symphony in C.
But once Schoenberg was in his grave, Stravinsky came around to dodecaphony. Some think he was led to it by his long-time friend and amaneunsis, conductor Robert Craft, a passionate exponent of serialism. But that argument is for another day. In the 1950s and up to his death in 1971, Stravinsky was turning out works like Monumentum pro Gesualdo, The Flood, and Requiem Canticles, all of which embraced the 12-tone method.
One of the problems I have with 12-tone music is that it's so complicated and theory-driven that a composer must have a powerful personality to make any personal imprint on it. Stravinsky certainly did, and even his 12-tone pieces still sound like Stravinsky. Webern, too, is distinct in his use of the style; his music is very spare, most of his pieces fleetingly short and heavy on exploitation of various timbres. Stravinsky admired Webern, and I'll go out on a limb here and say that I think Stravinsky's late pieces, the 12-tone works, sound more like Webern than they do like Schoenberg. Stravinsky was always distinct in his use of rhythm, and like Webern he was interested in exploring different timbres. For example he described a passage in his Orchestra Variations of 1965, (which by the way, were dedicated to the memory of T.S. Eliot) as sounding like broken glass being ground up.
But Bernstein made the point in his lectures at Harvard on Schoenberg and Stravinsky respectively that the 12-tone method made it possible for almost anyone, by memorizing a few rules, to come up with a presentable piece of music. My take on that remark is that dodecaphony lends itself to mediocrity very easily, and an awful lot of it sounds like all the rest of it. Schoenberg certainly had a strong musical personality, and when I listened for the first time to the Maurizio Pollini recording of his Piano Concerto, I wrote to my pianist friend Charles Berigan back in New York that it seemed to me as if, but for the lack of a key signature, this piece could be Brahms. Charlie more or less nodded in assent. Well, Schoenberg was famous for being a "conservative radical." He gave up tonality reluctantly, developing the new 12-tone method with relentless Germanic logic in response to the problems posed by Wagner's famous "Tristan chord" and what came after it.
That problem arose from the simple fact that the Romantics, from Chopin to Wagner, had experimented so thoroughly with chromaticism, that is, making their music wander far and wide from the traditional dialogue between the tonic and dominant keys, that they had pushed it to the snapping point. Composers like Gustav Mahler, Max Reger and Hans Pfitzner had stretched chromatic expression so far that Schoenberg decided it could no longer be contained within a tonal framework, and did what seemed to him the logical thing: he threw the key signature out and started over.
Then World War II came along and he moved to America.
America has always been culturally somewhat in thrall to Europe, and American composers embraced the Schoenbergian method with both arms. Some big names resisted; Aaron Copland held out for a while, but eventually even he started experimenting with The Method.
In no time, 12-tone music was the thing to do on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe had spoken. For the entire second half of the 20th century, dodecaphony held unchallengeable sway in the university music departments of the United States. You either wrote serial music or you were a reactionary and a fuddy-duddy.
And this is where our old friend irony steps into the picture. There are certain parallels between serialism and Marxism. For one thing, as Bernstein pointed out at Harvard, according to Schoenberg's rules (which were meant to be broken of course) in the construction of a 12-tone row, no one note can be repeated until the other 11 have sounded. And if a note is especially high or low, it can't be held for a long time because its position as high or low gives it a more prominent place than the other 11 tones, just as would being repeated. In other words, the method creates a complete tonal "democracy" if you define democracy as preventing any one individual from having any more or being any more important than any other individual.
That sounds to me like the way Marxism defines democracy, or at least the way Marxist regimes traditionally described themselves when calling themselves "democratic republics."
I don't think there is any coincidence in the fact that 12-tone music took over the university music departments at the same time that the political science departments were giving themselves over to Herbert Marcuse. There is something about serialism that inspires the dogmatic approach, and of course you can say the same thing about Marx. Marxists were forever accusing each other of apostasy, and any composer right up to John Corigliano who dared to deviate from the righteous path of Schoenberg would immediately suffer the ostracism of not being taken seriously, in much the same way that poets who persist in using meter are not taken seriously in English departments today.
How ironic then, that the country which tried to lead the world down the path to Marxism for 74 years, the Soviet Union, had a strict rule against Schoenberg and his method. In the USSR, of course, the problem was that everything from chalk to cheese was dictated from the Kremlin, and of the command-givers in the Kremlin, starting with Stalin, you could charitably say that when it came to music, as with architecture and so many other things, all their taste was in their mouths. Stalin was about as musical as a hedgehog, but he told Soviet composers what kind of music they had to write, as did his successors. And they stuck to a strict rule: what they called "formalism," by which they meant music that stressed form over content, was forbidden. There were Soviet composers with enough genius to work around this rule and still create great music. Shostakovich and Prokofiev are the first two that come to mind.
But in my youth, Shostakovich was not taken seriously in the United States. 12-tone music was so firmly in the saddle in American musical circles that composers and musicians looked down their noses at Shostakovich as being at best hopelessly old-fashioned, and at worst a Kremlin toady doing the bidding of his masters. It wasn't until Solomon Volkov published Testimony, a memoir purported to have been dictated by Shostakovich himself, that his stock in the west began to rise. Testimony showed Shostakovich to have detested Stalin and everything he stood for, and to have bridled under the way the Soviet regime made him live his life as a musician.
When Shostakovich died in 1975, Testimony had not yet been published and 12-tone was still king. But a few dissenting voices were beginning to whisper by the time the 1980s rolled around. Some in the musical community began pointing out that 12-tone music, while it might have solved a problem for fin-de-siecle Vienna and Europe generally, had little if anything to do with the American experience. Some also began looking at their watches and pointing out that 12-tone had now had 75 years or so to find an audience, and had yet to do so anywhere outside of universities and at festivals of "new music" attended mainly by composers and musicians and hardly at all by the public.
The public, generally, just didn't like 12-tone, and was getting tired of being hectored about eating its vegetables. The academy, predictably, labeled the public as dunderheads and philistines who just wanted to hear the same Tchaikovsky pablum over and over, and went about its business like the cultural priesthood it saw itself to be. One thinks of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier telling the American financiers who were paying for the buildings they designed to just shut up and pay the bills. "We'll tell you when it's done. Write us a check and then leave us alone." The musical intelligentsia had a similar attitude.
But by the 1990s, (interestingly, concomitant with the collapse of the Soviet bloc) tonality began to reassert itself in ever-bolder voices, and the cries of "Philistine" from academia began to grow somewhat fainter. Composers from the former Soviet empire such as Lithuanian Arvo Paert were writing music that was shamelessly tonal, as were John Tavener in England, Corigliano in the United States and plenty of others. Aaron Jay Kernis, a New York-based composer who attended The San Francisco Conservatory in the 1970s with my friend Berigan, won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1998 with a piece so tonal that Charlie told me it sounded like Hugo Wolf's Italian Serenade.
What can be said for that? Well, from my standpoint it's a big plus if you can hear a piece of music and actually recognize it without having to stop and get out the book or read the jewel box notes. And that's my biggest problem during these late night vigils with Schoenberg, Webern and company. I enjoy their music, but more as sound than as music. Sure, it's interesting to try and follow what they do with orchestration, dynamics and timbre, but the music all sounds so much the same that I can only take it in helpings and then I want to go back to my set of Brandenburg Concertos. I have listened to Leon Kirschner's 1963 Piano Concerto maybe a dozen times, and every time I hear it, it's like I'm hearing it for the first time. It's that forgettable. And it sounds like every other 12-tone piece I've ever heard. If I didn't know it was by Kirschner, I wouldn't know it was by Kirschner. On the other hand, I can hear a passage of Tchaikovsky, Berlioz or Bruckner and immediately know who the composer is even if I don't know the piece. I'll leave it to one of my musician friends to explain that to me, but it's the truth.
Tonight I might give Schoenberg's Pelleas and Melisande a try. It's an early work, written before he went "over the edge" tonally with the op. 11 piano pieces that proclaimed the arrival of atonality in 1908. But this is 2008, 100 years later. And I think tomorrow night I'm going back to Beethoven quartets. I ate my vegetables. Bring on dessert.
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