The Case for Difficult Music
On December 1, 1900, at an intimate live performance corridor in Vienna, a revered native baritone gave the premiere of some early songs for voice and piano by Arnold Schoenberg. At present this music, although written in an elusive harmonic language, comes throughout as exuding hyper-Wagnerian richness and Brahmsian expressive depth. However the viewers in Vienna broke into shouts, laughter, and jeers. From that day on, as Schoenberg ruefully recalled twenty years later, “the scandal has by no means ceased.”
The writer Harvey Sachs relates this story, and describes the songs sensitively, in his new e-book, Schoenberg: Why He Matters. As Sachs makes clear, the “scandal” solely obtained worse. In 1908, Schoenberg premiered the Second String Quartet, his boldest step so far towards breaking the tethers of tonality—the musical language of main and minor scales and keys that had been round for hundreds of years. Plush with wayward harmonies and arching vocal strains, the music is darkish, moody, and entrancing. However a lot of the viewers heard solely piercing dissonance and rambling stretches of ugly sounds. One reviewer deemed the piece not a composition however a “pathological case,” a “nugatory assault” on the ears of listeners, for which the composer needs to be “declared a public nuisance.”
Sachs’s e-book, focused to music-loving normal readers, is much less an impassioned protection of an indisputably influential composer than an earnest try by a fascinating author and insightful music historian to elucidate Schoenberg’s important achievements and perceive the lingering resistance to his works. These scores nonetheless “fascinate many individuals within the career,” Sachs asserts, however “proceed to fulfill with apathy, and sometimes downright antipathy, on the a part of most listeners.”
By Harvey Sachs
Sachs, the writer of the critically acclaimed biography Toscanini: Musician of Conscience, admits to being an unlikely candidate to tackle this activity. He calls himself “Schoenberg-curious fairly than a Schoenberg skilled.” However this, he hoped, may make him extra reliable to numerous Schoenberg skeptics amongst classical-music devotees. In the event that they discover Schoenberg’s music baffling, off-putting, and excessively difficult, Sachs understands why and doesn’t actually disagree.
However by sustaining that “most listeners” nonetheless cling to this notion of Schoenberg and those that adopted in his path, Sachs winds up compounding the issue, at the very least to this admitted Schoenberg lover. The stigma is bolstered. Additionally, he solely glances at a bigger associated difficulty that has constantly nagged at me.
The early twentieth century was an period of fervent experimentation and radical ventures in the entire arts. Consider what emerged in different fields throughout the early Twenties when Schoenberg was writing his first 12-tone items. For a decade or extra, cubist work reminiscent of Picasso’s 1921 Three Musicians had been actually shattering norms of illustration by breaking apart and reassembling shards of pictures into summary configurations. James Joyce’s Ulysses, printed in 1922, was banned in the UK for content material deemed obscene when the true shocker was pages upon pages of seemingly stream-of-consciousness writing. Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author opened in 1921 and overturned notions of what narrative drama might be. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land without delay rattled and riveted readers of poetry in 1922.
A century later, one has to order a timed ticket to get right into a Picasso exhibit at most museums, or a retrospective of Kandinsky. Culturally curious folks, younger and outdated, appear to simply accept {that a} “difficult” portray—or trendy dance work, or play, or impartial movie—might be thrilling, mind-expanding, actually cool, and form of on the market exactly as a result of it’s difficult. Why in classical modern music accomplish that many individuals equate difficult with intimidating—and even infuriating?
Classical music was deemed, even by some musicians (although a minority, I’d argue), to have gone incorrect within the center a long time of the twentieth century. And Schoenberg continues to be seen as the primary wrongdoer.
Sachs genuinely comes throughout as making an attempt to make a robust case for Schoenberg as a difficult, sure, however consequential composer. He does an admirable and environment friendly job telling the story of Schoenberg’s life, profession, and struggles (the e-book is simply greater than 200 pages), and reveals how early experiences fortified his later resolve to radically shake up modern music.
Born in 1874 in Vienna to a lower-middle-class Jewish household (his father stored a shoe store), Schoenberg was drawn early to music. At round 16, he needed to take a job as a financial institution clerk after his father died. However he made musical buddies and have become ever extra centered and impressive. His tenaciousness paid off. A composer who in his youth was compelled to show himself compositional varieties by subscribing to an encyclopedia’s instruction information, he finally wrote two books on concord which are nonetheless in use and is taken into account among the many century’s most important academics. At 23, in 1898, Schoenberg transformed to Lutheranism, and his iconoclasm performed out right here as effectively. When Hitler got here to energy in Germany in 1933, he reconverted to Judaism on the most harmful second, changing into an outspoken advocate of Jewish solidarity and defiance. In 1933, he emigrated to America, the place he wound up dwelling in Los Angeles, throughout the road from Shirley Temple, and located a pal, and tennis companion, in George Gershwin.
These early years in Vienna, when he confronted disdain, left him each defensive and decided, and able to strive on the function of visionary prophet in modern music. Schoenberg “would see himself as a lonely David utilizing his slingshot to fend off hordes of cultural Philistines who had been incapable of greedy, or unwilling to know, the sweetness and the significance of his concepts and his work,” Sachs writes.
That angle emboldened Schoenberg as he confronted what he noticed because the “disaster” of tonality that got here to a head within the early twentieth century. The musical system that listeners had been snug with (consider Maria educating the von Trapp kids do, re, mi) was a sort of harmonic hierarchy by which melodic strains and chords might wander away and turn out to be ambiguous so long as the music by no means misplaced full contact with the primary key of any piece, or passage, of music. However the music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had grown so harmonically unmoored that Schoenberg felt, with some justification, that the performance of main and minor keys had critically dissipated.
He dared to chop the bonds, to put in writing items that embraced this ambiguity and took it additional, radically so. For some years, he wrote freely atonal items, by which excessive harmonic ambiguity grew to become for him a brand new norm. Lastly, he thought, if composers, he particularly, had been writing music that didn’t revolve round one key however gave equal weight to all 12 notes, why not systematize this?
He devised a system primarily based on invented “tone rows,” as he known as them, a sequence of all 12 notes put in an order with out a longtime central key; the music would progress with none one be aware repeated till its flip got here up once more. This may increasingly appear a very cerebral conceit. (Sachs properly doesn’t go into the main points.) However two factors are essential. First, the approach truly allowed for all types of permutations, as a result of the rows might be gone by ahead or backwards, or inverted, or transcribed, and far more. Second, Schoenberg wished audiences to neglect concerning the methodology and simply hear, even when the notes in a piano piece appeared all skittish and jumpy, if the sonorities sounded ungrounded, flinty and dissonant; listeners ought to give themselves over. As soon as he devised the approach, he felt liberated. In 1921, nonetheless swept up in a flush of nationalism he would later remorse, Schoenberg boasted to a pal that he had found one thing that may guarantee “the dominance of German music for the following century.”
That’s the place he was incorrect. He had not found the following stage of music, as a result of, it may be argued, there’s been no subsequent stage. Music can change, even dramatically, with out progressing to some greater, complicated realm. And tonality was not in such a disaster in any case, as Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, Britten, Shostakovich, Copland, and an entire roster of composers would show because the twentieth century unfolded.
Fairly, twelve-tone system was an exhilarating leap into the past, an invite to let go, to dispense, at the very least for some time, during a bit, with what Leonard Bernstein in his Norton Lectures at Harvard maintained was an inherent want in human beings from all cultures for music that loosely adheres to some sort of tonal harmonic mooring.
My strongest objection to Sachs’s account of what occurred comes up for the primary time within the e-book’s prologue, when he writes that Schoenberg’s 12-tone compositional approach and its offshoots, which had been “nearly compulsory amongst composers struggling for recognition within the third quarter of the 20 th century,” have been “both deserted or drastically altered, typically past recognition” by most youthful composers. He provides that atonality and the 12-tone approach “have proved to be useless ends for many listeners and for a lot of—maybe even most—skilled performing musicians as effectively.”
This appears unfair and too sweeping. Did cubism show a useless finish as a result of few painters at present emulate Picasso’s particular method and approach? For a few a long time, summary expressionism appeared to dominate and drive modern portray. Some influential critics maintained that this method outlined trendy artwork. Related claims had been made by influential, if regrettably dogmatic, 12-tone composers within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s who held educating posts at universities. They dominated the mental excessive floor over their timid colleagues who, as they noticed it, nonetheless hewed to varied sorts of tonality.
All such pronouncements had been incorrect. Summary expressionism stays an exhilarating improvement that also influences painters whose works look little like these of Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock. And the influence of the daring experiments pioneered by Schoenberg is ever current.
Go to a up to date music live performance at any conservatory or college. It’s protected to say that not one of the younger composers on the packages are writing something near strict 12-tone works. Nonetheless, in virtually each piece, you hear intrepid parts of atonality, pointillist riffs, the tart harmonic twang and flighty figurations attribute of Schoenberg & Co., even when the general musical language could also be drawing from many types—tonality within the method of Copland or Britten, minimalism, folks music, jazz, electronica, no matter. And movie scores for many years have been thick with stretches of gnarly, 12-tonish sounds to convey thriller, angst, and depth. Checked out this fashion, Schoenberg’s atonal and 12-tone works, removed from being useless ends, had been door openers.
Even in his personal time, as Sachs reveals, Schoenberg was not as dismissed as is mostly assumed. He did have highly effective champions and his share of gratifying successes. In a compelling chapter, Sachs discusses the ecstatically acquired 1912 Berlin premiere of Pierrot Lunaire, a bit that boldly blends modernist atonal music with Berlin cabaret. Written for an actress and a small instrumental ensemble, the piece units 21 poems by Albert Giraud (translated into German) relating the exploits of the timeless Pierrot character, who seems in a moon-drunk state, singing of lust, violence, nightmares, and heresy. The voice half, tailor-made to the actress’s expertise, is written in a sort of song-speech that Schoenberg known as “Sprechstimme.” The music “‘fulfills’ the phrases and provides dimensions to them,” Sachs writes, “to such a level that one feels as if the phrases have grown out of the music itself, in a form of onomatopoeic symbiosis, which after all will not be the case.”
Sachs explains the dearth of outstanding orchestras’ performances of main Schoenberg works by pointing to the inherent complexities and awkward technical difficulties of the scores. Sachs writes admiringly of the sensible violinist Hilary Hahn’s recording of Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto, however factors out, quoting Hahn, that she wanted a few years to coach her fingers to play it and to uncover the music’s “grace, wit, lyricism, romanticism and drama.”
However I might think about many excellent violinists devoting two years to mastering the concertos by Tchaikovsky or Brahms, among the many most tough within the canon. In 1970, on Beethoven’s 2 hundredth birthday, I heard Rudolf Serkin play a monumental efficiency of Beethoven’s daunting Hammerklavier sonata at Carnegie Corridor. Some weeks later, I used to be in a position to congratulate him in particular person for that unforgettable Hammerklavier. He checked out me and stated, “It took me 50 years.”
Additionally, assessing the importance of a composer’s works by the present reputation of his items will not be fairly proper. The stigmatization of Schoenberg has caught, sadly. But I discover that with just a bit assist, open-minded listeners reply. In lessons I’ve taught, I’ve gained over the Schoenberg-averse by taking part in a Bach musette after which the musette from Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, Op. 25, which is nearly like a 12-tone transformation of a Bach suite. Aside from the way in which the pitches had been picked, the Bach and the Schoenberg are strikingly comparable, the identical short-short-long dance rhythm, the identical skipping, impish character.
The argument that classical music has by no means recovered from the incorrect flip taken within the center a long time of the twentieth century appears dated and downright incorrect. Judging by the reactions of audiences I’ve been a part of over the previous 20 years, even simply in New York, the local weather for modern music has gotten increasingly welcoming. It appeared an apt studying of the cultural second when in 2020 the New York Philharmonic largely eschewed commemorating the 250th birthday of Beethoven and as an alternative inaugurated Project 19, a sequence of works commissioned from 19 ladies composers to commemorate the centennial of the Nineteenth Modification. The Metropolitan Opera has given New York premieres in current seasons of unapologetically difficult—sure, that phrase—however arresting operas, together with Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin and Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel. This season, in an inventively modern and vibrantly choreographed manufacturing, the Met is presenting its home premiere of Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, a long-overdue listening to of a breakthrough work from this Pulitzer Prize–successful composer. Davis has written that he tried to mix “the improvised and subversive spirit of the blues” with the shape and construction of “the post-tonal harmonic language of Berg and Stravinsky.”
Regardless of what chances are you’ll hear, many works by Schoenberg and his circle, particularly his devoted scholar Alban Berg, written throughout these tumultuous a long time of change, have been embraced by audiences. Within the fall of 2021, when an ailing Michael Tilson Thomas heroically carried out a program with the New York Philharmonic ending with Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, the excessive level, for me and for a lot of, was a powerful efficiency of Berg’s 1935 Violin Concerto, with Gil Shaham as a soloist. This wrenching, elegant piece folds passages of tonal music, together with strands of a plaintive Bach chorale, into the complicated musical language that Schoenberg pioneered.
The efficiency acquired a protracted, ardent ovation from an viewers of attentive listeners who didn’t appear to know that they had been supposed to search out twelve-tone system alienating.
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