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Title

Black Mountain College Bulletin: Arnold Schoenberg at Seventy by Ernst Krenek (Vol. 3, No. 1, November 1944)

Date
1944
Century
20th century
Medium & Support
Ink on paper
Object Type
Archival Documents
Credit Line
Black Mountain College Collection, gift of Barbara Beate Dreier and Theodore Dreier, Jr. on behalf of all generations of Dreier family
Accession Number
2017.40.032
Copyright
In Copyright, Educational Use Permitted
Courtesy of the Theodore Dreier Sr. Document Collection, Asheville Art Museum
Description

Stapled booklet, no cover, glossy paper. Transcription of address given at Black Mountain College September 6, 1944.

BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE BULLETIN Volume 3 Number 1 November 1944
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG AT SEVENTY by ERNST KRENEK
Address given at Black Mountain College September 6, 1944
Considering the relative brevity and eminently consistent evolution of the history of western music, almost any period of seventy years in that history appears highly significant. The period from 1300 to 1370 for instance produced the flowering of the Arts Nova, indicating a pronounced change in the psychological attitude of music and the phenomenal conquest of new technical means. To choose an example closer to our own days, the span from 1740 to 1810 is characterized again by a profound alteration of basic tenets and by the full growth of the sonata from the embryonic beginnings of the pre-Mannheim composers to the awe-inspiring structure of the Eroica symphony.
If the seventy years immediately past appear to us as one of the most portentous of such periods in music history, it is due not merely to the fact that we are bound to see things that are close to us in sharper outline and in more detail than more remote objects, nor to our being immediately implicated in the happening of our own time, but especially is it due to the ideas and deeds of a man whose life so far has coincided with those seventy years, as he is about to complete his seventh decade in a few days. This man is Arnold Schoenberg.
There is one other period of seventy years in the history of music that may be compared with this one. That is the years 1550 to 1620 approximately, and the man who dominated that earlier period in a way comparable to Schoenberg’s position in our own days was Monteverdi. In the second half of the 16th century the impact on music of Renaissance and Humanism came to full consummation. The center of gravity in the creation of music shifted from the ecclesiastical ceremonial of mass and motet to the secular fancy of madrigal and opera, and the pendulum soon swung further toward purely instrumental forms. The technical implications of this change of the psychological scene from the intricately organized group-feeling of the church community to the adventurous exploration of the emotional depths of the soul of the individual were extremely far reaching. Dr. Lowinsky’s recent studies of the symbolic significance of musica reservata and of the symptomatic relationships of the conquest of geographical space in nature and of the dimension of harmony in music have revealed new aspects of this period. Mark Brunswick has contributed a very interesting viewpoint, examining the discovery of perspective in painting in connection with the emergence of the Dominant-Tonic principle in music. Monteverdi who stared out in the time-honored style of polyphonic writing soon shocked some of his contemporaries as a revolutionary who disregarded the rules of counterpoint as taught by Zarlino and practiced by Palestrina. Breaking away entirely from the modal idiom and from the polyphonic texture after 1600, Monteverdi seemed to add the final and boldest stroke to his revolutionary work by creating the new form of opera. However, more careful study of the period reveals that the true revolution had been carried forth by a group of half-forgotten composers, the most extraordinary of them being Carlo Gesualdo. In view of what music could have become in their hands if they had succeeded in throwing the switches of the main line of evolution in their own direction, the ultimate accomplishments of Monteverdi appear conservative rather than revolutionary. Undoubtedly he was greatly responsible for the stabilization of the tonal idiom into a universally manageable instrument of musical expression, a set of technical procedures susceptible to clear-cut systemization and standardized rules. Through the impact of his genius and the tremendous vitality and inclusive significance of his operas he stopped the trend toward limitless and fantastic freedom as personified in Gesualdo who was able to express himself only in minor works of limited scope.
If we compare morphologically so to speak the main characters of the seventy years into which Monteverdi’s appearance fell with those of Schoenberg’s seven decades, we may say that in a certain sense Schoenberg has exercised the functions of both Gesualdo and Monteverdi, of revolutionary and stabilizer. To understand this better, let us cast a glance at the musical scene into which Schoenberg was born, that is, as it was seen from the Vienna of the 1870’s.
The phenomenon dominating that scene was, of course, Richard Wagner, entering then the last decade of his life and about to move into Bayreuth, the shrine that he had meant to erect as the artistic center of the newly united German nation. His most portentous work, “Tristan”, was then approximately twenty years old and far from being generally accepted as an expression of the age, was rather hotly contested. The truly revolutionary shock that had gone out from the works of Wagner’s middle period was by no means absorbed. The disturbance was patently enough emanating from the unusual vocabulary of that music, its strange chords, and from the extremes in which that music loved to indulge with respect to dimension, dynamics, orchestration and the like. But there was more to it than technical innovations. It was the attitude of the maker of that music that startled his contemporaries; a man who liked to emphasize freedom and sovereignty of the creative spirit beyond any known limits, who seemed to invite trouble and enjoy fights, who defiantly challenged his age by declaring that his was the music of the future. There was an aura of danger and excitement about the man and his music, to an extent perhaps never before equaled in the history of art.
It is well known that the Viennese opposition against Wagner had appointed Brahms, who was then in the prime of his life, as their leader. With the distance in time growing, we are less and less inclined to visualize such essential differences between the idioms of Wagner and Brahms as their contemporaries apparently felt. If the ostensible reason for the Wagner-Brahms antithesis seems less obvious today, there remain good enough reasons for seeing substantial differences between the two men. Brahms suggested his stand opposite to Wagner by staying away entirely from the extrovert medium of opera and by stressing in his instrumental works the formalistic aspects of the middle period of Beethoven approximately. Wagner, too, nominated Beethoven as a witness in defending his revolutionary tendencies, but this apparently carried not much power, as the revolutionary aspects of Beethoven, fairly evident in a period reverberating from the turmoil of the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars, had faded away in the consciousness of the saturated, generally peaceful age of rapid industrial progress.
Bruckner, roughly speaking a contemporary of Brahms, had tied his fortune to that of Wagner and was making accordingly slow progress in view of the Brahmsian opposition. It is interesting, however, to notice that four composers usually not seen in such perspective, were less than fifteen years old when Schoenberg was born. They are: Mahler, Debussy, Strauss and Sibelius.
Schoenberg entered the scene at a point at which avoiding compromises as they were practiced by many minor composers was possible only by driving one or both of the present components to a climax and trying to reach a synthesis. Strauss has eventually settled for the compromise. Debussy’s impressionism may, in spite of possible protestations to the contrary, well be understood as the utmost consequence of Wagnerian tenets. This is usually not seen in this light, because the technical achievements of the impressionistic school have prepared the way for the powerful anti-psychological, and thus anti-Wagnerian, movement whose chief exponent has become Stravinsky. Mahler, and with considerably less fervor and intensity, Sibelius, have tried for the synthesis. Especially Mahler might have reached it had he lived longer and had he been less exclusively preoccupied with the symphonic form on a grand scale, which involved too many set assumptions to allow free experimentation. Schoenberg has from the outset aspired to integration of the opposite principles, but by pushing each of them further and further, he has eventually reached the horizon of any of his contemporaries.
Schoenberg’s First Quartet is a perfect example of that synthesis on the grounds of the status of the musical idiom as he found it. The vocabulary is clearly derived from the highly chromatic, emotionally saturated, expansive and rampant style of Wagner, in many places still less concerned that Wagner with definite key references. The structure, however, is more Beethoven-like than Brahms ever dared to be, deriving its tremendously involved design from the formidable architecture of the latest Beethoven. While the material seems to point to progressive elimination of the last vestiges of the once powerful braces known as the system of tonal harmony, the motivic construction indicates an unprecedented degree of consistency and logical coherence.
However, the balance in which the two opposing elements, that of boundlessly roaming expressive power and that of tight construction, are held is not as stable as it may seem. While unity of design is the purpose of the construction, this purpose is accomplished by revealing a multitude of individual thematic ideas as closely related to a few basic patterns of great simplicity. Thus the thematic material is presented in a state of constant motion, a process known in classical music as development. In comparison to earlier classical specimens, the thematic statements are relatively brief, each of them quickly dissolving into active, driving formations, so that most of the space of the vast combinations of motives extracted from the themes, in constant subtle variations leading on from one idea to the other and revealing kinship or even identity of distant parts of the structure.
It is in those polyphonic sections that the tonal characteristics of the idiom are most completely corroded, until practically nothing is left of them. The action through which Schoenberg acquired his unique place in the history of music consisted in considering the precarious an, in terms of earlier standards, negative status of the idiom not as an exception any longer, but making it a new point of departure. The piano pieces Opus 11 are the first work of this kind, inaugurating a series of compositions in which the temporary balance of the First Quartet is largely suspended, in favor of the expressive, Wagnerian component. This phase of Schoenberg’s work has been called with some justification his expressionistic period. The constructive elements, though still present, are gradually receding until in the operas Erwartung and Glueckliche Hand they are almost gone. They are completely overshadowed by the fact of the new idiom, the so-called a-tonal idiom.
Beyond any previous expectation, music has become a more than sensitive tool for registering the finest standings of psychological reality. In the tonal idiom, a system of relationships between the single elements of the material had been handed down by tradition. These relationships, known as tonal harmony, had existed outside of and before individual compositions were created, and they made the musical process to some extent predictable, which is one of the characteristics of formalization of artistic procedures. Such preexistent relationships having been eliminated, the material was in a liquid state, as it were, immensely flexible and yielding to the slightest psychological impulse. If the material as such sounded strange and unfamiliar enough, it was the unpredictability of the musical process that alarmed and shocked most people beyond belief. The popular scornful remark that in modern music “anything goes” is like most vituperations of that kind, a half-truth. However, that may be, the shock emanating from that music has been very real. The style has many genuinely disquieting traits of catastrophe, and undoubtedly we are justified in interpreting it as one of the most eloquent seismographic symbols announcing the disastrous quake that has been shaking our civilization ever since 1914. Expressionistic painting and literature have furnished more such symbols.
We know that the upheaval engendered by the first World War was followed by the first World War was followed by a period that was filled with many attempts toward stabilization, and we also know that those attempts were eventually in vain, followed as they are now by a still more inclusive catastrophe. Attempts toward stabilization were in the field of music no less conspicuous than in the other arts, or in all fields of human endeavor, for that matter. They became known under such headings as neo-classicism, Gebrauchsmusik and others; and although it is less obvious that they were just as futile as similar movements in politics and economics, it is clear enough that they were aiming at a wrong kind of stabilization, for all of them involved giving up substantial parts of the territory that had been conquered by Schoenberg’s invasion of the unknown continent of atonality.
However, the trend toward stabilization in itself is an inevitable historical consequence of the very disturbance which preceded it, and therefore a legitimate attitude on the part of the individuals affected by it. The atmosphere of unlimited freedom carried along by the storms that accompany the great earthquakes does not last forever, regrettable as this may seem to many. The catastrophe which his unheard-of musical revolution had announced was hardly over when Schoenberg started working on organizing the new territory. His attempts at stabilization are different from those of the reactionaries in so far that he did not propose giving up any of the hard-won features of the new idiom.
On the contrary, the twelve-tone technique which has become the basic statute of his stabilizing actions serves the purpose of consolidating the conquered province. After he had pushed forward the Wagnerian component of unbridled expressive intensity beyond any previously conceivable limits and thus had fulfilled the mission of Gesualdo, he took up again the constructive component of the late Beethoven and imposed a new discipline upon the forces let loose in his middle period taking over the role of the later Monteverdi, as it were. Students of music history will easily recognize that the basic tenets of the twelve-tone technique are not only obviously an elaboration on the artistic thinking of the late Beethoven, by may be traced considerably further back, over the chorale prelude of Bach to the medieval cantus firmus technique, and even to the essential structural methods of Gregorian Chant. They are not the products of the whims of a strangely twisted brain; they are an ingenious adaptation of the basic principles of all polyphonic music to the conditions of the new material.
Much has been said and written against the twelve-tone technique, suspected as it was for being a device that was meant to replace the inspirational factor in music by mathematical computations. This kind of talk is reminiscent of the criticisms leveled by the nineteenth century musicologists against the medieval polyphonic schools of the Low Countries. It is difficult to see on the strength of what evidence that criticism was based, for even superficial inspection of compositions by Dufay, Okeghem and other masters of the period shows that they made but sparing use of the dreaded devices of canonic imitation that seem to many to be the epitome of the cold intellectual manufacturing of music. And even their more elaborate contrapuntal works display an astonishing amount of expressive imagination. We can only assume that such criticism originated with people who did not bother to study the music. There is much reason for suspecting that exactly the same is true of the fierce critics of the twelve-tone technique. Only too frequently it turns out that those who are most articulate in its condemnation don’t know the most elementary principles of the technique and have hardly ever listened to twelve-tone music, let alone analyze it. All that criticism is so silly that it becomes almost too easy to take it apart and to demonstrate its utter nonsense.
It is dangerously easy, for it might make us believe that the twelve-tone technique is a ready-made, self-sufficient method, a handy tool available to anybody who wants to put together “modern” sounding music. If this were so, we would have some reason for doubt as to whether Schoenberg has made a contribution of any value whatsoever in contriving this technique. It is the duty of younger generations to develop the technique in such a way that its essential principles may manifest their vitality in ever renewed application and modification. It is hard to foretell the future development of the twelve-tone technique. But we may presume that, similar to the evolution of the great scientific theories, it will be modified through constant striving for ever broader generalization, for increasingly inclusive application in an increasing variety of cases, until its timeless spirit, its basic idea, that principle which is common to all the diverse applications of the technique and transcends its time-determined materializations, will be transferred and incorporated into the unknown realm of future musical formations. If composers of genius, imagination and intelligence will carry forth these ideas, it will become more and more evident that the seventy years of Schoenberg’s life have been one of the most significant periods in the history of music.
At this point, and particularly in these surroundings, it is proper to speak for a few minutes of a line of activity of Schoenberg’s that has not immediately to do with his capacity as a composer, although it has grown out of it. Since this institute has concerned itself essentially with problems of interpretation, it is fitting to mention what Schoenberg has contributed to raising the standards of interpretation in our time. There is a very special reason for that, because at least three of the highest ranking interpreters of music among us have come out of Schoenberg’s school, that is our genial host and amiable master, Heinrich Jalowetz, and the distinguished guests, Rudolf Kolisch and Edward Steurmann.
Somewhat over twenty years ago Schoenberg founded in Vienna the Association for Private Performances of Music which was devoted to making its members thoroughly acquainted with contemporary music. Schoenberg had very wisely recognized that the new style that he had inaugurated involved more than just different methods of composition, that it was the expression of a new attitude towards music including also the approach of the interpreter. Wagner, the other great innovator of music, had known that very well, too, and his Bayreuth establishment was not only meant to be a hallowed shrine of the new art, but also a most efficient training center for the prospective apostles of the new gospel. One reason for the fact that our contemporary new music is making much slower headway than the Wagner style did may be found in the fact that we have not yet been able to turn out interpreters on the same scale and with the same determination as Wagner did. Wagner was blessed with an admirable single track mind, so that he was his own best manager. Furthermore his work was almost exclusively devoted to the most spectacular of music species, opera; and if putting across those enormous shows was certainly the most difficult task to be undertaken, it was also, as far as publicity went, the most rewarding if it succeeded.
If Schoenberg’s work in this direction has not led to nearly as impressive results, it was nonetheless of greatest significance within the limits that conditions imposed upon it. The Association that Schoenberg had founded held many meetings in which all kinds of contemporary chamber music were presented; for Schoenberg was not only far from narrow-minded in regard to the question of style, he also knew that the particular style that he and his followers had embraced would be more clearly understood if projected against the background of other contemporary styles. The performances were prepared with an unheard-of degree of conscientiousness and accuracy, seemingly easy pieces were practiced in incredibly numerous rehearsals, all of them supervised by Schoenberg himself or his immediate pupils and open to the members of the Association. I don’t doubt that some of the performing artists might occasionally have cursed under their breath for being tortured by the fanatic will to perfection of their inexorable drill-master. Be that as it may, it is the rare privilege of those assembled here to be able to appreciate the phenomenal results of those bygone days. Unfortunately the Association for Private Performances was not granted a long enough life to exercise far and wide influence. But is spirit lives on, as we are happy enough to notice watching the activities of the Black Mountain Summer Institute of Music.
For artists of this type and caliber of Schoenberg, life is not an easy proposition. On account of the great and far-reaching commotion which he had caused once upon a time his name is established in the minds of many as that of a great man, although the meaning of the noise that had filled the world is not at all clear to them. Since the noise has died away for quite some time, there are just as many who would say that his day is over, for they measure the importance of a man solely by the noise that he is able to cause at any given moment. The noise has died away because in the first place it was a result of the unprecedented shock that Schoenberg’s atonal exploits produced when they first appeared, and it is the very nature of a shock to be momentary and unique. And it also is the nature of a shock that those experiencing it try to forget it, pushing it down below the level of consciousness. A great deal of music written nowadays looks as it does because its makers trying desperately to avoid the issue raised by Schoenberg’s action. Thus is appears that those who think that they happily overtook him and now are far ahead of him actually have not even yet reached the crossroads which he had discovered almost forty years ago.
In our age it takes approximately forty years for new musical materials to become assimilated by the public mind. The Wagner style came entirely into its own in the beginning of the century, and we need only to listen to any recent arrangement of swing music to realize that the innovations of Debussy, Ravel and of the early Stravinsky have become part and parcel of the standard material of commercialized entertainment music. In the light of this observation one may expect that the “crazy” chords of early atonality will soon become respectable, and even practically useful materials. That, however, will still not mean that Schoenberg will have become popular. The true significance of his contribution is not based on the number of so-called dissonances which he uses, although it was his idiom that caused his reputation to be what it is. An indefinite time may have to elapse before the spirit animating. Schoenberg’s music will be recognized for what it is, that is the same spirit that has animated the greatest music of all times. And that music, for all its greatness, is not popular in the sense of quantitative success. Several years ago, Schoenberg said in a lecture which he gave in Vienna: “The thought can wait: for it has not got any time.” The same applies literally to himself: Schoenberg can wait, for he has not got any time. Our most cordial wishes go to him, and our thoughts of friendship will be with him, when we are now going to listen to a small selection from the rich vintage of those seventy years.

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