Decentralized Music

If the premise is right that feeling, will, or subjective interiority are the "content" of music (though the claim can be debated), and if these are also the raw material of Schoenberg's music, then we must note at least this: Here the spectrum of feeling becomes extraordinarily vast—

unpatterned and self-estranged. It is no longer spurred by an "outer occasion" (a military victory, a devotional creed, a gurgling fountain or peaceful landscape). Even where there is a text that accompanies the music (a "program" so to speak), Schoenberg's compositions divorce themselves from it, freeing themselves from all content but that of their own formal relations.^[15] The content of this new, expressionist music, developed before the war and elaborated in original ways by Schoenberg's pupils Anton Webern and Alban Berg, is form unhinged from all content whatsoever—forms of pure sound in its unmitigated and alien materiality. If they have any emotional purpose, it is certainly not solace, consolation, joy, or reassurance. It is something closer to the unsettled, inexplicable emotions of turmoil, agitation, and unease. Here Apollo, the clarifying god of consonant harmony, gives way to the frenzied Dionysus.^[16]

[15] There is not sufficient space in this study to examine the interesting relationship between Schoenberg and the Triestine composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni, who operated in Berlin between 1905 and 1914 and whose theory of "absolute music" in Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (published in Trieste in 1907 and dedicated to Rainer Maria Rilke) found resonance in Schoenberg. Suffice it to note that when Busoni defends the self-sufficiency of musical form in late 1910 he immediately thinks of Schoenberg: "I shall have to revise my little Esthetic, in which not everything seems to have been expressed with sufficient clarity. I am a worshiper of form!! This is a matter about which I am hypersensitive. . . . But I reject traditional and unalterable forms and feel that every idea, every motif, every object demands its own form, related to that idea, to that motif, to that object. In nature this is so: the bud already contains the fully grown plant. Although I could write in great detail, these words will convey my meaning to you. I would like to draw your attention to a little piece by Arnold Schoenberg, reshaped for piano by myself, which has just been published (Piano piece, op. 11, no. 2). . . . You will find it hateful, particularly the sound of its harmonies, but it has its own individual feeling and seems to be perfect in its form" (Busoni 1987: 115). On the ties between Schoenberg and Busoni, see their exchange of letters between 1903 and 1919 in this same volume as well as Busoni 1957 and Daniel M. Raessler, "Schoenberg and Busoni: Aspects of Their Relationship," Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 7, no. 1 (June 1983): 7–28.

As with Trakl, the analysis of Schoenberg that follows is indebted to dozens of studies, including Adorno 1985; Cacciari 1980 and 1982; Crawford 1993; Carl Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music: Essays, trans. D. Puffett and A. Clayton (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Hailey 1993; Hermand 1991; Jan Maegaard, Studien zur Entwicklung des dodekaphonen Satzes bei Arnold Schoenberg (Copenhagen: Wilhelm Hansen, 1972); Luigi Rognoni, Espressionismo e dodecafonia (Turin: Einaudi, 1954); Rosen 1975; Schorske 1981; Joan Allen Smith, Schoenberg and His Circle: A Viennese Portrait (New York: Schirmer Books, 1986); H. H. Stuckenschmidt, Arnold Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work, trans. Humphrey Searle (London: John Calder, 1977); William Thomson, Schoenberg's Error (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Tiessen 1928.

[16] Indeed, theoretical inspiration for Schoenberg's atonal innovations was provided by the Dionysian aesthetics described in Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music . One senses that Schoenberg was particularly struck by section 24, where Nietzsche equates dissonance with primordial, artistic power. How can we explain the enigma by which "that which is ugly and disharmonic" is represented so often in music, asks Nietzsche? "Surely, a higher pleasure must be perceived in all this." The enigma can be explained by the tragic experience of heroic suffering, which makes us see "that even the ugly and disharmonic are part of an artistic game that the will in the eternal amplitude of its pleasure plays with itself. . . . The joy aroused by the tragic myth has the same origin as the joyous sensation of dissonance in music."

Moreover, even Nietzsche's explanation for the purpose of dissonance in this section of The Birth of Tragedy is replicated in Schoenberg (as will become clear later). The suffering hero's wish to achieve tragic knowledge and simultaneously to overcome such knowledge, he writes, is analogous to the problem of musical dissonance: It makes us "desire to hear and at the same time long to get beyond all hearing." Dissonant, Dionysian art arises among those who have been compelled "to see at the same time that they also longed to transcend all seeing." The terms are similar to those in Schoenberg's aphorism, discussed later in this chapter, on expressionist art—the product of those who open their eyes wide "to tackle what has to be tackled," but who also simultaneously shut them. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968): 139–143. I am grateful to my brother Robert for bringing Nietzsche's comments on dissonance to my attention.

In the centuries leading up to Schoenberg, European composition had been governed by certain stabilizing structural elements: (1) a tonal center, or key, recognizable soon after a piece began, (2) a resolution of the piece into no less definitive a key (usually, but not necessarily, the same one with which it began), (3) a fixed scale of tones on which a melody could be constructed (major, minor, modal), (4) a harmonization of the melody in chords built out of privileged combinations of tones in the scale (from the Baroque period onward, the 1-3-5 intervals of the major triad chord). Variations on these patterns were naturally permitted within the composition, even serving to produce rich and surprising effects; but they were eventually expected to settle back into the consonant pattern from which they had veered. Dissonance was the name for these momentary deviations from an established harmonic order.

Schoenberg's innovation consisted in nothing less than a valediction to this framework for composition. Hesitantly in 1908, and more decisively in Erwartung of 1909, he confided his melodic and harmonic lines to a formal language bereft of conventional resolutions, resting in no order that could be deduced from the tones of a scale. This was a logical, not a random development. The dissonance freed by Schoenberg between the last movement of the Second String Quartet (1907–08) and Die glückliche Hand (1910–13) is the end point of a musical itinerary prepared by the withering away of triadic harmony in nineteenth-century music. The decisive move here lay in the chromaticism of Richard Wagner, which no longer subordinated dissonance to modulations from one key to another, but made it an inherent struc-

tural component of the composition, a formal correlative, as it were, of empirical fluidity and movement. In Wagner's wake, Richard Strauss, Aleksander Scriabin, Claude Debussy, and Gustave Mahler elaborated dissonance to the point where the only step not yet taken was the complete and categorical liberation of dissonance from all dependence on tonal resolution. This was the leap of Schoenberg, determined, as he put it, to do away with the bad faith of composers who ventured to the farthest reaches of tonal experimentation only to end their pieces by obediently reaffirming the harmonies expected by their audience.

Dissonance is radicalized when it is presented as the universal and exclusive substance of harmonic order. On one level Schoenberg's compositions from 1908–1913 seem to be entirely ruled by negativity and contradiction. They sound "atonal" and "athematic," contemptuous of all "natural" aural laws, replacing the virtually divine providence of the triadic chord with a pandemonium of clashing sonorities. What once were moments of passing harshness now pervade the entire fabric of the works, causing unrelieved anguish in listeners. Indeed, one sometimes wonders whether these musical contortions, like the figural ones of expressionist painting, do not intend primarily to disrupt the whole notion of an enjoyable "aesthetic experience," scoffing at the call for beauty, order, and the regulation of feeling. These musical anti-forms seem to be based on a contention that an easily recognizable arrangement of pitch, rhythm, and harmony means an unnecessary concession to psychic comfort. The voices of Schoenberg's compositions move independently; musical syntax loses its binding power; paratactical collisions seem not to be means to an end, but ends in themselves.

On further study, however, it appears that a new compositional method is at work in the dark disorder of this free atonal music, even if it is not easy to hear, and even if it is exercised differently by each work. The question Schoenberg raises at this critical moment in his art is whether one can establish unity among elements of a work which do not seem to share any preestablished "sympathy"—irreconcilable musical intervals, for example, or strident orchestrations. Can unity be found in strife itself? Ordinarily one tolerates the conflict between one thing and another because of some larger whole to which they contribute, where their immediate differences appear superseded, if not reconciled. But what if we do not "rationalize" these differences by reference to a larger, abstract system in which they participate? What if one tries to find unity within the actual and immediately present relations of sound? The question, in other words, is whether what has

been traditionally called dissonance cannot be seen as revealing its own consonance.^[17] If the answer is yes, then this will mean that each work will have its own individual unity, not furnished by an external and abstract scale or by a habitual harmonic procedure.^[18]

This is the paradoxical unity that Schoenberg seeks as he tries to make each composition enact its own inexorable logic, revealing formal possibilities that contemporary audiences hardly suspected that music had. The relative unimportance of pitch (or the position of notes on a scale) in these compositions is compensated for by greater sensitivity to the dynamics with which these pitches are sounded. Harmony becomes a function of volatile and interrelating tone timbres and colors known as Klangfarben . So exacting was Schoenberg on this issue of the execution of his tone colors that he believed that his music was not appreciated simply because instrumentalists had not acquired the necessary sensitivity to perform it. "My music is not modern," he is reported to have said, "it is just badly played" (Rosen 1975: 50). In the cold and rarefied songs of Pierrot Lunaire (1912) the dynamics of the vocal line vary from whisper to shriek. Their texture, too, is unstable. Neither a singing nor a speaking, it is in between: Sprechstimme, a pitched declamation, an unprecedented hybrid of tone and word. The unorthodox orchestrations of the chamber ensemble require instruments to be used in unlikely ways and registers. With the voices of the soprano and the instruments almost never coinciding, it becomes "impossible for the mind to draw from the work's unfolding a sense of general law or pattern being observed, as one can when listening to tonal or twelve-tone music" (Wuorinen 1975).

The new effect of this prewar music does not rest exclusively on surprising dynamics of timbre and color. It also involves the dramatic power of sonorous simultaneity, the supersaturation, as it were, of musical texture in an instant of time. Traditional, thematic organizations of melodies in larger, harmonized units give way to motivic constructions of short, independent sequences of notes. Not immersed in homol-

[17] On the history of Schoenberg's notion of the emancipation of dissonance see Robert Falck, "Emancipation of the Dissonance," Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 6, no. 1 (June 1982): 106–111. For a good analysis and overview of Schoenberg's music as an aesthetic of strident oppositions one should read Robert Fleisher's "Dualism in the Music of Arnold Schoenberg," Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 12, no. 1 (June 1989): 22–42. Fleisher further argues that Schoenberg's tendency to aesthetically re-create the world in antithetical terms is possibly rooted in the principles of Jewish mysticism.

[18] "Now, I like to imagine a species of art-praxis wherein each case should be a new one, an exception!" (Busoni 1907: 41).

ogous and homogeneous contexts, the motifs appear abandoned and naked. No "accompaniment" makes their journey a destiny. Taken in their community of solitude, however, these divergent motifs and voices shape a fluid, contextual harmony so responsive to its own components that it alters with each newcomer. This may be most evident in the monodrama Erwartung, where, as Anton Webern remarks, the musical components follow each other in "an uninterrupted, ever-changing stream of sounds which have never been heard before. There is not a single bar in this score which does not display a completely new tonal picture. The instruments are treated as soloists throughout" (cited in Schoenberg 1991). Once constructed in vertical layers of chords, harmony is now generated by the horizontal divagations of crossing lines. Musical repetition gives way to multiplicity, uniqueness, and difference.

Parts once subordinated to wholes and "signs" once serving preestablished meanings now become so autonomous and self-contained that they produce the briefest musical miniatures in history. The best examples probably lie in the works of Anton Webern, particularly his Six Bagatelles (1911–13), five of which last less than a minute, and his earlier Six Pieces for Large Orchestra (1909), ranging in length from fifty seconds to five and a half minutes. But none of Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces (1909) is longer. The thirty-six songs of his Book of the Hanging Gardens (1908) add up to only twenty-five minutes. In such a terse environment, overarching, synthetic wholes become as impossible as "natural," organic progressions. If music once illustrated feeling extensively, in broad narrative lines, it now does the opposite, compressing the expression to an instant. The thirty minutes of Erwartung, for example, are devoted to a single second of emotion in which a woman discovers her lover killed by the edge of a wood. The strident miniatures, too, are interested in the transitional density of immediate time, including its quotient of silence, as though wishing to say that when faced with the inherent "expressions" of a moment's contending forces, all "impressions" received from the outside grow dumb. As registers, colors, and lines are developed in such a way as to let no note drown out any other, "a unity of sound is created, in spite of everything" (Webern, cited in Schoenberg 1991). For the very first time in music, all notes seem capable of coexisting with each other. "The tonal relations, clusters, and rhythms expand and contract 'like a gas'" (Schorske 1981: 351). And this makes for a type of resolution after all.

While theorizing new forms of musical harmony, Schoenberg was

also exploring other avenues of artistic expression. One was painting. Of his sixty-five canvases, two-thirds were painted between 1908 and 1910 and his first exhibit was held in Vienna on October 8, 1910.^[19] In the same period Schoenberg also experiments with stage productions and trenchant aphorisms. The formal restlessness of his career bears out the principle already explicit in the Theory of Harmony, to the effect that there is no single or fixed procedure by which to express an artistic intention. No abstract method can fully formalize or finalize the energy that sets it in motion. Every form is a provisional response to provisional problems in time. Historical, existential, and moral as these problems are, they necessitate a constant transmutation and over-spilling of form, an exploration of numerous expressive genres, a form for the "formlessness" of every novel intention. Schoenberg's multiple forms of art perhaps ultimately finalize the "non-finality" of artistic content—or the fact that this "content" can only be that which a form enables it to be. And this is why Schoenberg speaks of a dynamic circularity in the relationship between art and experience, art and audience, art and idea.