II

Schoenberg opened Gedanke manuscript no. 6 (1931) with the statement "Composing is thinking in tones and rhythms. Every piece of music is the presentation of a musical idea. " Schoenberg maintains that musical thinking is subject to the laws and conditions of all our other thinking. All thinking consists essentially in bringing things (concepts, and so forth) into relation. That being so, thinking searches out coherences; every idea is based on coherences. An idea is the production of a relation between things that would otherwise have no relation. Therefore an idea is always new.^[16] In the opening of Gedanke no. 12 (undated) he distinguishes a "musical idea":

A musical idea is sheerly musical. It is a relation between tones.

If one may designate as ideas the production of relations between things, concepts, and the like (thus also between ideas), then in the case of a musical idea such a relation can be established only between tones, and it can be only a musical relation.^[17]

In the theoretical literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the musical idea (Gedanke or Idee) was commonly taken to be the theme or melody. Beginning with this traditional meaning, Schoenberg moved toward an understanding of the idea as standing for the wholeness of a work. He expressed this in the familiar passage in "New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea":

In its most common meaning, the term idea is used as a synonym for theme, melody, phrase or motive. I myself consider the totality of a piece as the idea: the idea which its creator wanted to present. But because of the lack of better terms I am forced to define the term idea in the following manner.^[18]

Describing the manner in which a state of unrest or imbalance grows throughout most of a piece, he then goes on to state that "[t]he method by which balance is restored seems to me the real idea of the composition."^[19] With this concept of the idea as the totality of a work he created a powerful conceptual tool, the development of which is demonstrated in the series of Gedanke manuscripts.

Already in the early Gedanke manuscripts Schoenberg confronted the problem of the integrity of the theme, and by 1925 he had begun to turn

his attention from the theme as a whole to its smallest parts. Discussing the presentation of the idea independently of its substance, he distinguishes in the idea its components, Gestalt and Grundgestalt. On the one hand, the more primitive a musical idea and the piece based on it, the fewer and more closely related the Gestalten that may be enlisted; on the other hand, the more artful the idea, the richer the number of Gestalten and the more remote in form from the Grundgestalt.^[20] He distinguishes even smaller components of an idea, its "characteristics" — that is, specific pitch and rhythmic relationships. Ultimately the characteristics of a motive — what he called its "features," its intervals and rhythms — could themselves be treated as motives.^[21] By reducing the theme to these smallest components, Schoenberg destroyed its role as musical idea and transformed the material, freeing intervals and rhythms to be used for their own sake.

In an unpublished manuscript dated 5 October 1923 and entitled "Zur Terminologie der Formenlehre,"^[22] Schoenberg raised the crucial matter of whole and part: Is the idea a part, the theme, or somehow the whole? He comments on the ambiguity of the term musical idea, observing that although it is preferable to theme, motive, or phrase, one must still distinguish the main or secondary ideas of an entire piece from individual smaller or smallest parts. This ambiguity is likewise taken up in Gedanke no. 12 (undated):

The idea can be the subject of a longer or shorter work, it can exist for itself alone, but it can also be part of a larger whole. This larger whole will then itself usually break down into more or less numerous sections, steps, parts, and the like, which in part can again be ideas. Such ideas will in some way be connected with each other or juxtaposed, or will otherwise have a relation to each other which will probably be referable to the whole.^[23]

Schoenberg resolved the relation of the idea to the whole by means of his remarkable vision of the dynamic of the musical work. He saw the potentiality for musical motion in the single tone, as he stated in the Harmonielehre.

The primitive ear hears the tone as irreducible, but physics recognizes it to be complex. In the meantime, however, musicians discovered that it is capable of continuation, i.e., that movement is latent within it. That problems are concealed in it, problems that clash with one another, that the tone lives and seeks to propagate itself.^[24]

In even the smallest component there is the potential for unrest and imbalance, as Schoenberg discussed in Gedanke no. 10 (1934-1936): "Through the connection of tones of different pitch, duration, and stress . . . an unrest comes into being: a state of rest is placed in question through a contrast. From this unrest a motion proceeds."^[25] He conceived of the whole as a bal-

ance of forces between the unrest inherent in the material, the imbalance produced by such unrest, and the restoration of balance. The idea, then, is the contrast that challenges the state of rest — and the means by which that state is restored.

The source of Schoenberg's investigations of the musical idea was of course his experience as a composer. Ultimately he turned to his own experience to explain the relation of the idea to the wholeness of the work. A work is a totality because it is the realization of a single idea, the composer's vision — and that idea is always new.