III

Schoenberg's philosophy of composition is based on this principle of totality. He elaborated on it in a passage in the 1941 version of his lecture "Composition with Twelve Tones," which epitomizes his view of artistic creation. "To understand the very nature of creation," Schoenberg began, "one must acknowledge that there was no light before the Lord said: `Let there be Light."'

We . . . should never forget what a creator is in reality.

A creator has a vision of something which has not existed before this vision. And a creator has the power to bring his vision to life, the power to realize it.

. . . . In Divine Creation there were no details to be carried out later; "There was Light" at once and in its ultimate perfection.

Alas, human creators, if they be granted a vision, must travel the long path between vision and accomplishment; a hard road where, driven out of Paradise, even geniuses must reap their harvest in the sweat of their brows.

Alas, it is one thing to envision in a creative instant of inspiration and it is another thing to materialize one's vision by painstakingly connecting details until they fuse into a kind of organism.

Alas, suppose it becomes an organism, a homunculus or a robot, and possesses some of the spontaneity of a vision; it remains yet another thing to organize this form so that it becomes a comprehensible message "to whom it may concern."^[26]

Having set up an antithesis between divine and mortal creation, between the composer's instantaneous vision and the arduous road from revelation to consummation, Schoenberg goes on to discuss several points in turn: inspiration, materialization, form, and idea.

A work, Schoenberg says, originates in an instant of inspiration. Der Einfall, or "inspiration," is a word he also uses for "idea," as in "der blitzartige Einfall, "^[27] the idea that strikes like lightning. In 1931 he described the first thought that must dictate the structure and texture of the work as an "unnameable sense of a sounding and moving space, of a form with charac-

teristic relationships."^[28] The first thought is thus the source of the totality of a musical work.

But an instantaneous creative vision is one thing, its materialization quite another. The artwork materializes the vision in a particular way, as a kind of organism. Schoenberg's model for artistic creation is natural generation.

[A]rt does not depend upon the single component part alone; therefore, music does not depend upon the theme. For the work of art, like every living thing, is conceived as a whole — just like a child, whose arm or leg is not conceived separately. The inspiration is not the theme, but the whole work.^[29]

The distinction between organic form, achieved by a process analogous to natural growth, and mechanical form, imposed from without, was prevalent in the nineteenth century and was stated succinctly by August Wilhelm Schlegel in his influential "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature" of 1809-1811:

Form is mechanical when it is imparted to any material through an external force, merely as an accidental addition, without reference to its character. . . . Organic form, on the contrary, is innate; it unfolds itself from within, and reaches its determination simultaneously with the fullest development of the seed. . . . In the fine arts, just as in the province of nature — the supreme artist — all genuine forms are organic.^[30]

Schoenberg espoused the same distinction in his most extensive Gedanke manuscript, no. 10 (1934-1936). In the final essay of that manuscript, entitled "Prinzipien des Aufbaus" (Principles of construction), he elaborated on the principle that in art the construct is not a mechanical one, like a clock, but an image resembling an organism in its vital unity.^[31]

An organism implies totality — indeed, a certain kind of totality. The properties of an organic whole cannot be derived from the sum of its parts; it cannot, to use Schoenberg's metaphor, be built up the way a bricklayer, for example, builds a wall.^[32] The whole is prior to the parts; its unity is therefore diametrically opposed to the aggregate of bricks gathered to build a wall. Organic unity entails a certain relation of parts and whole, a relation that is not arbitrary, but as close and intimate as that among the organs of a living body. An artwork conceived organically is a totality because its author, by virtue of his creative imagination, has fused its elements into a single entity.

In "Prinzipien des Aufbaus" Schoenberg pursues this traditional concept of organicism. He proposes that to symbolize the construction of a musical work, one can think of a living body that is whole and centrally controlled, that puts forth a certain number of limbs by means of which it is capable

of exercising its life function. In music, he says, only the whole itself is that central body.^[33]

Schoenberg declares that the composer must organize the form of that body in such a way that it can be grasped by the listener. Now, form is an ambiguous word, but Schoenberg is quite specific when in Fundamentals of Musical Composition he defines "musical form" as the organization of the whole, in which the parts function like those of an organism.^[34] Form is not a schema to be abstracted from or imposed upon the work, not something separable from the work — "a solid and inflexible body like a mold in which to cast material."^[35] As he defined it in his 1925 essay "Tonality and Form," Schoenberg's notion of form begins with the musical "body":

The form of a composition is achieved because (1) a body exists, and because (2) the members exercise different functions and are created for these functions.^[36]

Form organizes, articulates the musical organism.

Articulation is the central concept in Schoenberg's theory of form. As he wrote in Fundamentals of Musical Composition, articulation disposes parts to produce a "surveyable whole," entailing delimitation and subdivision, as well as the distinction between main and subordinate matters, by giving to each its correct place, length, importance, form, and so forth.^[37] He discussed this in even greater detail in the Gedanke manuscript no. 10, where he wrote that parts of a work are differentiated according to function:

Above all (perhaps always) a piece of music is an articulated organism, whose organs, limbs and their definite functions exercise their own external effect as well as that of their mutual relationship.^[38]

Schoenberg goes on to distinguish the parts of an inanimate object from limbs of a biological body and states that truly functioning limbs are found only in organisms and that, unlike parts — which are actually dead, alive from event to event only through an external power — limbs sustain their power as a result of their organic membership in a living organism.^[39] Our way of receiving music, he says, is mostly as the comprehension of parts. And only a very precise knowledge of the whole and all its parts and their functions enables a few among us to comprehend a whole.^[40]

Finally, with regard to the idea, Schoenberg insisted that the material, tonal body is worthless unless it transcends itself to become something immaterial, a comprehensible message, an idea. He believed that the inner force giving the tonal body its life is the musical idea this body represents. Form, he wrote elsewhere, is the embodiment of a content, the "outside" of the "inside."

All form-making, all conscious form-making, is connected with some kind of mathematics, or geometry, or with the golden section or suchlike. But only unconscious form-making, which sets up the equation "form = outward shape," really creates forms.^[41]

Because the outer form corresponds to the inner nature of the idea, it makes the idea comprehensible. In the Harmonielehre he wrote:

In music we assume that the components of . . . an idea are expressed as melodic or (harmonic) progressions. That is correct, insofar as it concerns the visible or audible in music that can be perceived by the senses; it is correct only by analogy for that which makes up the actual content of a musical idea. . . . We may still assume that, as in any well-built organism[,] . . . the form and articulation manifested by the notes corresponds to the inner nature of the idea and its movement, as ridges and hollows of our bodies are determined by the position of internal organs.^[42]

As Schoenberg wrote in the 1934 article "Problems of Harmony," "The effort of the composer is solely for the purpose of making the idea comprehensible to the listener. For the latter's sake the artist must divide the whole into its surveyable parts, and then add them together again into a complete whole."^[43] In his 1941 twelve-tone lecture Schoenberg continued that discussion:

Form in the arts, and especially in music, aims primarily at comprehensibility. The relaxation which a satisfied listener experiences when he can follow an idea, its development, and the reasons for such development is closely related, psychologically speaking, to a feeling of beauty.^[44]

The form of the work therefore articulates the idea as well as the organic body. To borrow notions from the traditional concept of beauty, form so clarifies the musical body, makes it so lucid, that the idea it embodies shines through. Toward the conclusion of his article Schoenberg declares: "Formerly, sound had been the radiation of an intrinsic quality of ideas, powerful enough to penetrate the hull of the form. Nothing could radiate which was not light itself; and here only ideas are light."^[45]

These, then, are the main points of Schoenberg's philosophy of composition, from a description of his concept of the musical idea as representing the total dynamic of the artwork to a discussion of its role in artistic creation. Schoenberg's creative process begins with the idea, the instantaneous inspiration of the whole, the first thought. It proceeds with its materialization or presentation in the musical organism, the work. And this in turn is so articulated, so formed, as to clarify the material, allowing the idea and its presentational body to be grasped as a unity. As Schoenberg

says in his short essay "Konstruierte Musik" (Constructed music), written around 1930:

[I]n my case the productive process has its own way; what I sense is not a melody, a motive, a bar, but merely a whole work. Its sections: the movements; their sections: the themes; their sections: the motives and bars — all that is detail, arrived at as the work is progressively realized. The fact that the details are realized with the strictest, most conscientious care, that everything is logical, purposeful and organically deft, without the visionary images thereby losing fullness, number, clarity, beauty, originality or pregnancy — that is merely a question of intellectual energy. . . .

The inspiration, the vision, the whole, breaks down during its presentation into details whose constructed realization reunites them into the whole.^[46]