Thirteen
Schoenberg and Present-Day Theory and Practice

Jonathan Dunsby

In 1971 Allen Forte wrote the following:

The scope and variety of contemporary musico-theoretical investigations, especially in the U.S. beginning in the 1950s, is remarkable. . . . There seems to be ample evidence that musical theory in the twentieth century is once again what it has occasionally been in the past: a vital intellectual component of music.^[1]

These words were partly a tribute to Arnold Schoenberg, who is mentioned in Forte's article "Theory" (from which this quote is taken) essentially for the notions of extended tonality that evolved between the 1911 and 1922 editions of the Harmonielehre.

One must doubt whether Forte had much inkling even as late as 1971 — bearing in mind the composers who were then in vogue — that the end of our century would see a surge of artistic evolution that now has its very firmly established name borrowed from wider trends in Western society that became (fatally for "modernism") conspicuous in the 1980s — namely, "postmodernism." There does not appear to be significant commentary from the late 1960s that predicts the household names of the next wave of composition, though the likes of John Adams, Arvo Pärt, and Toru Takemitsu were alive and musically kicking at the time.^[2] Now, so soon afterward, even that ongoing — and, as it were, institutional — European masterpiece Répons, by Pierre Boulez, has a new, sensuous, repetitive, multivalent quality to stamp it as a work of the 1990s and beyond. In Boulez the new way — in Schoenberg's wake but not in his manner — seems to have shed its skin in yielding to an even newer way. So it is hardly to Allen Forte's discredit that he could not foresee the concomitant swing toward the present-day antiformalist character of much that is on offer in the name of new music theory.

Of course, one may make too much of this new Zeitgeist as an orderly, interlinked phenomenon of the creative and the contemplative. The very plurality of postmodernism suggests that Zeitgeist is itself a formalist, if last-century Hegelian, notion that perhaps should be allowed to die quietly beside other old modernisms adopted in the twentieth century. Nowadays fashionable creativity and fashionable commentary do not necessarily go hand in hand, but this does not necessarily imply any conflict. After all, such distinguished West Coast antiformalist writers as Kerman and Taruskin do pay more attention publicly to old music than to new, as we find of those more recent darlings of the music-academic press, Abbate and Kramer, and the ascendant Korsyn. In this curious scenario antiformalism and anticontemporaneity seem to go in tandem. Such writers as Joseph Straus talk about remaking the past.^[3] One gets the feeling that that is where they would really like to live.

It is tempting to declare that modern music theory, of the kind Schoenberg would recognize, not only saw its beginnings in the thinking he himself conducted in Vienna and Berlin many decades ago but is now drawing to its close in America and, given our transcultural age, elsewhere too. We can now begin to discern the true curve of the arch that is twentieth-century music theory — or, as some nostalgic historians of music might say, we can now begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. As a result it is possible to get a sense of how deep and enduring was the view of music that Schoenberg, above all, put on the agenda. That "above all," of course, needs some gloss, and it seems to me that there are both an easy way and a hard way to provide it.

The easy way is to examine the development of theorizing about dodecaphonic and what have come to be called "serial" forms of composition in general. Despite the excellent contribution made by other theorists in the early years of musical modernism, it was Schoenberg who provided the golden key. Forte has put this succinctly. "Schoenberg's brief consideration of new atonal harmonies," he wrote, "inspired others to examine systematically the resources of the twelve-tone method. . . . This in turn led to projections of other systems and resources."^[4] From this line of development were to emerge the great trends of postwar American activity, in the work of what is usually termed the "Princeton axis," and in the dissemination and elaboration of pitch-class set theory. This well-known and oft-told story is a transatlantic matter. It may well be that Die Reihe, for instance, which grew out of the postwar Darmstadt ethos, put down a more focused historical marker than, say, the early Perspectives of New Music; certainly one must acknowledge the continuing, lively, creative theoretical developments of the European scene.

It has been a natural tendency for the prospective and proactive aspects of Schoenberg the composer-theorist to be praised at the expense of their

genealogy. What unlocked the "oft-told" story to which I just referred was Schoenberg's insistence that, putting it somewhat whimsically, consonance is a lower form of dissonance. There is such a hackneyed familiarity in the air whenever we are asked to contemplate emancipated dissonance that the historical leverage of the idea is forgotten. When Heinrich Schenker illustrates the lack of tonal prolongation in a Stravinsky excerpt, all we are being offered is an image of the end of music history, or of a future that never did arrive. When Schoenberg illustrates how Mozart's dissonance can be understood only in terms of the total chromatic, we are being offered a link from the past to a future that did arrive and that did in this century yield many marvels of the human spirit. And thus we reach the center of my own view on these matters. There has been only one comprehensive theorist of our age — so far — who has regenerated the spirit of his European past into a progressive, contemporary resource. Not every composer of genius could have achieved this, or wanted to; on the other hand, only a real composer interested in theory could have achieved it.

This brings me to what I called the "hard way" of providing a gloss to the claims I have made for Schoenberg. For how is it that in many respects Schoenberg the theorist has been marginalized?

It often appears to be a matter of wheels within wheels, as is exemplified almost canonically in a little clash between Walter Frisch and Kofi Agawu, two of the most energetic and imaginative musical commentators in what might still be called the younger generation. Many readers will have sympathized with Frisch's difficulties in addressing his subject in Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation.^[5] It was not just a matter of high expectations, given that this was the book Schoenbergians had been longing for since 1932 and even before. Everyone assumed, too, that Frisch would be in the position of the quixotic homicide officer who has just the two clues: "A" (who is missing and presumed dead), developing variation; and "B" (who looks a bit guilty), Schoenberg. Agawu replies, though, that what Frisch has missed, and by implication what the Schoenbergians in this area have missed in general, is the very point on offer in the first place:

It is often said that Schoenberg formulated the notion of developing variation too vaguely and that he failed to provide demonstrations in extenso of how it works. . . . I would contest the extent to which Schoenberg's analyses are ambiguous; in fact . . . we need not look beyond his essay "Brahms the Progressive" in order to form a fairly clear idea of what developing variation means. The emphasis in Frisch's own analytical plot on an absence of "sustained illumination" in Schoenberg's own analysis only propagates a myth.^[6]

On the contrary, Agawu is arguing, Schoenberg's analytical work is relatively brief not because it lacks some ideal musico-critical lyricism but just because it is, at its best, systematic.^[7] I do not have the temerity to adjudicate

between these two positions.^[8] All the same it is intriguing, at the risk of being unfair to two subtle writers, to summarize them: on the one hand Schoenberg is frustrating but ultimately good because he does not formalize; on the other Schoenberg is constructive and good precisely because he does formalize or at least leads the way to it.

Is it too much to infer from all debates of this type that one of the reasons Schoenberg has been marginalized in music theory is because theorists have been unequal to the task of taking up his ideas during the era of formalism? Have the ideas been almost too advanced for music theory as a discipline? Considering current theory and practice in respect to "developing variation," it is pertinent to see how cleanly and helpfully Ethan Haimo has at last been able to stitch the concept into his new account of the evolution of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method, some sixty to seventy years after the event.^[9] Along with some of the best recent work in music theory, this indicates at least some continuing contemporaneity in Schoenberg's legacy, as we become able to see the things that were not to be seen before. Arnold Whittall formulated the matter in 1980:

From a perspective where the consequences of Schoenberg can be contemplated, the study of Schoenberg himself is becoming increasingly concerned with analysis and less with criticism. Only now, therefore, are the essential technical issues beginning to be adequately explored and expounded.^[10]

Here Whittall is contemplating the critical treatment of Schoenberg's own music, but again commentary folds into itself, and his comment applies perfectly well to the position of Schoenberg's theories. Once we have taken on board the idea of historical perspective, there remains the challenge of assimilating Schoenberg's thinking as a guide to analysis, explored thoroughly.

Although I have in fact already introduced him by name and in principle, in practice this is the point to come clean about Schenker. One cannot speak of Schoenberg as the "above all" in music theory without returning to Vienna and that other ascendant — but not, I believe, transcendent — theorist. It has been implied here that Schoenberg has been marginalized by large cultural forces, matters of time, place, intention — simply the contingencies of history that we historians struggle to comprehend. Yet the obsession of a large class of music theorists, myself included, with Schenkerian theory and practice is something identifiable and indeed obvious. The serpent is to some extent biting its tail. I have already indicated that notions of approaches to musical structure in terms of pitch-class set (and, one must certainly add, genera) would be unthinkable without Schoenberg's work as a composer-theorist, and there is a pungent scent of postmodernism in all the current research that combines pitch-class-set and neo-Schenkerian posttonal voice-leading theories, as there is in the idea of the trichordal

pitch genus. However, in the study of First Viennese music, Schenker's insights have proved so attractive — mainly, I would say, to those who are not primarily concerned with musical composition — that they have distracted the attention of a large community of potential students of Schoenberg's theories. Schoenbergians may take some grim satisfaction in knowing that this has happened to Schenker too, who has been marginalized in the German-speaking world by yet other cultural forces.

If there is any justice and balance in twentieth-century life, some confirmation of this might be found in the theoretical marginalization of Schoenberg the composer, who insisted that it does not matter how a piece of music is made. If it does not matter, why did Schoenberg spend so much time trying to discover how pieces of music by other composers were made, and explaining this to his many students? The answer, for sure, is that Schoenberg could theorize only as a composer and yet could not theorize about his current practice: theory had to be a notch behind what he was actually creating, as has often been stated.^[11] The years of rapid atonal evolution, approximately 1907 to 1912, could easily spawn Schoenberg's theoretical magnum opus, the 1911 Harmonielehre. After that it was very much slower work compositionally. I feel that to his dying day Schoenberg was preoccupied with a compositional breakthrough he had made in his forties, about which he had little to say because it required more than a lifetime's quiet reflection. Here I would wish to supplement Reinhold Brinkmann's portrayal of the politico-religious projects dating from Schoenberg's middle age. It was overall surely a philosophic -politico-religious project; to society and to the spirit we have to add the intellect, even if Schoenberg's intellect was less overtly at work in the second part of his life.

Although Schoenberg has been marginalized as a theorist, insofar as institutionalized theorizing is concerned, in books, journals, and debates, his pedagogical importance is well-nigh universally recognized, at the highest level through study of the Harmonielehre, and in common practice through the American textbooks. This is not the occasion to discuss those volumes, but they are the obvious signs of a core of thinking through which Schoenberg intended to pass on more than simple descriptions. Description is the best result of most theory, in the hands of those who really want to discover how a composer managed to work. The contemplative armchair theorist is in awe of creativity and cultivates an intellectual, quasi-scientific detachment. Even the brilliant Schenker, a very failed composer but by all accounts a superb performer, has the demeanor of the detective — of the fascinated operative whose whole claim on our attention nevertheless depends on acts committed by others. In the past, minds such as those of Johann Fux, Heinrich Koch, and Paul Hindemith have also been oriented in this way, while attempting to pass on a degree of compositional know-how. Such theorists in this intermediate group are less in awe of compositional prac-

tice and do not have an idealistic — one might almost say European — view of what it means to be a composer.

Among first-order theorists, Rameau provides the atavism, an unusual Franco-Austrian embrace. His task may have been a little easier than Schoenberg's because he was part of the march of Enlightenment thinking — not, as inevitably the case more recently, one of many lone voices speaking different tongues. Rameau, who managed to forge a new musical language while theorizing about it enduringly, is the paradigm of the composer-theorist in the modern sense: he left indelible creative and intellectual acts to future generations. It is not I who posit this well-established paradigm, and it is for the reader to decide whether the coincidence of art and reflection at a transcendent level is a good and useful thing. If it is, we must accord to Schoenberg an importance in twentieth-century culture that goes beyond what one must thus dare to call a mere appreciation of his compositions.

Heinrich Schenker, who has been an inescapable subtopic of this essay, provides us with a profound method for studying and discussing the many jewels of First Viennese music, and much more besides, from Scarlatti to Chopin. This method is of universal interest. Yet in the end Schoenberg has done something potentially more important: he has offered us the means of understanding a continuity between First and Second Viennese musics and, in a way, whatever else is to follow. This is probably what the composer, rather than the pure theorist, most needs, and is certainly what many composers of the mid to late twentieth century have demonstrably exploited creatively. For decades arcane commentary has been recycling a fixation with what is called Schoenberg's "historical self-justification." In perspective it is time to start discussing his theoretical comprehensiveness, to investigate this as a live issue. It has recently been reasserted in the telling words of Ian Bent: "[W]ith Schoenberg's powerfully suggestive concepts . . . the organic model, aesthetic, and technical array of tools that can be seen to have arisen in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were transmitted to the twentieth century."^[12] And I note with interest how in his very recent major article "Debussy's Significant Connections" Craig Ayrey brings Schoenberg squarely into a current music-theory heartland, noting that "the organicist metaphor in Schoenberg asserts a preference for metonymy,"^[13] confirming the impetus in the "old" thinking for the thinking of the poststructuralist future.

Returning to my opening theme, I stress the crucial element of postmodern pluralistic approaches as far as they concern not only music theory, but music history in its broadest sense. As various cultural historians are now expounding, we find in these new movements not some kind of deathly return to old values but a modernism that has taken a new turn, away from formalisms that require us to learn and to imitate, and toward a pluralist

approach that constrains us to ask questions and accept no easy answers. In arguing the case for musical prose, for developing variation, for the musical idea and the logic, technique, and art of its presentation, for the emancipated dissonance, indeed for the plenty of good music still to be written in C major — in all of this Schoenberg has been the greatest irritant to the orthodoxies, not just of theorists, but of musicology in general and the music making it merely reflects. We may question his formalist credentials but not his modernist ones, and this is what renders him such a central architect of present-day theory and practice. Any composer or musicologist, whether twenty or eighty years old, will see this. One has only to read Style and Idea.