Lifelines

Musical Times, Autumn 2001 by Gritten, Anthony

Tie atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg 1908-1923 Bryan R. Simms Oxford UP (New York & Oxford, 2000); ix, 265pp; L6.95. ISBN 0 19 5128265.

Alexander Goehr has recently said that `Most composers of my generation, or a little older, which includes Pierre Boulez, set off trying to imitate Schoenberg's Erwartung. Regrettably we didn't have the technique.' What technique might Goehr have been referring to? Reading between the lines of this new book by Bryan Simms, we can gain the beginnings of a provisional answer.

Writing about the style of the third of Schoenberg's op. 11 piano pieces, Simms suggests that conventional formal principles consummate (and determine?) the expressive trajectory of the content to a lesser extent than in the first two pieces, and that 'a large-scale coherence that connects the string of sections is achieved instead by a continuous expressive curve'. Moreover, the claim that this work and others like it ran precariously close to Schoenberg's then very turbulent personal life is relatively easy to maintain, one possible idea being that the `continuous expressive curve' was the curve (read: narrative) of life. Perhaps the paradigmatic example of this was Erwartung, which Schoenberg famously wrote about a month later in seventeen days flat, and which was, embodying artistically a life lived on the threshold of great change, concerned with `what transpires in a person in a moment of the greatest tension and intensity of feeling' (Egon Wellesz, quoted by Simms).

Simms writes well about Schoenberg's instrumental works of these years (occasionally coming over slightly constrained by the apparent textbook limitations of the book), though personally I can't seem to hear op.11 no.3 as sounding as different to the other two pieces in the set as Simms seems to imply, nor do I play it as such - but that's my problem. In fact, I hear the third piece remaking the immediate past, the other voices being those of the first two pieces, which Schoenberg had written a few months earlier. For example, the last of the five etwas langsamer passages (bars 24-26), the only one also marked mafsig, contains several material elements from the recapitulation of the first piece: the melodic line (including the dotted rhythm); the rising semiquaver left hand; the sonorities in bar 26; the claustrophobic middle-- register motive D-E6-D; and the rising third in the bass line. Though not enough to warrant a description like 'cyclic' or 'recapitulation', and it is unclear whether they were conscious or not, these close recurrent relationships between the elements of Schoenberg's musical language say something about his style and technique, and, underlying these (for him at any rate), the idea of music as he then conceived it mid-1909.

In a thoughtful discussion early on in the book of `Schoenberg's evolution toward atonality', Simms notes that `Schoenberg based his concept of harmony on a pedagogical tradition that rigidly isolated harmony per se from counterpoint and voice leading, and in doing so it made relatively few concessions to how the music actually sounds'. Schoenberg's compositionally motivated analysis of chords in this slightly exaggerated manner without reference to voice-- leading, like viewing stills from a film, required the production of ideas like that of the `vagrant chord', and it was from within this way of thinking about music that tonality came to be seen as `always in flux, always contending with the seeds of its own destruction' - its deathbound subjectivity Indeed, `This technique of detaching motivic development from rhythm would prove to be of immense importance in Schoenberg's later development of the atonal style', for it gradually set the scene for a largely visual economy of music that would eventually (and in the hindsight of many, predictably) lead to atonality. This was the essence of Schoenberg's personal Modernism, which was, Simms reminds us, `an older Modernism' than those of his Neoclassical contemporaries.

Schoenberg himself, writing much later in `My evolution' (1949), noted that in his atonal music he had `renounced a tonal centre - a procedure incorrectly called "atonality".' This attempt at a full-scale renunciation of the musical God-figure - and it was important for Schoenberg himself that it was a conscious renunciation - had been a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence of the new type of musical utterance which Schoenberg had intuited, influenced in no small measure by `the powerful formative element' of the texts he chose to set and his understanding both of the nature of their relationships to the music and of the nature of music as text. As his famous gripe with the term atonality' suggests, the matter concerned for him, less an absolute absence of grounding, a kind of musical no-man's land, than a new mode of compositional 'control' (no longer in fact the best word). Hence the talk of 'masks' in Pierrot Lunaire (p.131) and phrases like `suspended tonality' - and hence, in particular, the rhetoric of the quite extraordinary manifesto Schoenberg sent to Busoni in August 1909, a central document in his emerging style. Hermann Bahr (whose 1905 play Die Andere Simms could have mentioned, along with Kandinsky's short narrative poem `Seeing:, as part of the context for Erwartung) referred to a new way of seeing `with the eye of the spirit'.