Arnold Schoenberg - Drei Klavierstücke ("Three Piano Pieces"), Op. 11
“...for the first time in world history, popular cultural production had proved to be aesthetically superior to the cultural production of the elite. Genre fiction, whether thrillers or sci-fi, was broadly superior, at that time, to the mainstream novel; the comic book outclassed by far the creations of the official representatives of the visual arts; and most particularly, popular music made a mockery of subsidized attempts at ‘experimental music.’”
- Michel Houellebecq, Annihilation
“Intelligent people have always been offended if one bothered them with matters which any idiot could understand at once.”
- Arnold Schoenberg, New Music, Outmoded Music, Style, and Idea
I.
If you were forced to lay blame for the trajectory of 20th century art music on one person – and there is much to answer for – the most natural choice would be Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg pioneered the now-ubiquitous variety of atonal classical music that no normal person wants to hear, and the composers he influenced gave us the embarrassing experimentalism associated with 20th century art music: four minutes of silence marketed as a song, a string quartet performed in four helicopters, et cetera.
Before the late 19th century, composers were under less pressure to justify their work with ideas. This is not to say that pre-romantic composers were devoid of philosophical opinions; some, like Monteverdi, had plenty. But in general, more context was assumed about what we are doing and why we are doing it. Beethoven certainly didn’t have to publish an “artist statement” each time a work of his was premiered. His music existed in the context of a common musical language. This language may be a cultural artifact, but it was always grounded in general features of human perception as they relate to the physics of the overtone series. The language has a grammar, but the grammar is not arbitrary. It developed organically, over many years, as composers learned that certain combinations of frequencies felt consonant, while others felt dissonant. Compound quadruple rhythms evoked the gallop of the hunt, while waltz time made you want to shake that ass. These observations were codified in theory, giving composers tools to write music that could evoke a variety of moods, and more broadly, just sounded good. The musical developments of the enlightenment mirrored the progress of the natural sciences; theoretical constructs like the circle of fifths were not mere inventions: they were discoveries about the relationship between physics and perception.
Contrast this grammar with Arnold Schoenberg’s “Method of Composing with Twelve Tones Which are Related Only with One Another,” a compositional tool the composer developed in the 1920s. In twelve tone serialism, you begin with the same twelve tone equal temperament chromatic scale employed by everyone else. From this scale you create a “prime tone row” – an ordering of the twelve notes in which each note appears exactly once. Then you define the “retrograde,” which is the prime row played backwards; the “inversion”, which is the prime row with the intervals inverted; and the “retrograde inversion” – you get the idea. So now we have four sequences. Each can be transposed to all twelve keys, yielding 48 sequences. These sequences, rather than chord progressions or melodic motifs, form the building blocks of a piece. Harmony is an emergent property of overlapping tone rows, rather than the foundation on which we build.
The goal of twelve tone serialism is to prevent any one note from exercising too much gravity, doing away with the hierarchical structure that underpins tonal harmony. In the absence of any formal constraints, attempts to compose a song that is not in any particular key might, by accident, privilege one note over another, giving rise to classic harmonic structure. The twelve tone technique is a particularly stringent constraint designed to prevent this. (Its stringency cannot be overstated; Schoenberg himself writes that “nothing is given by this method; but much is taken away.”) It succeeds wildly at its goal, at the expense of a whole host of other aesthetic virtues. It received considerable criticism; in the words of Glenn Gould (who incidentally considered Schoenberg to be the greatest composer of the 20th century), detractors thought it was “a childish bit of mathematics.”
To many, there is a clear problem here: instead of theory serving music, music is serving theory. The natural theory that was grounded in musical practice has been replaced by an arbitrary theory which is unconstrained by the psychology of perception – and the result is music that nobody likes. This, it is argued, is why contemporary classical music is relatively marginal. That’s the standard critique of 20th century art music. I didn’t come up with it, versions of it have been articulated by Roger Scrutton, Fred Lerdahl, and basically anyone who has heard a piece of non-Russian classical music that was written in the past hundred years.
It would be a mistake to downplay the role that technology played in the declining popularity of art music. The advent of recording technology made it impossible for Bach to compete with the Beatles – the western art music establishment had been dealt a bad hand; it was basically inevitable that the 20th century would belong to pop music. But nonetheless, the establishment could have played that hand a little better. The only thing more incredible than the decline from a situation where composers like Handel and Verdi were national celebrities – whose appeal transcended social class, whose music was loved by all – to a situation where the average person couldn’t name a single living composer of western art music if you put a gun to their head, is the fact that members of the art music establishment are appalled by the suggestion that something might have gone wrong. If you go to the music theory subreddit and say that it was mistake for the establishment to invest all its remaining political capital in the Helicopter String Quartet guy, you will be met with a combination of sneering, bemusement, and worst of all, a language game where you’re accused of failing to understand the tonal/atonal distinction.
In short, I think there is some truth to the standard critique. But I also think that this is not the only lens through which to understand Schoenberg.
II.
At the close of the nineteenth century, a largely self-taught Schoenberg composed romantic music in the tradition of Brahms and Wagner. His work in this period was innovative, and some elements hinted at the more radical direction he would take in the next century. But it conformed, in large measure, to the conventional aesthetic standards of western art music, and is legible to your average listener. Schoenberg himself articulated these aesthetic standards better than anyone else. His writings on music theory – Fundamentals of Composition, Theory of Harmony and Structural Foundations of Harmony – are considered classics. They are not about radical 20th century music. They consist of deep analysis of the common practice period, drawing their examples primarily from Beethoven’s piano sonatas and Bach’s keyboard music.
Schoenberg was acutely aware of his position in history, and saw himself as existing in a progression toward increasing tolerance of dissonance. Of the period, he writes:
The ear had gradually become acquainted with a great number of dissonances, and so had lost the fear of their "sense-interrupting" effect. One no longer expected preparations of Wagner's dissonances or resolutions of Strauss' discords; one was not disturbed by Debussy's non-functional harmonies, or by the harsh counterpoint of later composers. This state of affairs led to a freer use of dissonances comparable to classic composers' treatment of diminished seventh chords, which could precede and follow any other harmony, consonant or dissonant, as if there were no dissonance at all.
Wagner, in particular, introduced a harmonic idiom which was radical in its dissonance. At the time, reception was mixed. A large segment of his audience couldn’t speak Wagner’s language. But by the early 20th century, as audiences were exposed to similar ideas through Mahler, Strauss, and others, the new sound started to click with most listeners. Wagner’s dissonance was not an arbitrary invention, it was a deep discovery. Today, anybody who has watched films from the golden age of Hollywood understands Wagner’s vocabulary.
In 1865, Wagner could hear things that his audience couldn’t – of course he could; he was a complete genius. It’s plausible that Schoenberg, also a genius, could hear things in 1909 that his audience could not. This was the year he composed his first atonal keyboard work: Drei Klavierstücke ("Three Piano Pieces"), Op. 11. This predates his twelve tone technique by a decade – the “childish bit of mathematics” came after, not before, musical practice. Some passages from Schoenberg’s letters from 1909 suggest that Schoenberg’s early atonal work was the result of following musical intuition:
I strive for: complete liberation from all forms / from all symbols of cohesion and of logic. …It should be an expression of feeling, as our feelings, which bring us in contact with our subconscious, really are, and no false child of feelings and "conscious logic."
Blogger Mechanics of Aesthetics, who has proposed that “beauty is the reward for successful predictive processing at the edge of our capability,” argues that Schoenberg’s experiments in atonality are an example of the kind of patterns that live at the edge of the capability of a complete genius:
It is not random that it was Arnold Schoenberg, a master of tonal music, who wanted to break free of the chains of tonal music. It probably all had become too predictable for him, due to his mastery of tonal music.
I think there is something to this, though we shouldn’t take it too far. When listeners hear serialist music – even musicians trained in this tradition – they don’t hear tone rows in the same way that listeners hear melodies and chord progressions in tonal music.
So now we have two pictures of Schoenberg emerging: one of a philosopher working out abstract ideas, another of an aesthete following intuition. Musicologists are still fighting about which Schoenberg wrote the Drei Klavierstücke, and both sides are able to find quotes – and notes – that support their case. The former is an easier case to make, but maybe there is some truth to both. Schoenberg was unquestionably obsessed with developing an idea: “An idea is born; it must be molded, formulated, developed, elaborated, carried through and pursued to its very end.” But to Schoenberg, an idea is something concrete, like a melody: “an idea is not always the product of brain-work. Ideas may invade the mind as unprovoked and perhaps even as undesired as a musical sound reaches the ear or an odor the nose.”
I have somewhat conservative aesthetic leanings. I hate installations, and the term “sound art” evokes in me a visceral negative reaction. I enjoy Schoenberg’s romantic work, but I am cynical about “difficult” 20th century music, and for that reason, I never made a serious, sustained effort to listen to any of Schoenberg’s atonal work. But I found the second picture of Schoenberg somewhat plausible; enough, at any rate, to follow the standard steps for “getting into atonal Schoenberg”: select a canonical work, and listen to it. Over, and over, and over again. I went with Glenn Gould’s recording.
III.
The first of the Drei Klavierstücke has received the most attention as a potentially tonal piece. It has been given three tonal analyses by three different theorists. Since each of these theorists came to a totally different conclusion about what key the piece is in, I think we’re safe to say it is properly atonal.
The piece opens with a descending melodic line. This forms the main motives of the piece, and they are repeated, inverted, stretched, and reused throughout. The descending melody is met with moody chords in the bass that move upward, completing the first thought. In the next section, the bass plays an ascending chromatic line, while the right hand varies the motives introduced in the first section. A third section mirrors the first. This concludes the first eleven bars, and the ideas introduced here are explored throughout the rest of the piece.
This review is not a serious technical analysis of the work. I’m completely unqualified to do that, and if you want one, there are accessible analyses on YouTube (which is a better medium for this sort of thing) and bare-knuckled mathematical analyses in textbooks. But from my perspective as an amateur, there are two things about no. 1 that have stayed with me.
The first is the observation that this music does become increasingly legible through repeated listens. By the time I sat down at the piano to work out my favourite parts of no. 1 – the rich chords of the opening, the ascending chromatic line that seems to evaporate – my mistakes were no less jarring than they would be if I had been playing tonal music. Sections of the piece that annoyed me on my early listens – particularly the intense, dissonant flurries – became playful once I knew when to expect them.
The second observation is that what makes this piece work is balance. Motives respond to one another, support one another, reinforce one another. When you play a wrong note in this piece, the resultant jarring sensation is not just about subverted expectation, but a sense of being off-kilter.
The second klavierstück is, to me, the most accessible, for two reasons. The first is that for much of the piece, the bass plays an ostinato that alternates between F and D, which, though the piece doesn’t employ functional harmony, creates a sort of tonal center at D, and a vague sense that we’re in D minor. Over top of this ostinato, the right hand explores various themes: sometimes melodic, sometimes chordal; sometimes harsh and other times pretty.
It’s worth recalling exactly what Schoenberg gave up when he started composing music this way. Today, we have this idea that a song is in a key – let’s say C major – and the C major triad serves as a sort of home base. The song will move to other chords that are related to the C major triad by virtue of sharing notes with it. This way of thinking about – and feeling – music is so natural that it’s hard to grasp that it wasn’t always there. But it’s really only a few hundred years old. There are other musical forms, which have a tonal center, but don’t stray from it. A lot of sacred music that predates the common practice period is like this. This may be a naive way of listening to Schoenberg, but rather than an evolution beyond tonality, I hear in no. 2 a timeless sound that existed before and after the advent of functional harmony, one that you hear in both the organum of the middle ages, and in the groove-based music of the late 20th century. If nothing else, listening this way helps form a bridge between Schoenberg’s world and my own.
The second reason the piece is more accessible is that it contains more repetition than the others. Part of what makes Schoenberg difficult is not just dissonance, but a lack of obvious structure. In no. 2, the different sections are more legible. The middle section of the piece is much more difficult, but it culminates in a passage whose intensity is intelligible to any listener.
The third of Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke is where, at least for now, Schoenberg leaves me behind. It is the shortest of the three pieces. It is intense, dissonant, extreme. Any vestiges of tonality hanging around in no. 1 and no. 2 are gone. I can recall passages from no. 1 and no. 2 in my head; I struggle to do this with no. 3. To properly hear this piece, I would need to spend more time listening to it, I would need to go through more analyses. The best thing I could do is sit down at the piano with the score and attempt, within my limited ability, to learn parts of it. I think there would probably be some reward for this.
IV.
The people championing Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and Elliot Carter are some of the same people who championed Schoenberg and Wagner. They can play songs that you and I cannot, they can read scores that you and I cannot, and most importantly, they can hear things that you and I cannot. Most of us will never be great musicians, but if we apply ourselves, we can hear things that exist beyond the ears we have today.
Does this mean that what I’ve just derided as a century of embarrassing experimentalism is, in fact, a trove of beautiful secrets that will reveal themselves to the faithful? No, but it means we have to deal with the following problem: if some great art is genuinely demanding, and some shallow art is ostensibly demanding, how do you tell, while you’re in the process of struggling to understand a work, which one it is?
“Trust the experts” is inadequate; in the first place, because there is considerable disagreement amongst the experts, and in the second, because while there are plausible apriori arguments as to why something like mid-period Schoenberg may eventually reward patient listeners, it’s harder to make those arguments for something like Stockhausen. We can question how much effort should be necessary to truly hear a song. We can hold that accessibility is an aesthetic virtue. But all of these arguments – which ought to form a core part of our philosophy of art – must take seriously the fact that we are always growing, that others have heard things we have not, and that understanding is often the reward for undergoing a trial.