Schoenberg, Berg, Webern

I left things hanging a bit with my last post on Schoenberg. Let me see if I can wrap things up, provisionally at least. My exploration of classical music in the early days was partly guided by reading some library books and the purchase of recordings. One led to the other, of course. For some reason, the tiny municipal library I had access to had several books on 20th century music. In retrospect the interesting thing about these books was their relatively uniform view on the ideology of 20th century music. From these books I took for granted both who were the important figures (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg) and the context for understanding why: technical progress in new ways of writing music.

I accepted this paradigm for a long time and only much later did I really started to doubt it. I think the first inkling of a problem came in undergraduate music when I was in the listening library one day sampling some new music recordings. I happened to put on a disc of some Stockhausen for multiple orchestras (Carré or something) and followed it with Drumming by Steve Reich. The Reich was much more interesting and made a larger impact for me because it was not maximalizing dissonance and complexity! Well, according to the aesthetic parameters that I had learned regarding 20th century music, that was just wrong!

Technical progress in writing music is a very problematical concept as soon as you start to unpack it. For one thing it tends to place music in the same realm as science: research and development of new musical ideas. Milton Babbitt is the locus classicus for this viewpoint; another prominent practitioner is Pierre Boulez. Let's listen to some Babbitt. Here is his Composition for Four Instruments from 1948:

How are you supposed to listen to that? Are you supposed to hear the structure? Do you have to listen with the score? Should you study the score first? What kind of aesthetic experience could you have? Also, I have to point out that, there are a distressingly large number of pieces in this genre that all sound the same to me: the disjointed, fragmentary rhythms, the wide leaps in the melody, the huge changes in dynamics, the chopped off phrases--it all adds up to the same aesthetic effect. For me.

This is music that seems to be focussed only on the process of creating it. The syntax of it. The aesthetic effect is somewhat secondary. But it wasn't always so. If we go back to Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, two of the three always seemed to have also have a semantic or content side as well. In his early works such as Verklärte Nacht or Pierrot Lunaire or even the Six Little Piano Pieces, op 19, Schoenberg has a great deal of 'content'. Later on, he seems to have less and less, though there are exceptions such as his unfinished opera Moses und Aron. Some of his content seems to be related to issues surrounding his Jewish identity and the rise of anti-semitism in Nazi Germany. In other words, extra-musical events.

Schoenberg's student Alban Berg seems to have even more leaned towards the 'content' aspect and away from the structural aspect. His Lyric Suite for string quartet, long thought to be simply abstract music, turned out to have a rather detailed secret program referring to an affair between Berg and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. Here is the first movement to give you a sense of the music:

While written using 12-tone procedures, that music certainly has an expressive 'content' in the sense I am using the word. Berg, as the author of two successful operas, Wozzeck and Lulu, has a strong sense of theater in his music. This has not ever been discussed to my knowledge, but his Violin Concerto contains instructions to the orchestra to perform certain actions onstage--again, the result is a kind of theatre. Mind you, I have not noticed any orchestras actually enacting these instructions! But they are there.

Anton Webern went in quite the opposite direction: he has the least 'content' of the three and his music seems to be the most concerned solely with the technical aspects of composition. It is hard to imagine a 'secret program' in any of Webern's pieces! Here is his String Quartet, Op 28:

I think you can hear how that is going to lead directly to Babbitt and Boulez. After the war the choice was made in places where composition was being taught, like Darmstadt, to follow the example of Webern and not the example of Berg. We might speculate that with the just past horrors of the war, the last thing anyone wanted was aesthetic content! On the other hand, this didn't seem to stop people like Shostakovich from writing content-full music after the war. But in Western Europe and North America, the ideology of music composition was to take Webern as a model and stress the syntax of music while ignoring the semantic. Even though this model has begun to break down there are still places that turn out composition students who seem to follow it.

If I might inflict on you a metaphorical way to distinguish Schoenberg from his students I could compare Schoenberg himself to a hearty dish like wienerschnitzel which would make Alban Berg a Sachertorte and Anton Webern, well, schnapps!

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Unpopular Music

A lot of people in the classical music world are working on the problem of, as Greg Sandow calls it, the "future of classical music", that is, how can we bring in new audiences to symphony, opera and chamber music concerts? The statistics are unclear, but it seems as if audiences are declining and attracting more young people is a project a lot of musical organizations see as critical.

The massive place that popular music now occupies in the public consciousness is one major factor in the increasing pressure on the classical music world. The change has come in the last fifty or sixty years. If we go back to the fifties, a huge classical artist like Van Cliburn, the winner of the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, could sell more records than Elvis Presley. But with the coming on the scene of pop artists like the Beatles and the host that followed them, this changed and now classical sales are a tiny fraction of popular music sales. Popular music and the mass media have proved to be such a powerful partnership, as exemplified in the music video, that mere classical artists are forced to emulate them, just to be heard. I have posted a few times on this here and here.

So the question is, if popular music is what we mostly hear in the mass media, is classical music now "unpopular music"? In terms of sales? Sure. So administrators and promoters and artists are all working to make classical music more popular. There are a few problems, though. For one thing, popular music is popular because it is easy to listen to. Classical music is often not so easy to listen to. In fact, if you really want to enjoy all the glories of classical music, you need to investigate a bit, be curious, learn about it. Now mind you, classical music can have an immediate impact. Have a listen to this, for example:

For sheer musical power and glorious sound, this is pretty outstanding. I still get shivers every time I hear that theme in the French horns. Or listen just to the first couple of minutes of this:

Those horns again! But there is much more to classical music than just the orchestral showpieces. There are pieces of subtlety and sheer musical beauty such as this:

A piece like that is not going to overwhelm you on first listening like the first two did. No, you need to listen to it a few times. Each time you will notice something new and the beauty of it will grow on you. Some music makes very little impression the first time, but just sounds odd:

The first time you listen you might say "what the heck is going on there"? It may make little sense because of the big contrasts and may just sound confused. But then, after a few listenings, some things might suddenly capture your attention, and as time goes on it all starts making sense and a kind of sense that no other piece has. Other music is very challenging at first:

And may continue to be challenging, even after many hearings! Or you may start to pick up on the eerie floating harmony... One thing for sure, this music is very subtle and intricate: you must listen with your full attention and no distractions.

Classical music may be the "unpopular music" as compared to pop music. But it is not unpopular because it is bad music! It is unpopular because a lot of classical music does not give up its secrets and beauties immediately. You have to work at it a bit as a listener. Perhaps you might read a book on the composer, or at least look him or her up on Wikipedia. There is a wealth of information there. There are even individual articles on pieces. Here is the article on the 'Serioso' Quartet by Beethoven that is the fourth YouTube clip above. Here is another one on the Piano Sonata by Alban Berg that is my last example.

The neat thing about Wikipedia is that each article contains links to others. In the one on the Berg sonata there is mention of whole-tone scales which is linked to an article on them which explains what they are. If you follow those links you will start being knowledgeable about such things.

Most pop songs are just what you hear the first time, nothing much beneath the surface. But classical music is like an iceberg: what you hear the first time is just a fraction of what is going on. The more you dig, the more you will discover. Take my word for it, there are pieces of classical music that no-one has ever gotten completely to the bottom of:

 

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