Reposted from The National Post
This year marks the centenary of monosodium glutamate, drip coffee makers, the FBI and -- most importantly -- atonality as we know it.
In 1908, Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg led the classical tradition away from its audience, changing the world with music not in any key and of no commercial value. He put music before audiences, both literally and figuratively, and in doing so created some of Western culture's best music while gutting classical's contemporary significance.
Schoenberg started writing compositions as a child in the 1880s, studying Bach and Mozart passionately. And though none of his family was artistic, his music began demonstrating genius, soon blending the sounds of those romantic antipodes, Brahms and Wagner.
In the late 19th century, European opinion was primarily divided between these two composers. Brahms was a supposed reactionary who nonetheless wrote the first pieces that were completely thematic, wherein every bit of the score was related to the main melody. Wagner's blatantly progressive, extended tonalities seemed too delicate to support Brahms' tight melodic weaves.
Nonetheless, Schoenberg put them together in his 1899 Transfigured Night, when he was just 25. It wasn't merely beautiful, sophisticated music; this half-hour string sextet was wise and heart-wrenching, on par with the best of Mahler or Richard Strauss.
Schoenberg didn't just want to entertain; he was a culture warrior who said things like, "I have discovered a technique that will guarantee German music's supremacy for the next thousand years."
At the turn of the century, most serious artists in Vienna were confronting psychoanalysis by looking inward.
Painters were on the front lines of new ideas back then, and Schoenberg was active in this art as well. He and cutting-edge younger Viennese visual artists like Egon Shiele and Oskar Kokoschka were interested in the bald psychological stresses hinted at on the canvases of Klimt, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Bodies and landscapes could now be legitimately, hideously rendered if the artist was revealing truth, the same way clenched hands betray the lie behind a smile. This style was dubbed expressionism, pulling the romantic pose inside out.
Schoenberg's view of musical history allowed for a similar inversion. It ran something like this: from Mozart to Mahler, classical music became more and more dissonant, with more chromatic (or "wrong") notes in it, so that it was more indirect overall with each generation. The handling of chromatic notes was critical to a composer's unique sound. Schoenberg concluded that since wrong notes were coming more and more into the foreground of compositions, that they were music's progressive impetus.
But the public was uninterested in difficult music. Schoenberg barely supported his family as a conductor. Critics were childishly toxic, writing clever cruelties like "Transfigured Night sounds similar to Tristan and Isolde if the ink were smeared across Wagner's score." By today's standards, these dissonances are no more offensive than one of Danny Elfman's soundtracks.
Today, Schoenberg's genius (if not his saleability) is questionable only to insincere people, though Schoenberg himself had doubts. He said that God was telling him to say something new, but that his mortal ears couldn't absorb God's message. So instead of being pleased with having a few bona fide masterpieces under his belt, Schoenberg was often depressed, complaining that his music was derivative of the human condition, rather than accurately recording what God was telling him to say.
This artistic quandary, both aesthetic and moral, didn't exist before Schoenberg. He wasn't a showman or an opportunist like Beethoven, who used his influence to sway court judges, or to charge fans money to watch him eat in restaurants. Schoenberg was the sort of guy who publicly affirmed his Judaism the day Hitler assumed the Chancellorship. The composer even travelled to Berlin just to do that. His absolute courage and sincerity extended to all things.
But what seems to have pushed his imagination over tonality's edge was more personal and tangible.
In the summer of 1908, while writing a song cycle titled The Book of the Hanging Garden, Schoenberg was vacationing in Grunden with his family. During this time, his wife Matilde left her husband to live with his painting instructor, Richard Gerstl. During the months his wife was absent, Schoenberg completed the song cycle with the last two numbers lacking any final cadence or primary chord. He suspended the traditional resolutions in his music, reflecting the upheaval in his marriage.
His students made regular contact with Matilde until she was convinced to return. She eventually conceded that autumn. Gerstl burned all his paintings and then fatally stabbed himself.
The next piece Schoenberg completed, in time for Christmas, was his second string quartet. It was dedicated to his wife, and the tonal centre was again undetectable in the final movements. In its place was a soprano soloist singing a Stefan George poem that begins "I feel the air of other planets."
Schoenberg believed that he was closer to God's message now, and he never went back to tonality. His conviction influenced generations of composers who felt that a return to tuneful tonality was a backward tendency, fascistic even. A century of avant-garde music was thus born. Academics and connoisseurs really appreciated the results, though the general public assumed a thousand years of music just stopped being made.
The closest thing we have to a recent mainstream compositional hero was the grinning deconstructionist John Cage, who was, incidentally, also Schoenberg's student. The performance arm of classical has successfully kept the tradition breathing, but its pendulum remains stuck to the populist end of the artistic spectrum. Now we just keep playing the old favourites while, hopefully, new composers figure something out.
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment