Thought of the Week: Brahms and Schoenberg

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Comment by Barnaby Thieme on June 24, 2009 at 12:44pm

Tovey also notes "Schönberg rightly says that der Einfall, the inspiration that comes without theorizing, is the sole criterion of musical truth...." That admirably expansive statement should accommodate Serialism in principle, were it not for his English gentelmanly prejudices, I think.

I believe Kerman's primary goal in his essay was to find a way to retain close structural analysis in the Schenker/Tovey sense without relying on a normative theory of deep structure. One of my favorite things about Kerman's writing is that he strives always to cast a wider net, to allow for more, to love more.

Comment by Stephen William Smoliar on June 24, 2009 at 11:11am

Barnaby, one might say that Schenker's "mission" was the validation of tonality. The Ursatz is basically a primary cadence in its most abstract form. It probably makes sense to think of it as a Chomskyan deep structure; and some of my own research involved demonstrating that the "layers" of a Schenkerian analysis amount to applying the sorts of transformational rules that Chomsky had in mind. From this point of view, however, we should recognize that Schenker probably felt that any composition that did not pass his "validity test" was not fit for analysis.

Similarly, I am not sure we can find anything by Tovey on atonal or serial music. It is, however, interesting to read what he said about Schoenberg's view of harmony. Consider this paragraph from Tovey's "Harmony" Encyclopædia Britannica entry:
--
Arnold Schönberg's harmonic theory is often masterly in its analysis of classical music, but it is extremely disappointing in its constructive aspect. Not only does Schönberg think the absurd old theory of 'added thirds' worth refuting, but he invents a new theory of added fourths which has even less foundation. The theory of added thirds was no more scientific than a classification of birds by the colour of their feathers. But birds do have feathers of various colours, and classical music does build up chords by sequences of thirds. Schönberg's theory rests on no observation at all, for the piling up of fourths has no origin in classical harmony and only a quickly exhausted melodic value. However, it can be carried right round the tempered scale in twelve steps and ad infinitum in just intonation. To find the composer of the Gurrelieder fathering such theories is as disconcerting as to discover Einstein telling fortunes in Bond Street.
--
Note that these are the words of an English gentleman, rather than a scholar, more interested in the dismissive turn of phrase than explanatory description; but Tovey is basically as obsessed with "validity" as Schenker was, even if he
had to resort to rhetoric, rather than logic, to make his point.

The bottom line is that "emancipated dissonance" is "off the map" for both of these analysts. I would even suggest that they both saw themselves as "gatekeepers of validity," even if they used radically different methods to manage the gate. From that point of view, the question of whether the "organic" metaphor can be applied to either of their methods may be a bit of an academic exercise in a time when so many new approaches to composition have burst through the gate!

Comment by Barnaby Thieme on June 24, 2009 at 9:40am

Very interesting piece -- thanks for alerting me. :)

To play devil's advocate, I'd say Kerman's point viz. organicism characterizes the ways that Schenker and Tovey conduct analysis and is not so much intended as an overarching description of their work. While Tovey is a gifted historian, the great bulk of his best-known work, his program notes, consist of close passage analysis.

I'm only familiar with Schenker second-hand, but it seems uncontroversial to assert his primary concern with analysis was in uncovering music's fundamental structures.

To continue your linguistic metaphor, Tovey and Schenker do seem to analyze music primarily with orientation to its fundamental ordering principles, analogous perhaps to Chomsky's deep grammar. At least, this would be true of the music that both Tovey and Schenker consider preeminent -- the great German tradition from Bach to Beethoven to Brahms. If there is a deep structure to music of this tradition, surely Schenker and Tovey regard it as essentially rooted in tonality.

On a more general note, I like your idea of complementarity in musical analysis. Also I've been thinking about this idea of phenomenology of musical expression and I believe I'm starting to see what you have in mind.

Comment by Stephen William Smoliar on June 23, 2009 at 4:28pm

There is now a post on my own blog about that Kerman quote.

Comment by Stephen William Smoliar on June 23, 2009 at 11:00am

Barnaby, thanks for clarifying the source. I must be showing my age when I say I remember when it first appeared! (I wish I had been better a remembering what he said when I first read it!) Regarding my phenomenological stance, you might want to take a look at Thomas Clifton's book, Music as Heard. I do not always agree with Clifton, but he definitely played a role in inspiring my own pursuits! (I just checked the online catalog for the San Francisco Public Library, and the book is in their collection.)

Let me throw another stone in the water with the suggestion that "emancipating" dissonance, not unlike Lincoln's act of emancipation, introduced problems in the social world, rather than the world of music theory. In this respect both Webern and Berg had the right idea in introducing "emancipated dissonance" to the listening public in small doses. The best example during the Schubert/Berg festival was Berg's settings of those Altenberg texts. Having "softened up" the audience with these songs, Berg could then move on to Wozzeck, Lulu, and his violin concerto. (Having said that, I would suggest that the "Chamber Concerto" was still a pretty tough nut to crack!)

Comment by Barnaby Thieme on June 23, 2009 at 10:42am

Since you've both touched on questions of context, I'll clarify that this statement came from an essay written in the late 70s (it definitely shows its age) called "How We Got into Analysis, And How to Get Out Again". This particular quote occurs as Kerman traces a genealogical sketch of the analytic tradition in musicology that regards organic unity as the fundamental concern of music -- hence his references to Schenker and Tovey, whom he regards as prominent advocates of this approach.

Stephen, thanks for your comments. I don't fully understand what you mean by "phenomenology of listening" in this context and will read some of the material on your blog -- much obliged for the thoughts and the links.

Jeff, I agree that Serialism is a dead end if its viewed as a totalizing system -- the mid-twentieth century witnessed the death of the dream of overarching theories in nearly every domain of study, and rightly so. If one regards Serialism as another step in a non-teleological progression then I think its value is clear, and the depth of its repercussions would be hard to overstate, viz. its position at the apex of the "liberation of dissonance". I do think there are some so-called atonal works which are not disturbing in affect. Berg's Violin Concerto is a ready enough example, since some of us got to see it performed to such great effect recently.

Comment by Jeff Dunn on June 23, 2009 at 10:15am

"Organicism" may be central to "the ideology" [of what?], but history has proved that the negation of tonality led to a dead end in terms of an all-embracing system. Human beings are simply wired to enjoy tonality. Schoenberg may have felt the necessity at the time to explore a non-tonal system, but why should we deny it today? We can still "continue the great tradition" by embracing both tonal and atonal techniques, as composers feel appropriate. Let's face it: if you want to express joy and love in music, it's a lot easier to do it tonally. For fear, angst and horror, atonality is the ticket.

The corner that Modernists like Schoenberg painted themselves into is the cult of newness, that only "new" approaches are worthy of greatness. Yet Brahms himself was criticized by Wagnerites for being so old-fashioned. That the music of these two composers survive today has little to do with their newness at the time they were writing.

I must add, though, that explorers of new territory do get a lot of the goodies. With the leitmotiv technique, Wagner scarfed up a host of the obvious tunes begininning with fourths and fifths, making it a little harder for later arrivals to the technique to come up with original memorable motives.

Comment by Stephen William Smoliar on June 23, 2009 at 9:39am

Having not yet read this collection, I would assume that this is Kerman's precis of Schoenberg's "Brahms the Progressive," which began as a lecture in 1933 (celebrating the centennial of Brahms' birth) and was eventually published in 1947 (fifty years after Brahms' death). My initial effort to find an on-line version of this text came up dry. I would not be surprised if it were still under copyright.

Much as I respect Kerman, I tend to view progressivism through the lens of the phenomenology of listening, rather than the theory of normative practices concerned with how one lays down the notes, so to speak. From this point of view, I have tried to make the case that there is a chain of progressives that begins with Bach, works its way through Brahms (avid subscriber to the first complete-works edition of Bach) into the realm of Ives, and was picked up by the likes of Coltrane and Cecil Taylor. In terms of the Schoenberg/Kerman argument, the links of this chain are joined less by their approach to composition than by their approach to performance, which is why we need to approach all of them through our own listening experiences, rather than through any artifacts of notation. I am prepared to entertain arguments over the right links in the chain, but I am pretty committed to the primacy of listening!

Finally, to be fair to Kerman, he once wrote an essay about Mozart's "radicalism," which, to my reading, was quite firmly rooted in matters of performance and listening!