Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture

258 Pages·1997·2.68 MB·English

by  Juliane Brand

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Constructive Dissonance
Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture
EDITED BY
Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London

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Page iv
Disclaimer:
Some images in the original hard copy book are not available for inclusion in the netLibrary eBook.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 1997 by
The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Constructuve dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the transformations of
twentieth-century culture/edited by Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey.
p. cm.
Papers delivered at a conference held at the Arnold Schoenberg
Institute, University of Southern California, Nov. 15-17, 1991.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-20314-3 (cloth)
1. Schoenberg, Arnold, 1874-1951 Congresses. I. Brand, Juliane.
II. Hailey, Christopher.
ML410.S283C66 1997
780'.92 dc20 96-24712
CIP
MN
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for
Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

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Page v
This book is dedicated to Leonard Stein

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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ix
Introduction xi
Source Note xvii
Contexts
Chapter 1. Music and the Critique of Culture: Arnold Schoenberg, Heinrich
Schenker, and the Emergence of Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna Leon Botstein 3
Chapter 2. Assimilation and the Emancipation of Historical Dissonance Alexander L.
Ringer 23
Chapter 3. Evolving Perceptions of Kandinsky and Schoenberg: Toward the Ethnic
Roots of the "Outsider" Peg Weiss 35
Chapter 4. The Émigré Experience: Schoenberg in America Alan Lessem 58
Creations
Chapter 5. Schoenberg and the Origins of Atonality Ethan Haimo 71
Chapter 6. The Refractory Masterpiece: Toward an Interpretation of Schoenberg's
Chamber Symphony, op. 9 Walter Frisch 87
Chapter 7. Whose Idea was Erwartung? Bryan R. Simms 100
Chapter 8. "Heart and Brain in Music": The Genesis of Schoenberg's Die glückliche
Hand Joseph Auner 112
Chapter 9. Schoenberg's Incomplete Works and Fragments Jan Maegaard 131
Chapter 10. Schoenberg's Philosophy of Composition: Thoughts on the "Musical
Idea and Its Presentation" Patricia Carpenter and Severine Neff 146

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Connections
Chapter 11. Schoenberg and the Canon: An Evolving Heritage Christopher Hailey 163
Chapter 12. Schoenberg's Concept of Art in Twentieth-Century Music History
Hermann Danuser 179
Chapter 13. Schoenberg and Present-Day Theory and Practice Jonathan Dunsby 188
Chapter 14. Schoenberg the Contemporary: A View from Behind Reinhold
Brinkmann 196
List of Contributors 221
Index 225

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ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
1. Kandinsky, untitled study for Impression III (Concert), January 1911 36
2. Kandinsky, Romantic Landscape, 3 January 1911 37
3. Schoenberg, Vision 40
4. Schoenberg, Self-Portrait from the Back 41
5. Kandinsky, sketch for the glass painting All Saints Day II 43
6. Design for a sacrificial blanket depicting Mir Susne Khum (World-Watching-
Man) 45
7. Kandinsky, vignette to the poem "Blätter" in Klänge 46
8. Kandinsky, drawing for Composition I 47
9. Kandinsky, untitled drawing, 1924 47
10. Schoenberg, Die glückliche Hand, Compositions Vorlage, sketch for mm. 58-61
116-117
11. Schoenberg, sketch for Die glückliche Hand 123
12. Schoenberg, sketch for Self-Portrait from Behind 201
Musical Examples
1. Schoenberg, "Mädchenlied," op. 6, no. 3, mm. 1-8 77
2. Schoenberg, "Traumleben," op. 6, no. 1, mm. 1-7 79
3. Schoenberg, "Jane Grey," op. 12, no. 1, mm. 1-3 80

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4. Schoenberg, First String Quartet, op. 7, mvt. 1, mm. 8-10 82
5. Schoenberg, Chamber Symphony no. 1, op. 9, mm. 355-359; 364 94
6. Schoenberg, Chamber Symphony no. 1, op. 9, mm. 582-584; 593 95
Tables
1. Fragments (Dated) 134
2. Fragments (Undated) 136
3. Outlines (Dated) 138
4. Outlines (Undated) 138
5. Sketches (Dated) 139
6. Sketches (Undated) 140

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INTRODUCTION
The second half of this century will spoil by overestimation whatever the first half's underestimation left
unspoilt.
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, 1949
In many ways the second half of the twentieth century has been preoccupied with sorting out the shock waves of
the first, which included two world wars, countless struggles for national and ethnic independence and autonomy,
political and economic upheaval, and genocide, population dislocation, and emigration on an unprecedented scale.
Since 1950, however, the political and economic structures that emerged following the Second World War have
been undergoing not violent shifts but rather a process of expansion, decay, and transformation. Inherited
ideologies, critically evaluated, have gradually been modified or abandoned, barriers have disintegrated, and certain
issues once thought parochial have assumed global import. This phenomenon is no less evident in the arts, where
the first half of the century brought revolutions of material and language, of media and means of dissemination,
and of the interrelationship between artists, their audience, and their craft. By midcentury an array of "isms" had
crystallized around a few fixed reference points.
One of those fixed points was Arnold Schoenberg. By the time he died in 1951 Schoenberg had come to be
regarded as one of the pivotal figures of twentieth-century musical culture. An entire generation of younger
composers was bred upon the dogma of a musical progress in which Schoenberg's innovations were a necessary
and inevitable consummation, and even that other central figure, the archneoclassicist Igor Stravinsky, adopted
Schoenbergian twelve-tone and serialist techniques in his last years. Now, nearly half a century later, Schoenberg
and his music have become the object of reappraisal. Although a number of major figures still build upon the
foundations of Schoenberg's method, others have abandoned serialism or ignore it altogether. Moreover, many of
Schoenberg's principal twelve-tone works have yet to find a place in our concert repertory comparable to that

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enjoyed by the mature works of other twentieth-century masters such as Berg and Bartók. How then are we to
evaluate Schoenberg's contribution to twentieth-century culture?
The partisan battles of the inter- and postwar years created an image of Schoenberg as a lonely, isolated figure a
latter-day prophet preaching in the wilderness of contemporary culture. Such an image obscured the ways in which
the composer's life was an integrated part of some of the central experiences of twentieth-century history. The very
stations of his professional biography from the hothouse ambience of turn-of-the-century Vienna to the frenetic
environment of the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, and on to exile in Los Angeles reflect the representative quality
of his life. Of course, mere chronological and geographic coincidence would be of little significance if the scope of
Schoenberg's intellect and curiosity had not penetrated so many facets of contemporary life. Schoenberg was an
articulate observer with strongly held and often idiosyncratic opinions on virtually any subject. His energy and
vitality, his forceful presence, are documented in his music, letters, essays, and books. What is more, his passion
for preservation insured the survival of the artifacts of his life, from a richly annotated library to a massive body of
correspondence spanning sixty years. It is the controversial and often problematic position that Schoenberg has
occupied in twentieth-century music history that compels historians to examine and reexamine his legacy. Beyond
that, the wealth and quality of the source material provide the scholar with unmatched resources for taking the
measure not only of the man but also of his time. Together these strands of inquiry make possible a critical
evaluation of Schoenberg and his relationship to twentieth-century culture as well as of our relationship to the
inherited structures that we are now in the process of transforming.
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Schoenberg is often referred to as a conservative revolutionary, and as a product of Hapsburg Vienna he could
hardly have been otherwise. The retrospective cast of Viennese intellectual thought is balanced, however, by a
critical spirit that could be at once ironic and pedantic. Schoenberg was inspired by such Viennese contemporaries
as Karl Kraus and Gustav Mahler to draw radical consequences from his profound identification with his musical
heritage. Much has been written about the prophetic qualities of prewar Vienna a testing ground, as Kraus wrote,
for the "end of the world." But did a world come to an end, or was it taking shape from the energies of a newly
self-confident middle class? The energies of that class were nourished not only by a critical assessment of the past
but also by a head-on confrontation with the present. For Schoenberg that confrontation with the present was most
intense during his years in Berlin.

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