ninme

I almost titled this “James Joyce For Musicians” but decided to make myself focus on the positive.

Telegraph Blogs - After atonality, what next?

It could be argued that the first decade of the twentieth century was the richest in musical history: Mahler, Strauss and Debussy were at the height of their powers, while Ravel, Sibelius, Elgar and Rachmaninov were writing much of their finest work.

And in the middle of all this, Schoenberg was creating a handful of pieces that represent the high point of late Romantic music: Verklarte Nacht, Pelleas und Melisande, Gurrelieder and the first String Quartet.

Then, in 1908, came the last movement of the Second String Quartet and the songs from The Book of the Hanging Garden, and music was set on a course which in many ways it is still on.

Ironically, what ultimately survived of the decade was the musical idea that repudiated its grandest achievements.

That one man could do this is remarkable - but Schoenberg was nothing if not remarkable.

Hah.

The force of his will and intellect devastated his contemporaries and left them feeling obsolete.

His genius was fundamentally neurotic, and so it’s unsurprising that his creative wellspring was a complaint - that music, even in its most complex forms, was too repetitive.

He sought to remedy this defect by the use of a technique he called ‘developing variation’: “With me variation almost completely takes the place of repetition”, he said.

The consequence of this is that much of his ‘atonal’ and serial work is sensationally difficult to grasp.

And, ah, what good is art that’s “sensationally difficult to grasp”? Unless its intent is only to make everyone but a couple of art snobs feel “obselete”, comforted only by Clear Channel and only the emotional outlet offered by Emo.

It’s a whole new kind of aural difficulty: yes, Beethoven’s late string quartets are challenging, but attentiveness yields large rewards - and one discovers that their huge structures rely on repetition for their integrity.

In fact, what is musical structure without repetition? Schoenberg’s answer to this question was ‘twelve-tone’ method he arrived at in the early 1920s - in effect; this music was an analogy for tonal music, note rows standing in for key signatures, the composer’s manipulation of them similar to that affected by Bach on a fugal subject.

Then the question arose which he didn’t answer: why have the analogy when you can have the real thing?

Hadn’t he written music simply by subtracting the bits that make music interesting and valuable? It transpires that human beings need repetition to make sense of things: it’s what turns noise into music.

It is difficult to derive satisfaction from music without pattern, without a sense of initiation, dispute and cadence.

But before along, the only people who cared about these questions were in the academy, because modern art music had lost the attention of the general audience.

The whole of Vienna came out to mourn Beethoven’s death. LA did not do the same for Schoenberg.

I should stop there. I might start getting ideas I can’t afford.