Expressionism in Music
Beginning in February, I will be teaching a ten week course on chamber music at the Academy for Lifelong Learning (http://www.academyll.org), so I am in the process of gathering together all the music that I plan to present to the class. It will, of course, include avant-garde music, and when I include new music (please do not confuse the term “new music” as it is used on Colorado Public Radio as being solely indicative of pop music) in any course that I am teaching, even if it is expressly on the avant-garde, I enjoy starting at the present and going backwards. Since the class that I will be teaching is only 10 weeks, and since it is not limited only to music of the 20th and 21st centuries, I must pick important composers and highlight their impact on music. As in any subject, music has its own set of labels to apply to compositional styles. Three composers who had a profound impact on music of the 20th century are Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern (I recently wrote an article on these three composers which will be published on the website of the 555 Collective in the next couple of weeks. The 555 Collective is a group dedicated to arts and music in Waco, Texas. http://www.555c.org/index.php).
For those of you readers who may not have in mind a clear idea of the music that Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg wrote, it is called 12 tone or serial music, and I will quote briefly from my upcoming article:
“12 tone music is usually referred to as serial music because it uses a series of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Those 12 notes do not have to appear in consecutive order, and it is also incorrect to refer to it as a ‘scale’ because a scale has a leading tone that gives the scale a sense of finality and rest. Keep in mind that serial music was designed to replace all of the traditional conventions of harmony and rhythm that composers had been familiar with since, roughly, 1580, when Gioseffo Zarlino published his four movement treatise on harmony Istitutioni Harmoniche. In that huge work, he codified major and minor and the sense of tonality.
“One of the rules that Schoenberg developed in using serial music was that the 12 notes could be divided into four three-note series; three four-note series; or, two six-note series. Each of those series can be performed as originally codified, or they can be inverted, or they can be performed in reverse order, or, as it is known, in retrograde.
Another label that has often been given to these three composers, in addition to accurately calling them “serial composers”, and composers of the Second Viennese School, is Expressionist. The term expressionism originally applied to painters and poets in Germany, just as Impressionism applied to painters, composers, and symbolist poets in France. It manifested itself shortly before World War I, and after that, the meaning was expanded to include painting, literature, theater, dance, music, and architecture. Wikipedia dangerously includes architecture, but other than that is correct when it says that, “Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.” I use the word dangerously, because by its very nature, architecture must be exempt from expressionism. Oswald M. Ungers was a highly influential architect from Cologne, Germany, and he came to the United States briefly to become the Chairman of the Architecture Department at Cornell University. His career as an architect has been typified as post modernism, and I think largely that was due to his objection to classifying his work as Expressionism. During his career, he gave an address in Florence, Italy, to an international consortium of architects, and I will quote from that address:
“Transferred to architecture, the idea underlying Expressionism, which culminates in the total detachment from reality by means of a purely visionary experience, cannot be directly realized. This is due to the unique quality of architecture, which, much more so than all the other arts, is tied to its materials, its purpose, its function and the principles of construction.
“The call for a purer vision can hardly be heeded by architecture, unless one restricts oneself to the realm of designs, i.e., ideas… Architecture is incapable of expressing all psychological phenomenon. It can achieve purely spiritual expression only if, in itself, it is not reality but reproduction, i.e., illusion.”
There is a very interesting series of books that was produced by the International Comparative Literature Association. The name of the entire five-book series is A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages. Volume 1 is entitled Expressionism As An International Literary Phenomenon, and is edited by Ulrich Weisstein, who is Professor Emeritus of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. (In past articles, I have mentioned the second book of the series which is extremely useful to musicians, and its title is The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages, and it was edited by Anna Balakian, former Chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. It contains some excellent articles on Impressionism, Debussy, and the Symbolist poets).
In Volume 1 on Expressionism, there is an article on Expressionist Literature and Music written by Henry A. Lea, who was on the UMass Amherst faculty in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature. On the University of Massachusetts website he is also listed as a talented musician, and at this juncture I would like to point out that no matter how talented he may have been, he had no degrees in music that I have been able to find.
He makes some very good points in this article in connection with labeling serial music as Expressionism, but says there is an odd underlying quality that it is not attractive to the ear. In the very first paragraph, he outlines Kierkegaard’s discussion of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and his remarks about the relationship between music and language. I have not read Kierkegaard’s article, but Lea summarizes some of the points that, “language is a more specific medium than music, which communicates its content without requiring reflection on the part of the listener.” He continues his summary by saying, “Being conceptual, language uses more concrete, but also more limited, symbols than music, which is less denotative and more abstract because the notes are not reducible to precise meanings.” To me, and I think to most trained musicians, that statement is very facile and glib. Doctor Lea goes on to say that there are more people who can read James Joyce than people who can listen to Schoenberg with genuine understanding, and I would point out that many individuals who are not trained musicians but who hear Schoenberg are puzzled by its content because it is unfamiliar when compared to romantic works.
I would also state that I firmly believe that, in many cases, there is a lack of curiosity concerning what makes the music sound the way it does. I am not saying that people must like what they hear, but they must understand it so that their opinions a valid. I would also like to point out to Doctor Lea that as a trained musician, I can understand Schoenberg more easily than some of the metaphors used by James Joyce. Dr. Lea also states that, “… Until fairly recently, competent performers of modern music were harder to find than actors of avant-garde drama or interpreters of experimental novels [Where does that come from?]. Even today, modern music has a limited audience, partly because much of it is not written for the orchestra or a solo instrument.” Even taking into consideration that this book was first printed in 1973, that is an absolutely absurd remark. For someone who is so blindingly intelligent as Dr. Lea, I wonder what he thinks of Webern’s Variations, Opus 27, for piano, his quartets, or his symphony. Likewise, what does he think of Berg’s magnificent Violin Concerto and Schoenberg’s orchestral pieces.
He does admit that these three composers were quite knowledgeable of literature and poetry, and that their interest was not centered around German poetry alone, though he does criticize them for representing primarily Neo-Romantic literature.
He compares Expressionism to Naturalism, and states that in Naturalism ugliness was used to present “a slice of life”, whereas the Expressionists went beyond the social aspect to challenge the traditional meaning of the word. Continuing, he is quite accurate when he says that Schoenberg believed that the development of harmony was making consonance and dissonance obsolete. As a matter of fact, that is one of the main reasons that Schoenberg developed the 12 tone series. He continues saying that Schoenberg proclaimed the equality of all 12 tones “of the scale.” You may accuse me of nitpicking, but I have read a lot of Schoenberg, and I don’t recall Schoenberg ever calling the 12 tone series a scale. The scale implies an order of notes, usually eight, where the distance between the seventh and the eighth note is a half-step, which forms a leading tone to the eighth note, thus giving the scale a sense of rest or finality or tonal center.
He also states that when Schoenberg said, “I believe that art does not stem from ability but from necessity”, he is making a distinction between art and craft, and a craftsman develops a skill without having anything vital to say, but the artist has an inner compulsion to express himself without conscious application. He attributes that idea to the painter Kandinsky. I found myself wishing he would explain the point he was trying to make.
Dr. Lea closes his discussion on Expressionism and music by saying:
“As we have seen, modern music developed more suddenly and more radically than modern literature, perhaps because music, having developed more slowly before, is capable of more far-reaching technical innovations. Because their theory and practice are harder to reconcile in music than they are in literature – theory is verbal, music is nonverbal – the Expressionist theory is not confirmed in practice; for while the theory is loftily idealistic, the music sounds doom-haunted – more evocative of a crumbling old world than of a dawning new one. Expressionist literature shares this despair, but has a more aspiring and dynamic ring and looks more to the future than to the past. Both, however, undertake a radically new examination of the bases of human existence.”
This strikes me as a very negative point of view, and I am quite surprised by it, because I have never seen anything in Berg, Webern, or Schoenberg, to make me think that their music was “doom-haunted.” I certainly agree that the atonality of the Second Viennese School startles many listeners with its sound, but those listeners, who are curious enough, usually have an epiphany, and whether or not they listen to Berg, Webern, and Schoenberg, every day, they at least have an understanding of what these composers tried to do. And, after reading Doctor Lea’s article, even when it contains some good points, I wonder if his understanding of Expressionism in music is as incomplete as my understanding is of Paul Zech or Alfred Wolfenstein, or Ludwig Scharf.
I wonder what Dr. Lea’s thoughts would be concerning the American composer John Cage, who I think was the ultimate Expressionist composer, and who had composition studies with Arnold Schoenberg. I wonder if he would have been in agreement with Cage when he abandoned serial technique and adopted the music of chance. That switch to indeterminism cost Cage many friends, and it is most ironic that those who abandoned him quickly, Boulez, Xenakis, and Stockhausen, to name but three (and they were serial composers), were eventually strongly influenced by the indeterminate music of John Cage.
In Doctor Lea’s article, he comes very close to stating out right that Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern wrote without implying any social commitment, except to say that they were concerned with the reform in the arts and in the quality of life. My question would be of Henry A. Lea: Why is it so startling that Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern considered traditional harmonies exhausted? Art to be art must always progress. And how does a new art affect the quality of life?
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Filed under: Commentary | Tags: Berg, Cage, Expressionsim, Henry A. Lea, Oswald M. Ungers, Schoenberg, Ulrich Weisstein, Webern
Beginning in February, I will be teaching a ten week course on chamber music at the Academy for Lifelong Learning (http://www.academyll.org), so I am in the process of gathering together all the music that I plan to present to the class. It will, of course, include avant-garde music, and when I include new music (please do not confuse the term “new music” as it is used on Colorado Public Radio as being solely indicative of pop music) in any course that I am teaching, even if it is expressly on the avant-garde, I enjoy starting at the present and going backwards. Since the class that I will be teaching is only 10 weeks, and since it is not limited only to music of the 20th and 21st centuries, I must pick important composers and highlight their impact on music. As in any subject, music has its own set of labels to apply to compositional styles. Three composers who had a profound impact on music of the 20th century are Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern (I recently wrote an article on these three composers which will be published on the website of the 555 Collective in the next couple of weeks. The 555 Collective is a group dedicated to arts and music in Waco, Texas. http://www.555c.org/index.php).
For those of you readers who may not have in mind a clear idea of the music that Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg wrote, it is called 12 tone or serial music, and I will quote briefly from my upcoming article:
“12 tone music is usually referred to as serial music because it uses a series of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Those 12 notes do not have to appear in consecutive order, and it is also incorrect to refer to it as a ‘scale’ because a scale has a leading tone that gives the scale a sense of finality and rest. Keep in mind that serial music was designed to replace all of the traditional conventions of harmony and rhythm that composers had been familiar with since, roughly, 1580, when Gioseffo Zarlino published his four movement treatise on harmony Istitutioni Harmoniche. In that huge work, he codified major and minor and the sense of tonality.
“One of the rules that Schoenberg developed in using serial music was that the 12 notes could be divided into four three-note series; three four-note series; or, two six-note series. Each of those series can be performed as originally codified, or they can be inverted, or they can be performed in reverse order, or, as it is known, in retrograde.
Another label that has often been given to these three composers, in addition to accurately calling them “serial composers”, and composers of the Second Viennese School, is Expressionist. The term expressionism originally applied to painters and poets in Germany, just as Impressionism applied to painters, composers, and symbolist poets in France. It manifested itself shortly before World War I, and after that, the meaning was expanded to include painting, literature, theater, dance, music, and architecture. Wikipedia dangerously includes architecture, but other than that is correct when it says that, “Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.” I use the word dangerously, because by its very nature, architecture must be exempt from expressionism. Oswald M. Ungers was a highly influential architect from Cologne, Germany, and he came to the United States briefly to become the Chairman of the Architecture Department at Cornell University. His career as an architect has been typified as post modernism, and I think largely that was due to his objection to classifying his work as Expressionism. During his career, he gave an address in Florence, Italy, to an international consortium of architects, and I will quote from that address:
“Transferred to architecture, the idea underlying Expressionism, which culminates in the total detachment from reality by means of a purely visionary experience, cannot be directly realized. This is due to the unique quality of architecture, which, much more so than all the other arts, is tied to its materials, its purpose, its function and the principles of construction.
“The call for a purer vision can hardly be heeded by architecture, unless one restricts oneself to the realm of designs, i.e., ideas… Architecture is incapable of expressing all psychological phenomenon. It can achieve purely spiritual expression only if, in itself, it is not reality but reproduction, i.e., illusion.”
There is a very interesting series of books that was produced by the International Comparative Literature Association. The name of the entire five-book series is A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages. Volume 1 is entitled Expressionism As An International Literary Phenomenon, and is edited by Ulrich Weisstein, who is Professor Emeritus of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. (In past articles, I have mentioned the second book of the series which is extremely useful to musicians, and its title is The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages, and it was edited by Anna Balakian, former Chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. It contains some excellent articles on Impressionism, Debussy, and the Symbolist poets).
In Volume 1 on Expressionism, there is an article on Expressionist Literature and Music written by Henry A. Lea, who was on the UMass Amherst faculty in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature. On the University of Massachusetts website he is also listed as a talented musician, and at this juncture I would like to point out that no matter how talented he may have been, he had no degrees in music that I have been able to find.
He makes some very good points in this article in connection with labeling serial music as Expressionism, but says there is an odd underlying quality that it is not attractive to the ear. In the very first paragraph, he outlines Kierkegaard’s discussion of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and his remarks about the relationship between music and language. I have not read Kierkegaard’s article, but Lea summarizes some of the points that, “language is a more specific medium than music, which communicates its content without requiring reflection on the part of the listener.” He continues his summary by saying, “Being conceptual, language uses more concrete, but also more limited, symbols than music, which is less denotative and more abstract because the notes are not reducible to precise meanings.” To me, and I think to most trained musicians, that statement is very facile and glib. Doctor Lea goes on to say that there are more people who can read James Joyce than people who can listen to Schoenberg with genuine understanding, and I would point out that many individuals who are not trained musicians but who hear Schoenberg are puzzled by its content because it is unfamiliar when compared to romantic works.
I would also state that I firmly believe that, in many cases, there is a lack of curiosity concerning what makes the music sound the way it does. I am not saying that people must like what they hear, but they must understand it so that their opinions a valid. I would also like to point out to Doctor Lea that as a trained musician, I can understand Schoenberg more easily than some of the metaphors used by James Joyce. Dr. Lea also states that, “… Until fairly recently, competent performers of modern music were harder to find than actors of avant-garde drama or interpreters of experimental novels [Where does that come from?]. Even today, modern music has a limited audience, partly because much of it is not written for the orchestra or a solo instrument.” Even taking into consideration that this book was first printed in 1973, that is an absolutely absurd remark. For someone who is so blindingly intelligent as Dr. Lea, I wonder what he thinks of Webern’s Variations, Opus 27, for piano, his quartets, or his symphony. Likewise, what does he think of Berg’s magnificent Violin Concerto and Schoenberg’s orchestral pieces.
He does admit that these three composers were quite knowledgeable of literature and poetry, and that their interest was not centered around German poetry alone, though he does criticize them for representing primarily Neo-Romantic literature.
He compares Expressionism to Naturalism, and states that in Naturalism ugliness was used to present “a slice of life”, whereas the Expressionists went beyond the social aspect to challenge the traditional meaning of the word. Continuing, he is quite accurate when he says that Schoenberg believed that the development of harmony was making consonance and dissonance obsolete. As a matter of fact, that is one of the main reasons that Schoenberg developed the 12 tone series. He continues saying that Schoenberg proclaimed the equality of all 12 tones “of the scale.” You may accuse me of nitpicking, but I have read a lot of Schoenberg, and I don’t recall Schoenberg ever calling the 12 tone series a scale. The scale implies an order of notes, usually eight, where the distance between the seventh and the eighth note is a half-step, which forms a leading tone to the eighth note, thus giving the scale a sense of rest or finality or tonal center.
He also states that when Schoenberg said, “I believe that art does not stem from ability but from necessity”, he is making a distinction between art and craft, and a craftsman develops a skill without having anything vital to say, but the artist has an inner compulsion to express himself without conscious application. He attributes that idea to the painter Kandinsky. I found myself wishing he would explain the point he was trying to make.
Dr. Lea closes his discussion on Expressionism and music by saying:
“As we have seen, modern music developed more suddenly and more radically than modern literature, perhaps because music, having developed more slowly before, is capable of more far-reaching technical innovations. Because their theory and practice are harder to reconcile in music than they are in literature – theory is verbal, music is nonverbal – the Expressionist theory is not confirmed in practice; for while the theory is loftily idealistic, the music sounds doom-haunted – more evocative of a crumbling old world than of a dawning new one. Expressionist literature shares this despair, but has a more aspiring and dynamic ring and looks more to the future than to the past. Both, however, undertake a radically new examination of the bases of human existence.”
This strikes me as a very negative point of view, and I am quite surprised by it, because I have never seen anything in Berg, Webern, or Schoenberg, to make me think that their music was “doom-haunted.” I certainly agree that the atonality of the Second Viennese School startles many listeners with its sound, but those listeners, who are curious enough, usually have an epiphany, and whether or not they listen to Berg, Webern, and Schoenberg, every day, they at least have an understanding of what these composers tried to do. And, after reading Doctor Lea’s article, even when it contains some good points, I wonder if his understanding of Expressionism in music is as incomplete as my understanding is of Paul Zech or Alfred Wolfenstein, or Ludwig Scharf.
I wonder what Dr. Lea’s thoughts would be concerning the American composer John Cage, who I think was the ultimate Expressionist composer, and who had composition studies with Arnold Schoenberg. I wonder if he would have been in agreement with Cage when he abandoned serial technique and adopted the music of chance. That switch to indeterminism cost Cage many friends, and it is most ironic that those who abandoned him quickly, Boulez, Xenakis, and Stockhausen, to name but three (and they were serial composers), were eventually strongly influenced by the indeterminate music of John Cage.
In Doctor Lea’s article, he comes very close to stating out right that Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern wrote without implying any social commitment, except to say that they were concerned with the reform in the arts and in the quality of life. My question would be of Henry A. Lea: Why is it so startling that Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern considered traditional harmonies exhausted? Art to be art must always progress. And how does a new art affect the quality of life?
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