Alban Berg’s Dissonances(nybooks.com)
nybooks.com
Alban Berg’s Dissonances
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/06/23/alban-bergs-dissonances-simms-erwin/
14 comments
When I see Alban Berg on the front page of HN, it really tells me I'm in the right place. I consider him, Webern, and Schoenberg as the "end" of western classical music. It's like the whole field ran into the brick wall of their work and never made it past.
The Second Viennese School feels like the termination of the long tradition probably because they were the last generation who felt an direct connection to their immediate predecessors. Schoenberg, despite being mostly an auotdidact, thought of himself as the heir of Brahms and Wagner. He was pretty adamant on mastering the old forms using his new language and demonstrate his place in the tradition.
Stravinsky by contrast, and to a lesser extent the post war avant-garde such as Boulez and Stockhausen work in a completely different manner. To them the entire music history is "flattened", instead of a sequence of styles where the most recent is the most important, they plucked whatever they pleased from any period which pleased them. It's pretty difficult to follow any of these composers in that regard and now almost every composer has a personal eclectic style. It's a blessing and a curse, since I don't think any previous period had as much variety to encompass the likes of Ferneyhough and Reich and everything in between. On the other hand the loss of a "centre" is definitely a downside, at least when it comes to writing a history of the period :).
Stravinsky by contrast, and to a lesser extent the post war avant-garde such as Boulez and Stockhausen work in a completely different manner. To them the entire music history is "flattened", instead of a sequence of styles where the most recent is the most important, they plucked whatever they pleased from any period which pleased them. It's pretty difficult to follow any of these composers in that regard and now almost every composer has a personal eclectic style. It's a blessing and a curse, since I don't think any previous period had as much variety to encompass the likes of Ferneyhough and Reich and everything in between. On the other hand the loss of a "centre" is definitely a downside, at least when it comes to writing a history of the period :).
> Schoenberg...thought of himself as the heir of Brahms and Wagner
Great point about the continuity of tradition. It is amazing how these people really were so interconnected. Brahms was impressed enough with the young Schoenberg that he offered to pay his tuition to the Vienna Conservatory. Mahler spent time with Brahms and had competitive encounters with Schoenberg, etc.
Considering the antagonism between the Brahms and the Wagner camps, is this something Schoenberg would have expressed? Wagner and Bruckner considered themselves to be carrying on Beethoven's tradition (I assume the same for Brahms, but can't recall reading him declaring such). It would be hard to argue, however, that Schoenberg wasn't an heir in a real sense, though (probably because of his essays) associate him more closely with Brahms. Just curious for your thoughts.
Great point about the continuity of tradition. It is amazing how these people really were so interconnected. Brahms was impressed enough with the young Schoenberg that he offered to pay his tuition to the Vienna Conservatory. Mahler spent time with Brahms and had competitive encounters with Schoenberg, etc.
Considering the antagonism between the Brahms and the Wagner camps, is this something Schoenberg would have expressed? Wagner and Bruckner considered themselves to be carrying on Beethoven's tradition (I assume the same for Brahms, but can't recall reading him declaring such). It would be hard to argue, however, that Schoenberg wasn't an heir in a real sense, though (probably because of his essays) associate him more closely with Brahms. Just curious for your thoughts.
Wagner, more than any other composer of his generation, undermined tonality as it was conceived and understood by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. Schoenberg's debt to Wagner is most explicit in the Verklaerte Nacht, but I think it's more important in that he conceived his innovations as a necessary and logical consequence of Wagner's chromaticism.
Brahms definitely wanted to give the impression that he was following in Beethoven's footsteps. Just to state two examples, the theme of the final movement of his first symphony was obviously modelled after Beethoven's Ode to Joy (hence the 'any ass can see that' remark), and his first piano sonata (in C) not only opens with a theme reminiscent of of Beethoven's Op 106 sonata in B-flat, but the counterstatement for the theme is in B-flat, just in case anyone missed the resemblance.
Brahms definitely wanted to give the impression that he was following in Beethoven's footsteps. Just to state two examples, the theme of the final movement of his first symphony was obviously modelled after Beethoven's Ode to Joy (hence the 'any ass can see that' remark), and his first piano sonata (in C) not only opens with a theme reminiscent of of Beethoven's Op 106 sonata in B-flat, but the counterstatement for the theme is in B-flat, just in case anyone missed the resemblance.
Oh, I don't doubt the influence. I was really only surprised about your assertion that Schoenberg believed that he carried on the traditions of both Brahms and Wagner, given the fractious climate around these two composers at the time. Not that he wasn't influenced by Wagner's music at all, but I've certainly considered him more in the Brahms camp.
What you said about the Brahms symphony reminded me of something Schoenberg wrote in "Brahms the Progressive", and so went to look it up and found another, more pertinent essay, "My Evolution" (written at 75).
In Schoenberg's essay "My Evolution", he writes that prior to Zemlinsky, he was a Brahmsian, but after he had a deep appreciation for Wagner's genius for writing music for stage action and goes on to detail how Verklärte Nacht was modeled on "Wagnerian 'model and sequence'...and on Brahm's technique of developing variation. He surely did acknowledge the influence as you suggest, which I suppose is tantamount to carrying on the tradition in some way, even if he didn't become primarily a composer for the stage.
Thanks for the post -- I had never thought to place Schoenberg somewhere in the Brahms/Wagner rift until your comment. That Schoenberg wrote the above about Wagner in 1949 rather than 1901 also let's Schoenberg affirm the influence with little risk to a new career.
What you said about the Brahms symphony reminded me of something Schoenberg wrote in "Brahms the Progressive", and so went to look it up and found another, more pertinent essay, "My Evolution" (written at 75).
In Schoenberg's essay "My Evolution", he writes that prior to Zemlinsky, he was a Brahmsian, but after he had a deep appreciation for Wagner's genius for writing music for stage action and goes on to detail how Verklärte Nacht was modeled on "Wagnerian 'model and sequence'...and on Brahm's technique of developing variation. He surely did acknowledge the influence as you suggest, which I suppose is tantamount to carrying on the tradition in some way, even if he didn't become primarily a composer for the stage.
Thanks for the post -- I had never thought to place Schoenberg somewhere in the Brahms/Wagner rift until your comment. That Schoenberg wrote the above about Wagner in 1949 rather than 1901 also let's Schoenberg affirm the influence with little risk to a new career.
There's this joke in the movie "Amadeus" where the emperor (Joseph II?) remarks that Mozart's music has "too many notes". He explains that the human ear can only hear so many notes. That might have a element of truth. Our perception is (obviously) limited, and beyond a certain point, complexity becomes overbearing.
But on the other hand, minimal music is a much more recent development, and it is certainly part of the "classical" tradition. There might be a bit of room left before we find the end.
But on the other hand, minimal music is a much more recent development, and it is certainly part of the "classical" tradition. There might be a bit of room left before we find the end.
The quote was real!
"He is a great master, ran the usual critical line, but he cannot restrain his overweening imagination, his chilly intellectualism, his too many notes."
I cannot recommend Swafford's biographies on Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven highly enough.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jan-swafford/moza...
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jan-swafford/beet...
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jan-swafford/joha...
"He is a great master, ran the usual critical line, but he cannot restrain his overweening imagination, his chilly intellectualism, his too many notes."
I cannot recommend Swafford's biographies on Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven highly enough.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jan-swafford/moza...
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jan-swafford/beet...
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jan-swafford/joha...
I sometimes think of the flood of notes in a bebop solo as being akin to the dots of color in a pointillist painting. As in, you can take them in as a continuous whole as well as discrete points.
There's no end.
There's no end.
I had that experience with some pieces in this work: https://mikiplayspiano.bandcamp.com/releases
A lot of it is sparse, and then there are moments that remind me of the black MIDI genre.
I’m sure I’m missing something in your comment here but Western classical music seems to me to have thrived in the years following the second Viennese school - so many interesting and innovative composers - Debussy, Messiaen, Varese, Lutoslawski, Boulez - to name a small handful.
Many of the composers today who would have continued in the so-called classical tradition instead turned their talents towards movies, and some very exceptional orchestral music is scored for films around the world, despite that those names are often not widely known.
Great post!
https://youtu.be/GKAVN5ZUdbw
Wozzeck is also a pretty brutal opera if you listen while reading the lyrics.