Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror | Hacker News Reader

Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror

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43 pointshoffmannesque21 comments

I spent several years studying and playing the piano works of Schoenberg. I loved it, so much so that I got the barcode from a CD of his piano concerto tattooed on myself (Emanual Ax was the pianist).

I remember thinking early on, how can anybody possibly memorize this? But the more I listened to it, the more the "melodies" stuck, and this was a break through for me. There is beauty in his music, and the more time spent with it, the more it really shines. Still to this day I can hum along to Op. 25 (the Suite for piano) -- something I never thought possible upon first listening.

I believe this is what distinguishes Schoenberg from later "atonal" composers.

As a pianist, my recommendations for approachable Schoenberg are the Piano Concerto (the first movement is a waltz!), Op 19, and Op 25, the two latter works being digestible in small pieces. Op. 33 is magical, and Op 11 is just plain difficult.

Schoenberg's music is admittedly hard to get into. But it is well worth spending some time with it because there is nothing quite like it.

For a bit of context, Schoenberg's atonal style was the culmination of centuries of development of Western harmony. From the Baroque/Classical era onward, the direction of Western music was towards greater chromaticism extending harmonies further and further away from the simple major and minor chords. Some composers came very close to complete atonality, particularly Scriabin and Stravinsky, but Schoenberg was the first to dive into completely atonal music.

While it may sound like someone randomly plonking on the keyboard, he had to work quite hard to get the atonal sound he wanted since harmonies are so ingrained in the way we hear music (especially for composers!). He developed the "twelve-tone system" in which each note had to be played exactly once in a theme so as to guarantee that no tonality was accidentally introduced by stressing particular notes.

The result is a style that is very cerebral, but enjoyable once you let go of the idea that music should contain traditional harmonies. Personally, I think the music world got a little obsessed about the idea and continued to develop it for maybe four decades longer than it should have. (His twelve tone technique was later extended to "serialism" which generalized the process to rhythms, dynamics, and instruments, and wasn't really abandoned by "serious" composers until maybe the 1980s.)

Incidentally, Schoenberg may have scared himself to death. He was intensely superstitious, particularly of the number 13. When he was 76 he was contacted by an astrologer who told him that this was a dangerous year since the digits of his age added up to 13. Later in the year, on Friday, July 13th, he spent the day extraordinarily anxious and died shortly before midnight.

> Some composers came very close to complete atonality, particularly Scriabin and Stravinsky, but Schoenberg was the first to dive into completely atonal music.

Atonality can already be found in some late piano pieces of Liszt, e.g. "Nuages gris", which is largely based on augmented triads (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYKl41e_hoU).

Before that, the music of Wagner already shook the foundations of Western tonality with its excessive chromatisism where any notion of a tonal center is often lost. Schönberg just continued where others have left and went to the extreme. It is also worth pointing out that he first composed in the so called "free atonal" style and only then, after a long hiatus, he developed his twelve-tone-system. By the way, there have been other people who developed similar systems around the same time, notably Josef Matthias Hauer.

Fun fact: Stranvinsky turned towards twelve-tone-technique in the fifties.

You can find a tone row in Bach even. Whether or not he consciously aimed to construct one is a debate that has no end, but it's interesting to challenge the conception that old = more traditional/harmonic, when in fact music history is much more wobbly than that.

The original chromatic series is in Lasso in the very late 16th century - Carmina Chromatico from Prophetiae Sybillarum.

It's decorated with smooth triads and moments that sound like cadences, but the progression as a whole is completely atonal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al41WvDW-OA

I’ve found Charles Rosen’s book _Arnold Schoenberg_ to be an excellent introduction to the composer. It’s a short, well-written book. Not so much a biography, as an exploration of the music and the various phases of the Schoenberg’s musical language; from the early tonal works, through free atonality, and finally serialism. And the most valuable part for me was the way in which it contextualized serialism in light of everything that had come before in western music, and some of what was to come after, and the way it presents it as a kind of an inevitability for Schoenberg. It’s not heavy on theory and people with only a cursory knowledge of music could get something out of it.

Thanks for the insightful comment! I agree about the difficulty in grasping his musical concepts. It certainly took me time.

For anyone interested - his tone poem “Verklarte Nacht” is a great work to understand the culmination of European musical ideas you spoke of. It has some of the chromaticism and an eye to Schoenberg’s future work while still having the immediate payoff of more traditional Western Music. It’s a striking and beautiful piece.

As a music student, I was always amazed at the irony of Schoenberg's thesis about the "Liberation of the Dissonance", when 12 tone Equal Temperament is an arbitrary intonation system that limits the actual potential for freedom when creating harmony.

Ben Johnston, an American composer who studied with Harry Partch, used extended Just Intonation, which is a system of unlimited harmonic capabilities, for several serialist pieces [1][2]. I feel like he was able to achieve striking dissonance unlike anything capable within the confines of Equal Temperament.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ujeXlFP7p0

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5HIPRuYdjA&list=OLAK5uy_mn3...

Schoenberg gave the scale some decent discussion in his Harmonielehre in the section on the major mode and diatonic chords. Overall, he was liberal and encouraging about the directions that music could go, and he led by example in producing his own compositions in his own way.

"And above all; this scale is not the last word, the ultimate goal of music, but rather a provisional stopping place. ... Whether there will then be quarter tones, eighth, third, or (as Busoni thinks) sixth tones, or whether we will move directly to a 53-tone scale that Dr. Robert Neumann has calculated, we cannot foretell. Perhaps this new division of the octave will even be untempered and will not have much left over in common with our scale. ... Probably, whenever the ear and imagination have matured enough for such music, the scale and the instruments will all at once be available."

I'd say that last prediction was very prescient!

Great quote, thanks for sharing! Maybe I have misplaced my frustration on Schoenberg, when he doesn't deserve it. The hordes of academic composers who came after him and pumped out soulless 12-tone serialist pieces probably do deserve the scorn, though. :)

I would recommend to anyone who has some basic musical education (like can play tunes or improvise a little on the piano/guitar) to try playing with tone rows. It's a brain expander on its own -- the discipline of tone rows makes evident the obscure role that tonality or even common chord progressions play even in something by e.g. Eric Dolphy or Sonic Youth (different brands of "experimental music")

I'd like to speak in support of Schoenberg's (only) piano concerto as a genuinely enjoyable piece of music to listen to.

Although strictly atonal using a tone-row method, it uses quite traditional phrasings that are fairly easy to latch on to mentally, resulting in something quite sympathetic, almost hummable, only one step ahead of your mind, and it's a light step. Nothing portentous or self-regarding about it.

There's an excellent recording of it played by Mitsuko Uchida, with Boulez conducting the Cleveland orchestra.

This music will destroy you. He barely survived it himself.

Very skilled though... Hit it a time or two on YouTube, then move on. Don't linger!

That sounds like a challenge. Are there any particular pieces you would recommend I don't spend too long on?

If you can play the piano, some of the six little pieces op 19 are quite easy.

The early works alone were enough to gain him a loyal and devoted gang of students.

Start at opus 1, no encore. Terrible philosophy--like cyanide in a candy shell.

For those who don't know who Schoenberg is: he's a composer of "abstract" music. Think of a musical equivalent to the abstract art. https://youtu.be/2V-qmC6xUW8

It is worth noting that Wassily Kandinsky reached out to Schönberg because he saw parallels in Schönberg's music to his own abstract art. But I think this parallel only exists in terms of breaking with the conventions and traditions of the medium, i.e. mimesis in visual arts and tonality in (Western) music. One could argue that music is always "abstract" in the sense that there is no real model in nature which it can abstract from. After all, music is always artificial.

music is always "abstract"

To me, the difference between the atonal or serial music and traditional classical music is in the amount of structure or order (that I can recognize and process). Bach's or Chopin's music has a lot more of it than Schönberg's. Also, classical music feels "natural", and is pleasant to listen to (for the most part), while atonal music feels "artificial" or "weird", and for the most part is not pleasant.

In the "abstract art" sense, isn't most music "abstract"? Does a Brahms symphony (or Knopfler solo) attempt to reference natural sounds?

"Abstract music" is actually an existing term [1], and it simply means non-program music, which is far older than Schoenberg.

That recording you link to is Webern, which sounds to me completely different than Schoenberg. How about linking to one of the compositions mentioned in the article, like [2] or [3]?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_music

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-pVz2LTakM

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2_bH-cpTVw

Re the link: my bad! I searched for "serial music Schoenberg" and grabbed the first Google result, without even looking at the title. I did listen to it before posting though, and found it representative of atonal music. It's not that far from Schoenberg, e.g. compare with https://youtu.be/voyLno0HdoA (I do like that "echo" effect in the Webern piece though!)

Re "abstract music" - how would you call a musical equivalent of abstract art? I think this term conveys the meaning (at least for regular people).

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