Slouching Toward Lachenmann: Transfiguring the Night

The only person who can help poor Schoenberg now is a psychiatrist.

-Richard Strauss

"You're a slouch not to like it," he said to me one day.  "Studying ordered relationships is ultimately the best there is.  Order is everything."
-Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

When I was in high school, the curriculum included a mandatory music appreciation class.  In addition to being mandatory, the class marshaled all the worst features of classroom instruction to make its case:  a huge amphitheater of a classroom, an otherworldly teacher who wasn’t able to communicate his love of music to the class, and an approach of pure lecture with the odd bit of listening thrown in.

How it came about I don’t recall, but perhaps in desperation, the teacher decided on a student lecture, and the student he chose for this assignment was me.  My topic was the twelve-tone system, about which I knew not a whit.  I suppose he intended this as a reward to one of his few attentive students.  I accepted it as such, though I knew it wasn’t bound to increase my high school popularity quotient very much.

I took my assignment seriously.  I found out the names of the twelve-tone big three—Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—and got LP records containing music composed by each.  I read up, as best I could in those pre-internet days, on what “twelve-tone” meant.  The basic rule seemed to be that you had to use all twelve notes in the chromatic scale before you repeated any one of them.

I don’t recall what pieces I listened to, but I do remember that, despite repeated attempts, I couldn’t make sense of them.  I liked the idea of having a system for writing music, though.  Sort of like the rules for a sonnet, I thought, a framework to guide you on your way.  I decided, since I didn’t understand the stuff I was hearing, maybe I’d just write one that made sense to me.  (Ah, the hubris of youth . . .)

While the class dozed and doodled, I did my best to explain what I’d learned, including some examples from LPs.  I saved the piece I’d written until the end.  To my surprise, some of my classmates awakened long enough to proclaim it genius.  My piece, they said, was so much better than those other ones.

The piece I wrote is lost to time, but I guarantee you that genius it was not.  What I’d done, as I recall, was to package those twelve tones into something like an ordinary melody.  Not entirely hummable, but more like music familiar to us all.

On that victory I rested, and that ended my travels into Twelve-Tone Land until today.  There isn’t any way, you see, to slouch toward Lachenmann, without at least trying to listen to what came before.

Arnold Schoenberg invented the twelve-tone system.  He’d been composing without any kind of system in a sort of musical free verse.  When that became too exhausting, he went in search of “a more orderly way of working,” according to Alex Ross.  Ross describes the method Schoenberg found like this:

A particular arrangement of twelve notes is called a series or row.  The idea is not to consider the row a theme in itself but to employ it as a kind of fund of notes, or, more precisely, of relationships among notes, or intervals. . . . The composer can run the row in retrograde (go backward from the last note).  Or he can use an inversion (turn it upside down).

Ross reports that, in all, there are 479,011,600 permutations available, “the factorial of twelve.”

And this isn’t exhausting?  Just thinking about all those permutations puts my mind in a twist.  Is this music or mathematics we’re talking about?  I mean, I know there’s a kinship, but, as composer Ben Johnston said (to my great relief), “what is mathematically intelligible is not necessarily musically intelligible.”

Still, I wanted at least to hear what all the fuss was about.  After all, Schoenberg’s music inspired at least one Wassily Kandinsky painting.  He taught a lot of composers, too, including John Cage.  And twelve-tone music and its progeny, the Finnegans Wake of music John Metcalf spoke about, is the music many Minimalists reacted to and felt compelled to clear away.

Alex Ross comments, “The early works of Schoenberg always come as a pleasant shock to listeners expecting a grueling atonal exercise.”  My own experience bears that out:  Transfigured Night (Verklärte Nacht) is a piece I actually enjoy.  Ross is on target also when he writes that “Schoenberg’s early atonal music is not all sound and fury,” pointing to Farben, one of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, as an example to prove his point.  But as Schoenberg and his students, Berg and Webern, move further into atonality and twelve-tone music, they still leave me behind.

Last year, we ventured up to Bard to hear the final program in its summer concert series, devoted to Alban Berg.  One of the pieces on offer was the Suite from Berg’s twelve-tone opera, Lulu, mounted at the Met last season to much acclaim.  I found the music hard listening, and I marveled that the singer found her way through the thicket of disconnected notes.  But every now and then I heard something weirdly beautiful, like the haunting music of a vibraphone sounding on its own.

I don’t know whether Schoenberg, Berg, or Webern will ever make my top ten list.  On the other hand, I’ve signed up to hear Berg’s Wozzeck at the Met.  I’ve no illusions I’ll find it easy going, but I’m curious.  And it does have the virtue of being short . . .

Postcript:  The title of this post is taken from Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, sometimes translated into English as Transfigured Night.  I had originally entitled the post "Listening to the Unlistenable," but after listening to total serialism, the twelve-tone system seemed warm and cuddly by comparison (well, almost).

Post-postscript:  To learn why Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus is quoted in this post, click here and scroll down.  (Or, better yet, read the whole of Alex Ross's fascinating article about "Imaginary Concerts.")

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Mitsuko Uchida talks about Schoenberg's Piano Concerto:  "You must be stubborn to want to learn it."



The painting at the head of the article is Kandinsky’s Impression 3 (Concert), which was inspired by Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2.  The painting of Schoenberg is by Richard Gerstl.  The painting of Webern is by Max Oppenheimer, and the painting of Berg is by Schoenberg.

The initial quotation is from Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma, By Michael Kennedy, p. 173.  The Ross quotations are from The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, pp. 212-213, 50, and 56.  The Ben Johnston quotation is from Talking Music, by William Duckworth, at p. 153.

Listening List

Schoenberg 
Verklärte Nacht (1899)
String Quartet No. 2, 4th Movement (I feel the air of other planets) (1908)
Farben, from Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909)
Friede Auf Erden (Peace on Earth) (1911)(thanks to Mark Kerstetter at The Bricoleur for alerting me to this piece)
Three Piano Pieces, op. 11 (1909)
Piano Concerto (1942), here and here.
 
Berg
Wozzeck (1914-1922), three excerpts here, here, and here.
Lulu Suite (1913-1929)
Violin Concerto (1935) 

Webern
Langsamer Satz (1905)
Five Pieces for Orchestra (1913) 
Variations for Piano (1936)