The sounds of late modernity, including all too much music, commonly interpellate us less as subjects than as the subjected, and the subjection that's proffered is not uncommonly sadomasochistic.
- Richard Leppert, Music "Pushed to the Edge of Existence" (Adorno, Listening, and the Question of Hope) 2003
The Twelve-Tone System provides the 'out-of-this-world' progressions so necessary to under-write the fantastic and incredible situations which present-day cartoons contain.
- Scott Bradley, composer for Tom & Jerry and Droopy Dog cartoons
When I was studying School Cert music in Jean France’s class at Southland Boys High the 12-tone serial system didn’t come into it; the modern work we were expected to know for School Cert was Penderecki’s ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’, composed along sonorist lines (what new sounds can the instruments of the traditional orchestra be set free to make, and how do we then order them?), which was more intuitive and easier for a child to grasp than the serial systems, as well as less repugnant to the apparatchiks running Poland under Soviet control. The Threnody may be familiar to you from the revival of Twin Peaks, where it soundtracks the nuclear threat; here’s another fine example of Polish sonorism, the 1961 nocturne ‘Pensieri Notturni’ by Grażyna Bacewicz.1
I should have kept studying to 6th form level before going to university, but I didn’t, because the school and I both wanted me gone. Consequently, when I did finally sit in a university lecture theatre a few years later and hear some short orchestral bagatelle by Anton Webern, I got a bit of a shock.
Not so much that it sounded chaotic, I was used to free jazz, and had been exposed to more of Penderecki and Xenakis in the interim, but that there was a system to it which I was expected to understand while, in reality, I was struggling to understand the basics of the diatonic system, further tuition in which I was already woefully unprepared for. What took me aback as much as anything was the assumption that I would want to understand serialism – why? I had a use for the diatonic nous, I even had a use for whole tones and a lot of other bric-a-brac from that lumber yard, but I couldn’t even taste the sado-masochistic joy of serialist subjection just yet.
Later, much later, on Brian Crump’s Sonic Tonic show on RNZ National, I heard this joke advert, originally made by Robert Conrad of WCLV in 1977 from a script by conductor Kenneth Jean (the visuals here were added more recently by someone at the Schoenberg Centre, Vienna).
This was an intriguing re-introduction; shorty after, a friend lent me Glenn Gould’s writings, which got me listening to Richard Strauss and Sergei Prokofiev and started my classical (or, more exactly, late romantic/early modernist) music obsession. Gould had a lot to say about Schoenberg, though the examples he chose failed to convince me, but was able to interpret Webern’s work in a way that made it kind of loveable.
From here I read Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise, which is a good discussion of the times and the people of musical modernism and the perplexing political context they struggled within; if you find any idea in this article intriguing you should read The Rest is Noise.
Twelve tone serialism was a response to the seemingly absolute freedom the late-romantic composers had wrested from the diatonic (major-minor) system of Enlightenment classical music. A series of daring personalities added and subtracted notes from the scales used previously and delayed or rejected the resolutions that the ear, and the rules, once demanded. Wagner’s Tristan and Isolte was the famous case where this extension of the system (known as chromaticism) became overt; it seemed offensive to many, but quickly became accepted as adding to music’s ability to express emotion and mood, which don’t always resolve neatly. Here’s Anton Webern again to show how it’s done in his tone poem for large orchestra Sommerwind, composed in 1904, the year he became Arnold Schoenberg’s pupil.
Richard Strauss, in many ways Wagner’s heir, took it further in his operas Salome and Elektra, no longer choosing notes from the scales but choosing them instead from inner musical logic; because Strauss had a musical sense as finely developed as that of any man who ever lived the results don’t sound like wrong notes or discords, in fact these “atonal’ pieces have an old-fashioned, art nouveau feel today, but his disregard for propriety (shown as much in the choice of libretto for Salome, Oscar Wilde’s daring verse play, as its music, a tendency to shock we’ll see in other modernist works) left other, less abundantly naturally gifted, composers wondering what rules they could follow to stay competitive.
Arnold Schoenberg in particular was possessed of the instincts of a great composer, including a Beethoven-like belief in his need to change the world. His early work Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night, 1899) was a highly chromatic tone poem which was condemned by some authorities for containing a “non-existent” chord (the inverted ninth) and by others for being an inspired response to a poem, by Richard Dehmel (also a favourite of Strauss and Schoenberg’s brother-in-law and teacher Zemlinsky), that’s accepting of, and possibly glorifying, pre-marital sex on the female side.
With this, and the magnificently over-orchestrated oratorio Gurre-Lieder (1900-1903), Schoenberg followed in the footsteps of Strauss and Mahler with great skill, progressing to a succession of free atonal compositions between 1908-1923 – the best known of these is his setting of Albert Giraud’s poems Pierrot Lunaire, Op 21 - but it bothered him that free atonality is only a negative system, and he felt called on to create a positive one. A system for making music from all 12 tones (all the black and white keys) without favouring any one of them (as “tonal” music does, and asystemic atonal music tends to) was first published by Josef Matthias Hauer in 1919, but it was Schoenberg who would put music composed according to his similar system on the world stage, in 1923. Hauer’s own motivation was that of someone who claimed he "detested all art that expressed ideas, programmes or feelings" and believed that the highest form of music was ‘purely spiritual, supersensual music composed according to impersonal rules."
One is tempted to ask, “Why are you like this?” The removal of ideas, programmes and feelings from music is what removes us as its subjects, and subjects us to it instead. It’s no coincidence that the works of serialism that I’ve listened to most frequently and look forward to hearing again are those that most overtly seek to express ideas, programmes, and feelings. Hauer’s Concerto above is quite listenable at first, because it rhythmically resembles a tonal classical work, and its solos have a lyrical flow - it’s not that different from one of Martinu’s violin concertos, which were written in a neobaroque idiom with excursions into bitonality (which can imitate serial harmony), except that you can follow Martinu’s tune, which is often a string of little joyous quips quite unlike Hauer’s perpetual overcast. The photo below is of Martinů with Vítězslava Kaprálová; he composed this chamber concerto in exile in the USA in the year following her death in Montpelier during the Fall of France.2
If Schoenberg had the instincts of a great composer, his student Alban Berg had the instincts of a good one. The serial method sometimes throws up passages that resemble tonal music; Schoenberg would cheat to edit these out, Berg was more likely to let them shine, and to incorporate diatonic elements into his compositions; to reconcile the new method with the lushness of late-romantic chromaticism. The first LP of Schoenberg and Berg pieces I bought at Real Groovy wasn’t like this, it’s still a challenge rather than a pleasure, but the CD of the Lulu Suite (this version, played by the Cincinnati Orchestra with Kathleen Battle) I bought in Invercargill hospice shop was different. Sitting outside Queen’s Park while Hayley went off to take photos I got high and slipped it into the car stereo, and this mild disorientation, the same I’d want to listen to bebop jazz properly, eased me into Berg’s soundworld.3
If the opening of the Lulu suite, a series of edits from Berg’s great opera (1929-1935), spins a gossamer spell, its denser passages are like clotted cobwebs; yet it’s not hard to imagine the programme of Wedekind’s play, the story Pabst made into one of the greatest of silent films, Pandora’s Box, with his era-defining star Louise Brooks.
Like Salome or Verklärte Nacht, Lulu is an expression of the early 20th century sexual revolution, and takes its cue from Freud and Ibsen in its portrayal of transgressive femininity; Lulu is a femme fatale who devours men and women alike as she climbs through German society in the way which has been constructed by her early exploitation (to quote Will Hermes’ recent Vulture article on Lou Reed’s last days, “Lulu is both victim and monster, the product of a misogynist, homophobic culture, and the embodiment of its worst fears”), only to die in London, melodramatically and willingly, at the hands of Jack The Ripper. All through the great modernist operas of the 20th Century, male composers are obsessed with exploring feminine psychology or the female condition, whether with Lulu’s expressionistically post-Freudian overtones, esoterically as in Prokofiev’s gothic Fiery Angel, or naturalistically as in Janacek’s adaptations of Gabriela Preissová’s stories of peasant life – it’s only Béla Bartók who really presents the case for the masculine, in Bluebeard’s Castle (here filmed by Michaël Powell, of The Red Shoes fame) and the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, which will make a great film for some Asian director one day.
Berg’s other serial success in my life is the violin concerto he wrote “to the memory of an angel”, for the daughter of his friends, the architect Gropius and his wife the former Alma Mahler, his attempt to reconcile the serial system with the diatonic.
Alma is an interesting character in her own right; she used to be the poster-child for the suppression of female talent in classical music, but scholarship has exposed the unreliability of a great many of her statements regarding her musical relationship with her husband (for example, suppressing or altering hundreds of his letters to her when their correspondence was published, and destroying all but one of her own), and given us plenty of less compromised examples of women composers and their complex creative realities during the same period.
After Mahler’s death Alma married Walter Gropius; when their 18 year old daughter Manon died of polio in 1935, Alban Berg was commissioned to write a violin work in her memory by Louis Krasner.4
Berg would himself die, also of the sort of disease easily prevented today, before the violin concerto was performed, by Krauser, in Barcelona, in 1938, not long after Prokofiev’s 2nd violin concerto saw its first performance in Madrid; Spain would be in flames by the end of the year, and the conflagration would eventually consume Germany and Austria.
Anton Webern, who wasn’t Jewish and who tended to support Hitler’s territorial ambitions, survived the war in Vienna, only to be accidentally shot by a US soldier during a raid on black marketeers when he went outside for a cigarette. His death was a double tragedy, because the soldier who shot him, cook PFC Raymond Norwood Bell of North Carolina, had enough education to know what he’d done, and, overcome by remorse, died of alcoholism in 1955. The cult of Webern after the war was amplified by the inaccessibility of his music and the anti-American implications of his death, but his work still defines a certain austere perfection, so succinct that his complete works can fit on one CD.
So it seems that the serial works I will listen to more than once, which are also the most popular, do have a subject, with a tragic history that’s very human and easy to empathize with - Lulu, Manon, Anton.
Theodore Adorno had studied music under Berg, but his true interest was aesthetics. In Germany he had founded the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research with Horkheimer (it’s sobering to realize that this pair’s esoteric and visionary take on cultural Marxism is the exact “Frankfurt School” that people were fooled into raving against a decade ago) but it was in America that his hallucinated Marxist prose found its proper subject, when Adorno found himself exiled in Los Angeles close to Hollywood itself. His talent for finding ‘the roots of fascism” in anything he didn’t like, e.g. big band music, was put there to good use; here’s a sample of his thoughts on popular music, where he ends up sounding like Mark Fisher.5
When exiled writer Thomas Mann decided to tell the story of how German intellectual life deteriorated into subjectivity in the slide to Naziism, he decided to use a composer as his protagonist – Mann had always been keen on music and worked it into his stories – and to use serialism as an example, perhaps, of an inhuman obsession. Mann enlisted Adorno, a man his wife and daughter hated, to supply some musicological authenticity to the descriptions of serialism in Doktor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, Told by a Friend (1941-1947), although he later tried to minimize Adorno’s involvement. I have a recording of Lulu with Adorno’s sleeve notes and they’re a bag of wind I wouldn’t want to quote a line of, sycophantic and uninformative, telling rather than showing; but he did a better job for Mann. Adrian Leverkühn’s magnum opus, the oratorio Apocalypsis cum Figuris (Apocalypse with Figures) , conceived because he has infected himself with syphilis, seems closer to The Fiery Angel than to Lulu in its theme. The book’s narrator describes the work as “filled with longing without hope, with hellish laughter transposed and transfigured even into the searing tones of spheres and angels”.
Schoenberg was offended that Mann had attributed his creation to his fictional composer, and a syphilitically insane one at that, and later editions of the novel included an Author's Note at the end acknowledging that the technique was Schoenberg's invention, and that passages of the book dealing with musical theory are indebted in many details to Schoenberg's Harmonielehre. Schoenberg and Hauer, who could both claim the invention of the system, had no beef with each other.
And what of Erwin Stein, seen in Berg’s photograph at the top of this page? He was a conductor, writer and composer, best known today for this charming rearrangement of Mahler’s 4th Symphony for a 15-piece chamber orchestra. As Schoenberg’s assistant, he wrote the first article on 12-tone technique, in 1924. A refugee in London during the Hitler years, he had a successful career in music publishing; his daughter, pianist Marion Stein, was married to the 7th Earl of Harewood and to Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the British Liberal Party.
Anyway, as promised, here’s an example of Tom Bradley’s 12-tone serial scoring for Tom And Jerry, where he’s used the system to create some of the melodies and effects.
Algorithmic doppelganger - ‘Junior Dad’, from the album Lulu by Lou Reed and Metallica
Bacewicz began as a neoclassical composer, studying in Paris under Nadia Boulanger before WW2. During the war she lived in Poland and performed for the resistance. Wikipedia says that the Poles invented sonorism to “break free from serialism” but I question whether Poland ever really had a serial period; it would have been suspect before and during the war as a German invention and was later anathema to the Soviets. I suspect that this was a cover story that allowed the Poles to experiment with avant garde music that would have been banned in the USSR, under the pretext that they were attacking western avant garde ideas. Similarly, Penderecki’s famous piece was originally untitled and had no program, but the anti-American title of ‘Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima’ made it hard for the Communist Party to object to.
‘History is the content of artworks. To analyze artworks means no less than to become conscious of the history immanently sedimented in them.’
- Theodore Adorno, AestheticTheory
Note that the soprano’s contribution to the Lulu Suite consists of a song which the US conductor Robert Craft cut from his recording, on the grounds that it made no sense, many of its words not even belonging to Lulu’s character.
In the 20th Century it was still usual for great violinists, who could earn good performing fees, to commission original works, usually concertos, from the great composers. Bohuslav Martinů, a violinist and a skilled writer for violin, probably holds the record for such commissions. The situation was a little different for piano concertos as most of the great composers were popular performing pianists and wrote their concertos to increase their own earnings. Even Richard Strauss, a popular conductor and not well-known as a pianistic composer, did this.
Thanks to Prof Matthew Bannister of Wintec for bringing this article to my attention.