Inaudible Pleasures

OONLY A PSYCHIATRIST can help poor Schoenberg now...He would do better to shovel snow instead of scribbling on music paper." So wrote Richard Strauss in a letter to Alma Mahler, voicing an opinion that is shared by most listeners today.

For Arnold Schoenberg, public notoriety began back in the 1890's when a performance of some of his songs was halted by boos and whistles from a shocked Viennese audience. From then until his death almost twenty-five years ago, as Schoenberg once put it, "The scandal has never ceased." But though the general animosity continues, Schoenberg is recognized by his fellow musicians as the rightful heir to the Beethovan-Brahms tradition and the most influential composer of this century.

Schoenberg began composing in an atmosphere of fin-de-siecle decadence with the ponderously rich chromatic harmonies of the post-Wagnerian idiom. He matured as a composer at a time when tonality, the structure which had supported music for over 300 years, was finally sinking under the bloated burden of its own chromaticism into an anarchic morass. The ferment which resulted from the destruction of the old order gave rise to Schoenberg's great expressionist compositions like the sextet Verklarte Nacht, which seems to breathe in that decaying, sickeningly rich atmosphere, and Pierrot Lunaire, which for many is the ultimate expression of diseased, depraved emotions. Schoenberg drew creative sustenance from the advancing disorder of musical forms and he hastened its progress, until by 1916, he felt that he could proceed no farther.

With the breakdown of tonality, the necessity for dissonances to resolve to consonances similarly disappeared. Large sections of music could no longer be draped on conventional cadential patterns or sequences. The composer was left with no rules and no guidelines-nothing but the twelve tones and the desperate need to organize them coherently. On the brink of what he saw as musical chaos, Schoenberg stopped composing until he could create a new system for organizing his materials and justifying his decisions, a new framework of music.

In 1923, after ten years without publishing a single work, Schoenberg produced his first compositions in the twelve-tone idiom. An intellectual creation of the highest order, this system is a logical outgrowth of 19th century chromaticism and turn-of-the-century atonality, which both moved toward giving an equal significance to each of the twelve tones. It is a method which has dominated the musical life of this century, eventually exercising a hold even on Igor Stravinsky, the man who had once seemed the great opponent of this serial technique.

And it is this system, so seemingly cerebral and unspontaneous, that has generated the greater part of the anti-Schoenberg feeling that is still so prevalent. Many denounce it as unnatural, arguing that the overtones of a note-the most important of which are the octave, the fifth and the third-necessitate a music based on these intervals. Anything else, they argue, will be incoherent and abrasive.

Other critics attack Schoenberg for negating the distinction between dissonance and consonance. They contend that music, like so many things, must operate through the alternation of tension and release. Serial music, they maintain, cannot supply this rhythm because when equal weight is given to all pitches, none can sound more tense or relaxed than others.

IN HIS NEW book, Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Rosen skillfully refutes these arguments. First, he places atonality and serialism in the context of the anti-naturalist tendencies which pervaded all the arts during the early part of the century. In the visual arts, the cubists and the Expressionists took bold steps toward the liberation of painting from the constraints of perspective and the desire to reproduce nature on canvas. In literature there was a similar movement away from naturalistic fiction to more introspective and fragmented modes. Composers were also motivated by this desire to free their art from natural as well as conventional constraints. Atonality and serialism, Rosen contends, draw some of their theoretical strength from a negation of the implications of the natural overtone series. Both styles seek to extend the composers' expressive freedom, although this is more true of atonality than of serialism.

And, in what is the most important achievement of this book, Rosen reveals the manner in which non-tonal music can supply both tension and the release of tension that many have criticized Schoenberg for destroying. "The saturation of musical space is Schoenberg's substitute for the tonic chord of the traditional musical language. The absolute consonance is a state of chromatic plenitude." As Rosen points out, Ewartung, one of Schoenberg's early works, ends with all the instruments of the orchestra playing accelerating chromatic scales up and down until a "state of chromatic plenitude" has been created. This state, according to Rosen, is perfect consonance and gives the piece a sense of finality.

This drive to fill the musical space also lies behind the 12-tone method. When eleven of the twelve tones have been heard, Rosen argues, the one missing note creates a tension much like a dissonance. When that note is supplied, the listener experiences a sense of arrival. Unfortunately, this elegant theoretical construction goes largely unrecognized in performance-only the most extraordinary listener will know which notes have been sounded and which remain unheard. However, like the 12-tone system itself, Rosen's theory reveals intentions which, even if inaudible, suffuse the composition like a magical incantation, giving intellectual if not auditory pleasure.

DESPITE THE inclusion of these insights, however, this book appears not to have been a major effort for Rosen. Though brief, it is fragmented; two of its four chapters are merely reprinted from magazine articles. Much of the material is a rewording of standard observations about Schoenberg, and the book rarely attains the level of brilliant originality that characterized so much of Rosen's The Classical Style.

Yet what is mediocre for Rosen is still something of a marvel amid the scholarly turgidity and banal superlatives of most music critics. His prose is clear and elegant and his thoughts sharply focused. And through his intellectual gymnastics, he is able to convince his readers that, far from the cerebral monster of popular mythology, Arnold Schoenberg was a composer of uncompromising integrity who responded sincerely and successfully to the musical demands of his time. Perhaps Charles Rosen will bring him a small step closer to the general appreciation he merits.