Arnold Schoenberg: 02–05.01.2017; 09–13.09.2024

[french frank]

IMV it would be impossible fairly to present that field of composers in any shallow way - a month's worth of programmes interlaced among the schdule would probably serve the purpose.

Someone has to decide what to include and what not to: wherever you place the boundary, connected works will be outside it. I thought you were just stating a preference - what would have enriched the programming for you - and presenting it as a criticism?

[Richard Barrett]

I don't know anyone who has written using the variety of methods it offers who has this "opinion"

I'm sure you do. You hear very many composers of the second half of the twentieth century who would echo words like these (from Rautavaara): "This music wrenched itself free (and liberated me) from the serial straitjacket and quasi-scientific thinking..." and similar.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I'm sure you do. You hear very many composers of the second half of the twentieth century who would echo words like these (from Rautavaara): "This music wrenched itself free (and liberated me) from the serial straitjacket and quasi-scientific thinking..." and similar.

Yes, indeed

I was tautologically meaning that I didn't know of any composer who produced a corpus of work using the variety of methods serialism offers has found it "restrictive".

[Richard Barrett]

Yes, indeed

I was tautologically meaning that I didn't know of any composer who produced a corpus of work using the variety of methods serialism offers has found it "restrictive".

The mistake is maybe to think that any "method" as such involves rules and regulations, which would naturally serve to constrict the "free play of the imagination", whereas in fact it enhances that free play, by providing so to speak a vehicle in which new musical spaces might be explored. This idea is maybe more explicit in the generations after Schoenberg than in his own work but it seems clear that his compositional output increased in scope and fluency as a result of developing those techniques. And many composers who decry serial methods as arid - Steve Reich springs to mind - would not have come to write the music they're known for without having passed through that experience, even if they might not have appreciated its significance (or if their sense of self-definition requires being seen to have "rebelled" against it).

[Serial_Apologist]

Well, he was much better when working with Music he didn't revere as much as he did Bach - the "Monn" 'cello Concerto and (especially) the Handel S4tet Concerto - the irony and mischief so lacking from the Bach transcriptions is here in spades. And the Strauss arrangements, too - retaining the graceful lyricism, but with the acidity of the chamber ensemble to offset the sugar (and closer to both Johanns' own instrumental forces when they began their careers).

Quite!

I prefer to listen to the Brahms Pno 4tet orchestration than to the Bachs, but don't enjoy the experience nearly as much as those from the Monn and Handel arrangements.

Again I agree - I can't help wondering if the "heaviness" in the orchestration in Schoenberg's arrangement of the Brahms amounted to tongue-in-cheek, a commentary on Brahms's orchestral manner of scoring (which he would nevertheless have loved, I am guessing) as compared to Mahler's clarity, considering the comparative lightness of touch in the other arrangements. I am actually tempted to hear an ironic Shostakovitchian touch in the xylophone's inclusion in the extrovert "Hungarian" passages in the last movement. As with his own works, orchestration always seems directed to highlighting structure so as to held the listener.

I don't know the Schubert, Mahler, Reger, Busoni arrangements that he made for his Society for Private Musical Performance - but altogether, his arrangement add up to more than three hours of performance time - and I think they shed light on Arnie, if not on the works themselves (which is fine by me) and a bit more than a "tiny ... part of his output"?

Am I correct in thinking Schoenberg was one of those originally aproached for the "completion" of Mahler 9, but that he turned it down due to preoccupations elsewhere? It has sometimes been opined that Schoengerg would have made a mockery (perhaps too strong a word) of the Mahler, wrongly, imv, citing the Monn and Handel arrangements (which were in fact radical reconstructions couched in his own musical vocabulary circa 1906) as examples of the composer making these works into his own. Perhaps evidence corroborating my view on this is provided in A.S.'s chamber orchestration of "Das Lied Von Der Erde"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDsOOYVTEcw

As for Reger's "Romantic Suite", Schoenberg's gorgeously sensuous orchestration of the opening whole-tone scale harmonised passage almost lends the music an Impressionist, almost Debussyan character, similar to the start and conclusion of the first of the Berg "Sieben Frühe Lieder" - again, in this I sense a bit of tongue-in-cheek:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQiB3kn4CM4

Enjoy?!

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[Richard Barrett]

I can't help wondering if the "heaviness" in the orchestration in Schoenberg's arrangement of the Brahms amounted to tongue-in-cheek, a commentary on Brahms's orchestral manner of scoring

I'm not so sure about the tongue-in-cheekness there... Schoenberg admired Brahms a bit too much if you ask me, and when he was in the mood he also had a pedantry all of his own that he could add to the Brahmsian one he'd imbibed as an influence.

[ahinton]

Am I correct in thinking Schoenberg was one of those originally aproached for the "completion" of Mahler 9, but that he turned it down due to preoccupations elsewhere? It has sometimes been opined that Schoengerg would have made a mockery (perhaps too strong a word) of the Mahler, wrongly, imv, citing the Monn and Handel arrangements (which were in fact radical reconstructions couched in his own musical vocabulary circa 1906) as examples of the composer making these works into his own.

I think that you mean Mahler 10 but yes, he was - as I believe was Shostakovich. I don;t know why he decided against doing this but, in Style and Idea, he did confess to what comes across to me as a surprising lack of understanding of the Ninth which might well have influenced his decision in that regard.

[ahinton]

Don't you dare!!! The last time I was rude about Godowski your comments shamed me so much that I spent a month chasing up examples on youTube to see if I could accommodate your enthusiasm. In all that time, I managed to hear one transcription that I thought was lovely - for the rest, it was a singularly painful effort, which I wouldn't want to repeat again - and, in fact, these days I have a note (and a prescription) from my GP excusing me from such dangerously high systolic encounters.

I tried - I really tried - but not nearly as much as I was tried; and subsequent encounters with his work on broadcasts have only confirmed that this repertoire and I cannot reach agreement at ACAS.

Each to his/her own, of course! Sorry that your YouTube trawl produced so little of interest to you (and I've only just seen your post above, hence the delay in response).

[ahinton]

I'm sure you do. You hear very many composers of the second half of the twentieth century who would echo words like these (from Rautavaara): "This music wrenched itself free (and liberated me) from the serial straitjacket and quasi-scientific thinking..." and similar.

Well, you only hear them if you listen to them, I suppose, although I don't doubt you here. In the example that you cite, I would have to ask how music itself could of itself "wrench" any composer "free" and "liberate" him/her from a "serial straitjacket" which no one would have asked him/her to wear in the first place. But even leaving that dogmatic and point-proving statement to one side, to me, it's not about whether or not serial dodecaphonic processes are "any good", or whether or not electronic composition is "any good", or why either might be thought of as somehow "restrictive", it's about what each individual composer might find in either of them (or indeed in other persuasions/processes) with which he/she can do something that he/she wants to. Even George Lloyd said that he spent time during the early 1930s (I think) investigating and working with serial dodecaphony but could not make it work for him, which is a far cry from using that as an excuse to claim that it couldn't work for anyone else. My own earliest efforts were very much geared to serial dodecaphony under the guidance of an ex-pupil of Webern but the fact that I simply could not make it work for me and I felt that I had to start all over again has never persuaded me to believe that it can't work for other composers.

That said, it's worth remembering that Schönberg himself, having arrived at the point at which he would compose works using principles of serial dodecaphony, continued to write "tonal" music not using such procedures when he felt that it suited him to do so (sketches for string quartet, various canons, &c. as well as the better known ones).

[Serial_Apologist]

Just a reminder that "Arnie" (as Ms Molleson refers to him ) is back as COTW this week.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0022k1q

[Barbirollians]

I see that Lebrecht is reporting that DG and Luisi are to record his complete orchestral works with the Danish orchestra.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Very good series this . As ever amazed by the range of AS’s music . So much I haven’t heard before or in a long time on R3. Among the former a short piece composed for his fellow soldiers complete with bugle calls . He was a supremely witty composer- far from the dry pedagogue some think him.

[smittims]

Indeed, and there are his cabaret songs, which sadly, I think , weren't performed where they were intended. His letters and prose articles are pepppered with a very Jewish humour , irony etc. tothe fore. And there's his famous self-portrait which shows him walking away.

[Serial_Apologist]

Indeed, and there are his cabaret songs, which sadly, I think , weren't performed where they were intended. His letters and prose articles are pepppered with a very Jewish humour , irony etc. tothe fore. And there's his famous self-portrait which shows him walking away.

Yesterday I was unsuccessfully trying to trace a supposed painting of Mahler by Schoenberg, mentioned in Tuesday's programme. There is one of Mahler's burial, as painted by Schoenberg:

http://www.visitingvienna.com/footsteps/gustav-mahler-grave/

[Pulcinella]

I have amended the original thread title, I hope helpfully.