Music in Time: Breaking Free

[Serial_Apologist]

Someone at Radio 3 has obviously had a New Year resolution to improve morning programming for the station, because, for the first time in god knows how many years, there are items worth tuning in for from 10.30 am every morning in this coming week - namely a Second Viennese School traipse through. Closer inspection will doubtless reveal any number of gaps - I notice the name Eisler seems to be missing for just one - but hopefully it represents a start.

Being otherwise occupied led me to overlooking today's The Listening Service (yep, our Tom) at 5 pm, kicking things off. Then at five past midnight, for all night owls, there's a 25 minute on Schoenberg's Society for private Musical Performances.

[doversoul1]

I thought this was excellent.

Breaking Free: Freud versus Music

Did Freud really dislike music as much as he professed? Stephen Johnson explores Sigmund Freud's enigmatic relationship with music. He talks to the American cultural analyst Michelle Duncan, pscyho-analysts and writers Darian Leader and Julie Jaffee Nagel, the music critic David Nice, whose first job it was to take tours around the Freud Museum in Hampstead, and the Barcelona-based neurologist Josep Marco Pallares who is studying amusia and music-specific anhedonia, which he proposes might have been the root cause of Freud's problem with music. Plus extracts from Freud's writings read by the actor Nicholas Murchie.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b086t9qk

[Serial_Apologist]

I thought this was excellent.

Breaking Free: Freud versus Music

Did Freud really dislike music as much as he professed? Stephen Johnson explores Sigmund Freud's enigmatic relationship with music. He talks to the American cultural analyst Michelle Duncan, pscyho-analysts and writers Darian Leader and Julie Jaffee Nagel, the music critic David Nice, whose first job it was to take tours around the Freud Museum in Hampstead, and the Barcelona-based neurologist Josep Marco Pallares who is studying amusia and music-specific anhedonia, which he proposes might have been the root cause of Freud's problem with music. Plus extracts from Freud's writings read by the actor Nicholas Murchie.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b086t9qk

Fantastic! - I'll have a listen to that tomorrow.

Lovely to have you back, dovers.

[Pianorak]

Schoenberg

He's also Composer of the Week!

[Serial_Apologist]

He's also Composer of the Week!

Yes indeed! I do hope Schoenberg sceptics are listening in, because DM seems to be making a very good job of de-mystifying this music, aided by some of the best recordings to this end. Or maybe it's just me saying this - Schoenberg's musical vocabulary having become home territory in so many ways for me after many years of listening. Hearing the first two chords of the orchestral Variations just now: an unresolved chromatic chord followed by a simple open fifth. In no way is the latter a resolution of its predecessor: each chord exists on equal terms with its neighbour, and this is no different in theory than parallel developments since late 19th century harmonic thinking, whether it be Satie's "Vexations" or Messiaen's "Le banquet Celeste", other than in its musical cultural provenance.

I hadn't realised that the Waltz from Op 23 was considered by anyone to be Schoenberg's first wholly 12-tone serial-based work - some commentators cite the vocal movement from the wonderful Serenade Op 24.

[MrGongGong]

He's also Composer of the Week!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I hadn't realised that the Waltz from Op 23 was considered by anyone to be Schoenberg's first wholly 12-tone serial-based work - some commentators cite the vocal movement from the wonderful Serenade Op 24.

Ah ... yes ... well ...

It all depends on what is meant by "first", "wholly", and "serial-based", I suppose!

The "Sonnet" from the ("wonderful" ) Serenade uses a twelve-note set throughout - but never is the term "set" more appropriate than here; the vocal line repeats it thirteen times over, with no transpositions, inversions, retrogrades ... or any of the techniques, devices, and tricks that are associated with "wholly ... serial-based" composition. The counter melodies similarly reiterate the series in its prime incarnation - and the harmony is "only" vaguely based on the series (you can sort-of make a chart showing how it features, if you allow the sort of voice-leading that points out a note in the "tenor" of the guitar part is then taken up after four intervening chords by the "soprano" of the Mandolin - but I can't hear Music like this, and I presume to suggest that Schönberg didn't compose like this either). The movement is an Etude in octave displacement, and holds the listener's attention by its kaleidoscope of variations on exactly the same sequence of pitch classes.

Mind you - whilst the Op23 "Waltz" does use transposition, retrograde, and inversion, I wouldn't describe it as "wholly ... serial-based": partitioning, combinatoriality, series based on complementation by inversion ... all the things that composers need to use the Method to create large-scale works (such as a String Quartet, a twenty-plus minute orchestral work, an opera ... ) didn't emerge in Schönberg's writing until a little later with the Third Quartet, the Orchestral Variations, Moses etc ... (The "Sonnet" and the "Waltz" are both miniatures; to create successful, large-scale harmonic structures to fit in the succession of Austro-German traditions so important to him, a more secure and more flexible method of "brickwork" was necessary.)


(And Schönberg had created a Twelve-note Row at the start of Die Jakobsleiter, some years before the serial Method occurred to him. In one of his attempts to finish the work in America, he tried to realize the potential of this row as a series, only to discover that it was based on hexachords that don't allow the sort of inversional combinatoriality that he found so freed his imagination and opened up the myriad structural possibilities of the works from Op30 onward. His last known thoughts on the work were to completely re-write it, with a completely different opening Twelve-note collection that contained such combinatorial and partitioning possibilities ... essentially, in order to complete the work, he felt he needed to start again! )

[Serial_Apologist]

Ah ... yes ... well ...

It all depends on what is meant by "first", "wholly", and "serial-based", I suppose!

The "Sonnet" from the ("wonderful" ) Serenade uses a twelve-note set throughout - but never is the term "set" more appropriate than here; the vocal line repeats it thirteen times over, with no transpositions, inversions, retrogrades ... or any of the techniques, devices, and tricks that are associated with "wholly ... serial-based" composition. The counter melodies similarly reiterate the series in its prime incarnation - and the harmony is "only" vaguely based on the series (you can sort-of make a chart showing how it features, if you allow the sort of voice-leading that points out a note in the "tenor" of the guitar part is then taken up after four intervening chords by the "soprano" of the Mandolin - but I can't hear Music like this, and I presume to suggest that Schönberg didn't compose like this either). The movement is an Etude in octave displacement, and holds the listener's attention by its kaleidoscope of variations on exactly the same sequence of pitch classes.

Mind you - whilst the Op23 "Waltz" does use transposition, retrograde, and inversion, I wouldn't describe it as "wholly ... serial-based": partitioning, combinatoriality, series based on complementation by inversion ... all the things that composers need to use the Method to create large-scale works (such as a String Quartet, a twenty-plus minute orchestral work, an opera ... ) didn't emerge in Schönberg's writing until a little later with the Third Quartet, the Orchestral Variations, Moses etc ... (The "Sonnet" and the "Waltz" are both miniatures; to create successful, large-scale harmonic structures to fit in the succession of Austro-German traditions so important to him, a more secure and more flexible method of "brickwork" was necessary.)


(And Schönberg had created a Twelve-note Row at the start of Die Jakobsleiter, some years before the serial Method occurred to him. In one of his attempts to finish the work in America, he tried to realize the potential of this row as a series, only to discover that it was based on hexachords that don't allow the sort of inversional combinatoriality that he found so freed his imagination and opened up the myriad structural possibilities of the works from Op30 onward. His last known thoughts on the work were to completely re-write it, with a completely different opening Twelve-note collection that contained such combinatorial and partitioning possibilities ... essentially, in order to complete the work, he felt he needed to start again! )

Thanks very much for clarifying that, ferney - fascinating stuff!

[Serial_Apologist]

Listening right now to "Die Gluckliche Hand" thinking, surely this has to be among the most astonishing and revelatory music ever composed, and that amazingly, Arnold composed this as early as 1911-13, and also hoping others who've maybe had mixed thoughts about this composer are now also plugged in, or, if not, will check out the iPlayer later when it becomes available.

[Richard Barrett]

(And Schönberg had created a Twelve-note Row at the start of Die Jakobsleiter, some years before the serial Method occurred to him. In one of his attempts to finish the work in America, he tried to realize the potential of this row as a series, only to discover that it was based on hexachords that don't allow the sort of inversional combinatoriality that he found so freed his imagination and opened up the myriad structural possibilities of the works from Op30 onward. His last known thoughts on the work were to completely re-write it, with a completely different opening Twelve-note collection that contained such combinatorial and partitioning possibilities ... essentially, in order to complete the work, he felt he needed to start again! )

Very interesting, I didn't know that. Some people would find this last idea completely insane, although personally I have every sympathy with it. I think it underlines the fact that serial composition is not about being able to relate everything to the series but about being able to relate everything to everything else. Although of course Schoenberg never quite got to the point of equivalence not only between the twelve chromatic pitch classes but also between all the forms of the series itself, so that its "thematic" character dissolves into a universe of relationships, as in Einstein's relativity where there's no privileged position from which to understand the whole. Sorry, getting a bit waffly here.

[Serial_Apologist]

Very interesting, I didn't know that. Some people would find this last idea completely insane, although personally I have every sympathy with it. I think it underlines the fact that serial composition is not about being able to relate everything to the series but about being able to relate everything to everything else. Although of course Schoenberg never quite got to the point of equivalence not only between the twelve chromatic pitch classes but also between all the forms of the series itself, so that its "thematic" character dissolves into a universe of relationships, as in Einstein's relativity where there's no privileged position from which to understand the whole. Sorry, getting a bit waffly here.

I find it persuasive to cross-infer that explanation into other spheres. In Lovelock's Gaia Theory the self-regulating system of life accordant with the Earth's ecosystemic carrying capacity (as generally accepted in the scientific community I understand), has no overlording element in charge, like God or a dominating key centre; it operates sui-generis and is self-sustaining provided no species takes charge at the head of the food chain for too long, i.e. until the resulting contradictions within the system as a whole have accrued to such a point as to unbalance the whole. Such dominating species are maladjusted to their environment/context, insofar that, sooner or later in the evolutionary chain, by overexploiting their purview, their own continued existence is put in question.

Ideally it would seem most propitious to the healthy functioning of the whole that such dominating species with their innate tendencies be kept under control - which up to now seems to have been the case, eventually.

Or maybe I'm eliciting too many analogies there!

[Richard Barrett]

I find it persuasive to cross-infer that explanation into other spheres.

Of course, serial thinking is a product of the same sort of stage in historical processes that gave rise to ideas like relativity and evolution (and the latter principle's extension into ecosystems, by Lovelock and others). It is certainly persuasive as far as I'm concerned to view tonal music with its fixed frame of reference as analogous to a "Newtonian" way of looking at things, which is then subsumed (as a "special case") into the generalisation of the "Einsteinian" relational approach.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

There's been surprisingly little discussion on this thread. For years, many of us have been more than a little grumpy about the Breakfast/Essential Classics/In Tune recurring cycle, and now, all of a sudden, we are having a feast of interesting works throughout the day, that Radio 3 had apparently all but forgotten.

All I can say is: