SCHOENBERG IS DEAD[1]

(Schönberg est mort, 1952, revised 1966)

 

by Pierre Boulez

 

Where do we stand with regard to Schoenberg?

 

     This is certainly one of the most urgent questions that confronts us; and yet it is elusive and baffling, and perhaps cannot be satisfactorily answered.

 

     There is no point in denying that the “case” of Schoenberg is primarily annoying for its flagrant incompatibilities.

 

     Paradoxically, the central experiment of his work is premature precisely in so far as it lacks ambition. Or we can happily reverse the proposition and say that its ambition is at its greatest precisely where its code is most outworn. It is arguable that this ambiguity is the source of that disturbing misunderstanding which in turn prompts those more or less conscious, more or less violent reservations one feels toward a body of work which, in spite of everything, one knows to be absolutely necessary.

 

     For with Schoenberg we witness one of the most important upheavals that the language of music has ever been called on to undergo. Admittedly the actual material does not change: the twelve semitones; it is the way the material is organized that is called in question: from tonal organization we move to serial organization. How did this idea of the series come about? At what point in Schoenberg’s work? And as a result of what deductions? In tracing the genealogy, we may come nearer to explaining certain intractable inconsistencies.

 

     We may start saying that Schoenberg’s discoveries are essentially morphological. The development starts with the post – Wagnerian vocabulary and ends up with the “suspension” of tonality. Although there are already signs of a clear tendency in Verklärte Nacht, in the First Quartet, Op.7, in the Chamber Symphony, it is only in certain pages of the Scherzo and Finale of the Second Quartet, Op.10, that we find real break for freedom. All the works I have just mentioned are therefore in some sense preparatory; we may reasonably allow ourselves to regard them now as above all documentary.

 

     Tonality is effectively suspended in the Three Piano Pieces of Op.11. Thereafter the experiments become increasingly intense until they culminate in the resounding triumph of Pierrot lunaire. We may observe in the technique of these scores three remarkable features: the principle of perpetual variation, or non-repetition; the preponderance of “anarchic” intervals – those which yield the greatest tension in terms of tonality and the gradual elimination of that tonal interval par excellence, the octave; and a clear preoccupation with counterpoint.

 

     There is already inconsistency – if not contradiction – in these three characteristics. The variations principle in fact does not go well with a strict, even academic contrapuntal technique. In strict canon, especially, where the consequent is an exact copy of the antecedent – in rhythm as well as pitch – we get major internal contradiction. If, on the other hand, the cannon is at the octave, it is easy to imagine the extreme antagonism between a series of horizontal events governed by a principle of tonal abstention and a vertical control that emphasizes the strongest of all tonal intervals.

 

     Nevertheless one can detect here a discipline which will have fruitful consequences; we should particularly note the possibility, as yet embryonic, of a series of intervals passing from the horizontal to the vertical and vice versa: the separation of the notes of a given thematic cell from the rhythmic figure which produced it, so that the cell becomes a series of absolute intervals (to use the term in its mathematical sense).

 

     To return to the use of what I have called “anarchic” intervals. In the works of this period we very often find fourths followed by diminished fifths, major thirds followed by major sixths, with all the inversions and dovetailings to which these two figures can be subjected. We notice here a preponderance of those intervals (where the texture is linear) or chords (where there is a vertical build-up), which are least reducible to the classical harmonic norm of superimposed thirds. On the other hand, we may observe the abundance of disjunct intervals, which give the range a feeling of distension, and hence the importance attached to the absolute pitch of each note, something which had scarcely ever been hinted at before.

 

     This approach to musical material has prompted a good deal of defensive “aestheticizing” and special pleading, but with no attempt to generalize the problem. Schoenberg himself wrote on this subject in a way which seems to authorize the use of the term expressionism: “In my first works in the new style I was particularly guided, in both the details and the whole of the formal construction, by very powerful expressive forces, not to mention a sense of form and logic acquired from tradition and well developed through hard work and conscientiousness.”

     

     No further comment is called for, and one can but applaud this initial phase, in which the musical thought is perfectly balanced by the purely formal aspects of the experimentation. In short, aesthetics, poetics, and technique are all in phase – if I may again use a mathematical term – whatever flaws one may be able to find in these areas individually. (I deliberately avoid discussion of the intrinsic value of post-Wagnerian expressionism.)

     

     In the series of works beginning with the Serenade, Op.24, Schoenberg seems to have been overtaken by his own innovation, with the no-man’s-land of strictness locatable to the Five Piano Pieces, Op.23.

 

      This Op.23 is the extreme point of equilibrium and the first manifesto of serial technique, to which we are introduced by the fifth piece, a waltz: it is worth pondering on the essentially "expressionist" coincidence of the first dodecaphonic composition with a German romantic formal stereotype. ("Prepare yourself with serious immobilities," as Satie might have said.) We are here in the presence of a new way of organizing sound, rudimentary as yet, but which will be codified above all in the Suite for Piano, Op.25, and the Wind Quintet, Op.26, before reaching a conscious schematization in the Variation for Orchestra, Op.31.

 

     Schoenberg is open to bitter reproach for this exploration of dodecaphony, pursued so determinedly in a direction as wrong as any in the history of music.

 

     I do not say this lightly. Why then?

 

     We may recall that the series arose, in Schoenberg, from an ultrathematicization in which, as we have seen, the intervals of the theme can be regarded as absolute, free of any rhythmic or expressive obligation. (The third piece of Op.23, which is based on a five-note series, is particularly significant in this respect.)

 

     It has to be admitted that this ultrathematicization is the underlying principle of the series, which is no more than its logical outcome. Moreover, the confusion between theme and series in Schoenberg's serial works is sufficiently expressive of this inability to envisage the world of sound brought into being by serialism. For him dodecaphony is nothing more than a rigorous means for controlling chromaticism: beyond its role as regulator, the serial phenomenon passed virtually unnoticed by Schoenberg.

 

     What then was his main ambition once a chromatic synthesis - or safety net - had been established by serialism? To create works of the same nature of those of the old sound-world which he had only just abandoned, works in which the new technique would "prove itself." But how could the new technique would “prove itself.” But how could the new technique be properly tested if one took no trouble to find specifically serial structures? And by structure I mean everything from the generating of the component materials right up to the global architecture of the work. In a word, Schoenberg never concerned himself with the logical connection between serial forms as such and derived structure.

 

     This seems to be the reason for the reason for the futility of most of his serial output. Since the preclassical and classical forms, which predominate, are historically unconnected with dodecaphony, a yawning chasm opens up between the infrastructures of tonality and a language whose organizational principles are as yet but dimly perceived. Not only does the actual intention fail, since the language is not supported by the architecture, but the very opposite happens: The architecture annuls any possibility of organization that the new language may possess. The two worlds are incompatible: and yet has tried to justify the one by the other.

 

     This could hardly be called a valid way of working, and it yields results which can simply be discounted: the worst kind of misconception, a sort of lopsided “romantico-classicism” whose well-intentionedness is not its least repellent future. It certainly does not show much faith in serial organization to deprive it of its own modes of development in favor of others that seem safer, a reactionary attitude which left the door open for every kind of more or less shameful survival, as we can now proceed to demonstrate.

 

     The persistence, for example, of accompanied melody; of counterpoint based on the idea of leading voice and secondary voice (Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme). I do not hesitate to call this one of the most unfortunate inheritances from the sclerosis of hybrid romanticism. Echoes of a dead world can be heard not only in these outworn concepts but equally in the actual technique. From Schoenberg’s pen flows a stream of infuriating clichés and formidable sterotypes redolent of the most wearily ostentatious romanticism: all those endless anticipations with expressive accent on the harmony note, those fake appoggiaturas, those arpeggios, tremolandos, and note-repetitions, which sound so terribly empty and which so utterly deserve the label “secondary voices”; finally, the depressing poverty, even ugliness of rhythms in which a few tricks of variation on classical formulae leave a disheartening impression of bonhomous futility.

 

     How can one associate oneself unreservedly with an output that displays such contradictions, such illogic? If only it displayed them within a strict technique – the one saving grace! But what are we to think of Schoenberg’s American period, which shows utter disarray and the most wretched disorientation? How are we to judge this reinstatement of polarized and even tonal functions, if not as one further (and unnecessary) proof of his lack of grasp and cohesion? From now on technical rigor is abandoned. The interval of an octave, the false cadence, the strict canon at the octave, all reappear. Such an approach achieves a lack of coherence which can only be described as a reductio ad absurdum of Schoenbergian incompatibility. Have we arrived at a new musical methodology merely so as to reconstruct the old one? So monstrous a trick of incomprehension leaves me speechless: the “case” of Schoenberg embodies a “catastrophe” which will doubtless remain exemplary.

 

     Could it have been otherwise? It would be naively arrogant today to answer “no.” Nevertheless, it is possible to see why Schoenberg’s serial music was doomed to stalemate. First, the investigation of serialism was one-sided: it neglected rhythm, and even, strictly speaking, sound, in the sense of dynamics and mode of attack. Who would dare to blame him for that? One may, on the other hand, point to a remarkable preoccupation with timbre, in the sense of Klangfarbenmelodie, which could be generalized into a timbre series. But the real reason for the stalemate lies in profound misunderstanding of serial FUNCTIONS as such, as engendered, that is, by the actual serial principle – there are traces of them, but in an embryonic rather than effective form. By this I mean that Schoenberg saw the series as a lowest common effective form. By this I mean that Schoenberg saw the series as a lowest common dominator which would guarantee the semantic unity of the work, but that the linguistic components generated by this means are organized according to a preexistent, nonserial, rhetoric. This, to mind my mind, is the central provoking UNEVIDENCE of a body of work without intrinsic unity.

 

     The unevidence of Schoenberg’s in the field of serialism has prompted enough defections of prudent disappearances to call for some response.

 

     It is not learning demonism but the merest common sense which makes me say that, since the discoveries of the Viennese School, all nonserial composers are USELESS (which is not to say that all serial composers are useful). I will hardly do to answer in the name of so-called liberty, for this liberty has a strong flavor of ancient servitude. If the Schoenbergian stalemate is a fact, we shall not find a valid solution to the problem posed by the epiphany of a contemporary language by simply spiriting it away.

 

     Perhaps we should start by dissociating serialism as such from the work of Schoenberg. People have confused the two with patent delight and ill-concealed dishonesty. It is easy to forget certain Webern ploughed the same furrow; admittedly (so thick are the smokescreens of mediocrity) hardly anyone has heard of him. Perhaps we might tell ourselves that serialism is a logical consequence of history – or historically logical, if you prefer. Perhaps we might, like this Webern, investigate the musical EVIDENCE arising from the attempt at generating structure from material. Perhaps we might enlarge the serial domain with intervals other than the semitone: micro-intervals, irregular intervals, complex sounds. Perhaps we might generalize the serial principle to the four constituents of sound: pitch, duration, dynamics/attack, and timbre. Perhaps… Perhaps… we might expect of a composer some imagination, a certain measure of asceticism, a bit of intelligence, and finally a sensibility which will not blow away in the first breeze.

 

     We should anyway guard against seeing Schoenberg as a sort of Moses dying within sight of the Promised Land, having brought the sacred tablets of the law from a Sinai which many insist on confusing with Valhalla. (Meanwhile, the “Dance Round the Golden Calf” is in full swing.) We are certainly indebted to him for Pierrot lunaire … and a few other more-than admirable works – pace the mediocrities all around us, who would like to limit the damage to “Central Europe.”

 

     But it is now essential to dispose of the ambiguity and contradiction: it is time to resolve the stalemate. There is no room in this conclusion for any gratuitous bravado, still less any bland fatuity, but only a rigor impervious to weakness of compromise. So let us not hesitate to say, without any silly desire for scandal, but equally without shamefaced hypocrisy or pointless melancholy:

 

                                                                                                                  SCHOENBERG IS DEAD.

 

 

 

Notes

 

[Text: Boulez, “Schönberg est mort,” from Relevés d’aaprenti, translated by Stephen Walsh in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Used by permission of David Higham Associates.]

 

[1. This issue is addressed further in Martha MacLean Hyde; “The Roots of Form in Schoenberg’s Sketches,” Journal of Music Theory 24 (1980): 1 – 136.]

 

[2. Pierre Boulez, “Through Schoenberg to the Future,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute I (1977): 123 – 24.]

 

[3. Here Boulez cites Schoenberg’s essay “Opinion or Insight,” found in Style and Idea (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984): 262.]

 

 

 

 

 

[1] This translation differs considerably – most notably in its greater lengtha – from the version this essay which appeared in Score (London) for May 1952. – TRANS.