Commentary of 'The Musical Idea: and the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation.'-II

Carpenter, Patricia and Neff, Severine. edited, translated, and commentary (1995) The Musical Idea: and the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation. Columbia University Press: New York.


p. 3
Schoenberg's View of Art
.....the musical work as concrete presentation of a musical idea.  His view of art in general unifies his thinking about music.

p. 4
Art as Technique
At the most fundamental level Schoenberg defined art as it has traditionally been defined in the West, by distinguishing it from science.  Both technē (or ars) and theoria (or scientia) are kinds of knowledge; technē, or craft, is skill of mind in making.  Aristotle.....distinguishing capacities of the mind, defines art as the capacity to make, involving a true course of reason, and theory as knowing that something is the case.
In the first chapter of Harmonielehre ..... compares the teaching of the techniques of carpentry and the teaching of musical composition; both rest on "observation, experience, reasoning, and taste, on knowledge of natural laws and the requirements of the material."

p. 5
Schoenberg, maintaining that the work proceeds from the composer's idea, echoes the old distinction between natural and artistic production.  Just as one cannot build a house without a plan, he states, on cannot compose a work without the idea.[".....]Every human activity, in so far as it is not exclusively instinctive, proceeds according to a plan."

Art as Expression
Schoenberg surely understood the artist's idea not as something external to be imposed by the craftsman on the material but as something internal to be made external.  Craft alone does not make the artist: "artistic expression does not depend on any technical trick, but lies rather in musical thought itself." .....

'I believe art is born of "I must," not of "I can." A craftsman "can": whatever he was born with, he has developed, and so long as he wants to do something, he is able to ....But the artist must....but since he must, he also can. Perhaps he was not born with something; then he acquires it....Not other people's, though: his own. This ability developed from within, under compulsion, this ability to express oneself differs fundamentally from the craftsman's ability, which in fact really expresses someone other than himself. The craftsman can make what the artist had to create.

The shaping forces of art are inherent in the imaginative process of the artist himself.  Art is expression.

Schoenberg uses expression in its narrowest sense: something is pressed out.  Expressive content in its demand to make itself understood erupts like a volcano; its upheaval produces a form.

p. 6

"I see the work as a whole first.  Then I compose the details.  In working them out, I always lose something.  This cannot be avoided.  There is always some loss when we materialize.  But there is a compensation gain in vitality.  We all have technical difficulties, which arise not from inability to handle the material, but from some inherent quality in the idea.  And it is this idea, this first thought, that music dictate the structure and the texture of the work."

"The real composer (!) does not composer merely one or more themes, but a whole piece. .....a real composer's musical conception, like the physical, is one single act, comprising the totality of the product.  The form in its outline, characteristics of tempo, dynamics, moods of the main and subordinate ideas, their relation, derivation, their contrasts and deviations--all these are there at once, though in embryonic state.  The ultimate formulation of the melodies, themes, rhythms and many details will subsequently develop through the generating power of the germs."

p. 7
Organic and Mechanical Form

"Form is mechanical when it is imparted to any material through an external force, merely as an accidental addition, without reference to its character....Organic form, on the contrary, is innate; it unfolds itself from within, and reaches it determination simultaneously with the fullest development....In the fine arts, just as in the province of nature--the supreme artist-- all genuine forms are organic."

p. 8
In the essay "Principles of Construction," .....Schoenberg contrasts there two kinds of form.  In art the construct is not a mechanical one, like a clock, but an image that is like an organism in its vital unity.

Organic unity implies the concept of totality.  The properties of such a whole cannot be derived from the sum of its parts; .....The whole is prior to the parts; its unity is therefore opposed to the aggregate of bricks gathered together to build a wall.

.....He [Schoenberg] suggests that to symbolize the construction of a musical form one might think of a living body that is whole and centrally controlled and puts forth a certain number of limbs by means of which it is capable of exercising its life-function.  In music only the whole itself is that central body.  The cohesive force of such a whole comes from an inner necessity.  The inner force that gives the tonal body its life is the musical idea that this body presents.  The central concept for Schoenberg's theory of the presentation of the musical idea is this concept of the musical organism as a tonal body, vitalised by an inner necessity, the idea it presents.  With this concept Schoenberg takes leave of the nineteenth-century view of the musical organism.

There might be a more precise way to summarise Schoenberg's view of art, nonetheless, this did explain Schoenberg's view in a way much easier than has to read through Schoenberg's writing word by word.  Not sure if it works for people unfamiliar with Schoenberg's works and words the same way though.