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

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. 9
Schoenberg's Preface
.....This is a textbook, he says, that will show not how the composer should compose but rather how he has done so.  .....His facts are the examples of the musical technique of presenting an idea, shown by the masters in their masterworks.  Schoenberg's theory is thus based on phenomena.

"It is in deed our duty to reflect over and over again upon the mysterious powers of art.  And again and again begin at the beginning; again and again to examine anew for ourselves and attempt to organize anew for ourselves.  Regarding nothing as given but the phenomena.  These we may more rightly regard as eternal than the laws we believe we have found.  Since we do definitely know the phenomena [as facts] we might be more justified in giving the mane 'science' [Wissenschaft], to our knowledge of the phenomena, rather than to those conjectures that are intended to explain them."

Schoenberg maintained that on learns best from the facts, not from inflexible rules laid down by theorists.  He accepted honest efforts to discover tentative laws of art as necessary for the aspiring mind, but denounced those theorists who substitute a system of so-called eternal laws for the living examples of the master, then try to impose those laws on composers. .....Fr Shoenberg teaching and theory were two sides of the same coin.  Both teaching and learning, he maintained, are a search: "Our noblest impulse, to know and understand, makes it our duty to search.  Even a false theory, if found through genuine searching, is superior to the complacent certainty of those who presume to know--to know, although they themselves have not searched!"

In his preface Schoenberg characterizes theory by this ongoing quality: it is always in progress, always incomplete, an open-ended, developing process.  Even the relation of theory and fact will be always subject to reexamination.

p. 10
The Ground for Theory
In the Harmonielehre Schoenberg had opposed the requirements of the subject to the so-called eternal natural laws for which current theorists search:  "In every case where human understnding tries to abstract from divine works the laws according to which they are constructed, it turns out that we find only laws which characterize our cognition through thinking and our power of imagination....We always see and recognize only ourselves...as often as we think we are describing te essence of a thing outside ourselves." .....Order is demanded by the subject, not the object.  The artwork mirrors the subject's demand for order.

pp. 11-13
The Musical Idea and the Twelve-Tone Method
.....
Schoenberg identified with the German musical tradition; its superiority and preservation were among his chief concerns.  In 1926, reflecting on national superiorities in art, he observed that at given times in the Western tradition a single view of an art is dominant--for example, in painting, the Italian, then the French.  In music, after the Italians, the Germans, he claims, have exerted the greatest influence, unbroken until today.  A few years later he wrote that although it was mianly through J. S. Bach that German music came to determine the developmn of music, as it has for two hundred years, it is homophonic music that reached its climax in Germany, making apparent its position of dominance.  .....Schoenberg believed that at the time, he himself best represented the German tradition:  "it is a remarkable thing, as yet unnoticed by anyone...that my music, produced on German soil, without foreign influences, is a living example of an art able most effectively o oppose Latin and Slav hopes of hegemony and derived through and through from the traditions of German music."

Schoenberg maintained that his music was a product of evolution and no more revolutionary than any other development in the history of music. .....

In 1923 Schoenberg wrote nineteen or twenty essays that can be considered theoretical.  Three are the earliest essays on his new method.  In these, his developing insights into the musical idea in traditional tonal music evidently helped crystallize his thoughts about his new method. .....

In one of these 1923 essays....."Five tones have been drawn into composition in a way not called upon before--that is all.  This does not call for any new laws.  The first thing to be done is to find the form in which the laws of earlier art can be applied to the new, .....

.....Schoenberg expressed the need to find a new means of presentation in twelve-tone composition:  "With the renunciation of the formal advantages inherent in tonal cohesion, presentation of the idea has become rather harder; it lacks the external rounding-off and self-containedness that this simple and natural principle of composition brought about better than did any of the others used alongside it...To find means of replacing this is the task of the theory of twelve-tone composition.

.....The weightiest assumption behind twelve-tone composition, he says, is a new conception of the musical idea and its presentation:  all that sounds simultaneously (harmonies, chord, the result of part writing) works in the same way as all that sounds successively (motive, shape, phrase, melody) and is equally subject to the law of comprehensibility.  From this assumption, he draws a distinction that, he claims, historically trained makers of history have overlooked: the real contrast in the Western tradition is between contrapuntal and homophonic art.  "This law," he says, "which I was the first to utter and accord it true significance, has the following results."  In accordance with this law, he distinguished tree kinds of presentation of the musical idea.  In homophonic forms, for the sake of the development of the principal part, a certain economy governs the harmony, allowing it to exert a decisive influence on the development of the structure.  In polyphonic music, motivic shapes, themes, phrases are never developed, do not split off new shapes, and are seldom varied; development takes place through alteration of the mutual relation to one another of the various components.  In twelve-tone composition the relationship of the twelve tones to one another develop, on the basis of a particular prescribed order, determined by the idea.  The great significance of the idea in twelve-tone composition is that simultaneity and succession work in the same way:  "In twelve-tone composition the matter under discussion is in fact the succession of tones mentioned, whose comprehensibility as a musical idea is independent of whether its components are made audible one after the other or more or less simultaneously."  By envisioning twelve-tone composition as a new kind of presentation of new kind of musical idea, Schoenberg could see his new method as the logical consequence of past history and the next step in the ongoing tradition of Wester music.

.....Compositions executed tonally, he states, proceed so as to bring every occurring tone into direct or indirect relationship to the fundamental tone, in such a way that doubt about that relationship can never last for an extended period.  Composition with twelve tones related on ly to one another, on the other hand, presupposes knowledge of these relationships and does not perceive in them a problem still to be worked out.  Drawing an analogy to language, Schoenberg compares twelve-tone compositions, in which a certain knowledge can be presupposed, to working with a language in which the basic materials of communication are "concept-complexes"; one speaks in complexes of concepts that include the phenomenon and everything connected with it.  The only question is whether the ear, whether the musical understanding, is capable of grasping these relationships and drawing the consequences from them as it does from long-familiar relationships.

.....Roughly stated, the following happened in tonal composition: the relationship of each occurring tone to the fundamental tone was expressed in both the vertical and the horizontal, in both the harmony and the melody; or to put it differently, the idea was presented in such a way that certain problems were worked out not only in one dimension but in other dimensions as well.  The same is the case in composition with twelve tones; the relationship of the twelve tones to each other is expressed in such a way that in both dimensions of the musical space that we are aware of up until now, the same thing is said.

Schoenberg refined this concept of a unified musical space in his essay on twelve-tone composition:  "Proceeding from these assumptions [that music is the presentation of musical ideas that must be part of what man can apperceive, reason, and express] I arrived at the following conclusion.  THE TWO-OR-MORE-DIMENSIONAL SPACE IN WHICH MUSICAL IDEAS ARE PRESENTED IS A UNIT."  Shuch a space is unified like a coherent discourse:  "Though the elements of these ideas appear separate and independent to the eye and the ear, they reveal their true meaning only through their co-operation, even as no single word alone can express a thought without relation to other words."  It is also unified as a gestalt:  "All that happens at any point of this musical space has more than a local effect.  It functions not only in its own plane but also in all other directions and planes."  .....

Can't agree more with Schoenberg's view about there is not so-called eternal rules for music making.  There is no 'you shall', there is no such rules that you can not break down, but a reason for any action is always necessary.  As well agreeing his view in musical concept exerting its influences more than one dimension, and any fragments has not only the local effects but also in all other directions.