Experimentation and history

With this decline in importance of harmony for modernist composers came the "emancipation" of dissonance proclaimed by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), and the proliferation of individual tonal systems. The focus shifts to rhythm, counterpoint, and timbre. Harmonic tonality had served as a common system of reference for European composers since the 17th century, setting out the boundaries within which a composition had to function in order to count as "music". After about 1910, modernist music was identified by the absence of shared tonal systems.

A series of works by Schoenberg helps illustrates this transformation. Listen to the brief third portion of Schoenberg's string sextet "Transfigured Night" (op. 4, 1899):

 

It features the young composer as a master of late Romantic technique. Schoenberg was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, but his parents (originally from Szécsény and Prague) had moved there from Pozsony/Bratislava/Pressburg, so he was a Hungarian subject until 1918, and a Czech citizen until taking U.S. citizenship in 1941. In the early years of the century he was already becoming aware of the expanded tonal harmonies that signaled a crisis of classical composition. Utterly ripped out of context, here is the single uncatalogued dissonance in measure 42 that caused one Viennese concert group to reject performance of the piece:

 

Though he did not perhaps become the most beloved advocate of alternative modern forms, Schoenberg did eventually become the most successful (or, at least, consistent) developer of a thoroughgoing functional basis for new tonal forms.

Between 1907 and 1909 Schoenberg produced a series of works that are now regarded as seminal for the development of modern music. In his second string quartet (1908) Schoenberg took the unusual step of adding a soprano to the mix in the third and fourth movements, and then proceeded to strain the tonal structure to the utmost. 

 

Listen to the fourth movement, which begins innocently enough, but does not actually bear a key signature, and only occasionally makes reference to the F^# major tonic. He does not entirely surrender thematic form, however, and phrasing influenced by Brahms is still evident in this work. This is what Schoenberg himself had to say about the approach to 'free atonality' in this quartet:

"In the third and fourth movements the key is presented distinctly at all the main dividing points of the formal organization. Yet the overwhelming multitude of dissonances cannot be balanced any longer by occasional returns to such tonal triads as represent a key. It seemed inadequate to force a move into the Procrustean bed of a tonality without supporting it by harmonic progressions that pertain to it. This was my concern, and it should have occupied the mind of all my contemporaries also."

Now listen to "Colors," the third of the Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16 (1909):  

 

This entire piece is played at a very soft dynamic, and we are not meant to easily recognize the individual instruments entering and departing. The effect is one of changing sonority—the timbre is more important than the pitch, and tonality is once again nearly superfluous. Some scholars have referred to this as the "emancipation of tone color." Schoenberg himself did not always find this "liberating," but more an inevitable consequence of the evolution of musical form, and many of his contemporaries felt that the discovery of new tonal possibilities brought with it a sense of loss as well.

In Erwartung, (1909) Schoenberg again employs a soprano, but this time because he has abandoned thematic form entirely, at least in the usual sense: no themes are repeated, and motifs are not elaborated:

 

Rather than use harmony to provide structure to the piece, he uses the text itself to drive the work. Based on what we now tend to regard as rather dreadful poetry, the text presents the interior dialogue of a woman waiting for her lover in the forest. He does not appear, she becomes frantic, stumbles upon his murdered corpse, and then fitfully oscillates between states of fear, jealosy, and remembrance. The text was commissioned especially by Schoenberg, however, and its hysteria is evoked by the stream-of-consciousness quality of the music itself, which is frequently turbulent, and was correctly understood at the time as a masterpiece of Expressionism in musical form. You can sense much of the effect of the longer composition in the closing section excerpted here.

Finally, in Pierrot Lunaire (1912), a melodramatic work for string quintet and voice, Schoenberg introduces a further twist in the now somewhat-reduced emphasis on textual motif, calling for the use of Sprechstimme, a kind of half-singing, half-speaking recitation voice that is purposely to avoid strong adherence to a fixed set of pitches. In his instructions to performers, Schoenberg wrote, "It is never the task of performers to recreate the mood and character of the individual pieces on the basis of the meaning of words, but rather solely on the basis of the music. The extent to which the tone-painting-like rendering of the events and emotions of the text was important to the author is already found in the music." Listen to these four brief excerpts from the longer work. The earnestly blasphemous text by the Symbolist poet Albert Giraud concerns a clown engaged in various surreal activities. Let's sample a few of the movements:

1. Moondrunk (1:39):

 

The wine which through the eyes we drink
flows nightly from the moon in torrents,
and as a spring-tide overflows
the far and distant land.

Desires terrible and sweet
unnumbered drift in floods abounding.
The wine which through the eyes we drink
flows nightly from the moon in torrents

The poet, in an ecstasy,
drinks deeply from the holy chalice,
to heaven lifts up his entranced
head, and reeling quaffs and rains down
the wine which through the eyes we drink

2. Columbine (1:43):

 

13. Decapitation (2:13)

 

The moon, a polished scimitar...

(You get the idea)

18. The moonspot (0:54)

The "Moonspot" excerpt also happens to be a very elaborate canon, though it is difficult for the untrained ear to detect this without a musical score at hand. (The canon is a form in which each part plays the same line, but enters at a different time—think of "Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream." Variations include introducing the original line backwards, upside down, twice as fast or slow, etc.) The effect is not really meant to be virtuosic, however, since the main challenge of the tonal canon lay in how to resolve all the disparate lines into a concluding consonance, and here Schoenberg deliberately had no tonic chord to refer to.

(In the future, we'll add Schoenberg works in the post-1920 serialist mode, crucial to the notion that a proper "system" distinct to modernist music could be formally specified.)