The Ellington Century

by David Schiff

  —Zola, Au bonheurs des dames

  Between 1905 and 1910 the spectrum of European music shifted from somber Victorian mauve to riotous fauve. The mournful hues of Brahms and Bruckner gave way to the extravagant glitter of Ravel's Shéhérazade, Strauss's Salome, Puccini's Madama Butterfly, Debussy's Ibéria, Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, Stravinsky's Firebird. Shimmering orchestral effects, erotic subject matter, and exotic geographic settings mirrored looming issues of the fin de siécle: imperialism, orientalism, Decadence, Symbolism, the occult, the primitive, and what Elaine Showalter termed “sexual anarchy.” More than a matter of “sound for sound's sake,” the heightened intensity of timbre presaged changes in the way music represented ideas and feelings, changes, as well, in its social function.

  These riotous new timbres heralded the musical onset of modernism (a.k.a. Symbolism or Decadence in fin de siècle parlance). Unlike romantic music, Symbolist music did not conjure up easily identifiable emotions. Instead it was evocative, evasive, even deliberately obscure. Treating human nature as an unfamiliar terrain, it placed the human subject (you and me) within a complex web of sensory associations. The self became an Other.

  By mimicking, however superficially, non-European musical styles (Chinese, Japanese, or Balinese), composers undermined the assumption that the ideas and emotions represented in European music were universal categories. European music, like Zola's department store, had already begun to trade in exotic colors (think of Aida and Carmen) without the composers realizing how such appropriation might transform the appropriators. The xylophone, a rogue instrument with Asian/African origins, can help track the fin de siècle shift of timbre and its unforeseen consequences. Long before its first clattering appearance in European concert music, in Saint-Saëns's Danse macabre of 1874, the xylophone assumed the role of a menacing outsider. Originating in Southeast Asia and developed in Africa, it reached Europe in the fifteenth century: “The earliest pictorial evidence of the xylophone is found in a woodcut from the collection Totentanz [Dance of death, 1511] by Holbein the Younger, depicting Death carrying the instrument hanging from a shoulder strap.”35 An alien, skeletal instrument played by itinerant musicians, the xylophone signified otherness; in the 1890s its dry, cackling tone propelled a broomstick-borne witch in Hansel and Gretel and gave a tinselly glitter to the countercultural street life of Montmartre in La Bohème.

  Placed within the plush romantic orchestra, the alien xylophone sounded unvocal and immiscible. Its diabolical death rattle mocked the sound ideal of European music, the expressive voice. It did not breathe or vibrate, it just clonked. In the first decade of the twentieth century the xylophone became an emblem of the new as well as the Other. Its sound evoked states of being that were alternative geographically, racially, or psychologically. In Strauss's Salome it paced the frantic belly-shaking coda of the Dance of the Seven Veils; in Debussy's Ibéria, it initiated the sultry habanera of “les parfums de la nuit”; in Gigues it punctured the sound of a whining carousel like a throbbing migraine; and in Jeux it mocked middle-class morals with a shockingly modern romance à trois. It etched its alien imprint on Mahler's Symphony no. 6 (danses macabres and hard-driven death marches), Ravel's Mother Goose Suite (evoking the Balinese gamelan) and Daphnis et Chloé (satyrs), Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16 (sinister premonitions), Berg's Altenberg Lieder, op. 4 (snow and, later, unmeasurable pain), and Stravinsky's Firebird (the infernal Kastchei) and Petrouchka (the fatal interracial fight between Petrouchka and the Moor).

  In all these works the xylophone's harsh matter-of-factness eroded the aesthetic foundation of European music, which could be summed up in the word expression. Music was supposed to be a simple voicelike communication, speech turned into song. Heeding Wordsworth's notion that a poet was a “man speaking to men,” nineteenth-century listeners imagined a symphony or concerto as a gendered lyrical utterance, a man singing to men. Composers emphasized instruments most reminiscent of the human (particularly the male) voice, including cello, horn, and clarinet, to make the entire orchestra sound like a magnified lyric baritone. Audience members felt that the music spoke to them directly in terms they immediately grasped, a condition I'll call “inter-subjectivity.” Assuming that the emotions expressed in the music, from the pathétique to the eroica, were universals, theorists and acousticians claimed that the devices for representing these emotions were not the conventions of a particular idiom or culture but sprang from the facts of physics and biology—an idea that remains surprisingly alive today.

  The xylophone's antivoice drove the center of musical aesthetics away from human expression and toward tone color, whose relation to human consciousness was more mysterious than the familiar signals of feelings. Bypassing the ideal of expression, Debussy defined music as “colors and rhythmicized time.”36 Schoenberg's “Farben” (Colors), the third of his Five Pieces for Orchestra, elevated tone color above melody, harmony, or rhythm. In his Harmonielehre of 1911 he predicted that the music of the future would make melodies not out of pitches but of colors: klangfarbenmelodie. A quarter of a century later, Ravel's Bolero, an epic klangfarbenmelodie, confirmed the triumph of timbre over expression—and quickly achieved worldwide popularity.

  The development of recording further aided and abetted the new primacy of sound. Bolero, popular as it was in the concert hall, came into its own with the advent of hi-fi stereophonic recording technology. Although the pursuit of high fidelity seemed like a technological development, recording changed all aspects of musical culture. By allowing any kind of music to be played at home, it undermined the brick-and-mortar hierarchy that placed the highest forms of musical art in concert halls and opera houses, the lowest in bars and brothels. Recorded music, reproduced without recourse to notation, erased the distinction between calculated composition and spontaneous improvisation. Its technology also determined musical form; Ellington built his “three-minute masterpieces” to fill one side of a 78 rpm, just as Stravinsky composed the movements (one to a side) of his Serenade in A.37 Soon enough, the evolving capacities for sound storage and organization fed back on acoustical sound itself, so that live performances increasingly aspired to the sound and ambience of recordings. The art of orchestration now collaborated with the artistry of the recording engineer; classical and popular musicians alike would need to master both roles.

  KIND OF WHITE: PIERROT LUNAIRE

  Like Duke Ellington, Arnold Schoenberg was, at times, a painter as well as a composer. However, while Ellington's music merged aural and visual sensations effortlessly, in Schoenberg's music they collided explosively. The resulting music and paintings retain their power to disturb. Critics have treated them either as artistic breakthroughs toward a new representational system, or as medical data, the diaries of a mad musician, but choosing either one of these escape routes trivializes the music. Schoenberg's short-lived exaltation of musical color over melody and harmony, like Ellington's lifelong pursuit of the blues, sprang from a fundamental dissatisfaction with the framework of reality as it had come to be understood in European culture.

  In 1905 Arnold Schoenberg struck up a fatal friendship with the painter Richard Gerstl at a Mahler concert in Vienna. Discussions with Gerstl soon led Schoenberg to try painting himself. In 1907 Gerstl moved in with Schoenberg's family and then ran off with Schoenberg's wife, Mathilde, mother of his two children and sister of his friend and teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky. When Mathilde returned to her husband, Gerstl committed suicide, on November 5, 1908. Even before Gerstl's death, Schoenberg's music was moving toward the “emancipation of the dissonance” that had been forecast, though not yet attained, in the final movement of his Second String Quartet (which he dedicated to Mathilde after the affair had ended). At the premiere, a month after the suicide, hostile members of the audience made catcalls and whistled into their house keys in protest, even though the quartet cadenced conventionally enough in F# major.

  In the face of such vehement resistance to his music Schoenberg suddenl
y considered pursuing a career as a painter—a delusion perhaps born from a kind of Stockholm syndrome after the Gerstl affair. At the same time though he pushed the “emancipation of the dissonance” further in a series of increasingly radical compositions: Three Pieces for Piano, op. 11, The Book of the Hanging Gardens, op. 15 (song cycle), Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16 (the first piece entitled “Premonitions,” the third, “Colors”), and the monodrama Erwartung, op. 17, all composed in 1908 and 1909.38

  After this creative explosion Schoenberg entered a dry spell. His sense of isolation had deepened with Mahler's departure from Vienna in 1907 and his death in 1911. He feared that even his staunchest supporters, his two students, Berg and Webern, were becoming rivals more than disciples. Ever resourceful, Schoenberg took advantage of his composer's block by completing his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony), mainly traditional save for speculative talk about constructing chords in fourths rather than thirds (which Schoenberg had already demonstrated in his Kammersinfonie, op. 9) and constructing melodies from tone colors rather than pitches, or klangfarbenmelodie. Schoenberg's compositional floodgates would reopen only after another momentous encounter with a painter, Wassily Kandinsky.

  Kandinsky and other artists associated with the journal The Blue Rider attended an all-Schoenberg concert in Munich on January 2, 1911. Kandinsky commemorated the concert in his painting “Impression III (concert),” which evolved from a realistic doodle to an abstraction in which, as Fred Wassermann writes, “the piano has become a dominant mass of black (bisected by a white band), smashing up against and vibrating with the overwhelming intensity of the yellow that envelops most of the painting.”39 The concert included the recent Second Quartet, op. 10 and Three Piano Pieces, op. 11. On January 18, Kandinsky wrote Schoenberg, whom he had never met, a letter with a portfolio of his works, proclaiming that “what we are striving for and our whole manner of thought and feeling have so much in common that I feel completely justified in expressing my empathy.40 Schoenberg responded on January 24 as if he had been thrown a lifeline:

  I am sure that our work has much in common—and indeed in the most important respects: In what you call the unlogical and I call the “elimination of the conscious will in art.” I also agree with what you write about the constructive element. Every formal procedure which aspires to traditional effects is not completely free from conscious motivation. But art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one's taste, or one's upbringing, or one's intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive.41

  Schoenberg and Kandinsky met in person in September 1911. Kandinsky had been planning to publish “an almanac that would present a synthesis of the arts by mixing the radical new work of an international group of modern artists and musicians with folk art, Asian art and ‘primitive’ art.”42 Schoenberg contributed the essay “The Relationship to the Text” and the score of Herzgewächse, a setting of a symbolist poem by Maeterlinck for high soprano, celesta, harmonium, and harp for the publication. Four of his paintings appeared at the first Blue Rider exhibition in December 1911.

  Herzgewächse, with its otherworldly, séance-style sonority and super-high F on the word mystisches was the first indication of Kandinsky's influence on Schoenberg. The composer had come to this new artistic alliance already steeped in the Viennese expressionism of Klimt and Kokoschka, and he was devoted to the notions of the instinctual basis of life found in the writings of Strindberg and especially Otto Weininger, the suicidal author of Sex and Character, to whose memory Schoenberg had originally dedicated his Harmonielehre.

  As Carl Schorske chronicled, the fin de siècle Viennese vanguard saw their society as fundamentally deceptive. But what was the truth behind the false appearances? Schoenberg may have found an answer in Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art. The painter presented the composer with an inscribed copy of his book on December 9, 1911. Just before publication he had added these words: “Schoenberg's music leads us into a new realm, where musical experiences are no longer acoustic, but purely spiritual. Here begins the ‘music of the future.”43 A trained musician, Kandinsky also praised the compositions of Debussy and Scriabin.

  Kandinsky's speculative theoretical writings could not be more different from Schoenberg's textbooklike Harmonielehre. In “The Relation to the Text,” however, Schoenberg not only extolled Concerning the Spiritual in Art as a book he had read “with great joy,” but he developed Kandinsky's distinction between appearances and reality: “The outward correspondence between music and text, as exhibited in declamation, tempo and dynamics, has but little to do with the inner correspondence, and belongs to the same stage of primitive nature as the copying of a model.”44 Kandinsky's book presented three arguments. First he called for an art that would rise above “materialism,” with its concern only for appearances and “shapeless emotions such as fear, joy, grief, etc.” The new art would express “lofty emotions beyond the reach of words” in pursuit of “the internal truth which only art can divine, which only art can express by those means of expression which are hers alone.”45 Next he described a “spiritual revolution” using the figure of a triangle moving onward and upward. At the center of this argument he cited Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, a movement that approached “the problem of the spirit by way of the inner knowledge.”46 Finally, Kandinsky discussed at length “the psychological working of color” as a way toward a fusion of the arts involving musical movement, pictorial movement, and physical movement. (Not surprisingly, Kandinsky's search for a Gesamtkunstwerk sprang from his experience of Wagner's Lohengrin.)47 Although, unlike Scriabin, he did not actually experience synesthesia, Kandinsky catalogued the effects of colors in terms of musical sounds:

  A light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a cello; a still darker a thunderous double bass and the darkest blue of all—an organ.

  …absolute green is represented by the placid, middle notes of the violin.

  White…has this harmony of silence, which works upon us negatively, like many pauses in music that break temporarily the melody.

  In music black is represented by one of those profound and final pauses.…The silence of black is the silence of death.

  Light warm red…is a sound of trumpets, strong, harsh, and ringing.

  Violet is…an English horn, or the deep notes of wood instruments (e.g. the bassoon).48

  The purely spiritual was no vague region; psychic explorers from Swedenborg to Blavatsky had mapped it out in terms of numbers and colors.49 The Theosophical Society attached particular importance to the numbers three and seven; the society defined its mission in terms of three large aims and pictured the universe as seven bodies of spirit/matter.

  During his brief but intense friendship with Kandinsky (which terminated with the outbreak of the First World War), Schoenberg applied occult ideas of the spirit to two major works, one, Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand), a one-act opera already in progress, the other, Pierrot Lunaire, an unforeseen opportunity. Die glückliche Hand was begun in 1910 as a pairing to Erwartung, a contrast of masculine genius to feminine instinct straight out of Weininger. At curtain rise, the protagonist, simply called “Der Mann,” lies facedown: “On his back crouches a cat-like, fantastic animal (hyena with enormous, bat-like wings) that seems to have sunk its teeth into his neck.” Following the example of Kandinsky's opera Der gelbe Klang, written in 1909 with music by Thomas von Hartmann (a Russian composer who later became a follower of Gurdieff) and published in The Blue Rider in 1912, Schoenberg represented the creative work of Der Mann through a “color crescendo”: “It begins with dull red light (from above) that turns to brown and then a dirty green. Next it changes to a dark blue-gray, followed by violet. This grows, in turn, into an intensely dark red which becomes ever brighter and more glaring until, after reaching a blood-red, it is mixed more and more with orange and then bright yellow; finally a glaring yellow light alone remains an
d inundates the second grotto from all sides.”50

  In January 1912 Albertine Zehme, a onetime Wagnerian soprano who had become a diseuse, asked Schoenberg to write music to accompany her recitation of poems from Pierrot Lunaire, a collection of fifty poems by the Belgian Parnassian Albert Giraud in the German translation of Otto Erich Hartleben. Zehme promised twenty to thirty performances and Schoenberg at first viewed the commission mainly as a business opportunity, but he soon found himself engaged in his most original composition to date.

  Usually discussed in term of its sprechstimme performance style midway between speech and song, its contrapuntal structures (including passacaglia and fugue), and its brilliant instrumental writing, Pierrot owes much of its sound and structure to Kandinsky. Schoenberg constructed it systematically from colors and numbers, the “inner values” behind external appearance, as Kandinsky had written in his introduction to Der gelbe Klang: “The means belonging to the different arts are externally quite different. Sound, color, words!…In the last essentials, these means are wholly alike: the final goal extinguishes the external dissimilarities and reveals the inner identity.”51