The Ellington Century

by David Schiff

  The piece alternates two ideas so its formal plan could be likened to classical style alternating variations, although few listeners would detect the structure because the two themes are mainly defined by their pitch content but not their rhythms or textures. The only other hint that Schoenberg provides to make the contrast audible is in dynamic gesture; until the coda all the appearances of A are rising crescendos.

  In a classical variation piece the harmonic progression would unify the structure. Op. 23 no. 2 has a lot of chords, but are they harmony? I've just backed into the central question about atonality, which, back in the day, also seemed like the central question about twentieth-century music. Theorists offer three different types of explanation for music like Op. 23 no. 2, which bears little recognizable relation to the harmonic practices and conditions of the tonal period. On one side Hindemith and Ulehla argued that any combination of tones produces a hierarchy; any music made from tones is tonal. Schoenberg actually made a similar point in 1923 in defending himself against the rival twelve-tone system of J. M. Hauer: “With tones, only what is tonal, in keeping with the nature of tones, can be produced; there must at least be that connection of tones based in the tonal, which has to exist between any two notes if they are to form a progression that is at all logical and comprehensible.”9 At the other side are the aesthetic arguments of Cage and Stockhausen. In their view the emancipation of the dissonance was just a first step toward a general emancipation of sounds; differences in harmony were mere statistics. And in the middle fall the Schoenbergian theorists, mainly American scholars influenced by the ideas of Milton Babbitt, George Perle, and Allen Forte. They see Schoenberg's harmonic development as evolutionary, but with a crucial turning point with the move, around 1921, from an idiom they term either “free atonal” or “contextual” to the twelve-tone method that Schoenberg developed in composing, simultaneously, the piano pieces Op. 23, the Serenade op. 24, and the piano suite Op. 25. The earliest twelve-tone piece, or at least the one with the lowest opus number, is the Waltz, op. 23, no. 5.

  In much of his writings Schoenberg used the reasonable, omniscient voice of the teacher, claiming that the goal of his music was not revolution but comprehensibility: “I have not discontinued composing in the same style and in the same way as at the very beginning. The difference is only that I do it better now than before; it is more concentrated, more mature.”10 But he would also break into a religious and even mystical kind of discourse to defend his music in terms of divine inspiration. He alternatively portrayed himself as the successor to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms, and, as in his 1911 essay on Liszt, compared himself to “Plato, Christ, Kant, Swedenborg, Schopenhauer and Balzac.”11 The twelve-tone method was not a logical path but a divine intervention: “The Supreme Commander had ordered me on a harder road.”12

  In practice Schoenberg's deep-seated dualism (style and idea, Moses and Aaron) rests on an unsteady foundation of jostling ideas. From the classical repertory Schoenberg derived an idea of organicism, in which all details of a piece are connected. “When one cuts into any part of the human body,” he wrote with Kafkaesque imagery, “the same thing always comes out—blood.”13 From romantic music he derived an idea of unmediated, inspired writing, particularly in relation to a text. He claimed that he composed songs “inspired by the first word of the text…straight through to the end without troubling myself in the slightest about the continuation of poetic events, without even grasping them in the ecstasy of composing.” Even though he had formulated the identity of compositional logic and spontaneous inspiration in 1912 at the moment of his decisive involvement with Kandinsky, he restated the argument in more concrete terms for a radio broadcast in 1932.14 Schoenberg here explained his Four Orchestral Songs, op. 22 in terms of “the unconscious sway of musical logic.” The first song, “Seraphita,” begins with a long melody for the clarinets. Schoenberg shows first how it opens (like the bridge of “Prelude to a Kiss”) with a series of minor seconds. This series ends, though, with a minor third. The combination of a rising minor third and a descending minor second produces what Schoenberg calls a “gestalt,” but that shape immediately mutates to a rising minor third and a rising minor second, outlining a previously unstated interval, the major third. Pretty soon similarly inspired tropisms turn minor seconds into major sevenths, combine minor thirds into the tritone, and somehow generate “variations” that include the interval of the perfect fifth, which was not present in immediate succession in the initial phrase. Schoenberg here includes within the techniques of variation not only repetition and transposition and recombination of intervals but also their enlargement, so that a minor third can swell to become a major third. Inspiration knows no limits.

  This radio lecture nicely illustrates the technique that Schoenberg termed “developing variation.” When he cited this technique in the music of Brahms, it referred to the use of thematic elaboration rather than repetition. At the beginning of the Fourth Symphony Brahms followed his initial statement of the theme not with the usual repetition or counterstatement, but with a variation that introduced a new contrapuntal element to the phrase. Similar kinds of elaboration appear in Mahler's later symphonies. Both Brahms and Mahler, however, worked within the classical notion of a variation, which is also the basis of jazz improvisation—the rearticulation of a harmonic structure through melodic ornamentation. In his description of melodic development in Op. 22 no. 1, however, Schoenberg makes no mention of harmony, even though the melody is accompanied by chords of three to six pitches. In a music appreciation-style radio talk, such oversimplification may just be the nature of the beast, but Schoenberg certainly gave the impression that the rapid free-associational expansion of the melodic line was not constrained or contained by any notion of harmony.

  This brings us to a third foundational idea, the emancipation of the dissonance, for which Schoenberg had to claim divine origins. Here too, though, Schoenberg offered a logical explanation. He described the history of music as a gradual expansion of the field of permitted harmonies, from perfect intervals, to triads, to seventh chords. Harmonies that once seemed dissonant, Schoenberg argued, later became consonances. Since dissonances created musical tension and heightened emotional expression, composers had to find new dissonances as the old ones lost their potency. Post-Wagnerian composers, like Wolf, Strauss, and Schoen-berg, often created chords provocatively out of dissonances, in appoggiatura chords. In his early songs Erwartung, op. 2 no. 1, Schoenberg constantly restates such a brazen nonharmonic harmony in a five-pitch chord that looks like it is constructed in fourths rather than thirds (from the bottom up: E-A-D-G-C Heard on its own, this combination of pitches would seem tonally illegible, but Schoenberg preceded it and followed it with an E triad. The four upper pitches in his strange chord are neighbor tones to the notes of that triad. Heard as accented but passing dissonances they are both logical and pretty. And if they are so pretty, why call them dissonances? The richly expressive songs in Schoenberg's Opp. 2, 3, and 6 show a wide variety of techniques for avoiding, but ultimately confirming, the tonal structure. Schoenberg thought that he had attained a mature synthesis of advanced harmonic and melodic thinking in his Kammersinfonie, op. 9, written in 1906, which conspicuously absorbed whole-tone and quartal harmonies associated with his French rivals, into the synthesis of Brahmsian and Wagnerian ideas he had already achieved in his First String Quartet. The comforting idea that he had finally arrived at a personal style, however, “was as lovely as a dream as it was a disappointing illusion.”15 The next step, the result of an “unconscious process,” was to abolish the distinction between dissonances and consonances; from now on all harmonies were to be created equal. Even before Schoenberg portrayed his role as musical emancipator in the operatic figure of Moses, the phrase “emancipation of the dissonance” carried a lot of baggage from the book of Exodus, and in particular the lesson that emancipation itself would be just the beginning of a long and difficult journey, a painful cultural revolution. As i
n Orwell's parable, after emancipation some intervals would have to be more equal than others. Schoenberg and his students increasingly emphasized the previously dissonant intervals of the second, fourth, seventh, and tritone while repressing the older consonances like the octave, fifth, and major triad as emblems of the previous enslavement.

  Schoenberg's new harmony would grow out of this unpromising mix of academicism, genius worship, and utopianism, but perhaps the confluence of these ideas only looks strange if you expect the results to sound like normal music. To my ears the Waltz that ends Op. 23 and announces the twelve-tone method sounds all too normal, neither expressive nor ironic nor even, as it unfolds, particularly interesting, let alone divinely inspired. It seems more perishable than Irving Berlin's contemporary valse triste “What'll I Do?” Op. 23 no. 2, on the other hand, shows what Schoenberg could do when the lightning really struck. The system is not necessarily at fault here. Like other superfluent composers (Strauss, Hindemith, Shostakovich), Schoenberg couldn't always distinguish works that were merely competent from those that hit the bull's-eye.

  Op. 23 no. 2 seems compelling even though it wavers between strict serial development and freer developing variation. Even its rigorous restatements of pitch material vary so much in rhythm that the connections are not obvious—nor should they be. Schoenberg's other biblical hero was Jacob; in the years leading up to the invention of the twelve-tone method he struggled with and failed to complete a vast cantata called Jacob's Ladder. Op. 23 no. 2 sounds like a man wrestling with an angel. Its harmonies are at once visionary and tactile; even the clustering of adjacent melody notes into chords calls attention to the physicality of fingers, muscles, and arm weight, and the gradually slowing coda is a picture of bodily exhaustion. In ending with a bare but reconfigured restatement of the opening motive it still clings to a hope of transcendence, the promise that this seedling might again spring to life.

  Schoenberg believed that the twelve-tone method would sustain larger forms without compromising the emancipation of the dissonance. Other composers of the interwar period, however, felt that the new harmonic possibilities created by emancipation could also retain some aspects of older tonal thinking. Bartók and Berg worked out complex syntheses of tonal and atonal idioms. Although much has been written about both composers, their achievements have become enshrouded by arcane systematic elements either of their own devising or imagined by their proponents. Even today many of the riches of their harmonies remain untapped.

  Let's look at a movement by Bartók that has achieved masterpiece status and yet remains resistant to harmonic analysis: the third movement, Lento, of his Quartet no. 2, composed in 1917, just a few years before Schoenberg's Op. 23 no. 2, and similarly impacted by the Great War. The movement might be described as a modified sonata form:

  1. Opening to rehearsal no. 2: Theme I

  2. Rehearsal no. 2 to no. 4: Theme II (sounds, vaguely, like a variation of Theme I)

  3. Rehearsal no. 4 to three bars after no. 6: Theme III

  4. Fourth bar of rehearsal no. 6 to six bars before no. 7: Development

  5. Five bars before rehearsal no. 7 to six bars after no. 8: Episode

  6. Seven bars after rehearsal no. 8 to end: compressed recapitulation of Themes I, III, and II.

  The problem with this generic description, however, is that, in addition to its odd proportions, all three themes are in the same tonality of A.

  I hear the movement in different terms, as a tone parallel to a funeral:

  1. Gathering of mourners (the theme in violin I three bars after rehearsal no. 1 represents the deceased)

  2. Dirge

  3. Hymn

  4. Cortege

  5. Interment

  6. Departure and dispersal of mourners with a climactic recall of the Hymn.

  In his book on Bartók's chamber music János Kárpáti identifies the melody of the dirge as a “Transdanubian lament melody” from the collection made by Bartók and Kodály.16 Bartók's great dirges form a Mahleresque subgenre that is as characteristic of his personality as his better-known night musics. (Perhaps Bartók was as scarred by the loss of his father, when he was just seven, as Mahler was by the premature deaths of many of his siblings.) We might term these despairing pieces the shadows of those ecstatic nocturnes. His early symphony Kossuth contained his first funeral march, but a more original style of elegy appeared in his piano music of 1907-10, Bagatelles no. 6 and 13 from his op. 6, the two Elegies, the last of the Seven Sketches, and the Four Dirges. All of these increasingly desolate pieces prepare for two greater examples written during the war, the last movements of the Suite for Piano and the Quartet no. 2, and these in turn prepare for the great elegiac movements of his later years, in the Divertimento, Quartet no. 6, and Concerto for Orchestra. Also part of the subgenre is the seventh Improvisation on Hungarian folk songs, written in 1920, which Bartók dedicated to the memory of Debussy.

  To understand the harmonic idiom of the string quartet movement we first need to note the distinctive stylistic features of Bartók's dirge genre. Their source in folk music is clear both in the volume of transcribed laments and, more accessibly, in the second series of For Children, based on Slovak folk songs, which ends with the Mourning Song and Funeral Song. In these two dirges Bartók combined a plaintive melody with a simple dronelike accompaniment. This texture, which resembles the relation of bluesman and guitar, appears in most of the composed dirges as well and is clearly elaborated in the Four Dirges, op. 9a. All four pieces contrast a folk melody with an accompaniment that is less a harmony than an Other; the two elements seem to go their own way, so that, for instance, at the end of the last Dirge the melody cadences on the pitches C# and A# while the accompaniment ends on a G major triad. In all these pieces the accompanying harmonies serve to set off and amplify the expressive intensity of the melody rather than assimilating it to tonal progressions. To a large extent, therefore, melody and harmony use different pitches. Reversing usual tonal practice, shared notes, or melodic notes that complete a triad with the accompaniment, often resolve to nonharmonic tones, an effect first heard at the end of Bagatelle op. 6 no. 6.

  In the Lento of String Quartet no. 2 Bartók presents the opposition of melody and drone clearly at the very opening by separating the two violins musically from the viola and cello. This opposition reappears in what I term the Dirge section, and in the Cortege, and at the very end. According to Kárpáti, Bartók composed his thematic ideas first and then added the connecting sections. The two main themes, which I call the Dirge and Hymn, contrast sharply in texture; the first is the folklike contrast of melody and drone, the second a chorale. The Interment episode has its own uniquely woven texture, a two-part counterpoint in which the first violin plays one line in octaves while the second violin and cello play the other, a unique occurrence. Bartók linked these carefully differentiated textures with mediating transitional passages that also have the most directional sense of harmony, and, not incidentally, the most traditional voice leading.

  Like Schoenberg's Op. 23 no. 2, the Lento of Bartók's Quartet no. 2 breaks with nearly all the conditions of earlier tonality. Not a single major or minor triad appears. The most coherent and affirmative-sounding harmonies, heard in the Hymn, are built out of fourths rather than thirds. Also like the Schoenberg, but more consistently, Bartók pursued “developing variation.” Ideas do not repeat but evolve or mutate. We hear this at the very opening, where the violins state an idea four times: a held note and a descending interval that gradually expands, in each statement, from a minor third to a perfect fifth.

  In keeping with this movement's theme of loss, its musical ideas rarely sustain their initial form. Even the relatively affirmative-sounding rising fourth that begins the new section at rehearsal number 4 shrinks to a major third when it begins to be developed after rehearsal number 6. The wraithlike, insubstantial quality of the themes becomes even more apparent when we begin to notice how they are related to motives from the previous two movements
. The main motive of the first movement, E-A-D-C#, returns in shriveled form three bars after rehearsal number 1 in the first violin, G#-C#-F-E, and in a distended variant in the cello four bars before rehearsal number 2, C#-F-B-A. The melody played by the first violin at rehearsal number 2 is a beheaded version of the opening theme of the first movement, but it also recalls the ironic, acerbic melodic idea from the trio of the central Scherzo, drained, however, of its sassiness. The episode at the center of the movement sounds like an even more distant allusion, to the opening of the lachrymose fifth act of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande.17 Piling despair on despair Bartók quoted a motive, note for note, E-F-A-F, which itself is a shrunken, death-ridden version of the leitmotif associated with Mélisande in the opera: E-F#-A-F#.

  Harmonically the movement similarly presents a ghost tonality of A, a tonal center more clearly, if not traditionally, affirmed in the first movement with a memorable cantabile theme. In creating a ghostly, “deceased” tonality Bartók reinvented the traditional distinction between minor and major modes and between harmonic stasis and motion. The Dirge and Hymn represent grief and hope with two different kinds of static harmony, the drone on the pitches A and C, implying the minor mode, and chords constructed in fourths, which sound here like a parallel major mode. This opposition appears in stark contrast in the climax, seven bars after rehearsal number 9,where a five-note chord in fourths (E-A-D-G-C), all on the white keys, alternates with intensifying fourth chords, climaxing in a six-note tower of fourths (A#-D#-G#-C#-F#-B). The harmonies convey some sense of progression and also present a clear range, from the relatively consonant to the dissonant.

  Somehow Bartók also preserved the distinction between chord tones and nonchord (or nonharmonic) tones, distinctions lost in Schoenberg's music, even while he avoided familiar chordal types. In the dirge-style passages melody and drone use different pitches; we might say that Bartók constructed his dirge melodies entirely from nonharmonic tones, but since the melodies came first it would be more accurate to say that he constructed the drone so that it would form dissonant intervals with the melodies, a process cognate with Charles Mingus's harmonization of the blues in “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”