0.10 Appendix 1: musician biographies  (Page 28/37)

Since medieval times, Western music theory had been based on the concept of a key center, or tonic, in melodies and harmonies, and on the distinction between consonance and dissonance in the relationship between voices in music of two or more parts. These are seminal principles that form the underpinnings of the religious music of the Renaissance, the fugues and cantatas of Bach, the symphonies of Beethoven, the operas of Mozart and Verdi, and other masterpieces of Western art music. At the end of the 19th century, however, there was a sense among progressive musicians that the major/minor system and the compositional procedures and forms it had produced had run their course. It was in this atmosphere of searching for alternative approaches that Schoenberg came up with a new theory of composition. Perhaps his lack of formal training in a discipline where complex problems of form, counterpoint and harmony, instrumentation, and notation have traditionally required years of study with a master freed him to think outside established conventions. In any case, Schoenberg’s “method of composing with twelve tones” was a radical departure from traditional compositional procedures. Central to the method is his revolutionary idea that all twelve tones into which the octave is divided in Western music should be treated as equal. In other words, no tone would dominate as a tonic. The composition of a work according to Schoenberg’s method begins with the creation of a tone row containing all twelve pitches. This row is the germinal cell from which all melodic, harmonic, and contrapuntal materials are derived. The principles for configuring a tone row and the complex ways it can be manipulated are formulated in Schoenberg’s theoretical writings. Because of the absence of a key center, twelve-tone music is often called “atonal,” a term to which Schoenberg objected, or “serial” because the compositional technique involves manipulation of a tone row, or series.

While twelve-tone describes Schoenberg’s compositional procedure, his style is classified as expressionist. Expressionism was an early 20th-century movement that sought to reveal through art the irrational, subconscious reality and repressed primordial impulses postulated and analyzed in the writings of Freud. Rather than depict impressions received from the outer world, painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, Edvard Munch, and Max Beckmann, and writers such as August Strindberg, Frank Wedekind, Stefan George, and Franz Kafka explored the shadowy and distorted images, hallucinatory visions, and irrational terrors of the subconscious. Hysteria, isolation and alienation, the grotesque and macabre were favorite subjects of Expressionist artists. Schoenberg himself took up painting in 1908 and, over the course of his life, created imaginatively intense if technically amateurish pictures, including several self-portraits. In the music of Schoenberg and other Expressionist composers, relentless emotional intensity is attributable to jagged, highly disjunct melodic lines; instruments in extreme ranges; unresolved tension through avoidance of consonant sonorities; texts dealing with violence and abnormal behavior; and exaggeration and distortion of the natural accents of speech.