Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice 3515101608, 9783515101608

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Tonality 1900–1950 Edited by Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler and Philip Rupprecht

Tonality 1900–1950 Concept and Practice Edited by Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler and Philip Rupprecht

Franz Steiner Verlag

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über abrufbar. Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzulässig und strafbar. © Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2012 Druck: AZ Druck und Datentechnik, Kempten Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier. Printed in Germany. ISBN 978-3-515-10160-8

Contents Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Tonality as Concept and Category Joseph Auner Weighing, Measuring, Embalming Tonality: . How we Became Phonometrographers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Richard Cohn Peter, the Wolf, and the Hexatonic Uncanny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Wolfgang Rathert The Legacy of German Rule: Some Reflections on Another Musical . Iceberg in the Transatlantic Relationships of Music History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen Concepts of Tonality in Hindemith’s Unterweisung im Tonsatz and in His Late Writings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Tonality in Austro-German Theory Markus Böggemann Concepts of Tonality in Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Stephen Hinton Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre: Psychology and Comprehensibility. . . . . . . . . . 113 Felix Wörner Constructive and Destructive Forces: Ernst Kurth’s Concept of Tonality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

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Contents

Practices of Tonality Marianne Wheeldon Defending Tonality: The Musical Thought of Milhaud . and Koechlin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Mark Delaere “Autant de compositeurs, autant de polytonalités différentes”: . Polytonality in French Music Theory and Composition of the 1920s . . . . . . . . 157 Volker Helbing Nocturne in Blue, Black and Poppy Red: Tonal and . Formal Dramaturgy in the Third Movement of Ravel’s Sonate pour violon et violoncelle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Alain Frogley Tonality on the Town: Orchestrating the Metropolis . in Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Ullrich Scheideler Between Archaism and Modernism: Tonality in Music . for Amateurs in Germany around 1930 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Philip Rupprecht Among the Ruined Languages: Britten’s Triadic Modernism, 1930–1940 . . . . 223 Beth E. Levy Roy Harris and the Crisis of Consonance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Daniel Harrison Samuel Barber’s Nocturne: An Experiment in Tonal Serialism. . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

Contributors Joseph Auner is Chair and Professor of Music at Tufts University. His scholarly work focuses on Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, turn of the century Vienna, Weimar Berlin, and music and technology. He is the author of Western Music in Context: A Norton History, Music of Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Norton, forthcoming), A Schoenberg Reader (Yale, 2003), Postmodern Music/ Postmodern Thought (with Judy Lochhead; Routledge, 2001), and the Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg (with Jennifer Shaw; Cambridge, 2010). Markus Böggemann is Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of Kassel and was previously Lecturer at the University of Arts in Berlin and Assistant Professor of Musicology at Potsdam University. His publications include the monograph Gesichte und Geschichte. Arnold Schönbergs musikalischer Expressionismus zwischen avantgardistischer Kunstprogrammatik und Historismusproblem (Vienna, 2007), writings on the cultural context of the Viennese school, analytical studies, and essays on contemporary music. Richard Cohn is Battell Professor of Music Theory at Yale University. His work on chromatic harmony has been the topic of a series of summer seminars convened by the late John Clough, and has been developed in about a dozen doctoral dissertations. He recently completed Audacious Euphony: Chromatic Harmony and the Triad’s Second Nature (Oxford, 2012). In preparation is a general model of meter with applications for European, African, and African-diasporic music, and a co-edited collection on David Lewin’s phenomenological writings. Cohn also edits Oxford Studies in Music Theory. Mark Delaere is Professor of Musicology at the University of Leuven. His research covers music from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a special focus on the interaction among the analysis, history, theory, and aesthetics of music. Book publications include Funktionelle Atonalität (1993), New Music, Aesthetics and Ideology (1995), and Pierrot lunaire (with J. Herman, 2004). He is currently preparing a book on early serial music to be published in the series Analysis in Context: Leuven Studies in Musicology. Alain Frogley teaches music history at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and in Spring 2008 was Visiting Professor at Yale University. In 2005–06 he was a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. A contributor to the revised New Grove, Frogley has also edited Vaughan Williams Studies (Cambridge, 1996), and authored a monograph on Vaughan Williams’s Ninth Symphony for the Oxford University Press series Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure (2001).

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Contributors

Daniel Harrison is the Allen Forte Professor of Music Theory at Yale University, where he is also Chair of the Department of Music. His book on late nineteenthcentury chromaticism, Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music (Chicago, 1994), won the Young Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory. He has published on tonal-music topics in Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum, Musical Quarterly, Theory and Practice, and Music Analysis, among other venues. He has also published on the music of The Beach Boys in Understanding Rock (Oxford, 1997), a collection of essays on pop music. Volker Helbing is Professor of Music Theory at Hanover University of Music, Drama, and Media, and was previously Visiting Professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and Trossingen University of Music. His publications include a mono­ graph on Ravel entitled Choreographie und Distanz. Studien zur Ravel-Analyse (Hildesheim, 2008), a chapter in Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music (Rochester, 2011), and several essays on late twentieth-century European composers. Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen is Ordinarius in Musicology at the University of Zürich. He is co-editor of the Archiv für Musikwissenschaft and of Schubert: Perspektiven. He has published widely in music history, aesthetics, and the interpretation and reception history of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Most recently, he co-edited Johann Sebastian Bach und die Gegenwart (with Michael Heinemann; Cologne, 2007), Werk-Welten: Perspektiven der Interpretationsgeschichte (with Andreas Ballstaedt; Schliengen, 2008), and Bruckner-Handbuch (Stuttgart, 2010). Stephen Hinton is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, where he has also served as Senior Associate Dean for Humanities and Arts and chair of the Music Department. His publications include The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik, Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera (Cambridge Opera Handbook), the critical edition of Die Dreigroschenoper for the Kurt Weill Edition (edited with Edward Harsh), Kurt Weill: Gesammelte Schriften (edited with Jürgen Schebera, expanded 2nd edition, 2000), a volume in the Hindemith Collected Works, and most recently Kurt Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (Berkeley, 2012). Beth E. Levy is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Davis. She has recently finished a book titled Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, and has published articles in American Music, repercussions, and the Journal of Film Music. Her contribution to Copland and His World (edited by Carol Oja and Judith Tick; Princeton) won the Irving Lowens Award for the best article on American music in 2005. Wolfgang Rathert is Professor of Musicology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and his main research concerns music of the twentieth century to the present. He has published Charles Ives (Darmstadt, 1996) and Musikgeschichte USA (with Berndt Ostendorf; Mainz, 2012), and edited the Chamber Music of Kurt Weill for

Contributors

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the Critical Edition (with Jürgen Selk; Weill Foundation, 2004). He is a member of the advisory board of the journal Musik-Konzepte. Philip Rupprecht is Associate Professor of Music at Duke University. His publications include Britten’s Musical Language (Cambridge, 2001); “‘Something slightly indecent’: British composers, the European avant-garde, and national stereotypes in the 1950s” (Musical Quarterly, 2009); “Thematic drama,” in Peter Maxwell Da­ vies Studies (Cambridge, 2009); and “Agency effects in the instrumental drama of Musgrave and Birtwistle,” in Musical Narrative After 1900, ed. Michael Klein and Nicholas Reyland (Indiana, in press). He is preparing Avant-Garde Nation: British Musical Modernism, 1956–1979, and Rethinking Britten (forthcoming, 2013). Ullrich Scheideler is Head of Music Theory at Humboldt-University in Berlin and a former editor of the Arnold Schoenberg Critical Edition. His publications include Komponieren im Angesicht der Musikgeschichte. Studien zur geistlichen a-capellaMusik in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts im Umkreis der Sing-Akademie zu Berlin (Berlin, 2010), the critical editions of Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand (Mainz, 2005), and Autorschaft als historische Konstruktion (with Andreas Meyer; Stuttgart, 2001). Marianne Wheeldon is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include the music of Claude Debussy and musical culture in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century. She is the author of Debussy’s Late Style (Indiana, 2009) and editor of Rethinking Debussy (with Elliott Antokoletz; Oxford, 2011). She is currently preparing a book on Debussy’s posthumous reputation in the 1920s and 30s, an article from which appeared in Journal of Musicology (2010). Felix Wörner is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the history of music theory and aesthetics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His publications include a monograph on the early twelve-tone works of Anton Webern (Bern, 2004), and articles in Musiktheorie, Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, and Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, among others. His most recent publications are “Otakar Hostinsky, the Musically Beautiful and the Gesamtkunstwerk,” in Eduard Hanslick: Aesthetic, Critical and Cultural Contexts, ed. Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan and Wolfgang Marx (Rochester, forthcoming) and “Transmitting Schoenberg’s Legacy into a New World” in Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000, ed. Felix Meyer, Carol Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne C. Shreffer (Woodbridge, forthcoming 2012).

Introduction Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht Tonality, 1900–1950: our title aligns a very broad category of musical experience with a quite specific historical moment. The rhetorical strategy is deliberate, slightly polemical even. We begin by recognizing that tonality—or the awareness of key in music—achieved crisp theoretical definition in the early twentieth century, even as the musical avant-garde pronounced it obsolete. The notion of a general collapse or loss of tonality, ca. 1910, has remained influential within music historiography, and yet the textbook narrative sits uneasily with the continued flourishing of tonal music throughout the past century. Tonality, from an early twenty-first century perspective, never did fade from cultural attention, yet it remains a prismatic formation—defined as much by ideological and cultural valences as by more technical understandings of musical practice. The history of twentieth-century art music has often been told as a story of innovations in technique, and it is in the early years of the period that the narrative appears most dramatic. Talk of expressive crisis and stylistic rupture, of revolution rather than smooth continuity, dominates many histories of musical style or musical technique.1 The venturing into an atonal idiom by Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils around 1910, or the appearance of twelve-tone composition after 1923, invariably figure as pivotal developments in the history of Western music as a whole. In a 1933 lecture Webern examined tonality “in its last throes” in order to prove “that it’s really dead.”2 The sense of an inevitable and possibly irrevocable abandonment of tonality governs Schoenberg’s own references to “emancipation of the dissonance,” or Boulez’s later description of the Viennese composer’s atonal counterpoint as “freed from its slavery to tonality.”3 Atonal music, for its first listeners, was 1 Among widely circulated historical surveys, see for example Marion Bauer, Twentieth Century Music (1933; New York: Putnam, 1947); Adolfo Salazar, Music in Our Time (New York: Norton, 1946); H. H. Stuckenschmidt, Neue Musik (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1951); Paul Collaer, A History of Modern Music, trans. Sally Abeles (Cleveland: World, 1961); André Hodeir, Since Debussy: A View of Contemporary Music, trans. Noel Burch (New York: Grove, 1961); William W. Austin, Music in the 20th Century (New York: Norton, 1966); Hermann Danuser, Die Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts (Laaber: Laaber, 1984); Bryan R. Simms, Music of the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer, 1986); Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music (New York: Norton, 1991); Arnold Whittall, Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Richard Taruskin, The Early Twentieth Century, vol. 4, The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 2 Anton Webern, The Path to the New Music, ed. Willi Reich, trans. Leo Black (Bryn Mawr: Presser, 1963), 47. 3 Schoenberg, “My Evolution” (1949), in Style and Idea: Selected Writings, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (London: Faber, 1975), 84, 91; Pierre Boulez, “Arnold Schoenberg” (1961),

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something radical; like Cubism in painting (a “harmony of asymmetrical lights”),4 it was first understood as a genuinely new art, rather than as a reworking of earlier paradigms. Schoenberg himself in a January 1910 program note wrote of being “conscious of having broken through every restriction of a bygone aesthetic.”5 The image of limits breached has persisted for later historians. William Austin in the 1960s wrote of “a sort of spaceship, the twelve-tone technique,” carrying its creator “out into the abyss.” Paul Griffiths, 40 years later, in A Concise History of Western Music, puts the point more simply in the title of his chapter on atonality—“To Begin Again.”6 Most recently, the advent of atonality (born: 1909) has been marked as a historical event.7 But there is another story to be told about the 1900–1950 period. It begins by acknowledging the obvious continuity of tonal music throughout these years, in an established art-musical canon—encompassing Sibelius, Debussy, Copland, Prokofiev, Poulenc, Tippett, and any number of figures—whose music patently affirms tonal centers (not to mention the vernacular and theatrical works of Gershwin, Porter, Ellington, and countless others). Later movements operating under the banners of New Tonality, New Simplicity, or the post-modern have returned musicians’ concern with asserting a home key to the center of cultural debate in American and European music. As composers as diverse as Terry Riley, Arvo Pärt, and Alfred Schnittke have achieved wide popularity since the 1960s, musicology has called into question the categorical tonal/atonal divide, especially when mapped onto an evolutionary view of music history. Charles Seeger, already in 1929, dismissed historically motivated views of music’s pitch realm with a common-sense appeal to audience tastes: “Just as one can weary of too much tonality, so one can weary of too little.”8 Closer to the present, views surrounding the advent of atonality are changing; Schoenberg’s renunciation of tonality, Charles Rosen noted, had to be thorough, for “no one was so deeply attached as he to certain aspects of it.” Even in Schoenberg’s own music, the idea of a sharp break with former tonal practice has been modified by recognition of his “ongoing extension and transformation” of prior techniques.9 in Stocktakings From an Apprenticeship, trans. Stephen Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 281. 4 Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintres Cubistes (1913), in A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, ed. Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 477–514, citing 481. 5 “Bin ich mir bewuβt, alle Schranken einer vergangenen Ästhetik durchbrochen zu haben…” Cited in Danuser, Die Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, 35; trans. in A Schoenberg Reader, ed. Joseph Auner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 78. 6 Austin, Music in the 20th Century, 38; Paul Griffiths, A Concise History of Western Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 231. 7 See the symposium 100 Jahre Atonalität: Herausforderung für die Musiktheorie, in Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preuβischer Kulturbesitz, ed. Simone Hohmaier (Mainz: Schott, 2009). 8 Charles Seeger, “Tradition and Experiment in (the New) Music,” in Studies in Musicology II, 1929–1979, ed. Ann M. Pescatello (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 125. 9 Charles Rosen, Schoenberg (Glasgow: Collins, 1976), 42; Ethan Haimo, Schoenberg’s Transformation of Musical Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 7.

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Much turns on the circulation of metaphor. Figures of tonality’s exhaustion or death tug firmly against images of immutable nature; tonality is a proto-geometric space, or else a shared lingua franca; its loss spells crisis, its recovery a return to cultural vitality.10 The role of tonality in music historiography, as Michael Beiche has shown, is a highly mutable one, and by the early twentieth century the term invariably encompasses the relation to a new conceptual opposite, atonality. The historical course of tonal music, as Bryan Hyer writes, has been understood largely in terms of a proto-cadential master narrative “directed toward its own end.” The story unfolds in genetic accounts of growth or decay, and in the technological allegory in which tonality “collapses, breaks down or wears out from over-use.”11 Vivid metaphors, in their turn, are a salutary reminder that music theory—a discourse seeking ordered representations of what can be heard and understood—is constrained by verbal language.12 Striking, in the 1900–1950 period, is the extent to which the discovery of “new” musical resources by composers coincides with a spate of theoretical reflection on earlier tonal repertory, most notably from Austro-German writers. Schoenberg’s own Harmonielehre was first published in 1911, on the heels of his least tonal sounding compositions, and in close proximity to a Harmonielehre (1906) and a Kontrapunkt (1910) by the Viennese theorist Heinrich Schenker. Schenker’s theory of voice leading—the counterpoint of an Urlinie with supporting Bassbrechung, creating a deep structure, the Ursatz—was transplanted posthumously by his students to the USA, where it achieved widespread influence among English-speaking theorists and analysts. Ernst Kurth’s treatises, with their emphasis on leading-tone motion and the energetic flow of chromatic tonal music, date from this same period. For German-speaking musicians, on the other hand, it was Hugo Riemann’s prolific writings, offering an evolving theory of chordal functions within a key, that assumed by far the greater influence and pedagogical dissemination. Towards the end of his long career, Riemann reacted against the scientific methods of an emergent field of ethnomusicology, arguing in a 1916 study for tonality’s historical development from folk-melodic repertories towards the diatonicism of modern European art music.13 Such a study could be construed as an edifice against incomprehensibly atonal new music, or else as a teleological and Euro-centric view of world music. 10 The metaphoric lexicon is parsed in Lloyd M. Whitesell, “Twentieth-century Tonality, or, Breaking Up is Hard to Do,” in The Pleasure of Modernist Music, ed. Arved Ashby (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 103–20. 11 Michael Beiche, “Tonalität,” in Terminologie der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995), 412–33, esp. 425; Brian Hyer, “Tonality,” New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), 25:591. 12 On epistemologies of the aural, see Jairo Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: the Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 13 See Hugo Riemann, Folkloristische Tonalitätsstudien (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1916); also Matthew Gelbart and Alexander Rehding, “Riemann and Melodic Analysis: Studies in FolkMusical Tonality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories, ed. Edward Gollin and Alexander Rehding (New York: Oxford, 2011), 140–64.

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Either way, Riemann’s theory (much like Schenker’s, for that matter) was strongly implicated in discourses of cultural nationalism. A rounded concept of tonality, it seems important to affirm, can scarcely be thought apart from a complex of value judgments and claims toward cultural identity. Between 1900 and 1950, concepts of tonality define themselves amid the wider trans-Atlantic transmission—and ensuing modifications—of a range of theoretical concepts and compositional practices. Schenker’s well-known “Americanization” was by no means the first such transplant from the old world to the new; numerous other Austro-German theorists made the passage. Amid this historically continuous diaspora—stretching at least from Bernhard Ziehn’s arrival in Chicago in 1868 to Schoenberg’s college teaching in Los Angeles after 1936—the conceptual field encompassed by the basic term tonality, inevitably, covers a range of aesthetic and epistemic commitments. A perennial conceptual tension arises: that between acoustical definitions of relations between pitches (in a scale, for example), and a metaphysical concept of tonality grounded in the listener’s consciousness. A separation between physical and anthropological views of tonality is clearly evident in Fétis’s 1844 Traité, and one might claim that it is only with due attention to cultural context and the diverse premises of competing scholarly traditions that any concept of tonality comes into clear focus.14 The series of historically defined transformations identified in Fétis’s influential account of tonalité bears affinities to the clearly historicist program that grounds much later tonality theorizing. Carl Dahlhaus’s categories of melodische and harmonische Tonalität, for instance, expounded in publications of the 1960s, asserted considerable influence on Anglo-American scholars,15 even if the commitment to an eclectic and historically mediated notion of tonality remains at odds with more structuralist conceptions.16 But the tension between tonality as a kind of Saussur­ ian langue (a set of underlying and broadly valid structural rules) and tonality as parole (a more historically contingent and localized way of speaking) is hard to escape, even within the oeuvre of a single scholar. The point is clear if we return 14 François-Joseph Fétis, Traité complet de la théorie et de la pratique de l’harmonie (Paris: Schle­singer, 1844; 11th ed., Paris: Brandus, 1875). On Fétis’s engagement with German ­idealist thought, see Thomas Christensen, “Fétis and Emerging Tonal Consciousness,” in Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Ian Bent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37– 56. Fétis’s writings owe much to earlier French theorists’ formulations, notably the 1810 discussion of modalité and tonalité by Alexandre Étienne Choron. See his “Sommaire de l’Histoire de la Musique,” in Dictionnaire historique des Musiciens, ed. Choron and F. J. Fayolle (Paris: Valade, 1810; 2 vols., repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1971), 1:xxxvii–xxxix. 15 See Dahlhaus’s dictionary articles “Tonalität,” for Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Friedrich Blume (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1966; also repr. in the 1998 2nd edition); and “Tonality,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), 8:51–55; and his Untersuchungen über die Entstehung der harmonischen Tonalität (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1967); translated by Robert O. Gjerdingen as Studies on the Origins of Harmonic Tonality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 16 On the reception of Dahlhaus’s tonality scholarship, see Alexander Rehding, “Dahlhaus zwischen Tonalität und Tonality,” in Carl Dahlhaus und die Musikwissenschaft: Werk, Wirkung, Aktualität, ed. Hermann Danuser, Peter Gülke, Norbert Miller, and Tobias Plebuch (Schliengen: Edition Argus, 2011), 321–33.

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once more to Riemann, acknowledging now the discrepancies between his unified theory of Tonalität—grounded in traditional fifth-based chord relations—and the inconvenient centrality of enharmonic third relations revealed in his own analyses of Beethoven piano sonatas. Riemann’s central categories of tonal function, as Alexander Rehding has shown, prove inadequate to the harmonic exigencies of Beethoven’s chordal maneuvering. Tonality remains caught between structural rule and historical repertory.17 If Riemann’s theories of chordal function failed to take hold outside Germanspeaking countries in the early twentieth century, they have belatedly inspired one more phase of trans-Atlantic music theory—in this case, the remarkable efflorescence of so-called neo-Riemannian work, both formal and analytic, by American music theorists in the past two decades. Tonality, here, arises in sequences of transformations among triads within a Tonnetz, the grid-like network of tonal relations arranged according to common tones familiar from several nineteenthcentury theoretical writings.18 The “parsimony” of smoothly stepwise voice leading between Tonnetz positions well matches the chromatic situation in later Romantic music—Wagner’s Parsifal, for example—a repertory obviously still triadic but “not altogether tonally unified” in ways familiar in earlier diatonic music.19 A neo-Riemannian perspective increasingly promises new insights into a wealth of triadic music written after 1900, too. Analyses of works by Vaughan Williams, Ravel, Prokofiev, and Britten in the present volume attend particularly to a triadic language operating beyond traditional tonic-dominant schemes, one in which the security of the older consonance/dissonance binary is compromised at moments of functional ambiguity. Where familiar major and minor triads group themselves into symmetrical hexatonic progressions, a newly uncanny (unheimlich) discourse of “home” or tonal center emerges, and extant concepts of the distance between chords are up-ended.20 This soundworld, enticing to many early twentieth-century composers, is amenable to heuristic analyses that broaden the explanatory reach of an evolving branch of tonal theory. When attention turns away from tonality as rule to its living presence as repertory, the sheer breadth of the post–1900 tonal field is undeniable. The well-worn pedagogical notion of a diatonic common practice linking composers from Bach to Brahms appears unsatisfactory to listeners facing the chromatic fluency or mod­al 17 Alexander Rehding, “Tonality between Rule and Repertory: Or, Riemann’s Functions— Beethoven’s Function,” Music Theory Spectrum 33 (2011): 109–23. 18 See especially Richard Cohn, “Introduction to Neo-Riemannian Theory: a Survey and a Historical Perspective,” Journal of Music Theory 42 (1998): 167–80. In addition to the GollinRehding Oxford Handbook, three recent publications suggest a consolidation of this theoretical paradigm: Steven Rings, Tonality and Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Richard Cohn, Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Triad’s Second Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 19 Cohn, “Introduction,” 167. 20 On the numinous semantic trappings of hexatonic music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Cohn, Audacious Euphony, 20–24.

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flexibility of Schubert, in whose music the centrality of a single tonic function appears less self-evident.21 Whether it is possible to chart the territory beyond an era of seeming linguistic communality remains an open question. In the present context, we do not claim to present anything so grand as a paradigm shift in our historical view of something called tonality. Yet there are signs of an evolving ferment in theorists’ understanding of the broader historical trajectory of music’s pitch language—for example in the recognition of a nineteenth-century “second” practice favoring duality of key center, in the notion of separate diatonic and chromatic languages, or in the broader contention that tonal music presents an “extended” common practice, stretching from early polyphony through present-day vernacular styles.22 It is clear that recent commentators have moved a long way beyond the attimes bewildered reactions of early twentieth-century theorists to the stylistic transformations of the period. Schenker’s unprecedented insights into the contrapuntal basis of earlier tonal music were accompanied by his famously hostile dismissal of Stravinsky’s polyphony (“inartistic and unmusical”).23 Concurrently, Schoenberg’s most chromatic scores were being explained with reference to traditional tertian harmony and conventional chord functions.24 Casting a quizzical glance over a period of “unprecedented confusion,” the English critic Edwin Evans in 1925 sensed that the advent of twelve-note chromatic music did not necessarily “imply either the abolition or even the desuetude of the tonalities as we know them,” only the student’s age-old need to “probe the mysteries of harmony as the aspiring painter probes those of colour.”25 The various practices comprising the field of “Tonality 1900–1950” resist any simple taxonomy. And while reports of tonality’s demise are, we maintain, exaggerated, it is easy to sense a genuine transformation of outlook among composers and listeners. Works such as Stravinsky’s Symphony in C of 1940 or Hindemith’s Sinfonietta in E (1949), by title alone, knowingly draw attention to the problem of key emphasis as a central value in musical language. The designation “in C,” in a 21 “Schon in dieser so wohlklingenden und dem vordergründigen Ohr eindeutig tonal gesichert erscheinenden Musik Schuberts ereignet sich als sanfte Revolution ein erstes Infragestellen der Tonika als Funktionszentrum” (“In this music of Schubert, so gorgeous and so tonally secure to the foregrounded ear, the position of the tonic as functional center is placed into question for the first time, like a soft revolution”); Diether de la Motte, Harmonielehre (Kassel: Bären­reiter, 1976), 167; trans. from Cohn, Audacious Euphony, 205. 22 See, respectively, The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality, ed. William Kinderman and Harold Krebs, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); Cohn, Audacious Euphony, chapter 9; and Tymoczko, A Geometry, chapter 6. 23 “Meine Beweisführung gibt mir das Recht zu sagen, Strawinskys Satz sei … durchaus schlecht, unkünstlerisch und unmusikalisch.” Heinrich Schenker, “Fortsetzung der Urlinie-Betrachtungen,” in Das Meisterwerk in der Musik (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1925–30; repr. Hildes­ heim: Georg Olms, 1974), 2:39. Schenker’s assessment concludes his analysis of an excerpt from Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto. 24 See, for example, the analysis of cadence and function in Schoenberg’s Klavierstück, Op. 11, No. 1, in Edwin von der Nüll, Moderne Harmonik (Leipzig: Kistner & Siegel, 1932), 102–6. 25 Edwin Evans, “Atonality and Polytonality,” in Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, ed. Walter Willson Cobbett (London: Oxford University Press, 1929–30), 1:46, 47.

Introduction

17

century perceived to be wary of tonality, carries seemingly unavoidable historical baggage, whether the composer is Stravinsky or Terry Riley. Even if one accepts claims for unbroken historical ties between nineteenth-century tonal music and what followed, tonality after 1900 ceases to represent a quasi-natural foundation of music. It becomes, instead, a musical technique: “not an end in itself, but a means to an end.”26 Echoing Adorno’s conclusions about art in general, one might well argue that nothing concerning tonality is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.27 To speak so conclusively, though, is to run the risk of ignoring a number of salient threads of compositional practice in the first half of the twentieth century—threads we will identify here only briefly and synoptically. Tonality in the early twentieth century derives meaning and function frequently through a conscious artistic opposition to nineteenth-century aesthetic values. Stravinsky captured the sea-change memorably in 1924: “My Octuor is not an ‘emotive’ work but a musical composition based on objective elements which are sufficient in themselves.”28 His quotation marks do away with the emotional trappings of musical romanticism—a concern with subjective expression, or the sounding depiction of myth, society, religion, and philosophy.29 Busoni’s call for a “Young Classicism” of “strong and beautiful forms” found realization in a schematic opposition of diatonic and chromatic elements in his own music.30 The rage for a kind of audacious simplicity in pitch choices, meanwhile, is as idiomatic to the explicitly white-note side of Stravinsky’s middle period as to the eighteenth-century pastiche effects in early Poulenc, Milhaud, and others among Les Six. The self-conscious search for clarity and comprehensibility is bound up with a second facet of tonality in this period—its prominent role in works of functional (rather than absolute or programmatic) music. In the Gebrauchsmusik of Hindemith, Eisler, and Weill, modal or neo-triadic materials aim to address a wide public in an easy, pop-inflected vernacular. For Shostakovich and Prokofiev, in the 1930s and beyond, pitch choices were actively and publicly the object of Soviet-era ideological strictures. A fuller survey of early-to-mid twentieth-century tonalities—plural—might go on to identify the revival of folkloric melodic tonality in composers as diverse as Bartók, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams, or Copland. Further mapping of the territory, likewise, would require that we acknowledge the interplay of tonal and “post-tonal” or even serial languages in music that is essentially eclectic in its constructive means. Berg’s appropriations of Bach amount to what Mark DeVoto calls 26 Schoenberg, “Opinion or Insight?” (1926), in Style and Idea, 259. 27 See the opening sentence in Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, in his Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 7:9; and Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1. 28 Stravinsky, “Some Ideas About my Octuor” (1924), in Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: the Composer and his Works, 2nd ed. (London: Faber, 1979), 575. 29 On this paradigm, see Hermann Danuser, Weltanschauungsmusik (Schliengen: Edition Argus, 2009). 30 Busoni, letter to Paul Bekker, cited in Jim Samson, Music in Transition: a Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 1900–1920 (London: Dent, 1977), 28.

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“nostalgic tonality,” operating both as audible gesture and as a structuring framework that holds even amid densely chromatic textures.31 Britten’s compositional allusions to Purcell or Dowland, similarly, control the larger progress of luminous triads. By mid-century, Britten—like Frank Martin, Samuel Barber, Alberto Ginastera and others—is apt to arrange major and minor triads according to idiosyncratic twelve-tone schemes, thereby staging a delicate reconciliation of compositional approaches once deemed mutually exclusive. Some obvious features of earlier tonal practice continue to flourish throughout the twentieth century in radically different stylistic settings—the assertion of a home tonic or key-note; a favoring of plain triads as a central chordal resource; the prominence of scales as an audible basis for melodic invention. But if one seeks a fuller syntactic model of tonality—the rigorous hierarchy of structural and embellishing events in Schenker’s Schichten, for example—one is bound to admit that tonality after 1900 lacks the kind of linguistic familiarity and security observable in music of earlier periods. Fétis’s historical narrative, with its orderly progression of epochs—from a tonalité ancienne of plainchant through the tonalité moderne of Monteverdi and, later, of Mozart and Rossini—whatever its resonances for early nineteenth-century music, hardly speaks to the musical landscape after 1900. Tonality, to recall our starting point, isn’t exhausted or dead; a canon of artworks confirms it was never really abandoned. What seems most clear, surveying the first half of the twentieth century, is that the storms of progress define no coherent historical succession in the field of musical tonality. It seems more accurate to speak of a cosmopolitan simultaneity of musical languages—an old notion in music-historical circles, though one more frequently applied to the art of the later twentieth century.32 The time has come to attend more closely to continuities among a spectrum of musical styles—all “tonal,” to varying degrees—spanning the years 1900–1950. It may be that only from the longer perspective of the early twenty-first century are we ready to recognize tonality in the period of its much-reported demise. * Concept and Practice: in arranging the fifteen essays of this volume, we have—as the subtitle suggests—sought to balance broader conceptual reflections with the particularity of individual case studies. Confronting the contingent and diversified practice of a rich half-century of tonal music, we (like Melville’s narrator) felt that this was the kind of enterprise for which “a careful disorderliness” furnished the only true method.33 A first cluster of chapters, “Tonality as Concept and Category,” attempts to delineate and explore the basic field of inquiry. Four writers address the big questions grounding all tonality-talk—the influence of new musical technologies; the 31 Mark DeVoto, “Harmony,” in New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Michael Randel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 368. 32 See Leonard B. Meyer, Music, The Arts and Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), chapter 9. 33 See Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 82.

Introduction

19

listener’s role in identifying tonality effects; and the geographical and historical transmission of several concepts of tonality, most especially between Austro-Germanic culture and the US. Joseph Auner’s essay, “Weighing, Measuring, Embalming Tonality: How we Became Phonometrographers,” explores inventions in sound technology and science of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century as direct influences on the imagination of composers, performers, and theorists. Drawing on an eclectic array of writings, Auner proposes a set of hypotheses for how tonality has been and continues to be thought—his categories of “weighing,” “measuring,” and “embalming” (inspired by remarks of Satie) provide suggestive ways for understanding mechanical mediations of the sonic. Technology, in this reading, has served as a catalyst for “new conceptions of individual harmonies, their relationship to each other, and the radically expanded sphere of sound in which music came to be understood.” Tonality has invariably been defined either as an effect of the listener’s cognition or as an intrinsic property of music. Richard Cohn, in “Peter, the Wolf, and the Hexatonic Uncanny,” starts from a definition of tonality as something invested in listeners (“this for me sounds tonal”) rather than in any listened-to musical object. The ontological query is pursued, however, through close analytic parsing of a single work. Revealing the musicalized folk-tale Peter and the Wolf to be rife with triads moving by smooth chromatic (“parsimonious”) voice leading—rather than by more standard diatonic progressions—Cohn gets at the uncanny and disturbing harmonic forces that roam Prokofiev’s 1936 score. Within a hexatonic framework, the Tarnhelm progression between triads and its major-mode form (the Taruskin) provoke doubts as to the security of the categorical boundaries, consonance and dissonance. Tonality, Cohn concludes, “frames … but does not saturate” the dangerously liminal world of Peter and the Wolf. The transmission of concepts of tonality, both across history and by geographic displacement, is explored in Wolfgang Rathert’s chapter, “The Legacy of the German Rule.” Rathert’s concern is with “Trans-Atlantic” relationships in music history as they developed in the US under the extensive influence of ideas originating in the Austro-German cultural sphere. The compositional and theoretic Ultra-Modernism of Charles Seeger and Henry Cowell in the 1920s provides the first of three case studies of cultural encounters with Germanic thought that bore new fruit when transplanted abroad. In the second, Rathert traces Schenker’s impact on American musicians in the 1930s, through the specific lens of Roger Sessions’s reviews of the Viennese theorist’s writings and of Hindemith’s Unterweisung im Tonsatz. Schoen­berg’s reversion to tonal composition around this time, lastly—a relaxing of “the antithesis between suppressed tradition and lawless innovation”—situates one phase of his compositional activity within its biographic and geographic context. Inscribed on the history of tonality, Rathert shows, are personalized histories of students, emigrants, and exiles. Modifications of the category of nature in Hindemith’s concept of tonality over two decades again betray a precisely localized history, considering his emigration to the US in 1942 and his later return to Europe. Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen’s account traces how a concept of tonality might change significantly within the theo-

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retical work of a single author. With close attention to the texts of the Unterweisung treatise, both in its original German form and in English translation, Hinrichsen investigates the reception of Hindemith’s tonality concept. That reception, he shows, was itself governed by the complexities of the composer’s own career at home and abroad. “Tonality in Austro-German Theory” forms the subject of part two, which is dominated by the imposing figure of Schoenberg, viewed here as the author of a treatise that was a milestone in theoretical discourse about tonality. Markus Böggemann’s chapter, “Concepts of Tonality in Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre,” emphasizes the flexibility of Schoenberg’s rhetorical strategies with regard to the core concept of tonality. The book’s argument, Böggemann notes, is structured around two competing concepts—historical and natural—of tonal organization. That Schoen­berg in the Harmonielehre found it impossible to ground tonality in any single normative concept confirms music theory as another site of post-1900 modernity—a period of inescapable relativism of categories, norms and premises. Stephen Hinton’s chapter on “Psychology and Comprehensibility” in the Harmonielehre compares the 1911 first edition with the third revised edition (1922). Hinton scrutinizes both texts in order to trace the development of two central ideas—the so-called “emancipation of dissonance” and the notion of Fasslichkeit (“comprehensibility”)—each closely bound up with Schoenberg’s evolving compositional aesthetic. Felix Wörner, in “Constructive and Destructive Forces: Ernst Kurth’s Concept of Tonality,” reconstructs the discursive foundations of Kurthian energetics. Kurth’s premise that sound (Klang) in music is only an inadequate representation of inner forces leads him to conclude that tonality is not given through the musical material itself. Kurth’s theoretic formulations, as Wörner notes, are indebted to such diverse philosophical concepts as Dilthey’s psychological hermeneutics, Bergsonism, and Gestalt theory. Tonalität, for Kurth, enacts the “crisis” of romantische Harmonik, presenting a highly flexible and ever-changing constellation of constructive and destructive forces which must themselves be reenacted through musical listening. If there is a plurality of the discourses surrounding tonality after 1900, even within the restricted orbit of Austro-German theory, the plot only thickens when attention turns from conceptual matters to individual composers and their works. “Practices of Tonality”—the third and final section of Tonality 1900–1950— presents eight case studies, grouped loosely according to cultural-geographical milieu: one essay treats German composers, three writers focus on French music, two on British composers, two more the scene in the US. French music, especially after 1918, witnessed broad discussion of aesthetics, invariably inflected by cultural and political forces. Marianne Wheeldon, in her essay “Defending Tonality: The Musical Thought of Milhaud and Koechlin,” views tonalité as one salient element in a larger cultural field, along with atonality, and polytonality. The meanings of such terms, Wheeldon observes, in the French musical world of the 1920s and 30s derived “not only from how they were defined with regard to one another, but also in how they were deployed in the various ‘positiontakings’ of composers, for whom the establishment of a distinct French musical identity was key.” Her discussion frames tonality as a term in public, journalistic

Introduction

21

circulation in particular institutional and professional settings, as well as a term of proto-philosophical significance. Mark Delaere’s chapter, “Autant de compositeurs, autant de polytonalités différentes,” complements Wheeldon’s by tracing polytonality as a system of composition in the writings and compositions of Milhaud and Koechlin, and also in the work of less familiar figures such as Georges Monier, Marcel Dupré, and Armand Machabey. Volker Helbing’s study of the third movement of Ravel’s Sonate pour violon et violoncelle (1921) revealingly links analysis of the composer’s modally inflected harmonic language to his articulation of a dramatic form. In an aesthetic of nuance and transformation, as Helbing’s account makes clear, Ravel traces a forceful narrative of peripeteia and catastrophe. Alain Frogley’s study, “Tonality on the Town: Orchestrating the Metropolis in Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony”—one of two chapters with a British focus—offers a hermeneutic reading of a score whose finely balanced dialectic between diatonic tonality and various anti-tonal elements engages the anxieties surrounding urbanized life in the early twentieth century. The score’s brash hexatonic modernity serves as a foil to more pastoralist idylls, visions evoked by pentatonic means. This twilit harmonic idiom, as Frogley argues, can be understood in the context of an array of responses by social commentators, novelists, poets, and painters—from Baudelaire to Kraus, Renoir to Sickert—to the experience of modern daily life. In “Between Archaism and Modernism: Tonality in Music for Amateurs in Germany around 1930,” Ullrich Scheideler examines a brief moment in music history when a self-consciously tonal language was cultivated amid the shifting aesthetic currents of Neue Sachlichkeit. In both Weill’s Der Jasager (1930) and Bruno Stürmer’s Feierliche Musik (1931), an archaic tone is achieved by a modal reworking of Baroque dance forms. Clear tonal goals, in Hindemith’s Plöner Musiktag (1932), are affirmed even within a resolutely polyphonic idiom of non-traditional chord structures. While a 1931 essay of Adorno’s had criticized purveyors of “neue Tonalität” for historical naiveté, Weill, Stürmer, and Hindemith, in distinctive ways, were creating tonal music as an agent for building community among amateur players and listeners. In “Among the Ruined Languages: Britten’s Triadic Modernism, 1930–1940,” Philip Rupprecht begins by noting that the teenage Benjamin Britten’s familiarity with Schoenbergian atonality bore compositional fruit in a little-known 1930 Sextet for Wind. Sketching British critical awareness of atonality and polytonality in the 1910s and 20s (including the pre-1914 fascination with Scriabin), Rupprecht reconsiders the aesthetic context for Britten’s later, emphatically triadic scores. In Les illuminations (1939) and the Michelangelo Sonnets (1940), key sense emerges through hexatonic symmetries rather than conventional chord functions. Tonality never seems “lost” in Britten, and by mid-century, his continued embrace of triadic euphony set him apart from what Hans Keller dubbed “the anti-diatonicism of the present.” Two final contributions to this volume offer a suggestive sampling of the rich tonal compositional practices of the US. Beth E. Levy, in “Roy Harris and the Crisis of Consonance,” explores Harris’s development of his own theory of tonality,

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and his response to serialism in the 1930s. Harris, as Levy notes of the 1936 Piano Quintet, conceived of a twelve-tone music that could “strengthen the gravitational pull of the tonic rather than breathing the air of other planets.” As the composer’s own testimony makes clear, his ideas of tonality were inextricably bound up with personal experiences of the physical world. Another tonally oriented flirtation with serial techniques is documented, finally, in Daniel Harrison’s chapter, “Samuel Barber’s Nocturne: An Experiment in Tonal Serialism.” Barber, for all his well-known ambivalence to serial techniques, undertook in the Nocturne an uncharacteristically rigorous experiment in using multiple rows of cyclical intervallic content. The likely model, as Harrison suggests in a detailed analysis, was not Schoenberg, but Berg, a composer who had also sought to reconcile all-chromatic structures with conventional overtone-rich harmonies. The chronological sweep of the eight case studies spans Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony (1913) and Barber’s Nocturne (1959). Clearly, it would take a much larger group of contributors to document the fully international extent of tonal music in the first half of the twentieth century, with due attention to many other figures—Bartók, Stravinsky, Messiaen, among others—whose music was created, heard, and understood (to varying degrees) as “tonal” after 1900. The mutual interference of compositional imagination and the rule of theory suggest the possibility of a recuperative history of tonal music, and of alternate canon formations. For now, though, we must rely on synecdoche, and the prospect of future scholarly investigation of tonality—as conceived and as practiced. * The editors gratefully acknowledge generous financial support for the conference Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice, held October 1–2, 2010 at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke University, from a number of donors: the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, College of Arts and Sciences; and Duke University’s Department of Music. The conference brought together a distinguished roster of scholars, including all contributors to the present volume. Preparation of the book has been made possible by a two-year research and publication grant from the TransCoop Program of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; and by a grant from the Senior Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Science at UNC Chapel Hill. We are particularly grateful to the following colleagues for their support at various stages: William Andrews, Tim Carter, Hermann Danuser, Edward Gollin, Jane Hawkins, Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, Brian Hyer, Stephen Jaffe, Severine Neff, Carol Oja, Terry Rhodes, Christian Martin Schmidt, Gayle Sherwood Magee, and Anne C. Shreffler. Susan S. Williams facilitated many administrative issues over the entire period of this collaborative project. Ben Haas was indispensable at all stages in preparing the manuscript for publication. At Franz Steiner, we are most grateful to Thomas Schaber and Harald Schmitt.

Tonality as Concept and Category

Weighing, Measuring, Embalming Tonality: . How we Became Phonometrographers Joseph Auner In his peculiar little essay from 1912, “What I am,” Satie denies being a musician, describing himself instead as a “phonometrographer,” inspired by science and dedicated to weighing and measuring sounds. He writes: … I enjoy measuring a sound much more than hearing it. With my phonometer in my hand, I work happily and with confidence. What haven’t I weighed or measured? I’ve done all Beethoven, all Verdi, etc. It’s fascinating. The first time I used a phonoscope, I examined a B-flat of medium size. I can assure you that I have never seen anything so revolting. I called in my man to show it to him. On my phono-scales a common or garden F-sharp registered 93 kilos. It came out of a fat tenor whom I also weighed. Do you know how to clean sounds? It’s a filthy business. Stretching them out is cleaner; indexing them is a meticulous task and needs good eyesight. Here, we are in the realm of phono­ technique.1

With what at first seems like a series of one-liners, Satie in fact opens up a wide range of questions concerning the impact of science and technology on the new ways of hearing and thinking about sound, the materials of music, and the nature of tonality that emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is as if through the use of his phonoscope a musical sound is forcibly extracted from the sacred sphere of art and turned into an object to be manipulated and probed, with rather unsettling results. And not only is the musical sound transformed by the process, but so is the person on the other end of the phonoscope. Satie’s disavowal of his identity as a musician—no doubt alluding to his many teachers and critics who derided his competence—was more than a one-off joke; during this period he repeatedly asked to be introduced at concerts as a “phonometrographer.”2 Moreover, it is clear that he did not believe the eye- and ear-opening experience of the phonoscope should be 1 Erik Satie, “What I Am,” in A Mammal’s Notebook: Collected Writings of Erik Satie, ed. Ornella Volta, trans. Antony Melville (London: Atlas Press, 1996), 101. The essay has also been discussed in Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 193–94; and Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 192–94. 2 Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 118. Peter Dayan points out that in the original publication of “What I am” in the Revue musicale S.I.M. 8, no. 4 (15 April 1912), Satie added a footnote referring to a description of himself the previous year by the critic Gérard Poueigh as a “clumsy technician, but a subtle one, a seeker after new sonorities, sometimes exquisite, sometimes bizarre.” Peter Dayan, Art as Mu-

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limited to artists or to the elite; as soon as he sees the revolting Bb, he at once calls his servant in to take a look. In this essay I will argue that many of the composers who defined musical modernism in the first half of the twentieth century might also be thought of as phonometrographers, with ears and minds remade by recording, phonography, player pianos, and the burgeoning sciences of sound. The last two decades have seen an explosion of scholarship on the impact of these and other technologies on many aspects of musical composition, performance, reception, and the history of hearing in classical and popular music around the world.3 Scholars in other disciplines have also been exploring the impact of sound technology, film, and radio on literature, art, phonetics, and the history of the senses. As Jonathan Sterne has written, “The history of sound reproduction is the history of the transformation of the human body as an object of knowledge and practice.”4 While earlier technological revolutions had focused on extending limbs and muscles in the search for “physical speed and power,” Friedrich Kittler and Steven Connor have written of the period between the invention of the telephone and the beginning of World War II as a second phase dedicated to extending the reach of the central nervous system, one carried out by the development of technologies designed to enhance the senses, including such inventions and writings as listed in Fig. 1.5 1857 Phonautograph, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville 1862 Helmholtz, On the Sensation of Tones (Eng. trans. 1877) 1867 Tyndall, On Sound 1876 Telephone, Bell (three million in use by 1904) 1877 Phonograph, Edison (large commercial market by 1890) 1885 Electric Siren 1889 Universal Exposition, Paris, Galerie des machines 1897 Telharmonium, Cahill, (Telharmonium Hall, NYC, 1906) 1897 Oscilloscope (improved version 1911) 1899 Wireless Telegraph 1904 Welte-Mignon Reproducing Piano 1906 Radio 1913 Oscillator 1917 Condenser Microphone sic, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 40. 3 I have developed ideas related to the discussion of tonality here in connection with our relationship to the recorded voice in, “Losing Your Voice: Sampled Speech and Song from the Uncanny to the Unremarkable,” in Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, ed. Ulrik Ekman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming). 4 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 50. 5 Steven Connor, “The Modern Auditory I,” in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 204–5; Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

How we Became Phonometrographers

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1924 Electrical Recording 1928 Theremin, Ondes Martenot 1930 Spectrograph 1934 Magnetic Recording Tape 1935 Long Playing Phonograph Figure 1: Some Important Landmarks in Sound Technology and Science

I would argue that the impact of this second technological revolution on the development of harmony has been largely overlooked in the established historical narratives focusing on musical style, compositional technique, the history of theory, and aesthetics. In what follows I will turn Satie’s phonoscope on some familiar topics and figures to consider how these and other sound technologies in the early decades of the twentieth century may have influenced how composers, musicians, and theorists heard, worked with, and reimagined the basic building blocks of tonal harmony. Though he does not pursue the observation at length, Michael Chanan is one of the few to speculate on the connection, writing, “Is it only a coincidence that over the same period as the introduction of the new technology of reproduction, the Western musical tradition experienced a revolution in its every aspect? Figures like Debussy, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Bartók and Stravinsky turned it inside out and upside down.”6 More than just a temporal coincidence, these and other modernists interacted with sound technologies in manifold ways as has been frequently discussed. One could cite the role of the phonograph and other recording and measuring devices in ethnographic fieldwork for Bartók, Janáček, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and others; Taruskin points out that Stravinsky insisted on working with phonographically transcribed folk song collections.7 There is also evidence of the impact of recordings of exotic and folk music on Mahler, Stravinsky, and McPhee. Surprisingly early on composers including Weill, Hindemith, and Cage began to explore ways to use phonographs themselves as compositional tools. Many composers were involved to varying degrees with player pianos, including Debussy, Stravinsky, Antheil, and Mahler, who in 1905 wrote in the Welte-Mignon studio guest book after recording on their elaborate system, “In my astonishment and admiration, I join with those who preceded me.”8 New instruments also attracted broad attention, including Busoni’s interest in the Telharmonium, the noise machines of the Italian Futurists, and Ives and Cowell’s interest in the Theremin and other early electronic instruments. Schoenberg too, who plays an important role in what follows, was deeply influ6

Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1995), 20. 7 Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1:733. 8 Liner notes to Mahler Plays Mahler: The Welte-Mignon Piano Rolls. Kaplan Foundation, 1993. For a wide-ranging study of the impact of the player piano see Christine Fena, “Composing the Land of Sewing Machines and Typewriters: American Modernist Music and the Piano in the Machine Age 1918–1933” (PhD diss., Stony Brook University, 2011).

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enced by overtone theory, wireless telegraphy, the radio, mechanical instruments, and recording technology. Such technologies are sometimes part of the story of the development of these composers’ musical thought, but it may be that they are more central than has been recognized. It is striking to consider, for example, how much attention has been paid to the impact on Debussy, Ravel, and others of the opportunity to hear Javanese Gamelan and other exotic musics at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris. But the major sensations of the event were at the Galerie des machines where, under thousands of electric lights, one could listen to live musical performances from theaters in Paris transmitted by telephone lines; the largest exhibition space was given over to Edison’s Phonograph.9 Debussy wrote in 1913, “The century of aeroplanes has a right to a music of its own. Let those who support our art not be left to waste away in the lowest ranks of our army of inventors, let them not be outdone by the genius of engineers!”10 In what follows I will use the categories of weighing, measuring, and embalming to frame hypotheses about possible connections between what I will call a phonometrographic attitude and new conceptions of individual harmonies, their relationship to each other, and the radically expanded sphere of sound in which music came to be understood. In making such speculations I do not mean to imply a narrow technologically deterministic model linking the introduction of specific devices to changes in musical style. On the contrary, in every case compositional developments were shaped by multiple historical factors, with technology often providing a catalyst for trends already long in place. Similarly, influences do not move just in one direction; science and technology have themselves been shaped by musical and cultural developments. I also am aware of the danger in what follows of reifying a notion of tonality that was itself very much in flux during this period. Indeed, perhaps a more interesting question than the one I am posing here would be the degree to which the formulation of tonality as a concept was itself shaped by the context of sound and recording technologies. As Brian Hyer notes, “Before 1910 […] tonality—as a construct that informs the production and consumption of music—had a modest historical provenance.”11

9 Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 279–312. In an article on Debussy that anticipates my phonometrographic approach here, David Lewin notes in a footnote the “importance of the coincidence the phonograph, a well-nigh indispensable adjunct for cognitive studies in ethnomusicology, was introduced to the European intellectual world on precisely the same occasion” at which so much exotic music was featured. David Lewin, “Some Instances of Parallel Voice Leading in Debussy,” 19th-Century Music 11 (1987): 70, n. 9. 10 Cited in Robert P. Morgan, ed., The Twentieth Century, vol. 7 of Source Readings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk and Leo Treitler, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1998), 163. Kittler observes, “composers of 1880, however, are allied with engineers.” Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 24. 11 Brian Hyer, “Tonality,” in Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 746.

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My focus will be on the first half of the century, but there are clear connections to our musical world today, a world in which we have all, to some degree, become phonometrographers ourselves. Weighing When Satie wrote about weighing the B he was anticipating one of the most common observations about the impact of recording, namely the transformation of evanescent sounds into objects that could be seen and touched, now a familiar concept thanks to Pierre Schaeffer’s term Musique concréte. Mark Katz’s list of recording effects in Capturing Sound includes the categories of tangibility, portability, and manipulability.12 Steven Connor has written of the sense of hearing as a kind of touch, citing the hearing-impaired Thomas Edison’s claim in 1913 to have bitten down on the wood of the phonograph in order to hear the faint overtones: “The sound-waves thus came almost directly to my brain. They pass through only my inner ear.”13 But Satie’s notion of weighing implies considerably more than just thinking about sounds as objects, also pointing to new ways of analyzing how the sound object was constituted, how one should determine the boundaries between consonance and dissonance and music and noise, and what one should do with these newly understood sound objects once they were identified. It is not clear precisely what devices Satie had in mind with his lexicon of technologies in the essay, including the “Phonometer,” “Phonoscope,” “Phono-scales,” “Motodynamaphone,” and the “Kaleidophone-recorder” he reports using to write his Cold Pieces (Pièces froids) in seven minutes. Satie may have known of one of the earliest such devices, Édouard-Léon Scott’s Phonautograph from 1857, which used a bristle attached to a diaphragm to record sound waves on to lamp-blackened paper.14 Although Scott’s invention could not play back these tracings, they have recently been reconstructed to unveil the earliest known recordings, including a voice singing the first line of the French folk song “Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot.”15 By 1880 there were several devices called Phonometers, including one patented by Edison, that were used to measure the intensity, duration, and location of sound, cure stammering, and help ships navigate in the fog. The inaugural issue from November 1896 of the New York Journal The Phonoscope described its purview as “Talking Machines, Picture Projecting and Animating Devices, and Scientific and 12 Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 13 Steven Connor, “Edison’s Teeth,” in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 169. 14 See Sterne, The Audible Past, 31–51; David Pantalony, Altered Sensations: Rudolph Koenig’s Acoustical Workshop in Nineteenth-Century Paris (New York: Springer, 2009), 41–47; and Katherine Bergeron, Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in the Belle Epoque (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 15 Arved Ashby, Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 123–25.

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Figure 2: Dayton Miller, Photographs of Sound Waves, Phonodeik, The Science of Musical Sounds, 1916

Amusement Inventions Appertaining to Sound and Sight.” In its pages one could read articles and advertisements for the phonograph, gramophone, graphophone, metaphone, artograph, radiophone, the sympsychograph, and many other devices. The Phonoscope thus also points to the degree to which the phonometrographic attitude embraced all the senses. That sound was produced by vibration has been known since Pythagoras, and many scientists in the nineteenth century including Fourier, Doppler, Ohm, and Helmholtz had described physical laws of harmonics and waves, but devices like Scott’s Phonoautograph were the first to actually capture and, thanks to Edison, by 1877 to allow the reproduction of sound. The ability to see sound waves also shifted attention from the centuries old focus on the ratios between different frequencies to the nature of the vibrations themselves.16 The Phonodeik, invented in 1908 by Dayton Miller, preserved the sound vibrations on film by means of a diaphragm at16 Alexander Rehding has written of the intense interest aroused with the invention of the siren in 1819 which challenged established ideas of the nature of pitch, and which resulted in Helmoltz differentiating, “Klang, the physical impression of the periodic movement of air molecules that constitute the soundwave, and Ton, the perceptual impression of the periodic vibration in the ear.” Rehding, “Of Sirens Old and New,” in Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music and Sound

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tached to a mirror that moved a beam of light (Fig. 2). In his influential 1916 book The Science of Musical Sounds, he published images of the sound waves from various moments in the Sextett from Lucia di Lammermoor, showing the differences between, from the top down, an octave, a single note (notably a Bb), two voices singing a major third, and all six voices singing an Eb-major triad. Douglas Kahn has discussed Miller’s interest in building complex waveforms up from the addition of simpler shapes, as well as the idea of turning lines from nature into sound, such as a wave form created by multiple versions of Beethoven’s profile.17 Harry Partch in his Genesis of a Music (first published in 1949) refers to Miller’s Phonodeik images and writings as important inspirations for his efforts to create new instruments “capable of expressing an infinite range of ideas and of infinite mutability […].”18 The notion that the world of sound waves embraced such an infinite diversity can be linked to the technology at the core of all these devices: a tympanic membrane that transduces the sound vibrations from the air into another medium. Sterne has discussed how Bell’s early work on the telephone in 1874 started with a membrane from an actual human ear, to which a stylus was attached that would etch vibrations on to smoked glass. This represented a major change of direction in the pursuit of sound reproduction from the earlier focus on devices based on the mouth, such as Wolfgang von Kempelen’s 1791 design for a Vox Humana that used a keyboard to control mouth-shaped resonators.19 But more importantly for our purposes, Sterne identifies tympanic hearing as a crucial turning point in our conception of sound; instead of categorizing sounds in terms of their manifold sources (voices, instruments, natural events, etc.), a focus on the transductive properties of the membrane allowed all acoustic phenomena to be understood as vibration. He writes: “sound became a waveform whose source was essentially irrelevant; hearing became a mechanical function that could be isolated and abstracted from the other senses and the human body itself.”20 Kittler writes similarly: “The phonograph does not hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words, and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such.”21 Such a conception of sound as a waveform has now become second nature due to the ubiquity of programs like “ProTools” or the ringtone editing tool in “iTunes.” But Satie’s “What I am” makes clear that such ways of thinking about sound were already widespread at the turn of the twentieth century. The realization that musical soundwaves were a subset of the larger sphere of all vibrations had many ramifications for an understanding of tonality, which likewise could be understood as a subset of a larger sphere of frequencies and waveStudies, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 17 Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 95–99. 18 Harry Partch, Genesis of a Music: An Account of a Creative Work, its Roots and its Fulfillments, 2nd ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), 95. 19 Bernd Pompino-Marschall, “Kempelen et al.: Remarks on the History of Articulatory-Acoustic Modelling” ZAS Papers in Linguistics 40 (2005): 145–59. 20 Sterne, The Audible Past, 23. 21 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 23.

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forms. Helmholtz had already drawn the conclusion that, while there were physical and anatomical factors involved, the borders of consonance and dissonance and the structure of scales were not based on natural laws, but were historical and cultural, as he wrote: “the result of esthetical principles, which have already changed and will still further with the progressive development of humanity.”22 We can see manifestations of this conception of sound as waveforms in both the new interest in devices that would capture and create infinite gradations of pitch as well as composers increasing interest in questioning the boundaries between musical sound and noise. Around the turn of the century composers, scientists, and engineers developed devices like the Telharmonium that, as Busoni wrote in his Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music (1907), could precisely produce an “infinite gradation of the octave.” Three decades earlier the German physicist Rudolph König developed a widely exhibited device that used nearly 700 adjustable tuning forks that could produce more than 800 different frequencies between 16 and 4096 Hz.23 The Intonarumori of the Italian Futurists can also be linked to this new understanding of sound as vibration. Pratella, for example, described the orchestra of the future as “a sonorous universe in a state of constant mobility.” As Robert Morgan has discussed, the Italian Futurists insisted in the Art of Noises in 1913, that “the limited circle of pure sounds must be broken and the infinite variety of ‘noise-sound’ conquered,” thus aspiring to an image of composition like a “musical poem with the power of the machine and the victorious reign of electricity.”24 Thomas Levin writes of the origins of sound synthesis and its connection with film sound research and the efforts to develop a script that would encompass all sounds.25 But a more direct challenge to traditional conceptions of tonal harmony and theory came from the use of the phonograph for ethnographic field recordings, already common around the turn of the century, involving figures like Hornbostel, Kodály, Janáček, and Bartók who compared listening to a recording to “examining music objects under a microscope.”26 In contrast to a reliance on transcription into conventional notation, the tympanic membrane of the phonograph captured all the nuances of pitch and rhythm, thus documenting the existence of very different tuning systems. Rehding has discussed how Riemann as a result viewed phonography as dangerous, capturing as it did “indications of individual intervals that contradicted our habitual intonations.” Riemann wrote in his 1916 essay Folkloristische Tonalitätsstudien: “The annoying result of this research of comparative musicology 22 Robert Beyer, Sounds of Our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics (New York: Springer, 1999), 69; and see The Audible Past, 63–67. Leon Botstein discusses the impact of Helmholtz’s writings in “Time and Memory: Concert Life, Science, and Music in Brahms’s Vienna,” in Brahms and His World, ed. Walter Frisch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3–22. 23 Pantalony, Altered Sensations, 69. 24 Robert P. Morgan, “‘A New Musical Reality’: Futurism, Modernism, and ‘The Art of Noises,’” Modernism/Modernity 1, no. 3 (1994): 129–51. 25 Thomas Levin, “‘Tones from out of Nowhere’: Rudolph Pfenninger and the Archeology of Synthetic Sound,” Grey Room 12 (2003): 32–79. And see Marc Battier, “Phonography and the Invention of Sound,” in Recorded Music: Philosophical and Critical Reflections, ed. Mine Dogantan-Dack (London: Middlesex Press, 2008), 100–118. 26 Chanan, Repeated Takes, 10.

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was, first and foremost, to shake up the very foundations of music theory, gradually solidified as they had over the course of millenia.”27 And it is also clear that at the same time there were many examples of composers having their musical worlds shaken by recordings of exotic music, including Mahler and Chinese music, Stravinsky and Japanese music, and a few years later Colin McPhee’s encounter in 1929 with recordings of Balinese music that friends had brought back from travels in Indonesia. It is striking that the rise of this equalizing tympanic conception of all sound as vibration paralleled what Morgan has described as the “shift in modern music from the background to the foreground, from substructure to surface,” especially clear in works of Schoenberg and Scriabin.28 He describes Schoenberg as sacrificing “a traditional background to allow the compositional foreground to speak more freely, unencumbered by the constraints of a conventional syntax.” In reference to Schoen­ berg’s idiosyncratic analyses of earlier music in the Harmonielehre, he writes: “What for Bach and Mozart were passing “accidents”—the result of surface contrapuntal elaborations firmly tied to an unmistakably inferable triad background—have become for Schoenberg absolute entities warranting theoretical investigation and explanation in their own right.”29 But we could also read Schoenberg’s interest in reevaluating these vertical slices from earlier music as a manifestation of the phonometrographic impulse to hear and weigh sounds like a recording device would. In the music and thought of Schoenberg we can see many ramifications of these new ways of thinking about sound, as his pupil Heinrich Jalowetz wrote in 1912, “For Schoenberg as well as for science, the physical basis in which he is trying to ground all phenomena is the overtone series.”30 Most obviously, his conception of the emancipation of the dissonance in the Harmonielehre referred to the harmonic series to argue that dissonances were only more remote consonances. The final chapter considers “Chords of Six or More Tones,” which accepts in principle any combination of notes, including all twelve at once. Schoenberg finishes up with the remarkably open ended notion of Klangfarbenmelodie, which explicitly insists that pitch and timbre are manifestations of the same phenomenon of vibration.31 It is noteworthy that both Schoenberg and Kandinsky at this time were creating syn­ aesthetic works that extended the spheres of vibration to the other senses as well. As he was beginning work on his opera Die glückliche Hand in 1910, Schoenberg wrote to Alma Mahler of his goal of combining “colors, noises, lights, sounds, movements, looks, gestures—in short, the media which make up the ingredients of the stage.”32 In On the Spiritual in Art (1911), Kandinsky explains synaesthesia in 27 Alexander Rehding, “Wax Cylinder Revolutions,” Musical Quarterly 88 (2005): 132. 28 Robert P. Morgan, “Musical Time/Musical Space,” Critical Inquiry 6 (1980): 534. 29 Robert P. Morgan, “Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism,” Critical Inquiry 10 (1984), 454–56. 30 Cited in Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 24. 31 Alfred Cramer has discussed Schoenberg’s conception of Klangfarbenmelodie from the perspective of contemporaneous writings on Klang and timbre by Ernst Mach and others. Alfred Cramer, “Schoenberg’s Klangfarbenmelodie: A Principle of Early Atonal Harmony,” Music Theory Spectrum 24 (2002): 1–34. 32 John C. Crawford, “Die glückliche Hand: Further Notes,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg

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terms of vibrations that propagate “along corresponding paths leading away from the soul to other sensory organs (in this case the eye). This effect would seem to be an echo or resonance, as in the case of musical instruments, which without themselves being touched, vibrate in sympathy with another instrument being played.”33 A crucial manifestation of this conception of sound for the present context, is the tendency in the music of Schoenberg and many others during these years for chords to function as freestanding objects rather than as elements in a progression. In Between Romanticism and Modernism, Dahlhaus writes of what he calls the “individualization of harmony,” a consequence of a wide range of “Issues in Composition” in the second half of the nineteenth century: “Relieved of the responsibility for the large-scale formal structures, the harmony serves instead to establish the unique identity of one instant in the music.”34 Tracing Stravinsky’s roots in the traditions of Russian music, Taruskin describes harmonies in the Rite of Spring as “hypostatized, turned into stone, timbrally and registrally so fixed that even transposition—let alone transformation or transition—were inconceivable.”35 But I would argue that the phonometrographic attitude also played a major role in this approach to harmony. Compare for example, Albright’s discussion of Satie in reference to the phonometrography essay and “furniture music,” where he describes Satie as “the first great materialist of music,” with music of a “disconcertingly high specific gravity, a strange leadenness” that “doesn’t develop, doesn’t cue emotions, but just lies there furnishing the ear.”36 The idea of a chord as a static vibrating object is literally explored in one of the earliest atonal pieces, Schoenberg’s song Am Strande, originally considered as part of Op. 14, and composed in 1908 or 1909.37 Much of the piece is anchored around the untransposed collection, C-E-F-B, which appears in half of the song’s twenty measures (Fig. 3). As he would do again in the first movement of Op. 11 composed in 1909, he includes a passage where the notes of the chord are silently depressed to allow harmonics to ring. We first hear the fundamental tones resonating in response to the sustained harmony an octave below, but then the motive in bass (C#, D, G) excites more distant overtones. Just how deeply Schoenberg thought about such acoustic effects can be gleaned from his discussion of resonance in the Draft of a Will he wrote in 1908 in response Institute 4 (1980): 73. 33 Wassily Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art (New York: Da Capo, 1994), 158. 34 Carl Dahlhaus, “Issues in Composition,” Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 74. 35 Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:957. 36 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 193. In related terms Erica Scheinberg discusses a concert of “Stehende Musik” organized by Stefan Wolpe and the Novembergruppe in the context of Andreas Huyssen’s formulation of the “technological imagination.” Erica Scheinberg, “Music and the Technological Imagination in the Weimar Republic: Media, Machines, and the New Objectivity” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2007), 79. 37 Jennifer Shaw, “Zwei Lieder für eine Singstimme und Klavier Op. 14,” in Arnold Schönberg: Interpretationen seiner Werke, ed. Gerold W. Gruber (Laaber: Laaber, 2002), 1:181–95.

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Figure 3: Arnold Schoenberg, Am Strande, mm. 1–9. Arnold Schoenberg Center, Vienna

to his wife’s infidelity. He explains his lack of awareness of her relationship with the painter Richard Gerstl, because it was so foreign to his nature: I don’t actually know anything about it. I must have slept through it or have forgotten it, perhaps I didn’t notice it at all. If I sing a pure note A into my piano, then all the strings that contain A also ring. But if I sing a wrong note, higher or lower, the reverberation is much weaker. Obviously only some distant overtones resonate—musically wrong, useless—but I believe that the well-tempered piano really doesn’t know anything about them; it can forget them; they don’t penetrate into its harmonic musical nature.38

In his correspondence with Busoni in 1909 he similarly described the reception of his music in terms of vibration and resonance: “the work of art will only have 38 Joseph Auner, A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 55.

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an impact on those who are like-minded. On those who possess a receiving organ which corresponds to our transmitting organ. As with wireless telegraphy.”39 In many writings during the years from 1908–1912 he characterized the act of composition as a kind of seismographic transcription of his unconscious sensations. As he began Pierrot in March 1912 he wrote: “The sounds here truly become an animalistically immediate expression of sensual and psychological emotions. Almost as if everything were transmitted directly.”40 As I have discussed elsewhere, it was only when he lost faith in his ability to achieve this vision of direct transmission as well as the listeners’ ability to resonate appropriately, that he began to turn his attention to other ways of ensuring comprehensibility and coherence.41 Measuring The new sound technologies also had a major impact on the temporal aspects of music, as Kittler has noted: “What phonographs and cinematographs […] were able to store was time: time as a mixture of audio frequencies in the acoustic realm and as the movement of single-image sequences in the optical.”42 Katz and others have discussed how musicians in all styles began to write pieces to fit the temporal constraints of the spiraling grove of 78s, with Stravinsky’s Serenade in A as a famous example. But I want to consider more generally what sound technologies may have suggested to composers for a way of hearing these newly considered musical objects discussed above as points on a timeline that could itself be precisely measured, stretched out—as Satie notes—or compressed, or run in different directions. Just as importantly, this aspect of Satie’s “phonotechnique” also opened up new ways of listening to all those accidental sounds that happened between the originally intended musical events. It is perhaps easiest, for those of us who still remember it, to consider the idea of measuring sound in terms of magnetic recording tape, which like a measuring tape can be stretched out before us. In his 1957 essay on “Experimental Music,” Cage noted that since “so many inches or centimeters equal so many seconds,” counting was no longer necessary: “magnetic tape music makes it clear that we are in time itself, not in measures of two, three, four, or any other number.”43 Music software like “Live” and “GarageBand” now makes it commonplace to measure and manipulate sounds at a microtemporal level, as our place is marked by the cursor scanning across the screen.44 But already by the 1890s wire recorders were 39 Ferrucio Busoni, Ferrucio Busoni: Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Antony Beaumont (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 383. 40 Auner, A Schoenberg Reader, 112. 41 Joseph Auner, “‘Warum bist du so kurz?’—Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra (1910) and the Problem of Brevity,” in A Festschrift for Jan Maegaard (Frederiksberg: Engstrøm & Sødring, 1996), 43–63. 42 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 3. 43 John Cage, “A History of Experimental Music in the United States,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 70. 44 And see Mark Hansen, “Ubiquitous Sensation: Towards an Atmospheric, Collective, and Mi-

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being used, and before that player piano rolls, that made visibly and tangibly clear that musical sounds took place within a scrolling span of time. In a 1950 letter to Boulez, Cage wrote, “Composition becomes ‘throwing sound into silence,’” but a half century earlier many works by Debussy and Mahler already give the sense of music embedded in a length of silence, such as the opening of the “O Mensch” movement in Mahler’s Third Symphony with its disassociated pitches and triads floating in a dark space, or Debussy’s collage-like “Nights in Grenada” from Estampes which he recorded on the Welte-Mignon piano in 1913. Writing of Stravinsky’s attraction to “mechanical performance media,” Taruskin describes the Étude for Pianola from 1916 as the “paradigm of drobnost’,” or splinterdness, the quality of being a sum-of-parts, closely related to another of his analytical categories, nepodvizhnost’, or immobililty. He describes the etude with its intercutting ostinati in terms of collage, Moment form, and “a kind of vertical slice through time, calculated to give the impression of a cacophony of simultaneous musics, the whole unfolding in a sort of instantaneous ‘specious present.’”45 One of the most vivid enactments of musical sound as an object existing on a time continuum is in the last movement of Antheil’s Ballet mécanique (1924). Comparing his use of the “time canvas” to Picasso’s use of blank spaces, Antheil writes, “I did not hesitate, for instance to repeat one measure one hundred times; I did not hesitate to have absolutely nothing on my pianola rolls for sixty two bars.” In what he characterized as “the first piece of music that has been composed out of and for machines,” the frenetic activity at several points comes to an alarming pause.46 A phonometrographic perspective on the technique of throwing sounds into a scrolling silence opens up new perspectives on the spatial quality of many twentieth century works that Morgan and others have discussed in reference to the music of Ives, Varèse, and many others. Thinking in terms of a length of wire, piano roll, or film also suggests connections to the importance of reversibility and the equivalence of musical space so central to Schoenberg’s creation of the method of twelvetone composition. In his essay on “Composition with Twelve Tones,” Schoenberg emphasizes the tangible quality of the row, which like a physical object can be recognized from any perspective: “Just as our mind always recognizes, for instance, a knife, a bottle or watch, regardless of its position, and can reproduce it in the imagination in every possible position.”47 In one of Schoenberg’s first twelve-tone pieces, the Sonnet from the Serenade, Op. 24 (1922–23), he actually materialized the row in the form of a slide rule that could be moved back and forth to help him to visualize the rotations of the row used to construct the vocal line. In Mondfleck from Pierrot Schoenberg had already written a strict palindrome, signaling in the manuscript just how literally he conceived it like a recording running in reverse by crotemporal Model of Media,” in Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming). 45 Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2:1452–53. 46 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 229, 236. 47 Arnold Schoenberg, “Composition with Twelve Tones” (1941), in Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. by Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 223.

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writing some of the performance directions in mirror script.48 Inspired in particular by film, as in the palindromes in Lulu, Berg explored the idea of reversibility in many works including the Chamber Concerto and Der Wein, where the music literally runs backwards.49 As Berg demonstrates in these pieces, twelve-tone music is ideally suited for reversibility, preserving most of its essential features regardless of direction, as opposed to tonal music, in which the meaning of progressions is largely dependent on their order. The twelve-tone idea also of course included the insight that a row of intervals could preserve its identity independent of its rhythmic presentation or tempo. Throughout the Sonnet movement we hear the row at many speeds, as if one were moving the slide rule back and forth faster or slower. While obviously musicians have employed augmentation and diminution since some of the earliest notated music, I would argue that variable speed playback of sound technologies introduced a new dimension in how such manipulations were conceptualized. Many player pianos made it possible to adjust the tempo during playback to recreate a more natural sense of phrasing. For the Welte-Mignon piano, tempo control was so flexible that it can be very challenging to determine now what the precise playback speed should be. Unlike the player piano, which would of course preserve the same pitches and proportions between events regardless of the tempo chosen for the recreation of the piece, recordings on wire recorders, the phonograph, and gramophone, register a change of tempo also as a change of pitch. In his essay on parallel voice leading in Debussy, David Lewin describes a peculiar progression in the prelude, Canope—the title of which refers to funeral urns from the ancient city of Canopus—as evoking the image of the composer suddenly noticing “his phonograph running down as it is playing its record of Egyptian organum,” and then winding it back up.50 This pitch- and time-shifting feature was sometimes used intentionally, as was the case with slowing down field recordings to aid in transcription as Hornbostel recommended.51 Katz has discussed a set of vocal and instrumental “Trick recording” pieces Hindemith composed in 1930 in which he built up complex texture by recording himself playing instruments and singing at different speeds.52 Arguably the most significant ramification of measuring time through recording technology was the realization that there was in fact no silence between the musical sounds. We associate this insight particularly with Cage and his experience of hearing the sounds of his own body in the anechoic chamber, but this aspect of phonometrography had earlier manifestations. Here too, film has received the most attention, building on Benjamin’s formulation of “unconscious optics,” which described how film opened up a vast new range of experience, “by focusing on 48 Reinhold Brinkmann, “What the Sources Tell Us … A Chapter of Pierrot Philology,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 10 (1987): 25–27. 49 For more on the impact of film, see Rebecca Leydon, “Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema,” Music Theory Spectrum 23 (2001): 217–41, and Jeremy Tambling, Opera, Ideology, and Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). 50 Lewin, “Some Instances of Parallel Voice Leading in Debussy,” 67. 51 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 35. 52 Katz, Capturing Sound, 100–101.

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Figure 4: Leoš Janáček, Circular Representation of City Sounds, from “Strolling” (1927) in Janáček Leaves from His Life, eds. Villem and Margaret Tausky (London: Kahn and Averill, 1982), 138–39

hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera.”53 In the same way, the tympanic membrane of the microphone captured both intentional and unintentional sounds. Ashby and others have discussed how the specific acoustics of a room, the timbres of specific instruments, and extraneous noises all became bound up with aural phenomenon of the recording.54 But this way of listening, in which all sounds had a place, soon did not require mechanical mediation, as can be seen in a striking representation of the urban soundscape Janáček included in an essay from 1927 about walking in the streets of Prague.55 Janáček’s musical image of the city with its tram noises, horns, and voices—all circling dizzyingly and endlessly around him—strikingly anticipates works based on loops of sampled street noises such as Steve Reich’s City Life as well as a vast range of hip hop production that has shaped the global soundscape (Fig. 4). In the measured spans of time of the phonometrographer any sounds can find a place, even tonal harmonies. Satie’s “Realist Ballet,” Parade (1917), with its futurist soundscape of typewriters, roulette wheels, and gunshots offers a vivid re53 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 236. 54 Ashby, Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction, 42–45. 55 Leoš Janáček, “Strolling” (1927), in Leaves from His Life, ed. Villem and Margaret Tausky (London: Kahn and Averill, 1982), 138–39.

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alization of the equalizing process of tympanic hearing as the piece unfolds in time. This can be perceived as a loss, as in George Auric’s preface to the score where he writes that Parade “very humbly yields to the same reality that drowns the nightengale’s song under the rumble of streetcars.” Benjamin wrote in related terms of the way in which technology penetrates so deeply into the shooting of a sound film that only careful cutting and camera placement can create the effect of an equipmentfree reality, which thus becomes “the height of artifice.” In film, as a result, “the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.”56 But by the time we get to Cage it was possible to regard tonal harmonies in turn as a kind of orchid in the land of technology. As he notes in the “Experimental Music” essay, “it goes without saying that dissonances and noises are welcome in this new music. But so is the dominant seventh chord if it happens to put in an appearance.”57 Embalming As we have seen above, when Satie weighed and measured the B with his phonoscope he found it to be revolting, though he does not tell us why. Satie’s output is full of unpleasant and disagreeable images of many sorts, such as the Desiccated Embyros or the Unappetizing Chorale in Sports and Divertisements, written for the “Shriveled up and the Stupefied.” I would argue that this tendency can be linked to the phonometrographic attitude, which connected the materials of tonal harmony to the extensive discourse associating recording technology with death, preservation, embalming, and, as Sterne argues, “the nineteenth century’s momentous battle against decay.”58 Kittler cites a German monograph from 1902, “On the Care and Usage of Modern Speaking Machines,” which describes the wax cylinder’s ability to transport us “back in time to the happy days of youth” by preserving the voices of “Cherished loved ones, dear friends, and famous individuals who have long since passed away.”59 Recording was seen as offering not only a way of preserving the voices of the dead, as Edison proposed, but also as a way of capturing through ethnographic fieldwork permanent records of what were regarded as “dying cultures” around the world. Rehding cites the pioneering ethnomusicologist Hornbostel’s warning from 1905: “The danger is great that the rapid dissemination of European cultures will destroy the remaining traces of ethnic singing and saying. We must save whatever can be saved before the airship is added to the automobile and the electric express train and before we hear tararabumdieh in all of Africa.”60 Such connections further illuminate the elegiac tone and frozen harmonies at the end of Mahler’s Das Lied 56 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 233. 57 John Cage, “Experimental Music” (1957), in The Twentieth Century, ed. Robert P. Morgan, vol. 7 of Source Readings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk and Leo Treitler, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1998), 34. 58 Sterne, The Audible Past, 292; and see Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 13. 59 Ibid., 55. 60 Rehding, “Wax Cylinder Revolutions,” 329. “Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-De-Ay” was a hit vaudeville

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von der Erde, which was inspired in part by the phonographs of Chinese music that a friend purchased in Vienna at a shop near St. Stephen’s cathedral. But if composers heard recordings of exotic music as remnants of a vanishing past, to what degree did they start to hear their own musical traditions as just one of the many musical languages that had come and gone over time? Sterne cites Johannes Fabian’s observation from Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object that ethnography “promoted a scheme in terms of which not just past cultures, but all living cultures were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of time, some upstream, others downstream.”61 It is striking how quickly the piling up of recordings of music became an object of concern in this process of decay. We have seen above that Satie wrote in 1912 of having already weighed and measured “all Beethoven, all Verdi.” Using surprisingly similar metaphors, Debussy wrote the next year about the Salon de Phonographe in Paris where one could go and listen to recorded selections through ear tubes: “In a time like ours, when the genius of engineers has reached such undreamed of proportion, one can hear famous pieces of music as easily as one can buy a glass of beer. It only costs ten centimes, too, just like automatic weighing scales. Should we not fear this domestication of sound, this magic preserved in a disc that anyone can awaken at will? Will it not mean a diminution of the secret forces of art, which until now have been considered indestructi­ble?”62 In 1919 Schoenberg anticipated aspects of our own culture of sampling, mash­ ups, and remixes in a sketch for his parody of Pfitzner’s Palestrina that included a scene of a composer digging through stacks of records trying to figure out how to compose.63 In Pfitzner’s 1917 original, Palestrina, who is despairing about the dangerous new directions in music, is visited by spirits of past musical masters and then by a chorus of angels who dictate his new mass to him during the night. In Schoenberg’s parody, intended for a comedy night at the Society for Private Musical Performances, Pfitzner is visited by the Modern Masters, Strauss, Ravel, Stravinsky, while the angels are replaced by critics dictating to a group of secretaries. What is striking in both the original and the parody is the phonometrographic idea of both ancient and contemporary music and styles being embalmed and ready for playback. But with the piling up of recorded sound there was also a sense of music crumbling into immobile blocks. Writing in 1938 in “On the Fetish Character of Music,” Adorno described what he called the atomization of listening caused by the radio and phonograph, which result in music being heard as a potpourri or collage: “there exists today a tendency to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as if it were a set

song from the 1890s. Chanan cites Bartók and Hindemith warning Arab colleagues at a 1932 conference in Cairo of the dangers of Westernization. Chanan, Repeated Takes, 91. 61 Sterne, The Audible Past, 311. 62 Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records, and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 44–45. 63 Joseph Auner, “Composing on Stage: Schoenberg and the Creative Process as Public Performance,” 19th-Century Music 29 (2005): 64–93.

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of quotations from Beethoven’s Fifth.”64 In Der Freie Satz published three years before, Schenker contrasted true linear progressions which mirror the human soul with “today’s idol, the machine! It simulates the organic, yet since its parts are directed toward only a partial goal, a partial achievement, its totality is only an aggregate which has nothing in common with the human soul.”65 It is striking how quickly Satie makes the leap in “What I am” from weighing the masterpieces of the tonal tradition from Beethoven to Verdi to the minute study of isolated individual pitches. It is as if the phonoscope breaks down the links between the physical stimulus of sound and the cognitive structures had been built up to process them, leaving us only with the revolting B and the obese F#, disturbingly extracted from any context. As Albright has discussed, Satie’s music with its “disconcertingly high specific gravity,” is full of passages that become “profoundly fixed, as if pounded in with a pile driver.” These often take the form of static loops that threaten to go on forever, as in the 840 repetitions of Vexations, for which the pianist is to prepare “by serious immobilities.”66 But in Satie, major and minor triads are the sounds that are most likely to become stuck in time, like the eighteen G-major triads at the end of the first of the Desiccated Embyros. Satie underscores the hopelessness of achieving the “grandiose” and “imposing” effect with such fossilized resources in his note to the pianist, “do your best.” The only substantial passage with functional progressions in Parade is the long quotation from Irving Berlin’s “That Mysterious Rag” (published in Paris in 1913), which stands out from the surrounding loops as if quarantined. The alarming results of the phonometrographic way of hearing tonality may have suggested this particular song, with its lyrics: “Once you met it, you’ll regret it, Just because you will never forget it, If you ever wake up from your dreaming, A-scheming, eyes gleaming, Then if suddenly you take a screaming fit, that’s it! That mysterious ra-ag.”67 * Today we are habituated not only to the vast archives of recorded works, but also to the easy access provided to the basic building blocks of music. Programs like Reason offer dizzying whirlpools of carefully embalmed samples of instruments, voices, drum loops, and even a few triads and seventh chords. Rather than despairing like Schenker, a great many musicians working around the world in styles like minimalism, postminimalism, R&B, hip hop and its many offshoots, and electronic 64 Chanan, Repeated Takes, 118. 65 Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition, ed. and trans. Ernst Oster (New York: Longman, 1979), xxiii–xxiv. The notion of music falling into parts suggests connections with the intensive interest in phonetics in connection with research on the telephone and education of the deaf. See Mara Mills, “Deaf Jam: From Inscription to Reproduction to Information,” Social Text: The Politics of Recorded Sound 28, no. 102 (2010): 35–58. 66 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 193. 67 Nancy Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 137–40.

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dance music seem perfectly content with triads that have stopped dead in their tracks. While we can’t reconstruct precisely what that B might have looked like through Satie’s Phonoscope, Leif Inge’s 9 Beet Stretch has used sound technology along the lines Satie suggested to open up a similarly surprising vantage point on some very familiar harmonies.68 The piece consists of a recording of the Ninth Symphony slowed down so that it lasts 24 hours, continuously looping online on several websites. Such sound stretching is becoming more commonplace with other recent examples receiving wide attention including “Justin Bieber slowed down 800%,” or Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for Inception (2010), which features a sample of the French singer Édith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (1960) stretched out into an ominous, murky cluster. In the case of 9 Beet Stretch, the effect is of sending Beethoven’s work across nearly 200 years of history, perhaps attempting to clean it off, as Satie proposes, from all that it has been through. At the same time it short-circuits historical narratives like Ligeti’s “Metamorphoses of Musical Form,” which justified textural music through an evolutionary process from the church modes to integral serialism and indeterminacy. Instead the phonoscope reveals what sounds like a work of Ligeti already there hiding between the notes of Beethoven’s score. With the touch of a button the technology thus brings Beethoven’s harmonies in line with our own world of sound art, soundscapes, and aural culture, a world in which any and all sounds and noises from any point on the globe can be considered musical. A world in which, as presented in John Holland’s Acoustic Wave Spectrum, tonal harmony and indeed all musical sound are just a tiny subset of a unitary sphere of vibration spanning the range from the million year galactic cycles to the nanodimension of particles and string theory.69 If we have all become phonometrographers, with all the losses that entails, Satie ends his essay “What I am” on an optimistic note, reminding us also of what we have gained in the process. He concludes: “I think I can say that phonology is superior to music. There’s more variety in it.”

Special thanks to Arved Ashby, Jane Bernstein, Mark DeVoto, Christine Fena, Brian Kane, Mark Katz, Alessandra Lampana, Beth Levy, Robert Morgan, Alex Rehding, Philip Rupprecht, Janet Schmalfeldt, Benjamin Steege, Jonathan Sterne, and Felix Wörner.

68 Leif Inge, 9 Beet Stretch (2005), http://www.park.nl/park_cms/public/index.php?thisarticle= 118. Discussed in Alexander Rehding, “The Discovery of Slowness in Music,” in Liminal Auralities: at the Thresholds of Listening, ed. Sander van Maas and Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 69 John Holland, “Acoustic Wave Spectrum,” http://www.johnholland.ws/home/acousticwave.

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Bibliography Albright, Daniel. Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Ashby, Arved. Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Auner, Joseph. A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. — “Composing on Stage: Schoenberg and the Creative Process as Public Performance.” 19thCentury Music 29 (2005): 64–93. — “Losing Your Voice: Sampled Speech and Song from the Uncanny to the Unremarkable.” In Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, edited by Ulrik Ekman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming. — “‘Warum bist du so kurz?’—Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra (1910) and the Problem of Brevity.” In Jan Maegaard Festschrift, edited by Mogens Anderson, Claus RøllumLarsen, and Niels Bo Foltmann, 43–63. Frederiksberg: Engstrøm & Sødring, 1996. Battier, Marc. “Phonography and the Invention of Sound.” In Recorded Music: Philosophical and Critical Reflections, edited by Mine Dogantan-Dack, 100–118. London: Middlesex Press, 2008. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1936. In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zorn, 217–51. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Bergeron, Katherine. Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in the Belle Epoque. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Beyer, Robert. Sounds of Our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics. New York: AIP Press, 1999. Botstein, Leon. “Time and Memory: Concert Life, Science, and Music in Brahms’s Vienna.” In Brahms and His World, edited by Walter Frisch. 3–22. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Brinkmann, Reinhold. “What the Sources Tell Us … A Chapter of Pierrot Philology.” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 10 (1987): 11–27. Busoni, Ferrucio. Ferrucio Busoni: Selected Letters. Edited by Antony Beaumont. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Cage, John. “A History of Experimental Music in the United States.” In Silence; Lectures and Writings, 67–75. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. — “Experimental Music.” 1957. In Source Readings in Music History: The Twentieth Century, edited by Oliver Strunk and Leo Treitler. Revised edition. Vol. 7, The Twentieth Century, edited by Robert P. Morgan, 30–35. New York: Norton, 1998. Chanan, Michael. Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music. London: Verso, 1995. Connor, Steven. “Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing.” In Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, edited by Veit Erlmann, 153–72. Oxford: Berg, 2005. — “The Modern Auditory I.” In Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, edited by Roy Porter, 203–23. London: Routledge, 1997. Cramer, Alfred. “Schoenberg’s Klangfarbenmelodie: A Principle of Early Atonal Harmony.” Music Theory Spectrum 24 (2002): 1–34. Crawford, John C. “Die glückliche Hand: Further Notes.” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 4 (1980): 68–76. Dahlhaus, Carl. “Issues in Composition.” In Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, translated by Mary Whittall, 40–78. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Dayan, Peter. Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.

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Eisenberg, Evan. The Recording Angel: Music, Records, and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Fauser, Annegret. Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005. Fena, Christine. “Composing the Land of Sewing Machines and Typewriters: American Modernist Music and the Piano in the Machine Age 1918–1933.” PhD diss., Stony Brook University, 2011. Hansen, Mark. “Ubiquitous Sensation: Towards an Atmospheric, Collective, and Microtemporal Model of Media.” Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011 forthcoming. Hyer, Brian. “Tonality.” In Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen, 726–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Janáček, Leoš. “Strolling.” 1927. In Leaves from His Life, edited by Vilem and Margaret Tausky, 138–41. London: Kahn and Averill, 1982. Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Kandinsky, Wassily. Complete Writings on Art. New York: Da Capo, 1994. Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Levin, Thomas. “‘Tones from out of Nowhere’: Rudolph Pfenninger and the Archeology of Synthetic Sound.” Grey Room 12 (2003): 32–79. Lewin, David. “Some Instances of Parallel Voice Leading in Debussy.” 19th-Century Music 11 (1987): 59–72. Leydon, Rebecca. “Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema.” Music Theory Spectrum 23 (2001): 217–41. Mills, Mara. “Deaf Jam: From Inscription to Reproduction to Information.” Social Text: The Politics of Recorded Sound 28, no. 102 (2010): 35–58. Morgan, Robert. “Musical Time/Musical Space,” Critical Inquiry 6 (1980): 527–38. — “Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism.” Critical Inquiry 10 (1984): 442–61. Morgan, Robert P. “‘A New Musical Reality’: Futurism, Modernism, and ‘The Art of Noises.’” Modernism/Modernity 1, no. 3 (1994): 129–51. Morgan, Robert P., ed. The Twentieth Century. Vol. 7 of Source Readings in Music History, edited by Oliver Strunk and Leo Treitler. Revised edition. New York: Norton, 1998. Orledge, Robert. Satie the Composer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pantalony, David. Altered Sensations: Rudolph Koenig’s Acoustical Workshop in Nineteenth-Century Paris. New York: Springer, 2009. Perloff, Nancy. Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Eric Satie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pompino-Marschall, Bernd. “Kempelen et al. Remarks on the History of Articulatory-Acoustic Modelling.” ZAS Papers in Linguistics 40 (2005): 145–59. Partch, Harry. Genesis of a Music; An Account of a Creative Work, its Roots and its Fulfillments. 2nd edition. New York: Da Capo Press, 1974. Rehding, Alexander. “Of Sirens Old and New.” In Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music and Sound Studies, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. — “The Discovery of Slowness in Music.” In Liminal Auralities: at the Thresholds of Listening, edited by Sander van Maas and Kiene Brillenburg Wurth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. — “Wax Cylinder Revolution.” Musical Quarterly 88 (2005): 123–60. Satie, Erik. A Mammal’s Notebook: Collected Writings of Erik Satie. Edited by Ornella Volta. Translations by Antony Melville. London: Atlas Press, 1996.

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Scheinberg, Erica. “Music and the Technological Imagination in the Weimar Republic: Media, Machines, and the New Objectivity.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2007. Schenker, Heinrich. Free Composition. Vol. 3 of New Musical Theories and Fantasies. Edited and translated by Ernst Oster. New York: Longman, 1979. Schoenberg, Arnold. “Composition with Twelve Tones.” 1941. In Style and Idea, edited by Leonard Stein, translations by Leo Black, 214–45. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Shaw, Jennifer. “Zwei Lieder für eine Singstimme und Klavier Op. 14.” In Arnold Schönberg: Interpretation seiner Werke, edited by Gerold W. Gruber, 1:181–95. Laaber: Laaber, 2002. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Tambling, Jeremy. Opera, Ideology, and Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987. Taruskin, Richard. Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Peter, the Wolf, and the Hexatonic Uncanny Richard Cohn I Pitches are properties that tones are heard (mentally represented) as having; if you like, pitches are properties ascribed to tones in auditory perception by normal observers under normal listening conditions (whatever those are) […]. Talk about the pitches of tones, or about pitches per se, [is] elliptical for talk of hearing tones as having certain pitches.1

One might well ask: whose hearing are we talking about? And yet, we aren’t inclined to ask. Pitch ascription is consistent across communities of listeners. “This pitch is a B” is elliptical not only for “I hear this frequency as representing B,” but also for “ … and I expect that you, as a member of my listening community, will hear it in the same way (even if you have no language in which to express that perception).” This assured intersubjectivity affords ontological parsimony: we can live, under ordinary circumstances, with the fiction that pitch is invested in the tone itself, and elide the intermediary listener out of the model. There are consequences for tonal ontology. Since tonality is constituted of pitches, it follows that tonality is equally invested in the listener rather than the listened-to musical “object.” Talk of tonality is elliptical for talk of hearing a composition as organized about a tonic. “This composition is tonal,” or “in B major,” is elliptical for “I hear it as tonal, and anticipate that, you, a member of my listening community, share my propensity to organize these perceptions in this way.”2 Tonality is an interpretive response, and not an intrinsic property of the music.3 Is this a significant claim, or a trivial one? Elliptical speech is ordinary speech, not a special case. “X is an apple” is shorthand for “X is a member of the category that (in English) we refer to by the term apple.” Such locutions tie the tongue into pedantic knots; worse, they threaten an infinite regress, since category instantiates the category of categories, and so forth. We gladly sacrifice precision in order to permit speech to proceed unimpeded; we all know what we mean, anyway. If investing tonality in the musical artifact is a fiction, it is a perhaps useful one, without 1 Diana Raffman, Language, Music, and Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 8. 2 An equivalent claim about meter is standard; see, for example, Justin London, Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4. 3 Compare Brian Hyer, “Tonal Intuitions in Tristan und Isolde” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1989), 19. See also Marion Guck, “Analysis as Interpretation: Interaction, Intentionality, Invention,” Music Theory Spectrum 28 (2006): 191–209; David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 143; and Steven Rings, Tonality and Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 42.

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pernicious consequence under ordinary circumstances, like investing day’s end in the setting sun rather than the turning earth. This would be the case if tonality were a classical category, with necessary and sufficient conditions for membership and crisp boundaries. But there is a significant class of compositions that bear only some of the characteristics that are proper to tonality. Such compositions evoke tonal expectations in the mind of the listener, without permitting determinate tonal interpretations of all of the events that constitute them. To come to analytical grips with compositions of this class, and with the sensations that they provoke in us, we need to view them against the backdrop of compositions that are prototypically tonal in all of their aspects. In a prototypically tonal composition, a triad is sounded, and the acculturated ear takes it as a meronym for a tonal system.4 Hearing a triad, one imagines it embedded in a diatonic collection. One further imagines that sector confirmed by a cadence that defines its boundaries.5 Having successfully “attuned our ear to the key,”6 each pitch in the composition is evaluated with respect to that tonic. That evaluation takes the form of a determinate scale-degree assignment, either directly with respect to the tonic, or at some higher order of recursion: one hears each note as representing a determinate scale degree with respect to some tonic that represents a determinate scale degree with respect to some tonic that represents … the global tonic. This is a strict standard, but there are thousands of compositions that are absolutely wellformed with respect to it. Indeed, our standard analytic modalities for tonal music are fashioned for the specific purpose of recording that aspect of our experience, in the form of Roman-numeral strings or Riemannian functions or Schenkerian graphs. In such cases, our fictitious investment of tonality in the musical artifact is never called to account. Prototypicality can give way in a number of ways, and in a number of dimensions. The cases that I have written about are those that concatenate consonant triads, which serve as elements of continuity with the classical tradition. In some cases, the principles of tonality evoked by those elements can be heard to be overridden by a logic with greater force. One example is the diatonic sequence, which the nineteenth-century Belgian/French theorist François-Joseph Fétis heard as temporarily substituting a principle of uniformity that overrides those of tonality. “The mind, absorbed only in the contemplation of the progressive series, momentarily loses the feeling of tonality, and regains it only at the final cadence, where the normal order is reestablished.”7 Other cases involve triads that are strewn through the 4 This account of prototypicality is historically deep and has considerable psychological support, as documented, for example, in Carol Krumhansl, Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). It is not, however, universally accepted. See, for example, Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 5. 5 Candace Brower, “Paradoxes of Pitch Space,” Music Analysis 27 (2008): 51–106; Richard Cohn, Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Triad’s Second Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), chapter 8. 6 Gottfried Weber, Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst (Mainz: B. Schott, 1817– 21). 7 François-Joseph Fétis, Complete Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Harmony, trans. Peter

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sectors of diatonic key space. Such passages evoke a desire for tonic, due to Weber’s principal of inertia, which seeks to situate individual triads within their eponymous diatonic systems. But they do not fulfill it, often for long periods of compositional time. Their constituent triads do not communicate with each other: as Fétis put it, “no attraction is in evidence, because every perfect chord is a harmony of repose.”8 In the absence of Fétis’s law of uniformity, what is likely to come to the fore as a local syntactic driver is common-tone retention and small-interval voice-leading. In yet a third, stronger case, uniformity and voice-leading parsimony collude, with the result that the logic of tonality is not merely pushed to the side; it becomes shot through with paradoxes and contradictions. The prototype is the chromatic sequence, a series of transpositions by a constant (measured in chromatic semitones).9 If that constant is a divisor of twelve, then the result is an equal division of the octave. In these cases, the law of uniformity breaks down the principles of tonality by inducing two conflicting perceptions: that the bounding pitches are octave-related, and hence represent identical diatonic scale degrees; and that the local transpositional intervals are identical, which implies that they traverse an identical number of diatonic steps. Underlying this conflict is Agmon’s Principle: presented with two pitches in a context-free environment, we assign them to a diatonic rather than a chromatic interval.10 When the octave is equally divided into three- or four-semitone segments, Agmon’s Principle dictates that we hear the bounding interval as seven diatonic steps (an octave); it also dictates that we hear each local interval as two diatonic steps (a third). These perceptions are in conflict. If the bounding interval is an octave, one of the local intervals is a non-diatonic dissonance (a diminished fourth or augmented second). If each local interval is a third, then the bounding interval is a non-diatonic dissonance, a diminished ninth in the first case, an augmented seventh in the second.11 Such conflicts imperil tonic identity, scale degree, function, and the consonance/dissonance binary—i.e., everything upon which tonal judgments are secured. In all of these cases where tonal expectations are temporarily overridden or placed into conflict, listeners have a strong incentive to divest from tonal logic and give over to the logic of uniformity, or of parsimonious voice leading in chromatic M. Landey (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2008), 27–28. 8 Ibid., 163. 9 Ernst Kurth, Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners Tristan (Bern: P. Haupt, 1920); Gregory Proctor, “Technical Bases of Nineteenth-Century Chromatic Tonality: A Study in Chromaticism” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1978). 10 Eytan Agmon, “Diatonicism, Chromaticism, and Enharmonicism: A Study in Cognition and Perception” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1986), 185; David Temperley, The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 128. 11 For those readers who associate arithmetic with higher-order calculation, I need to stress here that the mathematics is not far from the first level of pre-articulate subitization. The 2 + 2 + 2 = 7 paradox is not so far from the order that infant cognitivists research, when they overtly place two dolls behind a screen, covertly remove one, pull up the curtain, and record the astonishment that passes across the cherubic visage. See Karen Wynn, “Addition and Subtraction by Human Infants,” Nature 358 (27 August 1992): 749–50.

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space, or both in some combination. And here is the real attraction of the proposition that tonality resides in the listener. To invest tonality in the musical artifact compels us to ascribe tonality, or its absence, to the composition in its entirety. Does a sequential or pan-triadic segment disqualify the composition as tonal? If so, then our tonal responses must be sidelined for the entire composition: the composition is not tonal. If not, then we must shoehorn the tonally transgressive events into the tonal model, no matter how awkward or tendentious the result. It is this latter strategy that is implicitly adopted by textbooks of tonal harmony with near unanimity, as they encounter the chromatic pan-triadicism of Schubert and beyond. Restoring the listening subject to models of tonality allows us to explore our responses to triadic music, as tonality combines and competes with other logics of triadic composition, and to track the tension curves as our attuning capacities are incrementally destabilized and frustrated. This view was already well-described by Fétis, who conceived of classical tonality (“transitonality”) as a category whose constituent elements are not integral “pieces”— compositions or complete movements — but rather musical moments. The faculty of (transi-) tonal listening is capable of spontaneous suspension and reengagement without notice or fuss, like a carpenter exchanging a screwdriver for a hammer. II In a 2004 article, “Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age,” I studied hexatonic poles, which problematize tonal determinacy in the juxtaposition of only two triads, rather than through an entire series as in the case of the equal division of the octave.12 An example is the juxtaposition of E major and C minor, in either order (Ex. 1a). “Hexatonic” refers to the six-tone collection that is formed by their union (Ex. 1b).13 “Pole” indicates that these two triads are maximally distant within that collection, by virtue of sharing no common tones. “Uncanny Resemblances” presents a number of passages that use such juxtapositions to call forth some aspect of the uncanny, or are interpreted as doing so by performers or listeners. (a)

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(f)

˙ n˙˙

˙ ##˙˙

(g)

Example 1: a. A hexatonic pole; b. A hexatonic scale; c. Hexatonic pole with diatonic semitones; d. Taruskin; e. Taruskin with diatonic semitones; f. Tarnhelm; g. Tarnhelm with diatonic semitones

˙ ‹˙˙

triad?

12 Richard Cohn, “Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 57 (2004): 285–323; see also Richard Cohn, “Hexatonic Poles and the Uncanny in Parsifal,” Opera Quarterly 22 (2006): 230–48. 13 In scalar form, this collection alternates semitones and minor thirds. It combines two semitonerelated augmented triads, as indicated by the stems in Ex. 1b.

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Peter, the Wolf, and the Hexatonic Uncanny

The progression is not an arbitrary sign, but rather has iconic status (in the Peircian sense), acquiring its semiotic power through homology rather than solely through convention. Hexatonic poles destabilize the consonant status of one or both constituent triads. Agmon’s Principle dictates that, presented with two semitonally related pitches, we evaluate them by default as a minor second rather than as a chromatic inflection of a unitary scale degree. Motion from a triad to its hexatonic pole involves semitones moving in contrary motion. The interval comprising the perfect fifth, here E to B, is thus heard to grow by two diatonic degrees. What is notated as the consonant E to C is perceived as D to C. But that is a dissonant interval; and so the second chord must be a dissonant chord (Ex. 1c). The ear is caught between the desire to hear the chord as a consonant triad or as a species of diminished seventh. The progression thus erodes a cardinal musical binary, between consonance and dissonance. Such leaks in boundaries that one had thought secure are a mark of the uncanny. For music theorists of Freud’s era, the consonance/dissonance binary was the musical equivalent of reality/illusion or life/death, the boundaries whose erosion are most prone to arouse an uncanny response. A consonant chord is a real entity, with the ability to propagate a key; a dissonant chord is an inert coincidence of neighbor and passing tones, with no such capacity; it lacks reality.14 Although hexatonic poles represent the most intense way to induce a diatonic paradox using two consonant triads, there is another genus of triadic progression that induces a milder version of the same effect: when two triads of the same mode are root-related by major third. This genus come in two species: the major version, or the Taruskin; and a minor version, the Tarnhelm. In a chapter entitled “The Music Trance,” Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music devotes considerable attention to the case when a tonic major chord leads to the VI chord of its parallel minor, as at Ex. 1d. The progression “marks a kind of boundary between inner and outer experience, and its sounding came to signify the crossing of that edge, endowing the music on the other side with an uncanny aura.”15 Taruskin does not say why, leaving the impression that the progression is an arbitrary signifer that acquires its semiotic force by convention. My analysis of hexatonic poles suggests that the trance-inducing capacity follows from the contrary motion, which erodes the consonance/dissonance boundary as with hexatonic poles. The new root, C, is heard as approached from its leading tone, B; the new fifth, G, is heard as approached from its 6̂ , A. The minor third of the first chord is revealed as an augmented second, undermining the first chord’s status qua triad (Ex. 1e). These voice-leading properties are also present in the minor species, of which the locus classicus (although far from the earliest example) is the Tarnhelm motive from Wagner’s Ring Cycle (Ex. 1f). D# moves up to its 6̂ , E, and G# down to its leading tone, which is F! Fx, not G (Fig. 1g). If the resulting interval is a diminished seventh, how can the “E-minor” triad be a consonance?16

F! 14 This idea is developed considerably in Cohn, “Uncanny Resemblances.” 15 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3:69. 16 This enharmonic indeterminacy is reflected in Wagner’s preliminary sketches. See Warren Darcy, Wagner’s Das Rheingold (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 168–69. !"

!"

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Richard Cohn

What establishes these three progressions as a class, beyond their major-third root relations and chromatic status, is their participation in a hexatonic collection (through presentation of at least five of its tones), and the contrary motion of their voice leading. Under least-motion conditions, every other triadic progression involves similar motion: all of the moving voices move in a single direction. The contrary semitonal motion of these three progressions gives them the unique capacity to provoke paradoxes, to undermine the security of categorical binaries, and thereby to raise doubts concerning that which listeners treasure as most stable: the consonance of major and minor triads.17 III The Taruskin and the hexatonic pole are exploited early and often, and the Tarnhelm used at a particularly hair-raising moment, in one of the best-loved and enduring compositions from the first half of the twentieth century: Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, a “Symphonic Tale for Children; for Narrator and Orchestra” from 1936. Although Prokofiev referred to the composition as a fairytale (skazka),18 its imaginative elements are more subtle than the levitations and transubstantiations characteristic of that genre. They first become evident in the linguistic capacities of the small animals, who use human speech to chatter with each other as well as in their interior monologues. More overtly uncanny is the final action of the narrative, when the duck, whom we had presumed to have perished, “could be heard quacking inside the wolf’s stomach, because the wolf had been in such a hurry that it had swallowed the duck alive.” This is the uncanniness of Jentsch and Freud: “Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to … the return of the dead. …”19 And then there’s the lone wolf, who is viscerally scary, especially for children, but also is associated with the supernatural in the local context of Russian folk-tales, as incarnation of the malevolent forest-spirit.20 Peter’s capture of the wolf suggests a mastery of the external world of spirits and unsensed forces, as well as of the internal and entirely rational terror that a wild and hungry beast with sharp fangs might inspire. Peter comes to this contest, evidently, from a subject position associated with bourgeois comfort and protection. Peter lives with his grandfather in a country house protected by a stone wall. The property is not small: Peter must run from the gate back to the house to gather a rope. Although these circumstances are not ones 17 For a broader perspective on this problem, see Cohn, Audacious Euphony, chapter 2. 18 Catriona Kelly, “At Peace with the Wolf? Prokofiev’s ‘Official’ Soviet Works for Children,” Three Oranges 12 (2006): 4. 19 Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (1917–19; London: Hogarth, 1955), 241. 20 Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), 66–67. Also anomalous to the tale is the early-morning appearance of a nocturnal creature.

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53

one would immediately mark as salutary in Stalinist Russia, they recall the composer’s pre-Soviet childhood on a large estate managed by his agronomist father.21 These are among the circumstances in which sensations of the uncanny are most likely to arise. While the stone wall represents a prophylactic against the external world, its gate is an aperture through which that world can intrude, or through which children and ducks might innocently go out to meet it. Peter’s theme, which begins the composition, can be interpreted as a musical allegory of these elements and their relations. The theme arpeggiates C major for two measures, moves to a half cadence at the end of a four-measure antecedent, and concludes with an authentic cadence in the dominant at measure 8. It thus has the form and dimensions of a modulating period. Moreover, each of its four instrumental groups plays the textural role that it would bear in the gallant era. The first violin sounds the melody; the cello (later contrabass) produces a slower series of harmonic roots; the viola (later joined by the cello) performs an Alberti pattern; and the second violin alternately fills out the harmony with sustained notes, and doubles the first violin at a diatonic third below. In the aspects just described, Peter’s theme portrays the comfortable bourgeois home in three different respects. Its participation in the syntax of diatonic tonality is sufficient to conjure home-like associations. The affiliation of the tonic with the musical home dates to the middle of the eighteenth century;22 by now, we are quite at home with the idea that tonic is a musical home. The particular key of C major is a “home of homes,” by virtue of its historical priority and its status as the “natural” default against which degrees of softness and hardness are measured. Finally, the galant era signified by the theme’s instrumentation, form, rhythm, and texture has been assigned the value of chronological home by the educational and social institutions that have supported the classical-music canon ever since its consolidation in the early nineteenth century. Other aspects of Peter’s theme are less home-like. The initial harmonic progression at the half-way point of the four-measure antecedent executes a Taruskin, moving chromatically to an A major triad. Despite the characteristic contrary motion (G → A balanced by E → E), we might pass this off as an innocent little piece of modal mixture, but for the characteristic gesture on the off-beats of measure 3. Both violins here attempt an arpeggiation but fall a semitone short: G/B rather than A/C. The outer voices at measure 3 thus project A minor, the tonic’s hexatonic pole, rather than the more tonally prudent A major. The B is both the leading tone, and the minor third of A, but it can’t be both at the same time without un21 Dorothea Redepenning, “Prokofiev, Sergey,” in Grove Music Online. http://www.oxfordmusic­ online.com.subscriber/article/grove/music/22402 (accessed March 9, 2011). Catriona Kelly, a scholar of Stalinist-era literature, points out (in private correspondence) that Alexei Tolstoy’s adaptation of Pinocchio, from the same year, depicts children in similar circumstances. During the 1930s, Stalin supported the depiction of luxury in order to provide citizens with an aspiration. Simon Morrison (also in private correspondence) notes that many loyal Bolsheviks were rewarded with the management of rural estates built during the Tsarist era. 22 Brian Hyer, “Tonality,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 732.

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dermining its scale-degree identity and the consonance/dissonance boundary. The innocent “wrong notes” represent the first phase of a process in which hexatonic poles emerge from the tonal fabric with increasing boldness. The second stage of that process occurs at the analogous point of the consequent phrase, where E major, from which that phrase launches, proceeds directly to its hexatonic pole. Here, Prokofiev accelerates the harmonic rhythm, as if hastening by the uncanny visage. A cadence one measure later recuperates and masters this B minor as the mediant of G major. After Peter’s theme repeats, a scalar passage in octaves traverses a C-major scale at measure 17, and then transforms most of its components up a semitone into C minor. A reversal of the transformation triggers a perfect cadence in C major at measure 20. We learn, through their frequent omission in later presentations, that these measures are not inherent to Peter’s theme. They have the status of an optional codetta.

A

F

E

C Ab

?

Cb

antecedent

B

G

Eb

con seq uen t

D

G# codetta

C#

F#

D Bb

Gb

Ebb

Example 2: Peter’s theme on the Tonnetz, with diatonic encapsulation

Example 2 traces Peter’s theme and its extension on a segment of the Tonnetz, a planar geometric figure popular among German theorists during the second half of the nineteenth century. The three axes are generated by the consonant interval classes: perfect fifth on the horizontal, and major and minor thirds on the diagonals. Each triangle represents a major or minor triad. The superimposed parallelogram traces the seven natural tones. The six encapsulated triangles represent the consonant triads of C major.23 Musical activity within those confines is safely inured from the 23 Hugo Riemann, “Ideas for a Study on ‘The Imagination of Tone,’” trans. Robert W. Wason and Elizabeth West Marvin, Journal of Music Theory 36 (1992): 102; Brower, “Paradoxes,” 72; Cohn, Audacious Euphony, chapter 8.

55

Peter, the Wolf, and the Hexatonic Uncanny

external chromatic universe, and is governed by the familiar syntactic protocols of classical diatonic tonality. The figure depicts the initial Taruskin to A major by a southwest arrow that exits the parallelogram. The A minor implied by the outer voices of measure 3 extends that vector by one further degree. The question mark and double-headed arrow indicate the liminal status and quick retraction of that harmony. The motion now proceeds rightward to E major, entering the sector of the consequent phrase. By analogy with the antecedent, motion from E major also proceeds southwest, to C minor, penetrating deeply into the chromatic forest. But through a piece of enharmonic magic (indicated by the broken arrow), C minor is reinterpreted as B minor, just outside the chromatic wall, and adjacent to the dominant where it can safely cadence. The codetta is then depicted as a chromatic trip in the northern direction, inverting about the E that is common to both C major and C# minor. SUBDOMINANT

C

ant ece

F

E

den t

A

Ab

?

Cb

TONIC

B

DOMINANT

G

Eb

con se q uen t

D

G#

codetta

C#

F#

D Bb

Gb

Ebb

Example 3: Peter’s theme on the Tonnetz, with hexatonic alleys

Example 3 redraws Example 2, but removes the parallelogram and substitutes lines along the major-third axis, representing augmented triads. Adjacent walls form hexatonic collections, and bound alleys within which triads form hexatonic regions. Until its last measure, harmonies of the antecedent phrase are contained within the “tonic” alley, presenting all six tones of that hexatonic collection. To its right is the alley of the dominant, in which Peter’s consequent unfolds. To its left is the subdominant alley, traditional territory for a coda. Although C minor, the hexatonic pole of F major’s subdominant, would seem to have few subdominant credentials, the S-D-T cadential rhetoric of mm. 17–20 allows it to fill that role convincingly.

56

Richard Cohn

F Db C# D

Ab G#

A

F

E

B

C Ab

G

D

Eb

?

F#

Bb

Cb

Gb Ebb

Example 4: Character keys, in relation to triads of Peter’s theme

With a single exception, each triad of Peter’s theme serves as a platform upon which one of the character themes is launched, as shown in Ex. 4. Three characters are initially presented in the tonic alley: Peter and the bird in C major, and the unfortunate duck in A. Three further characters are initially in the dominant alley: the grandfather in B minor, the cat in G major, and the wolf in G minor, the latter’s modal variant. The late-arriving hunters are assigned D major, a modal and enharmonic variant of the late-arriving C minor in Peter’s theme. A number of further stages in the story’s hexatonic tonal progress can now be explored, score in hand. Locations in the score are indexed by rehearsal numbers, in bold face. Flute ° œ œ œ œ bœ œ œ bœ nœ œ œ nœ bœ œ œ bœ nœ œ œ nœ bœ œ œ bœ nœ œ œ nœ bœ œ œ bœ ¢&

° ¢& œ

Vln. pizz.

C+

‰

bœ ab-

‰

œ C+

‰

œ ab-

‰

œ

‰

œ

C+

‰

œ

‰

bœ

‰

ab-

Example 5: The bird’s fioratura at 2

2. Immediately following the conclusion of Peter’s theme, the narrator introduces the bird. The solo flute’s C-major fioratura, presented as Ex. 5, is inflected by the tones of its A-minor hexatonic pole. As these tones fall on weak beats and are accompanied by dissonant pedal G, they are local neighbors that never threaten

Peter, the Wolf, and the Hexatonic Uncanny

57

to fuse into a triad. Of all the creatures of the forest, the bird is the most in charge of his dark side, and thus best primed for effective action against the wolf. When Peter’s theme is presented now in the subdominant, the hexatonic pole of its consequent phrase (at 5) leads A major to E minor. Rather than accelerating the harmonic rhythm as in the opening presentation, here Prokofiev lingers on E minor for an extra measure. This represents a stage in the aural emergence of hexatonic poles, with their associated dangers. The particular pairing of A major with E minor prepares the musical portrait of the narrative’s darkest aspects, which involve the juxtaposition of just those particular triads. 6. Next we are introduced to the duck, depicted by an oboe that securely squats on A major. When his music first waddles away from that key, just before 7, it telescopes the harmonic course of Peter’s theme, returning to C major. The bird takes up that key as before, but immediately flies down in the duck’s A major, in which key their quarrel begins at 9. A chromaticized 5–6 sequence leads from that key to an alternation between E-major and E-minor triads at 10, terminating with the latter. Having travelled to the hexatonic pole of its characteristic A major tonic, the duck will soon go down a similar tonal road in more dire circumstances. After the clarinet twice presents the cat’s theme, an action sequence temporarily accesses a different tonal universe: the octatonic world of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, whose characteristic superposition of F major and C major is precisely the harmonic field at 13. F major emerges alone, as dominant of B major, from which a third presentation of the cat’s theme is launched. 15. Grandfather’s B minor is the first thematic material in minor. Peter ignores him, presenting his music in the tonally distant key of B major, but grandfather leads him home in B minor, locking the gate with a cadence. In Peter’s theme, B minor’s adjacency to the dominant constituted an easy portal back to safety. B major, on the other hand, is an incautious choice, as it stands adjacent to G minor, a dangerous key. °? bc ˙ b ˙ Horns

?b ¢ bc˙

œ œœ œ œœ œ œ œœ # œœ œœ œn ˙ œ œ œœ œ n˙

œ#œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ n˙

b˙ n˙ ˙ & nœ n œ nœ œ œ œ œ n œ œ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ ? ˙ b œ n œ b œn œ b œ œ œ n œ b œ n œ b œ œ œ # œ œ œ œ œ ˙ & œ # œ n œ# œ n œ œ œ œ bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙ f-/A+

Db+/a-

Example 6: Wolf’s mastication theme, with hexatonic poles, at 19

19. The visceral power of the wolf’s G-minor music is due in part to Prokofiev’s skill as an orchestrator: not only the shimmering cymbal and tremolo strings, but also the three horns, whose low register and closely spaced minor triads evoke the (at that time) incomparable power of the diesel train.24 But tonal events contribute to the effect. The transition from grandfather to wolf at 20 is a direct Tarnhelm pro24 An internet site dedicated to the sounds of diesel air horns presents a variety of closely-spaced minor triads, most to within a whole step of g minor, although an octave higher than the pitches with which the horns depict the wolf. http://www.dieselairhorns.com/sounds/DM_S-3B-J.wav

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Richard Cohn

gression, from B minor to G minor, with contrary motion voice leading from F→G and B→B. The theme itself is a musical portrait of mastication, moving in contrary motion between strong-beat triads (mostly minor) and weak-beat semitonal neighbors. The latter initially form diminished triads, then French sixths,25 and finally a series of hexatonic poles, indicated in Ex. 6. 20. The hunting of the duck selectively reprises the action music at 9–14: the quarrel between bird and duck, and the predatory slinking of the cat. The chromatic 5–6 sequence from the duck’s A major, this time with the fioritura supplied by the duck’s oboe rather than the bird’s flute, leads as before to E major and then to E minor. What ensued in the earlier action music was the cat’s theme, followed by the Petrushka music that accompanied the cat’s pounce and the bird’s escape. The position of the cat’s theme is here occupied by a six-measure prolongation of E minor, with added sixth, leading immediately to six measures of Petrushka music. The consummatory gulp occurs to a sustained C-minor triad, which leads to a {C-E-A} augmented triad, and to a reprise of the duck’s music, but with muted strings symbolizing the lupine membranes that now intervene between the quacking duck and our listening ears. Example 7 depicts on the Tonnetz the uncanny route from the duck’s free but frantic A major of 21 to his desperately confined A major of 24. 26

A#

C

F#

Ab duck jumps out Eb G#

C# E

A

closer...

C Ab

wolf getting closer

catching up...

embellied

GULP

B

G

Eb

Example 7: Wolf chasing and swallowing duck, on the Tonnetz 25 In one case, the contrary motion is idealized: the D splits into the augmented sixth C#/E, although literally the E is approached by leap from above in the second horn. 26 The F# triad that sounds as part of the Petrushka chord on the strong measures, and supports a dominant seventh on the weak measures, is external to the cycle.

Peter, the Wolf, and the Hexatonic Uncanny

59

25. The extended climactic episode that leads to the capture of the wolf is replete with hexatonic progressions, hexatonic poles, and dissonant harmonies that are subsets of hexatonic scales. The wolf paces and masticates in F minor, concluding on an implied B minor. This leads immediately to its hexatonic pole, D major, the key in which Peter’s theme is quoted as he watches the wolf. The liquidation of Peter’s theme over a B-major triad leads immediately to its hexatonic pole, a reprise of the wolf’s music in G minor at 31. The mastication theme is followed by a two-chord cadential “snap” progression, which recurs throughout the span of the wolf’s capture. The cadential chords contain major triads in dominant-tonic relation, enhanced by dissonant major sevenths. The chord in dominant position bears a sharped fifth as well, composing a pentachord from the union of two Taruskinrelated triads (C major and E major upon initial presentation). 33. After the wolf’s last cadential snap in C major, Peter fashions his lasso over a violin cadenza that suggests C minor, and then snares the wolf on an Abminor triad. The two triads that straddle the monophonic cadenza are related by yet another hexatonic pole, the one embedded into the bird’s opening fioritura. The A-minor triad pulsates for one measure, and then is placed into periodic alternation with a pulsating G dominant seventh. Although this chromatic juxtaposition is not hexatonic, it does contains two sly references, one internal and one external. The internal reference is to the optional tag at the end of the initial presentation of Peter’s theme, which similarly juxtaposed a major and minor triad that share a third. The external reference is to the Fate motive from Wagner’s Ring cycle, which pairs a minor triad with a dominant seventh whose third it shares. 40. The musical processes are markedly simplified during the narrative’s denouement. Table 1 synopsizes the narrative and tonal plan. After the wolf is subdued, the hunters emerge from the forest. Their theme, presented long after those of the other characters, is built on an alternation between D-major and C-major triads. Of these, the D has more claim to status as local tonic: it is presented in root position on the downbeat, whereas C is presented in six-four position on the third beat. The source of this tonic is the codetta at mm. 17–20. This association is clarified by the C-major cadence before 40, and its intensified repetition before 41, which rhetorically heighten the tag’s cadence at m. 20. The allegorical interpretation of this association falls out easily: the hunters and the little tag theme are both extraneous pieces of pomp. Just as Peter can capture the wolf quite well without the aid of the hunters, so too can his theme exist quite well without the musical bauble to which it is initially attached.

60

Richard Cohn Rehearsal . # 36–37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49–50 51 52 53 54

Action/Theme Wolf tries to escape Hunters

Peter’s theme as waltz Triumphal procession

Duck Final cadence

Peter Hunters Wolf Hunters Grandpa/Cat Peter Bird

Key (major unless indicated) atonal  C C D  C D  C#  C A E C C C E minor D  C B C  D C C  E minor A atonal  C

Table 1: Narrative and Tonal Script for the Procession

The right column of Table 1 emphasizes how closely the final quarter of the composition clings to C major. Most of the music is firmly in, or leads quickly back to, that tonic. There are three exceptions: Peter’s waltz, which uses Taruskin progressions through the major keys of a hexatonic cycle; grandfather and cat, transposing a semitone a down to B major in accordance with their characteristic keys; and E minor, the only minor tonic in the final pages of Peter and the Wolf. E minor, the hexatonic pole of A major, was the duck’s tonal destination while squabbling with the bird and fleeing the wolf. Here that key is assigned to wolf himself, now captive like the duck who fled him. At 46, E minor sets the mastication music of the now domesticated wolf. The key returns at the end of the procession, at 53. This is not just any E minor: orchestrational features suggest its association with E minor as it was first presented just before 11, as duck and bird squabble and the cat begins to slink. In that earlier passage, the root and third are eliminated, but E minor is still virtually present as marcato B pendulates in the high strings. The entire E-minor triad pendulates, marcato in the high strings, as the captive wolf is paraded by. What we are being primed for is one final hexatonic pole: E minor is directly followed by a gauzy presentation of the duck’s theme in A major. The scene perhaps parodies the end of Wagner’s Parsifal, where a processive ritual is interrupted by one last uncanny stage action, Kundry’s “de-souling,” accompanied by one last hexatonic pole as the curtain drops. The duck having had his say, the entire orchestra now accelerates through a dissonant, atonal wedge to a final Cmajor cadence.

Peter, the Wolf, and the Hexatonic Uncanny

61

IV Peter and the Wolf, at those moments when it is not dissonant and atonal, is largely populated by consonant triads, especially major ones. (Seventh chords, especially those that contain tritones, are surprisingly rare; they tend to occur only at cadences and to portray special effects, such as the cat’s tree climb.) Triads are sometimes framed as tonics by their dominants and subdominants, projecting diatonic systems, but just as frequently enter into chromatic major-third relations, which project hexatonic organization. Hexatonic poles and modally matched Taruskins occur early, late, often, and at moments of high drama. Peter is thus saturated with the sound of contrary-motion voice leading, which at each presentation projects a paradox that threatens to undermine the secure sense of the local tonal home. Sometimes those projections are fleeting and innocuous, as in Peter’s antecedent phrase or the bird’s fioritura, where A minor is merely suggested. Sometimes they are rapidly recuperated, as in Peter’s consequent. Sometimes, a rhetorical flaring delays the moment of recuperation, as in the A minor on which Peter traps the wolf. In the most uncanny or terrifying moments, the flare persists unextinguished: the hexatonic pole or Tarnhelm progression establishes a new local tonic that undermines the consonant status of its predecessor, as in the two G-minor appearances of the wolf theme, or the A-major swan song of the embellied duck. The more perilous or fantastic the circumstance, the more explicit and unrecuperated the contrary motion, the more indeterminate the consonant status of the local triad, and the more insecure its relation to the global C-major tonic. Tonality frames Peter and the Wolf but does not saturate it.27 Tonal sensibilities stimulate expectations that condition responses to its most emblematic moments and dramatic effects. Exploring those responses requires the terms, concepts, and representational modes associated with classical tonality, but not those alone. Does that make Peter a tonal composition? Yes and no, which is to say, perhaps maybe and partially sometimes. If I equivocate, perhaps it is because the question is malformed or misdirected; because tonality is a property that only seems to attach directly to compositions; because Peter and the Wolf, like thousands of its ilk, illuminates the presence of the listening and interpreting subject who has, all along, been transparently interposed between the property and the music; and because that subject is more capable of spontaneously suspending and reengaging his or her tonal sensibilities than our analytic modes have been prone to document. Bibliography Agmon, Eytan. “Diatonicism, Chromaticism, and Enharmonicism: A Study in Cognition and Perception.” PhD diss., City University of New York, 1986. Brower, Candace. “Paradoxes of Pitch Space.” Music Analysis 27 (2008): 51–106. Cohn, Richard. Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Triad’s Second Nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 27 The framing/saturating distinction is due to Asher Yampolsky.

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— “Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 57 (2004): 285–323. — “Hexatonic Poles and the Uncanny in Parsifal.” Opera Quarterly 22 (2006): 230–48. Darcy, Warren. Wagner’s Das Rheingold. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Fétis, François-Joseph. Complete Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Harmony. Translated by Peter M. Landey. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2008. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’” 1917–19. In An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. Vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 217–52. London: Hogarth, 1955. Guck, Marion. “Analysis as Interpretation: Interaction, Intentionality, Invention.” Music Theory Spectrum 28 (2006): 191–209. Huron, David. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Hyer, Brian. “Tonal Intuitions in Tristan und Isolde.” PhD diss., Yale University, 1989. — “Tonality.” In The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen, 726–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Ivanits, Linda J. Russian Folk Belief. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989. Kelly, Catriona. “At Peace with the Wolf? Prokofiev’s ‘Official’ Soviet Works for Children.” Three Oranges 12 (2006): 3–9. Krumhansl, Carol. Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Kurth, Ernst. Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners Tristan. Bern: P. Haupt, 1920. London, Justin. Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Proctor, Gregory. “Technical Bases of Nineteenth-Century Chromatic Tonality: A Study in Chromaticism.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 1978. Raffman, Diana. Language, Music, and Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Redepenning, Dorothea. “Prokofiev, Sergey.” In Grove Music Online. http://www.oxfordmusiconline. com.subscriber/article/grove/music/22402 (accessed March 9, 2011). Riemann, Hugo. “Ideas for a Study on ‘The Imagination of Tone.’” Translated by Robert W. Wason and Elizabeth West Marvin. Journal of Music Theory 36 (1992): 69–79. Rings, Steven. Tonality and Transformation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Taruskin, Richard. The Nineteenth Century. Vol. 3 of The Oxford History of Western Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Temperley, David. The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Tymoczko, Dmitri. A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Weber, Gottfried. Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst. Mainz: B. Schott, 1817–21. Wynn, Karen. “Addition and Subtraction by Human Infants.” Nature 358 (27 August 1992): 749–50.

The Legacy of German Rule – . Some Reflections on Another Musical Iceberg . in the Transatlantic Relationships . of Music History Wolfgang Rathert (Some) Preliminaries Our knowledge about the transmission of continental music theory to the colonies and the United States from the beginning of the eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century has considerably increased during recent decades.1 And yet, research on the exact transmission and reception of so-called “German Rule”—that is, the spread of German music and music theory as the be-all and end-all of American art music from the mid-nineteenth century on—is bound to remain a fascinating task for future transatlantic musicology. In the nineteenth century, German art music was played in all major East Coast cities and formed the established canon of such orchestras as the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony.2 But what about the reception of German theorists, who were available in translation in the case of Riemann and Richter and transmitted orally in other cases? Similarly, we know comparitavely little about the biographical background and the further professional activities of the many German musicians emigrating to the States after 1848, such as Adolf Weidig, a Hamburg-born student of Riemann who moved to Chicago in 1892 and became the first important teacher of Ruth Crawford Seeger at the American Conservatory. She would later say, full of admiration, that he had “an unusual balance between necessary discipline and necessary allowance for individuality.”3 Whatever the case, it is clear that German musical culture was successfully exported on many levels and helped to establish American art music as a cosmopolitan if stylistically bland sub-category of its European counterpart. As early as 1855, John Knowles Paine, who had studied organ with August Haupt in Berlin, presented an expertly crafted if anachronistic journeyman’s effort with his Mass, situated stylistically in an idealized eighteenth century. He regarded his 1

Cf. the excellent overview in Sherman Van Solkema and Bryan R. Simms, “Theory,” in New Grove Dictionary of American Music, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie, 4:370–77. New York: Grove’s Dictionaries of Music, 1986. I am most grateful to Prof. Brian Hyer for valuable information about further influences in the early nineteenth century, which he provided to me during the conference. 2 See Nancy Newman, Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society in Nineteenth-Century America (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2010). 3 Joseph N. Straus, The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 206.

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teaching activities at Harvard as a bastion of European (and especially German) music amidst a culture dominated by light musical entertainment. Horatio Parker, who had studied with Joseph Gabriel Rheinberger in Munich, taught in much the same spirit at Yale. In Parker’s case we are precisely informed about the musical tools he acquired in Munich and transmitted to the United States, not only to Charles Ives, but later to Roger Sessions as well. These tools consisted of a classically tinged sense of form, a command of the standard genres, a thorough grounding in counterpoint, and, of course, a respect for the traditional limits of tonality (although Parker’s music harbors many a Wagnerianism missing in Rheinberger).4 In contrast, George Chadwick—who had also studied with Rheinberger and previously in Leipzig—was attracted from the very outset to French culture and later to verismo. Yet when Chadwick came to revise the curriculum of the New England Conservatory (which he headed from 1897 on), he generally adhered to German models, focusing on the great masters of the past and their compositional doctrines. Still, in combining theory, practice, and history, Chadwick was more open toward contemporary musical life than the teaching staff of such German institutions as the Berlin Hochschule, which was notorius for its uninspiring, almost bureaucratic way of teaching music theory.5 (In a fit of despair, the young Leo Blech—another student of the Hochschule and later one of Germany’s most distinguished conductors—once called it a “spiritual slaughterhouse.”) But there was no doubt about the task that the New England Conservatory swore to uphold: it was the same idealistic defense of musical culture whose culmination was to be found in Germany. To quote the opening sentence of the Conservatory’s early course catalogue: “Music, more than any other art, has fallen into the hands of charlatans.”6 Other centers of European influence, such the National Conservatory headed in Washington D.C. by Dvořák after 1893, likewise employed teachers with German backgrounds. One was Rubin Goldmark, a nephew of Karl Goldmark. Though born in New York, Rubin Goldmark studied with Robert Fuchs in Vienna and became the first teacher of Copland and Gershwin before they were exposed to other influences—Copland to the French influence of Nadia Boulanger, and Gershwin to that of Joseph Schillinger, whose universal and rigorously mathematical system later drew the admiration of Henry Cowell. From 1871 on, the Erfurt-born Bernhard Ziehn flourished in Chicago. Ziehn was the diametrical opposite of Riemann and one of the most acute theorists of his day. Though his activities were at first limited to church music, his long-distance impact—a phenomenon that has eluded 4 See E. Douglas Bomberger, “Layers of Influence: Echoes of Rheinberger in the Choral Works of Horatio Parker,” in Josef Rheinberger: Werk und Wirkung: Bericht über das Internationale Symposium anlässlich des 100. Todestages des Komponisten, veranstaltet von der Gesellschaft für Bayerische Musikgeschichte und dem Institut für Musikwissenschaft der Universität München, München, 23.–25.11.2001, ed. Stephan Hörner and Hartmut Schick (Tutzing: Schneider, 2004), 225–42. 5 Siegfried Ochs, Geschehenes, Gesehenes (Leipzig and Zurich, 1922), 79–80. 6 See the catalogue for winter term 1871, reproduced under the English language version of Wikipedia. Wikipedia contributors, “New England Conservatory,” http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/File:1871_NewEnglandConservatory_WinterTerm_BostonMusicHall.png (accessed June 11, 2011).

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study to the present day—extended far into the modern age, even reaching Busoni and Schoen­berg. Particularly remarkable was his teaching method, already laid out in his textbook of harmony and modulation in 1888.7 Dispensing with deductive axioms, he instead discussed specific instances from various historical ages. Ziehn worked his way speculatively and spectacularly through the canon; composing was, for him, more a scholarly than an artistic activity. This set him apart from Riemann, whose theory was aimed at artistic content, and still further from Schenker and his penchant for organicism. There have been no reliable estimates of how many nineteenth-century German teachers taught privately in the United States. George Ives, the father of Charles, studied in New York with Carl (Charles) Foeppl(e), a German organist and theorist.8 To this, we must add the all-encompassing if diffuse influence of German theory via the work of newspaper journalists and John Sullivan Dwight’s influential music periodical. Their impact continued to be felt until America entered the First World War. A useful gauge of this influence can be found in Charles Ives’ contradictory (and highly amusing) statements in his Memos: In the same breath, Ives both heavily rebels against the dry and academic “German Rule” infused by his Yale professor Horatio W. Parker and glorifies Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as high priests of musical art.9 Ives’s withering attacks on “soft ears” and his well-known tirades against Richard Strauss and Max Reger—the former as decadent, the latter as the quintessence of musical Teutonicism—take up arms against what he considered an obsolete culture of music and performance. For this reason, his Fourth Symphony (1911–1916) is a kind of oxymoron: it contains Ives’ most advanced experimental piece (the so-called “Comedy”), follows with a fugue symbolizing musical academia, and ends with a hymn-like march surrounded by a faint background of percussive noise that culminates in a solemn tonal cadence without any sense of irony. Was Peter Burkholder right to view Ives as an involuntary but staunch adept of European music? The question is directed toward the historical mindset behind the music: was the major-minor tonal system an incontrovertible reality for Ives, or merely an artistic device? Or was Ives, like Schoenberg, already deeply imbued with an acoustical theory of music that viewed tonality with detachment from other vantage points? The First World War brought about an interruption to “German Rule”, for French music was already beginning to obtain a stronger foothold in Boston around 1900. Beginning in 1920, the leading young composers born around the turn of the century preferred to travel to Boulanger in Paris. But German theory, like German music, remained present in their minds and compositional output. In the United States, as in Europe, the reception and transformation of “German Rule”—the ideal 7

Bernhard Ziehn, Harmonie- und Modulationslehre (Berlin: R. Sulzer, 1888). An enlarged English version was released as Manual of Harmony: Theoretical and Practical (Milwaukee, WI: William A. Caun Music Co., 1907). 8 See David Eiseman, “George Ives as Theorist: Some Unpublished Documents,” Perspectives of New Music 14 (1975): 139–47; and Carol K. Baron, “George Ives’s Essay in Music Theory: An Introduction and Annotated Edition,” American Music 10 (1992): 239–88. 9 See Charles E. Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (London, Calder & Boyars, 1973): 115–22.

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of tonal music in theory and practice, honed to stylistic perfection by historical awareness and a rigorous adherence to rules—progressed in a complex interplay of competing currents and countercurrents. Nonetheless, its consequences were quite different. In Europe, this ideal had already been called into question during the conflict between the “New German School” (Neu-Deutsche Schule) and the classicists in the nineteenth century, when the writings of Fétis and Helmholtz were influential in the humanities and natural sciences as well. The situation in the United States was at once simpler and more complex: On the one hand, there was no comparable polarization into ideological camps; on the other, there were more decisive attempts to break free of the old tonal system. In both cases, the power of tradition—or what Harold Bloom has called the “anxiety of influence”—was at work. In fact, the Europeans equated tradition with a tonal theory and practice that predominated between 1600 and 1900. This equation was by no means self-evident in the colonies, or later in the United States, where the social and religious function of music was paramount. (This explains why around 1770 William Billings posed as a fierce opponent of rules: it had less to do with the aesthetic of genius than with a fundamentally different attitude toward music.) In the nineteenth century, this posture was overwhelmed and suppressed by the European aesthetic. It was not until the end of the century, at the zenith of German influence, that there arose an opposition whose radicality can be measured in its degree of independence from Europe, but which was less aesthetically constricted. This is apparent in many Ives works that continue to use traditional tonality to surprising effect, unconcerned by the state of musical progress. It has earned him accusations of iconoclasm and of a perceived lack of the theoretical and historical reflection appropriate to a twentieth-century composer. Obviously, the use of traditional tonality to uncannily mythic effect—as in the famous string chorale of The Unanswered Question—was part of a integral strategy whose opposite extremes (sometimes found in the same work), were noise or the forbidden paradise of popular sounds. Thus the “Ives Case” unveils a central problem faced not only by American composers but by their post-war European counterparts—namely, how to deal with the legacies of the past. Three constellations illustrate the productive and contradictory repercussions that the confrontation with German classical-romantic music held out for American modernism. (Naturally, the influence of the German tradition on American popular music requires a separate discussion.)10 Here the terms “German” and “American” call for explication and refinement. In the minds of late-nineteenth-century American composers and audiences, “German” meant the preponderance and influence of European musical culture per se. It was the quintessence of the exemplum classicum—the timeless masterpiece, sacrosanct and impervious to criticism. But as such, it was also associated with an unpleasant suprematist claim that belittled the musical writings and works of all other nations. If Beethoven’s music still embodied the ideal celebrated in John Sullivan Dwight’s transcendentalist Beethoven cult 10 Donald Johns has discussed the influence of traditional harmony on popular music in Donald Johns, “Funnel Tonality in American Popular Music, ca. 1900–1970,” American Music 11 (1993): 458–72.

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(and followed by Ives),11 Wagner’s complex tonal language, with its latent abolition of tonality, was already seen as a danger. And finally, German musicology laid claim to an all-embracing study of music, even if its encyclopedic approach was actually a legacy of the French Enlightenment and Riemann followed in the footsteps of Fétis. The preponderance of German music can be heard in every statement by American composers and theorists, progressive and conservative alike. Whether Ives or Sessions, Cowell or Thomson, they all presuppose it, either to thrust it aside or to develop it further. In our context, “American modernism” should be regarded less as a national tag than an aesthetic posture also adopted by European composers living and teaching in the United States. The openmindedness of America’s musical life—its tolerance and generosity toward the new vs. its indifference toward anything failing to serve the cause of entertainment or found outside the canon—proved to be favorable for the implementation and dissemination of ideas and perspectives that had encountered resistance or wholesale rejection in Germany. Under the conditions of American musical culture, Hindemith’s style of writing (an up-to-date version of Schenker’s ideas) and Schoenberg’s return to tonality underwent a “progressive” acceleration. Conservative German compositional positions could evolve undisturbed in the United States, from whence they probably had a stronger impact on post-1950 music history than would have been the case in their country of origin. Three case studies will serve to illustrate these thoughts: first, the ultramodern concept of dissonance advanced by Charles Seeger and Henry Cowell; second, the influence of Schenker’s theories on Hindemith and Sessions (a transatlantic point of contact that failed to produce a convergence); and third, Schoenberg’s reversion to tonality during his American exile, as seen from the vantage point of postmodernism. In all three instances, we can see how the paradigm of “German Rule” remained in force, whether in the form of deliberate negation (of consonance), as a vehicle for teaching and composing, or finally, in Schoenberg’s case, as a relaxation of the antithesis between suppressed tradition and lawless innovation. All three positions are crucial prerequisites for the cosmopolitan history of post-war music, where traditional tonality and the compositional techniques associated with it led to post-modernism, albeit as metaphors for a post-historical awareness among composers and listeners. In retrospect, we might ask whether this sort of awareness—a “pre-modernist” awareness, if you will—had been latent in American music history at least from the mid-nineteenth century. It is incontestable that the idioms and stylistic postures of German composers had already changed in the 1920s under the impact of jazz. But the post-1933 émigrés realized quickly that a return to “German Rule” furthered rather than hindered their influence on American modernism. This strategy presupposed certain compromises in the émigré’s own music; namely, they had to adapt to the aforementioned social and aesthetic functions that American listeners expected of music. It is no coincidence that Schoenberg’s most successful work in the United States was his arrangement for string orchestra of Verklärte 11 See Michael Broyles, Beethoven in America, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011, 41–94.

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Nacht, whose tonal language and post-Wagnerian expressive burden reminded American listeners of Hollywood film music. Little did they realize, or even think it relevant, that Hollywood made use of Schoenberg’s topoi rather than vice versa. 1) Seeger, Cowell, and Ultra-Modernism The confrontation between the ultra-modernists and German music formed part of a larger process of realignment toward Europe that included its music, its music theory, and the musicology that described it. The catalyst in this process was Charles Seeger, whose intellectual development was marked by a passionate effort to penetrate music in its entirety. Feeling his training at Harvard to be insufficient, he traveled to Europe in order to imbibe the impulses of French and German modernism in Munich and Paris and to embark on a conductor’s career in Cologne—a career that was to be crowned with the performance of his own “genuine” American opera. Established in Berkeley, he became ceaselessly active as a composer and scholar during the First World War. One of his students was the young Henry Cowell, whose seminal book New Musical Resources, completed by 1919, was evidently the fruit of their mutual inspiration. This book combines approaches from physics and constructivism into a fascinating panorama of previously overlooked possibilities in musical composition. What is relevant in the context of my essay, however, is their position on tonality: was it to be rejected, surmounted, or expanded? Later Cowell recalled: [W]hen I had my first formal meeting with Seeger […] in the fall of 1914, I remember so well his pleasure and excitement at discovering polytonality, dissonant harmony and counterpoint, and atonality, in the music I showed him. These were new terms to me, though such music was not. That first day Seeger showed me Schoenberg’s Opus 11, with the tactful remark: “You might like to see how someone else has handled similar problems.”12

Seeger’s concept of “dissonant counterpoint” was developed in these years—a concept that would bear impressive compositional fruit in the music of Carl Ruggles and Ruth Crawford, who would later become Seeger’s wife. At first glance, it seems to be an American equivalent of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, a breakthrough to a musical language divested of any inkling of tonality. Initially, Seeger regarded it as a purely theoretical game that derived “dissonant counterpoint” from the rules of sixteenth-century polyphony, merely interchanging the functions of consonance and dissonance. Two things are crucial here: the positing of a historically definable “Urtonality,” and the acknowledgment of a need for compositional “regulations.” In the early 1920s, Cowell supplied a familiar explanation for this march toward the emancipation of dissonance—namely, it resulted from the successive conquest and incorporation of higher partials in the overtone series, which led ineluctably from 12 Quoted from Ann M. Pescatello, Charles Seeger: A Life in American Music (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 65. According to Pescatello, Cowell’s comments were described in a 1960 letter from Sidney Robertson Cowell to Charles Seeger regarding Cowell’s interview with Hugo Weisgall in the Music Quarterly, October 1959.

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medieval organum to the present-day music of Schoenberg and Ornstein.13 The Hegelian telos of a relentless “tendency of the material” rests on a well-known grounding in physics. Drawing on a line of argument from Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre, Cowell refers to consonance and dissonance as “relative terms with a psychological distinction.”14 In other words, the process of becoming accustomed to dissonance entails a growing sophistication on the part of the aural faculty. (In terms of the psychology of perception, dissonance becomes consonant, thereby allowing consonances such as the open fifth to become “dissonant” archaisms.) Cowell and Seeger were not concerned with a “revolution,” but with enhancing human sensory perception. They did so, however, by systematically examining all possible combinations of the musical material. Seeger later described this process in what he intended to publish as a selection of essays under the title Principia Musicologica using a term from linguistics: inflections. “Consonance and dissonance are the names given, from a structural viewpoint, to what has been called, from a functional viewpoint, inflection of the pitch function.”15 We find ourselves in the realm of a universal field theory inspired by the project of a holistic science of music as proposed by Guido Adler, a figure Seeger had intensively studied.16 Seeger’s combination of empirical psychology and an epistemological cum linguistic approach makes use of a mode of discourse that dates back to German music theory of the early eighteenth century. His object is not so much an encyclopedic presentation of the variety of musical phenomena, nor primarily their viability as teaching material, but rather the illumination of physical, psychological, and historical connections that converge in a theory of culture. In the case of Schenker and Schoenberg, this theory of culture hinges on a proof of the primacy of the classicalromantic canon as viewed from diametrically opposite standpoints. In the case of Riemann, as is well known, it was augmented with other aspects of an anthropol­ ogical bent. Seeger expands all of this into a universal theory in which the concept of tonality becomes a decisive methodological tool. To Seeger, “dissonance” and “consonance” are nothing but placeholders for two universally valid principles: “tension” and “relaxation.” The transcendental use of these terms also explains why Cowell, following his extremely “dissonant” iconoclastic works of the 1920s, felt no qualms about seeking out Erich von Hornbostel in Berlin a short while later (and Schoenberg as well, a fact still awaiting scholarly attention). Cowell also went on to write expressly “consonant” pieces related to eighteenth-century American folk music—compositions that seemed hopelessly antiquated to the 1950s avant-garde. Notwithstanding the highly conflicting stylistic languages in these works, they all proceeded, according to Cowell and Seeger, from the same structural and functional 13 Henry Cowell, “Harmonic Development in Music” (1921), Essential Cowell: Selected Writings 1921–1964, ed. Dick Higgins (New York: McPherson & Co., 2001), 280. 14 Cowell, “Harmonic Development,” 280. 15 Charles Seeger, “Consonance and Dissonance,” in Studies in Musicology II: 1929–1979, ed. Ann. M. Pescatello (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 95. 16 See Charles Seeger, “Toward a Unitary Field Theory for Musicology” (1970), in Studies in Musicology: 1935–1975, ed. Ann M. Pescatello (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 102–3.

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principles, which were in turn derived and abstracted from the burning issues of the late-nineteenth century. They were marked by the compositional intricacies of enharmonic modulation on the one hand, and on the other by a historical awareness according to which all historical phenomena were equally close to the present. (The manner in which their recourse to the sixteenth century was handled is a topic well worth further study.) Nonetheless, the intellectual achievement of dissonant counterpoint would have been inconceivable without the heated debate on consonance and dissonance that took place among German musicologists, whether on an historical plane (Riemann) or in systematic musicology (Stumpf). It was from this debate that Schoenberg derived the question of the essence of pitch, and Seeger the question of the essence of music per se. That the notion of a single indivisible tonality could no longer be upheld was made clear by Milton Babbitt in his “Celebrative Speech” of 1974. Here he not only mocked the Boulanger school as a “musical bakery where loafs of chords were packaged and labeled,” but lashed out indirectly at Seeger: Schoenberg’s true and lasting contemporaneity led us not only to model theory […], but to the restimulation of what already had appeared to have been evanescent slogans, but superstitions as widely circulated as the clinical aprioristic notions of context-free “consonance” and “dissonance”; and the universal humanist’s spin-off fancies of the associated “tensions” and “relaxations” finally could be exorcised when it was realized that proclamations of the “emancipation of the dissonance” were simply that of the relativization of dissonance […]17

From the vantage point of intellectual history, both of these positions are legacies of German theory that had a falling out and became archenemies. 2) Sessions, Hindemith, and Schenkerianism After studying with Horatio Parker and Ernest Bloch, Roger Sessions—the “American Brahms”—lived in Florence, Berlin, and Paris from 1925 to 1933. Returning to the United States, he exerted an influence for decades as a teacher of composition and theory at Berkeley and Princeton. (Among his students were Milton Babbitt and Edward T. Cone.) During his years in Europe, he was an eyewitness to the rise of neoclassicism and clearly recognized the aesthetic problems of European modernism, stuck as it was between adaptation to a politically tamed mainstream and the splendid isolation of advanced musical languages as the twelve-tone system.18 His articles in the 1930s on Schenker, Hindemith, and Krenek demonstrate how he transcended the subject at hand to pose fundamental questions on the relation between works and history, theory and compositional practice, and the extent to which European models remained valid, or even relevant, for American music. One surprising discovery (surprising only at first glance) is that the teachings of the “reactionary” 17 Milton Babbitt, “Celebrative Speech,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Society 1 (1976): 9. 18 See Wolfgang Rathert, “‘Models for Strangers’: Geschichte und Analyse in Roger Sessions’ Blick auf die europäische Musiktheorie,” in Werk und Geschichte: Musikalische Analyse und historischer Entwurf: Festschrift Rudolf Stephan zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Thomas Ertelt (Mainz: Schott, 2005), 211–19.

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Heinrich Schenker were more important to Sessions than the “modernist” concepts of Hindemith and Krenek. In a series of articles published in the American journal Modern Music between 1935 and 1938, Sessions dealt with Schenker’s final book Der freie Satz, Hindemith’s Unterweisung im Tonsatz, and Krenek’s Über neue Musik. He also published an appreciation of Schenker’s lifework in an obituary following the great theorist’s death in January 1935. He summed this critique up once again in his final article, “The Function of Theory.” Though Sessions addressed an American readership, he basically set his sights on the European crisis in composition. To him, this crisis took two forms. First, he felt that Schenker’s teachings, though exclusively analytical and limited to the music of the past, provided the strongest intellectual impetus for the further evolution of musical thought. Second, he saw Hindemith and Krenek as composers who abandoned their true area of responsibility when they ventured into the field of music theory. Sessions criticized this “intellectualism” as a sign of “a profound inner insecurity” that went beyond the composer’s actual task.19 Sessions’s rappel a l’ordre reads as follows: “After all, the composer’s real task is to discover and utilize, not to classify and rationalize, his materials. He achieves form through the necessities of a clear and directed intensity of vision, not through molds into which his ideas can be poured, or recipes according to which they can be fabricated to pattern.”20 To the end of his days, Sessions was convinced that composing requires a complete command of the necessary skills, but is not a science or based on scientific principles. This belief lay at the root of his critique of Hindemith’s Unterweisung. True, in the first section of his critique, he praises Hindemith’s pragmatism in formulating rules in relation to their applicability as well as his notion of “tonality”—a notion honed on Schenker. Many young composers in the United States would, he felt, benefit from these rules. (Indeed, Hindemith’s book was first published in American translation as early as 1941 and was widely used as a textbook until it was superseded by Piston’s Harmony.) All the more incisive, however, were Sessions’s doubts as to the viability of Hindemith’s physics-based approach, of which he said, even before Jacques Handschin, “[that] physics can be useful for [the musician] primarily as a confirmation of effects observed, never as a point of departure, or as an adequate explanation of effects which are the manifest results of centuries of cumulative musical experience.”21 It was, ironically, the “ahistorical” American Sessions who wielded the argument of composition’s historical essence against Hindemith’s “naive” doctrine of craftsmanship! In the same vein, Sessions also criticized Hindemith’s dependence on earlier mechanistic theories of chordal structure, in particular “verticalism,” which prevented him from drawing on other aspects, whether psychological or functional, to create a unitary musical analysis. He found fault with Hindemith’s avoidance, in the Unterweisung, of dimensions in the compositional fabric that cannot be unconditionally rationalized, but which nevertheless draw their impact from historical or sensory implications. The book’s 19 Roger Sessions, “The Function of Theory” (1938), in Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays, ed. Edward T. Cone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 267. 20 Ibid. 21 Sessions, “Hindemith on Theory” (1937), 245.

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scientistic inductivist garb, Sessions continued, ultimately prevented it from being more than an historical anthology and conveying a sophisticated picture of the problems a composer faces. In the case of Ernst Krenek, whose book Über neue Musik he reviewed at greatest length, Sessions takes the opposite tack and criticizes its tendency toward deductivism and historico-philosophical dogmatism. Given Adorno’s active involvement in this book, Sessions’s critique thus anticipates the position adopted in Philosophie der neuen Musik. He attacks its historico-philosophical essence as follows: Herr Krenek’s book deals […] not with specific musical works, but with a musical system […] A system which seems to claim more than empirical validity, a system, that is, in which the works seem to be almost of secondary importance in comparison with the theory behind them.22

The fundamental distinction between “grammar” and “language,” he maintains, is ignored in Krenek’s view of the musical work of art. Sessions goes on to add, in relation to the twelve-tone method (the heart of the book’s discussion), that while it may well form a “quasi-grammatical” basis for art and can be examined for its consistency, yet “the ultimate judgment must rest on works and not on theories or points of view.”23 In contrast, Sessions agrees—at least partly—with Hindemith’s adherence to the physical foundation of music and to the final authority of the auditory faculty. Not even the twelve-tone system, he argues, can neutralize or abolish such elementary tonal relations and hierarchies as the perfect fifth or the conflicting perception of consonance and dissonance. This view—that the centripetal forces of tonic relations and consonant intervals remain intact even in a dodecaphonic context—is bolstered by Sessions’s interpretation of the latest works of Schoenberg. In these works, he argues, the creative process is increasingly directed toward a possible rapprochement between the twelve-tone method and traditional tonality—a view diametrically opposed to Krenek’s teleological ennoblement of the twelve-tone method from a technique to an end in itself. Sessions’s second basic objection is aimed at Krenek’s thesis that atonality and twelve-tone technique both follow “from the consistent escalation of the espressivo attitude,” and that both can be called “expressionist” in a “specific technical sense” of the term, from which it follows that the most genuine form of contemporary music is the fragment or gesture.24 Once again, Sessions responds with an historical argument. He refers to the ephemeral quality of “excessively” expressive music in the past, whose exaggeration invariably foundered on the absence of a real object to which the espressivo could relate. The “inmost expression of the essence” that Krenek sees consummated in the paradox of the fragment can also, Sessions counters, be achieved by intensifying other layers of the composition. By referring to the “inmost expression of the essence,” Sessions identifies the aspect that accounts for the initially puzzling inclusion of Schenker in his critique 22 Sessions, “Exposition by Krenek” (1938), 251. 23 Ibid. 24 Ernst Krenek, Über neue Musik (Vienna: Ringbuchhandlung, 1937), 14.

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of contemporary European music theorists (among whom he definitely numbers Schenker although the Viennese theorist never touched on the problem of contemporary composition). In other words, Sessions makes a distinction between object and method, thus forging a connection between Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s theoretical writings. We must not be misled by Sessions’s reservations toward Schenker’s normative ethical speculations—his claim that the Ursatz and Urlinie represent “immutable laws”—or his excoriation of the “excessive Germanism” in Schenker’s reduction of music history to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. True, Sessions expresses these reservations as a fundamental critique. But he sees two of Schenker’s methodological approaches as a crucial precondition toward recognizing real problems in composition, and thus in music theory. The first is Schenker’s chosen point of departure: the historical and aesthetic facticity of the musical work of art rather than an a priori system. The second is his return to an understanding of counterpoint and harmony as “grammatical” foundations which can and must be isolated as teaching material in order to study elementary facts of horizontal and vertical motion in tonal space. Schenker’s “interior” view of the musical work of art, Sessions finds, also makes it possible to perceive the individuality of each conception. He argues that Schenker then relativizes this individuality by claiming absolute knowledge and limiting himself to a past which is “complete in itself and sealed, so to speak, at both ends.”25 Even so, Sessions goes on to write: But opposed to Hindemith, it faces fully the problem of musical continuity—the continuity of organic growth and not merely that of succession, while as opposed to the twelve-tone system it takes as its point of departure the ear in its manifold discriminative and synthesizing functions, and not a set of arbitrary relations between tones.26

Sessions’s reservation, which also makes him a partial follower of Schenker, is directed both at analysis and at composition: a unitary music theory becomes a matter for the composer when he hands it on to his students as a doctrine, thereby connecting their study of historical forms with the personal goal of composition. Sessions demanded a music theory that would do justice to both without ideological narrowmindedness. This is the actual model that emerges from his study of European theory, and the remarkable thing is that the allegedly “conservative” elements of his model predominate.27 Nevertheless, as a basic assumption for the creative process, Sessions’s model of “musical craftsmanship” goes beyond the bounds of mastering a traditional métier: it establishes an inseparable bond between the tools provided 25 Sessions, “The Function of Theory,” 267. 26 Ibid. 27 The astonishing career of Schenker’s theory of musical layers as an analytical model in American musicology—a career launched by Sessions’s discussion of the Schenkerian axioms “tonicization” and “composed-out”—would be worth a study in itself. The extraction and generalization of his analytical model in the United States was based on a pragmatic neglect of the historical implications of the works analyzed, the limits of analysis (for Sessions a sine qua non), and finally what Babbitt called the “the boundary conditions of tonality.” Milton Babbitt, review of Polyphonie: Review musicale trimestrielle, Quatrième Cahier, Le Système dodécaphonique, Journal of the American Musicological Society 3 (1950): 265.

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by theory (as a practical guide to composing) and the composer’s complete freedom in choosing goals that leads perforce to the autonomy of the work of music. A key precept from Sessions’s later reflection of 1967, “What can be taught?,” reads as follows: “I would still insist […] that a composer in the fullest sense of the word is one who has the whole range of known musical possibilities within his comparatively easy grasp, and who therefore is free to choose to do whatever he likes, with full assurance.”28 Returning now to Hindemith, we find that the contrasts between him and Sessions are smaller than Sessions’s critique would suggest. Hindemith was a confirmed Schenkerian from the early 1920s, probably via the influence of the theorist Hermann Roth.29 Still, the brief correspondence that Hindemith conducted with Schenker in 1925—to the composer’s great frustration—revealed an insurmountable barrier erected by Schenker, who deemed himself the last defender of the vanishing tonal art of the great masters of the past. Hindemith expressed the belief that his music, too, contained “the Urlinie, and hence musical rationality and the confirmation of your theories.”30 Schenker considered this to be sheer presumption and replied that Hindemith’s music “has nothing more in common with the music of the masters; you will not admit it, but I must state it outright.”31 Hindemith’s Unterweisung is, as Carl Dahlhaus pointed out, an adaptation of Schenkerian analysis in the primacy it attaches to the melodic interval of the second. However, he makes no distinction between actual melodic progressions and “step progressions,” which remain an acoustical rather than a structural phenomenon.32 Nonetheless, Hindemith’s book has something fundamentally in common with Schenker—namely, the assumption of a unified tonal space, though Hindemith gives this space a basis in physics rather than in human cognition and uses all twelve degrees of the chromatic scale rather than only the diatonic ones. With his emigration to the United States and his appointment as professor at Yale, Hindemith perceived himself in the predicament of having to adapt the teaching methods he had developed in Berlin to unsatisfactory conditions. His response was to create a basic music textbook for beginners in the form of a traditional harmony manual. This work, first published in English as A Concentrated Course in Traditional Harmony in 1943, dispenses with any form of theoretical derivation, and for this very reason is a remarkable historical document—an attempt to reconstitute a “trade apprenticeship” that seems to deny the state of historical reflection reached in Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre and to wholly ignore the niceties of Schenkerian analysis. Hindemith’s vindication

28 Sessions, “What Can Be Taught?” (1967), 215. 29 See Wolfgang Rathert, “Zu Hindemiths musikpädagogischen und -theoretischen Anschauungen in seiner Berliner Zeit,” in Paul Hindemith in Berlin, ed. Franz Bullmann, Dietmar Schenk and Wolfgang Rathert, HdK-Archiv 2 (Berlin: Hochschule der Künste Berlin, 1996), 33–46. 30 Quoted from Donald Johns, “Aimez-vous Brahms? Ein Hindemith-Schenker-Briefwechsel,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 20 (1991): 144. 31 Ibid., 149. 32 See Carl Dahlhaus, “Hindemiths Theorie des Sekundengangs und die Probleme der Melodielehre,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 11 (1983): 114–25.

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for this in the preface reveals not only a pragmatic attitude but a deeper educational purpose: I am consciously taking this step backwards in full realization of its relative unimportance. Its purpose is not to provide a traditional underpinning for the principles set forth in The Craft of Musical Composition (which is not necessary, since for the understanding reader tradition is present on every page of that work), but to facilitate the speedy learning mentioned above, and this in as little scholastic a manner as possible, so that a close connection with living music may be continuously felt. […] The fact that harmony can be taught along these lines has been proved by the class for which and with whose active participation this brief manual was written.33

Hindemith’s primer was conceived in such a way that it demands an equal degree of activity and awareness from the teacher as from the students—a ceaseless examination and visualization of the kinetic potential residing in the material. His approach is governed by a maximum reduction of the rules—or, to put it another way, by a maximum number of steps derived from a single principle. Hindemith’s pessimistic forecast—that the traditional theory of harmony would be rendered obsolete by the evolution of music itself—must therefore be seen in relative terms, for the principle behind the theory of harmony is universal in regards to the activities and responsibilities of the composer. Hindemith’s pupil Frank Lewin summarized this view as follows: If I were to adduce Hindemith’s most memorable impression on me, I would cite his remark in a class in which we chewed on the three-part writing material, to the effect that in writing music everything must be made conscious: melodic material, harmony, harmonic rhythm, texture, instruments—everything.34

Just as Schenkerian analysis is aimed at performers, so Hindemith’s teachings were aimed at composers, who will only discover freedom in their need for subjective expression when they gain rigorous formal and intrinsic control over their actions. This was a “German legacy,” albeit one that clearly clashed with the ideals of the Viennese School. Virgil Thomson, in his brilliantly acerbic Hindemith review of 1941, viewed this as a shortcoming—to which we must add, a “typically German” shortcoming: When one considers […] that Hindemith never properly liberated himself from the German bass, that his rhythm is constrained and unimaginative counterpoint, that his melodic contours, though dignified enough, are inexpressive, that his creative concentration is too diffuse to allow him to write effectively either visual music or subjective emotional music, it is surprising that the Mathis triptych should come off at all.35

33 Paul Hindemith, A Concentrated Course in Traditional Harmony: With Emphasis on Exercises and a Minimum of Rules (Associated Music Publishers: New York, 1943), 1:iv–v. 34 Quoted from Geoffrey Skelton, Paul Hindemith: The Man Behind the Music (London: Gollancz, 1977), 200. 35 Virgil Thomson, A Virgil Thomson Reader (New York: Dutton, 1984), 214; Article originally published in New York Herald Tribune, 9 February 1941.

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3) Schoenberg’s “late tonality” Schoenberg’s return to tonality in the United Sates is a complex phenomenon over which much ink has been spilled. It involved not only a whole bundle of motives that accompanied Schoenberg on his life’s path, but probably—as Hans Keller suggested—a confrontation with a suppressed artistic past that invites a psychoanalytical interpretation.36 Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, in 1976, put his finger on the contradictory nature of Schoenberg’s standpoint. In an interview of 1933, Schoen­ berg is said to have answered the question of whether he might use a more accessible tonal language in the United States by gruffly replying, “I’d rather destroy America!” Yet, a short while later, he produced the Suite in G major and, over the next few years, such tonal pieces as Kol Nidre, Variations on a Recitative for Organ, and finally Theme and Variations for Full Band, sometimes even using key signatures. Stuckenschmidt commented: “When his pupils asked him whether he was revoking his earlier achievements—the emancipation of tonality and twelvetone serial composition—Schoenberg protested vehemently: these works, he said, represent an expansion of compositional technique, not a genuflection to mass taste.”37 The idea of expansion was one of the latent possibilities of twelve-tone technique, namely, to advance toward what Dika Newlin called “progressive tonality,” in which traditional tonality becomes conceivable within the dodecaphonic system. The same even applied to the triad—a phenomenon legitimized, as Hans Keller argued, not through its basic shape or motivic elaboration, but as an intervention and disturbance in a uniform stylistic “background.” Perhaps, as Joseph N. Straus has maintained, it is even a recompense for the depletion of tonality, whose place had been taken by motivic elaboration as a whole, by the all-pervasive “musical idea.”38 If so, the return to tonality was connected with two things. The first is the idea of forming a dialectical relation between two opposing musical spheres by applying the notions of “tension” and “relaxation” not only to intervals, textures, and forms, but also to stylistic postures. The second is the reflection of the composer’s own position in history. After all, didn’t Schoenberg’s teaching constantly stress the continuity with the past and emphasize, like Hindemith, the need to deal constantly with the most elementary questions? The basic difference lies in the nature of their perspective: Schoenberg’s view is chiefly focused on the constructive potential of the musical idea rather than on lending audibility to allegedly objective musical layers. Once again, we can discern two competing notions of “tonality”: one as a musical construct, the other as a physical donné. For Schoenberg, too, the touchstones are the masterpieces of the past, but his heuristic approach resides in using analysis to discover and unveil things that neither the teacher nor the pupils were aware of before. It was in just such terms that Schoenberg, in an interview of 1935, described his work as a teacher and justified the significance of his models: 36 Hans Keller, “Schoenberg’s Return to Tonality,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 5 (1981): 2–21. 37 Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Deutsche Musik und deutsche Musiker in den USA,” Musica 30 (1976): 380. 38 Straus, Remaking the Past, 22.

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To know how to make a modulation is of no use if the pupil does not know how to employ this in a composition. But even if he knows, he may perhaps be able to harmonize a given theme, but will not know how to invent themes on a basis, from which you can look forward to the further development and which guarantees the constructive purposes of harmony. The same is true in counterpoint: you have to write a canon or a fugue when you are a pupil. But in free composition you would write a canon or fugue only if you did not understand how to develop contrapuntal ideas according to their true nature and according to constructive purposes. And the same thing happens with the knowledge of musical forms, if the student does not know the true meaning of musical formation, that is, to arrange and to build up one’s ideas in such a manner that the pictures produced show one’s ideas in an understandable and sound manner. In such a way the listener may be convinced, that one has spoken only of his ideas and has carried them out thoroughly and fancifully. I think this cannot be brought about without a profound knowledge of the achievements of the great thinkers of music. You will admit, that I do not ask a pupil to write like Bach, or Beethoven, or Mozart or Brahms. But I do ask that he realizes how profoundly they carried out their ideas and how manifold the means were, by which these great masters did their work.39

This standpoint brings us back to “German Rule,” but with a highly characteristic shift. Schoenberg, who adamantly refused to teach his own music, used works of the past to show that the number of constructive solutions is inexhaustible. He was concerned not with rules, but with discovering how something came about, what it is, or even why it cannot become what it wants to be. (Hindemith would have found such a standpoint absurd.) An episode from Schoenberg’s counterpoint lessons of 1939, reported by Dika Newlin, is illuminating in this respect: He stated, while writing his fugue example on the blackboard, that he would like very much like to make a certain modulation in the second section, and asked, ‘Now, why do I want to do this?’ Everybody thought and thought, but nobody could see why. All of a sudden he burst out laughing and cried, ‘Because it is impossible!’40

A similar sort of procedure, drawing strength as it were from negation and doubt, may well have been a central inspiration for the young John Cage during his studies with Schoenberg. Reinhard Kapp points to this in connection with the crucial role of tonal harmony in Cage’s thought: Cage defined traditional harmony as a hierarchical order of (functionally) unequal elements and emphasized, in twelve-tone technique, the equal importance of different homogenous materials. For the future, however, he proclaimed the equivalence of contrasting materials, that is, he transferred Schoenberg’s achievement to expanded material.41

39 Radio interview with Lewen Swarthout in 1935, accessible as transcript on the home page of the Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna (http://www.schoenberg.at/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id= 1017&Itemid=730&lang=de). 40 Dika Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections 1938–1976 (New York: Pendragon Press, 1980), 20. 41 “Cage hat die traditionelle Harmonie als hierarchische Ordnung (funktional) ungleicher Elemente definiert, an der Zwölftontechnik die Gleichberechtigung verschiedener homogener Materialien hervorgehoben, für die Zukunft jedoch die Gleichberechtigung ungleichartiger Materialien proklamiert, d. h. die Übertragung der Schönbergschen Errungenschaft auf erweitertes Material.” Reinhard Kapp, “John Cage,” in Metzlers Komponisten Lexikon: 350 werkgeschichtliche Porträts, 2nd ed., ed. Horst Weber (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003), 97.

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Obviously, this was also an attempt to synthesize Seeger’s theory of a musical field consisting of different but equal forces with Schoenberg’s conception of a hierarchical musical space. But there is a crucial difference between Cage and Schoenberg: for Schoenberg, the past is always part of the aesthetic present, or even the future. Furthermore, he believes in an autonomous compositional will which, in the end, freely decides whether again to embrace tonality as an artistic device for particular expressive purposes, or not. A Brief Coda The composer John Adams, a pupil of Sessions and a second-generation pupil of Schoenberg (via Leon Kirchner), became famous in Europe with an orchestral piece that bears an odd and portentous German title: Harmonielehre (1985). The title would normally be translated as “Theory of Harmony,” but its true connotations only become apparent in the original German. It is, of course, a tribute to Schoenberg’s famous book of that title, the book that proclaimed the emancipation of dissonance and the alleged demise of tonality. But the title is more than that; it also bears witness to assimilation and complete cultural emancipation. Babbitt, in 1974, had noted that the role of the American composer “was transformed from that of our wandering predecessors, who abroad had been innocent spectators and visiting aliens, to that of participants, hosts, and—at least by propinquity—colleagues […]”42 In Adams, who made no secret of the importance of Schoenberg’s music to his own artistic development, this sense of pride has yielded to a certain irony. He explained the choice of the title as follows: Somehow, the word really got to me—the idea of this summa of harmony. I kept thinking about spiritual harmony, too. Schoenberg seemed like some religious zealot cutting off his genitals to prove how totally pure he is, how dedicated to the Lord. […] Harmonielehre, my version of it, is a kind of parody. But I also reached out and embraced all of that harmony that we weren’t supposed to touch.43

By tasting the forbidden fruit from the lost Garden of Eden, Adams reinvoked traditional tonality as something very much alive. But, at the same time, we find ourselves in a post-modern situation in which we can at best speak of an “emancipation of consonance.” The recovery of ostracized sounds had already been tried out in minimalist music, not to mention Bernstein’s unbridled eclecticism (which was combined with a fierce critique of the twelve-tone system). In the case of minimalism, it involved a deliberate avoidance of historical implications; in Bernstein’s case, it was something akin to a “third stream.” Adams’s music conjures up the historical situation which, a century earlier, had marked the rise of American art music under “German Rule,” but had ushered in the disintegration of traditional tonality in Europe. The earliest American modernists and avant-gardists associated 42 Babbitt, “Celebrative Speech,” 6. 43 Quoted from A John Adams Reader, ed. Thomas May (Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus, 2006), 36–37.

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the problem of tonality and a regulated compositional fabric with a deep sense of dependency on European centers of art and on German conservatories. Now, in Adams’s work, it has given way to a stance that is at once playful and aggressively detached. Would it have been accepted by Hindemith, Schoenberg, or even Cowell? Or would they have regarded Harmonielehre as the dissolution of a bond that connected the present with the past above and beyond all cultural hierarchies? I think these questions will remain unanswerable. But the very fact that they spring to mind highlights the continuing legacy of “German Rule.” (Translated by Bradford J. Robinson) Bibliography Adams, John. A John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer. Edited by Thomas May. Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus, 2006. Babbitt, Milton. “Celebrative Speech.” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Society 1 (1976): 6–11. — Review of Polyphonie: Review musicale trimestrielle, Quatrième Cahier, Le Système dodécaphonique. Journal of the American Musicological Society 3 (1950): 264–67. Bomberger, Douglas E. “Layers of Influence: Echoes of Rheinberger in the Choral Works of Horatio Parker.” In Josef Rheinberger: Werk und Wirkung: Bericht über das Internationale Symposium anlässlich des 100. Todestages des Komponisten, veranstaltet von der Gesellschaft für Bayerische Musikgeschichte und dem Institut für Musikwissenschaft der Universität München, München, 23.–25.11.2001. Edited by Stephan Hörner and Hartmut Schick, 225–42. Münchner Veröffentlichungen zur Musikgeschichte 62. Tutzing: Schneider, 2004. Broyles, Michael. Beethoven in America. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011. Burkholder, J. Peter. All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. — Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Cowell, Henry. “Harmonic Development in Music.” 1921. In Essential Cowell: Selected Writings 1921–1964. Edited by Dick Higgins, 271–88. New York: McPherson & Co., 2001. Dahlhaus, Carl. “Hindemiths Theorie des Sekundengangs und die Probleme der Melodielehre.” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 11 (1983): 114–25. Hindemith, Paul. A Concentrated Course in Traditional Harmony: With Emphasis on Exercises and a Minimum of Rules. New York: Associated Music Publishers, 1943. Johns, Donald. “Aimez-vous Brahms? Ein Hindemith-Schenker-Briefwechsel.” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 20 (1991): 141–51.  — “Funnel Tonality in American Popular Music, ca. 1900–1970.” American Music 11 (1993): 458–72. Kapp, Reinhard. “John Cage.” In Metzler Komponisten Lexikon: 350 werkgeschichtliche Porträts, edited by Horst Weber, 95–103. 2nd enlarged edition. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003. Keller, Hans. “Schoenberg’s Return to Tonality.” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 5 (1981): 2–21. Krenek, Ernst. Über neue Musik. Vienna: Ringbuchhandlung, 1937. Magee, Gayle Sherwood. Charles Ives Reconsidered. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Newlin, Dika. Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections 1938–1976. New York: Pendragon Press, 1980. Newman, Nancy. Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society in NineteenthCentury America. Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2002. Ochs, Siegfried. Geschehenes, Gesehenes. Leipzig: Grethlein & Co., 1922.

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Pescatello, Ann M. Charles Seeger: A Life in American Music. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. Rathert, Wolfgang. “‘Models for Strangers’: Geschichte und Analyse in Roger Sessions’ Blick auf die europäische Musiktheorie.” In Werk und Geschichte: Musikalische Analyse und historischer Entwurf: Festschrift Rudolf Stephan zum 75. Geburtstag, edited by Thomas Ertelt, 211– 19. Mainz: Schott, 2005. — “Zu Hindemiths musikpädagogischen und -theoretischen Anschauungen in seiner Berliner Zeit.” In Paul Hindemith in Berlin, edited by Franz Bullmann, Dietmar Schenk, and Wolfgang Rathert, 33–46. HdK-Archiv 2. Berlin: Hochschule der Künste Berlin, 1996. Seeger, Charles. “Consonance and Dissonance.” In Studies in Musicology II: 1929–1979, edited by Ann. M. Pescatello, 91–109. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. — “Toward a Unitary Field Theory for Musicology” (1970). In Studies in Musicology: 1935– 1975, edited by Ann M. Pescatello, 102–38. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Sessions, Roger. “Exposition by Krenek.” 1938. In Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays, edited by Edward T. Cone, 249–56. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. — “The Function of Theory.” 1938. In Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays, edited by Edward T. Cone, 263–68. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. — “Hindemith on Theory.” 1937. In Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays, edited by Edward T. Cone, 241–48. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. — “What Can Be Taught?” 1967. In Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays, edited by Edward T. Cone, 204–27. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Skelton, Geoffrey. Paul Hindemith: The Man Behind the Music. London: Gollancz, 1977. Straus, Joseph N. Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. — The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz. “Deutsche Musik und deutsche Musiker in den USA.” Musica 30 (1976): 379–83. Thomson, Virgil. A Virgil Thomson Reader. New York: Dutton, 1984. Van Solkema, Sherman and Bryan R. Simms. “Theory.” In New Grove Dictonary of American Music, edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie, 4:370–77. New York: Grove’s Dictionaries of Music, 1986.

Concepts of Tonality in Hindemith’s . Unterweisung im Tonsatz and in His Late Writings Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen Paul Hindemith’s treatise Unterweisung im Tonsatz (The Craft of Musical Composition) is undoubtedly one of the major works among twentieth-century composers’ contributions to music theory.1 Yet since its first publication in 1937 up until today, it has been much more criticized than adequately understood. This remarkable fact is due to its rather complicated genesis as well as its different reception in the German and the English speaking worlds. Hindemith was one of Germany’s leading figures in New Music during the 1920s and certainly more influential than the Schoenberg school, which at the time had not yet made a considerable impact. Published in 1942 after Hindemith arrived in the United States, the English version of his book raised high expectations. The polarity between serialists and tonalists “was just in process of formation, and the odds were definitely with the tonalists, especially in the United States in 1942.”2 These circumstances changed during the last years of Hindemith’s residency in the United States and especially after his return to Europe in 1953, where an entire generation of young composers made an effort to redeem the music that had been ostracized between 1933 and 1945, focusing particularly on dodecaphony. For our present context, Hindemith’s concept of “tonality” (respective to “atonality”) is the most interesting issue. Although it certainly cannot be considered the main concern of the Unterweisung, it did eventually form the center of Hindemith’s post-war theoretical development after his return to Europe. There is no doubt that the roots of Hindemith’s late concept of tonality are already laid out in his 1937 treatise. Therefore, we first need to take a closer look at the origins of the German version from 1937 before we consider the circumstances and special features of the English translation, published by Arthur Mendel in 1942—the period when Hindemith was teaching at Yale and Harvard Universities. Hereby it is necessary to note that the English translation3 suffered from a certain misunderstanding from the very beginning: The Craft of Musical Composition means something entirely different than Unterweisung im Tonsatz. The German word “Unterweisung” is a deliberately old-fashioned and by that time completely outdated synonym for teaching (with a slight baroque or even medieval connotation), while “Tonsatz” does not 1 Paul Hindemith, Unterweisung im Tonsatz: Theoretischer Teil (1937; new expanded edition, Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1940). 2 Allen Forte, “Paul Hindemith’s Contribution to Music Theory in the United States,” HindemithJahrbuch 27 (1998): 67. 3 Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition: Book I: Theoretical Part, trans. Arthur Mendel (1942; repr., New York: Associated Music Publishers, Inc., 1945).

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mean “Composition” itself but at the most its prerequisites (the setting, the preparation of a composition). Thus Hindemith’s book does not aim at musical poetics, nor even at a high-level compositional theory. Despite these facts, Hindemith’s text still has manifold theoretical implications which can and should be subjected to discussion. From the very beginning, Hindemith’s book was subject to severe criticism. One of the leading voices to trouble Hindemith just before the war was none other than Theodor W. Adorno, who later positioned Hindemith (along with Stravinsky) as a negative counterpart for Schoenberg and his school. Adorno’s supposedly progessive viewpoint considered Hindemith’s theory as “höchst widerwärtig” (“highly offending” or even “extremely disgusting”).4 Critics of the second half of the century tended to accuse the Unterweisung of a restorative or even reactionary view of history. Indeed, Hindemith assumes a timeless “nature” of the tone material (so to speak) from which the laws of composition are to be deduced, such that this material is barely even touched by history. From this point of view, tonality is a naturally given fact, and the term merely indicates the organic relations between tones. Thus for Hindemith, “there are but two kinds of music: good music, in which the tonal relations are handled intelligently and skillfully, and bad music, which disregards them and consequently mixes them in an aimless fashion.”5 Therefore his idea of “working material” (or “medium” in Mendel’s translation) constitutes the complete opposite of Adorno’s concept of musical material, which started its success story after the publication of Philosophy of New Music in 1947. Unlike Hindemith’s theory which seems describable in terms of physical features, Adorno’s concept is subject to historical development and variability. Considering, however, that the concept for Unterweisung dates back to Hindemith’s progressive phase in the late 1920s,6 it becomes apparent that it was actually quite a progressive impulse that caused Hindemith to phrase his understanding of working material and musical medium. What is fascinating about Hindemith’s Craft of Musical Composition is that, as Virgil Thomson put it in a 1942 review, it “proposed an analytic method that can be applied to the tonal structure of all written music of Europe from medieval to modern times, whether or not that music observes the syntax of “classical,” which is to say eighteenth and nineteenth cen4

5

6

Cf. Adorno’s spontaneous reaction to Hindemith’s Unterweisung just after its publication: “Außerdem lese ich die höchst widerwärtige Unterweisung im Tonsatz von Hindemith, die ich abfertigen möchte, seis in der Zeitschrift, seis in der 23.” Adorno to Walter Benjamin, 2 August 1938, in Briefe und Briefwechsel, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 1:346; Cf. Wolfgang Lessing, Die Hindemith-Rezeption Theodor W. Adornos (Mainz: Schott, 1999). Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition, 152. “[…] daß es nur zwei Arten Musik gibt: Eine gute, in der auf verständige Weise mit den Tonverwandtschaften gearbeitet wird, und eine schlechte, die nichts von ihnen weiß und sie deshalb wahllos durcheinanderwirft.” Hindemith, Unterweisung im Tonsatz, 183. For the best overview of the complicated history of Hindemith’s text, see Giselher Schubert, “Vorgeschichte und Entstehung der Unterweisung im Tonsatz: Theoretischer Teil,” HindemithJahrbuch 9 (1980): 16–64.

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tury, harmony.”7 Though the declared intention of Hindemith’s treatise is to provide methods of analyzing all music of all times and all stylistic periods (that’s what provoked the critical reproach of a-historicism), it clearly originates from a contemporary perspective: Hindemith based his assumptions on the acknowledgement of a fully chromatic twelve-tone scale in which all historical features (modality, major and minor, etc.) are overcome. But Hindemith does not acknowledge the 12 keys of the equally tempered keyboard scale as the fundamentals of all composition. He rather insists on differences such as those between G# and Ab, i.e. he implicitly holds onto the real existence of more than merely 12 keys. Yet his preferred chromatic scale (he coins the term “series 1” for it) consists of only twelve pitches which are weighed or evaluated according to their distance from the central key C. In the final version it reads: C-G-F-A-E-Eb-Ab-D-Bb-Db-B-F#. This division of the virtually infinite tonal microcosm into twelve distinctive tones and their intelligible relations is not arbitrarily extendable, because the impurity of equal temperament would render any further multiplication of keys entirely intolerable. Thus Hindemith assumes a twelve-tone scale as a starting point but does not at all mean the equally tempered keyboard scale. (I will later note this as one source of certain inconsistencies or even contradictions in his theory.) For Hindemith all creative musical infinity is confined to a finite set of tonal relatedness: “In the domain of tonal relations no expansion or innovation is possible, no questions of style are applicable, and there can be no progress, any more than there can be in the multiplication table or the simplest laws of mechanics.”8 It is precisely this paradoxical relation of freedom and constraint that Hindemith calls “tonality.” Within this concept of tonality the independence of all traditional features such as fifth- or third-relations is a basic issue, especially for the interpretation and evaluation of chords and chord progressions. Built upon these preconditions, one of the major claims of the Unterweisung reads as follows: “[…] our thesis must be that all intervals and chords are perceived, independently of their notation, as the ear first hears them, without reference to what has gone before or what comes after.”9 Thus at first glance there are at least two innovative features worth stressing: on the one hand there is the concept of twelve centers of the chromatic scale that supplant the twenty-four keys of traditional theory and on the other hand there is a sort of context-free concept of chord. Both of these features must be examined more extensively, since it is they that constitute—even if seemingly related—the actual reason for the differentiation from Schoenberg. Hindemith’s handling of Schoenberg 7 8

9

Quoted in Forte, “Paul Hindemith’s Contribution to Music Theory,” 68. Thomson’s review under the title “Hindemith on Harmony” was originally published in the New York Herald Tribune, 12 July 1942. Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition, 55. “Auf dem Gebiete der Tonverwandtschaften läßt sich nichts erweitern und erneuern. Hier gibt es keine Stilfragen und keinen Fortschritt, so wenig wie es im Einmaleins Stilfragen und in den einfachsten Gesetzen der Mechanik einen Fortschritt geben kann.” Hindemith, Unterweisung im Tonsatz, 77. Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition, 93. “Hier muß die Forderung gelten: Alle Zusammenklänge werden unabhängig von ihrer Schreibweise so aufgefaßt, wie das Ohr sie als ersten Eindruck ohne Bezugnahme auf Vorhergegangenes oder Folgendes hört.” Hindemith, Unterweisung im Tonsatz, 117.

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marks the only instance of the term “atonality” within the treatise, (invoked, by the way, without saying Schoenberg’s name): The only music which can really be called atonal, therefore, is the work of a composer who is motivated perhaps by a consciousness of the inadequacy of old styles to the musical needs of our day, perhaps by a search for an idiom that will express his own feelings, perhaps by sheer perversity, to invent tonal combinations which do not obey the laws of the medium and cannot be tested by the simplest means of reckoning.10

(Note that it is not Hindemith’s original version but only Mendel’s translation which uses the word “perversity” for Schoenberg’s technique; the original German word in Hindemith’s Unterweisung reads “Mutwille”—perhaps better translatable to “high spirits” or, with somewhat more negative connotations, “mischief”!). Based on these preconditions, Hindemith first elaborates a catalogue of criteria for the evaluating the usefulness of chords. He then proceeds to his concept of “Stufengang” (“degree progression”), which makes the harmonic design of a composition understandable. Last—but not least—he develops the idea of “harmonic fluctuation” (“harmonisches Gefälle”), on which the quality of any composition depends. This fluctuation can be convincing or, on the contrary, cause dullness and monotony. At the end of the book Hindemith puts his new system of analysis to the test by examining it against his demand that it be able to explain all music of all times and all stylistic eras. In the hand-written draft Hindemith uses several dozen examples to prove his point; that number was drastically decreased for the publication in 1937. Among the seven music examples that made it into the print version, only two originate from the realm of so-called major-minor tonality: Johann Sebastian Bach’s three-part keyboard Sinfonia in F minor and Richard Wagner’s prelude to Tristan and Isolde (the other ones are: the Dies irae (Gregorian chant), a ballad by Machaut, the 1924 piano sonata by Stravinsky, Schoenberg’s piano piece Op. 33a and, last but not least, Hindemith’s prelude to his own opera Mathis der Maler). I confine myself here to a brief look at the Bach example (Ex. 1). Without any doubt, Hindemith’s first remark rings true: “This piece is a true Chinese puzzle, from the harmonic point of view.”11 Following the preconditions of his own system, Hindemith’s analysis ranks the real sound pattern at the very beginning of each measure higher than its solutions within the measure, as shown in every third line of his analytic example titled “Stufengang” (“degree progression”). Thus, at the beginning of m. 4, he assumes an A-major chord (by enharmonically changing the D into C#) prepared by a dominant E-major chord at the end of m. 3. Hindemith 10 Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition, 153. “Der einzige Fall, in dem wir also wirklich von Atonalität sprechen können, ist die Arbeit eines Komponisten, der vielleicht aus der Erkenntnis der Unzulänglichkeit alter Setzweisen für unsere Zeit, vielleicht auf der Suche nach einem seinen Empfindungen gemäßen Ausdruck, vielleicht auch nur aus reinem Mutwillen Tonverbindungen erfindet, die weder den Forderungen des Materials entsprechen noch durch die einfachsten rechnerischen Nachprüfungen zu kontrollieren sind […]” Hindemith, Unterweisung im Tonsatz, 184. 11 Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition, 208. “Dieses Stück ist ein wahres harmonisches Vexierspiel.” Hindemith, Unterweisung im Tonsatz, 245.

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Example 2: Hindemith’s Bach example in the first (handwritten) version of The Craft of Musical Composition (by kind permission of the Hindemith Institute, Frankfurt am Main)

comments as follows: “The ear is constantly offered a choice of what it wishes to hear: independent chords, or subordinate, non-chord tones. Only by the latter can formations as striking, in a style of simple tonal relations, as the A-chord in the F minor (or C-minor) of the fourth measure […] be explained.”12 This short quotation is sufficient to show Hindemith’s principal error. Actually, the harmonic step from mm. 3 to 4 would have to be explained as a dominant seventh of F minor at the end of m. 3 followed by an F-major chord resolving at the second beat of m. 4.13 12 Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition, 208. “Der Zuhörer wird fortwährend vor die Frage gestellt, was er hören will: selbständige Akkorde oder untergeordnete, akkordfremde Töne. Nur so sind die in einem Stil einfacher tonaler Verhältnisse auffallenden Bildungen wie der A-Klang im f- bzw. c moll des vierten Taktes […] zu erklären.” Hindemith, Unterweisung im Tonsatz, 245. 13 Cf. Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, “Motorik, Organik, Linearität: Bach im Diskurs der Musiktheo-

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There are two key points to an adequate understanding of the Bach example: first, that in this case acoustic consonances (such as fifths or thirds) are to be grasped as structural dissonances, and second, that one needs to recognize dissonances as structurally consonant since they are parts of incomplete tonal chords. Their structural meaning is different from their mere physical sound. Hindemith recognizes the dialectical interplay of those two issues (in German one would call them “akustische Konsonanz” and “Auffassungs-Dissonanz”), but tries to mitigate or even abolish this tension in favour of the physically audible “facts” according to his theory. It is instructive to compare the Bach example that was chosen for the print version to the one that had originally been planned (the D-major fugue from the WellTempered Clavier, part I, see Ex. 2). A closer look at the D-major fugue reveals that this example does not challenge a harmonic understanding at all; compared to the highly chromatic F-minor Sinfonia it is not only diatonic but also one-dimensional. Thus we understand Hindemith’s eventual choice of the dense and complicated three-part Sinfonia over the rather simple D-major prelude. It simply offers the greater theoretical challenge. Hindemith’s Bach analysis may reveal certain systemic errors (such as perceiving chords as they sound acoustically, without any differentiation between harmonic background and acoustic surface), but these weaknesses are precisely what makes it representative of Hindemith’s musical thinking. The same is true for the Wagner example, which cannot be extensively discussed here.14 Thus it becomes clear that Hindemith selected his two Bach examples for their structural relationship and similarity: Both of them purposefully toy with the tricky difference between acoustic consonance and mental dissonance, which is a major feature of nearly all music of the classic and romantic periods. Hindemith treats Schoenberg’s Klavierstück op. 33a (music that to him represents the atonal paradigm in 1937) quite differently (Ex. 3). Even for this composition Hindemith aims at a “tonal ordering.” As he puts it: “The tonal ordering of this fragment springs from the desire to group in the analysis as many chords as possible around one tonal center, so far as that is possible at all in this case.”15 Hindemith even takes the dodecaphonic structure of the piece into account by dividing it into sections reigned by twelve different twelve-tone series (indicated by roman numerals and dotted lines within the upper piano part). With regard to the piece’s sonority, Hindemith rightly observes a neglect of those chords which would belong to his own chord class II (consonances or mild dissonances). Leaving aside the validity of Hindemith’s supposition of tonal centers, his innovative analytical method works well and delivers plausible results in understanding the logical structure of Schoenberg’s chord progression (“harmonic fluctuation” in Hindemith’s terminolretiker,” in Bach und die Nachwelt, ed. Michael Heinemann and Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen (Laaber: Laaber, 2000), 3:361–63. 14 For a close reading of Hindemith’s Wagner analysis cf. Constantin Houy, “Hindemiths Analyse des Tristanvorspiels: Eine Apologie,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 37 (2008): 152–91. 15 Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition, 219. “Die tonale Zuordnung der Taktfolge geht von dem Wunsche aus, möglichst viele Klänge einem tonalen Zentrum unterzuordnen, soweit es hier überhaupt möglich ist.” Hindemith, Unterweisung im Tonsatz, 256.

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Example 3: Hindemith’s Schoenberg example (no. 6) in the printed version of The Craft of Musical Composition (p. 217)

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ogy). Thus, ironically, Hindemith’s new system of analyzing music harmonically does not work convincingly for tonal music such as Bach’s or Wagner’s, but is wellsuited to understanding the harmonic structure of “atonal music” (as he understands it). * As revealed by the Wagner and the two Bach examples in comparison to the five others, the distinctions between different structural layers are only applicable to the realm of tonal music. Hindemith here stays notably close to Heinrich Schenker and was presumably aware of this fact.16 Interestingly enough, the tension between foreground and background plays an important part in the extensive but very fair critique of Hindemith in Hermann Pfrogner’s Die Zwölfordnung der Töne (this title could possibly be translated to The Twelveness of Tones) from 1953.17 It would be worthwhile to compare Pfrogner’s concept to Hindemith’s, since Hindemith’s late statements can be understood as a reaction to considerations of such nature. There is no definite proof that Hindemith did indeed read Pfrogner’s Zwölfordnung der Töne, but he did own other books by Pfrogner and it seems improbable that he did not know this one.18 Due to space limitations this potential relationship can only be briefly sketched here. Basically, Pfrogner (who considers the tonal “twelveness” to be merely the surface of a subcutaneous and indemonstrable “‘Vielheit’ oder ‘Allheit’” of tonal relations19) criticizes Hindemith for what he himself had accused Schoenberg of: namely, taking the acoustic facts of the equally tempered scale for granted, i.e. mistaking a merely physical feature for the reality of the music itself.20 Pfrogner analyzes examples from Hindemith’s Ludus tonalis in order to prove that there is no adequate understanding of Hindemith’s music without taking into account a flexible and widened concept of enharmonicism. Since enharmonicism deals with the different meaning of equally sounding pitches, it can only be described in terms of mental representation, and is therefore in no way at odds with acoustically audible facts. And that is the crucial point, since it only makes sense within tonality. Thus, for Pfrogner the visibly existing twelve-tone keyboard is not the matter itself but merely represents an invisible system of twelve virtual tone-locations (“Tonorte”), 16 For a close comparison of the early and the late (i.e. the published) versions of Hindemith’s Unterweisung, cf. Jürgen Blume, “Hindemiths erste und letzte Fassung der Unterweisung im Tonsatz im Vergleich,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 20 (1991): 71–109; especially for a look on Hindemith’s relationship to Heinrich Schenker cf. ibid., 97, n. 22. 17 Hermann Pfrogner, Die Zwölftonordnung der Töne (Zürich: Amalthea, 1953), 233–54. 18 I wish to thank Prof. Giselher Schubert, the former director of the Frankfurt Hindemith institute, for providing me with rich information on Hindemith sources in general and especially about Hindemith’s library. 19 Pfrogner’s by no means colloquial but highly artificial German terms “Vielheit” and “Allheit” are semantically connected to “multitude,” “universality,” and “infinity.” 20 For this point of criticism, very sharply, cf. Jens Rohwer, Tonale Instruktionen (Wolfenbüttel: Möseler, 1949), 122–35. This book was held by Hindemith in his private library (information given by Prof. Giselher Schubert).

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a system of twelve invisible tone areas (so to speak) in which an infinite number of real tones can meet and enharmonically transform their identity. The first part of this claim goes smoothly along with Hindemith’s theory, the second one does not. Of course Pfrogner’s claim that in Hindemith’s compositions, too, every pitch must be noted from two different perspectives—namely from its origin as well as its destination while considering the respective transformational process—diametrically contrasts Hindemith’s above-mentioned theoretical prerequisite “that all intervals and chords are perceived, independently of their notation, as the ear first hears them, without reference to what has gone before or what comes after.”21 This observation is apt to reveal the fundamental inconsistency of Hindemith’s theoretical foundations. It therefore seems as though considerations such as Pfrogner’s— that had in some way always been in the background of Hindemith’s aversion to dodecaphony—began to change Hindemith’s post-war concept of “tonality.” So, in conclusion, let us take a short look at Hindemith’s late theoretical development. Unfortunately, merely the outlines of this development are available, since the author lacked time to thoroughly elaborate his new approach. * Hindemith’s late theory is not laid out in a systematic order but is spread over a number of casual texts such as talks and lectures. The most important among them are his Zurich lecture “Hören und Verstehen unbekannter Musik” (“Hearing and Understanding Unknown Music”) held in 1955, his 1963 Balzan award speech “Sterbende Gewässer” (“Dying Waters”) and the completely revised German translation of his 1949 Harvard lectures “A Composer’s World”22 (published in 1959 under the title “Komponist in seiner Welt: Weiten und Grenzen”). Given that in 1937 Hindemith still referred to the Schoenberg school as “the only music which can really be called atonal,”23 the drastic change of this view in his writings from the 1950s and 1960s is remarkable. In Hindemith’s thinking, one may call it a veritable theoretical turn. We no more find the striking contrast of tonal and atonal; rather, the idea of “atonality” gets rejected as completely foreign to the matter, just as Schoenberg himself had demanded much earlier. Instead, all music, including Schoenberg and all of the twentieth century, gets integrated into a sort of “super concept” (“total tonality”) which now offers room for differentiation.24 21 Cf. above, note 9. 22 Published in English as A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952). 23 Cf. above, note 10. 24 Hindemith unfolds a broad historical panorama of “tonalities,” such as modality, minor-major tonality, or universal chromaticism, all of which can be included into his own concept of allaround tonality which he coins as “total tonality”: “Da erst die Tonalität, wie sie hier geschildert wurde, alle satztechnischen Möglichkeiten umschließt, zögern wir nicht, von ihr als der totalen Tonalität zu sprechen.” Paul Hindemith, “Sterbende Gewässer,” in Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, ed. Giselher Schubert (Zürich: Atlantis, 1994), 327. For a profound critical look at Hindemith’s late writings cf. Giselher Schubert, “Polemik und Erkenntnis: Zu Hindemith’s späten Schriften,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 156, no. 5 (1995): 16–21; and Franz Knappik, “Hindemith und

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In his 1955 Zurich lecture Hindemith addresses the general public opinion that modern music had managed to loosen the bonds of tonality, but dismisses it as entirely illusionary.25 He claims, for example, that the supposed liberation of the well-praised serialism leads to disastrous results (and here we notice the return of the Schoenberg analysis from the 1937 Unterweisung): for systemic reasons, serial, especially dodecaphonic, composition must consistently confine itself to dissonant chords of minimal variety (mostly drawn from Hindemith’s chord classes IV and V), which lack contrast to chords of different classes (such as Hindemith’s classes II or III). The result of composing in such manner is monotony, dullness, and the loss of harmonic color and variety.26 Twelve-tone composition functions without any kind of “higher tonal organisation.”27 From this, and contrasting his own concept of “total tonality,” Hindemith develops the critical idea of a limited (and thus less valuable) “excerpt(ed)” or “selected tonality” (“Ausschnittstonalität” or “Auswahltonalität”28), which in his opinion is typical for all types of serialism.29 Hindemith’s reasoning for his own understanding of tonality is rooted in a deep humanism, since he deals with compositional technique in terms of comprehensibility and intelligibility.30 For him music must be a medium of human communication— the very opposite of Adorno’s vision of a New Music rejecting all comfortable accessibility by establishing itself as a message in the bottle (see the famous last sentence of the Schoenberg chapter in his Philosophy of New Music31). In his very last (public) talk—his acceptance speech for the Balzan award in 1963— Hindemith proposes an era of “total tonality” (total tonality and tonal totality—more than just a play on words; see Pfrogner’s enharmonic wholeness): “the modern complete and unmodal twelve-tone system with its specially facilitating Harmonik-Konzeptionen in Dodekaphonie und Serialismus: Eine Re-Lektüre der Rede ‘Sterbende Gewässer,’” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 34 (2005): 154–85. 25 Paul Hindemith, “Hören und Verstehen unbekannter Musik,” in Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, ed. Giselher Schubert (Zürich: Atlantis, 1994), 297. 26 “[…] so fällt beispielsweise die als Befreierin gepriesene Reihentechnik oder der ihr nächststehende allgemeinere Zwölftonstil notwendigerweise immer auf ein und dieselbe Art von Zusammenklängen, die mangels Gegenüberstellung von einfachen Klängen nach und nach, trotz ihrer anfänglichen Neuartigkeit, das Gefühl der Gleichförmigkeit, des Farblosen, der Langeweile und schließlich der Öde hervorrufen müssen.” Ibid., 299. 27 “Eine höhere tonale Organisation ist weder beabsichtigt noch kann sie erzielt werden […].” Paul Hindemith, Komponist in seiner Welt: Weiten und Grenzen (Zürich: Atlantis, 1959), 154. 28 Hindemith, Komponist in seiner Welt, 107–8; Cf. Andres Briner, “A New Comment on Tonality by Paul Hindemith,” Journal of Music Theory 5 (1961): 109–12. 29 In a certain respect, i.e. in comparison to the virtually imaginable “tonal totality,” also modality or minor-major tonality are kinds of deliberately “selected” or “confined” tonalities; but from Hindemith’s point of view, twelve-tone technique is by far the poorest of all of them. 30 It is the neglect of the “ethical force of music” that Hindemith accuses all kinds of serialism of: “Die ethische Kraft der Musik wird da völlig außer Acht gelassen. Die Verpflichtungen des Komponisten gegen seine Mitmenschen weichen einer Art Kreuzworträtsel in Tönen […]” Hindemith, Komponist in seiner Welt, 157. 31 “Dem opfert sich die neue Musik. Alle Dunkelheit und Schuld der Welt hat sie auf sich genommen. […] Sie ist die wahre Flaschenpost.” Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 12, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 126.

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total tonality is doubtless the best of all media which can all musical forms live in like fish in fresh waters.”32 The mere contrast is given by dodecaphony,33 which is the “dying waters,” announced in the title of his speech. In Hindemith’s late theory, however, the point of reference shifts away from “nature” in the sense of a physically measurable entity: The partly amateurish “physicalism” (“Physikalismus”) of his early system (as Jacques Handschin has labeled it34) did not remain critically unchallenged in the 1940s and 1950s; Hindemith presumably accepted that. Still, he does not completely give up nature as his last point of reference—it just gets relocated to the perceptive consciousness of the human listener. Hindemith does admit in pseudo-objective terminology to “the limitations set for the human producers of music within our tone system and its tonal possibilities.”35 What he means, however, is the productive and receptive formation of musical material in the act of listening. In a certain way, we can detect a shift of paradigm from the objective to the subjective in Hindemith’s theory: away from the crude naturalist physics of the early phase—which is relatively dispensable—towards a phenomenology of mental reception. In Hindemith’s words, “Music will then only be what happens within our tone system according to the circumstances of total tonality which in its unlimited variety is also tonal totality.”36 While working on the renovated basic principles of his system, the naturalist may have become a phenomenologist. Hindemith’s “total tonality” (along with its conceptual counterpart “tonal totality”) is a decidedly inclusive (or integrative) concept instead of an exclusive one, but it is not at all motivated by an attempted reconciliation with dodecaphony, at least not to what Hindemith called the theory of dodecaphony. Dodecaphonic practice may be a horse of a different color. By the end of his teaching at Zurich University in the 1950s, Hindemith taught an analytical class on Schoenberg’s string quartets. His thorough occupation and fascination with these works is evidenced by a certain number of analytical drafts now held in the archives of the Frankfurt Hindemith Institute (Ex. 4 and 5). It was his very last term before resigning in favor of more time for composing and performing, and it was one of only two lectures that Hindemith devoted entirely to one single composer (the other one was on Carlo Gesualdo).37 As far as we know from these last lessons, Hindemith finds the 32 “Das heutige komplette zwölftönige, unmodale Tonsystem mit seiner nur in ihm möglichen totalen Tonalität ist zweifellos das beste aller Media, in welchem die musikalischen Formen, den Fischen im frischen Wasser gleich, sich munter tummeln können.” Hindemith, “Sterbende Gewässer,” 327. 33 Ibid., 331. 34 Jacques Handschin, Der Toncharakter (Zürich: Atlantis, 1949), 130–32. For Handschin, Hindemith’s theory is based upon “a naïve belief in physics” (“naiver Glaube an die Physik,” 130), and thus its character is merely “pseudo-scientific” (“pseudo-wissenschaftliche Thesen,” 132). Cf. also Norman Cazden, “Hindemith and Nature,” Music Review 15 (1954): 288–306. 35 “die den menschlichen Musikproduzenten gesteckten Grenzen innerhalb unseres Tonsystems und seiner tonalen Möglichkeiten.” Hindemith, “Sterbende Gewässer,” 334. 36 “Musik wird dann nur das sein, was sich innerhalb unseres Tonsystems nach den Gegebenheiten der totalen Tonalität abspielt, die in ihrer unbegrenzten Vielfalt auch eine tonale Totalität ist.” Ibid., 334–35. 37 Cf. Laurenz Lütteken, “In ‘der ständigen Mischung von Kunst und Wissenschaft:’ Hindemiths

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Example 4: Hindemith’s analytical draft of Schoenberg’s Third String Quartet (by kind permission of the Hindemith Institute, Frankfurt am Main)

Schoen­berg string quartets to be well-composed music. Hindemith’s own methods of harmonic analysis prove as much, just as they did in the case of Schoenberg’s Op. 33 in 1937. The same goes for the late dodecaphonic quartets as well: Hindemith considers them to be solidly composed—but in spite of their theoretical backdrop (and not because of it). For Hindemith there is no doubt about them being tonal music. Thus in Hindemith’s opinion they are made much better than they are supposedly thought. Ironically, this method of analyzing Schoenberg’s music as music without any backdrop of dodecaphonic theory is not as far from Schoenberg himself as Hindemith might have believed.38 Yet in spite of this late reappraisal, Hindemith’s position regarding dodecaphony had not fundamentally changed. In a way Hindemith’s principal critique of Schoenberg’s compositional method becomes more effective through his late inclusion of Schoenberg’s music into the overall concept of tonality than through his earlier exclusion of that repertory from the realm of tonal music. That is because the idea of “anything goes” does not exist in the wider concept of tonality. Instead, the old Tätigkeit an der Universität Zürich im Spannungsfeld eines umfassenden Musikbegriffs,” in Der späte Hindemith, ed. Ulrich Tadday (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 2004), 85. 38 Cf. Schoenberg’s famous letter to Rudolf Kolisch trying to keep him off analyzing the third quartet (op. 30) in terms of twelve-tone technique. For further insight into the relationship between Hindemith and Schoenberg cf. Gerd Sannemüller, “Hindemith und Schönberg. Stationen einer Beziehung,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 32 (2003): 235–53.

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Example 5: Hindemith’s analytical draft of Schoenberg’s Third String Quartet (by kind permission of the Hindemith Institute, Frankfurt am Main)

values of Hindemith’s theory of 1937 stay in effect. An “excerpt(ed)” or “selected tonality” (as Hindemith grants Schoenberg) is a musical idiom that Hindemith clearly considers beneath the possibilities and potential of a tonal system. In Hindemith’s opinion, this is an accidental and completely unnecessary self-restriction. Interestingly, that is the exact same notion that Pfrogner used to pit off his idea

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of a “Twelveness of Tones” against Schoenberg. Notably, he accomplished this while accepting Hindemith’s compositional practice, only defending it against Hindemith’s own theory.39 If it is true that Hindemith planned to completely rewrite his Unterweisung (as some of his students reported), there are surely some features that would remain the same: a catalogue of criteria for evaluation of the usefulness of tones and sonorities, the intention of creating ordered sets of chord progressions, the idea of convincing harmonic fluctuation and, last but not least, the demand for music which can be analyzed and grasped by mere listening, albeit a kind of high-level and well-educated listening. Yet Hindemith would have possibly abandoned his dogmatic and often erroneous pseudo-physical axioms which he himself felt uncomfortable with and which today do not withstand scientific scrutiny.40 What remains is the remarkable fact that in his last theoretical comments, Hindemith attacked the supposed zeitgeist of the 1960s by favouring the term “tonality” and expanding its concept to “totality,” even if he did so entirely non-systematically. Especially with regards to Hindemith’s late Schoenberg analyses, the question whether that stance is merely a symptom of reactionary resignation (as many have put it since) or rather a promising attempt to advance entirely new dimensions of theory, deserves to be the subject of many intensive debates to come. Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. Briefwechsel, 1928–1940: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin. Edited by Henri Lonitz. Vol. 1, Briefe und Briefwechsel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994. — Philosophie der Neuen Musik. Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 12, edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. Blume, Jürgen. “Hindemiths erste und letzte Fassung der Unterweisung im Tonsatz im Vergleich.” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 20 (1991): 71–109. Briner, Andres. “A New Comment on Tonality by Paul Hindemith.” Journal of Music Theory 5 (1961): 109–12. Cazden, Norman. “Hindemith and Nature.” Music Review 15 (1954): 288–306. Forte, Allen. “Paul Hindemith’s Contribution to Music Theory in the United States.” HindemithJahrbuch 27 (1998): 62–79. Reprint in Journal of Music Theory 42 (1998): 1–14. Handschin, Jacques. Der Toncharakter: Eine Einführung in die Tonpsychologie. Zürich: Atlantis, 1948. Hindemith, Paul. “Hören und Verstehen unbekannter Musik.” 1955. In Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, edited by Giselher Schubert, 293–309. Zürich: Atlantis, 1994. — Komponist in seiner Welt: Weiten und Grenzen. Zürich: Atlantis, 1959. English version as A 39 Pfrogner, Die Zwölfordnung der Töne, 251. 40 Cf. Allen Forte’s reappraisal of Hindemith’s theory: “Finally, the pillars of Hindemith’s theory, Series 1 and 2, may not withstand scrutiny as instances of ‘empirical’ music theory, but many of their features are intuitively plausible, suggesting a reappraisal and fresh applications.” Forte, “Paul Hindemith’s Contribution to Music Theory,” 79. It was as early as in 1965 that William Thomson came to an appropriate description of the state of theory in Hindemith’s Unterweisung im Tonsatz when he coined it “a mixed blessing; the proliferation of systemic errors balances out his genuine insights.” William Thomson, “Hindemith’s Contribution to Music Theory,” Journal of Music Theory 9 (1965): 68.

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Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952. — “Sterbende Gewässer.” 1963. In Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, edited by Giselher Schubert, 314– 36. Zürich: Atlantis, 1994. — Unterweisung im Tonsatz: Theoretischer Teil. 1937. New and expanded edition. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1940. — The Craft of Musical Composition: Book I: Theoretical Part. 1942. Translated by Arthur Mendel. Reprint. New York: Associated Music Publishers, Inc., 1945. Hinrichsen, Hans-Joachim. “Motorik, Organik, Linearität: Bach im Diskurs der Musiktheoretiker.” In Bach und die Nachwelt, edited by Michael Heinemann and Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen. Vol. 3, 1900–1950, 337–78. Laaber: Laaber, 2000. Houy, Constantin. “Hindemiths Analyse des Tristanvorspiels: Eine Apologie.” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 37 (2008): 152–91. Knappik, Franz. “Hindemith und Harmonik-Konzeptionen in Dodekaphonie und Serialismus: Eine Re-Lektüre der Rede ‘Sterbende Gewässer.’” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 34 (2005): 154–85. Lessing, Wolfgang. Die Hindemith-Rezeption Theodor W. Adornos. Mainz: Schott, 1999. Lütteken, Laurenz. “In ‘der ständigen Mischung von Kunst und Wissenschaft’: Hindemiths Tätigkeit an der Universität Zürich im Spannungsfeld eines umfassenden Musikbegriffs.” In Der späte Hindemith, edited by Ulrich Tadday, 69–85. Musik-Konzepte 125, no. 26. Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 2004. Pfrogner, Hermann. Die Zwölfordnung der Töne. Zürich: Amalthea, 1953. Rohwer, Jens. Tonale Instruktionen. Wolfenbüttel: Möseler, 1949. Sannemüller, Gerd. “Hindemith und Schönberg. Stationen einer Beziehung.” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 32 (2003): 235–53. Schubert, Giselher. “Polemik und Erkenntnis: Zu Hindemiths späten Schriften.” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 156, no. 5 (1995): 16–21. — “Vorgeschichte und Entstehung der Unterweisung im Tonsatz: Theoretischer Teil.” HindemithJahrbuch 9 (1980): 16–64. Thomson, William. “Hindemith’s Contribution to Music Theory.” Journal of Music Theory 9 (1965): 52–71.

Tonality in Austro-German Theory

Concepts of Tonality in Schoenberg’s . Harmonielehre1 Markus Böggemann I. Between Argument and Polemics Arnold Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre is a multi-faceted work. It was originally conceived as part of a comprehensive course in composition, serving equally as a document of Schoenberg’s teaching abilities and as a well-directed provocation to the academic music theory of his days. Likewise, it justifies certain compositional aspects of his music—although not to the extent his contemporaries expected for a theoretical work of Schoenberg: Many of the prevailing cool to dismissive reviews show a noticable disappointment and irritation concerning the fact that Schoen­ berg’s theory of harmony is a textbook on tonal harmony. For example, Hugo Leichtentritt, who some years later would undertake a sympathetic first analysis of the piano pieces op. 11,2 writes in the journal Signale für die musikalische Welt: I assumed that here Schoenberg would be a guide into the new territory of strange sounds which give his works such a peculiar imprint. To my surprise, I realized that throughout these 475 pages (in regards to purely factual information concerning the material) almost nothing is touched upon which I would not have been quite familiar with for a long time. Only at the very end, does Schoenberg very briefly address the whole-tone scale, the fourth chord, sixpart chords, etc. For me personally, it would have been indefinitely more valuable to have an extended, well-reasoned, and clear representation of precisely these topics, than a long-winded chewing [langatmiges Durchkauen] of already well-known things over 430 pages. Schoenberg fails precisely where he should prove himself.3

The Harmonielehre stems directly from Schoenberg’s own teaching activities, in which he always limited himself to the traditional musical language. This is confirmed not only by the famous opening of the preface, “This book I have learned 1 2 3

I am most grateful to Felix Wörner for his translation of greater parts of this text and to Benjamin Haas who revised the entire manuscript. Hugo Leichtentritt, Formenlehre, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1927), 436–57. “Ich meinte, Schönberg würde hier ein Führer sein in das Neuland der seltsamen Zusammenklänge, die seinen Werken ein so merkwürdiges Gepräge geben, fand aber zu meinem Erstaunen, dass auf diesen 475 Seiten im Grunde (rein sachlich, das Material betreffend) kaum etwas berührt wird, das mir seit langer Zeit nicht schon durchaus vertraut wäre. Nur ganz am Schluss lässt Schönberg sich ziemlich kurz aus über die Ganzton-Skala, über Quartenakkorde, sechstönige Klänge und dergl. Gerade darüber ausführliches, gut begründetes, anschaulich dargestelltes zu erfahren, wäre mir persönlich aber unendlich wertvoller gewesen, als ein langatmiges Durchkauen von lauter bekannten Dingen auf 430 Seiten. Schönberg versagt gerade da, wo er sich bewähren sollte.” Hugo Leichtentritt, “Arnold Schönberg’s ‘Harmonielehre,’” Signale für die musikalische Welt 70, no. 22 (1912): 732.

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from my pupils,”4 but also by its characteristic style of oral presentation, which directly results from the book’s didactic context and dominates lengthy passages of the text. Harmonielehre is a dictated work.5 This also explains the manifold digressions and occasional inconsistencies of presentation reproved by critics such as Leichtentritt: Similar to extemporaneous speech, the work generally proceeds in instantaneous impulses rather than careful progression. The reproach met by Harmonielehre’s “long-winded chewing through” of already well-known facts points towards another distinguishing feature of the text: Strictly speaking, it is not a complete and self-contained work, but rather the first part of an extensive music theory project designed to cover all areas of composition in no less than five volumes.6 Within such a project, the theory of harmony would have taken a purely propedeutic position. Though these ambitious plans were never realized,7 this comprehensive conception is the reason that Schoenberg starts Harmonielehre—in Walter Frisch’s words—“from scratch,”8 and concentrates his considerations almost exclusively on the vertical dimension. Voice leading does not figure within Schoenberg’s list of subjects, and melody or counterpoint are similarly ill-considered in his description of certain chord progressions. Schoenberg expresses a desire “to derive the nature of chord connections strictly from the nature of the chords themselves.”9 This restriction is motivated by method, not content; on the one hand, it proceeds from the projected (yet never finished) further volumes, and indicates neither a denial of the connection between harmony and counterpoint,10 nor an assertion of harmony as the most important parameter of a composition.11 On the other hand, this restriction follows from Schoenberg’s polemical delinea4 Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 100th Anniversary Edition, trans. Roy E. Carter, foreword by Walter Frisch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 1; “Dieses Buch habe ich von meinen Schülern gelernt.” Arnold Schönberg, Harmonielehre (Vienna: UniversalEdition, 1911), v. 5 See Schoenberg’s letter to Emil Hertzka (the director of the Universal-Edition), 4 July 1910, where he urges Hertzka to provide him with a secretary. Partially cited in: Ernst Hilmar, ed., Arnold Schönberg: Gedenkausstellung 1974 (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1974), 220–21. 6 Schoenberg to Hertzka, 23 July 1911, cited in Rudolf Stephan, “Ein Blick auf die UniversalEdition: Aus Anlaß von Alfred Schlees 80. Geburtstag,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 36 (1981): 639–45. The letter reveals on the other hand how much all these plans were influenced and even caused by Schoenberg’s dire need of funds. 7 Schoenberg did indeed continue to pursue the project: The notes on “coherence, counterpoint, instrumentation, and instruction in form” as well as the various attempts at a work on the “musical idea” follow the intended plan (cf. Andreas Jacob, Grundbegriffe der Musiktheorie Arnold Schönbergs (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005). 8 Walter Frisch, foreword to Theory of Harmony, by Arnold Schoenberg, xvi. 9 Schoenberg, Theory, 13. “das Wesen der Verbindungen lediglich aus dem Wesen der Akkorde abzuleiten.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 9. 10 Ibid., 26–27, 115 fn. 11 To the contrary: For Schoenberg, the primacy in music composition (Tonsatz) is the motivic structure (Motivik). In his Theory of Harmony, this motivic structure serves as a justification of chord progressions even (and particularly) in those instances in which the provided music examples proved unsatisfactory (cf. ibid., 379).

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tion against “aesthetic” in favor of a “course in handicraft” (Handwerkslehre): his Harmonielehre is intended to deal exclusively with the results of the characteristics and conditions of the material—the tones and their possible sonorities—providing “data for harmonic theory” and not making aesthetic judgements.12 As he outlines programmatically at the outset of his book, he intends to provide not merely a theory, but rather a “system of presentation.”13 This designation implies a careful differentiation between the possibilities inherent in the nature of material and the artificial, systematizing presentation of these possibilities as music theory. This difference is of decisive significance for Schoenberg’s critique of the traditional theory of harmony as well as for his own style of representation. Beside the pretensions of aesthetic judgements, his criticism is motivated by the inconsistencies of traditional music theory. Schoenberg’s main allegation is that music theory issues laws on the basis of selected historical phenomena with the claim of timeless validity: “And, what is most disastrous of all, it is then the belief that a yardstick has been found by which to measure artistic worth, even that of future works.”14 Excluded from these laws are not only those phenomena which conflict with the laws’ fundamental axioms—i.e. the rootedness of the chords and their construction in thirds—but also some which support them. Additionally, the explanatory statements posited for those exceptions are either faulty, or “solely the expression of a certain taste in art.”15 It is on this basis that aesthetic judgements are made, judgements which then govern the use of chords and chord progressions in lieu of more satisfactory technical explanations. The traditional music theory is, in truth, a disguised aesthetic. In addition, it is unable to comprise all phenomena of the traditional harmony under a unified perspective: the representation definitely changes with the treatment of the so-called “non-harmonic” tones, replacing the vertically oriented examination of chords based on their fundamentals with an explanation of sonorities through voice leading.16 According to Schoenberg, the traditional theory of harmony is inconsistent and presumptuous: It is unable to comprise all accepted phenomena within a consistent systematic concept. Rather, in order to explain certain dissonances, the traditional harmony must adopt the—for Schoenberg absurd—term “non-harmonic tones,” which changes the vertical perspective of sonorities to a horizontal consideration of voice leading.17 Even what could be covered based on the foundation of the concept (for example ninth chords and other four-part chords) is excluded by questionable arguments inconsistent with the system: “But that the system is false or at least inadequate, because it cannot accommodate phenomena that do exist,

12 Ibid., 345; “Data zur Harmonielehre.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 389. 13 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 7. 14 Ibid., 9 (emphasis in original); “man glaubt einen Maßstab gefunden zu haben, den man berechtigt ist, auch an zukünftige Kunstwerke anzulegen.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 3. 15 Ibid., 414; “[…] nur der Ausdruck eines bestimmten Kunstgeschmacks […]” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 462. 16 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 329. 17 Ibid., 309–10.

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[…] that had to be said. And yet the system would arrogate to itself the status of a natural system, whereas it will scarcely do as a system of presentation.”18 Being a “course in handicraft” instead of an aesthetic means that Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre aims for a thoroughly systematic approach, i.e. to present the elements of tonal harmony and their possible combinations without any reference to historical practices and their corresponding rules. In its obvious disregard to matters of tradition, the Harmonielehre thus reflects the more general experience of an all-pervading relativism inaugurated by an invalidation of aesthetic norms.19 On the other hand, this posthistoire-like perspective significantly depends on Schoenberg’s own step into atonality years before; to realize that meaningful music can be composed outside of the—however broadly conceived—confines of tonal harmony clearly has a strong impact on the theoretical outline and presentation of this very harmonic practice. This realization also has consequences for the practice’s conceptual framework, particularly for the concept of tonality. As I shall demonstrate, tonality in Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre is less a topic or a foundational idea than a flexible argumentative strategy within a system of presentation. In fact, there are two different and even contradictory concepts of tonality at work in the Harmonie­ lehre, both of which serve to support his polemical stance against academic music theory. Their interrelation with Schoenberg’s own premises and goals therefore merits a closer examination. II. Tonality as a Natural Phenomenon The categorial basis of Schoenberg’s descriptive system is formed by his assumption of a general urge for development: “Everything alive contains the future within it. Living means begetting and giving birth. Everything that now is strives toward what is to come.”20 This urge for development is expressed in art through a basic imitative instinct: Most essential is the following psychological assumption: The development of the harmonic resources is explained primarily through the conscious or unconscious imitation of a prototype; every imitation so produced can then itself become a prototype that can in turn be imitated.21

18 Ibid., 321; “Aber daß das System falsch ist oder wenigstens ungenügend, weil es Erscheinungen, die sind, nicht unterbringen kann […], das mußte gesagt werden. Arrogiert doch das System für das System der Natur gehalten zu werden, während es kaum System der Darstellung ist.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 360. 19 More on this topic below. Cf. also the author’s Gesichte und Geschichte: Arnold Schönbergs musikalischer Expressionismus zwischen avantgardistischer Kunstprogrammatik und Historismusproblem (Vienna: Lafite, 2007), 31–40 and 75–90. In the present article, I draw partly on material already presented in that book in German. 20 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 369; “Jedes Lebendige hat das Zukünftige in sich. Leben heißt zeugen und gebären. Alles Gegenwärtige strebt dem Zukünftigen zu.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 414. Cf. also ibid., 53. 21 Ibid., 385; “In erster Linie grundlegend ist folgende psychologische Annahme: Die Entwicklung der harmonischen Kunstmittel erklärt sich vor allem dadurch, daß ein Vorbild bewußt oder

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The imitative instinct and its chainlike progress—the idea that the point of reference for emulation is not the original but rather the directly preceding element—is of crucial importance to Schoenberg’s argument in Harmonielehre.22 The initial state in this process of emulation is the single tone. It represents the primary basis of music as well as the totality of all harmonic possibilities: [T]he tone is the material of music. It must therefore be regarded, with all its properties and effects, as suitable for art. […] And the evolution of music has followed this course: it has drawn into the stock of artistic resources more and more of the harmonic possibilities inherent in the tone.23

The “harmonic possibilities” mentioned here result from the structure of the harmonic series, which is “one of the most remarkable properties of the tone.”24 The scale and simple chords emanate from it by straight imitation: If the scale is imitation of the tone on the horizontal plane, that is, note after note, then chords are imitation on the vertical, notes sounded together. If the scale is analysis, then the chord is synthesis of the tone. […] The simplest of such chords is, obviously, that one which most closely resembles the simplest and most evident aspects of the tone, that one which consists of fundamental, major third, and perfect fifth—the major triad. […] The triad is without doubt similar to the tone, but it is no more similar to its model than, say, Assyrian reliefs are to their human models.”25

Starting from the unlimited harmonic series (which comprises the entire sound spectrum), Schoenberg regards the single tone as both the source of all music and the goal of its development (to which it moves by way of infinite approach). Combined with the aforementioned assumption of an imitative instinct, this notion gives way to the idea that the development of music as art results from a continuous diffusion into the nature of the tone, that is, a successive unlocking of artistic means lying within the most distant harmonics not yet sensed.26

unbewußt nachgeahmt wird, und daß jede so entstehende Nachahmung wieder Vorbild werden und wieder nachgeahmt werden kann.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 432. 22 The same idea of a gradual movement away from an initial state defines Schoenberg’s concept of developing variation. 23 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 20–21; “der Ton ist das Material der Musik. Er muß daher mit allen seinen Eigenschaften und Wirkungen für kunstfähig angesehen werden. […] Und die Entwicklung der Musik ist den Weg gegangen, daß sie immer mehr von den im Ton gelegenen Zusammenklangsmöglichkeiten in den Bereich der Kunstmittel einbezogen hat.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 18–19. 24 Ibid., 20; “eine seiner bemerkenswertesten Eigenschaften.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 18. 25 Ibid., 26; “Ist die Skala die Nachahmung des Tons in der Horizontalen, im Nacheinander, so sind die Akkorde Nachahmung in der Vertikalen, im Miteinander. Ist die Skala Analyse, so ist der Akkord Synthese des Tons. […] Der einfachste solcher Akkorde ist selbstverständlich derjenige, der den einfachsten und deutlichsten Wirkungen des Tons am meisten ähnelt, der aus Grundton, großer Terz und Quint bestehende Durdreiklang. […] Er ist dem Ton zweifellos ähnlich, aber nicht ähnlicher als beispielsweise assyrische Menschendarstellungen ihren Modellen.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 26. 26 Cf. Markus Böggemann and Ralf Alexander Kohler, “Harmonielehre,” in Arnold Schönberg: Interpretationen seiner Werke, ed. Gerold W. Gruber (Laaber: Laaber, 2002), 2:424.

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Markus Böggemann [T]he natural prototype, the tone, can be used to explain, as chords, still other harmonic combinations entirely different from these simple ones […] What is within reach has its temporary boundaries wherever our nature and the instruments we have invented have their temporary boundaries. What is attainable with the phenomenon outside ourselves, as far as the tone itself is concerned, theoretically speaking, has no boundaries. What has not yet been attained is what is worth striving for.”27

For Schoenberg the single tone thus represents a potentiality, it already inheres what the development of music unearths in a kind of delayed movement. The idea of equivalency between origin and end belongs to the very topoi that govern the mindset of aesthetic modernism in general.28 It sharply contrasts the notion of an ongoing historical progress, so dear to nineteenth century’s common thought. It opposes any linear conception of history, but without abandoning the idea of development altogether. The concept of a dynamic unfolding of the already given offers an alternative idea of development beyond that of pre-modern stasis or teleological mechanics of history. This idea is of decisive importance in the Harmonielehre, as it allows Schoenberg to reduce the historical system of tonality to a mere exception within the broader natural context. Wherever historical development and tradition contradict Schoenberg’s positions, he is thus able to refer to a higher authority against the historical fact. The “will of nature”29 always outplays the contingencies of history. “Tonality” in this perspective is a basic characteristic of the tone. Understood this way, “tonal” means: according to the properties of the tone, and relates to all parameters which are part of its character. Like the tone itself and the sonic possibilities within it, tonality is a natural phenomenon with the utmost range. In fact, it excludes barely anything at all in harmony. The concept of tonality as a natural phenomenon is thus especially useful to Schoenberg when he discusses sounds that go beyond tonal hamonies, allowing him to suspend the categorial difference between consonance and dissonance in favor of a merely gradual one corresponding to the lesser or greater remoteness of the overtones.30 This perspective then promises to explain phenomena like chords of fourths, chords of six or more tones, and other more complex harmonic possibilities thus far inaccessible to theory.31 Moreover, relying on the basic properties of the tone and on nature in general makes a strong argument for Schoenberg against any upcoming criticism.32

27 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 359; “das natürliche Vorbild, der Ton, ist geeignet, noch ganz andere Zusammenklänge als Akkorde zu erklären als diese einfachen. […] Das Erreichbare hat dort seine vorläufigen Grenzen, wo unsere Natur und die Instrumente, die wir erdacht haben, ihre vorläufigen Grenzen haben. Das Erreichbare im außer uns Liegenden, im Ton, hat, theoretisch genommen, keine Grenzen. Was noch nicht erreicht ist, ist das Erstrebenswerte.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 357. 28 See Beat Wyss, Der Wille zur Kunst: Zur ästhetischen Mentalität der Moderne (Köln: Dumont, 1996), 98. 29 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 315; “Wille der Natur.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 352. 30 Ibid., 20. 31 See Schoenberg’s description of the emancipated dissonances, ibid., 323. 32 On the harmonic series as a fundamental argument in music theory see Carl Dahlhaus, Die

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Even in the few cases where he discusses examples from the literature, Schoenberg keeps clinging to this naturalistic perspective. He does not follow theoretical tradition with its historically flexible rules, but refers instead to the universal basics, that is, the inherent potential of the tone’s natural model and the imitative instinct as the driving force behind a development that strives to unlock the tone’s musical potential. Based on this conviction—and on the methodologically-founded rejection of the concepts of voice leading and non-harmonic tones—Schoenberg may, for example, neglect the genesis of a “chord of Mozart.”33

Example 1: Schoenberg’s Mozart example (no. 305a: chord of Mozart) in Theory of Harmony (p. 368)

What would be appropriately classified as a multiple suspension with a strong motivic background becomes, in Schoenberg’s view, an independent chord suitable for some daring sequences. In his interpretation, Mozart’s chord is not a historical artifact but rather a piece of nature.

Example 2: Schoenberg’s Mozart example (no. 305b: sequence of chord of Mozart) in Theory of Harmony (p. 368)

III. Tonality as a Historical Phenomenon Alongside this concept of tonality, there is another one in the Harmonielehre which emphasises the historical dimension of tonality. According to this concept, tonality is not an effect of the tone itself, but a “means of art which is consistent with some basic conditions of the natural prototype, the tone, but which primarily serves Musiktheorie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert: Erster Teil: Grundzüge einer Systematik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 102–12, on Schoenberg especially 106–7. 33 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 367–68. The chord is from Mozart’s Symphony K. 550, first movement, measures 150 and 152 respectively.

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to emulate the deeply satisfying effect coming from the formal closure of a wellshaped idea.”34 As a means of art, it has a value for Schoenberg; however, it does not constitute an aesthetic norm: “I do not consider it [tonality, M.B.] an eternal law, a natural law of music, even though I know well, how very consistent this law’s demands are with the simplest conditions of the fundamental chord.”35 This passage clearly reflects Schoenberg’s realization from a few years earlier that meaningful and coherent composition is possible beyond tonality as well. The Harmonielehre views its subject—and the concept of tonality in general—from a newly gained distance, not as a set of rules or a matter of course but as one compositional possibility among others. Therefore—as is the case with the above-mentioned chord of Mozart—Schoenberg’s description does not follow the paths of tradition, as represented by the theoretically humble, yet didactically reliable contemporary works of Richard Stöhr or Ernst Friedrich Richter.36 Moreover, Schoenberg does not describe a historically based practice. This distinguishes his Harmonielehre from, for example, the work of Rudolf Louis and Ludwig Thuille, which quotes extensively from works by Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, and numerous others (especially in the later chapters).37 Schoenberg describes tonal harmony neither as it is nor as it should be;38 instead he presents his version of what it could be, if one takes its system seriously. His Harmonielehre does just that: it takes the system of tonal harmony at face value and, insisting on its internal logic with utter consequence, drives it to the point where it breaks apart. Obviously motivated by his polemical stance against traditional music theory, Schoenberg presents this selfdestruction of the system as inevitable and describes it with visible pleasure. For instance, he combines two cadential patterns based on the same tonic (Ex. 3, a–d)—which by themselves are conventional and even labeled as “not unusual”—in a slightly altered version to produce an eight-part chord which contains six minor seconds (Ex. 3, e–f).39 A similar function among the separate elements and their direction towards the same tonic seems to legitimize their combination.

34 “[Ein] Kunstgriff, der einigen einfachen Bedingungen des naturgegebenen Vorbilds, des Tons, entspricht, dessen Ausübung vor allem aber den Zweck hat, jene formal befriedigende Wirkung nachzuahmen, die an der Geschlossenheit eines gut geformten Gedankens so sehr befriedigt.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 28. The translation is mine. In the 3rd edition (on which the available English translation is based), this and the following passage were substantially altered. 35 “Ich glaube nicht, daß sie [die Tonalität, M.B.] ein ewiges Gesetz, ein Naturgesetz der Musik ist, obwohl ich recht gut weiß, wie sehr das, was dieses Gesetz verlangt, den einfachsten Bedingungen des Grundakkords entspricht.” Ibid. 36 Richard Stöhr, Praktischer Leitfaden der Harmonielehre, 2nd ed. (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1909); Ernst Friedrich Richter, Lehrbuch der Harmonie, 17th ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1891). 37 Rudolf Louis and Ludwig Thuille, Harmonielehre, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: Grüninger, 1909), 361– 91. 38 As does Heinrich Schenker, Harmonielehre (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1906). 39 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 368.

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Example 3: Schoenberg’s Mozart example (no. 306: cadential patterns) in Theory of Harmony (p. 368)

Such combination of harmonies which are only indirectly related (insofar as they are directed towards the same tonic) obviously suggests Schoenberg’s penchant for polemics more than serious compositional advice.40 Here at last the radicalism of his approach comes to the fore: he explicitly wants to demonstrate how the system’s own rules, applied with consequence, lead to the inevitable self-destruction of tonal harmony: It is remarkable: the vagrant chords do not appear directly by way of nature […]. Actually, they arise only out of the logical development of our tonal system, of its implications. They are the issue of inbreeding, inbreeding among the laws of that system. And that precisely these logical consequences of the system are the very undoing of the system itself, that the end of the system is brought about with such inescapable cruelty by its own functions, brings to mind the thought that death is the consequence of life.41

Adopting the perspective that the system’s inner logic and dynamics tend to overrun this same system and finally cause its collapse, Schoenberg is able to claim that 40 See also Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 367, Ex. 304, where Schoenberg demonstrates that each diminished seventh chord fits together with any other tone and therefore could be used to harmonize every given melody. He readily admits though, that “we will not do so because it would not be interesting, and besides, it would be contrived.”; “Man wird’s nicht tun, weil’s nicht interessant und außerdem konstruiert wäre.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 412. 41 Ibid., 196; “Es ist eigentümlich: diese Akkorde entstehen nicht direkt auf dem Wege der Natur […]. Sie entstehen ja eigentlich nur aus der logischen Weiterentwicklung unseres Tonsystems. Also durch Inzucht, durch Inzucht zwischen den Gesetzen jenes Systems. Und daß es gerade diese folgerichtigen Ergebnisse des Systems sind, die dem System selbst den Garaus machen, daß das Ende des Systems mit so unentrinnbarer Grausamkeit durch seine eigenen Funktionen herbeigeführt wird; das erinnert an den Gedanken, daß der Tod das Ergebnis des Lebens ist.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 217.

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his “theory, […] although it does not serve a particular party—or, far more, for that very reason—arrives at results considered correct by the group that thinks as I do. My aim is just that: to show that one must arrive at these results.”42 The dissolution of tonality and the new harmonies that take its place are not arbitrary, but rather a necessary result of the dynamics within the tonal system. Tonality is a historically contingent artistic device; it was established and developed in its own time, but now necessarily gives way to a new and differently-founded harmony out of submission to its own rules. This is what Schoenberg seeks to demonstrate. IV. Beyond Teleology: . Nature vs. (Historical) Necessity Nonetheless, Schoenberg does not succeed. Dealing with the most advanced harmonies of his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern as well as Béla Bartók, Franz Schreker, and himself in Harmonielehre’s famous last chapter, Schoenberg relies on faith and phenomenological description rather than explanation: Why it is that way and why it is correct, I cannot yet explain in any detail. In general, it is selfevident to those who accept my view concerning the nature of dissonance. But that it is correct, I firmly believe, and a number of others believe it too.43

It is telling that at this point Schoenberg relies on a mutually accepted “nature of dissonance”—a conception limited to the more remote overtones and emancipated from the need of resolution—instead of explaining the chords and their function within a (however broadly conceived) tonality. Contrary to his pronouncements, he does not demonstrate how chords derive from the inner dynamics of the tonal system and thus does not clarify their relation to the more traditional phenomena presented in the Harmonielehre. The crucial point is whether these chords possess the ability to create harmonic coherence and a kind of functional directionality, or, alternately, are merely isolated sounds. As long as this remains an open question (as it does for Schoenberg), it forecloses any discussion of these sounds as analogous to tonal chords.44 Therefore, Schoenberg advocates only for their naturalness: There are no limits to the possibilities of tones sounding together, to harmonic possibilities; [the limits are] at most to the possibilities of fitting the harmonies into a system that will establish their aesthetic valence. At present; even that may eventually be attained.45 42 Ibid., 70 (emphasis in original); “Lehre, […] trotzdem sie nicht einer Partei dient, oder vielmehr eben deshalb, zu jenen Resultaten gelangt, die von der Gruppe, die ähnlich denkt wie ich, für richtig gefunden werden. Gerade das zu zeigen, daß man zu diesen Resultaten gelangen muß, ist mein Ziel.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 82. 43 Schoenberg, Theory, 420. “Warum das so ist und warum es richtig ist, kann ich im einzelnen vorläufig noch nicht sagen. Im ganzen ergibt es sich als selbstverständlich für den, der meine Ansicht über das Wesen der Dissonanz akzeptiert. Aber daß es richtig ist, glaube ich fest, und eine Anzahl anderer glaubt es auch.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 469. 44 Cf. Carl Dahlhaus, “Emanzipation der Dissonanz,” in Schönberg und andere: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Neuen Musik (Mainz: Schott, 1978), 146–53. 45 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 322 (addition in square brackets by the translator); “Den

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The problem of harmonic coherence pushes the latent rivalry of these two concepts of tonality to the fore. And it comes to plain contradiction when Schoenberg on the one hand describes harmonic coherence as a “possibility of our technique,”46 and on the other hand, (just a few paragraphs later) states that the tone is “capable for continuation, i.e. that movement is latent in it.”47 “Technique” implies tonality as something to be installed by the individual composer, whereas “tone” signifies a concept of tonality that depends solely on the natural properties of the sounding material. The first employs “History” as an explanatory model, the second “Nature.”48 And as already mentioned, Schoenberg’s choice of “Nature” rather than “History” when discussing atonal harmonies is of utmost importance for the evaluation of Schoenberg’s apologetic stance in the Harmonielehre. The purely descriptive presentation of atonal harmonies as isolated objects, along with his lack of remarks on their evolution and a disregard of their harmonic context, shows the difficulties of deducing them from tonal harmony. Atonality, it seems, is no historic inevitability at all. To assume its emergence as an unavoidable consequence of the tonal harmonic system’s self-destructive forces is a teleological overstatement. By invoking the above-cited “nature of dissonance,” Schoenberg compensates for the failure of the historical argument with the explanatory model of “Nature.” But if two arguments are to explain the same thing, the one with less explanatory power is dispensable. Consequently, the teleological explanation of atonality can be completely dismissed. Thus, atonality is not a historical necessity with Schoenberg as its executioner, but rather originates from a personal decision that is determined as much by individual options as by universally shared topics or problems.49 The failure of the teleological argument dismisses the idea of a directed course of music history altogether. The case is similar with tonality: the deliberate use of two different concepts of tonality in Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre demonstrates that tonality is no longer a normative force but has become disposable. It is no longer the main topic and goal of a theory of harmony, but merely a means within its general system of presentation. What tonality in this respect is or can be depends on the particular argument it serves. In other words, tonality in Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre is not—to adopt Brian Hyer’s term—an intrinsic property of music, neither as an effect of nature nor as an effect of history. Instead it is a tool that depends completely on the intentions of the user/composer. This overtly voluntaristic approach makes any foundation of tonality that refers to objective, superhuman authorities like history or nature dubitable, if not impossible. Möglichkeiten des Zusammenklangs sind keine Grenzen gezogen; höchstens den Möglichkeiten, die Zusammenklänge in ein System zu bringen, das ihre ästhetische Wertigkeit feststellt. Vorläufig; später wird wohl auch das gelingen.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 360. 46 Ibid., 312; “eine Möglichkeit unserer Technik,” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 349. 47 Ibid., 313 (emphasis in original); “daß er fortsetzungsfähig ist, d. h. daß Bewegung in ihm liegt.” Schönberg, Harmonielehre, 350; Cf. Böggemann, Gesichte und Geschichte, 89–90. 48 Cf. Dahlhaus, Die Musiktheorie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, 37–42 and 56–63. 49 See for this perspective Reinhard Kapp, “Arnold Schönberg, Vier kurze historiographische Versuche mit altmodischen Begriffen,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 53 (1998): 32–42. On the teleological perspective on Schoenberg cf. Böggemann, Gesichte und Geschichte, 117–21.

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Music theory therefore participates in the problems which make up for the fundamental crisis of modernity: formerly shared universal ideas erode and lose their authority; they decay dramatically in their binding forces, giving way to a pluralization of ideologies. History as a coherent tale is split into subjective histories, or even worse, a sheer pile of unrelated facts. Similarly, nature evaporates into a set of personal impressions and assumptions without any common obligation. This muchdebated crisis of modernity,50 as Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre clearly shows, affects the concept of tonality in the twentieth century in equal measure: What tonality is, whether and how it should be retained, whether it should be newly founded or abandoned altogether, and on which general assumptions, physical invariants, or acoustical properties it could rely—all this is irreversibly open to question. Every composer who seeks to reinstall tonality under these circumstances has to confront the restricted normativity of his ideas, however much they may strive for general acceptance.51 Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre is an example of drawing the most radical consequences from this situation, in that it employs several concepts of tonality in an entirely voluntaristic way, that is, according to particular argumentative needs. Once established, such willful disposal of a formerly normative force cannot be undone—one wonders, then, why an otherwise receptive critic like Leichtentritt did not notice the shattering power of Schoenberg’s approach.

Bibliography Böggemann, Markus. Gesichte und Geschichte: Arnold Schönbergs musikalischer Expressionismus zwischen avantgardistischer Kunstprogrammatik und Historismusproblem. Vienna: Lafite, 2007. Böggemann, Markus and Ralf Alexander Kohler. “Harmonielehre.” In Arnold Schönberg: Interpretationen seiner Werke, 2 vols., edited by Gerold W. Gruber, 2:420–36. Laaber: Laaber, 2002. Dahlhaus, Carl. Die Musiktheorie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert: Erster Teil: Grundzüge einer Systematik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984. — “Emanzipation der Dissonanz.” In Schönberg und andere: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Neuen Musik, 146–53. Mainz: Schott, 1978. Frisch, Walter. “Foreword to the 100th Anniversary Edition.” In Theory of Harmony, by Arnold Schoenberg, translated by Roy E. Carter, xv–xx. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Hilmar, Ernst, ed. Arnold Schönberg: Gedenkausstellung 1974. Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1974. Jacob, Andreas. Grundbegriffe der Musiktheorie Arnold Schönbergs. 2 vols. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005. Kapp, Reinhard. “Arnold Schönberg: Vier kurze historiographische Versuche mit altmodischen Begriffen.” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 53 (1998): 32–42. Leichtentritt, Hugo. Formenlehre. 3rd edition. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1927. 50 An extensive overview, summing up his own important research on this topic, is provided by Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Krise des Historismus—Krise der Wirklichkeit: Eine Problemgeschichte der Moderne,” in Krise des Historismus – Krise der Wirklichkeit: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur 1880–1932, ed. Otto Gerhard Oexle (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 11– 116. 51 Paul Hindemith’s Unterweisung im Tonsatz provides an especially revealing example. See Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen’s contribution in this volume.

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— “Arnold Schönberg’s ‘Harmonielehre,’” Signale für die musikalische Welt 70, no. 22 (1912): 732. Louis, Rudolf and Ludwig Thuille. Harmonielehre. 3rd edition. Stuttgart: Grüninger, 1909. Oexle, Otto Gerhard. “Krise des Historismus—Krise der Wirklichkeit: Eine Problemgeschichte der Moderne.” In Krise des Historismus—Krise der Wirklichkeit: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Litera­ tur 1880–1932, edited by Otto Gerhard Oexle, 11–116. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007. Richter, Ernst Friedrich. Lehrbuch der Harmonie. 17th edition. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1891. Schenker, Heinrich. Harmonielehre. Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1906. Schönberg, Arnold. Harmonielehre. Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1911. Schoenberg, Arnold. Theory of Harmony. 100th Anniversary Edition. Translated by Roy E. Carter. Foreword by Walter Frisch. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Stephan, Rudolf. “Ein Blick auf die Universal-Edition: Aus Anlaß von Alfred Schlees 80. Geburtstag.” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 36 (1981): 639–45. Stöhr, Richard. Praktischer Leitfaden der Harmonielehre. 2nd edition. Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1909. Wyss, Beat. Der Wille zur Kunst: Zur ästhetischen Mentalität der Moderne. Köln: Dumont, 1996.

Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre: Psychology and Comprehensibility Stephen Hinton Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre, ostensibly a textbook on tonal harmony, has been published in two separate English translations. The first, by Robert D. W. Adams, appeared in 1948; the second, by Roy E. Carter, in 1978. Both translators chose to render the title as Theory of Harmony, thereby begging a question: in what sense can Harmonielehre be called theory?1 Providing an answer to this question involves addressing another one, and vice versa. How does Schoenberg’s theory define tonal harmony and, more generally, tonality? Neither of the categories considered in these questions—neither “theory” nor “tonality”—goes without saying. Ubiquitous in musical scholarship, they have tended to engender controversy rather than consensus in the discourse surrounding Schoenberg’s musical thought, in part because of their ambiguous use by the composer himself. Invoking them, especially together, invites qualification. 1) How does Schoenberg define tonality? It scarcely needs mentioning that Schoenberg wrote the first edition of his treatise in 1910, precisely at the time when, as the history books tell us and as is often remarked, his own music had made a decisive turn away from tonality toward socalled atonality.2 Why the qualifying “so-called?” Schoenberg, for one, emphatically rejected the term “atonality” being applied to his music, and he made his reasons quite clear on a number of occasions. He considered it a pejorative, arguing against defining music negatively and suggesting that all music may be considered “tonal” insofar it is comprised of tones. Discounting the expression atonal music’ as “extremely unfortunate” in a polemic against Josef Matthias Hauer, he drew 1 Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony – Harmonielehre, trans. Robert D. W. Adams (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948); Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Both translations are based on the third edition of Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre, which was published by Universal-Edition of Vienna in 1922. As discussed below, Adams’s text is, in fact, only a partial translation and omits. “[m]uch philosophical, polemic material.” 2 In their entry on “Harmonielehre” in Arnold Schönberg, Interpretationen seiner Werke 2:420– 36, ed. Gerold W. Gruber (Laaber: Laaber, 2002), Markus Böggemann and Ralf Alexander Kohler include a section entitled “Die Harmonie ist ein Lehrbuch der tonalen Harmonik,” in which they describe the reception of Schoenberg’s theoretical ideas in terms of traditional versus modernist, more unconventional aspects.

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an analogy with calling flying “the art of not falling” or swimming “the art of not drowning.”3 The expression “atonal” is “wrong,” he stated, because 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 on the tonal, which has to exist between any two tones if they are to form a progression that is at all logical and comprehensible; an opposite, “atonal,” among tones can no more exist than can an opposite “aspectral” or “acomplementary,” among colours and progressions of colours.4

His theoretical efforts were directed among other things at asserting and, where possible, establishing the basis of logical and comprehensible tone relations. What he considered logical and comprehensible, however, and how he sought to establish these qualities remains to be seen. On the other hand, insofar as he generally defined “tonality” as “the relationship of all occurrences within a piece of melody and especially harmony to a single fundamental tone or fundamental chord, the tonic,” it follows that the absence of such relations, or put cognitively: the absence of the ability or the willingness to acknowledge such relations, might justify the use of the negative concept “atonal.”5 It is tempting therefore to conclude that Schoenberg temporarily ignored his own basic definition of tonality as the relationship of tones such that they are perceivable in relation to a root in order to make his polemical point about the absurdity of the adjective “atonal.” More appropriate is to consider whether, and if so on what basis and to what extent, tonal theory can still be applied in the analysis of a repertory commonly classified as “atonal.” That, surely, lies at the basis of Ethan Haimo’s critique of Allen Forte’s work, which in turn occasioned a number of responses from pupils of Forte.6 It is also worth mentioning here that the word 3 Arnold Schönberg, “Hauers Theorien” (9 November 1923), published in Andreas Jacob, Grundbegriffe der Musiktheorie Arnold Schönbergs (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005), 2:802. “Vor allem finde ich den Ausdruck ‘atonale’ Musik höchst unglücklich. Wenn einer das Fliegen die ‘Nichtherunterfallkunst’ nannte, oder das Schwimmen die ‘Nichtuntergehekunst,’ so gienge er ebenso vor.” Translated into English as “Hauer’s Theories” in Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 210. 4 Ibid. “Dass mit Tönen nur tonales, tongemässes hergestellt werden kann. Dass es mindestens diese auf tonalem beruhende Ton-Verbindung sein muss [,] die zwischen je zwei Tönen vorhanden sein muss, wenn sie überhaupt eine logisch-fassliche Folge bilden sollen. Dass es einen Gegensatz atonal zwischen Tönen und Tonverhältnissen so wenig geben kann, wie einen Gegensatz aspektral oder akomplementär zwischen Farben und Farbenfolgen.” English translation in Schoenberg, “Hauer’s Theories,” 210–11. 5 This particular formulation comes from the subsection concerning “the function of tonality” from an unfinished project entitled “Probleme der Harmonie.” Dating from January 1927, the draft notes have been published in Jacob, Grundbegriffe, 2:781–97. “Tonalität ist die Kunst, die Töne in solcher Reihenfolge und solcher Art von Gleichzeitigkeit zu verbinden, daß die Beziehung aller Vorkommnisse auf einen Grundton wahrnehmbar wird.” The subsection occurs within a chapter called “Muß Tonalität aufrecht erhalten bleiben?” (Must Tonality be Kept Alive?), 788. 6 See Ethan T. Haimo, “Atonality, Analysis, and the Intentional Fallacy,” Music Theory Spectrum 18 (1996): 167–99. For responses to this article, see Edward D. Latham’s review in Music Theory Online 3, no. 2 (1997) and Haimo’s response “Linear Analysis – A Cure for Pitch-Class Set Analysis?: A Reply” in the same journal, 3, no. 3 (1997); and Jack Boss, “The Musical Idea

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“atonal” does not appear in the first edition of Harmonielehre, but only in the third edition, where Schoenberg adds a long footnote along the lines of his “aspectral” polemic against Hauer as well a brief comment rejecting the concept because, as he writes, “we simply do not yet know how to explain the tonality, or something corresponding to tonality, in modern music.”7 As is well known, he would eventually see that “something” as the twelve-tone method; and within just a few years of the third edition he would write of “row connections” as a “substitute” (Ersatz) for “key connections.”8 In this latter connection it should also be recalled that Schoenberg did not use the expression “the emancipation of dissonance” in the Harmonielehre either. It first appears in his writings in the mid-1920s in connection with his own “method of composition with twelve tones related only to one another.” In fact, there is a single passage in Harmonielehre where Schoenberg expressly invokes the concept of emancipation in relation to harmony. It is where he talks of “already emancipated dissonances,” specifically referring to “unprepared appoggiaturas” (freie Vorhalte), that is, to a well-known expressive device frequently employed in tonal contexts.9 This is significant in a number of respects. In general, Schoenberg as both theorist and teacher was at pains to stress continuity between the past and the present. The connection between his Harmonielehre and his own practice as a composer may not be obvious; his book deals chiefly with music of the so-called “common practice” era—another qualifying “so-called” because Walter Piston’s expression “common practice” is more appropriately thought of as “common theory,” in this case, the common theory with which Schoenberg begged to take issue. Harmonielehre addresses twentieth-century practice only in its closing chapter, and hardly touches on Schoenberg’s own practice at all, except for a fleeting reference at the very end to the monodrama Erwartung by way of describing the effect of chords with six or more notes. Despite its brevity, it is nonetheless worth dwelling on this last example in detail. In using chords with six or more notes “there will be a tendency,” Schoenberg writes, “to soften dissonances through wide spacing of the individual chord tones. That such is a softening is obvious. For the image of what the dissonances actually are, more remote overtones, is imitated in a satisfying way.”10 It’s not merely a and the Basic Image in an Atonal Song and Recitation of Arnold Schoenberg,” A Music-Theoretical Matrix: Essays in Honor of Allen Forte (Part I), ed. David Carson Berry, in Gamut: Online Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic 2 (2009): 223–66. 7 Arnold Schönberg, Harmonielehre, revised and expanded edition (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1922), 157. “ohne zu behaupten, daß die modernste Musik wirklich atonal ist: denn wir können in ihr vielleicht bloß die Tonalität oder etwas dementsprechendes noch nicht nachweisen.” 8 “Probleme der Harmonie,” 1927, section VI on “Methode der 12-Tonkomposition,” in Jacob, Grundbegriffe, 2:782. 9 Schönberg, Harmonielehre (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1911), 362. 10 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony (1978), 418; Schönberg, Harmonielehre (1911), 467. “Im allgemeinen wird bei der Verwendung von sechs- und mehrtönigen Akkorden die Neigung sich zeigen, die Dissonanzen durch weite Auseinanderlegung der einzelne[n] Akkordtöne zu mildern. Daß das eine Milderung ist, ist selbstverständlich. Denn das Bild dessen, was die Dissonanzen sind, entfernter liegende Obertöne, wird in glücklicher Weise nachgeahmt.”

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matter that he composes with so-called dissonances but of how he composes with them. Yet another “so-called”: in this case it is a qualification that captures a central ambiguity in Schoenberg’s theory, a theory which recognizes only gradual, not absolute differences, between consonance and dissonance.

Example 1: Schoenberg, Erwartung (m. 382–83) according to Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony (ex. 340, p. 418)

Example 2: Schoenberg, Erwartung (m. 382) according to Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony (ex. 341, p. 418)

To continue with the Erwartung example: “Eleven different tones appear in this chord,” Schoenberg observes. “But the gentle instrumentation and the fact that the dissonances [one might say “more remote consonances” in accord with his postulate about gradual differences] are widely spaced make this sound quite delicate.” He then suggests that the reader consider—or rather, hear—something else: “the individual groups of tones are so arranged that one could easily refer them to previously known forms.” He even provides an example: “in the first group I believe the ear expects the following resolution [which in this case would culminate in a diminished seventh chord]. That it does not can do no more damage here than when the resolution is omitted in simple harmonies.”11 He goes on to suggest other explanations of other combinations based, for example, on the addition of two chords 11 Schönberg, Harmonielehre (1911), 467. “In diesem Akkord kommen elf verschiedene Töne vor. Aber die zarte Instrumentation und, daß die Dissonanzen weit auseinander liegen, macht, daß dieser Klang sehr weich wirkt. Aber vielleicht noch eins. Die einzelnen Gruppen sind so gesetzt, daß man sie leicht auf frühere Formen zurückführen könnte.”

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that have a diminished seventh in common, which in turn becomes, with different bass tones, two ninth chords. In short, although Schoenberg’s compositional practice at the time is often described in terms of radical change, he himself is keen to stress continuity by referring to earlier “emancipated dissonances” and applying the premises of tonal theory to represent his own music. Invoking the technique of omission or ellipsis, as he does in the Erwartung example and as writers such as Walter Frisch and Bryan Simms have described, is a far cry, indeed, from the kind of contextualist structuralism suggested by set-theory nomenclature, which proceeds from the assumption of “atonality.”12 One could even go so far to say that by making an overt connection to earlier music, Schoenberg intends his own use of the adjective “emancipated” as an indirect polemic against the theoretical writings of Rudolf Louis, who was responsible for coining the phrase “the emancipation of dissonance” in the first place—some thirty-three years, in fact, before Schoenberg himself first used it in the 1926 essay “Gesinnung oder Erkenntnis?” In Schoenberg’s case, the source for the adjective “emanzipiert” was more likely Louis’s text Die deutsche Musik der Gegenwart from 1909, which Schoenberg owned.13 The central point here is this: the so-called emancipation of dissonance has a very different significance for Schoenberg in 1910 from 1926. Whereas the object of his reference in the Harmonielehre is consistent with Louis’s historical explanation, even if his value judgment is not, the significance of the phrase “Emanzipation der Dissonanz” for Schoenberg in 1926 is utterly different. Even in 1910 there were at least two notable differences. Like Schoen­berg, Louis may have acknowledged the tradition of unprepared dissonances (specifically citing Monteverdi as the originator); unlike Schoenberg, however, Louis drew attention to the dramatic and programmatic basis of that historical development, a factor entirely missing in Schoenberg’s account. Moreover, in coining the phrase “emancipation of dissonance,” Louis was sounding a note of alarm in the face of what he perceived as unchecked artistic anarchy, the “uncontainable movement,” as he described it, toward complete disregard of the rules of conventional 12 See Walter Frisch, The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893–1908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993): 92–98; Bryan R. Simms, The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg 1908–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). With reference to Frisch’s work, Simms observes that this “elliptical treatment is highly characteristic of Erwartung.” (24). 13 Rudolf Louis, Der Widerspruch in der Musik: Bausteine zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst auf realdialektischer Grundlage (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1893), 50 and 80–81; quoted in Werner Breig, “Das Schicksalskunde-Motiv im Ring des Nibelungen,” in Das Drama Richard Wagners als musikalisches Kunstwerk, ed. Carl Dahlhaus, Studien zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhundert 23 (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1970), 232; see also Ludwig Holtmeier, “Die Erfindung der romantischen Harmonik: Ernst Kurth und Georg Capellen,” in Zwischen Komposition und Hermeneutik: Festschrift für Hartmut Fladt, ed. Ariane Jeßulat, Andreas Ickstadt and Martin Ullrich, 114–28 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 122; and Robert Falck, “Emancipation of Dissonance,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 6 (1982): 106–7, which cites Louis’s book Die deutsche Musik der Gegenwart (Munich: Georg Müller, 1909). Schoenberg first used the phrase “the emancipation of dissonance” in “Gesinnung oder Erkenntnis,” in 25 Jahre Neue Musik: Jahrbuch 1926 der Universal-Edition (Vienna: UniversalEdition, 1926), 21–30; trans. Leo Black as “Opinion or Insight” in Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 258–64.

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theory, stressing however that these are merely rules, not laws, which he likened to shifts in approaches to dramaturgy.14 “Preparation, dissonance, resolution—exposition, conflict, catastrophe—these are all things,” Louis observed, “that recent dramaturgy has flouted, in a way as bold as it is justified, just as modern music has flouted the analogous rules of harmony.”15 Schoenberg, by way of extreme contrast, would embrace the “emancipation of dissonance” as a historical law leading to the formulation of his twelve-tone method—the basis, he claimed, of logical and comprehensible relations among tones. That was, as mentioned, in the mid-1920s, shortly after he issued the revised and expanded edition of his Harmonielehre, the third edition of 1922. (The second edition of 1919 was essentially a reprint of the first.) But his notion of logic and comprehensibility—that is, the basis on which he sought to establish and demonstrate relations among tones, whether or not the resulting music should be called tonal or atonal—had evolved considerably in the interim. Some of this evolution is reflected in the revised edition, some not. The text remains a curious hybrid of earlier and later Schoenberg. The revision did not amount to a complete update. 2) In what sense can Harmonielehre be called theory? Preceding the discussion of Erwartung in Harmonielehre, in a passage retained in the revision, Schoenberg had made an appeal to “feeling” as the ultimate authority. In composing I make decisions only according to feeling, according to the feeling for form. This tells me what I must write; everything else is excluded. Every chord I write down corresponds to a necessity or compulsion (Zwang), a necessity of the need to express myself; perhaps, however, also to the necessity of an inexorable but unconscious logic in the harmonic design. I am firmly convinced that logic is present here, too.16

14 Louis, Der Widerspruch in der Musik, 55. “Als aber Monteverde [sic.] zuerst den Dominantseptakkord frei eintreten ließ, da begann jene nun nicht mehr zu hemmende Bewegung, welche die Harmonik der Neuzeit schuf, deren Wesen wir in dem Streben nach ‘Emancipation der Dissonanz’ erkennen zu müssen glauben, und welche wie nichts Anderes dazu beigetragen hat, die Alleinherrschaft des Schönen in der Musik zu stürzen.” 15 Ibid, 83. “Vorbereitung, Dissonanz, Auflösung—Exposition, Konflikt, Katastrophe:—es ist ein ganzes Drama, das sich in jeder Anwendung einer Dissonanz abspielt, und wenn man das Gleichnis weiter ausführen wollte, könnte man die regelrechte Vorbereitung der Dissonanz mit der unerlässlichen ‘Schuld’ des Helden in der alten Dramaturgie, die richtige Auflösung mit der ‘poetischen Gerechtigkeit’ in Parallel bringen, alles Dinge, über welche die neuere Dramatik sich ebenso kühn als berechtigt hinweggesetzt hat, gerade wie die moderne Musik über die analogen Regeln der Harmonielehre.” 16 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony (1978), 417; Schönberg, Harmonielehre (1911), 466. “Ich entscheide beim Komponieren nur durch das Gefühl, durch das Forgefühl. Dies sagt mir, was ich schreiben muß, alles andere ist ausgeschlossen. Jeder Akkord, den ich hinsetze, entspricht einem Zwang; einem Zwang meines Ausdrucksbedürfnisses, vielleicht aber auch dem Zwang einer unerbittlichen, aber unbewußten Logik in der harmonischen Konstruktion. Ich habe die feste Überzeugung, daß sie auch hier vorhanden ist; mindestens in dem Ausmaß, wie in den früher bebauten Gebieten der Harmonie.”

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Carl Dahlhaus uses this exact same quotation as the basis for his far-reaching attempt to answer the question “What is ‘History of Music Theory’?”—not so much to provide a neat and simple answer to his interrogative title, however, as to introduce competing theoretical traditions that are at work in Schoenberg’s text. Despite the composer’s appeal to the basis of musical relations in the overtone series— hence the relativizing definition of dissonance as remote consonance—Dahlhaus claims that Schoenberg’s theory-concept is primarily “operational,” not “ontological,” that is, practically oriented toward its intended pedagogical function. But it is not exclusively so, as reflected in Schoenberg’s invocation of the seemingly paradoxical notion of “unconscious logic.”17 The declared pragmatic ambition, with which Schoenberg introduces his harmony treatise at the outset—the ambition, that is, to replace aesthetics with handicraft—is not consistently realized. Or to put the matter in the language of philosophy: the epistemological premises underpinning Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre are fraught with tensions and contradictions, which Dahlhaus sees as characteristic for the epoch in question. One could also say that these tensions and contradictions only appear as such when evaluated from a particular vantage point, from one epistemological perspective rather than another. There is a sense, in other words, in which Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre is incompatible with concepts of music theory as commonly understood. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in electing to render the book’s title as Theory of Harmony Carter issued his own caveat or qualification. Carter’s translation was not the first translation of Harmonielehre, as mentioned, but it was the first complete one. For his earlier, incomplete translation Robert D. W. Adams relied on an author-approved authority for his cuts: Erwin Stein’s Praktischer Leitfaden zu Schönbergs Harmonielehre, a publication issued around the same time as the third edition and intended to serve, as the title indicates, as a practical guide to Schoenberg’s treatise more along the lines of a conventional theory textbook. Stein’s 48-page guide consists of a two-page index followed by a longer section containing brief descriptions of the selected examples to be studied from the original edition of the Harmonielehre combined with a concordance for the examples.18 17 Carl Dahlhaus, “Was heißt ‘Geschichte der Musiktheorie’?” in Ideen zu einer Geschichte der Musiktheorie, Geschichte der Musiktheorie 1, ed. Frieder Zaminer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), 8–39. Dieter Rexroth uses the same passage at the beginning of the concluding section of his dissertation Arnold Schönberg als Theoretiker der tonalen Harmonik (Inaug. Diss., Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 1971), arguing that Schoenberg’s treatise should be read as “a document of crisis” (ein Dokument der Krise) (431). Schoenberg, Rexroth concludes, understands theory as an “obligation” (Verpflichtung), born of a search for insight that contains both “the avowal and admission” (das Bekenntnis und Eingeständnis) that “in the crisis-ridden situation at the beginning of the twentieth century, the belief in the artistic power of vision, inspiration and feeling for form do not yet provide the certainty that artistic-creative activity is necessary and true” (daß in der krisenhaften Situation zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts der Glaube an die künstlerische Kraft der Vision, des Einfalls und des Formgefühls noch nicht die Gewißheit gibt, daß das künstlerisch-schöpferische Tun notwendig und wahrhaftig ist). (448). 18 Erwin Stein, Praktischer Leitfaden zu Schönbergs Harmonielehre: Ein Hilfsbuch für Lehrer und Schüler (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1923).

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There is also a brief foreword by Stein, prefaced by a lengthy quotation from Schoenberg, in which the composer-theorist voices his approval of the project, which he says was “encouraged” (angeregt) by him. Adams does not include Stein’s foreword, but instead translates the one that Schoenberg wrote for the 1911 edition. Otherwise, as reflected in his own index, Adams’s translation follows Stein’s Leitfaden to the letter. The subtitle of the Leitfaden defined the purpose of Adams’s translation quite clearly: A Handbook for Teachers and Pupils. “Much philosophical, polemic material has been omitted,” he notes in his Translator’s Preface, “but the essentials—explanations, directions, examples—have been included.”19 This is not strictly true, however. The text ends with the chapter on fourth chords, and in omitting the final chapter on the “Aesthetic Evaluation of Chords with Six or More Tones,” it also removes the examples from Webern, Schreker, Bartók, and of course Schoenberg himself. Carter finds the title Theory of Harmony even less acceptable in Adams’s case than in his own. The earlier translation, he observes, had “omitted […] all of Schoen­ berg’s theoretical commentary.”20 His own translation “grew out of the conviction that the abundance of Schoenberg’s theorizing, speculation, and polemics is no less ‘essential’ than the purely technical material.” (xv) Indeed, Schoenberg addresses his objection to traditional “theorists” in his very first chapter, called “Theory or System of Presentation,” also omitted from Stein’s Leitfaden. In a lengthy footnote, somewhat going against Schoenberg’s gist, Carter suggests that “Harmony […] would perhaps be the most accurate translation of Schoenberg’s title; but since the book is far more theoretical than the usual textbook of harmony, and since it is commonly cited in English as Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony, it was deemed appropriate to retain the title for this new translation.” (xv) A later reviewer, Robert Wason, justified the decision as nonetheless appropriate, while taking Schoenberg’s caveat into account, because “the book is certainly about theory.”21 Carter also provides some illustrations of Schoenberg’s revisions, to which others, including Markus Böggemann and Christian Reineke, have contributed with their own discussions.22 There is one revision, in particular, that strikingly illustrates the shift in Schoenberg’s thinking between the first and third editions. Both Carter and Böggemann single it out, too. Writing in 1910 Schoenberg stated: It should not be said that order, clarity, and comprehensibility [N.B. the German here is Verständlichkeit, not Fasslichkeit] can impair beauty, but they are not a necessary factor without which there would be no beauty; they are merely an accidental, a circumstantial factor. For 19 Robert D. W. Adams, “Translator’s Preface,” in Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony (1948), xi. 20 Adams, “Translator’s Preface,” in Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony (1948), xv. 21 See Robert Wason, review of “Theory of Harmony,” by Arnold Schoenberg, trans. Roy E. Carter, Journal of Music Theory 25 (1981): 307–16. 22 Christian Reineke, Der musikalische Gedanke und die Fasslichkeit als zentrale musiktheoretische Begriffe Arnold Schönbergs, Kölner Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 10 (Kassel: Gustav Bosse, 2007); Markus Böggemann, Gesichte und Geschichte: Arnold Schönbergs musikalischer Expressionismus zwischen avantgardistischer Kunstprogrammatik und Historismusproblem (Vienna: Lafite, 2007).

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nature is also beautiful even when we do not understand her, and where she seems to us unordered.23

In 1922, he revised that to: “This is not to say that some future work of art may do without order, clarity, and comprehensibility, but that not merely what we conceive as such deserves these names. For nature is also beautiful … [etc.].”24 What was incidental or “accidental” becomes essential. The concluding remarks of the Harmonielehre following the Erwartung example and envisaging a hitherto unexplored logic of tone-color melodies seems particularly at odds with Schoenberg’s thinking of the 1920s. He was anticipating a “fantasy of the future” (Zukunftsphantasie), as he calls it, but which he had in fact already espied in the third of the Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, in which “progressions whose relations with one another work with a kind of logic entirely equivalent to that which satisfies us in the melody of pitches.”25 He also betrays an expressionist’s proximity to the world of Freud by stating his firm belief that the realization of this fantasy will “bring us closer to that which is projected to us in dreams.”26 How Schoenberg evolved as composer-theorist from his expressionist vision of Klangfarbenmelodie to his confident declaration of the emancipation of dissonance as his principal achievement in 1926 is a long, involved story, with further experimentation and creative frustrations along the way (his own “errors and detours,” as he would refer to them in the 1949 lecture “My Evolution”). An activity often marginalized or entirely overlooked in coming to terms with these shifting aesthetic convictions that can be seen as playing a pivotal role in the transition between the so-called atonal and the twelve-tone periods is that of the Society for Private Musical Performances. Without consideration of the work of the Society, which involved the instrumentation for small chamber groups of music by Schoenberg and his pupils and also by earlier composers, some of this transition might otherwise seem like something of a void in his creative output. Even for a revolutionary conservative such as Schoenberg, the vision of the emancipation of tone color and the need, even desire, to strip compositions of their original timbral parameter in reductions for small ensemble could seem incompatible. The emancipated Klangfarbe as structural essence yields to the more conventional notion of Klanggerüst, an essential tone structure. The musical idea is presented by other, vastly reduced means; in twelve-tone music it would become embodied in the interval classes of the row itself. Yet the incompatibility or anomaly is perhaps no greater than that 23 Schönberg, Harmonielehre (1911), 31. “Es soll nicht gesagt sein, daß Ordnung, Klarheit und Verständlichkeit die Schönheit beeinträchtigen können, aber sie sind nicht ein notwendiger Faktor, ohne den es keine Schönheit gäbe, sondern ein zufälliger.” 24 Schönberg, Harmonielehre (1922), 32. “Damit soll nicht gesagt sein, daß jemals Ordnung, Klarheit und Verständlichkeit einem Kunstwerk werden fehlen dürfen, wohl aber, daß nicht bloß, was wir als solche begreifen, diesen Namen verdient.” 25 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony (1975), 421; Schoenberg, Harmonielehre (1922), 471. “Folgen […] deren Beziehung untereinander mit einer Art Logik wirkt, ganz äquivalent jener Logik, die uns bei der Melodie der Klanghöhen genügt.” 26 Schönberg, Harmonielehre (1922), 471. “[…] daß [die Zukunftsphantasie der Klangfarbenmelodie] jenem uns näherbringen wird, was Träume uns vorspiegeln.”

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between Schoenberg’s compositional practice circa 1910 and his pedagogical preoccupations with traditional harmony and voice-leading rules codified in strict contrapuntal exercises. The challenge is to find the common denominator, a path of mediation, between Schoenberg’s compositional theory and practice. In each case, we are dealing with a significant shift in his work from the so-called “atonal” to the twelve-tone works that renders the concept of the emancipation of dissonance effectively unusable for both repertories without substantial qualification. The period during which Schoenberg established and led the activities of the Society for Private Musical Performances sees the emergence of the word Fasslichkeit (“comprehensibility”) in his theoretical writings, not in evidence before 1917. His more general reflections about comprehensibility are closely tied to his concern with demonstrating coherence or Zusammenhang above all in the motivic dimension of New Music. These efforts, in turn, inform the development of the twelve-tone method. As Reineke has observed: “The development and application of dodecaphonic construction had its basis in Schoenberg’s efforts to consolidate the comprehensibility of his non-tonal works, thereby continuing a process of artistic intentions that already existed in 1917.”27 How Schoenberg used the term would shift over time, having to do less with subjective cognitive expectations and increasingly with normative categories of compositional handicraft (thereby risking a lapse into the “bad aesthetics” that the composer had derided in the opening section of Harmonielehre and nonetheless not entirely managed to resist elsewhere in the treatise). Comprehensibility in this theoretically and analytically substantiated sense of Fasslichkeit supplants the earlier emphasis on psychology, whether in connection with the subjective disposition of the listener or with the unconscious logic of the inspired composer. Both of these categories—the logic of expression or “Expressionslogik,” as the philosopher Ernst Bloch called it, on the one hand, and the ideal of organic musical coherence, on the other—comprise two normative strands of Schoenberg’s thought that are no doubt responsible for complicating any account of his theory of tonality. Their significance for his evolution is at once aesthetic and historical. It also affects how we define the celebrated “emancipation of dissonance.” Taking into account this central tension in the evolution of Schoenberg’s theories of tonality—a tension reflected in the conservative-revolutionary dichotomy of numerous characterizations, such as Derrick Puffett’s description of Theory of Harmony as “half-rejected orthodoxy and half-suppressed radicalism” or in Hanns Eisler’s portrait of Schoenberg as a composer who “created a new material in order to make music within the consolidated richness of the classics,” a composer who is “the true conservative: he even created a revolution for himself so that he could be a reactionary”28—I shall conclude with a proposition whose aesthetic as well 27 Reineke, Der musikalische Gedanke, 102. 28 Derrick Puffett, review of Theory of Harmony, by Arnold Schoenberg, Music & Letters 60 (1979): 220–22; Hanns Eisler, “Arnold Schönberg, der musikalische Reaktionär,” in Arnold Schönberg zum 50. Geburtstage, 13. September 1924, Sonderheft der Musikblätter des Anbruch 6 (August–September 1924), 312–13. “Er schuf sich ein neues Material, um in der Fülle

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as historiographical implications I have explored in greater detail elsewhere.29 Insofar as Schoenberg’s so-called “atonal” period represents an expressive or even expressionist extension of conventional tonal practice, as his Harmonielehre of 1911 would have us believe, it can be likened aesthetically to a kind of second practice analogous to early seventeenth-century music, especially that of Monteverdi, whether or not Rudolf Louis’s dramatic or programmatic motivation applies. Conversely, the revisions of 1922 reflect a more overtly classically inclined composer, one who would soon seek to establish a new, contrapuntally based first practice. Bibliography Böggemann, Markus. Gesichte und Geschichte: Arnold Schönbergs musikalischer Expressionismus zwischen avantgardistischer Kunstprogrammatik und Historismusproblem. Vienna: Lafite, 2007. Böggemann, Markus and Ralf Alexander Kohler. “Harmonielehre.” In Arnold Schönberg: Interpretationen seiner Werke, 2 vols., edited by Gerold W. Gruber, 2:420–36. Laaber: Laaber, 2002. Boss, Jack. “The Musical Idea and the Basic Image in an Atonal Song and Recitation of Arnold Schoenberg.” In A Music-Theoretical Matrix: Essays in Honor of Allen Forte (Part I), edited by David Carson Berry. Gamut: Online Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic 2 (2009): 223–66. Breig, Werner. “Das Schicksalskunde-Motiv im Ring des Nibelungen.” In Das Drama Richard Wagners als musikalisches Kunstwerk, edited by Carl Dahlhaus, 223–33. Studien zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhundert 23. Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1970. Dahlhaus, Carl. “Was heißt ‘Geschichte der Musiktheorie’?” In Ideen zu einer Geschichte der Musiktheorie. Geschichte der Musiktheorie 1, edited by Frieder Zaminer, 8–39. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985. Eisler, Hanns. “Arnold Schönberg, der musikalische Reaktionär.” In Arnold Schönberg zum 50. Geburtstage, 13. September 1924. Sonderheft der Musikblätter des Anbruch 6 (August-September 1924), 312–13. Falck, Robert. “Emancipation of the Dissonance.” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 6 (1982): 106–11. Frisch, Walter. The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893–1908. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Haimo, Ethan T. “Atonality, Analysis, and the Intentional Fallacy.” Music Theory Spectrum 18 (1996): 167–99. — “Linear Analysis – A Cure for Pitch-Class Set Analysis?: A Reply.” Music Theory Online 3, no. 3 (1997). Hinton, Stephen. “The Emancipation of Dissonance: Schoenberg’s Two Practices of Composition.” Music & Letters 91 (2010): 568–79. Holtmeier, Ludwig. “Die Erfindung der romantischen Harmonik: Ernst Kurth und Georg Capellen.” In Zwischen Komposition und Hermeneutik: Festschrift für Hartmut Fladt, edited by Ariane Jeßulat, Andreas Ickstadt and Martin Ullrich, 114–28. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. Jacob, Andreas. Grundbegriffe der Musiktheorie Arnold Schönbergs. 2 vols. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005. und Geschlossenheit der Klassiker zu musizieren. Er ist der wahre Konservative: er schuf sich sogar eine Revolution, um Reaktionär sein zu können.” (313). 29 Stephen Hinton, “The Emancipation of Dissonance: Schoenberg’s Two Practices of Composition,” Music & Letters 91 (2010): 568–79.

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Latham, Edward D. Review of “Atonality, Analysis, and the Intentional Fallacy,” by Ethan T. Haimo. Music Theory Online 3, no. 2 (1997). Louis, Rudolf. Der Widerspruch in der Musik: Bausteine zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst auf realdia­ lektischer Grundlage. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1893. — Die deutsche Musik der Gegenwart. Munich: Georg Müller, 1909. Puffett, Derrick. Review of Theory of Harmony, by Arnold Schoenberg, translated by Roy E. Carter. Music & Letters 60 (1979): 220–22. Reineke, Christian. Der musikalische Gedanke und die Fasslichkeit als zentrale musiktheoretische Begriffe Arnold Schönbergs. Kölner Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 10. Kassel: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 2007. Rexroth, Dieter. Arnold Schönberg als Theoretiker der tonalen Harmonik. PhD diss., RheinischeFriedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 1971. Schönberg, Arnold. “Probleme der Harmonie.” January 1927. In Andreas Jacob, Grundbegriffe der Musiktheorie Arnold Schönbergs, 2:781–97. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005. — “Gesinnung oder Erkenntnis.” In 25 Jahre Neue Musik: Jahrbuch 1926 der Universal-Edition, 21–30. Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1926. Translated by Leo Black as “Opinion or Insight.” In Style and Idea, edited by Leonard Stein, 258–64. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). — “Hauers Theorien.” 9 November 1923. In Andreas Jacob, Grundbegriffe der Musiktheorie Arnold Schönbergs, 2:802–05: Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005. Translated by Leo Black as “Hauer’s Theories.” In Style and Idea, edited by Leonard Stein, 209–13. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). — Harmonielehre. Revised and expanded edition. Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1922. — Harmonielehre. Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1911. Schoenberg, Arnold. Theory of Harmony – Harmonielehre. Translated by Robert D. W. Adams. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. — Theory of Harmony. Translated by Roy E. Carter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Simms, Bryan R. The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg 1908–1923. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Stein, Erwin. Praktischer Leitfaden zu Schönbergs Harmonielehre: Ein Hilfsbuch für Lehrer und Schüler. Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1923. Wason, Robert W. Review of Theory of Harmony, by Arnold Schoenberg. Translated by Roy E. Carter. Journal of Music Theory 25 (1981): 307–16.

Constructive and Destructive Forces: . Ernst Kurth’s Concept of Tonality Felix Wörner Living in Switzerland at the fringe of the political, economic, and cultural upheavals which plagued most of Europe after the end of the First World War, the Austrianborn music theorist Ernst Kurth showed little public interest in the heated cultural clashes of early twentieth-century musical modernism. Yet in his seminal study Romantic Harmony and its Crisis in Wagner’s Tristan, Kurth offered a rare but significant assessment of contemporary perspectives on the future development of tonality: The question of the future—if all sub-processes of the dissolution of tonality will lead to ever new possibilities, or if the development will return to a larger strengthening of the tonality principle—is undoubtedly of great significance; yet it does not touch upon the historical processes of Romanticism itself. […] The question also illuminates the historical-psychological foundations of a dispute that is at this very moment extremely relevant. That this dispute will also not be resolved during the present time, but […] only through a development of at least a decade, if not more, must be clear to anyone who surveys the far-reaching implications of the inner split which was set off in this and many other ways by the high Romantic period.1

While Kurth never indulged in critiquing or theoretically investigating contemporary music production (which to his mind was characterized by a wide stylistic plurality or even confusion, as well as by pervasive experimentation and extreme contradictions), he interpreted these conflicts as the musical and spiritual heritage of the high-Romantic period. The given passage indicates that Kurth imagined his interpretations of Romantic musical language and its inherent tendencies to be useful in unearthing the roots of ongoing debates about contemporary music.2 Kurth’s 1

2

“Die Zukunftsfrage, ob alle die Teilprozesse der Tonalitätszersetzung zu immer weiteren Möglichkeiten hinausgehen, oder ob die Entwicklung wieder zu größerer Straffung des Tonalitätsprinzips zurückkehrt, ist zwar zweifellos von großer Tragweite, berührt aber nicht die historischen Vorgänge der Romantik selbst […]. Sie gibt auch Klarheit über die historisch-psychologischen Unterlagen des gerade gegenwärtig sehr aktuellen Streites. Daß diesen auch nicht die Gegenwart, sondern […] nur eine mindestens jahrzehntelange, wenn nicht längere Entwicklung entscheiden kann, muß jedem klar sein, der die große Tragweite der inneren Spaltung überblickt, die in dieser und vieler anderer Hinsicht die Hochromantik ausgelöst hat.” Kurth continues the statement: “Mit den breiten Ausstrahlungen ihrer Entwicklung ist es historisch bedingt, daß gegenwärtig eine Periode wirren, aber leidenschaftlichen Suchens, größter Gegensätze, wie verschiedenartigst tastender Neuanfänge herrscht; wer die einheitliche Linie in ihr sucht, muß sie in der Vielfältigkeit erkennen.” Ernst Kurth, Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners Tristan, 3rd ed. (Bern: Paul Haupt, 1920; Berlin: Max Hesse, 1923), 312–13. Citations are to the Max Hesse edition. If not otherwise indicated, all translations of Kurth’s texts are mine. I am grateful to Philip Rupprecht for his suggestions concerning the translations. Kurth explicitly denounced any attempts to apply principles laid out in his book on linear coun-

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particular approach and idiosyncratic prose style, marked by a less technical but highly metaphorical language, is closely related to the zeitgeist of his time. (In a private, more critical remark, his academic teacher and lifelong supporter Guido Adler characterized his literary style and presentation as “to border on the mystical”3). His terminology, metaphors, and potentially even his concepts were inspired by such popular writers as Arthur Schopenhauer, Henri Bergson, and Sigmund Freud, and proved to be evocative for the broader audience of the 1920s, a fact that further contributed to his reputation as music theorist. As a result, his books became very popular music theoretical texts, provoking enthusiastic acclaim as well as harsh polemics.4 Yet behind Kurth’s suggestive analytical narratives hides a well-conceived (albeit complex and subtle) methodological and theoretical framework. Using his concept of tonality as an example, in this essay I investigate the close relation between Kurth’s conception of music theory, his vision of appropriate scientific methodology, and the specific means he chose to represent musical-technical features in his analyses. With his research projects, Kurth intended to contribute to a new concept of music theory. Already in his first book, Die Voraussetzungen der theoretischen Harmonik und der tonalen Darstellungssysteme,5 Kurth laid out some critical observations on the state of contemporary music theory which proved programmatic for his later scholarly work. To give an example from one particular discipline of music theory, Kurth’s Voraussetzungen questions some foundations of Hugo Riemann’s work, particularly the validity of physicalism for harmonic theory. Riemann’s emphasis on the structure of chords and on harmonic progressions at the expense of their linear aspects (namely horizontal, contrapuntal lines) cannot, according to Kurth, be supported by any objective reasoning or by the results of reliable scientific research. More generally, Kurth claims that the inability of “tone psychology” (as a discipline) to provide “a logically unified and consistent transition from acoustics terpoint to contemporary music; cf. Ernst Kurth, Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts, 5th ed. (Bern: Max Drechsel, 1917; Bern: Krompholz, 1956), xiii. Citations are to the Krompholz edition. 3 Guido Adler to Ernst Kurth, Vienna, 10 September 1920. “You extend the language of the musicological literature and supply fruitful suggestions for the future. […] Some things seem to me to border on the mystical – probably intentionally so, since that will certainly not have escaped your sharp wit.” (“[…] Sie erweitern den Sprachschatz der mw. Literatur u. bringen fruchtbare Anregungen für die Zukunft. […] Manches erscheint mir als an der Grenze zum Mystischen stehend – wol beabsichtigt, denn Ihrem scharfen Verstand wird das wol nicht entgangen sein.”) Original at the Kurth Archive, Bern University, Department of Musicology. 4 Compare, for example, the detailed discussion of reviews and reactions after the publication of the Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts in Luitgard Schader, Ernst Kurths “Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts”: Ursprung und Wirkung eines musikpsychologischen Standardwerkes (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 109–86. 5 Ernst Kurth, Die Voraussetzungen der theoretischen Harmonik und der tonalen Darstellungssysteme (Bern: Max Drechsel, 1913). Second, unaltered edition with an epilogue by Carl Dahlhaus, Schriften zur Musik 14 (Munich: Katzbichler, 1973). English translation by Lee A. Rothfarb as Ernst Kurth’s The Requirements for a Theory of Harmony: An Annotated Translation with an Introductory Essay (Master’s thesis, Hartt School of Music, University of Hartford, 1971).

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to musical logic”6 as envisioned by Riemann7 repudiates the possibility of a music theory based solely on ideals of scientific methodology established in the natural, exact sciences; results of research in the fields of acoustics do not explain musical phenomena. Following this diagnosis, Kurth pleads for a different conception of music theory based on a distinction between the appearance (Erscheinungsform) of sound (Klang) and the underlying forces in music. He considers the former (i.e. the sound) as just a partial representation of music’s essence and describes the underlying forces—specified as force (Kraft) and as energy (Energie)—as the root and foundation of music.8 Accordingly, Kurth contends that these forces influence all musical activity (composition, performance, listening) and must therefore be taken into account for all parts of music theory.9 Indeed, one can describe the main objective of his theoretical project as a shift in perspective away from the appearance of music, the acoustical (physical) exterior, towards an investigation of subconscious forces, the psychological interior. This premise raises the question of how the existence and supposed impact of these forces can be appropriately conceptualized as the foundation of music theory.10 Conventional music-theoretical approaches deny—or at least ignore—the existence of such unconscious roots which, according to Kurth, nonetheless intuitively penetrate all scientific concepts.11 Kurth’s major objective in virtually all his writings from the Voraussetzungen der theoretischen Harmonik (1913) up to Musikpsychologie (1931) is to shed light on the meaning, implications, and working mechanisms of what he considers to be the hidden roots of music.12 6

“der logisch einheitliche und geschlossene Übergang von der Akustik zur musikalischen Logik.” Kurth, Voraussetzungen, 6. 7 Riemann divides music theory in three areas: physics (acoustics), physiology, and psychology. In his 1882 essay “The Nature of Harmony,” he describes the “investigation of the nature of sounding bodies” as part of physics, the perception of tone sensations as “part of physiology,” and the “nature of tone representations and their combination” as part of psychology. Benjamin Steege, “’The Nature of Harmony’: A Translation and Commentary,” in The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories, ed. Edward Gollin and Alexander Rehding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 65. 8 Kurth uses “force” often in an unspecific way to characterize dynamic motion, whereas “energy” with its sub-categories “potential” and “kinetic” energy becomes a technical terms in his music theory. 9 “[Der psychische Spannungszustand] wirkt […] in die gesamte musikalische Theorie, die sich demnach als eine energetische Entwicklung darstellt und diese in Aufbau und Entfaltung der klanglichen Erscheinungen nur spiegelt; diese Auswirkung betrifft aber alle Zweige der Musiktheorie, die Harmonik ebensowie die Melodik und lineare Kontrapunktik und (in gewissem Umformungen) die Rhythmik, alle Formenkunst und schließlich über die Theorie hinaus die Ästhetik und Stilpsychologie […]” (emphasis by Kurth). Kurth, Romantische Harmonik, 5–6. 10 Kurth, Linearer Kontrapunkt, 62–67. 11 Kurth, Voraussetzungen, 6. 12 The closing paragraph of his study Romantic Harmony is paradigmatic: “Liegen die dringendsten Zukunftsaufgaben und die eigentlichsten Wurzeln der Musikpsychologie in der Erforschung dieser unterbewußten Spannungen, so ist der erste Weg hierzu ihre Erkenntnis in den musikalischen Erscheinungsformen und ihren vom Stil- und Zeitempfinden bedingten Wandlungen. Die Grundfragen vom Wesen jener psychologischen Vorgänge steigen unmittelbar hinter ihnen auf. Sie alle umkreisen das einfachste, aber größte Rätsel musikwissenschaftlicher Forschung: was ist Musik?” Kurth, Romantische Harmonik, 571.

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It has sometimes been assumed that Kurth’s critique of principles from the natural sciences (such as objectivity, universality, logical deductions, and systematic coherence) as paradigms for music theory produces an approach nurtured by arbitrary psychologism or even mysticism. In reality, such is not the case, and precedents for Kurth’s critique can be traced back as far as the late-nineteenth century. In his 1883 work Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften,13 the philosopher, historian, and psychologist Wilhelm Dilthey set the concept of “understanding” (verstehen) as the objective of historical against the concept of “explaining” (erklären) as the objective of the natural sciences. To achieve “understanding,” Dilthey advocated expanding established philological-hermeneutical methodologies to consider the “Einfühlung” and “Erleben” of any artwork. With this psychologically based method, Dilthey sought to establish a direct link between the contemporary and the historical subject. While the validity of this methodology was always under debate, Dilthey’s dichotomy between “understanding” and “explaining” as two equally valid procedures in their respective areas of science—the cultural and the natural— shaped the discussion within the theory and philosophy of science well into the twentieth century. As previous research has noted, Kurth’s music-theoretical concept absorbs various influences from a wide array of disciplines such as philosophy, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and intellectual history.14 Kurth’s rejection of the natural sciences’ ideal of “objective character” as a sufficient foundation for music theory leads him to the conclusion that it must be complemented or even guided by another principle which he terms “instinctive character.”15 As even a cursory reading of Kurth’s writings makes clear, his way of contrasting the “objective scientific” and the “instinctive” indicates a paradigmatic distinction and a shift towards a different understanding of the methodologies and objectives of science. For example, as Kurth explains in the preface of Romantic Harmony, his investigation of the principles of Romantic harmony seeks to distinguish between changing, historically bound characteristics of music and absolute principles.16 In order to achieve this objective, Kurth proposes “a close connection between theoretical

13 Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883). 14 An excellent overview of how Kurth’s theory relates to various intellectual and cultural currents of his time can be found in Lee A. Rothfarb, “Ernst Kurth in Historical Perspective: His Intellectual Inheritance and Music-theoretical Legacy,” in Gedenkschrift Ernst Kurth: ­Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 6/7 (1986/87): 23–42. Other important writings by the same author about Kurth’s music theory include his seminal study Ernst Kurth as Theorist and Analyst (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988) and the edited volume Ernst Kurth: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Lee A. Rothfarb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Expanding on Rothfarb, Brian Hyer emphasizes the possible importance of Sigmund Freud’s writings for Kurth in “Musical Hysteria,” 19th-Century Music 14 (1990): 90–94. 15 “unsere gesamte Musiktheorie neben einem objektiv wissenschaftlichen auch eines gewissen instinktiven Charakters nicht entbehren kann,” Kurth, Voraussetzungen, 6. 16 Kurth, Romantische Harmonik, xi.

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studies and style-psychological conditions,”17 by which he intends to reestablish the true relation of theory with “art” and “living art.”18 Kurth’s concept of music as “living art,” and the position of the “living art work” within his theory, is based on certain premises outlined in the opening chapters of Linearer Kontrapunkt and Romantische Harmonik. In a move away from the prevailing paradigm in Austro-German music theory, Kurth seeks (a) the historization of theoretical concepts, including the development of compositional styles and their relation to the zeitgeist;19 (b) a repositioning of the relationship between the mental (seelisch) and sensual (sinnlich) content of music;20 (c) the inclusion of the listener’s active participation in the understanding of music.21 I will briefly comment on the second point, the relation of the mental and sensual content of music. Within Kurth’s concept, the sensual part of music is nothing more than the limited appearance of much stronger and more complex inner (psychological) processes. This notion is tellingly captured with the aphorism “The sound (Klang) is dead; what lives within it, is the will to sound.”22 Consequently, music theory must direct its attention towards this essential feature of music: research has to focus on the motivating psychological forces23: Therefore, music is not a reflection of nature, but the experience of its mysterious energies themselves inside us; the feelings of tension within us are the characteristic sensing of similar living forces, as they reveal themselves at the very beginning of all physical and organic life.24

Kurth’s writings are peppered with terms such as experience (Erlebnis), energy (Energie), tension (Spannung), living forces (lebendige Kräfte), etc. This characteristic and symptomatic choice of language places Kurth in the proximity of the 17 “enge Verbindung theoretischer Studien mit stilpsychologischen Voraussetzungen,” Ibid., xi. 18 “lebendiger Kunst,” Kurth, Romantische Harmonik, xi. 19 “So ist auch die musikalische Technik selbst, als Ganzes genommen, Symbol [Kurth defines ‘Symbol’ as ‘sinnliche Ausdrucksbilder des Seelischen’], indem sie in allen ihren Wandlungen durch die verschiedenen Stilperioden mit ihrer gesamten Charakteristik und mit ihren vielfachen Einzelmerkmalen nur einen tieferen künstlerischen Gestaltungswillen zum Ausbruch hervordringen läßt. Der künstlerische Schaffensvorgang, dessen Vollkraft nur zersprengt in die Ausdrucksform hineinklingt, ist darum stets auch nur aus einem Zurückfühlen ins Unbewußte zu erfassen, aus einer Resonanzfähigkeit für die lebendigen Kräfte, die sich ans Licht des Kunstwerks verloren haben.” Ibid., 9. 20 Ibid., 5. 21 “Das musikalische Hören, das Erlebnis des Kunstwerks, ist gar nicht im wesentlichen eine Gehörs- noch auch von Grund auf harmonisch-logische Verstandestätigkeit, sondern der psychische Spannungsverlauf eines Mitströmens mit dem Urvorgang der Bewegungskräfte,” ibid., 8. For further comments on the nature of “musical listening” in this publication, cf. significant statements on p. 59, 69, 163, and 397. 22 “Der Klang ist tot; was in ihm lebt, ist der Wille zum Klang.” Ibid., 3 23 “Nicht die neuere Natur und aller Aufbau physikalisch vorgebildeter Grundformen ist Schöpfer der Harmonik, sondern die innere, psychische Natur” and “Die Umsetzung gewisser Spannungsvorgänge in Klänge zu beobachten, ist die Kernaufgabe aller Musiktheorie.” ibid., 2. 24 “Die Musik ist daher keine Spiegelung der Natur, sondern das Erlebnis ihrer rätselhaften Energien selbst in uns; die Spannungsempfindungen in uns sind das eigentümliche Verspüren von gleichartigen lebendigen Kräften, wie sie sich im Uranfang alles physischen und organischen Lebens offenbaren.” Ibid., 5.

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highly popular philosophical trend of “philosophy of life” (Lebensphilosophie). In 1920, the German philosopher Heinrich Rickert characterized Lebensphilosophie as a “fashion of our time,”25 explicitly commenting on and criticizing a certain mannerism in the movement’s handling of key words.26 Although ideas and terminology associated with Lebensphilosophie were pervasive, it is possible to highlight one particular contemporary philosopher from this movement as an influential source of inspiration for Kurth: Henri Bergson.27 It is particularly striking that the contrasting methodological approaches mentioned above (the “scientific-objective” and the “intuitive”) were already developed as part of Bergson’s metaphysical concept around 1900. In one of his most popular and internationally-discussed essays, “Introduction a la métaphysique” (1903),28 Bergson distinguished the conventional procedure of modern science which—based on the comparative study of single elements from known and new objects—tries to analyze and categorize these objects.29 While such a procedure produces a diversity of perspectives, it remains focused on the surface of objects. Furthermore, it is essentially an infinite process, since any additional perspective or category not only enlarges, but also changes the always incomplete image of the object. In order to compensate for these limitations, Bergson propagates the so-called intuitive method. As the following passage from “An Introduction to Metaphysics” demonstrates, the method of “intuition”— in contrast to analysis, the established scientific method—aims at the “real” and at the “essence” of the object: This means that analysis operates always on the immobile, whilst intuition places itself in mobility, or, what comes to the same thing, in duration. There lies the very distinct line of demarcation between intuition and analysis. The real, the experienced and the concrete are recognized by the fact that they are variability itself, the element by the fact that it is invariable. And the 25 Heinrich Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens: Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1920). 26 Ibid., 3–16. Rickert argues that Lebensphilosophie fails to define and to use those key words as philosophical terms, de facto denying Lebensphilosophie the status of a philosophical discipline. 27 Rickert names Bergson as the most authentic contemporary philosopher of the philosophy of life (Rickert, Philosophie des Lebens, 22). Kurth’s reception of Bergson’s philosophy is also discussed in Wolfgang Krebs, Innere Dynamik und Energetik in Ernst Kurths Musiktheorie, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 28 (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1998), 304–11. 28 “Introduction a la métaphysique,” first published in Revue de métaphysique et de morale in 1903; German trans. by R. Bendemann (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1909). 29 “L’analyse est l’opération qui ramène l’objet à des éléments déjà connus, c’est-à-dire communs à cet objet et à d’autres. Analyser consiste donc à exprimer une chose en fonction de ce qui n’est pas elle. Toute analyse est ainsi une traduction, un développement en symboles, une représentation prise de points de vue successifs d’où l’on note autant de contacts entre l’objet nouveau, qu’on étudie, et d’autres, que l’on croit déjà connaître. Dans son désir éternellement inassouvi d’embrasser l’objet autour duquel elle est condamnée à tourner, l’analyse multiplie sans fin les points de vue pour compléter la représentation toujours incomplète, varie sans relâche les symboles pour parfaire la traduction toujours imparfaite. Elle se continue donc à i’infini.” Bergson, Introduction, 1395–96. English trans. in Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme, ed. John Mullarkey and Michael Kolkman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 5.

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element is invariable by definition, being a diagram, a simplified reconstruction, often a mere symbol, in any case a motionless view of the moving reality.30

Since Bergson conceptualizes reality as variable and constantly moving, it can only be encompassed by a faculty capable of following this motion. Only intuition—a specific procedure of observation as well as a prerequisite for any development of terms and concepts—enables the human being to capture reality in duration. By contrast, analysis only reaches out to the invariable elements. It is the objective of true science—defined by the French philosopher as “metaphysics”—to grasp the essence of reality in its variability. Bergson summarizes the core of the relation between intuition and analysis with the following aphorism: “from intuition one can pass to analysis, but not from analysis to intuition.”31 Although Kurth only occasionally refers to Bergson’s writings explicitly,32 numerous passages in Kurth’s texts reveal striking similarities to Bergson’s concept of metaphysics as well as his concept of music theory as science. In addition to certain key terms such as “life,” “intuition,” etc. which were readily available as part of so-called Le Bergsonism, Kurth’s writings also exhibit more explicit influences of Bergson’s thought. Kurth’s description of the ideal principles of scientific research, for example, closely resembles Bergson’s concept of metaphysics: Therefore, even for scientific observation purposes, some appearances, such as a style of art, are not to be deduced merely from an analysis of component parts, since their combination effectively creates a new unity to be comprehended only intuitively. Therefore, for scientific research it is essential to use—in addition to philological analysis—intuition. Intuition is not a kind of artificial finery, but organically conditioned by the essence of the processes.33

Having established a conceptual link between Bergson’s philosophy and Kurth’s conception of music theory, I turn now to an investigation of Kurth’s concept of tonality, focusing on how “intuition” as methodology shapes Kurth’s view and assessment of the principles of tonality.

30 “C’est dire que l’analyse opère sur l’immobile, tandis que l’intuition se place dans la mobilité ou, ce qui revient au même, dans la durée. Là est la ligne de démarcation bien nette entre l’intuition et l’analyse. On reconnaît le réel, le vécu, le concret, à ce qu’il est la variabilité même. On reconnaît l’élément à ce qu’il est la variabilité même. On reconnaît l’élément à ce qu’il est invariable. Et il est invariable par définition, étant un schéma, une reconstruction simplifiée, souvent un simple symbole, en tout cas une vue prise sur la réalité qui s’écoule.” Bergson, Introduction, 1412–13. English translation in Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 28. 31 “[…] de l’intuition on peut passer à l’analyse, mais non pas de l’analyse à l’intuition.” Bergson, Introduction, 1413. English translation in Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 28. 32 For example, in Musikpsychologie, Kurth mentions Bergson’s early work Essais sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889). Kurth, Musikpsychologie (Berlin: Hesse, 1931), 46. 33 “Daher ist auch für das wissenschaftliche Schauen irgendeine Erscheinung, z. B. ein Kunststil, nicht bloß aus der Analyse der Bestandteile ableitbar; da mit deren Zusammenwirken die neue, nur intuitiv erfaßbare Einheit einsetzt, so liegt es im Wesen einer wissenschaftlichen Betrachtung, daß sie neben philologisch zerlegender Eingänglichkeit auch der Intuition bedarf, die somit nicht irgendeinen künstlerischen Aufputz darstellt, sondern organisch aus dem Wesen der Vorgänge bedingt ist.” Ibid., 31.

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In a brief recapitulation of the development of tonality, Kurth distinguishes three historically significant ways of expressing tonal motion. The oldest concept of key is based on the scale types of the church modes, and predominately linear in conception.34 After a long transitional period during the emergence of polyphony, the so-called “harmonic concept of key” (harmonischer Tonartsbegriff) finally prevailed in the common-practice period; it finds its clearest realization in the music of the high-classical composers. This harmonic concept of key, with its characteristic contrast between major and minor fundamental chords, embodies a more “natural capability of feeling”35 than the older scale types of the church modes. During the nineteenth century, the significance of chords as basic pillars of the expression of tonality is undermined and gradually replaced by a new concept of key characterized by tension (Spannung): throughout his study, Richard Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan serves as Kurth’s example par excellence for this kind of heightened dynamism. In a significant change from the classical period, Kurth envisions Romantic-period tonality as being expressed through a tension in the motion towards the tonic (this feature is encapsulated in Kurth’s concept of gravitation of will [Willensstrebung], or perception of tension [Spannungsempfinden]) rather than a clear manifestation or affirmation of the tonic itself. Historically, this shift does not happen suddenly, nor it is possible to grasp this change by focusing exclusively on technical aspects. Quite the contrary: Kurth emphasizes the importance of and directs our attention towards the psychological foundation of the Romantic style. In principle, the concept of tonality rests on the assumption that tonal chords are grouped in relation to a central chord, the tonic. Kurth provides the following explanation of the term “tonality” in Romantic Harmony: The concept of “tonality” means the unifying connection of sounds towards a central tonic and therefore, it entails two requirements: first, the existence of merging factors, second, the existence or at least the possibility of the “ideelle” reconstruction of a key center.36

At first glance, Kurth’s description of tonality is very similar to Hugo Riemann’s definition, as provided in his Musik-Lexikon.37 Such a basic outline of tonality demands specification, and Kurth immediately qualifies this universal explanation by scrutinizing the “merging factors.” He argues that integrative tendencies in music 34 Kurth, Romantische Harmonik, 327. 35 “natürliche Empfindungsweise,” Ibid., 327. 36 “Der Begriff ‘Tonalität’ bedeutet die einheitliche Beziehung der Klänge auf eine zentrale Tonika und enthält daher zweierlei Voraussetzungen; einmal das Vorhandensein zusammenschließender Momente, zweitens das Vorhandensein oder zumindest die ideelle Rekonstruierbarkeit eines tonartlichen Zentrums.” Ibid., 306. I translate Kurth’s terms “Tonartsempfinden” and “Tonartsbegriff” as “tonal notion.” 37 Riemann writes that tonality is “the particular meaning which the chords acquire through their relation to a central chord, the tonic” (eigentümliche Bedeutung, welche die Akkorde erhalten durch ihre Bezogenheit auf einen Hauptklang, die Tonika). Hugo Riemann, “Tonalität,” MusikLexikon 7 (1909): column 1422. Brian Hyer discusses just how limited and indeed problematic Riemann’s “definition” of tonality is in “What is a Function?” in The Oxford Handbook of NeoRiemannian Music Theories, ed. Edward Gollin and Alexander Rehding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 92–139. Kurth discusses Riemann’s definition in comparison with Sechter’s concept of tonality in Romantic Harmony, 308–9, n. 1.

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are neither exclusively based on physical (acoustical) principles, nor on what Riemann calls “intellectual activity.”38 Rather, Kurth’s basic argument rests on his conception of the all-pervasive principle of dynamism in music (based on psychology). How the feeling of tonality is created, and how tonality affects any individual work, is a complex phenomenon which cannot be adequately explained by systematic categorization. Although Kurth outlines some general principles of how tonality is—to various degrees—expressed in nineteenth-century music (with a particular focus on the supposed psychological underground), only a close reading of any individual composition can grasp the essence of each unique realization. Kurth explains the most elementary principle of how “merging factors” function through an investigation of the musical tone and the (dynamic) organization of the scale. Even the most basic element of music, a single tone, incorporates a tendency: “the resting tone has will to move.”39 As Kurth describes in Grundlagen, each melodic pitch in a musical context is perceived as part of a line, not as a singular entity;40 it is embedded in and well-integrated into a melodic (directed) motion.41 Coherence stems from “forces,” or inner “energy” towards motion; Kurth defines this force as “kinetic energy” (kinetische Energie)42. This principle is already at work at the conception of the most “basic form of the tonal organized melody,” the major scale.43 The motion (Bewegungszug) of the scale is primarily directed from the fundamental tone towards the upper octave, and only secondarily determined by further harmonic and tonal aspects. The major scale, as the most elementary stepwise and completed motion, is further determined by the simplest harmonic relations, the tonic chord (in C: C-E-G), and the two dominant chords (G: G-B-D; and F: F-A-C).44 The two dominants are highlighted by the formation of the two identically structured tetrachords (scale degree 1ˆ to 4ˆ, and scale degree 5ˆ to 8ˆ of the major scale): the fourth tone of the scale functions as a momentary goal, the fifth tone as the new starting point.45 Based on the inherent dynamic principle, Kurth defines the goal-directed motion towards the octave as the essence (Wesen) of the major scale, which is further enriched by the heightened tension of the leadingtone. Any additional melodic chromaticism serves to increase the feeling of kinetic energy. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss Kurth’s assessment and subsequent reasoning of the relation between major and minor triad, major and minor scale, the issue of dualism, his discussion of rhythm and motion, or other funda38 Kurth, Linearer Kontrapunkt, 47. Kurth opposes Riemann’s understanding of the intellectual unifying relation as a psychological principle. 39 “Der ruhende Ton ist Wille zur Bewegung,” Ibid., 30. 40 As Kurth describes most clearly in his music psychology, our perception of a complex of tones can be best explained according to the principles of Gestalt theory. Cf. Kurth, Musikpsychologie, 25–28. 41 “Das Melodische ist nicht eine Zusammenfassung von Tönen, sondern ein ursprünglicher Zusammenhang, aus dem sich Töne herauslösen.” Kurth, Linearer Kontrapunkt, 18. 42 Ibid., 9–12. 43 Ibid., 39–51. 44 Ibid., 39–40. 45 Ibid., 43.

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mental categories of his music theory such as “force” (Kraft), “space” (Raum), and “matter” (Materie), all of which are in individually and holistically essential for an adequate understanding of his broader conception. By extending the discussion of melodic motion and “kinetic energy” to sonorities and chord progressions, however, it is possible to capture what Kurth defines as his second energetic principle: “potential energy.” Between simultaneously sounding tones exists an attraction (Anziehung),46 a force of cohesion (Kohäsionskraft). This force of cohesion, which Kurth sees as stemming from the psychological realm, is the condition for integration or fusion of single tones into a chordal sonority, as well as the cause for their fusion into a unified structure. Even when fused into a complex sonority, single tones keep their kinetic energy (derived from the scale and the melodic motion), reverting the energy into a tension within each sonority. Kurth defines this tension as “potential energy” (potentielle Energie).47 In fact, Kurth argues that the vertical and the horizontal, line and chord, must not be seen as independent entities, but as two intertwined forces. Furthermore, Kurth considers this force of cohesion as initiating a constant push towards the most stable sonority, the major triad. (Kurth determines the major triad as the fundamental consonant chord; the minor triad, also labeled as consonant, is defined as a derivation of the major triad).48 Related to the force of cohesion is the feeling for the fundamental tone (Grundtonempfindung): Kurth assumes that we perceive pitches as having a mass, and that we sense a gravitational force centering that mass around the fundamental tone. He considers the relation between chords to be a “play of forces” trying to accomplish a balance; therefore, the more stable consonance is a resolution of musical tension, in other words, the result of a dynamic process.49 Kurth’s concept of dynamic motion as providing connection between chords complements his theory of fundamental motion. Several aspects are combined in the progression I-IV and V-I: (1) the traditional role of the fundamental relation (Rameau, Sechter); (2) the tension-resolution based on the leading-tone progression; and (3) the possible heightened tension of a dominant-seventh chord (a chord which has, in Kurth’s terminology, a strong “gravitational” tension, a tension within a chord). Kurth ascribes all three aspects to the dynamic principle of energy, which he locates in the psychological realm, insisting that sensation cannot sufficiently encapsulate consonance-dissonance relation. The experience of consonance and/ or dissonance is rooted in the subconscious as a relation between tension and relaxation. Since tension and relaxation are not absolute but relative, their degree cannot be determined by abstract “theoretical” concepts, and must ultimately be

46 Kurth, Linearer Kontrapunkt, 62. 47 Kurth introduces the concept of “potential energy” in Kurth, Linearer Kontrapunkt, 68–96. 48 Ibid., 83–88. It might be added that although Kurth considers the major triad as the most stable consonant chord, he nonetheless sees a tension at work within this sonority. Kurth argues that it is only because we are so used to perceiving the major triad as consonant that the inherent tension of the sonority is hidden by its acoustical exterior. 49 Kurth, Linearer Kontrapunkt, 62–68.

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determined through the totality of the musical features within any individual composition. Kurth’s description of tonality as the “coherent relation of the sounds towards a central tonic”50 highlights just one of several factors in a complex set of interacting forces, a dynamic process which is constantly in flux. The challenge for music theory and for music analysis lies in the fact that the effect of tonality—the realization of tonal features in a composition—depends on this very interaction of various and often contrasting factors. In this context, Kurth introduces further categories which he describes as substantial features of the Romantic musical language. In particular, he focuses on the notions of “sound” (Klang)51 and “sound connection” (Klangverbindung) and their effects in expressing tonality, distinguishing three different levels of effects for sound in a musical context. First, its specific tonal function, conceptualized as the relation of a chord (Klang) to the central tonic. Second, the relation of a sound to the immediately preceding chord influences the perceptive effect on this (local) level. While “simple tonal music”52 strongly integrates this factor, nineteenth-century music tends to emphasize the effect of particular chord progressions. Third, the pure effect of a sound might be strongly influenced by its individual attraction, its “sonic appeal” (Klangreiz an sich).53 All three aspects are interrelated. Important for Kurth’s notion of tonality is the fact that so-called “absolute progression” (absolute Fortschreitung) and “absolute sonic appeal” (absoluter Klangreiz) necessarily create an isolating effect; thus, they potentially work against the integrative, structural principle of tonality. The penetration of these features into the unifying tonal principle is a general characteristic of Romantic music: it is a sign of the two contrasting forces at work, and described by Kurth as the “constructive” and “destructive” process.54 Over the course of his book Romantic Harmony, Kurth develops his interpretative readings and theoretical categories through discussions of individual musical passages (provided in short score). At this point, it should be clear that Kurth does not start his investigation with technical aspects of a composition; he even warns that such an approach inevitably misses the essential. True to his view that the essence of music lies beyond the physical sound and cannot be grasped by analyzing the elements of music (such as motives, thematic structure, harmony), he argues that active listening paves the way to the recognition of meaning in musical art. What is given through representation (Anschauung) only indicates the underlying forces; the immediate recognition of these forces becomes possible by the process of listening. In the methodological reflections interspersed throughout his writings, Kurth’s approach is consistent with what Bergson calls the “intuitive” method. The 50 Kurth, Romantische Harmonik, 306. 51 Ibid., 262. For an English translation of Kurth, Romantische Harmonik, 262–305, see partial translation in Ernst Kurth: Selected Writings, ed. Lee A. Rothfarb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 119–29. 52 Kurth, Romantische Harmonik, 263. 53 Ibid., 263. Kurth categorizes the first two aspects as “relative,” the third one as “absolute.” One might, of course, question the notion that “absolute sonic effect” exists. Cf. Ibid., 297–305. 54 Cf. Rothfarb, Ernst Kurth: Selected Writings, 119.

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complexities and ambiguities of sonorities (which are understood here as merely the diminished exterior of the dynamics of inner forces) shape the “living art.” For Kurth, theory must pursue a new approach in order to capture these complexities, which cannot be grasped partially, but only in their entirety. The interpretation starts with the individual art work, and through a discussion of its features the investigation establishes categories. These categories might be best compared with regulative ideas, helping us to understand certain features of the musical language. Since Kurth rejects the validity of just identifying and systematizing the elements in favor of understanding the underlying “forces” at work, interpretation can hardly be presented in a graphic or symbolic representation. Apart from some sparingly used Roman-numeral analysis, Kurth consistently avoids any form of “analytical” notation. Kurth’s interpretations seem to be best conveyed through language, a medium well-suited to his procedure of gradually expanding and enlarging his views on the features under discussion.55 This method might also serve a pedagogical function. Indeed, readers who patiently follow Kurth’s extended discussion of musical passages (often short ones) will not only receive an introduction to Kurth’s music theory, but may also experience a gradual shift in how they listen to these passages, and subsequently in how they listen to this particular musical style. The “intuitive” approach, avoiding categorization in favor of an often-metaphorical elucidation, shows how tonality works when conceived as a flexible, context-dependent, and psychologically-influenced feature. In addition, for Kurth, it is the methodology of style-psychology that helps open a path to an adequate reading of the artwork. Scattered through his writings, he elucidates this approach; two shortened passages will serve as closing examples, the first one commenting on the Romantic, and the second one on the definitions of expressionism and impressionism in music: (1) The basic psychological manifestations of Romanticism, which are based on a heightened conflict between the world of appearance and subconscious forces, set off inharmonic relations a polar development, at once a current which enforces an intensification and tightening of energetic forces, and a trend which pushes sound-sensuous feeling to greatest intensification. […] the kind of feeling for music changes, and with it the technique as a whole.56 (2) To declare the overcoming of harmonic tonality as the criteria for expressionistic or impressionistic character is insufficient, because the breaking away from tonality happens gradually and seamlessly, and also because technical aspects are never the only determining factor, but rather the kind of feeling for art. Technical criteria […] find a far more essential fulfillment in all those criteria of impressionistic harmony for which the technical traits are nothing but a

55 Cf., for example, his extended investigation into the beginning of Wagner’s Tristan where, by taking multiple perspectives, he slowly develops his reading of the music. 56 “Die psychologischen Grunderscheinungen der Romantik, die in erhöhtem Widerspiel von Erscheinungswelt und unterbewußten Kräften beruhen, lösen in der Harmonik den Vorgang einer polaren Entwicklung aus, gleichzeitig eine Strömung, die gegen intensivste Stärke und Anspannung aller energetischen Kräfte hintreibt und eine Strömung, die das klangsinnliche Empfinden in höchste Steigerungen treibt. […] die Art des Musikempfindens ändert sich, und damit die ganze Technik.” Kurth, Romantische Harmonik, 312.

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means of expression, namely the art-psychological direction of will, the principle of shading (Tönungsprinzip), and the specific kind of listening.57

In the introductory chapter on the psychological foundations of Romantic harmony, Kurth argues for a particularly strong inner unity between general intellectual and musical phenomena during the Romantic period. Consistent with the image of the Romantic period in vogue at the beginning of the twentieth century, Kurth articulates the spirit of Romanticism and its turn against the enlightened classical period by emphasizing the movement’s strong interests in the subconscious, the demonic element of the darker side, the fantastic, the magic, and the wonderful, as well as in the individual and the particular. These psychological implications of the Romantic spirit are reflected in technical aspects of the musical language, a language which strengthens “destructive” forces and is clearly directed against a characteristically rounded and well-balanced classical tonality. Kurth’s aim to understand music as a manifestation of forces and motion created by inner, psychological tensions must at least partly be understood as his response to contemporary music theory and an explicit attempt to reconcile (living) art and music theory. Music theory as a purely technical investigation focusing on “elements” certainly does not capture the essence of art, and therefore such an approach is bound to fail. According to Kurth, only by intuition can we apprehend psychological direction of will (psychologische Willensrichtung), shading of tones (Tönungsprinzip), and a specific way of listening (besondere Art des Hörens), all of which are features necessary for understanding the work as a whole. Equally, an adequate understanding of Romantic-style tonality (particularly of the individual realization of tonal principles within an art work), only becomes possible by taking these aspects into account. Reviewing Kurth’s Musikpsychologie—the author’s last major contribution to music theory—in 1933, Theodor W. Adorno characterized Kurth’s approach as a late fulfillment of the increased subjectification of music theory during the (long) nineteenth century.58 Kurth conceptualizes the object of music theory as having two interrelated parts: the outside, which materializes in physical sounds, and the inner world of forces, which—although determining the outside—is only incompletely expressed by these physical manifestations. Hence, tonality is not a principle based on natural laws, or a ready-made device on hand for composers of the commonpractice period to create coherence within a piece. Rather, tonality is expressed to various degrees by “merging factors,” which—although partially historically 57 “Die Setzung der Überwindung der harmonischen Tonalität im Satzstil als Kriterium für expressionistischen oder impressionistischen Charakter ist unzulänglich, da sich der Ausbruch aus der Tonalität selbst allmählich und unabgrenzbar vollzieht, dann aber weil technische Erscheinungen niemals allein maßgebend sind, sondern die Art des Kunstempfindens. Technische Merkmale […] finden ihre weitaus wesentlichere Ergänzung durch alle jene Krierien impressionistischer Harmonik, von welchen sich die technischen Züge selbst nur als Ausdrucksmittel herausbilden, die kunstpsychologische Willensrichtung, das Tönungsprinzip und die besondere Art des Hörens.” Ibid., 399. 58 Theodor W. Adorno, “Ernst Kurths ‘Musikpsychologie’” (1933), in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 19, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 350–51.

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determined—depend on a variety of factors such as the overall musical style and the plurality of shaping forces within any individual composition. Abstract terms and visual metaphors fall short in capturing these ever-changing and multilayered forces at work. Rather, following Dilthey’s psychological-hermeneutical methodology, Kurth emphasizes the importance of a “musical-kinetic empathy” (musikalisch-kinetische Einfühlung)59 for capturing and conceptualizing these essential inner forces. This approach becomes particularly valuable under the condition that tonality—conceived as a result of conflicting constructive and destructive forces— is artistically expressed in highly individual ways. While commentators during the first decades of the twentieth century might have been more typically inclined to ask if a composition is tonal (or atonal), Kurth implicitly questions the relevance of this categorization. Rather, music theory must pursue the problem of to what degree and through what means tonal features (however defined) are expressed within a composition or a musical style, and what these features reveal about the inner world being expressed through music. Presenting this challenge for music theory by foregrounding the subjective experience of the dynamics of music, Kurth’s notion of tonality is demonstrably indebted to such diverse philosophical concepts as Dilthey’s psychological hermeneutics, Le Bergsonism, and Gestalt theory. However, the dilemma of how to interpret music’s engagement with the inner world of the listening subject is not merely a distant historical quest, but is also relevant to contemporary art theory. Indeed, music’s ability to express desires through tonal motion and our ability to experience these desires is precisely what separates musical art from visual media such as paintings. As Karol Berger states in The Theory of Art: “While visual media allow us to grasp, represent, and explore an outer, visual world, music makes it possible for me to grasp, experience, and explore an inner world of desiring.”60 Kurth’s compelling argument for the importance of incorporating expression in the concepts of music theory speaks powerfully to this musical potential and reflects significantly on the merits of his scholarship. Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. “Ernst Kurths ‘Musikpsychologie.’” 1933. In Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 19, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 350–58. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. Berger, Karol. A Theory of Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Bergson, Henri. “Introduction de la Métaphysique.” 1903. Reprint in Bergson, Œuvres, 1392–1432. German translation by R. Bendemann as “Einführung in die Metaphysik.” Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1909. In English as An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by T. E. Hulme. Edited by John Mullarkey and Michael Kolkman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. — Œuvres. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883. Hyer, Brian. “Musical Hysteria.” 19th-Century Music 14 (1990): 84–94.

59 Kurth, Linearer Kontrapunkt, 216. 60 Karol Berger, A Theory of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 34.

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— “What is a Function?” in The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories, edited by Edward Gollin and Alexander Rehding, 92–139. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Krebs, Wolfgang. Innere Dynamik und Energetik in Ernst Kurths Musiktheorie. Frankfurter Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 28. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1998. Kurth, Ernst. Die Voraussetzungen der theoretischen Harmonik und der tonalen Darstellungssysteme. Bern: Max Drechsel, 1913. Second, unaltered edition with an epilogue by Carl Dahlhaus. Schriften zur Musik 14. München: Katzbichler, 1973. Translated by Lee A. Rothfarb as Ernst Kurth’s The Requirements for a Theory of Harmony: An Annotated Translation with an Introductory Essay. Master’s Thesis: University of Hartford, 1971. — Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts. 1917. 5th edition. Bern: Krompholz, 1956. — Musikpsychologie. Berlin: Hesse, 1931. — Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners Tristan. 1920. 3rd edition. Berlin: Max Hesse, 1923. — Ernst Kurth: Selected Writings. Edited by Lee A. Rothfarb. Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Rickert, Heinrich. Die Philosophie des Lebens. Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1920. Riemann, Hugo. Musik-Lexikon. 7th completely revised edition. Leipzig: Hesse, 1909. Rothfarb, Lee A. Ernst Kurth as Theorist and Analyst. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. — “Ernst Kurth in Historical Perspective: His Intellectual Inheritance and Music-theoretical Legacy.” In Gedenkschrift Ernst Kurth: Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 6/7 (1986/87): 23–42. Schader, Luitgard. Ernst Kurths ‘Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts’: Ursprung und Wirkung eines musikpsychologischen Standardwerkes. Metzler: Stuttgart and Weimar, 2001. Steege, Benjamin. “‘The Nature of Harmony’: A Translation and Commentary,” in The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories, edited by Edward Gollin and Alexander Rehding, 55–91. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Practices of Tonality

Defending Tonality: The Musical Thought . of Milhaud and Koechlin Marianne Wheeldon Introduction In the 1920s, a new lexicon of compositional language was introduced and discussed in French newspapers and music journals. The terms polytonality and atonality appeared frequently in debates on contemporary music, with writers considering, among other things, their relationship to and effect on tonality. While many articles appeared on the subject, those by Darius Milhaud and Charles Koechlin were among the most revealing in that they were written by composers who availed themselves of both polytonality and atonality, and were thus practitioners with a vested interest in the dissemination and acceptance of their music. More interesting still is the evolution of their thought as the musical landscape changed in the 1920s and 30s. This evolution was as much a product of the arrival of new artists and aesthetic tendencies on the French musical scene as a reflection of their changing compositional outlook. As Pierre Bourdieu has noted, each new entrant in a cultural field “determines a displacement of the whole structure and that, by the logic of action and reaction, leads to all sorts of changes in the position-takings of the occupants of the other positions.”1 This essay traces the various stances taken by Milhaud and Koechlin with regard to tonality, from its peripheral position in critical discourse in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, to its growing centrality in their aesthetic as Schoenberg’s stature rose and free atonality gave way to twelve-tone composition. Surveying their arguments reveals how they adapted the notion of tonality to the exigencies of the moment, its definition contingent on the cultural politics of French music in the 1920s and 30s. In doing so, I hope to show how concepts like tonality, polytonality, and atonality were in some sense inherently unstable, deriving much of their meaning from how they were set against one another in composers’ and critics’ discourse. Polytonality and Atonality versus Tonality In the years immediately following the First World War, polytonality was recognized to stand at the center of the new musical language of Les Six (Georges Auric,

1 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 58.

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Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre). In January 1920, Henri Collet was the first to publicize the connection: In sum, what is the musical aesthetic of Les Six? They take the complexities of polytonality as a point of departure in their search for simplicity. They make use of all prior developments. They are not unaware of the achievements of the last fifty years, from Wagner to Stravinsky, passing through Strauss and Schoenberg, Debussy and Ravel. But what constitutes a culmination for the latter is for Les Six only the original chaos from which it is necessary to draw the germinal idea and a simple expression.

Collet presents post-war polytonality as a simplification of pre-war harmonic experiments in the style, describing its progression from “enchanting vagueness” to its current “denuded state.”2 As François de Médicis conjectures, this particular interpretation of polytonality most likely came from Milhaud. In 1920 he was the only member of Les Six to have extensively experimented with polytonality and Collet’s description of a musical simplification closely describes Milhaud’s compositional path of the preceding five years.3 Collet’s article presented polytonality as a necessary antidote to pre-war musical excess and a salutary compositional style that clearly demarcated the musical language of Les Six from that of the recent past. Concomitant with this break from the past, was an embrace of the future. Here atonality figured as an equally important compositional resource. In May 1920, Les Six published the following statement: “Arnold Schönberg les 6 musiciens vous saluent.”4 Once again it seemed that this announcement had more relevance for Milhaud than the other members of Les Six. As a composer Milhaud dedicated his Fifth String Quartet to Schoenberg in 1920; as a pianist he performed The Book of the Hanging Gardens with Marya Freund in November 1921; and as a conductor he led the French premiere of Pierrot Lunaire in January 1922, and continued to perform this work in Paris and throughout Europe for several years. But as a group, the published statement of Les Six signaled their commitment to the musical future. As Marie-Claire Mussat notes: Schoenberg was a symbol for these young musicians who similarly rebelled and wanted to distance themselves from conventional language. […] Although they welcomed a means of eman2

3 4

Henri Collet, “Les six Français: Darius Milhaud, Louis Durey, Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc et Germaine Tailleferre,” Comœdia (23 January 1920). Reprinted in Jean Roy, Le Groupe des Six (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 201. “Quelle est en somme l’esthétique musicale des Six? Ils partent de la complexité polytonique pour trouver la simplicité. Ils se servent donc de toute l’évolution antérieure. Ils ne méconnaissent aucune des acquisitions des cinquante dernières années, depuis Wagner à Stravinski en passant par Strauss et Schönberg, Debussy et Ravel. Mais ce qui constitue pour ces derniers l’aboutissement n’est pour les Six que le chaos originel d’où il faut tirer l’idée une et l’expression simple.” Unless otherwise acknowledged, all translations are my own. François de Médicis, “Darius Milhaud and the Debate on Polytonality in the French Press of the 1920s,” Music & Letters 86 (2005): 588. Le Coq, no. 1 (May 1920). Le Coq appeared for four issues in 1920 (numbers 3 and 4 were renamed Le Coq Parisien). Each issue consisted of a single folded broadsheet covered with aphorisms, brief articles, and upcoming events. Founded by Jean Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet, other contributors included Les Six (individually and collectively), Erik Satie, Lucien Daudet, Paul Morand, Max Jacob, Marie Laurencin, and Tristan Tzara.

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cipation, an aesthetic of freedom, it did not mean that they adopted this language. […] Schoen­ berg confirmed their own endeavors, in the necessity, in the possibility of an alternative.5

With a repudiation of the past that involved polytonality and the liberating idea of atonality, little attention was given to tonality. When it was mentioned, it was usually in order to pronounce its death. As Paul Landormy wrote in 1921: “The great principle of tonality, which one had not yet dared to broach, which one had only extended as much as possible, is finally battered into pieces.” Landormy viewed the demise of tonality as the logical outcome of a process that had exhausted its resources, first undertaken by Wagner, continued by Debussy, and brought to its culmination by the post-war avant-garde: Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and “our young French musicians, at least those that one calls ‘Les Six.’”6 Given this interpretation, it is surprising to see tonality return a few years later, invoked as the underlying basis for polytonality. Milhaud’s articles of 1923—“Polytonalité et Atonalité” and “The Evolution of Modern Music in Paris and in Vienna”—present a different understanding of the relationship between polytonality, atonality, and tonality. Instead of considering polytonality and atonality as post-war reactions against pre-war extended tonality, Milhaud’s articles changed the configuration, with polytonality and tonality now united in their opposition to atonality. Polytonality and Tonality versus Atonality By the time Milhaud’s articles on polytonality appeared, they represented his personal position rather than that of Les Six, for by 1923 the other members of the group had turned away from both polytonality and atonality. Their most candid comments on the subject are to found in their correspondence. In August 1921, Tailleferre wrote to Poulenc: “I have taken your excellent advice and no longer compose polytonality.”7 On 7 July 1922, Poulenc declared: “Believe me, polytonality is a dead end that will go out of fashion within five years, unless it is the means of expression for some type of genius, like Darius. I will not speak of atonal5

Marie-Claire Mussat, “La réception de Schönberg en France avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale,” Revue de Musicologie 87 (2001): 179. “En somme, Schönberg est un symbole pour ces jeunes musiciens qui, eux aussi, ruent dans les brancards et veulent prendre leurs distances avec le langage conventionnel. […] Mais qu’ils saluent une démarche d’émancipation, une esthétique de la liberté, ne signifie pas qu’ils aient fait leur ce langage. […] Schönberg les confortait donc seulement dans leur propre recherche, dans la nécessité, dans la possibilité d’une alternative.” 6 Paul Landormy, “Le Déclin de l’Impressionisme,” La Revue Musicale 4 (February 1921): 112. “De curieux chercheurs, l’Autrichien Schönberg, le Russe Stravinski veulent fonder un ordre nouveaux, et nos jeunes musiciens français, tout au moins ceux qu’on appelle “les Six”, avancent en tâtonnant encore dans le chemin à peine ouvert dont la direction seule est par avance tracée. Le grand principe de la tonalité auquel on n’avait pas encore osé sérieusement toucher, dont on avait seulement élargi autant que possible les applications est enfin battu en brèche.” 7 Germaine Tailleferre to Francis Poulenc, August 1921, in Francis Poulenc, Correspondance, 1910–1963, ed. Myriam Chimènes (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 135. “Je suis tes bons conseils et je ne fais plus de polytonie.”

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ity. It’s shit.”8 And on 21 December 1922, Auric stated: “A master like Schoenberg, if I admire him, I cannot be unaware of the harm that he causes almost everywhere and it was not worth the effort to throw so many stones at Wagner in order to end up in an Austrian intoxication.”9 Surprisingly even Milhaud, once a champion of Schoenberg’s music, reversed his position: “Reworked Pierrot Lunaire, which we are performing this afternoon. Odious, no longer bearable, in horribly bad taste. It is polished s[hit].”10 Milhaud’s changing estimation of Schoenberg was mirrored by his changing views on the relationship between atonality and polytonality. Instead of regarding Schoenberg as a fellow pioneer in avant-garde composition and atonality as an ally to polytonality, Milhaud now reconfigured atonality and polytonality to be “two absolutely opposed currents.”11 He further distinguished them by referring to their ostensible national characteristics. According to Milhaud, the Viennese School, more broadly defined as Teutonic, was innately chromatic and its continued adherence to chromaticism led inevitably to the dissolution of tonality and the advent of atonality. In contrast, the French School, more broadly defined as Latin, was construed as innately tonal, with its continued faith in the triad leading inevitably to polytonality, where two or more tonalities appeared simultaneously. As Milhaud bluntly asserts: “Diatoni[ci]sm and Chromaticism are the two poles of musical expression. One can say that the Latins are diatonic and the Teutons chromatic.”12 By linking polytonality to tonality and Gallic sensibility, Milhaud both reaffirms a commitment to French tradition and at the same time a remove from atonality, which reflects his growing disenchantment with Schoenberg. Milhaud’s insistence that polytonality was tonal consequently led to a much broader definition of tonality. Using four measures from his Third Symphony for Small Orchestra as an example, Milhaud demonstrates how each instrumental line operates within a diatonic scale: flute in B-flat major, clarinet in F major, bassoon in E major, violin in C major, viola in B-flat major, and cello in D major (Ex. 1). Despite momentarily juxtaposing five keys, the overall result is tonal, Milhaud argues, because each melody is recognizably diatonic. With this definition, tonality 8 Poulenc to Paul Collaer, 7 July 1922, in Paul Collaer, Correspondance avec des amis musiciens, ed. Robert Wangermée (Liège: Mardaga, 1996), 103. “Croyez-moi, la polytonie est une impasse dont on sentira la caducité d’ici 5 ans, à moins que ce ne soit le moyen d’expression d’un type de génie, comme Darius. Je ne parle pas de l’atonalité: c’est de la merde.” Translated in de Médicis, “Milhaud and the Debate on Polytonality,” 588 n. 80. 9 Georges Auric to Paul Collaer, 21 December 1922, in Collaer, Correspondance, 119. “mais un maître comme Schönberg, si je l’admire, je ne puis cacher le mal qu’il commence de faire un peu partout et ce n’est vraiment pas la peine d’avoir jeté tant de pierres contre Wagner pour en arriver à l’intoxication autrichienne.” 10 Darius Milhaud to Paul Collaer, 29 December 1924, in Collaer, Correspondance, 196. “Retravaillé le Pierrot Lunaire que nous donnons cet après-midi. Odieux, plus supportable, d’un mauvais goût horrible. C’est de la m… en platine.” Translated in Barbara L. Kelly, Tradition and Style in the Works of Darius Milhaud 1912–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 15. 11 Darius Milhaud, “The Evolution of Modern Music in Paris and in Vienna,” The North American Review 35 (April 1923): 546. 12 Ibid., 551.

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has very little to do with perception and more to do with intention. Milhaud concedes this point when he states that some polytonal and atonal passages are indistinguishable: “most of the time, when considering the harmonic ensemble of these polytonal counterpoints of diatonic melodies, one obtains vertical aggregations of unanalyzable notes whose harmonic result is atonal.”13 Regardless of the end result, however, Milhaud insists that it is the nature of the melodic lines that determines whether a piece is polytonal or atonal: that is, polytonality has as its point of departure diatonic melodies; atonality, chromatic melodies. In his effort to conjoin polytonality with tonality Milhaud valorizes melody over harmony, going so far as to disregard the harmonic parameter of polytonality altogether.

Example 1: Darius Milhaud, Third Symphony for Small Orchestra (1921), mvt. 1, mm. 9–12

With polytonality thus redefined as French and tonal, it could now take its rightful place within a national musical tradition. Rather than representing an indictment of pre-war French music, Milhaud now casts polytonality as emerging naturally from it. In this rendering of recent French music history, polytonality arises from an evolution of musical thought, beginning with the harmonic bitonality of composers such as Stravinsky, Debussy, Roussel, Bartók, and Ravel; moving through the harmonic polytonality of Koechlin; and culminating with Milhaud’s own brand of con13 Darius Milhaud, “Polytonalité et Atonalité,” La Revue Musicale 4 (February 1923): 40. “Il est à remarquer que la plupart du temps, en envisageant l’ensemble harmonique de ces contrepoints polytonaux de mélodies diatoniques, on obtient verticalement des agrégations de notes inanalysables et dont le résultat harmonique est atonal.”

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trapuntal polytonality, as represented by his Third Symphony for Small Orchestra. Instead of rejecting the past, Milhaud now asserts that “there is no modern manifestation of musical thought, free as it may be, which is not the outcome of a solid tradition and which, at the same time, opens a new and logical path to the future.”14 Why did Milhaud go to such lengths to assert that polytonality was French, tonal, even traditional? Two possible motivations come to mind. This reconciliation with the past represented a new strategy of legitimation as Milhaud endeavored to defend his polytonal compositions against hostile audiences and critics. Concerts of his music were often received with boos, jeers, and demonstrations, and critics accused him of being merely a provocateur. In contrast, other members of Les Six were beginning to receive wider acceptance and approval by the mid 1920s. The success of Honegger’s Le Roi David (1921) and the positive reviews that Auric and Poulenc were beginning to receive from the mainstream musical press provided them with greater public recognition, access to larger, more prestigious venues, and the opportunities and benefits that accrued as a result. It is not at all surprising, then, that Milhaud felt the need to reformulate his professional position, to leave the margins, and present himself also as belonging to the musical mainstream. As Bourdieu notes, competition in the artistic field “orients the strategies which occupants of the different positions implement in their struggles to defend or improve their position.”15 The linchpin to Milhaud’s strategy for repositioning himself in the musical field was his redefinition of polytonality as tonal. Ideologically it affirmed a commitment to French tradition and a place for polytonality within that tradition; practically it offered him absolute compositional freedom, by changing the discourse surrounding his music without having to change the music itself. Simply by virtue of being French, Milhaud was a tonal composer and, by extension, part of a national tradition that led logically to polytonality. But another motivation also explains why Milhaud was so anxious to emphasize the French roots of polytonality. He may have been responding to accusations that had long been leveled against polytonality and, more recently, Les Six. De Médicis cites two articles that introduced anti-Germanic and anti-Semitic rhetoric to the debates on polytonality.16 As early as 1917, Vincent d’Indy defined polytonality as “two superimposed tonalities (style boche),” “boche” being a derogatory term for Germans prevalent during the First World War. D’Indy’s description of polytonality arose from an argument that described the avant-garde musical aesthetics of 1917 as merely a matter of external trappings (“vêtements”).17 As d’Indy’s comment above insinuates, polytonality appears doubly condemned—not only was it cast as superficial dressing but also an importation from Germany. Six years later, the same accusation reappeared, the term “boche” now directed against Les Six as the leading representatives of the French post-war avant-garde. In an article published 14 Milhaud, “The Evolution of Modern Music,” 545. 15 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 30. 16 De Médicis, “Milhaud and the Debate on Polytonality,” 585–86. 17 Vincent d’Indy, “Esthétique,” Le Courrier musical (15 January 1917): 25–26. Cited in Charles Koechlin, Écrits, vol. 1, Esthétique et langage musical, ed. Michel Duchesneau (Sprimont: Mardaga, 2006), 157–58.

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on 1 January 1923, Louis Vuillemin describes the composers as “long-haired, pathetic, and wearing spectacles ‘à la boche.’” He accuses them of being cosmopolitan dupes, importing all that bad international taste had produced into the heart of the capital. According to Vuillemin, their motivation was “to corrupt (gangrener) our organism” and to demonstrate to foreigners present in the concert hall “the collapse of post-war French taste.”18 In addition to reviving d’Indy’s use of the insult “boche,” Vuillemin compounds the injury by entitling his review “Concerts métèques.” As Barbara Kelly notes, métèque was “a pejorative term for ‘immigrant,’ but also, at that time, for ‘Jew.’”19 Since the concert in question was organized by Jean Wiéner, featuring Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire conducted by Milhaud, Vuillemin’s rhetoric moves beyond d’Indy’s anti-Germanic stance to censure specifically the Jewish participants in the concert. While the main target of Vuillemin’s attack was the concert organizer and pianist Jean Wiéner (as their subsequent exchange in the press makes clear), the insinuations of such music criticism were potentially far more devastating for Milhaud than the other members of Les Six. Vuillemin went beyond casting doubt on the “Frenchness” of certain avant-garde compositional procedures to cast doubt on the cultural legitimacy of Milhaud’s music. Milhaud’s response in 1923, and in his subsequent writings, was to continually stress the French nationality and heritage of his music. Here, issues of professional advancement and identity politics collide, as the latter clearly had significant ramifications for the former. Enlisting tonality, and thus recent French tradition, in his defense, Milhaud could counter the accusations made against polytonality and, more importantly, himself. Tonality versus Atonality and Polytonality Charles Koechlin’s stance on tonality, atonality, and polytonality differed from Milhaud’s due in large part to his unique position in the world of French music. In terms of age, he was a peer of Satie and Debussy, although his late start in music placed him in Fauré’s composition class alongside the next generation of Florent Schmitt, Jean Roger-Ducasse, and Maurice Ravel. His standing within the pre-war avant-garde solidified in 1909, when Ravel invited him to join the newly formed Société Musicale Independante, in which he remained active until its dissolution in 1935. During the war, he befriended the next generation of composers, becoming close friends with Milhaud in 1913 and, through Milhaud, the composition teacher of Tailleferre and Poulenc. In 1918, Koechlin was invited to join Les nouveaux jeunes, Satie’s first attempt to corral the composers of the post-war avant-garde. Although this group was short-lived, Koechlin maintained close ties with its successor 18 Louis Vuillemin, “Concerts métèques…” Le Courrier musical (1 January 1923), 4. “Il faut voir la figure de ces sires, chevelus, minables et pourvus de lunettes à la boche […] Leur effort a pour but, sans doute, de gangréner notre organisme: de démontrer aussi aux étrangers curieux, présents en nombre dans la salle, ‘l’affaissement du goût chez les Français d’après guerre!’” 19 Kelly, Tradition and Style in the Works of Darius Milhaud, 11. See also chapter 2 (27–44), which discusses Milhaud’s writings on the issue of his identity.

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Les Six and with Satie’s subsequent L’École d’Arcueil, whose composers were all Koechlin’s students. As a noted member of both the pre- and post-war avant-garde, Koechlin’s views on polytonality and atonality were never predicated on a rejection of the recent past, since that past was a defining part of his musical persona. Moreover, polytonality and atonality were not post-war phenomena for him: his own explorations of polytonality, for example, began in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1917, Koechlin self-identified in these terms: Fashion does not concern me. I look for the beautiful everywhere, avidly, without taking sides in the manner of presenting it. […] I do not deprive myself, on occasion, of superimposing two or three tonalities, and I am very interested in the atonal compositions of Monsieur Schoenberg. Finally, I readily admit that one can create new and enduring music with known chords; on the other hand, despite fashionable harmonies, it is possible to write banal and outdated works.20

Throughout most of the twenties, Koechlin retained this all-inclusive outlook, writing voluminously on topics that embraced both pre- and post-war composition. Tonality, modality, bitonality, polytonality, and atonality all featured in his textbooks and articles, each concept illustrated with numerous examples drawn from his own music. But by the late twenties and thirties, Koechlin’s view of the musical landscape narrowed considerably. Having remained in close contact with three generations of the avant-garde, Koechlin simply lost empathy with the next. Again, Bourdieu’s discussion of the dynamics of the cultural field may help to explain Koechlin’s changing relationship with his younger colleagues. Bourdieu observes that with each successive generation the entire structure of the cultural field “moves a step down the temporal hierarchy which is at the same time a social hierarchy; the avantgarde is separated by a generation from the consecrated avant-garde which is itself separated by another generation from the avant-garde that was already consecrated when it made its own entry into the field.”21 As Koechlin found his musical training becoming ever more distant and irrelevant, his writings increasingly recommended an extensive education in tonality. He identified a “crisis of apprenticeship” with the newest generation of young composers: The old tonal ground is sterile only to the inexperienced amateur, to lazy oafs who no longer know or want to cultivate it, or to the young musician entranced by atonal magic. […] Our epoch is not propitious for the most serious and disinterested studies, the only type to bear fruit! Too many young musicians have an obsession for immediate results […].22 20 Charles Koechlin, “Esthétique?” Le Courrier musical (15 February 1917): 79. Cited in Duchesneau, Charles Koechlin, 155. “Je cherche le beau partout, avidement, sans parti pris pour ou contre telle façon de la vêtir. […] Je ne me prive pas, à l’occasion, de superposer deux ou trois tonalités, et m’intéresse fort aux compositions atonales de M. Schoenberg. Enfin, j’accord volontiers qu’on peut réaliser de la musique, et durable, et nouvelle, avec des accords connus; comme aussi, d’autre part, malgré des harmonies à la mode on écrit parfois des œuvres banales et sujettes à vieillir.” This article was Koechlin’s response to d’Indy’s article “Esthétique,” cited in note 17. 21 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 60. 22 Charles Koechlin, “Tonal ou Atonal?” Le Ménestrel 15 (10 April 1936): 118. Cited in Duchesneau, Charles Koechlin, 444. “La vieille terre tonale n’est stérile qu’à l’amateur inexpéri-

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This passage comes from Koechlin’s strongest defense of tonality, his 1936 article “Tonal or Atonal?” This essay responded to a series of articles in the musical press between Francis Poulenc and Ernst Krenek, in which Poulenc defended the validity of tonality in contemporary composition, while Krenek denounced tonality and promoted atonality. What Koechlin objected to in this exchange was Krenek’s insistence that atonality was the only direction for contemporary composition, the only path of “intellectual honesty.” To choose otherwise, Krenek stated, represented “the easy life,” which in the spiritual domain he regarded as “ignoble.”23 Koechlin, who prided himself on the breadth of his compositional outlook, bristled at the notion of atonality representing the only avant-garde and twelve-tone composition— whose systematization he detested—as the music of the future. His response was to defend the continued vitality of tonal composition: “I would like to demonstrate that it is absolutely legitimate to not abandon, to not believe obsolete the old tonal conception…and that this tonality can lead us very far from the banal, to absolutely new thought.” He even goes so far as to state: “In reality, only the harmony of triads and seventh chords has created, continues to create masterworks.”24 Although Koechlin objected to the restrictions Krenek imposed on contemporary composition, his argument introduced artistic constraints of its own: That being said, I do not want to be at war with polytonality or atonality: but only to prevent them from becoming a monopoly—useless and moreover illusory—because music that is born spontaneously with the human voice is tonal. Atonality results from artifice, which is not to condemn it but to forbid it from condemning the old tonality.25

According to Koechlin, tonality was natural and atonality was artificial. One could not sing atonal or twelve-tone music spontaneously; on the contrary, it demanded a great deal of skill and rehearsal. Koechlin continued: “That is not to say that if wellwritten, atonality cannot use human voices, but it is necessary to coerce them, and menté, qu’aux paresseux maladroits qui ne savent plus et ne veulent plus la cultiver, ou bien encore, qu’au jeune musicien envoûté par la magie de l’atonal. […] J’accorde aussi que notre époque n’est guère propice aux études les plus sérieusement menées et les plus désintéressées, les seules portant leur fruit! Trop de jeunes musiciens ont la hantise de résultats immédiats […]” 23 Francis Poulenc, “Éloge de la banalité,” Présence (October 1935): 24–25; Ernst Krenek, “À propos de la Banalité,” Présence (December 1935): 34–36. Cited in Duchesneau, Charles Koechlin, 450–54. For more information on this debate, see Robert Orledge, “Poulenc and Koechlin: 58 Lessons and a Friendship,” in Francis Poulenc: Music, Art and Literature, ed. Sidney Buckland and Myriam Chimènes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 32–36. 24 Koechlin, “Tonal ou Atonal?” 117 and 118. Cited in Duchesneau, Charles Koechlin, 442 and 444. “Je voudrais montrer qu’il est absolument légitime de ne pas abandonner, de ne point croire désuète la vieille conception tonale … et que cette tonalité peut nous conduire très loin du banal, jusqu’à des pensées absolument nouvelles. […] En réalité, rien que l’harmonie des accords parfaits et des septièmes a permis, elle permettrait encore des chefs-d’œuvre.” 25 Koechlin, “Tonal ou Atonal?” 117–18. Cited in Duchesneau, Charles Koechlin, 445. “Ce disant, je ne veux nullement partir en guerre contre le polytonal ni l’atonal: mais seulement ne pas en faire un monopole—inutile et d’ailleurs illusoire—car la musique qui naît spontanément avec la voix humaine est tonale. L’atonal résulte d’un artifice, ce qui ne saurait le condamner, soit, mais lui interdit de condamner la vieille tonalité.”

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it not their true nature, nor that of the ear, however modern.”26 In this regard, his later views on tonality represent a complete reversal of his earlier definition. Compare for instance the preceding quote with a passage from his Traité de l’harmonie of 1930. There, by contrast, he claims that “the notion of tonality is not an ‘innate idea’ from the spirit, it is a result of habit, experience, and the conditions in which sounds are produced.”27 Thus between 1930 and 1936 Koechlin’s notion of tonality shifted radically from something that was learned and contingent, to something that was inborn. Tonality was now considered to be a “natural law,” one that could not be uprooted from the human sensibility: Present the most persuasive theories, create the most convincing “laboratory experiments,” starting with the incontestable successes of Wozzeck or Pierrot lunaire, you will never uproot the tonal sentiment from the deep musical instincts of the masses, the humble, the simple, the children.28

In this respect Koechlin goes further than Milhaud, who argued that tonality was innate for all French composers. Koechlin readily agreed that French composers had an instinctual predilection for tonal composition but, in reality, tonality was innate in all—musicians and non-musicians, French and non-French alike. By 1936, Koechlin’s understanding of the relationship between tonality, polytonality, and atonality differed from Milhaud’s in that he configured tonality standing alone in opposition to polytonality and atonality. But while the configuration may have been different, the evolving relationship between these terms appeared to have similar motivations. Just as Milhaud’s embrace of tonality can be seen to emerge from the interrelated issues of professional advancement and identity ­politics, so Koechlin’s defense of tonality may have had professional and political motivations. For example, his complaint of a “crisis of apprenticeship” among the latest generation of composers stemmed not only from his growing sense of musical alienation but perhaps also from the more mundane issues of professional selfinterest. Beginning in the early 1920s, Koechlin had invested heavily in his tonal education with the publication of multiple textbooks on harmony and counterpoint: Étude sur les notes de passage (Study on passing notes), 1922; Précis des règles du contrepoint, 1926; Traité de l’harmonie, three volumes, 1927–1930; Étude sur le chorale d’école, 1929; Étude sur l’écriture de la fugue d’école, 1934; Théorie de la musique, 1934; and Abrégé de la Théorie de la musique, 1935.29 Thus the 26 Koechlin, “Tonal ou Atonal?” Le Ménestrel 16 (17 April 1936): 126. Cited in Duchesneau, Charles Koechlin, 448. “Cela ne veut pas dire que, bien écrit, l’atonal ne puisse utiliser les voix humaines, mais il faut les y contraindre, et là n’est point leur nature véritable, ni celle de l’oreille, même moderne.” 27 Charles Koechlin, Traité de l’harmonie (Paris: Max Eschig, 1930), 2:250–51. “La notion de tonalité n’est pas une ‘idée innée’ de l’esprit, c’est un résultat de l’habitude, et de l’expérience, et des conditions dans lesquelles se produit le son.” 28 Koechlin, “Tonal ou Atonal?” 125. Cited in Duchesneau, Charles Koechlin, 448. “Exposez les plus persuasives des théories, faites les plus convaincantes des ‘expériences de laboratoire’ en partant d’incontestables réussites comme Woszeck ou Pierrot lunaire vous n’arracherez point, de l’instinct musical profond des masses, des humbles; des simples, des enfants, le sentiment tonal.” 29 For a description and complete list of Koechlin’s didactic works, see Robert Orledge, Charles

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dismissal of tonality, advocated by composers like Krenek, threatened not only a significant part of his identity as a composer but potentially a portion of his income as a pedagogue. In addition, evidence of Koechlin’s contemporaneous political engagement can be discerned in “Tonal or Atonal?” when he draws attention to “the masses, the humble, the simple, the children” in his defense of tonality. Recourse to the masses within a debate on the musical avant-garde may seem surprising but, at this point in his career, Koechlin’s interests were turning toward “music for the people.” A founding member of the Fédération Musicale Populaire, a cultural organization attached to the Popular Front, between 1935 and 1938 he published a series of articles on “Culture musicale de la nation” for the communist newspaper L’Humanité. In this context, Koechlin’s advocacy for tonality takes on a political guise. His reinterpretation of tonality as part of the “deep musical instinct of the masses” coincides with his growing involvement with the FMP and its mandate to democratize music.30 Thus Koechlin was unlikely to renounce tonality as it provided an important means to bridge the gap between France’s musical elite and the masses. Conclusion After embracing polytonality and atonality in the early 1920s, both Milhaud and Koechlin returned to tonality. Their articles show a progression in their logic: the discussion moves from Milhaud’s “Polytonality and Atonality,” where tonality played a vital but supporting role in the redefinition of polytonality, to Koechlin’s “Tonal or Atonal?” where tonality assumed the status of an equal counterpart to atonality. In each case, tonality was marshaled to support other arguments. On the one hand, Milhaud used it as a means to distance himself from Schoenberg’s atonality and to gain entry into a French musical tradition he had formerly eschewed. On the other hand, Koechlin used tonality to reinforce his position with respect to the latest generation of composers. As this essay has demonstrated, their arguments may have been motivated by reasons that were not entirely musical: issues of professional advancement, identity, and alienation entered into both Milhaud’s and Koechlin’s defense of tonality. As Milhaud matured as a composer, the strategy by which he legitimized his music involved linking it to tonality, which in turn entailed a shift from a repudiation of tradition to proclaiming a continuity with that tradition. This maneuver softened the rhetoric surrounding his music and gained him greater acceptance from critics and audiences. Koechlin’s musical views moved from ecumenicism to a more stringent definition of tonality. Unlike Milhaud, whose position-taking was a way of gaining an advantage in the musical field, Koechlin’s stance was more defensive, the Koechlin (1867–1950): His Life and Works (London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1989), 36–48 and 418. 30 For more on Koechlin’s involvement with the Fédération Musicale Populaire, see Christopher Moore, “Music in France and the Popular Front (1934–1938): Politics, Aesthetics and Reception” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2007), chapter 3.

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result of the musical field changing around him. In this regard, Koechlin’s evolving position reflected the narrowing margin of professional maneuver available to him, as he aged in both biological and artistic terms. With a forty-year difference between Koechlin and his youngest colleagues, he was pushed into the role of elder statesman, which had the effect of constraining his musical views. Although Milhaud and Koechlin returned to tonality for different reasons, both of their returns responded to the cultural politics of their time. And what this revealed above all was that tonality, polytonality, and atonality were relational terms. Their meaning in the French musical world of the 1920s and 30s derived not only from how they were defined with regard to one another, but also in how they were deployed in the various “position-takings” of composers, for whom the establishment of a distinct French musical identity was key to their professional success. Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Collaer, Paul. Correspondance avec des amis musiciens. Edited by Robert Wangermée. Liège: Mardaga, 1996. Collet, Henri. “Les six Français: Darius Milhaud, Louis Durey, Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc et Germaine Tailleferre.” Comœdia (23 January 1920). Reprint in Jean Roy, Le Groupe des Six, 198–203. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994. Indy, Vincent d’. “Esthétique.” Le Courrier musical (15 January 1917): 25–26. Reprint in Charles Koechlin, Écrits. Vol. 1, Esthétique et langage musical, edited by Michel Duchesneau, 157–58. Sprimont: Mardaga, 2006. Kelly, Barbara L. Tradition and Style in the Works of Darius Milhaud 1912–1939. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Koechlin, Charles. Écrits. Vol. 1, Esthétique et langage musical. Edited by Michel Duchesneau. Sprimont: Mardaga, 2006. — “Esthétique?” Le Courrier musical (15 February 1917): 79–80. Reprint in Charles Koechlin, Écrits. Vol. 1. Esthétique et langage musical, edited by Michel Duchesneau, 155–58. Sprimont: Mardaga, 2006. — “Tonal ou Atonal?” Le Ménestrel 15 (April 10, 1936): 117–19 and Le Ménestrel 16 (April 17, 1936): 125–27. Reprint in Charles Koechlin, Écrits. Vol. 1, Esthétique et langage musical, edited by Michel Duchesneau, 441–54. Sprimont: Mardaga, 2006. — Traité de l’harmonie. 3 vols. Paris: Max Eschig, 1930. Krenek, Ernst. “À propos de la ‘Banalité’.” Présence (December 1935): 34–36. Reprint in Charles Koechlin, Écrits. Vol. 1, Esthétique et langage musical, edited by Michel Duchesneau, 452–54. Sprimont: Mardaga, 2006. Landormy, Paul. “Le Déclin de l’Impressionisme.” La Revue Musicale 2, no. 4 (February 1921): 97–113. Médicis, François de. “Darius Milhaud and the Debate on Polytonality in the French Press of the 1920s.” Music & Letters 86 (2005): 573–91. Milhaud, Darius. “The Evolution of Modern Music in Paris and in Vienna.” The North American Review 217, no. 809 (April 1923): 544–54. — “Polytonalité et Atonalité.” La Revue Musicale 4, no. 4 (February 1923): 29–44. Moore, Christopher Lee. Music in France and the Popular Front (1934–1938): Politics, Aesthetics and Reception. PhD diss., McGill University, 2007.

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Mussat, Marie-Claire. “La réception de Schönberg en France avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.” Revue de Musicologie 87 (2001): 145–86. Orledge, Robert. “Poulenc and Koechlin: 58 lessons and a friendship.” In Francis Poulenc: Music, Art and Literature, edited by Sidney Buckland and Myriam Chimènes, 9–47. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. — Charles Koechlin (1867–1950): His Life and Works. London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1989. Poulenc, Francis. “Éloge de la banalité.” Présence (October 1935): 24–25. Reprint in Charles Koechlin, Écrits. Vol. 1, Esthétique et langage musical, edited by Michel Duchesneau, 450–52. Sprimont: Mardaga, 2006. — Correspondance, 1910–1963. Edited by Myriam Chimènes. Paris: Fayard, 1994. Roy, Jean. Le Groupe des Six. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994. Six, Les. “Arnold Schönberg les 6 musiciens vous saluent.” Le Coq, no. 1 (May 1920). Vuillemin, Louis. “Concerts métèques…” Le Courrier musical (1 January 1923): 4.

“Autant de compositeurs, autant . de polytonalités différentes”: . Polytonality in French Music Theory and . Composition of the 1920s* Mark Delaere The bombastic metaphors in the writings of the English musicologist and composer Wilfrid Mellers offer today’s readers a cause for considerable merriment. In relation to the subject of this chapter, Mellers does not disappoint in describing Darius Milhaud’s polytonality in the Times Literary Supplement of 30 June 1989 as “a tribute to Nature’s polymorphous perversity.” In this essay, I do intend to offer a tribute to polytonality, but I can assure the guardians of public morals and decency that I will not make a plea for polymorphous perversity. A discussion of polytonality is essential in a volume such as this one, since this composition technique took center stage in musicological writings on French music during the 1920s and beyond. Polytonality is a deeply paradoxical concept. It has been described as both the consolidation and the destruction of tonality, as the acme of conservatism and an outstanding contribution to the avant-garde, as a mere paper tiger in the mind of the composer and a perceivable phenomenon. The aim of this essay is not to give an overview of the terminological ramifications of this concept and of its predecessor “polytonie,” since this task has been more than amply fulfilled.1 After outlining some contemporary historiographical interpretations, I will concentrate, rather, on the gradual elaboration of polytonality as a system of composition in French music theory during the 1920s. The predominant music-historical interpretation of polytonality at that time is best summarized in the following quotation from Darius Milhaud: At this time [1910] I clearly felt the existence of two parallel traditions in the recent evolution of European music: 1. The Latin one, based on the affirmation of tonality, with its themes always clearly expressed in intervals belonging to major or minor scales or to the two together. This tradition, in its normal course, was about to produce polytonality, wherein different keys are used simultaneously, each of them, however, retaining its purely tonal character. * A shorter version of this essay was presented at the conference Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Duke University, October 2010). I owe thanks to Felix Wörner, Philip Rupprecht, and Ullrich Scheideler for inviting me to present a paper at this conference. I am grateful to the participants for their comments and to the master’s students in Musicology at the University of Leuven for their contributions to the analysis of Darius Milhaud’s Saudades do Brazil during a seminar in the spring semester of 2011. 1 Michael Beiche, “Polytonalität,” in Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie 22, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1994), 1–12.

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In addition to establishing a cultural—indeed, nationalistic—dichotomy between German and “Latin” music and to subtly presenting himself as the culmination point of the latter, Milhaud interprets the use of diatonic major/minor scales within polytonality as consolidation of tonality. In contrast, according to Milhaud, the lack of harmonic stability that was typical of German music since Wagner led to the undermining of tonality. Similar interpretations abound in contemporary journals and dictionary articles as well as music-historical handbooks, thus testifying to the success of this historical construct. Within this framework, much attention is paid to the historical legitimization of polytonality, and to justifying the technique as the next logical step within a solid tradition rather than a revolutionary innovation. In his 1923 article “Polytonalité et Atonalité,” Milhaud claims that polytonality is rooted in canons at intervals other than the octave.3 For centuries, counterpoint and harmony rules for dissonance treatment had upheld the illusion of a single key, but Milhaud lifted these constraints and posited the polytonal quality of strict and free contrapuntal writing. His interpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Duetto BWV 803 in those terms has been quoted ever since. Charles Koechlin, for example, cites Milhaud in his authoritative study on contemporary harmony for the prestigious Encyclopédie de la Musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire.4 But Koechlin also goes to great lengths to demonstrate the existence of a harmonic type of polytonality, the origin of which he situates in the free handling of dissonances, ostinati, and pedal points in music from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The distinction between contrapuntal and harmonic types of polytonality is to be found both in subsequent music-historical accounts and in writings of a more theoretical nature.5 It is on the latter that I want to concentrate the main part of this chapter. 2 Darius Milhaud, “To Arnold Schoenberg on his Seventieth Birthday: Personal Recollections,” The Musical Quarterly 30 (1944): 380. 3 Darius Milhaud, “Polytonalité et Atonalité,” La Revue Musicale 4, no. 4 (1923): 29–44. 4 Charles Koechlin, “Évolution de l’harmonie: Période contemporaine, depuis Bizet et César Franck jusqu’à nos jours,” in Encyclopédie de la Musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire, 2 ptie., Technique–Esthétique–Pédagogie, ed. Albert Lavignac and Lionel de la Laurencie (Paris: Delagrave, 1925), 591–760. 5 In chapter 8 of this book, Marianne Wheeldon describes how the discourse on tonality and polytonality changes during the 1920s and 1930s on account of contemporary musical developments, and in particular of the growing reputation of Schoenberg’s atonal and twelve-tone music. A parallel shift can be observed in Koechlin’s epistemological foundation of tonality as one of the many possible systems based on mere cultural convention (“Évolution de l’harmonie,” 754; “Les Tendances de la musique moderne française,” Encyclopédie, 56–145) to tonality as the embodiment of the laws of nature and of perception. The latter is seen most clearly in Koechlin’s “Tonal ou Atonal?” Le Menestrel 98, no. 15 (1936): 117–19; 98, no. 16 (1936): 125–27. This provoked a sharp-witted reaction by Armand Machabey in “L’atonal, existe-t-il?” Le Menestrel 98, no. 20 (1936): 157–59.

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Milhaud’s “Polytonalité et Atonalité” is the starting point for a theory of polytonality. Here, Milhaud identifies elements common to all polytonal music: the exclusive use of diatonic pitch material in each tonal layer and the use of the triad as the basic unit of harmonic expression within these tonal layers. Milhaud does not exclude modulations, but requires that they be straightforward and unambiguous so as not to disturb the diatonic quality of the music. The cornerstone of his “étude méthodique” is the charting of all possible combinations of keys. A triad on C is combined with eleven other major triads (from C# to B), each combination of which yields four shapes by major/minor variation of one or both of the triads. Finally, each of the forty-four shapes can be written in six different positions (“renversements”), i.e. with six different bass tones. Example 1: Darius Milhaud’s charts of all possible bitonal combinations according to “Polytonalité et Atonalité,” 32–33 I

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The same systematic charting is applied to the combination of three keys, resulting in fifty-five combinations, 440 shapes, and 3520 positions. In addition to the three keys expressed by the superposition of three triads, Milhaud claims that seven other keys are implicitly suggested. It is clear that this combination offers rich harmonic possibilities, but Milhaud also acknowledges that the dividing line with atonality is increasingly blurred as more and more pitches become involved, with the twelvetone chord as the real borderline case. Milhaud quotes music examples from the contemporary literature to prove the practicability and aesthetic efficiency of the combination of melodies and chords expressing different keys. To be sure, Milhaud’s article begs for critical comments. First, it represents a tendency of one important part of European music theory during the early 1920s, that is, to replace harmonic rules with a systematic overview of the available musical material. With tonality considered obsolete and the emergence of an alternative system with comparable syntactic and regulative potential still impending, a mere quantitative enumeration seemed to be the right option for the time being, all the more so since this enumeration suggests both artistic richness and scientific rigor. Milhaud’s inventory is the polytonal counterpart to similar systematic enumerations: of symmetric chords,6 of melodic orderings of the chromatic aggregate,7 of the melodic/harmonic abstract thereof in a 144-tone complex,8 of a statistical inquiry into the number of possible chords within the chromatic scale,9 and above all of the extensive listing of all possible 5040 chords in the twelve-tone context.10 Secondly, Milhaud’s equation of tonality with the tonic triad is highly reductionist, to say the least. A discussion of chord progressions or of the establishment of tonal centers by means of cadences is entirely absent. Neither is the reader informed about the appropriate combination of tonal functions in the bitonal fabric: should combinations across tonal layers be limited to two tonic triads, or is combination with a subdominant or dominant chord of another tonality permissible as well? By not even asking these questions, Milhaud’s theory is of little use for a composer or a student wanting technical guidelines for writing polytonal music. Since Milhaud strongly believes in an empirical approach leading to as much variety as possi6

Hermann Erpf, Studien zur Harmonie- und Klangtechnik der neueren Musik (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1927). 7 Josef Matthias Hauer, Vom Melos zur Pauke: Einführung in die Zwölftonmusik, Theoretische Schriften 1 (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1925). 8 Herbert Eimert, Atonale Musiklehre (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1924). 9 Fritz Heinrich Klein, “Die Grenze der Halbtonwelt,” Die Musik 17, no. 4 (1925): 281–86. 10 Bruno Weigl, Harmonielehre (Mainz: Schott, 1922). Weigl’s chord classification is based on systematic transpositions of all pitches into the octave interval and on transposition of all chords on the bass tone C. In spite of some striking similarities in their respective classification principles, set theory developed some 50 years later is of course incomparably more sophisticated, and, in contrast to Weigl’s theory, also applied to the analysis of atonal music. See Allen Forte, The Structure of Atonal Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). The critique leveled then and now against this systematic approach is comparable as well (its tautological character, its abstract instead of musical relationships). Compare for instance Leonhard Deutsch, “Das Problem der Atonalität und das Zwölftonprinzip,” Melos 6, no. 3 (1927): 108– 18 with Célestin Deliège, “La ‘Set-Theory’ ou les enjeux du pléonasme,” Analyse Musicale 17 (1989): 64–79.

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ble, this may well have been intentional. Hardly surprising, perhaps, for a theorist championing the principle: “The more composers, the more polytonalities.”11 Milhaud’s article found wide response in French music theory. Instead of merely summarizing or criticizing Milhaud’s ideas, theorists tried to elaborate principles only vaguely hinted at in Milhaud’s text into concrete guidelines for writing polytonal music. In what follows, I would like to reconstruct this collective pursuit of a theory of polytonality. Charles Koechlin is heavily implicated since it was he who had inspired Milhaud to polytonal experiments in the first place.12 The chapter on polytonality and atonality in Koechlin’s study for the Encyclopédie is an immediate response to Milhaud’s La Revue Musicale article. It is striking that Koechlin describes the virtues of harmonic polytonality mainly in terms of its potential to produce a plethora of sensual and emotional impressions. The empiricist and/or irrational stance favoring “the musical idea” (l’idée musicale), “the talent” (le talent), “the genius” (le génie) and above all “the good taste” (le bon goût) of the composer over systematic and formal research is typical for French music theory, and for Koechlin in particular. By criticizing Milhaud’s chord charts as an oversimplification, recommending the use of one unambiguous tonality at the beginning of a polytonal composition, and suggesting that triads be written in root position and clearly separated until polytonal practice and perception is sufficiently established, Koechlin nevertheless clarifies the concept of (harmonic) polytonality considerably.13 The third volume of the Traité d’Harmonie, published in 1926 by the Belgian composer and theorist Paul Gilson, includes an extensive discussion of polytonality by his colleague Georges Monier. A somewhat enigmatic figure, Monier had been influential in establishing modern music in Belgium during the early 1920s, both as a composer and as the music editor of the periodical 7 Arts. His contribution to polytonal theory is twofold. From a theoretical standpoint, Monier underpins polytonality by pointing out that the laws of resonance provide an answer for combining keys efficiently.14 This is new, since a few years earlier the physical argument had been invoked by Jean Deroux to prove just the opposite (the impossibility of polytonality),15 and had been rejected on epistemological grounds by Koechlin. 11 “Autant de compositeurs, autant de polytonalités différentes.” Milhaud, “Polytonalité et Atonalité,” 40. 12 Robert Orledge, Charles Koechlin (1867–1950): His Life and Works (Chur: Harwood, 1989), 117. 13 Koechlin, “Évolution de l’harmonie,” 696–758. 14 There is some similarity with Henry Cowell’s ideas on “Polyharmony” put forward in his New Musical Resources (published in 1930, but written much earlier between 1916 and 1920). It is well-known that American composers (notably Charles Ives) and theorists contributed much to the practice and theory of polytonality at an early stage. See for instance H. Wiley Hitchcock, “Charles Ives und seine Zeit,” in Amerikanische Musik seit Charles Ives: Interpretation, Quellentexte, Komponistenmonographien, ed. Hermann Danuser, Dietrich Kämper, and Paul Terse (Laaber: Laaber, 1987), 21–29; David Nicholls, “In Re Con Moto et Al: Experimentalism in the Works of Charles Ives (1874–1954),” in American Experimental Music: 1890–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5–88; Wolfgang Rathert, The Seen and Unseen: Studien zum Werk von Charles Ives, Berliner Musikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten 38 (Munich: Emil Katzbichler, 1991), 258. 15 Jean Deroux, “La Musique Polytonale,” La Revue Musicale 2, no. 11 (1921): 251–57.

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More relevant to this chapter, however, are Monier’s technical recommendations. He argues that it takes some time to perceive the characteristics of the combined keys or modes, thus rejecting Milhaud’s definition of polytonality on the basis of one single (compound) chord. Chromaticism is strictly forbidden, since it endangers tonal identification. Monier has a singular view on the ideal number of keys to be combined. He considers bitonality to be the most difficult combination, since two closely related keys hinder the perception of polarity, but two keys not closely related result in a sound that is too harsh. By adding C and G major to the sharply clashing combination of E and E major, Monier posits, a more balanced sound is achieved. Three or four superimposed keys is the ideal situation for him, since the many inevitable pitch and interval doublings in the combination of more than four keys would lead to a lack of harmonic variety. “As a matter of fact,” Monier explains, “the polytonal overloading creates permanent monotony in some works.”16 One does not expect to find additions to polytonal theory in a handbook on organ improvisation. And yet, Marcel Dupré’s Traité de l’Improvisation à l’Orgue includes a substantive discussion of Milhaud’s chord charts. Dupré considers Milhaud’s classification as both incomplete—since it is impossible to list all potential polytonal combinations—and unjustified—since many compound chords charted by Milhaud are perceived as belonging to a single key because they share pitches from one and the same diatonic collection or because they can be understood as an expanded dominant chord. In view of this, Dupré adds a new criterion. A compound chord is polytonal only when it contains at least two chromatically related pitches.

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Example 2 offers a perfect case in point: the chord combines two triads and the polytonal quality is guaranteed by the simultaneous presence of C and C#.17 In his article “Dissonance, Atonalité, Polytonalité”—and this concludes my compendious overview—Armand Machabey comes up with some interesting suggestions on how to maintain the tonal individuality of each voice or layer in a polytonal fabric. Whereas each component must observe a strictly tonal layout, the tonal relationship between the components must be as remote as possible. Bitonality is the ideal case, since the combination of more than two keys is susceptible to being interpreted as one single—be it expanded—tonality. Both contrapuntal and harmonic forms of polytonality are possible, but hard to achieve in view of existing listening attitudes and the preponderance of the bass line. Only by carefully balancing and maximally individualizing the two layers through contrasting textures, 16 “En fait, dans certaines œuvres, la surcharge polytonale crée une monotonie permanente.” Georges Monier, “De la Polytonie,” in Traité d’Harmonie 3 (Brussels: A. Cranz, 1926), A232. 17 Marcel Dupré, Traité de l’Improvisation à l’Orgue (Paris: Leduc, 1925), 24–27.

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rhythmical structures, registers, and instrumentation will the composer be able to realize a perceptible polytonal structure.18 Let me summarize the criteria for polytonal writing put forward in what I described above as the collective pursuit of a theory of polytonality in 1920s France: 1. Use diatonic pitch material and the triad (or, one may add, any other classified tonal chord) as its harmonic expression only. Classified chords should preferably be in root position and clearly separated from one another in musical space. 2. Combined keys should be related as remotely as possible; compound chords should have at least two chromatically related pitches. 3. If rapid and unambiguous, modulations are possible. 4. A polytonal composition preferably begins in one key, with a second layer being added only later on. It takes time to establish different tonal centers; a single compound chord will not do. 5. With the exception of Monier, all authors consider bitonality on perceptual grounds as the preferred form of polytonality. 6. Contrasting textures, rhythms, registers, and instruments aid the perception of tonal polarity. To conclude this essay, I will discuss two compositions by Milhaud that are representative of the contrapuntal and harmonic forms of polytonality, respectively: the Finale from the fourth of the Cinq Symphonies (1921) and some movements from Saudades do Brazil (1920). It goes without saying that a sample as limited as this one is not representative of Milhaud’s oeuvre as a whole, let alone of all polytonal music. My only aim is to test the extent to which the collective pursuit of a polytonal theory in the 1920s was actually based on experiences with composing and analyzing polytonal music written some years earlier. Humphrey Searle aptly describes the “Étude” for ten solo strings from Milhaud’s Fourth Symphony as a strict canon in ten parts on two subjects; each subject is exposed successively in five different keys, the second subject entering (in m. 13) in the same key as the final entry of the first subject and reversing the order of keys in its exposition. This process is carried out twice, once starting from the bottom of the orchestra, and once from the top with stretto entries.19 It remains to see whether the above polytonality criteria apply.

18 Armand Machabey, “Dissonance, Atonalité, Polytonalité,” La Revue Musicale 12, no. 116 (1931): 35–45. 19 Humphrey Searle, Twentieth Century Counterpoint: A Guide for Students (London: Williams and Norgate, 1955), 34–35.

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The tonal plan for the first subject is F-C-G-D-A and for the second subject A-DG-C-F, brought on by the upper and lower fifth as canonic intervals, respectively. A chromatic ascending line from tonic to tonic starting in m. 13 (second double bass) notwithstanding, each voice is strictly diatonic, but the tonal relationship between keys is anything but remote. On the contrary, each subsequent key brings one new pitch only, hardly enough to identify a new key. The second half of m. 4 and m. 5, for instance, are heard as a II–V/V–V progression in the single key of F major, and only m. 6 with its frequent clashes between B and B breaks the single key interpretation. Other criteria are also unmet. Up to five keys are combined, the voices move in close registers with resulting occasional overlaps, and the scoring for ten strings excludes tone color contrasts. Even at its densest point, however, the strict canonic writing yields a transparent contrapuntal texture, with voices moving in contrary motion and individualized, complementary rhythmic patterns. The opening of a polytonal composition in only one key follows from the canon form, and Milhaud takes three full measures to establish this key. The opening motive of the first subject with its emphatic octave leap from tonic to tonic followed by the dominant clearly heralds the introduction of a new key. It is a small wonder that Milhaud interprets canons in intervals other than the octave as the origin of polytonality: the features of strict canonic writing as applied in his “Étude” may well compensate for the impediments to polytonal perception mentioned earlier. Saudades do Brazil comprises two sets of six dances for piano solo. The work was premiered in November 1920 and the version for orchestra some months later in 1921.20 The dances are inspired by Brazilian popular music, showing all the characteristics of the tango idiom: simple ternary forms, melody/accompaniment texture, symmetric four-measure units, dotted rhythms and syncopations, and plain V–I progressions. In other words: the conditions for applying harmonic polytonality are excellent. In the first part of the first dance (“Sorocaba”) the keys of B major and D major are combined, one of many instances of simultaneous third-related keys in Milhaud’s music. With only three pitches in common and many chromatic dyads, the tonal relationship between the two keys is sufficiently weak to establish tonal polarity (Ex. 4).

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The movement opens in B major with D major superimposed only four measures later. The new key center is expressed both by the melody and its harmonization. The simple alternation of tonic and dominant degrees is in keeping with the popular music style, but it is noteworthy that the tonic and dominant seventh chords run parallel in both keys, a few minor ambiguities notwithstanding. The compound chords have only one pitch in common (D and A respectively) and two chromatic dyads each (F–F# and A–Bb, C#–C and E–Eb).

Example 5: Milhaud, “Sorocaba” from Saudades do Brazil, mm. 1–6, © Éditions Max Eschig, Paris

The music is not as diatonic as that of the “Étude,” and chromatic inflections occur. Two types of chromaticism should be distinguished. In the middle part of “Sorocaba” (from m. 21 onwards), the violins and trumpets articulate the new key of G minor on the downbeat of each measure (descending scale, in violin 1 and trumpet 1 from D to G, in violin 2 and trumpet 2 from B to F#). The figuration between these scale degrees displays two chromatically ascending lines in the violin parts, which are reinforced and substantiated by the doubling in the two horns. I would argue that here the chromatic scale functions as a “key” and that bitonality consists of the combination of G minor and the chromatic scale. The chromatic lines moving in parallel major seconds and the harmonic relation with the scale degrees of G minor are sufficiently dissonant to create tonal dissociation. The contrary motion between the diatonic and chromatic scales further supports this effect.

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Example 6: Milhaud, “Sorocaba” from Saudades do Brazil, mm. 19–24, © Éditions Max Eschig, Paris

The second type of chromaticism is more familiar. The chromatic lines in m. 29– 33—and more clearly in the repetition of the first part from m. 43 onwards—move from tonic to dominant or tonic to tonic, thus articulating the key. Chromatic pitches are passing notes between the degrees of the diatonic scale only. The second dance “Botafogo” opens in F minor, with the superimposed key F# minor appearing only in m. 3 (as a melody) and in m. 7 (as a chord progression). Two chromatically related keys could not be tonally further removed from each other.21 Once more, the tonic and dominant functions run parallel in both keys. The transition to the middle part in A major/F major (m. 27 onwards) could hardly be more concise: just one chord, a superimposition of perfect fifths.22 All in all, both “Sorocaba” and “Botafogo” seem to fully satisfy the six criteria for effective polytonal writing. Textures and rhythms are sufficiently contrasted as well, and 21 The chromatic relation between keys is found at the end of the middle part of “Sorocaba” (from m. 37 onwards: G minor and F# minor) and at numerous other instances within Milhaud’s polytonal compositions. 22 Modulations by way of a single chord consisting of perfect fifths occurs frequently in Milhaud’s polytonal music. See for instance the transition to the B section in “Corcovado” (m. 30). This fulfils the requirement of modulations to be “rapid” and “unambiguous.”

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Example 7: Milhaud, “Corcovado” from Saudades do Brazil, mm. 1–19, © Éditions Max Eschig, Paris

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even in the piano version registers are widely spaced, separating the different tonal strands. It goes without saying that polytonality is even better served in the version for orchestra. The instrumentation is both skillful and sensitive, adding much to the “Saudade,” the melancholic vein of the music. But above all, the contrasting sound colors further polytonal perception. By contrast, other movements of Saudades do Brazil testify to the impossibility of polytonality. If “Ipanema,” “Corcovado,” or “Paysandu” were inspirational for the development of a theory of polytonality, then it would have been only as negative examples of music not meeting the requirements for polytonal perception. None of these movements present different keys successively. Each of them combines two tonal layers simultaneously from the outset, and not every key is equally well defined. “Paysandu” starts as a combination of F# major, B Dorian or E Mixolydian, and an ascending chromatic scale. The overall impression resulting from this combination is an F# tonality with some “wrong notes.” The octave registers of the first violins and the lower strings are clearly separated at the beginning of “Corcovado,” and their rhythmic construction adds to the differentiation of melody and accompaniment. The accompaniment in G major rather exceptionally includes a subdominant chord, with the harmonic progression I–II–V being repeated over and over again. The melody is in D major, but the occasional clash between C and C# is largely insufficient to establish the perception of another key.23 With ears accustomed to the harmony of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, m. 1 is perceived as a tonic ninth chord in G major, and most of the subsequent chords confirm Marcel Dupré’s ascertainment that many an alleged polytonal chord is but an expanded tonic or dominant sonority. The replacement of “D major” by the Aeolian mode on G from m. 9 onwards reinforces the single key interpretation, albeit in a major/minor guise. Measures 13–18 shift the key one semitone up (to A major), and the opening motif of m. 1 a major second down (clarinet, mm. 15 and 17). Once again, the resulting chord is a tonic sonority in A major with added augmented fifth and major seventh. The sequence of the opening motif in the clarinet, flute, and oboe parts stresses the very straightforward chromatic shift back to the initial key of G major (mm. 18–19). Finally, the opening of “Ipanema” could have served as the immediate cause of the restrictions formulated by theorists of polytonality during the 1920s. The two “keys” of F major and E minor are presented simultaneously in the same rhythm, in a narrow range, and without differentiation in tone color.

23 It is noteworthy that tonal functions and degrees—including the second degree—run parallel even in a polytonal context as ambiguous as this one.

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Example 8: Milhaud, “Ipanema” from Saudades do Brazil, mm. 1–6, © Éditions Max Eschig, Paris

The “keys” are represented by a mere reiteration of the tonic chords, with the lower and higher strings interchanging pitches around the viola’s central F#–A axis after each two-measure group.24 The descending F Phrygian scale in trumpet and trombone confirms the synthesis rather than the opposition between F major and E minor.25 To conclude, I would like to stress that during the 1920s polytonality was met with great enthusiasm by writers championing French music. In 1928, one commentator even predicted the hegemony of this composition technique for at least a century to come.26 Today an entry on “Polytonality” is lacking in The New Grove Dictionary and the article on “Bitonality” is as concise as it is skeptical about its 24 The central position of this dyad is reflected in subsequent modulations to D major (combined with E major) in m. 21, and to G major (combined with C major) in m. 34. 25 It should be clear that I do not value “Ipanema,” “Corcovado,” or “Paysandu” less than “Sorocaba” or “Botafogo.” My only aim is to demonstrate that the former are polytonal on paper only, in contrast to the latter. 26 Willem Pijper, “Het muzikale absolutisme,” De Quintencirkel: opstellen over muziek (1928; Amsterdam: Querido, 1964), 146. The resemblance to Arnold Schoenberg’s equally ambitious claim to have secured the dominance of German music for the next hundred years by inventing twelve-tone technique is striking: “Es dürfte zum Zeitpunkt der Komposition des ‘Präludiums’ [from the Piano Suite op. 25], Ende Juli 1921, gewesen sein, als mir Schönberg auf einem Spaziergang in Traunkirchen sagte, heute habe er etwas gefunden, das der deutschen Musik die Vorherrschaft für die nächsten hundert Jahre sichere.” Josef Rufer, Das Werk Arnold Schönbergs (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1959), 26.

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import: “The failure of bitonality to win wider acceptance confirms that it is a distinctly mechanical way of deriving something new from something traditional.”27 Furthermore, today’s Milhaud specialists are divided over the very possibility of polytonality, the disbelievers being largely driven by its incompatibility with the doctrine of Schenker.28 However, the criteria reconstructed from the theoretical literature of 1920s France suggest polytonality is not to be rejected as either a writing technique or a perceptual phenomenon, a fact made clear in the preceding discussion of Milhaud’s “Étude” and the “Sorocaba” and “Botafogo” movements from Saudades do Brazil. However charming and fascinating these compositions are, it is clear that polytonality is possible under strict conditions only, as was demonstrated in the subsequent succinct analytical discussions of “Ipanema,” “Corcovado,” and “Paysandu” from the Saudades. So, yes, polytonality is possible; yes, the constraints prevent a wider and more varied use of this technique; and no, polytonality is not a tribute to Nature’s polymorphous perversity. Bibliography Beiche, Michael. “Polytonalität.” In Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, edited by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, 22:1–12. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1994. Deliège, Célestin. “La ‘Set-Theory’ ou les enjeux du pléonasme.” Analyse Musicale 17 (1989): 64–79. Deroux, Jean. “La Musique Polytonale.” La Revue Musicale 2, no. 11 (1921): 251–57. Deutsch, Leonhard. “Das Problem der Atonalität und das Zwölftonprinzip.” Melos 6, no. 3 (1927): 108–18. Drake, Jeremy. The Operas of Darius Milhaud. New York: Garland, 1989. Dupré, Marcel. Traité de l’Improvisation à l’Orgue. Paris: Leduc, 1925. Eimert, Herbert. Atonale Musiklehre. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1924. Erpf, Hermann. Studien zur Harmonie- und Klangtechnik der neueren Musik. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1927. Forte, Allen. The Structure of Atonal Music. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973. Gilson, Paul. Traité d’Harmonie 3. Brussels: A. Cranz, 1926. Hauer, Josef Matthias. Vom Melos zur Pauke: Einführung in die Zwölftonmusik. Theoretische Schriften 1. Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1925. Hitchcock, H. Wiley. “Charles Ives und seine Zeit,” in Amerikanische Musik seit Charles Ives: In-

27 Arnold Whittall, “Bitonality,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), 3:637. 28 Excellent volumes on Milhaud’s works include Jeremy Drake, The Operas of Darius Milhaud (New York: Garland, 1989); Deborah Mawer, Darius Milhaud: Modality and Structure in Music of the 1920s (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997); and Barbara L. Kelly, Tradition and Style in the Works of Darius Milhaud 1912–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Deborah Mawer (55–56) distinguishes four classes of “localized bimodality” (absorption, surface-level bimodality, bimodality, and atonality), but remains rather sceptical in the end. Both she and Jeremy Drake prefer the term bimodality over bitonality. It is true that the pitch collections in Milhaud’s music express various, often rapidly shifting modes (including, but not limited to major and minor scales) whereas the concept of polytonality gives the harmonic structure of this music its due.

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terpretation, Quellentexte, Komponistenmonographien, edited by Hermann Danuser, Dietrich Kämper, and Paul Terse, 21–29. Laaber: Laaber, 1987. Kelly, Barbara L. Tradition and Style in the Works of Darius Milhaud 1912–1939. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Klein, Fritz Heinrich. “Die Grenze der Halbtonwelt.” Die Musik 17, no. 4 (1925): 281–86. Koechlin, Charles. “Évolution de l’harmonie: Période contemporaine, depuis Bizet et César Franck jusqu’à nos jours.” In Encyclopédie de la Musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire, 2 ptie., Technique–Esthétique–Pédagogie, edited by Albert Lavignac and Lionel de la Laurencie, 591– 760. Paris: Delagrave, 1925. — “Les Tendances de la musique moderne française.” Encyclopédie de la Musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire, 2 ptie., Technique–Esthétique–Pédagogie, edited by Albert Lavignac and Lionel de la Laurencie, 56–145. Paris: Delagrave, 1925. — ‘Tonal ou Atonal?’ Le Menestrel 98, no. 15 (1936): 117–19; 98, no. 16 (1936): 125–27. Machabey, Armand. “Dissonance, Atonalité, Polytonalité.” La Revue Musicale 12, no. 116 (1931): 35–45. — “L’atonal, existe-t-il?” Le Menestrel 98, no. 20 (1936): 157–59. Mawer, Deborah. Darius Milhaud: Modality and Structure in Music of the 1920s. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997. Milhaud, Darius. “Polytonalité et Atonalité.” La Revue Musicale 4, no. 4 (1923): 29–44. — “To Arnold Schoenberg on his Seventieth Birthday: Personal Recollections.” The Musical Quarterly 30 (1944): 379–84. Nicholls, David. “In Re Con Moto et Al: Experimentalism in the Works of Charles Ives (1874– 1954).” Chap. 2 in American Experimental Music: 1890–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Orledge, Robert. Charles Koechlin (1867–1950): His Life and Works. Chur: Harwood, 1989. Pijper, Willem. “Het muzikale absolutisme.” 1928. In De Quintencirkel: opstellen over muziek, 141–47. Amsterdam: Querido, 1964. Rathert, Wolfgang. The Seen and Unseen: Studien zum Werk von Charles Ives. Berliner Musikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten 38. Munich: Emil Katzbichler, 1991. Rufer, Josef. Das Werk Arnold Schönbergs. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1959. Searle, Humphrey. Twentieth Century Counterpoint: A Guide for Students. London: Williams and Norgate, 1955. Weigl, Bruno. Harmonielehre. Mainz: Schott, 1922. Whittall, Arnold. “Bitonality.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell, 3:637. London: Macmillan, 2001.

Nocturne in Blue, Black and Poppy Red: . Tonal and Formal Dramaturgy . in the third movement of Ravel’s Sonate pour violon et violoncelle Volker Helbing I In a letter to Roland-Manuel from August 20, 1921, Ravel reflected upon the third movement of the Sonate pour violon et violoncello, suggesting that “after a beginning in blue and black,” the piece had “broken into poppy red toward the middle.”1 Indeed, the harmonic contrast between the opening and the climax of the movement couldn’t be much larger: Whereas the opening is characterized by an unaccompanied line in monotonous quarter notes and in a mostly anhemitonic, seemingly archaic diatonicism, the climax is surprisingly marked by continuous eighth notes and a chromatic, quickly progressing harmony determined by major sevenths, something one would more readily expect in Bartók or the Viennese School than in Ravel. Ravel’s development is anything but continuous: Only a few bars before the climax, a modally diatonic “island” and a polymodal chromaticism verging on the free atonality of the Viennese School face each other within a minimum of space; the transition is marked by a quite sudden accelerando. In contrast to what the letter suggests—like many letters by Ravel it is peppered with allusions and irony—the eruption in the middle of the piece (its “red blob”) is not due to spontaneous inspiration or even the vicissitudes of Ravel’s recent house-moving; rather, the central “poppy red” music reflects a dramaturgy of stark contrasts and transformations between harmonic materials and between instrumental sounds. What is surprising, however, is that here the contrast assumes an acerbity not experienced in any of Ravel’s earlier music. The issue of this music’s tonality—which is an issue of form and coherence as well—can not be made clear without taking into account its dramaturgical concept. Hence the following analysis will deal on the one hand with the structural conditions that allow the aforementioned transformations and contrasts (its tonality in the narrow sense), and on the other hand with the dramaturgy that forms the basis of 1

“Du coup l’andante du duo, bleu et noir au début, s’est déchaîné en ponceau vers le milieu.” Roland-Manuel to Maurice Ravel, 20 August 1921, in Maurice Ravel: Lettres à Roland-Manuel et à sa famille, ed. Jean Roy (Quimper: Caligrammes, 1986), 128. (The passage is preceded by a depiction of Ravel’s fruitless efforts to provide a water supply in his newly acquired house in Montfort l’Amaury.)

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this movement. Side glances at earlier works—especially the Miroirs—will show the extent to which even this music of renouncement is rooted in Ravel’s prior musical language and aesthetics.2 II The form of this movement follows a clear ABA’ with coda. The demarcations are, however, partly concealed by an arched disposition of registers and a process-like evolution, which spans sections A (mm. 1–24) and B (mm. 25–57) as well as the A’ return (at m. 58) and the coda (mm. 70–82). The climax in m. 42 marks the exact center of not only the B section and the larger movement, but also the harmonic structure: A as a modal center controls the beginning, climax, and conclusion of the piece; the B section is framed symmetrically by its minor-third satellites F# and C. Modality and Momentum in the A section Like many pieces by Ravel, the movement begins with a minor-pentatonic initial idea (Ex. 1a).3 Such a beginning, especially if unaccompanied, is highly ambiguous in mode. Not only is an integration into the Dorian, Aeolian and Phrygian modes likewise conceivable,4 but in a constellation like G-A-C-D-E, the modal center is by no means fixed to A, but may also rest on D or C.5 Here, the antecedent with its two arpeggiations of the second scale degree of an A mode can be seen as Dorian; the B-minor chord functions as an alternating neighbor chord, whose structural analogy to the central A-minor chord complicates the clear hierarchies characteristic of major-minor tonality.6 Even the “half close” on the supertonic scale degree in m. 4 (Ex. 1a), insinuated by an interrupted linear progression at the end of the antecedent, is harmonized by an arpeggiated B-minor chord instead of E major or E minor. 2 To make a differentiation from major-minor tonality (which is still present in Ravel, but in most cases not constitutive), I will speak of modality or of polymodality instead of tonality. Bartók’s concepts of bimodality or polymodality, respectively, are explained in his Harvard Lectures from 1943. See Béla Bartók, Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), 365–71. 3 Une barque sur l’océan (upper voices) and La vallée des cloches (Miroirs, 1905), Passacaille (Piano Trio, 1914), Fugue (Le tombeau de Couperin, 1914–17), and Valses nobles et sentimentales No. 3 (upper voice, 1911) begin with minor pentatonic sets (e. g. A-C-D-E-G). Asie (Shéhérazade, 1903), Oiseaux tristes (Miroirs) and Pantoum (Piano Trio) begin with stratifications of minor pentatonic sets (e. g. A-C-D-E-G-A-B). 4 In the case of A-C-D-E-G, the thirds A-C and E-G may be filled by B or B and by F or F#, respectively. 5 For an example centered on D, see Une barque sur l’océan, Passacaille; for one centered on C, see Valses nobles et sentimentales No. 3, recapitulation. 6 This use of the Dorian second degree as a neighboring chord to the first is another characteristic feature in Ravel. See Piano Trio, beginning.

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Example 1: mm. 1–25; score and harmonic analysis of mm. 17–25

In the consequent phrase G major plays a role analogous to that of B minor in the antecedent: Both chords are arpeggiated initially in quarter notes, then in eighth notes, harmonizing the second scale degree within a linear progression. The modal center A—which after the first bar appears only in passing or within an arpeggiation—functions as an unexpressed center of gravity within an axis of fifths formed by E and B on the one side and by D and G on the other (Ex. 1a, top staff). The tonic quality of A however, lacking the tendency of the leading tone and a clear differentiation between harmonic degrees, is considerably weakened in comparison to tonal music.7 7 Thus, a kind of modulation to C major insinuated by the consequent is withdrawn only at the last moment.

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In the two-part version of the opening theme, beginning in m. 9, the harmonic ambiguities of the original solo line are “specified” in a manner typical for Ravel, alluding slightly to early-eighteenth-century thoroughbass8: The harmonic skeleton is based almost exclusively on progressions by third or fifth between an implied chordal progression of i, v, iv, and ii (as marked in Ex. 1a). These chords (or better: dyads), however, don‘t present themselves as tonal functions but decidedly as “Aeolian v,” “Dorian ii,” and so on. The same is true for the use of dissonances, most of which occur in the consequent phrase: Almost all of them may be interpreted as appoggiaturas or as seventh chords (see the figures in Ex. 1a, in mm. 13–16). But at the same time they sound explicitly modal, since in most cases they appear within an “Aeolian v.” From a dramatic point of view, the opening is followed by an “agitating momentum” (mm. 17–24), anticipating through a sudden crisis most of the components that are responsible for the evolution of the B section. The modal (but still two-part) texture introduced by mm. 9–16 functions as a starting point for this first harmonic heightening. The harmonic skeleton is shown in Ex. 1b: Three dyads prolong the major-third axis F-A-C#; interpolating their progress are three dyads articulating a chromatically raised axis F#-A#-D. The result is a hexatonic cycle reaching up to the high B in m. 25 and foreshadowing the passage prior to the climax of the movement. The foreground material remains diatonic until m. 20, but is intensified radically by two “Phrygian” II-v-i progressions leading from A Aeolian (or F Lydian) to F# Phrygian and A# Phrygian, respectively. A further harmonic complication is the reinterpretation of the violin’s A, C#, and F melodic pitches, heard first as major thirds, then set as minor thirds by the unfolding hexatonic progression. A structure of momentarily fixed pitches (as the F5 in mm. 21–24), turning figures, and chromatic alteration—as often in Ravel—signals the transitionary function of mm. 21–24. The end of this “movement in immobility”9 is the B in m. 25, reached by expanding chromatic progression (Ex. 1c).10 At the same time, other essential harmonic issues of the B section are anticipated: false relations (Ex. 1d), suggestions of octatonic and whole tone fields (Ex. 1e), and a minor-third axis A#C#-E embedded in the overall hexatonic progression (Ex. 1e). Contrast and heightening in the B section If we consider the B section (mm. 25–57) as a Schoenbergian “sentence,” the two four-bar groups beginning in the upbeats to m. 26 and m. 30 form the phrase and its varied repetition, and mm. 34–57 the (expanded) continuation, itself comprising three sentence-like segments. The first two of these segments (mm. 34–41 and 42–45) aim towards the melodic turning points (mm. 42 and 46, respectively) via a 8 See Le Tombeau de Couperin (especially Forlane and Minuet), Sonatine (Mouvt de Menuet), and Ma Mère l’Oye (Pavane de la Belle au Bois dormant, Le Jardin Féerique). 9 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Ravel, trans. Margaret Crosland (Reprint; Westport: Greenwood Press, 1976), 132. (The expression refers to Alain.) 10 The Bb5 interrupts an overall register transfer that leads from A2 (m. 1) to A3 (m. 9) and A4 (m. 17) to A6 (m. 42).

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process of fragmentation, while the third (mm. 46–57) prepares the recapitulation via a composed-out ritardando. It seems that with this clear, nearly classical phrase structure Ravel tried to give some kind of foundation to the very advanced (and heterogeneous) harmony of this passage. A closer parsing of the entire B section will consider three distinct stages, together outlining a suggestively dramatic progression. Octatonic paradis artificiel (mm. 25–33) The beginning of the B section is marked by a harmonically distorted variant of the opening: The cello picks up a part of the minor-pentatonic constellation of the opening—corresponding to a minor-seventh chord—and transposes it to F#.11 The distortion is effected by the pedal note Bb, which transforms the pentatonic collection into an octatonic subset. This easy label, however, misses the iridescent harmonic effect of the passage: Just as the B seems to change identity and hue depending on whether it is accompanied by A or by F#, E, and C#, so the pentatonic collection disintegrates into a group of contrasting B (or A#?) “colorations.” This tendency to harmonic vagueness—or rather polycentricity—increases in the consequent phrase (Ex. 2), when the melody shifts to a constellation projecting an E minor-seventh tetrachord (enriched with passing C pitch) while the pedal B is replaced gradually by the pedal trichord A-G-E. Again melody and pedal chord together—as expanded and truncated variants of minor-seventh chords a tritone apart—form a complete octatonic collection. Diatonic melody, in this harmonic setting, splits into distinct harmonic colors, and is hardly perceivable as diatonic.12

Example 2: constitution of the octatonic field, mm. 26–29 11 Thus fitting it to the overall minor third axis. The cello’s A-F#-E (mm. 25–26) imitates the violin’s A-F-E (mm. 23–24). 12 Ravel reinforces an effect (“breaking” a melody through alternating third relations) that goes back to Schubert (see String Quintet, 1st movement, secondary theme).

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This sudden change from an initially traditional, bass-rooted harmony into a floating, potentially (or completely) octatonic harmony is one of the dramaturgical topoi of Ravel which I call “immersion in the octatonic field” or octatonic paradis artificiel. A no less dramatic incursion of the octatonic governs Une barque sur l’océan, in a passage (mm. 82 ff.) juxtaposing a pentatonic subset (D-F-A-C, reflecting the pentatonic melody of the opening) with an “irritating” harmonic pedal (F#-A)—the F# as “major third” over D—before presenting a complete octatonic field (mm. 90– 94). In both Une barque and the Sonata’s third movement, the octatonic turn heralds the arrival of the climax of the piece. “Beautiful passage” (mm. 34–35) Mm. 34–35 and 36–37 constitute the beginning of the first liquidation process within the B section and work formally on the same level. Harmonically, though, a bigger contrast between these two phrases is hardly imaginable. Ex. 3 traces details of the transformation process, which connects these two passages with the beginning of the octatonic passage and the ensuing liquidation process. The violin part (Ex. 3b, mm. 34–35) originates in a transposition by major sixth of the earlier cello part (compare Ex. 3a): in the first violin measure, two melodic boundary pitches (circled) are displaced by an ascending fourth; in the second, Ravel reverses melodic contour. The resulting melody is mostly diatonic (with the exception of B#, m. 35)—a simple linear progression yielding to melodic displacements that create a compound line of two voices (Ex. 3c).

Example 3: motivic transformations, mm. 26–38

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Crucial for the harmonic effect of this passage is the minimal displacement by which it emerges out of an octatonic field. Ex. 4 shows this: Whereas the D# of the violin is enharmonically equivalent to the cello’s E in m. 33, the cello’s arpeggiation is nearly identical with that of the violin in mm. 33.13 The harmonic attractiveness of the passage (its melancholical charm), however, is not least due to the tension between the melody and the underlying minor-seventh chord. Acting as mostly unresolved appoggiaturas, D#, B, and G# generate a sound that appears both familiar and “thorny.” The music follows another dramaturgical topos of Ravel, which I call “beautiful passage.”14 Such passages stand out for diatonic simplicity (in most cases based on Ravel’s favored minor-seventh or minor-ninth chord), and function formally as a means of retarding momentum in the approach to the movement’s climax.15

Example 4: harmonic transition, mm. 33–35

Peripeteia and catastrophe (mm. 36–57) So far compositional structure and dramaturgy in the Sonate remain fully within the scope of Ravel’s prewar compositions: a pentatonic or diatonic opening marks the beginning of a process of gradual accumulation; it is followed by an agitating momentum, signaled harmonically by immersion into the octatonic field; an islandlike “beautiful passage” slows motion towards the climax proper. This familiar scheme of things ends (at m. 36) with the onset of the heightening process which leads to the climax—and following that, the catastrophe—of the piece. Through a sudden acceleration of harmonic rhythm, the “diatonic island” is 13 The only exceptions are the “resolution” from G to F# and the use of the D# as appoggiatura. 14 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Schöne Stellen” (1928), in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 18:695–718. Most of the passages (from Bach to Schönberg) Adorno cites in his radio lecture are beautiful not (only) in themselves, but in relation to their dramatic, tragic, or cataclysmic context. 15 The simplicity of the beautiful passage entails a telling change of harmonic color; see, for example, Une barque sur l’océan (mm. 98–99); Oiseaux tristes (mm. 21–22).

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left abruptly, and the harmonic structure seems to overrun tonal or modal control. Motivically, Ravel’s technique is one of intervallic augmentation (Ex. 3d–e).16 The cello opens a fleeting canon from G—taken up at the fifth in the violin (m. 36, beat 3)—and produces two whole-tone fields (Ex. 3f). The final approach to the climax itself and the rapid descent to the movement’s “catastrophe” (mm. 46–55) present a harmony of intricate foreground detail. Ex. 5 displays the different layers of this structure. The high notes leading to the climax in m. 42 comprise interwoven intervallic axes. As the vertices of an overall majorthird axis, C# (m. 36) and A (m. 38) are prolonged by more local minor-third axes initiated by C# (mm. 36–37) and A (m. 42) respectively. Each of these high notes is accompanied by its lower major seventh (the latter pitches themselves embellished with whole-tone neighbors). (The transitional theme of the first movement functions as a model for this interval constellation, and also as the “secret goal” of the transformation process.) Due to a liquidation in mm. 38–41, the harmonic structure concentrates on the members of the major-third axis and their respective lower sevenths. Thus, the harmonies of mm. 38–41 return by liquidation to the hexatonic collection underlying the first heightening; the Ex. 5 parsing also records a level of local harmonic detail—the (014) trichords, mm. 40–41, and associated tetrachords. Nevertheless—despite this network of connections, and despite all processual logic—it cannot be denied that the music’s dense and complex (non-sequential) progression (especially in m. 37) goes markedly beyond the scope of what we know as Ravel’s musical language. The transitional renunciation of a harmonic structure governing not only harmonic progression but also the actual sounds of the instruments makes the whole passage sound strange or—to say it with Schoenberg—allows us to feel “Luft von anderem Planeten.” Most of these tendencies remain effective for the rest of the B section. The descent (mm. 42–45) is still governed by the modal center A, the focus of immediately preceding measures. The descending-fourth progression A-E-B (mm. 42–43) corresponds to the ascending-fifth progression of the opening, with A as well as E harmonized by the same open fifth. But the whole passage sounds anything but tonal, since all three notes are prolonged by descending minor-third axes supported by (016) verticals. Instead, two octatonic fields emerge (mm. 42 and 43). Only preparing the piece’s low registral turning point (in the striding descent of m. 45) is there a transitional change into a kind of tonal (or, more precisely, bimodal) harmonic structure: The stratification of what looks (but doesn’t sound) like the dominant seventh chords of F# major and C major17 is a result of the tritone constellations of the preceding bars. The low point or “catastrophe” (mm. 46–57) serves as a kind of crystallization of the preceding bars: It is comparable in gesture to mm. 40–41, and takes over part of the pitch content of m. 45 (mostly in the same register, see Ex. 6, eliptical 16 M. 36 derives from the violin part of m. 34, transposed up by a second. The first half of the measure is thereby displaced into the cello (Ex. 3e). 17 Whereas the cello completes the minor third axis F-D-B to G7 (“resolving” in an astonishingly traditional way to C in m. 46), the violin completes its third axis to C#7 and concentrates on pitches belonging to F# major.

Example 6: catastrophe (mm. 44–58), interval constellations and harmonic reduction

Example 5: peripeteia and catastrophe (mm. 36–45), pitch structure

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frames); three of the major sevenths of m. 44 are transposed and combined into a single arpeggiation (Ex. 6, solid rectangular frames), all while the actual disposition of this arpeggiation—with C, G, and F# in the lower voices—alludes to earlier pitch content (compare mm. 44, 46). The resulting harmonic structure—including the cello’s prominent A# of m. 49—again has some similarity to a hexatonic collection. Even this process of crystallization is not without its parallels in the prewar music of Ravel. Thus, in Noctuelles, the harmonic surface (initially extremely complex) heads to a gradual crystallization and stacking of chord components corresponding to the ordered pc set (0,3,11). The process ends in parallel voice leading (Noctuelles, m. 38), and the pitch constellation framed at this point corresponds exactly to that in m. 46 of the sonata movement.18 The prominent melodic forms of trichord (016) (mm. 42–44) appear in a parallel inner-voice motion in Le Gibet (mm. 24–25). The difference is that the same major-seventh constellations, which in the earlier pieces were imbedded in more complex chords (and thus attenuated), here emerge nakedly. Epilogue (recapitulation and coda) As if the piece were now trying to keep as close as possible to the modal center, the recapitulation’s first four-bar phrases emerge from the “Phrygian” constellation E-F (accompanied in two cases by the A of the violin).19 It is transformed into an imitation of the opening motive (mm. 59–60), and grounds the cello’s flowing motives through m. 69. The continuous eighth note pulse, reactivated after the transitional retardation of mm. 50–55, lends the whole passage greater intensity than that of its earlier form (mm. 9–20)20—albeit one which is literally “damped”21 by the preceding catastrophe. The first two phrases of the cello end in a kind of virtual polyphony (thus allowing more extensive gestures), whereas the third increases by an ascending linear progression. The coda (beginning in m. 70) combines rhythmic and intervallic echoes (mm. 36, 38, and 40) with a more explicit assimilation to the transitional theme of the first movement, a unity which the process of intervallic augmentation in the middle section strived for. When one considers the different combinations of this invariant motive and the intervallically related (and likewise nearly invariant) upper-voice motive, a harmonic skeleton shimmers through that reminds us of late-nineteenth-century harmony. Several tonal associations interlock as a result, most of which are typical closing gestures. A possible tonal derivation of m. 70—interpreting the second 18 Volker Helbing, “Noctuelles by Ravel: An Essay on the Morphology of Sound,” in Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie 8 (2003), 149–50; Volker Helbing, Choreographie und Distanz: Studien zur Ravel-Analyse (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2008), 211–12. 19 E, F, and A are pcs purposefully omitted and chromatically surrounded in mm. 46–57, along with C#. The arrival of A (m. 62) is anticipated by the double stop a bar earlier. 20 After the continuous eighth-note rhythm of the middle section, a return to the far slower rhythm of the opening—“as if nothing had happened”—would hardly be convincing. 21 See performance instructions.

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half of the measure as a kind of “sp” (Riemannian “°Sp”) in A minor – is shown in Ex. 7a–d. (Ravel’s notation with G# instead of A—see my attempt at a chordal interpretation in Ex. 7e – does not seem very convincing.) Similarly, the whole phrase could be heard as an oscillation between a tonic-like first and a subdominant-like second half of the bar.

Example 7: Coda: tonal recompositions and score (mm. 70–75)

Ex. 7f “translates” the virtual three-part texture of mm. 71–75 into a real one and elaborates this to a kind of late-nineteenth-century texture, a reference Ravel could have had in mind while composing this passage.22 (The original score is shown in Ex. 7g.) By contrast, mm. 76–79 rather overtly allude to the kind of “pentatonic E minor” in a guitar-like fourth chain, whereas the parallel fifths of mm. 80–81 remind us of the first form of Western polyphony.23 Through historical and “extra-musical” implications, this coda transcends musical discourse in the narrow sense; even so, it is fully integrated in the process of 22 As a stylistic model one might consider, for example, Franck’s three organ chorales. 23 Similar gestures of final disillusionment by stratifications of fifths and fourths may be found in Oiseaux tristes (m. 26), La vallée des cloches (mm. 58–63, recapitulation of the pentatonic opening), Le Gibet (m. 48, likewise reflecting the opening of the piece). At the beginnings of Daphnis et Chloé and Concerto pour la main gauche, stratifications of fifths and fourths grow out of harmonically neutral material.

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developing variation24 as well as in the cadential process of a stretched dominant pedal (mm. 76–79) whose tonic resolution is delayed by a kind of parenthetic plagal cadence in the last three measures.25 By focusing successively on the minor second, major seventh, perfect fourth, and perfect fifth in the process of developing variation, Ravel produces areas of distinct coloration that play with reminiscence in a twofold manner: first, through “pale”26 diatonic or pentatonic reflection of earlier passages of this movement and of the first, and second, by creating historical associations triggered through the transformation of these passages. The only departure from the coda’s diatonic scale and the most explicit historical allusion is the cello’s adoption (mm. 70–74) of the movement’s climax and (with this) the transitional theme of the first movement. Though hardly integrated from a tonal point of view, tending towards chromaticism, and consisting nearly exclusively of major sevenths and whole tones, this idea presents a kind of idée fixe: a tonally disruptive element that will accompany the sonata up to its very end. III To return, by way of conclusion, to the broader question of Ravel’s dramaturgic way with tonality, the contrast between the two framing sections and the climax of the movement described above proves to be a shift between extreme variants of a basically modal compositional structure. This allows for passages characterized by the diatonic scale, progressions by fifths and consonant dyads, as well as for passages not controlled by any collection. In such passages, modally defined chords or dyads are replaced by fixed and “dissonant” interval constellations with salient major sevenths and controlled by a network of major- and minor-third axes. This “modal compositional structure” has a number of essential features, matters of technique as well as of drama. The difference between the two structural variants is smaller than one might think: The beginning and largest part of the A’ section are decidedly modal insofar as they avoid not only leading tones—by using the Dorian and Aeolian modes— but even semitones in general, as well as any distinct hierarchy between harmonic degrees. Conversely, the apparent atonality of the “Peripeteia” stage of the drama (mm. 36–45) proves to be integrated into the modal structure of the movement as a whole: in spite of their dissonant (and from a tonal point of view, vague) harmonies,

24 Rhythmically, these measures derive from mm. 70–71. Harmonically, they reflect (or prolong) the pentatonic constellation of the violin part in mm. 74–75. 25 The direct succession of degrees v (mm. 76–79), iv (80–81), and i functions (82) recalls Bachian pedal points; compare the ending of the C# minor fugue in Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1. 26 The pale character of the A’ section (in comparison to the B, but also to the A section) is basically due to the diatonic, sometimes even pentatonic quality of the violin part and most of the cello part.

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the linear progressions of this passage are based on the same third and fifth axes as the rest of the movement. The harmonic middleground of the movement confirms what goes for most of Ravel’s “advanced” works since at least the Rapsodie espagnole: Minor-third axes are the preferred structure as long as it is about “equivalence”27—that is, about arpeggiations in the harmonic foreground and middleground as well as about the central points of the movement—but major-third axes serve as a mode of intensification. On the harmonic surface, Ravel’s transformations are based on a process that stretches seconds, thirds, and fifths into sevenths and ninths. This process aims toward a gradual crystallization and isolation of “dissonant” interval constellations (see the passage leading to the climax and catastrophe). This is but a further stage of procedures tested by Ravel as early as 1905. It is not that the interval constellations as such are new, but rather that they are now isolated from any “harmonizing” chordal context. Constellations that in Miroirs appear as floating dissonances—embedded into a chordal context in which the possibility of resolution still exists or rather “resonates”—now prove to be emancipated dissonances in the literal sense of the term. Contrasts are mediated in most cases by a technique typical for Ravel, that is, combining temporarily invariant harmonic layers with minimal chromatic displacement. In the end, all transformations and contrasts are part of the formal dramaturgy of the movement. They are not merely means of expression, but part of the subject matter itself. In the context of this sonata, to reply to an openly diatonic beginning with a chromatic counterpart is a matter of aesthetic consequence. In the rondo-like last movement it is the coda that—in a stretto with three subjects— “draws the conclusion” of the tendency towards atonality that characterizes the whole Sonata (thus initiating another catastrophe). In the third movement, however, it is the climax and its direct neighborhood surroundings that advance into an area of tonal vagueness or—to put in with Ravel— breaks into poppy red. The individual stages within the process of transformation are represented as stations of a dramatic action: quiet (and melancholy) starting point, subtle “acceleration” (m. 17), hesitation (23), dive into the Paradis artificiel (25), “beautiful moment” (34–35), peripeteia (36), ca27 Michael Polth calls equivalence “the effect that different chords are heard as different aspects of one and the same sound.” As an example, he takes the progression Eb-A7-C7 accompanying the horn’s G at the beginning of Liszt’s Orpheus. Michael Polth, “Tonalität der Tonfelder: Anmerkungen zu Bernhard Haas […],” in Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 3 (2006): 172–73. Whether it makes sense to call minor third axes a “function” (as do Polth and others) should be decided from case to case. Here this interpretation is not without reason. With respect to Bartók, Ernö Lendvai called the members of a minor third axis a “function;” thus A-C-Eb-F# form the tonic, C#-E-G-Bb the dominant, D-F-Ab-B the subdominant axis. See Ernö Lendvai, Béla Bartók, An Analysis of His Music (London: Kahn and Averill, 1971), 1–15. Albert Simon applied Lendvai’s axis system to a full branch of compositional history reaching back to Schubert, see Bernhard Haas, Die neue Tonalität von Schubert bis Webern: Hören und Analysieren nach Albert Simon (Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel, 2004), 11–19; and Polth, “Tonalität,” ibid., 171–72. For a critical view of Lendvai’s theory see Peter Petersen, Die Tonalität im Instrumentalschaffen von Béla Bartók (Hamburg: Wagner, 1971), 10–13.

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tastrophe (46), return (58), and retrospective backward glance (m. 70 to the end). Without the theatrical elaboration of the transitions and their integration into the overall dramatical concept, these contrasts would not be plausible. The transitions are not just compositional means, but rather lie at the very center of an aesthetic attitude which is about nuance and transformation. Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. “Schöne Stellen” (1928). In Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 18, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 695–718. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. Bartók, Béla. “Harvard Lectures.” In Essays. Edited by Benjamin Suchoff, 354–92. London: Faber & Faber, 1976. Haas, Bernhard. Die neue Tonalität von Schubert bis Webern: Hören und Analysieren nach Albert Simon. Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel, 2004. Helbing, Volker. Choreographie und Distanz: Studien zur Ravel-Analyse. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2008. — “Noctuelles by Ravel: An Essay on the Morphology of Sound.” Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie 8 (2003): 142–51. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Ravel. Translated by Margaret Crosland. Reprint. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1976. Lendvai, Ernö. Béla Bartók: An Analysis of His Music. London: Kahn and Averill, 1971. Petersen, Peter. Die Tonalität im Instrumentalschaffen von Béla Bartók. Hamburg: Wagner, 1971. Polth, Michael. “Tonalität der Tonfelder: Anmerkungen zu Bernhard Haas […].” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 3 (2006): 167–78. Ravel, Maurice. Maurice Ravel: Lettres à Roland-Manuel et à sa famille. Edited by Jean Roy. Quimper: Caligrammes, 1986.

Tonality on the Town: Orchestrating . the Metropolis in Vaughan Williams’s . A London Symphony Alain Frogley In June 1922, on his first trip to the United States, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote to his friend Gustav Holst recording some initial impressions: I have now seen (a) Niagara (b) the Woolworths building and am most impressed by (b)—I’ve come to the conclusion that the Works of Man terrify me more than the Works of God—I told myself all the time that N’ga was the most wonderful thing in the world—& so it is—especially when you get right under it—but I did not once want to fall on my knees & confess my sins— whereas I can sit all day & look out of my windows (16 floors up) at the sky scrapers […]1

Vaughan Williams had crossed the Atlantic, a few months before his fiftieth birthday, to conduct the American premiere of A Pastoral Symphony (his third work in the genre) at the Norfolk Music Festival in Connecticut. His passion for New York was no fleeting infatuation; he later counted his first sight of the New York City skyline as one of the formative imaginative experiences of his life, a select group that included, more predictably, his first encounter with English folksong and his first visit to Stonehenge.2 Given the composer’s strong association with musical pastoralism, which extended well beyond his most recent symphony, some may find surprising, even a little shocking, Vaughan Williams’s bold reverence here for the man-made environment over nature—especially the skyscraper, the ultimate symbol of cutting-edge urban modernism. Yet in recent years both scholars and performers have been developing a much more nuanced and complex picture of this often misunderstood composer, including his use of pastoral imagery. A Pastoral Symphony, for instance, stemmed from Vaughan Williams’s experiences in the trenches of the First World War, not the leafy lanes of rural England, as was once thought. More to the point, the composer was invited to America on the strength of the success there of a very different work, his London Symphony; this was premiered in London in March 1914, though not heard in New York until December 1920. Towards the beginning of the work, nature and the city are brought into sharp juxtaposition: a slow introduction, in programmatic terms apparently representing 1 Ralph Vaughan Williams to Gustav Holst, 5 June 1922, in Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895–1958, ed. Hugh Cobbe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 132–33. A full account of the trip is given in Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 142–45. The research for this essay was begun during my tenure as a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies in 2005–6, and supported also by grants from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. 2 Ralph Vaughan Williams, “Musical Autobiography,” in Hubert Foss, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 22.

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the River Thames at dawn, is disrupted by an allegro that seems to hurl us into a busy street scene (Ex. 1). Juxtaposition is perhaps too neutral a term: brutal confrontation might be closer to the effect. This conflict, and others which I will discuss below, are played out across the course of the work.

Example 1: Ralph Vaughan Williams, A London Symphony, I, mm. 34–44. (All examples are taken from the piano score published by Stainer & Bell in 1922, an arrangement by Vally Lasker of the 1920 orchestral score, and are reproduced by kind permission of Stainer & Bell.)

Although orchestration, dynamics, and rhythm all play crucial roles in articulating the disjunction embodied in Ex. 1, the effect of rupture is also one of harmony and tonality, in terms both of dissonance and of contrasting pitch collections. Such conflicts turn out to be crucial to Vaughan Williams’s exploration throughout the work of the relationship of nature and the man-made city. I would also suggest that they sowed the seeds for the composer’s more far-reaching exploration from the mid1920s onwards of a finely balanced dialectic between diatonic tonality and various anti-tonal elements typical of mid-century modernism. Further, I would argue that their employment here in association with explicitly urban imagery is far from arbitrary, and that they offer a starting-point for broader reflections on possible connections between urban experience and the development of harmony and tonality in the twentieth century and before. I will begin by discussing this more expansive historical perspective, and then return to A London Symphony to offer some observations that illustrate the issues at stake.

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In the years leading up to the First World War, Vaughan Williams had been developing a musical language that would establish him as one of the most resourceful twentieth-century composers to retain a commitment to diatonic tonality, broadly conceived. His influence, which extended in his own lifetime beyond Britain to a number of mid-century American composers (e. g. Samuel Barber and Roy Harris), and continues today in film and popular music as well as the classical arena, has long been underestimated but is beginning to be appreciated in greater depth. Drawing on diverse influences, from the common-practice era, modern French music, Tudor polyphony, and English folksong, Vaughan Williams created a tonal language incorporating unusually subtle interactions of modal and chromatic practice, and recent analytical work has suggested a grasp of abstract theoretical possibilities sharply at odds with the surprisingly tenacious image of this composer as a groping and sometimes fumbling mystic.3 A number of works from before 1914, including On Wenlock Edge, the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and The Lark Ascending have pastoral associations, and although this was clearly not the single key to the development of his tonal practice, it was certainly enormously important. This is perhaps not surprising in terms of the development of tonality during the common-practice era, the backdrop to Vaughan Williams’s early formation as a composer. Throughout this period, and particularly in the wake of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony—the model for many later musical evocations of nature—the pastoral topic had been a locus of alternative approaches to harmony and tonality, most notably in the weakening or suspension of teleological harmonic progression (through the use of drone basses, for instance), or an emphasis on subdominant rather than dominant harmonic regions. The pastoral’s traditional association with religious works, and later with the incorporation of folk music or exotic elements, linked it also to the expansion of modal possibilities in nineteenth-century music. This stream of development became an important alternative energy source for tonal innovation, in counterpoise to the increasing chromatic saturation exemplified by Wagner’s Tristan, and it can be seen to culminate most powerfully in the early ballets of Stravinsky. Vaughan Williams’s pre-1914 music represents another fruitful outgrowth. This much is familiar territory. So, of course, is the underlying assumption that tonality can be taken to model aspects of social relations and individual consciousness, in the case of the pastoral as these relate to the natural world and time in particular; the language used to describe and categorize tonality, from at least Rameau to Schoenberg, has drawn heavily on social and even political imagery. Yet if we accept the general concept of tonality as social metaphor, whatever the particular mechanisms involved, in the case of the pastoral it does beg the question of what is on the other side of the equation, as it were, and this has received little attention from musicologists. If the pastoral ethos establishes an alternative psychological and/or physical space for the subject presumed to be experiencing the music, to 3 See in particular David Manning, “Harmony, Tonality and Structure in Vaughan Williams’s Music” (PhD diss., University of Wales, Cardiff, 2003); and Ian Bates, “Generalized Diatonic Modality and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Compositional Practice” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2008).

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what exactly is it an alternative? There are multiple answers, of course, depending on the context: the pastoral can oppose contemplation to action, offer a utopian escape from everyday “reality,” or counter the constraints of artificial social conventions, the clamor of war, or the pressures of humanity at large. And as in the other arts, the pastoral in music often involves complex elements of paradox and irony. But there has been a curious reluctance in the musical world to relate such oppositions directly to the most obvious dualism on which the pastoral has always turned, namely that of the country and the city—nature and the man-made environment. Indeed, the pastoral genre has always been a product of urban society, and dependent on the city for its meaning: shepherds and peasants do not write eclogues, for the most part. To put it simply, and with the most obvious example: if in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony the composer’s emphasis on the subdominant, and his avoidance of chromaticism and minor harmonies, represent the pastoral ethos,4 should we not assume that the more stressful tonal environment of a work such as the Fifth Symphony reflects in some way his experience as a city dweller? At one level this seems obvious—yet the question has not up to now been framed in quite this way. One reason the question has been neglected—and its implications obviously reach well beyond Beethoven—is no doubt that it must at one level seem simplistic. And how clearly may we define urban experience as something distinct from that of society in general, the forces of which musicologists do now study in great detail? By urban experience, I mean a set of impressions dependent on the particular spatial, temporal, and sensory characteristics of urban living, in addition to more abstract social relations of class and custom that may be diffused more broadly throughout society. There is in fact a vast body of scholarship in other disciplines addressing such issues, most notably in literature and the visual arts, and especially for the period from about 1800 onwards.5 It is true, of course, that Beethoven and his contemporaries offer little explicit representation of the city in their music; yet this should not discourage us, surely, from exploring ways in which implicit or indirect traces of metropolitan concerns may have shaped aspects of their work, and the understanding of which might open up new interpretative avenues.6 And the desirability of such an exploration becomes a veritable obligation as the nineteenth century progresses—despite the fact that music, at least in the realm of high culture, continued for the most part to steer clear of explicitly metropolitan subject 4 The extreme limitation of harmonic resources that Beethoven imposed on himself in this work, breached significantly only in the storm movement, has been discussed by many commentators: see David Wyn Jones, Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 5 Of the many sources one might cite in this context, two major representative volumes, from the disciplines of literary criticism and art history respectively, are William Chapman Sharpe, Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); and Timothy J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (New York: Knopf, 1985). 6 Though there are situations where the terms “urban” and “metropolitan” may usefully be distinguished from one another, for the purposes of the present discussion they will be used interchangeably.

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matter until the 1920s.7 It was in the second half of the nineteenth century that the truly unique nature of the modern metropolis and of modern urban experience, as something new and quite different from other modes of living, began to preoccupy social commentators, novelists, poets, and visual artists, from Baudelaire to Kraus, and Renoir to Sickert. Though a fascination with the city goes back to ancient times, including the Old Testament, rapid urbanization and industrialization, and in particular the extraordinary growth of cities such as Paris, Vienna, and especially London, effected a sea change in attitudes to the metropolis and, as the century drew to a close, an increasing sense of alarm and even panic. The new scale and speed made possible by technology—railways, trams, the telegraph, and so on—transformed notions of time, space (including vertical space), and sensory experience in all arenas. Such transformations created a sense of the urban environment as increasingly dehumanizing, and often mysterious, overwhelming, and threatening to the individual self; floods of generally rootless newcomers, more easily understood as a faceless mob than as individuals, precipitated an upheaval in social relations.8 Ironically, even when observers found a new kind of beauty in the modern cityscape, as in the case of Baudelaire, their frequent invocation of qualities such as the inhuman and the mysterious mirrored Romantic attitudes to untamed nature, creating an urban version of the sublime.9 (Vaughan Williams’s own comparison of his reactions to Niagara Falls and the Woolworth Building directly invites this parallel, falling squarely—and probably with a touch of the tongue-in-cheek—within the trope of the sublime, not least in an evocation of quasi-religious awe.) City dwellers came from increasingly diverse backgrounds and often distant regions of the nation and, in the heyday of empire, even the globe—classes, races, ethnicities, and reli7 Popular music during this period and later manifests more obvious connections with urban themes, and has received correspondingly much greater attention from musicologists. In the realm of art music, it might be argued that opera and related genres constitute an important exception to a wider reticence in engaging directly with the modern city: urban settings are an important backdrop in many operas of the period, particularly as we approach the end of the century. The most extensive discussion of urban themes and influences in nineteenth-century opera is Anselm Gerhard, Die Verstädterung der Oper: Paris und das Musiktheater des 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992); this has also appeared in English as The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998). Nevertheless, the works discussed by Gerhard rarely thematicize the city and urban experience in explicit terms. Probably the most celebrated opera of the period to do that is Gustave Charpentier’s Louise (1900), in which Paris becomes virtually a protagonist in the work. 8 The classic exposition of such alienation and its effects on the inner emotional life and outer social behavior of city dwellers is sociologist Georg Simmel’s 1903 essay “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” reprinted in Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, ed. Otthein Rammstedt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 7:116–31. The essay appears in English, translated by H. H. Gerth as “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), 47–60. 9 A more detailed account of such issues would clearly need to address changing attitudes to nature during this period, and distinctions between a traditional, relatively circumscribed notion of the pastoral topic, emphasizing peaceful contemplation and a human presence, and more varied and dehumanized evocations of the natural world.

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gions mingled and sometimes clashed in unprecedented ways. The development of the metropolis was inextricably bound up with the need for nations and empires to connect and control across increasingly vast physical distances, and across growing social and cultural chasms.10 By the first decade of the twentieth century, the case for hearing implicit connections between developments in musical style and the impact of urban experience, not least in the realm of harmony and tonality, becomes compelling. The fact that harmony involves both simultaneous and successive relationships between sounds, complicated by subtleties of texture, timbre, and rhythm, is enormously suggestive. The increasing prevalence in the period around 1900 of extreme harmonic flux, textural fragmentation and layering, formal disjunction, incipient bitonality, fleeting timbral effects, and so on, clearly invites comparison with literary and visual tropes of urban experience that emphasize simultaneity, collision, and the ephemeral; indeed, it can be argued that music was in many ways uniquely well suited to embodying such concerns, and of course modernists in the other arts, for instance James Joyce in Ulysses, often looked to music as a model for representing the multi-temporal complexity of the twentieth-century urban psyche.11 There have always been passing references in the literature to urban experience and the emergence of musical modernism before 1914, but only in the last few years have more sustained investigations appeared. The most ambitious contribution to date is Holly Watkins’s 2008 article on concepts of space and urban design in the development of Schoenberg’s atonality and the twelve-tone method.12 Watkins boldly interprets Schoenberg’s pre-serial works as being shaped fundamentally by issues of metropolitan subjectivity, despite the absence of explicit urban associations in their subject matter. But Watkins does not pursue the implications for music of urban studies in general beyond her immediate focus; and her concentration on Vienna, typical of other contributions in this area so far, illuminates only one metropolitan perspective of the time, albeit a critical one for the history of music. There has been little written so far on music and urban experience in other major metropolitan centers before 1914, and although certain concerns were shared in common across western cities, crucial distinctions need to be drawn not only between 10 One might fruitfully pursue parallels between high imperialism and expanded conceptions of tonality, especially in the symphony, but that would take us well beyond the present discussion. For some preliminary observations on such parallels see Alain Frogley, “Rewriting the Renaissance: History, Imperialism, and British Music since 1840,” Music and Letters 84 (2003): 256–57. 11 Joyce indicated that Chapter 11 of Ulysses was structured as a fugue, interweaving the perspectives of eight different characters. More recently, James Wood has analyzed urban scenes in Flaubert and others in terms of multiple simultaneous time-signatures: see Wood, How Fiction Works (London: Macmillan, 2009), 43–47 and 56–57. 12 Holly Watkins, “Schoenberg’s Interior Designs,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 61 (2008): 123–206. See also Thomas Peattie, “The Fin-De-Siècle Metropolis, Memory, Modernity, and the Music of Gustav Mahler” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2002); Julian Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Stephen Downes, “Eros in the Metropolis: Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 125 (2000): 41–61.

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different national cultures and their social preoccupations, but also in terms of the particular nature of the urban spaces and histories that characterized different cities. This brings us back, belatedly, to Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony, which may now be considered in a richer context. Surprising though it may seem, this symphony has a strong claim to be the most ambitious musical representation of a modern metropolis composed before World War One. Its closest counterparts in the orchestral arena are Delius’s tone poem Paris: The Song of a Great City (1899), Elgar’s overture Cockaigne: In London Town (1901), and Ives’s “contemplation” (as he called it) Central Park in the Dark (1906); yet while all three works constitute important precedents they are much more modest in scope, with the longest of them, the Delius, lasting only about twenty minutes. A London Symphony lasted close to an hour in the version performed in 1914, and even the heavily revised score heard today still typically runs at about forty minutes (Vaughan Williams revised it at least three times between 1918 and the mid-1930s).13 I will not dwell here on the programmatic background of the symphony, about which Vaughan Williams was reticent, but a few remarks are necessary. The composer revealed near the end of his life that the concluding section of the work was suggested by the final chapter of H. G. Wells’s Tono Bungay, a novel in the “Condition of England” genre published in 1908; the book concludes with the narrator-protagonist travelling down the Thames in a naval destroyer, reviewing England and its history impressionistically as he goes. I have argued elsewhere that the novel was most likely the initial impetus for the symphony, and surely influenced more than just its ending.14 Wells portrays a society in decay, and London as a vast and spreading cancer of mindless capitalism, engulfing an older England more in harmony both with itself and with nature. Such pessimism was reinforced by increasing social and political unrest in the years just before 1914, and it is not difficult to hear echoes of this vision in the many darker moments of A London Symphony. Nevertheless, in a landmark 1912 essay entitled “Who Wants the English Composer?” written while he was working on the symphony, Vaughan Williams exhorted his composer peers to embrace all the rich musical and sonic diversity of modern English life;15 he opens with a quote 13 See Stephen Lloyd, “Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony: the Original Version and Early Performances and Recordings,” in Ralph Vaughan Williams in Perspective: Studies of an English Composer, ed. Lewis Foreman (Taunton: Albion Music, 1998), 91–112. The original version can be reconstructed from manuscript sources in the British Library (Add. MSS 50317AD); it was recorded in 2000 by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Richard Hickox (Chandos 9902). The first movement was left virtually untouched in later revisions, but the other three movements were extensively altered. 14 See “H. G. Wells and Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony: Politics and Culture in Fin-deSiécle England,” in Sundry Sorts of Music Books: Essays on the British Library Collections: Presented to O. W. Neighbour on his 70th Birthday, ed. Chris Banks, Arthur Searle, and Malcolm Turner (London: British Library, 1993), 299–308. 15 Ralph Vaughan Williams, “Who Wants the English Composer?” Royal College of Music Magazine 9, no. 1 (1912): 11–15; reprinted in Vaughan Williams on Music, ed. David Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 39–42. For a detailed contextual examination of Vaughan Williams’s social and political views see Julian Onderdonk, “Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Folksong Collecting: English Nationalism and the Rise of Professional Society” (PhD diss., New York University, 1998).

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from Walt Whitman, and seems to share with the poet a willingness, unusual at the time, to see in urban social diversity signs of hope as well as threat. As we will see, A London Symphony celebrates this aspect of the city, even as it also evokes more destructive forces. If Schoenberg’s abandonment of tonality can be taken to embody a new metropolitan subjectivity riven by social alienation, as Holly Watkins argues, Vaughan Williams’s response to the city is certainly very different. Yet A London Symphony is a profoundly challenging work nevertheless. It was the composer’s most advanced attempt so far in his career to reconcile the diverse harmonic possibilities he had explored over the previous decade, which in addition to inventive modal elements included whole-tone, octatonic, and hexatonic materials. Here he sets out to assimilate such diversity into a relatively traditional symphonic concept of tonal unification, involving the vertical and horizontal integration of thematic and harmonic materials on a scale he had never before attempted; and he raises the stakes yet further by pushing to a new degree elements of modernist disruption, particularly intense dissonance and other potentially anti-tonal elements, and striving to encompass these also within the overall framework. Although violent disruption manifests itself in all parameters (e. g. rhythm and expressive topics), harmony and tonality represent the most crucial arena of conflict. Such elements are clearly suggested, one might even say demanded, by the particular programmatic subject matter. Yet Vaughan Williams continues to insist on tonality’s powers of integration against the potentially disintegrative forces associated with the metropolis, offering a social metaphor of some power: what exactly tonality represents for Vaughan Williams in this hermeneutic field I shall revisit in due course, but it clearly allows for a more optimistic and adaptive view of social and technological change than Schoenberg’s more radically alienated break with tradition. One should add that the choice of genre is also highly significant, given the long association of the symphony and the orchestra with metaphors of community and coherent diversity. The composer’s post-war revisions to the work strongly suggest that he had his own doubts as to just how far the disintegrative elements could be assimilated—how far tonality could be stretched before it snapped—in that his excisions included several of the most dissonant and harmonically disruptive passages in the original score. Nevertheless, the essential tensions remained in force. Furthermore, Vaughan Williams would return repeatedly to such issues in the remainder of his career, often in a drastically intensified form and in works without a programme, such as his Fourth Symphony: the imperatives of representing modern urban experience opened up possibilities that could be pursued more abstractly in his later music. The primary tonal elements of A London Symphony center on the interaction of G major, the overall tonic of the work, with various forces of opposition or contrast. These forces may be tonal, in terms of rival keys, or potentially anti-tonal, the latter primarily whole-tone and augmented triad structures that divide the octave symmetrically and tend to undermine diatonic tonality. Oppositions are at times dramatically verticalized as layered aggregations that suggest (locally or sometimes more extensively) multiple independent tonal centers, as in the music of Ives and

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Stravinsky from the same period. Hexatonic collections mediate between, or at least frame, a number of these elements at crucial points of the symphony. Though these interactions can be traced throughout the work, they are most clearly articulated in the first movement. This consists of a slow introduction followed by a sonata allegro; the latter unfolds an unusual deformation whose details cannot detain us here, but which involves two large rotations of material, the first comprising the exposition, the second the development, recapitulation, and coda, with elements of the slow introduction incorporated also towards the end of the allegro. Vaughan Williams never provided a detailed programme for any part of the symphony, and was in general tight-lipped and ambivalent about its meanings; he went further for some movements than others, but revealed very little about the first. He was obliged to acknowledge one obvious external musical reference, namely the sounding of the half-hour of Big Ben’s Westminster Chimes towards the end of the slow introduction, but he somewhat disingenuously (and unconvincingly) asked listeners to treat such references as “accidentals” rather than “essentials” of the music.16 Going rather further, he does seem to have at least tacitly tolerated for several years a programmatic guide produced by Madolen Coates, wife of the conductor Albert Coates, who was responsible for a number of important early performances. The majority of associations in Coates’s account of the first movement seem relatively obvious, in terms of well-established tropes of musical representation and the overall concept of a symphony about London (or by a Londoner, as Vaughan Williams preferred to put it).17 The slow introduction appears to represent the city at dawn, with the River Thames, and therefore nature, in the foreground (this music is recalled in the Wells-inspired Epilogue of the symphony, thus confirming independently the association with the river). The shrill and dissonant opening of the allegro indicates a shift of focus to the busy streets at the center of the metropolis, in particular the Strand, just off Trafalgar Square and not far from the river. The second main theme, characterized by brass-band swagger and ragtime syncopations, suggests Cockney working-class high spirits. According to Coates the slow and meditative section at the heart of the development section represents a withdrawal from the bustle of the main streets into one of London’s many quiet squares and side-streets (the squares often encompass small parks, invoking nature once again). 16 In his 1920 program note to the work: see n. 17 below. 17 The Coates program note is reproduced in The Analytical Concert Guide, ed. Louis Biancolli and William Mann (London: Macmillan, 1951), 706–10. Albert Coates conducted the American premiere of the symphony in New York in December 1920, and his wife’s notes appear to have been written for this performance. The composer himself wrote two program notes for the work, one in 1920, which gave no programmatic information at all on individual movements, and another in 1925, which cautiously suggested a few associations that listeners might find helpful, in the case of the first movement allowing that the allegro “may perhaps suggest the noise and hurry of London, with its always underlying calm”; both notes are reprinted in Manning, Vaughan Williams on Music, 339–40. By the mid-1920s Vaughan Williams had rather heatedly distanced himself from Coates’ account, yet Madolen Coates maintained that it stemmed faithfully from conversations that she and her husband had had with the composer: see Vaughan Williams to Percy Scholes, 21 September 1924, in Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams, ed. Cobbe, 146–47.

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After this the movement is largely concerned with recapitulating earlier material, though with significant transformations whose programmatic implications I will discuss in due course.

Frogley-3a

Example 2: Vaughan Williams, A London Symphony, I, mm. 1–7

œœ b œœ œ œ

b œ & b œœœ b œœœ œœ œœœ π bw ? b w b bw

110

Str.

bw

œœ œ bw

œœ œ



Poco animato



Wind & Brass

ƒ b b -

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Of the musical elements used to characterize the three primary programmatic associations, the explosion of clangorous street life was shown already in Ex. 1; the introductory river theme and the initial and closing ideas of the demotic second group are shown in Ex. 2 and Ex. 3(a)-(b) respectively. The driving force of the pitch materials, in this movement and across much of the symphony, involves conflict around scale degree 6 of G major, especially as neighbor to scale degree 5; this instability is represented at times as a function of major-minor modal mixture, but relates also to more chromatic interactions of the kind described above, and is replicated by analogy in other key relationships throughout the work. The issue emerges early in the slow introduction. In the context of open diatonic harmony derived from the initial adjacent fourths, D-G-A-D, melodic emphasis is given first to E-flat as scale degree 6 (mm. 5–13); this is soon flattened, however, as part of a passing but ominous turbidity in the harmonic waters (mm. 16–17). E-natural is restored in the transition to the allegro, but with the onset of the new tempo E-flat returns with a vengeance (m. 38), underpinning a kind of urban Schreckensfanfare (terror fanfare), to use Wagner’s resonant description of the opening of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; here a strident E-flat pedal drags the initial Gmajor triad of the upper parts down to E-flat minor, the hexatonic pole of G major (together the two triads create the complete hexatonic collection G-Bb-Bn-D-Eb-Gb).

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Despite the pedal, a harmonic stalemate ensues: G-major triads continue to sound, while the bass pounds out whole-tone figures rooted on E-flat, and the upper parts emphasize a sharper configuration centered on B-natural, introduced in m. 48. Meter as well as tonality fails to cohere at first, but eventually this suggestion of the threateningly chaotic side of metropolitan life subsides, and the tonality coalesces around a broadly Phrygian G minor. After this opening, a somber section of driving force, blossoming gradually into expansive but urgent lyricism, leads eventually into the second group of themes. These establish an ebullient B-flat-major tonality that once again places a strong emphasis on scale degree 6, in both natural and flatted forms. The latter, G-flat in this context, is present as a dissonant bass shadow in the otherwise diatonic fanfare that announces the new key (m. 112; Ex. 3(a)). This echoes the opening of the allegro; but whereas there the flat sixth in the bass was a disruptive, even destructive force, here it is assimilated as a more benign energy. In the closing theme (m. 133; Ex. 3(b)), which has the flavor of a music-hall song, G-flat even takes on a comic character, suddenly leering boozily out of the bass line in m. 140, as if to reassure us that the potentially disruptive social energies of the burgeoning metropolis, particularly those emanating from the working classes, can retain their vigor without undermining the body politic (unlike contemporaries obsessed with the idea of the “Mob,” Vaughan Williams’s socialist political leanings and respect for working people inclined him to a more optimistic view of class relations). This theme elaborates the adjacent-fourths figure of the slow introduction, a point driven home at the very end of the exposition by a repeated F-B-C-F triplet figure in the brass (m. 148), which is revealed as a kind of kernel of the closing theme. One might read into this connection a pentatonic affiliation of non-human nature and natural, unsophisticated man. Whether or not this is a step too far, the unveiling of such shared thematic foundations does hint at how the opposing elements of the work might be reconciled, or even revealed to be of cognate origin, and the development and recapitulation continue to probe and reconfigure the tensions and possibilities opened up in the exposition. We cannot pursue the rest of the movement in any detail, but a few points stand out. First, the recapitulation follows the most fundamental procedure of traditional sonata reconciliation, by the transposition of the original second-group material from B-flat to G major (though with new flat-side twists). Second, the coda brings into vertical combination, and in some cases horizontal thematic fusion, elements both of the second group and eventually of the slow introduction, including the rising-fourth figure. The end of the original closing theme is combined with a version of itself in augmentation, and this as well as other elements in the texture suggest the superimposition of multiple temporal perspectives. Though such textures can in essence be traced back as far as Notre Dame polyphony, their deployment in this programmatic context, and in such a way that creates high levels of dissonance, inevitably evokes one of the most prominent tropes of modern urban experience: the kind of jarring simultaneities and collisions represented in milling crowds, the interactions of pedestrian and mechanized traffic, or in this case, perhaps, the slow-moving Thames against the teeming streetlife along its banks. In harmonic terms, the independent melodic trajectories of

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the counterpoint justify unexpected harmonic combinations, in this case involving dissonance that is primarily diatonic yet nonetheless astringent at times. The sense of strain is palpable, but a metaphor of coexistence, if not complete reconciliation, is inescapable. This is confirmed by the ending of the movement. Just before a final rousing reaffirmation of G major, the composer quietly restates the Schreckensfanfare, then proceeds immediately to a forte version of the flat-inflected fanfare that initiated the second group, now in G: the connection between the flat-sixth element in both ideas is thus made quite explicit. It is noteworthy that this is the only one of Vaughan Williams’s symphonic first movements to end loudly and confidently. On the whole the mood darkens from here on, however. A twilit second movement, in which hexatonic elements evoke well-established associations with the uncanny,18 is followed by a vigorous Scherzo whose energy is drained by a tortured second trio.19 It is in the finale, however, that the most dramatic and overtly modernist conflicts of the first movement are revisited. As the finale progresses, intensifying chromaticism and slowly grinding dissonance begin to suggest massive forces that are now perhaps irreconcilable; at last we collapse into a void, and the opening of the first movement’s allegro, and then its slow introduction, are reintroduced. At this point Vaughan Williams moves to a different, implicitly metaphysical plane; a long and mysterious Epilogue (as he calls it), based on the river music of the first movement and apparently directly inspired by Tono Bungay, modulates across wide tonal spaces before finally and uneasily returning to G major. But the urge to reconcile the tonal conflicts of the symphony has not been abandoned entirely. The 5-b6 upper–voice motif of the first movement, which also launched the finale, returns now in ghostly form on muted brass, harmonically amplified into a pair of augmented triads, Gb-Bb-D and Eb-Gn- Bn (Ex. 4).20 The fact that the triads are augmented rather than major or minor embodies an important element of tonal organization heard throughout the symphony, and together they comprise the same hexatonic collection that underpinned the opening of the first movement allegro, now segmented into different harmonies. Yet the effect remains unsettling rather than conclusive; the final dissonance is left hanging in the air, and dissolves rather than resolves into the pianissimo G-major backwash, which slowly fades to nothing.

18 See Richard Cohn, “Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 57 (2004): 285–323. 19 But only in the original version of the work: this second trio was excised almost entirely in Vaughan Williams’s post-war revisions to the symphony and was their most significant casualty, fundamentally changing the character of the movement. In “Dancing in the ‘City of Dreadful Night’: Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg in the 1914 Scherzo-Nocturne of Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony,” a paper presented to the 2006 national meeting of the American Musicological Society in Los Angeles, I argued that the composer may have removed the trio because it presented a fractured modernist subjectivity typical of Schoenberg and others at this time but ultimately alien to Vaughan Williams’s own instinctive sympathies. 20 This progression was stated twice in the 1914 version of the score, but had been reduced to a single statement by the time that the first published version of the score appeared in 1920.

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The programmatic implications of this ending are ambiguous, to say the least. Are the oppositions exposed in the symphony reconcilable ultimately not through social and political dialectic, but only by invoking a mystical dissolution into some higher unity (one thinks of Ives, here, perhaps)? Or is this a bleaker vision, in which the failure to truly reconcile such forces can lead only to death and oblivion for civilization? There are no definitive answers to such questions, of course. Despite the troubled and sometimes threatening atmosphere that permeates much of the symphony, there are powerful elements of affirmation and celebration, even in the later movements; and though British political structures were under intense pressure, as a member of an influential upper-middle class Vaughan Williams would undoubtedly have felt more hopeful about the chances for progressive social change than would many of his contemporaries in continental Europe. What does seem clear is that Vaughan Williams’s engagement with the metropolis in A London Symphony emboldened him to develop an expanded vision of tonality that he believed could respond to the challenges of the modern world without sacrificing its rich legacy of social signification—a legacy that it was more valuable to interrogate than to reject out of hand. A London Symphony suggests that this vision can be taken at one level as a distillation and intensification of tensions (and of an ultimate interdependence) between the pastoral and the urban, and of nature and humanity, that had underlain western music for at least the preceding century, and which Vaughan Williams’s own particular sensibilities made him unusually well placed to bring into a new focus. The interrogation of such tensions took a number of different and sometimes extreme forms in his music after the cataclysm of the First World War, but in one way or another it continued to underpin much of his work until his death in 1958. The mechanized destruction, anonymous human masses, and sonic barrage of the 1914–18 war took to horrific and hitherto unimaginable new levels threatening aspects of modernity previously experienced most intensely in the metropolis—and yet all this was set against the backdrop of pastoral northern France. It is striking that Vaughan Williams’s own wartime experience resulted most immediately in the intense quiet of A Pastoral Symphony, a work at first hearing as different from its urban predecessor as possible, and yet on closer acquaintance related to it in a variety of ways (these include a shared preoccupation with pitting G major against various contrasting tonal elements). Vaughan Williams’s juxtaposition of New York

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skyscrapers and English folk-song in his litany of life-changing experiences is perhaps not so surprising after all. Bibliography Bates, Ian. “Generalized Diatonic Modality and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Compositional Practice.” PhD diss., Yale University, 2008. Clark, Timothy J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. New York: Knopf, 1985. Coates, Madolen. “Ralph Vaughan Williams: A London Symphony.” In The Analytical Concert Guide, edited by Louis Biancolli and William Mann, 706–10. London: Macmillan, 1951. Cohn, Richard. “Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 57 (2004): 285–323. Downes, Stephen. “Eros in the Metropolis: Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 125 (2000): 41–61. Frogley, Alain. “H. G. Wells and Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony: Politics and Culture in Fin-de-Siécle England.” In Sundry Sorts of Music Books: Essays on the British Library Collections: Presented to O. W. Neighbour on his 70th Birthday, edited by Chris Banks, Arthur Searle, and Malcolm Turner, 299–308. London: British Library, 1993. — “Rewriting the Renaissance: History, Imperialism, and British Music since 1840.” Music and Letters 84 (2003): 241–57. Gerhard, Anselm. Die Verstädterung der Oper: Paris und das Musiktheater des 19. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992. — The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Mary Whittall. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998. Manning, David. “Harmony, Tonality and Structure in Vaughan Williams’s Music.” PhD diss., University of Wales–Cardiff, 2003. Johnson, Julian. Webern and the Transformation of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Lloyd, Stephen. “Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony: the Original Version and Early Performances and Recordings.” In Ralph Vaughan Williams in Perspective: Studies of an English Composer, edited by Lewis Foreman, 91–112. Taunton: Albion Music, 1998. Onderdonk, Julian. “Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Folksong Collecting: English Nationalism and the Rise of Professional Society.” PhD diss., New York University, 1998. Peattie, Thomas. “The Fin-De-Siècle Metropolis, Memory, Modernity, and the Music of Gustav Mahler.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2002. Sharpe, William. Chapman. Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Simmel, Georg. “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben.” In Georg Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, edited by Otthein Rammstedt, 7:116–31. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. — “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Translated by H. H. Gerth. In Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, edited by Richard Sennett, 47–60. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969. Vaughan Williams, Ralph. Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895–1958. Edited by Hugh Cobbe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. — “Who Wants the English Composer?” Royal College of Music Magazine 9, no. 1 (1912): 11– 15. Reprinted in Vaughan Williams on Music, edited by David Manning, 39–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. — “Musical Autobiography.” In Hubert Foss, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Study, 18–38. London: Oxford University Press, 1950. Vaughan Williams, Ursula. R.V.W: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.

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Watkins, Holly. “Schoenberg’s Interior Designs.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 61 (2008): 123–206. Wood, James. How Fiction Works. London: Macmillan, 2009. Wyn Jones, David. Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony. Cambridge Music Handbooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Between Archaism and Modernism: . Tonality in Music for Amateurs in Germany around 1930 Ullrich Scheideler I In the middle of June 1930 the festival Neue Musik Berlin 1930 took place.1 At first glance, the program seems quite heterogeneous, with four discrete sections dedicated to music for and on the radio, recordings, electric music, and pedagogical works. The main ideas of all these sections, however, can be collectively summarized by terms such as Gebrauchsmusik and Gemeinschaftskunst. All these musical topics were characterized by a distance from traditional forms of musical hearing, and each advocated for music as not merely a part of concert-culture, but also a part of everyday life. For pedagogical music or—as it was more widely known—music for amateurs, the festival of 1930 marked the culmination of developments that had begun around 1900, but experienced a significant upturn after the First World War.2 This development had taken place in two branches. The first was the youth movement (Jugendbewegung), especially the youth music movement (Jugendmusikbewegung). The second was the broader idea of musical pedagogy, encompassing musical training well beyond the small demographic of children and youth. This second branch had

1 The Berlin festival was the successor of two other festivals: the Donaueschinger Kammermusik-Aufführungen zur Förderung zeitgenössischer Tonkunst (Chamber Music Festival to Support Contemporary Music in Donaueschingen, 1921–1926) and the festival Deutsche Kammermusik Baden-Baden (German Chamber Music Baden-Baden, 1927–1929). The procession to Baden-Baden in 1927 was due to new musical trends (especially Gebrauchsmusik) and the lack of good conditions for performances in Donaueschingen. Because of the economic crisis in the late 1920s, the city Baden-Baden wasn’t able to finance to festival after 1929. The music festival had to move again, this time to Berlin, where it was supported by the Rundfunkversuchsstelle bei der Staatlich-Akademischen Hochschule für Musik. No festival took place in 1931 and 1932, and in 1933 it returned again to Donaueschingen. 2 The pedagogical music at Neue Musik Berlin 1930 was divided into three subsections: The first was concerned with plays and songs for children, and contributions were made by Paul Hindemith (Wir bauen eine Stadt) and by Paul Dessau (Das Eisenbahnspiel). The second was about vocal music, especially pieces and textbooks for choir. The third focused on the genre of the didactic play (Lehrstück). In these sections compositions by Hermann Reutter (Der neue Hiob) and Ernst Toch (Das Wasser) were performed. It had also been planned that Kurt Weill’s Der Jasager be performed for the first time, but this performance was postponed to a slightly later date, and ultimately took place on 23 June at the Berlin Zentralinstitut für Unterricht und Erziehung (Berlin Institute of Education and Instruction).

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been widely propagandized and supported by the new Prussian state since the early 1920s. Although the two branches held a common preference for playing music oneself over music listening, they advocated quite divergent ideas and concepts which led them to embrace very different ideas about the right kind of music. Keywords for the youth music movement were “nature,” “naturalness,” “simplicity,” and “community.” In respect to music this meant a turn against the romantic, against musical genres like salon music and operetta, and against professionalized concerts on one hand and the new media for radio and gramophone on the other.3 Adherents of the youth music movement preferred mainly German folksongs and works for small vocal and instrumental ensembles from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, often published in volumes called Hausmusik (music for the home).4 During the 1920s, however, the Prussian state, led by Leo Kestenberg5 from the ministry of Culture and Education, had begun to reform musical education in public schools as well as the private sphere. Two main ideas were central: first, better training of teachers in both schools and private musical education; and second, a promotion of musical education, so that more children would learn to sing or play an instrument.6 This second idea corresponds in some respect with the ideas of the youth music movement, although Kestenberg’s pedagogical concept was quite far away from its broader ideals. His conception was less dogmatic, and he refused the dilettantish and unambitious music-making typical of the youth music movement. Instead he stood for professionalism of both musical education and musical performance. The movement’s strong conservatism was also notably absent from Kestenberg’s approach.7 While transforming the earlier ideas of the youth musical

3 See Hilmar Höckner, “Die Musik in der deutschen Jugendbewegung” (1927), in Die deutsche Jugendmusikbewegung in Dokumenten ihrer Zeit von den Anfängen bis 1933, ed. Archiv der Jugendmusikbewegung e.V. Hamburg (Wolfenbüttel: Möseler, 1980), 928–30. 4 For example: Deutsche Hausmusik aus vier Jahrhunderten, ed. Hugo Leichtentritt (Berlin: Bard, Marquardt & Co, 1907); Hausmusik (Beihefte zur Musikantengilde), ed. Fritz Jöde (Wolfenbüttel: Julius Zwitzlers Verlag, 1919 ff.). In this latter series new music was published along with the old, for example, works by the musicologist August Halm, who composed many works for the youth music movement 5 In July 1932, the Prussian government had to resign and the German right-wing chancellor Franz von Papen was appointed by the President of the Reich Paul von Hindenburg as “Reichskommissar.” In the following months a lot of civil servants were forced to leave their positions. Kestenberg had to retire on 1 December 1932; in March 1933 he immigrated to Prague. The main texts (Musikerziehung und Musikpflege [1921], Denkschrift über die gesamte Musikpflege in Schule und Volk [1923]) are reprinted in: Leo Kestenberg, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, Die Hauptschriften, ed. Wilfried Gruhn (Freiburg: Rombach, 2009). 6 These ideas led to the founding of special music schools (one of the first was founded in 1927 in Berlin-Neukölln, a mostly working-class part of Berlin). 7 Kestenberg’s relation to youth music movement is described by Andreas Eschen, “Kestenberg und die Jugendmusikbewegung: Von der Reichsschulkonferenz und Jödes Musikalische Jugendkultur bis zur Ernennung Jödes zum Professor,” in Leo Kestenberg: Musikpädagoge und Musikpolitiker in Berlin, Prag und Tel Aviv, ed. Susanne Fontaine et. al. (Freiburg: Rombach, 2008), 69–87.

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movement into an official program of the Prussian state, Kestenberg tried to reconcile the idea of music for amateurs with modern music.8 II It is quite obvious that any music which could satisfy the divergent demands of both the youth music movement and the new pedagogical music would represent a compromise. As the debates around 1930 demonstrate, two main conclusions were drawn from the idea of music for amateurs and music as Gemeinschaftskunst in respect to the music itself. First, there should be recourse to older models of musical techniques or forms, but in a way which maintains a link to modern music. Only if the earlier concepts of the youth music movement were combined with new musical means could this music gain an important position in the musical culture of the present. This idea led to music with an anti-romantic aesthetic that referred to pre-classic models, embracing an archaistic style of simple rhythmic and melodic features combined with mostly diatonic harmony. Because this archaism could not consist in merely copying older models, it is plausible that the question of tonality, which had to be old and new at the same time, necessarily played a decisive role. Secondly, the idea of Gemeinschaftskunst made it necessary that the main musical technique be polyphony rather than homophony or ostinato. In a 1930 article in the journal Melos titled “Music for amateurs” (Musik für Dilettanten), Georg Marzynski tried to determine some typical musical elements for this sort of music. These were: rhythm, dynamics, phrasing, form of expression, and—most important—polyphonic musical texture. To Marzynski’s mind “one should not let amateurs produce colours of harmony and sound. The amateur does not want to play filling parts. His field is polyphony; he will manage all rhythmic and dynamic complications with pleasure if this part has a vital development.”9 Tonality was therefore determined in two respects: It had to conserve the middle between archaism and modernism, and it was formed through the motion of single parts as well as the chord progressions, thus constituting a mixture of both melodic and harmonic tonality. In this essay I will analyze sections of compositions by Bruno Stürmer, Kurt Weill, and Paul Hindemith in order to demonstrate the actual consequences of these preconditions. I will ask which concepts of tonality 8

Kestenberg was not alone, and the growing educational literature serves as evidence that his ideas were shared by composers. Examples of this trend include Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, started in 1926, and the 1931 violin method by Erich and Elma Doflein to which Bartók, Hindemith, and others made contributions. 9 Georg Marzynski, “Musik für Dilettanten,” Melos: Zeitschrift für Musik 9, No. 1 (1930): 7. “Man darf [den Dilettanten] also nicht dazu verwenden, Harmoniefarben und Klangfarben zu produzieren. Wo die Füllstimmen anfangen hört die Möglichkeit des Dilettantismus auf. Sein Feld ist die Polyphonie, die lebendige Durchführung der Stimme. Er bewältigt mit Vergnügen alle rhythmischen und dynamischen Komplikationen.” At the end of his article Marzynski argues that there is a “natural convergence between the nature of modern music and music for amateurs.” Marzynski, “Musik für Dilettanten,” 7. “natürliche Konvergenz zwischen der geistigen Art der modernen Musik und der Musik für Dilettanten.”

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were carried out and which aesthetic ideas influenced their specific usage of tonality. To this end, I will first analyze a section of Feierliche Musik (Solemn Music) by Stürmer which clearly shows some connections to older music; and then proceed to an investigation of Kurt Weill’s Der Jasager—a work intended for the Berlin festival. Finally, I will ask how we can apply this context to a work by Hindemith, who was closely linked to the idea of music for amateurs from the mid 1920s. To that end, I will analyze a section of his Plöner Musiktag, written for a music school in 1932. III Bruno Stürmer’s Feierliche Musik was published in 1931.10 Stürmer was surely not a leading figure within the new music scene of the Weimar years.11 However, he was prominent enough to acquire Schott as one of his publishers, was frequently present at music festivals, and sometimes wrote essays in musical journals.12 His potential as a representative for some tendencies of the 1920s and 1930s is evident in the development of his career: After some very experimental music—e. g. Mass for Machine-Men13—he later composed numerous works for amateurs, both for orchestra and for chorus (mostly male chorus). In 1931—the same year as the publication of Feierliche Musik—Stürmer published a short essay with the title “The new tonality.”14 What he described in this article provides a key to understanding some elements of his tonal and harmonic thinking. For Stürmer, the “new tonality” is essentially “melodic tonality” (melodische Tonalität), and perhaps it is no accident that this same term was often used by twentieth-century theorists to characterize the music of the early seventeenth century.15 Stürmer wrote that in new tonality, the scale or tone series (Tonreihe) is the main basis of tonality. This scale could be a traditional major or minor scale as well as an artificial scale (willkürlich aufgestellte Tonreihe). Stürmer’s conception of new tonality also made a distinction between melody and harmony: While 10 Bruno Stürmer, Feierliche Musik op. 65 für zwei Streichorchester oder zwei Quintette (Köln: Verlag von P. J. Tonger, 1931). The work consists of three movements—a prelude (D minor), a choral (G minor) and a fugue (D minor)—and is intended for school or amateur orchestra. 11 Stürmer was born in 1892 and is from the same generation as Hindemith. He studied musicology and music theory in Heidelberg and Munich, founded a music school in the lower Rhine city Homberg in 1927, and moved to Frankfurt/Main after the Second World War. In his early years he composed mostly instrumental music, but since the 1930s, when he became a conductor of some choirs, he started to write more vocal music. Stürmer could continue his career after 1933 as well as after 1945. 12 For example: Bruno Stürmer, “Offener Brief an Herrn Professor Paul Hindemith, Berlin,” in Die Musik 23, no. 1 (October 1930): 41–42; Bruno Stürmer, “Bemerkungen zur Stillehre,” in Die Musik 23, no. 6 (March 1931): 420–21. 13 Bruno Stürmer, Die Messe des Maschinenmenschen für Männerchor, Bariton-Solo und Orchester, op. 48 (1929). 14 Bruno Stürmer, “Die neue Tonalität,” Die Musik 24, no. 2 (November 1931): 118–20. 15 See for example, Ernst Kurth, Die Voraussetzungen der theoretischen Harmonik und der tonalen Darstellungssysteme (Bern: Max Drechsel, 1913), 89.

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melodies are in every respect tonal because they have a specific scale (that is, one with a tonal center) as their foundation, the situation of the harmony is not so clear. The harmony could be regarded as tonal insofar as it uses mainly the notes of the scale, but atonal in that it incorporates not only major and minor chords but more dissonant sounds as well. In the new tonality, where the main technique of musical composition is polyphony, harmony is regarded only as a result of melodic events (das Nebeneinander). Harmony does not influence the melody by, for example, requiring that leading tones or dissonances be resolved.16 In respect to determination of tonality Stürmer’s text shows a clear rank order: the melodic line is essential, less important are the chords (das Übereinander). However, it seems that Stürmer levels this hierarchy when composing for amateurs. My analysis will concentrate on the first twenty-three measures (section A) of the first movement,17 primarily in respect to tonality and harmony. Tonally, the first three measures function to express the key of D  minor. There are only two uncommon elements: the C in m. 2 (instead of C#),18 and the bass line in the first measure, which has a dissonance that does not resolve by stepwise motion. Besides these two elements the beginning describes a normal D-minor cadence progression (tonic, subdominant, dominant, and tonic). Measures 4–6 show an upper-voice melodic motion ascending to the fifth degree, A. In the next two measures this motion continues but now slightly faster: the ascending melodic motion in mm. 7–8 needs only one measure to reach the octave D. Two other forms of increasing speed can be found. First, the rhythmic motive in the bass line of m. 1 is recapitulated in diminution in m. 4 and m. 7; second, the break in the first orchestra decreases from two measures long (mm. 4–5) to only one measure (m. 7). This tendency is paralleled by harmonic progressions which depart from the tonal center of D minor. In m. 6, D minor is reached within a plagal cadence, but at the end of m. 8 there is a C-major chord which leads to F major in m. 9. Furthermore the bass line has an increased number of dissonant notes. When looking at the violin and viola parts only, the following harmonic progression appears: In mm. 4–6 a-d-g-d, in mm. 7–8

16 Stürmer, Die neue Tonalität, 120. “Wir haben also […] eine melodische Tonalität erreicht, da, wenn Tonalität Begriff des Tonzentrums ist, die Tonreihe, ob willkürlich aufgestellt oder traditionell übernommen, Zentrum des melodischen Geschehens ist. Das Nebeneinander ist also zentral gerichtet. Das Übereinander jedoch schaltet aus, da es, zwar geachtet, aber doch nicht Ausgangspunkt, keine Funktion mehr hat. […] [W]ir haben heute wieder eine Tonalität im Melodischen, haben aber endgültig verzichtet auf die Funktion der Harmonie, einbegriffen der Funktion einzelner bis dahin von der Harmonie usurpierter Töne. Zu diesen rechne ich z. B. den Leitton der Tonleiter, den harmonisch-melodischen Vorhalt, überhaupt die auflösungsbedürftige Dissonanz, soweit sie auf die Melodie Einfluß hat.” 17 The overall form of the first movement is a varied ritornello form A-B-A’-C-A’’, in which the sections B and C contrast the A sections in terms of texture (B and C are mostly polyphonic instead of homophonic like in A), tonality (B is in various keys, at the beginning mostly in C minor and F minor; C starts in C# minor) and tempo. Section A has the tempo indication Allegro moderato, B has Poco tranquillo e cantabile and is therefore much slower, C has Quasi presto (alla breve). A’ is a type of development section, and A’’ is a short reprise and culmination. 18 When the first measures return at the end, C is replaced by C# (see m. 104).

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Bruno Stürmer, Feierliche Musik, 1st movement, mm. 1–23 © Edition Tonger GmbH, www.tonger.de

F7-g-a-Bb-C.19 The bass often has notes which are not part of these chords, and only the cadences in mm. 5–6 and m. 8 are consonant. The main rules for the harmony of these eight measures are: first, strict diatonic material; second, only major or minor chords in the upper parts with the possibility of dissonances in the bass; third, cadences lacking normal dominant-tonic structure; and fourth, mostly root-position chords. The principles of harmonic succession in the piece are better analyzed in mm. 9–14 of the first quintet. The progression F-C-d-C-Bb-a-Bb-d-g-d-a-d-E does not seem very regular, with the only noticeable property being that Stürmer avoids—as in mm. 2–3—a normal dominant-tonic cadence.20 Taking the bass line into account, however, reveals almost uninterrupted contrary motion between the bass and the 19 Upper case letters refer to major, lower case to minor triads. 20 Only the transition from m. 8 to m. 9 consists of such a progression (C–F).

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melodic line of the first violin. Furthermore, mm. 11–12 have a melodic sequence similar to mm. 9–10 (a third upwards), and most of the line in the second violin and viola has this sequence as well. The only part which does not fit into this sequence is the bass, resulting in a melodic sequence that isn’t paralleled by a harmonic sequence. All these elements (diatonicism, contrary motion of the outer parts, chords in root position, lack of functional harmony, waiving of harmonic sequences) call to mind older music, specifically the modality of the seventeenth-century homophonic four-part chorale (Kantionalsatz). So the basis for Stürmer’s new tonality is in fact an old tonality. Its archaic tone is decreased through the motion in quavers in the other quintet, which forms a second compositional layer and contrasts to the homophonic texture of half notes and quarter notes. Two pairs of parts (the two violins plus viola and cello) have melodic sequences in mm. 9–14, mostly playing in consonances. However, between these pairs dissonances are rarely treated in strict counterpoint. Rather, dissonances are apparently placed with reference to motives and resolve freely, giving the impression that they are almost accidental. The principle that motives can disturb strict counterpoint comes from later music, especially the music of the baroque. Thus, the musical texture of the second quintet, eighteenth-century in style, might be characterized as befogging the main harmony expressed in the first quintet, which comes from seventeenth century. Different principles of harmony and counterpoint are combined. In the following section (mm. 15–23) Stürmer changes his use of tonality. He composes a diatonic melody, a mixture of A major and A minor (only m. 19 does not fit into this scheme; in mm. 22–23 the tonality goes back to D minor), but this time we find no diatonic harmony: this section starts in A major, touches on G# major in m. 16, D minor in m. 18, A minor in mm. 20–21. Modal chord progression is now intermixed with chromatic progressions.21 This passage also continues the loose polyphony of the previous measures. The bass instruments move in strict contrary motion to the first violin, and the second violin and viola have a melodic counterpoint which is somewhat independent from the other parts. The first commonality between both sections appears in some shared negative features, that is, the absence of dominant relations and the avoidance of the leading tones characteristic within romantic functional harmony. The tonality tends more toward the harmonic language of the early seventeenth century, which is blurred (though not disturbed) through different means: in mm. 1–14 through a dissonant bass-line and the embellishments of the second quintet, and in mm. 15–23 through a form of chromaticism which recalls Gesualdo and the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth-century madrigal. In regards to the specific context of Feierliche Musik, one might consider Stürmer’s essay “The new tonality” as an idealistic model, one not uniformly practiced in this piece as a whole. In Feierliche Musik, melodic tonality does not produce particularly dissonant sonorities or even atonality. In fact the number of possible chords is limited, and all chords are based on thirds (normally major or minor chords). In this respect harmony is not subordinated to counterpoint, but rather both 21 Dominant related chord progressions are composed in mm. 16–17 and mm. 22–23.

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elements are in balance. Counterpoint influences the succession of chords (through contrary motion between the outer parts), even as the pre-selection of chords influences the counterpoint. That neither counterpoint nor harmony has a strong priority might well be related to the work’s status as music for amateurs. Within this context, Feierliche Musik could be interpreted as a domestication of melodic tonality in which Stürmer compensates for his amateur audience by employing quite different procedures of bringing counterpoint and harmony together within a genre, which refer to the model of the baroque concerto grosso, as evident in the sections’ rhythmic and melodic features and the texture between the two groups of string quintets.22 Informed by an anti-romantic aesthetic, Feierliche Musik attempts to shift from seventeenth and eighteenth century music to modern music, “remaking the past”23 through a mixture of very different historical styles. However, the resulting archaism is unable to hide its eclectic nature. IV In contrast to Stürmer, who was involved with music for amateurs from the beginning of his career, Kurt Weill came to this genre only in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His rise had begun with the two one-act operas Der Protagonist and Royal Palace, both composed around 1925, and was followed shortly thereafter by works which marked a breakthrough in his career: Mahagonny, Der Zar läßt sich photographieren, Happy End and—most prominently—Die Dreigroschenoper, first performed in 1928. Beginning with Mahagonny, Weill had started to compose music which had been characterized—even by the composer himself—as simple in respect to style and practicability (e. g. the characters in Dreigroschenoper could be sung by actors), and which was intended to popularize the genre of opera as well the music itself. This period, which is musically linked with the label “song-style,” lasted only a few years. Already in October 1929, for example, Hans Heinsheimer from Universal-Edition wrote in a letter to Weill that the style of Dreigroschenoper could only be transitional, and could not be copied for very long.24 He argued that the song-style could only be the basis for a new style which he described as a “new Romanticism,” a new desire or world of emotion (Gefühlswelt) which had to com22 The editors of the series in which Stürmer’s Feierliche Musik was published wrote in a preface: “Die Stücke dieser Reihe verkörpern einen Typ feierlicher Eröffnungsstücke, wie sie die Barockzeit liebte […]. Gleich anderen Erscheinungen der älteren Kunst hat heute die Suite in kleinerer Besetzung an Boden gewonnen. In diese Richtung gehört die hier vorgelegte ‘Feierliche Musik’ von Bruno Stürmer. Aus dem Gegeneinander und der Zusammenfassung zweiter Streichergruppen schöpft sie ihre Kraft, größere Schwierigkeiten meidet sie, macht aber von polyphoner Linienführung und neuzeitlichen Klangwirkungen Gebrauch.” 23 See Joseph N. Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 24 “Der Stil, der in der Dreigroschenoper und in Happy End festgelegt war und der auch in Mahagonny […] beibehalten bleibt, dieser Stil ist, darüber sind wir uns ja alle einig, nicht auf die Dauer kopierbar.“ Heinsheimer to Weill, 10 October 1929, in Kurt Weill, Briefwechsel mit der Universal Edition, ed. Nils Grosch (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2002), 192.

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prehend entirely the “Neue Sachlichkeit” in order to overcome it.25 In his answer a few days later, Weill agreed with Heinsheimer’s position and stressed gravity and expressivity as the main features of his new musical language.26 However, he made clear that this change of style had, in fact, already begun in Mahagonny and even in some pieces in Happy End. Der Jasager, composed in early 1930, is one of the first works by Weill based on this new style.27 The work is written for a school orchestra of strings (without viola), two pianos, and some wind instruments ad libitum. The choir and the solo vocal parts are intended for students as well.28 Weill regarded Der Jasager as a quite important work in respect to his own development,29 because he wanted to combine two musical elements within it. On one hand he continued and even strengthened his ambition to write in a popular way, this time for schools or students.30 On the 25 “Hier machen Sie mit dem Stil von 1928 Schluss, hier wird der neue Klang der nächsten Jahre hörbar, jener Klang, den ich mir gebildet denke aus einer neuen Romantik, einer neuen Sehnsucht, einem neuen Suchen nach dem Unerreichbaren, kurz einer Gefühlswelt, welche die neue Sachlichkeit ganz begreifen musste, um sie nun aber zu überwinden.” Heinsheimer to Weill, 10 October 1929, in Weill, Briefwechsel, 193. 26 “Dieser neue Stil übertrifft an Ernst, an Grösse und Ausdruckskraft alles […], was ich bisher gemacht habe.” Weill to Heinsheimer, 14 October 1929, in Weill, Briefwechsel, 194. 27 On 14 April 1930 Weill informed Universal-Edition: “The composition of Jasager is finished now.” (“Die Komposition des Jasagers ist beendet.”). In Weill, Briefwechsel, 245. Dates of performances can be found in Hyesu Shin, Kurt Weill, Berlin und die zwanziger Jahre: Sinnlichkeit und Vergnügen in der Musik, Berliner Musik Studien 23 (Sinzig: Studio-Verlag, 2002), 260–61. 28 For the aesthetic context of Der Jasager see: Stephen Hinton, “Lehrstück: An Aesthetics of Performance,” in Music and Performance During the Weimar Republic, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 59–73; and Klaus-Dieter Krabiel, Brechts Lehrstücke: Entstehung und Entwicklung eines Spieltyps (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1993). Weill published a short essay, titled Über meine Schuloper Der Jasager (1930), reprinted in Kurt Weill, Musik und Theater: Gesammelte Schriften, mit einer Auswahl von Gesprächen und Interviews, ed. Stephen Hinton und Jürgen Schebera (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1990), 91–92. 29 The decisive point of the plot of this school opera is as follows: a boy sacrifices himself for the community, he became ill on a trip with a small group, and he gives his agreement to be thrown into a valley and be killed so that the other members of the group can continue their trip. In its own time and in contemporary scholarship this plot is not considered as highly problematic as it seems at first glance, because the ideal of education to community in opposite to individuality was a main issue in all parts of society during the 1930s. However, although this school opera was quite successful, not all people were quite happy with the text, which therefore was altered in some performances. The plot and its implications are discussed in Ian Kemp, “Der Jasager: Weill’s Composition Lesson,” in A Stranger Here Myself: Kurt Weill-Studien, ed. Kim H. Kowalke and Horst Edler (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1993), 143–57. Some (negative) reactions are presented in Jürgen Schebera, Kurt Weill: Eine Biographie in Texten, Bildern und Dokumenten (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1990), 142–43; and in Krabiel, Brechts Lehrstücke, 147–57. 30 In his talk with Hans Fischer, Weill announced another school opera, this time with a funny plot (“Ein lustiges Stück wird als zweite Schuloper folgen”). See “Aktuelles Zwiegespräch über die Schuloper zwischen Kurt Weill und Dr. Hans Fischer.” Weill, Musik und Theater: Gesammelte Schriften, 308). Later, in May 1932, Weill told Universal-Edition that he wished to compose an opera for adult amateurs rather than children (“Unterdessen habe ich mit Neher angefangen zu

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other hand this new music for the amateur—especially for youth—shouldn’t be based on song-style.31 In a dialogue with Hans Fischer, Weill tried to render his conception more precisely, but ultimately stopped short of describing any details.32 Speaking in terms of general principles, Weill said only that he must achieve the highest degree of simplicity in order to be comprehensible, going on to add that simplicity must not become fabricated primitivity.33 Turning away from song-style in connection with simplicity had consequences for Weill’s approach to tonality. Song-style still relied on functional harmony, most obviously, for example, in “Und der Haifisch” from Dreigroschenoper or “Moon of Alabama” from Mahagonny, where the simple cadences are changed, masked, or alienated, but nonetheless remain intact.34 In Der Jasager, Weill’s compositional approach to tonal organization shows substantial changes from the style of Dreigroschenoper. My analysis will concentrate on the ritornello (the first 20 measures) from the overture which serves as a type of motto and is therefore repeated two times during the work. It presents the central theme of the play: to say yes not because somebody wants me to do so, but rather with conviction or agreement. Ian Kemp has characterized this overture as “a seventeenth-century minuet.”35 Although it might be difficult to assign this movement to a specific century one will surely agree that there is a minuet-like gesture present. Thus, Weill made a turn to the past but was eager to alter the old elements in order to create a new style: The tempo is quite fast, and more important, the phrase structure of the upper parts is asymmetric (4 + 3 + 3 + 2 + 4 + 4 measures), forming a contrast to a typical simple dance-like minuet. In this already alienated context, tonality is formed in an unusual way that shows nearly no link to seventeenth-century music. The measures of the music example below do not show a diatonic musical language, at least not in a traditional major-minor sense. Actually it is not easy to determine the exact key: At the beginning the tonal center seems to be on A, but because there is a continuous shifting between C and C# it remains unclear whether it is A minor, A major, or arbeiten. Es hat sich in mir in letzter Zeit eine neue Idee festgesetzt, von der ich mir viel verspreche. Ich möchte nämlich, so wie ich mit dem Jasager die Gattung der Schuloper begründet habe, jetzt wieder einen neuen bestimmten Typus herausbilden, den ich mit dem Wort “Laienoper” bezeichnen möchte, d. h. also Opern, die von Laien aufgeführt werden können, aber diesmal nicht von Kindern, sondern von Erwachsenen.” Weill, Briefwechsel, 385.) Neither plan was realized. 31 “Das Werk ist im jetzigen Moment ausserordentlich wichtig, da es gegenüber den Versuchen, mich ständig auf die Dreigroschenoper festzulegen, eine unverkennbare Abkehr vom Songstil zeigt.” Weill to Universal-Edition, 14 April 1930, in Weill, Briefwechsel mit der Universal Edition, 245. 32 “Aktuelles Zwiegespräch über die Schuloper zwischen Kurt Weill und Dr. Hans Fischer” (April 1930), reprinted in Weill, Musik und Theater: Gesammelte Schriften, 305–10. 33 “Die Einfachheit darf nicht zur konstruierten Primitivität werden.” Aktuelles Zwiegespräch über die Schuloper zwischen Kurt Weill und Dr. Hans Fischer (April 1930), reprinted in Weill, Musik und Theater: Gesammelte Schriften, 305–6. 34 See Tobias Faßhauer, Ein Aparter im Unaparten: Untersuchungen zum Songstil von Kurt Weill (Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2007). 35 Kemp, Der Jasager, 147.

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something else (e. g. a church mode). Thus, it is useful to divide the musical texture into different layers and then examine how these layers interact. I will first analyze the melodic line, and then move on to examine the voice leading of the other parts, the scale material, and finally the chords and their progression. The voice leading of the upper voice is composed quite clearly: it ascends by step from A to A (mm. 1–8), then downwards to B until m. 13. In that we have a scale which includes the note F# (instead of F), we could call this a Dorian mode. The middle voice is bonded to the upper voice, but in different intervals: at first in a fourth, then in a sixth, then in a fifth, and so on. The material is the same with the exception of m. 10, in which A# instead of A is written. The bass has a clear motion as well, which may be best understood as a double motion, one from A to C (mm. 1, 4, 7), the other from D# to E to F and then downwards. The scale material of the bass line is not the same as in the upper voice: Weill composed D# instead of D, F instead of F#. Thus, the three parts employ different scales but the same tonal center. If one looks at the scale material and examines all notes which are played (not only the voice leading) it seems possible to subsume the measures from m. 1 onward into two-measure units and from m. 5 onwards into one-measure units. The opening measures already show us the main principles. The first two measures have {q = 132}

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a Lydian scale (in m. 1 A Mixolydian). In mm. 3–4, which in the upper voice are a real sequence (minor third) upwards, the scale is A Phrygian. Measures 5–7 have E as a focal pitch, and there is a shift between E Aeolian (m. 5 and 7) and E Lydian (m. 6). Here also the opening measures present different scale material than that indicated by the voice leading of upper voice and bass line. Considering the chordal sequence of this passage, the harmonic center A minor and later (from m. 13 onwards) E minor becomes obvious especially at the beginning and end of the passages: The first five measures have a clearly functional chord progression (I-II-I-iv-v), mm. 12–13 expresses a type of Phrygian cadence iv6-v; and in mm. 17–20 (now written in the key E minor) there is a strong cadence (I-IV-v-I) with a clear bass line. However, even these chords defy traditional expectations: In m. 2 the II is major (like a secondary dominant), and the dominant in m. 5 is minor instead of major. The same happens in m. 13 and in the cadence after m. 17, where the major and minor quality of subdominant and dominant chords is interchanged. Measures 8–12 represent a fauxbourdon (i.e. a progression of sixth chords), but this overall structure is disturbed through a “wrong” chord in m. 10 (Eb minor instead of Bb major or B major) and the use of chromaticism. Weill’s method of composing tonality could be described with the term polymodality, introduced by Bartók.36 All the different parts have the same tonal center, but use different scales or keys. Specific to Weill’s polymodality is a very careful entanglement of vertical and horizontal events (i.e. harmony and polyphony). The different layers are brought into a hierarchy: Most important is the voice leading of the first violin, which has a clear tonal center derived from a mixture of A Dorian and E Dorian. (The embellishments sometimes alter this mode to A Mixolydian). In the second violin, Weill writes a type of harmonic counterpoint. This part is rhythmically parallel to the first violin, but some passages express different keys. The bass line is composed in a similar way. The result of this combination is a highly consonant sound (especially on the first beat of each measure), achieved through an uncommon progression of chords. At the same time one finds residues of traditional functional harmony, although modified through chromaticism and interchange of major and minor chords or double functions (e. g. the last chord in m. 19, which mixes dominant and subdominant functions). The latter point might be properly characterized as “alienation” (Verfremdung), a recourse to older harmonic progressions but with significant changes. More pertinent, however, is Weill’s art of montage, which has polyphony as a precondition37. This sort of montage has the effect that the single elements, which evoke archaism through simple rhythmic pattern and diatonic melodies in church modes, create as a whole a new and modern musical language. In contrast to the montage in Stürmer’s piece, the polymodality and 36 The concept of polymodality is illustrated in Béla Bartók, “Harvard Lectures,” in Béla Bartók, Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), 354–92. 37 For a more detailed description of the principles of Weill’s technique of montage cf. Tobias Faßhauer, “Des Songstils Nagelprobe. Anmerkungen zu den Kurt-Weill-Arrangements von Jerzy Fitelberg,” in Zwischen Komposition und Hermeneutik. Festschrift für Hartmut Fladt, ed. Ariane Jeßulat, Andreas Ickstadt, Martin Ullrich (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 316.

217

Tonality in Music for Amateurs in Germany around 1930

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können in der unteren Oktave durch Tuben verstärkt werden

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16

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Trp./Flhr.

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b. bœ bœ  Œ F

Paul Hindemith, Plöner Musiktag, Morgenmusik, 1st movement, mm. 1–19 © Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG

the logic of the voice leading in Weill’s Der Jasager make this montage stringent. Thus, what Marzynski considered as one of the main points while composing for musical amateurs is at the same time the solution for Weill’s desire to turn away from song-style. In this respect, the genre of school opera and Weill’s musical or stylistic reorientation matched perfectly. V Paul Hindemith was surely the most prominent composer in Germany during the 1920s and early 1930s. Since the late 1920s he had been very much involved with Gebrauchsmusik and with music for amateurs. Well known among his oeuvre at this time are works like Lehrstück (1929) and Wir bauen eine Stadt (1930), but he also wrote pedagogical music for amateurs and—after 1927—a lot of so-called Spielmusik for various ensembles.38 The most extensive of these latter works is 38 The “Spielmusiken” are published in the Hindemith Complete Edition, Series 8, Sing- und

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Plöner Musiktag from 1932, consisting of four parts (Morgenmusik, Tafelmusik, Kantate, Abendkonzert) and written for a music school in the small north-German town of Plön.39 The first part, Morgenmusik (Morning Music), is divided into three short movements,40 and the following short analysis will concentrate on the opening of the first movement, for wind instruments only. Like Stürmer and Weill, Hindemith’s Morgenmusik contains references to older music, this time to an Intrada type of the Renaissance. This is obvious in the instrumentation, meter, and musical gestures. The tonality of this piece at the beginning is Bb major. Measure 7 starts a transition passage which leads to Eb minor (mm. 10–13), followed by another transition, in which the harmony returns to Bb major (m. 19).41 Again we have a mixture of melodic and harmonic tonality, in which the tonality of the melodic lines became the more important one. The melodic line of the upper part seems to be composed very traditionally in two respects. First, it uses the diatonic scale of Bb major as a frame, stressing the triad notes B (m. 1), D (m. 4) and F (m. 10). Second, phrases end on the supertonic on two occasions (see m. 3 and m. 7). However, these common elements are treated in an unconventional way. The diatonic outline is disturbed quite unexpectedly in mm. 3 and 6 by chromatic notes. And concerning the supertonic, which is normally combined with a half-cadence, Hindemith does not satisfy our expectation. In place of an F major dominant, absent throughout the piece, Hindemith uses a chord consisting of layered fifths (Eb-Bb-FC, m. 3) and a chord without a third (C-G, m. 7). This observation shows us a trend already present in the opening measures, which do not very often use major or minor chords. In the first seven measures there are only two: the Bb-major chord in m. 1 and the Eb-major chord in the middle of m. 5. Two elements seem to be important in the other sections: the substitution of non-traditional chord structures, and the polyphonic musical texture. Essential for Hindemith’s choice of chords is his tendency to employ non-traditional sonorities such as the unison (m. 2, 5) or chords consisting of fourths or fifths (m. 3, end of mm. 6 and 7, m. 13) at important points such as the beginnings and endings of phrases. The major triad is reserved exclusively for beginnings, endings, and contrast-sections (m. 13 and m. 17). The polyphonic texture, on the other hand, leads to sounds which are equally careful in their planning. In his book Craft of Musical Composition—published in 1937 and hence five years later than Plöner Musiktag—Hindemith made a decisive distinction between chords which contain a tritone and those that do not.42 This Spielmusik, Übungsstücke, Etüden 2 vols. (Mainz: Schott, 2000 and 2009). Hindemith also published some articles concerning music for amateurs. Most important are “New tasks” (Neue Aufgaben), written for the 1929 Baden-Baden festival, and “Demands made to the amateur” (Forderungen an den Laien) from 1930. Both texts are reprinted in Paul Hindemith: Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, ed. Giselher Schubert (Zürich: Atlantis, 1994). 39 The music festival at Plön took place on 20 June 1932. It is described in detail in Gerd Sannemüller, Der ‘Plöner Musiktag’ von Paul Hindemith (Neumünster: Wachholtz 1976). 40 I: Mäßig bewegt, II: Lied. Langsame Viertel, III: Bewegt. 41 The harmonic stations in the second part of the piece are Eb major (mm. 23–29) and Bb major (m. 32 to the end). 42 Paul Hindemith, Unterweisung im Tonsatz (Mainz: Schott, 1937), in particular p.  102f. and

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distinction seems important for the first movement of Morgenmusik as well, because Hindemith avoids this interval to a large extent. Therefore, sonorities like the dominant-seventh chord are excluded from this movement. This avoidance might be an explanation for some alterations, for example, the D instead of D at the end of m. 6. The minor second and major seventh are often abandoned as well. Hindemith has other reasons for altering pitches as well, often preferring to have an upper leading tone falling by semitone to cadential goals (see mm. 3, 6–7, 18–19). Avoidance of major and minor chords, traditional dominants or cadences, and tritones as well as semitones within the chord structure are negative criteria. What, then, serves as a positive criterion for the musical texture and tonality in Hindemith’s Morgenmusik? This is voice leading, and five elements seem to be of importance in this regard: the motion in seconds, the contrary motion of the outer parts (see mm. 2–3, 5–6, 7–10), linkage of parts in parallel fourths and fifths, sustained notes, and (already mentioned) downward resolution of melodic leading tones. All these elements show recourse to music of the sixteenth and seventeenth century and perhaps even medieval music, or at the very least a turn away from the romantic. For the listener, the impression of archaism is obvious. However, the lack of chromatic progressions does not mean that there is only one key. The tonality of this short passage is, in fact, primarily based on a diatonic scale, but Hindemith makes an uncommon use of it. Remote tonal regions or chords like D major in m. 10 or the D-major chord in m. 17 are reached through diatonic motion, not through nineteenth-century-style chromaticism. It is here that the polyphony comes into play. Polyphony is not used as imitation (with the exception of mm. 7 and 8), but is rather a means to create the different sonorities. In comparison to Stürmer’s Feierliche Musik, the relationship of harmony and counterpoint is interchanged: In Feierliche Musik chord progression is the foundation and counterpoint often seems merely accidental. In Hindemith’s Morgenmusik, counterpoint asserts priority, while chords can be regarded (or heard) as a result of the movement of individual parts.43 In Morgenmusik, Hindemith retained some formal principles of tonality, but weighted them in a new way: Leading notes resolve downwards, major and minor chords are repressed in favor of other sonorities, and the relationship of harmony and counterpoint is changed. That this unfamiliar tonality is interpreted as a reference to older times despite no actual citation of fifteenth- or sixteenth-century music is a symptom of its alignment with the Intrada type. Only in combination with a much older musical texture can this new sort of tonality suggest an archaic musical language. p. 118f. Every chord which contains a tritone has the function of a dominant. 43 There are still some residues of functional harmony. This is obvious in the transition from m. 4 to 5, in which the melody in the upper voice (D–D–D–G) implies a dominant-tonic relation in G  minor. This chord progression indeed seems implied, but the D-major chord is replaced through a chord which sounds more like Bb major with a minor seventh. However, this chord has a dominant function because of the tritone Ab/D. Nonetheless, these sections with some kind of functional chord progressions are rare. Even in the case of mm. 4 and 5 the linearity of the middle parts seems to be more important than the resulting chords.

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VI In his article “Gegen die neue Tonalität” (Against the new tonality), written in 1931, Theodor W. Adorno criticizes some tendencies of music written around 1930, especially tonal music, which “is praised as being in compliance with community.”44 Adorno does not refuse tonality in toto, but rather bases his ideas on two primary conditions: First, that tonality bears inherently its own history, which must not be neglected in new tonality. Second, that music (as all genres of art) should not confirm but alter the consciousness of mankind. In this respect, Adorno demands a tonal practice in which conclusions are drawn from historical conditions. Adorno’s main formal category for this tonality is “Stimmigkeit” (coherence), which he only sees in a dialectic handling or even “Zersetzung” (disruption) of old tonality. The works by Stürmer, Weill, and Hindemith were written under different conditions than those Adorno had in mind. They wanted to fulfill what Adorno had criticized: they wanted to be “gemeinschaftsbildend” (community building), and to reconcile average listeners with modern music. However, Adorno’s categories of historical determination of tonality and coherence are also relevant. One gets the impression that all three compositions (at least in the analyzed sections) had clearly in mind the historical conditions of tonality. Under the condition of music for amateurs, however, different conclusions were drawn. Their tonality can be interpreted as an attempt to elude this historical conditionality by going back to a state of tonality which is quasi pre-historical. In this sense, archaism represents a way out of the historical implications of tonality. The question is whether this tonality is nonetheless coherent, and whether in this archaicizing tone a modern element is contained. Coherence is thus mostly the result of a cooperation of melodic and harmonic tonality or counterpoint and harmony. Stürmer’s tonality is highly eclectic, a sort of patchwork. There is no synthesis of the different tonalities or historical references: We have diatonic modality, sixteenth-century chromaticism akin to that of Gesualdo, romantic chromaticism, and textural and rhythmic features traceable to the baroque music of Bach or Handel. The archaic tone results from the collective impression of these elements, especially the absence of tonal sequences and normal dominant-tonic relations. In this piece we find melodic tonality in only a very restricted sense. The upper voice expresses the main tonality, and the function of counterpoint is either to create a chord progression through contrary motion (within a limited selection: only major and minor chords are allowed) or to make this tonality more diversified through motivic motion in the bass line or through chromatic notes in the inner parts. Counterpoint is therefore mostly accidental. The modernity of Weill’s Der Jasager lies in a form of tonality which can be labelled as “polymodality.” As in Stürmer, we have melodic tonality, but this time organized in a quite different way. In this tonality not all the notes within a part are 44 Theodor W. Adorno, “Gegen die neue Tonalität,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 18, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 103. “während eine ungebrochene und ernsthafte Neutonalität, die man als gemeinschaftsgemäß anpreist, gerade die Verfallenheit ihrer Mittel verschweigt […].”

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important, but only the voice leading (e. g. the main notes at the downbeat of a measure). The counterpoint of this voice-leading, which is characterized through asynchronous motion (in respect to the speed of its progression through scale material) in the three parts, is responsible for a type of tonality which resulted in common chords as a basis for uncommon chord progressions. Because the voice-leading of every part has its logic and spans over the entire twenty measures, there is a coherent tonality for the whole section, one which simultaneously shows a tendency to disrupt older models: The traditional concept of voice leading is duplicated as in a Cubist picture, giving a fresh new perspective on a familiar object. Hindemith’s music after 1925 was characterized by Adorno as “archaic and classicistic.”45 If we compare Stürmer’s music to Hindemith’s Plöner Musiktag, we find similar elements of “melodic tonality”: the diatonic melody, the avoidance of major and minor chords, and the principle of contrary motion. Insofar as this goes, we could agree with Adorno’s assessment. However, Hindemith’s archaicizing tone is—in respect to tonality—not the result of going historically backwards to a specific point, but rather the result of a new tonality. To put it in a formula: Hindemith is an archaistic modernist, who creates archaistic music with modern means. Most important in this respect is the relationship of harmony and counterpoint or voice leading. While Stürmer and Weill use traditional chords as in seventeenth-century music (Stürmer) or in an untraditional way (Weill), Hindemith relinquishes the use of these chords and uses other forms which derive their consistency through polyphony. Hindemith’s tonal usage is affirmative. He has no interest in disturbing tonality. Rather he wants to establish a new tonality, which avoids romantic concepts of chord progressions (through leading notes), but simultaneously provides space for a new concept, in which untraditional sonorities of far distant harmonic regions could be incorporated through counterpoint. As Stephen Hinton has shown in The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik, the quarrels between the exponents of the youth music movement and those of state-supported pedagogical music were yet to be settled in 1930.46 Hindemith could perhaps be interpreted as the composer who tried to reconcile the two branches of music for amateurs. In the works for amateurs, the archaistic tone is neither combined with eclecticism (as in Stürmer’s Feierlicher Musik) nor disturbed by montage of different tonal layers of voice leading (as in Weill’s Der Jasager). His popularity might be a sign that this reconciliation was successful to a certain extent. Beginning only a few years later, in 1933, however, the situation was to change fundamentally.

45 Theodor W. Adorno, “Ad vocem Hindemith. Eine Dokumentation,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 17, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 217. “Hindemiths neuen Ton, den archaisch-klassizistischen.” 46 Hinton, The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik, in particular 194–212.

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Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. “Ad vocem Hindemith. Eine Dokumentation.” In Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 17, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 210–46. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982. — “Gegen die neue Tonalität.” 1931. In Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 18, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 98–107. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. Höckner, Hilmar. “Die Musik in der deutschen Jugendbewegung.” 1927. In Die deutsche Jugend­ musikbewegung in Dokumenten ihrer Zeit von den Anfängen bis 1933, edited by Archiv der Jugendmusikbewegung e.V. Hamburg, 928–30. Wolfenbüttel: Möseler, 1980. Eschen, Andreas. “Kestenberg und die Jugendmusikbewegung: Von der Reichsschulkonferenz und Jödes Musikalische Jugendkultur bis zur Ernennung Jödes zum Professor.” In Leo Kestenberg: Musikpädagoge und Musikpolitiker in Berlin, Prag und Tel Aviv, edited by Susanne Fontaine, Ulrich Mahlert, Dietmar Schenk, and Theda Weber-Lucks, 69–87. Freiburg: Rombach, 2008. Faßhauer, Tobias. Ein Aparter im Unaparten: Untersuchungen zum Songstil von Kurt Weill. Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2007. Hindemith, Paul. “Neue Aufgaben.” 1929. In Paul Hindemith, Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden. Edited by Giselher Schubert, 34–36. Zürich: Atlantis, 1994. — “Forderungen an den Laien.” 1930. Paul Hindemith, Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden. Edited by Giselher Schubert, 42–44. Zürich: Atlantis, 1994. — “Berlin 1930.” 1930. Paul Hindemith, Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden. Edited by Giselher Schubert, 45–46. Zürich: Atlantis, 1994. Hinton, Stephen. The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik. New York: Garland, 1989. — “Lehrstück: An Aesthetics of Performance.” In Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic, edited by Bryan Gilliam, 59–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Kemp, Ian. “Der Jasager: Weill’s Composition Lesson.” In A Stranger Here Myself: Kurt WeillStudien, edited by Kim H. Kowalke and Horst Edler, 143–57. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1993. Krabiel, Klaus-Dieter. Brechts Lehrstücke: Entstehung und Entwicklung eines Spieltyps. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1993. Marzynski, Georg. “Musik für Dilettanten,” Melos: Zeitschrift für Musik 9, no. 1 (1930): 6–8. Sannemüller, Gerd. Der ‘Plöner Musiktag’ von Paul Hindemith. Neumünster: Wachholtz 1976. Schenk, Dietmar. Die Hochschule für Musik zu Berlin: Preußens Konservatorium zwischen romantischem Klassizismus und Neuer Musik, 1869–1932/33. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004. Shin, Hyesu. Kurt Weill, Berlin und die zwanziger Jahre: Sinnlichkeit und Vergnügen in der Musik. Berliner Music Studien 23. Sinzig: Studio-Verlag, 2002. Stürmer, Bruno. “Die neue Tonalität.” Die Musik 24, no. 2 (November 1931): 118–20. Weill, Kurt. Musik und Theater: Gesammelte Schriften, mit einer Auswahl von Gesprächen und Interviews. Edited by Stephen Hinton und Jürgen Schebera. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1990. — Briefwechsel mit der Universal Edition. Edited by Nils Grosch. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002.

Among the Ruined Languages: . Britten’s Triadic Modernism, 1930–1940 Philip Rupprecht Implicit in the widely circulating trope of an artistic avant-garde is the figure of a creator breaching uncharted territory, working ahead of contemporary audiences and beyond extant theoretical frameworks or linguistic norms. From a longer historical perspective, though, the shock of the new often fades, and a composer’s language may later be seen to have roots in prior conceptual and artistic traditions. Benjamin Britten was from an early point in his career identified as precocious and modern, frequently with the slur of being merely clever.1 For later listeners, though, Britten’s music contributes to a mid-twentieth century “moderate mainstream”2 and his language is construed as basically tonal in outlook. With such identifications, commonly, go assumptions about the music’s presumed distance from avant-garde developments—developments identified primarily with tonality’s alleged exhaustion, rather than its flourishing. A history of tonality in the early twentieth century necessarily encompasses, as Michael Beiche has noted, its relation to a conceptual opposite, atonality.3 From an early twenty-first-century vantage point, though, the familiar evolutionary narrative positing the demise of tonality ca.1910 ignores the realities of a century of subsequent musical history. What Brian Hyer has termed the “technological allegory” in which tonality “collapses, breaks down or wears out from overuse”4 fails to explain the continuity and renewal of tonal practice signaled (by title alone) in Stravinsky’s Symphony in C of 1940. Where, then, do we situate Britten in an account of twentieth-century tonal composition, particularly in one acknowledging composers who retained the most familiar elements of a “tonal” vocabulary—major or minor triads—within their idiom? Britten’s early successes from the Bridge Variations (1937) through Les illuminations (1939) and the Michelangelo Sonnets (1940) display luminous triadic sonorities and reach clear tonal conclusions, emulating the neo-classic euphony 1 The following remark is typical: “Experience and depth should not be sought in Britten … for they are apparently deliberately avoided. But his technical equipment is of a virtuoso order and he uses it with noteworthy ease and skill.” Nicolai Lopatnikoff, “England’s Young Composers,” Modern Music 14 (1937): 206. 2 Arnold Whittall, “Individualism and Accessibility: the Moderate Mainstream,” Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 365. 3 Michael Beiche, “Tonalität,” Terminologie der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995), 425. 4 Brian Hyer, “Tonality,” New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), 25:591.

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of Stravinsky’s works of the later Twenties—Apollon Musagète, for example—or the more austerely tempered triadic formations of Symphony of Psalms. Absent is the attenuated key feeling of Schoenberg or the linear-polyphonic emphasis of Hindemith. Tonality never seems lost in Britten, and by the post-war era his continued embrace of triadic resources set him apart from what Hans Keller dubbed “the anti-diatonicism of the present.”5 To position the mature Britten as a conservative, though, is to overlook his early exploration of an idiom closer to what one Thirties critic mischievously called the “official revolution”6 of atonalism; the danger is that we misconstrue the historical genealogy of what might be termed Britten’s triadic modernism. As a schoolboy, Britten briefly essayed a Schoenbergian style of intense motivic concentration, a direction that eventually faded during his formal training at the Royal College of Music in London. Even at the RCM, though, the young composer continued to take more stylistically from his mentor Frank Bridge than from his official composition teacher, John Ireland. Several works from this period—the Quartettino, the Sextet for Wind (both 1930), the Quartet in D (1931) and the Sinfonietta, Op. 1 (1932)—eschew common-practice formulae, exploring pedal point and ostinati as agents of tonal definition. These early scores argue that Britten’s more triadic style, when it finally emerged, was no disavowal of the new but a purposeful and individual embrace of “major-minor” resources by a composer well versed in recent, “advanced” stylistic developments. Much the same might be said of Walton’s turn to a relatively diatonic idiom after the chromatic works of the early Twenties.7 The present chapter will reevaluate Britten’s triadic modernity first by sketching some motifs in the British debate around musical modernism, in which the issue of harmonic innovation was central. Next, a glance at one of the more selfconsciously advanced of Britten’s early works, the little-known Sextet, confirms just what the young composer had taken from modernist quarters. Against this backdrop the music of Britten’s first maturity a decade later represents a stark contrast, more overtly tonal in effect and simpler in chordal vocabulary. Scott Goddard, writing in 1946, spoke for many in praising Britten’s “unusual ability to combine the cultures of an old and a new art,” achieving “a freshness unlike anything in our music.”8 Through analytic readings of two songs—“Villes” from Les illuminations and “Veggio co’ bei vostri occhi” from Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo—I will explore the hexatonic orientation of Britten’s subtly shifting key sense, most audible through prominent major-third shifts between triads. Mapping the distance between diatonic tonal practices and Britten’s more symmetrically deployed arrangements

5

Hans Keller, “The Musical Character,” Benjamin Britten: a Commentary on his Works from a Group of Specialists, ed. Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller (1952; repr. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972), 343. 6 Constant Lambert, Music Ho! (1934; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948), 208. 7 Walton’s early String Quartet, performed at the ISCM in 1923, was admired by Berg. 8 Scott Goddard, “Benjamin Britten,” British Music of Our Time, ed. A. L. Bacharach (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1946), 216.

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among triads, it may be possible to get at the modernity of his language, its familiarity and its freshness. 1. “Half-decided on Schönberg”: . British Views of Harmonic Innovation, 1910–1930 Debating whether Impressionism, Expressionism, Classicism etc. are right. I have half-decided on Schönberg. I adore Picasso’s pictures. Britten, 20 November 1929 diary entry9

That Britten himself was usually reticent when it came to discussing his own art need not detract from critical awareness of the historical and technical debts he owed to wider musical developments of his own youth. Influences on Britten’s juvenilia ranged from the Wagnerian and Debussyan echoes of teenage orchestral works (of 1926) to the Bergian trichordal sequences of the Quatre Chansons Françaises (1928), perhaps Britten’s most psychologically acute early setting of texts.10 That the 14-year old composer was, at the time of his first private lesson with Bridge (January 1928), absorbing an eclectic range of modern French, German, and Russian music, seems clear. The precise nature of Bridge’s influence in matters of style and technique, though, is harder to pin-point. Nor should we assume Britten’s development proceeded entirely by osmosis, through score-reading or live contacts with works of Schoenberg, Scriabin, Stravinsky or by Bridge himself, miraculously unmediated by any theoretic perspective. Britten’s development as a teenage composer in the Twenties and early Thirties might be considered not only in closely biographical terms, but equally with attention to the British reception of modernist developments recorded in journalistic and published sources of the day. British versions of musical modernism were as complex and self-contradictory as those of any other national culture, this despite perpetual retrospective jibes against the purported dominance of an English pastoralist idiom of “folksily wistful meandering.”11 The goal here is not to re-construct a whole climate of opinion, but rather to draw out those threads of the culture pertaining most directly to Britten’s stylistic-technical evolution. A particular focus will be British journalistic and academic-pedagogical reactions to what one writer termed the “widening of the harmonic field” in early twentieth-century music.12 No one attitude defines British discussions of chromatic or atonal music, but after about 1910, the latest music of Schoenberg and others was reviewed frequently 9

John Evans, ed. Journeying Boy: the Diaries of the Young Benjamin Britten (London: Faber, 2009), 27. 10 See Christopher Mark, Early Benjamin Britten: a Study of Stylistic and Technical Evolution (New York: Garland, 1995); and idem, “Juvenilia (1922–1932),” The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, ed. Mervyn Cooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 11 Peter Maxwell Davies, “The Young Composer in America,” Tempo 72 (1965): 2. 12 G. H. Clutsam, “The Whole-Tone Scale and its Practical Use,” Musical Times 51 (Nov. 1910): 703.

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and intensively by many observers. If the spectrum of opinion is broad, Ernest Newman in 1914 almost spans it single-handedly in one of his biting formulations: “As Schönberg’s name is at present a byword among us for calculated and meaningless cacophony, it is important to insist on the absolute sanity and sincerity of the mind that is revealed to us in the Gurre-Lieder.”13 The Twenties brought a more temperate rhetoric, even among detractors: George Dyson attributed “aimlessness” in Schoenberg’s Op. 11 to the composer’s invention of an “unknown tongue”; for Cecil Gray, the same opus sounded “almost classical in form and style.”14 A decade later, public knowledge of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique and the works up to Op. 31 produced more complex assessments; both Constant Lambert in his widelyread Music Ho! and John Foulds (in a less well-known book) praise the pre-war romanticism of Pierrot before dismissing row composition as cerebral and academic.15 Glancing ahead, momentarily, one notes a critical retreat in later decades from blunt outrage at the fact of atonality, but the advent of a challenge to tonal traditions continued to remain controversial. As late as 1949, the issue was still being framed by British writers as a stark question—“music’s future: tonal or atonal?”16 For the context of Britten’s teenage studies with Bridge, though, I return for a moment to one mainstream record of taste, The Musical Times, a journal Britten himself may be presumed to have read from at least 1926 (when, aged twelve, he contributed a letter to the editor) until his later prep-school years.17 Harmonic novelty is a leitmotive of Musical Times articles after about 1910 and throughout the Twenties, reflecting a sense that “The balance of the old theoretic essentials has been relentlessly upset.”18 An unsigned review of Henry Wood’s 1912 London premiere of Schoenberg’s Op. 16 pieces reports shock at that composer’s alleged “protest against all preconceived notions of music and harmony.”19 The journal mostly eschewed bald objections to harmonic “ugliness.” Still, one article (titled “The New Harmony”) prints the third Schoenberg Op. 19 piece together with a bowdlerized upside-down version of the score. The accompanying text, sent in by one wag (“Bewildered”),20 confirms that new pitch structures bothered listeners more than melodic or rhythmic novelty. Schoenberg’s music “is certainly creating a stir,” another writer notes, while emphasizing the need for critical open13 Ernest Newman, “Arnold Schönberg’s Gurre-Lieder,” Musical Times 55 (Jan. 1914), 12. 14 George Dyson, The New Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), 112, 114; Cecil Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music (1924; 2nd edition, London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 174. 15 Lambert, Music Ho!, 208–18; John Foulds, Music To-Day (London: Ivor Nicholson, 1934), 250–53. 16 Rollo H. Myers, ed. Music Today (London: Dennis Dobson, 1949), 132–52. On Schoenberg’s later English reception, see Arnold Whittall, “Schoenberg and the English: Notes for a Documentary,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 4 (1980): 24–33. 17 See E. B. Britten, “Beethoven and Davy,” Musical Times 67 (May 1, 1926): 448; a 1930 diary entry reads: “Musical Times is sent from home”; Evans, Journeying Boy, 31. 18 G. H. Clutsam, “The Harmonies of Scriabine,” Musical Times 54 (March 1913): 156. 19 Anon, “The Promenade concerts,” Musical Times 53 (Oct 1, 1912), 660. 20 Musical Times 55 (March 1914): 168. The notational trick skews chordal and melodic structures, a point the writer does not own up to.

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mindedness: “We in England shall require to become much more familiar with this music before we can say anything very definite about it.”21 Newman’s Gurrelieder analysis, in 1914, cites an “expressive range” in Schoenberg’s harmony wider than that of any other German composer of time.22 In stark contrast with Schoenberg’s reputation was the pronounced enthusiasm among British critics for Scriabin’s music. One of them, G. H. Clutsam, a prolific Musical Times contributor after 1910, devotes two early articles to the whole-tone scale.23 Clutsam’s articles, like Schoenberg’s well-known Harmonielehre chapter (whose publication they preceded by a year), emphasizes the proximity of wholetone sonorities to dominant ninth chords, though he is more interested in analyzing recent repertory—from Strauss’s Elektra, Ravel, Debussy, and younger British figures—than in theoretic generalization. Clutsam’s 1913 articles on Scriabin juxtapose score excerpts with chordal and scalar reductions,24 expressing admiration for the composer as pioneer and experimenter. The analyses attend closely to dominant functions and embellishing appoggiatura figurations in the composer’s later work. Commentary is foreground-oriented, but confirms the author’s clear grasp of harmonic function in scores that were in 1913 brand-new: the Sixth and Seventh sonatas. A focus of British enthusiasm for Scriabin was the 1913 London performance of Promethée, but the fashion continued after the composer’s death in 1915.25 The writings of Clutsam, Newman and others exhibit the essentially empirical tone of British discussions of musical modernity after 1910. There is nothing in British journals or books of the period to rival Busoni’s visionary tone, or the experimentalist outlook of a Henry Cowell. Nor do British analysts develop anything approaching the system-based orientation of Schenker, Kurth, or Riemann.26 While German theorists of the early twentieth century were delving deeply into a bygone tonal era, British writers—with the notable exception of Tovey—embrace a looser taxonomy of the new. Arthur Eaglefield Hull’s book Modern Harmony (1913) almost celebrates as a virtue the “formidable hiatus between musical theory and practice,”27 attempting to map the gulf with a hectic selection of musical excerpts up to and including Schoenberg’s Op. 16. Hull’s harmonic analyses are apt to miss conventional tonal explanations of musical detail in their uncritical zeal for the new; he is less aware of appoggiatura figures in Ravel, for instance, than his French colleague René Lenormand—author of a comparable 1913 study soon translated 21 D. C. Parker, “The Futurist in Music,” Musical Times 54 (Sept. 1913): 590. 22 Newman, “Gurre-Lieder,” 12. 23 Clutsam, “Whole-Tone Scale,” cited above; the second part appeared in Musical Times 51 (Dec. 1910): 775–78. 24 Clutsam, “Harmonies of Scriabine,” and idem, “More Harmonies of Scriabine,” Musical Times 54 (July 1913): 441–43 and (Aug 1913): 512–14. 25 See A. Eaglefield Hull, “The Pianoforte Sonatas of Scriabin,” Musical Times 57 (Nov. 1916): 492–95; (Dec. 1916): 539–42. 26 For brief admiring reference to Kurth’s writings, see Musical Times 66 (April 1925): 333. British references to Schenker or Riemann are more fleeting still in the Twenties. 27 A. Eaglefield Hull, Modern Harmony: Its Explanation and Application (London: Augener, 1913), v.

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into English.28 Hull’s outlook at times can seem almost naively empirical: a 1924 article finds him (and several eminent co-authors) asserting the irrelevance of the older Rameauian system of chordal inversions to modern practice, defined as loosely as possible: “harmony may be built upwards on a bass, downwards from the uppermost part, or around an inside part.”29 To ascribe such open-ended claims to a stereotypically British suspicion of theoretic universals, or a pedagogical emphasis, would be too glib.30 It would be truer to say that by the Twenties many writers simply felt that music’s radical harmonic developments had out-flanked theoretic grasp. Edwin Evans, a keener analyst than Hull, observes in 1929 that “at present very few people appear to have a definite conception of what constitutes atonality.”31 Even the occasional article aspiring to deal comprehensively with harmonic issues remains at a basic theoretic level. H. Walford Davies, for example, in 1920, introduces a six-note collection—a “sounding,” in his terms—comprising pitches C E E G A B, from which he derives major and minor triads on C, E and A.32 Modern readers expecting an early discussion of hexatonic harmonic resources, however, will be disappointed: to illustrate this “entrancingly interesting” sounding, Davies concocts a prosaic phrase in C major with perfunctory excursion to E. His discussion ignores actual nineteenthcentury practices, and fails to explore alternate partitionings of the same collection by augmented triads or major-seventh chords. Despite his taste for mathematical flourishes (“exactly four hundred and sixty-two seven-note soundings”), Davies lacks a theoretic perspective. Nothing in the inter-war British discussion of newer harmonic resources approaches the subtlety of writings on what was now being called the “old” system—tonality. Donald Tovey’s 1928 essay “Tonality in Schubert” lays Riemannian emphasis on the parallelism of major and minor-mode chord functions and shows a fascination with freedom of modulation.33 Tovey’s few technical pronouncements on recent developments, though, make little of atonality. Introducing an excerpt from Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony, Tovey elsewhere observes that most modern harmonic tendencies are “essentially matters of instrumentation.”34 Evans, meanwhile, ventures a broader perspective: atonality is harmonically a “logical 28 René Lenormand, A Study of Twentieth-Century Harmony (1913), trans. Herbert Antcliffe (London: Joseph Williams, 1915). For a review of Hull, see G. H. Clutsam, “Questions of Modern Harmony,” Musical Times 56 (Jan. 1915): 18–21. 29 “Harmony,”A Dictionary of Modern Music and Musicians, ed. Arthur E. Hull (London: Dent, 1924), 218. Hull’s named co-authors include Bax, Vaughan Williams, Edward Dent, Donald Tovey, and Bartók. 30 Matthew Shirlaw’s historically oriented The Theory of Harmony appeared in 1917; on Prout, Stainer and other Victorian-era theorists, see David Damschroder, Thinking About Harmony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 31 Evans, “Atonality and Polytonality,” Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, ed. Walter Willson Cobbett (London: Oxford University Press, 1929–30), 1:30. 32 H. Walford Davies, “Some New Scales and Chords,” Musical Times 61 (Nov. 1920): 736–38. 33 Reprinted in Donald Francis Tovey, The Main Stream of Music (Cleveland: Meridian, 1959). 34 “Harmony” (1929), Donald Francis Tovey, The Forms of Music (New York: Meridian, 1957), 71.

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sequel to the ambiguity fostered by chromaticism and constant modulation,” and contrapuntally a matter of “self-preservation”; bitonal contexts, he notes, bind individual parts to simple diatonicism since “the first invasion of chromaticism … will make the two tonalities indistinguishable.”35 Like many writers of the day, Evans ponders the historical situation of tonality and its potential loss as lingua franca, though not everyone shared his basically optimistic position vis-à-vis the advent of atonality. George Dyson in a 1927 article for Grove’s Dictionary stresses the power and precision of “classical” tonality, before sternly warning: “Should these conventions be permanently displaced, then only a new and equally rigid system can hope to offer an imaginative field of comparable promise.” For Dyson, modern chromaticism (he cites Schoenberg’s Op. 11) remains “an intellectual abstraction.”36 Did the schoolboy Britten read the likes of Hull, Evans, or Dyson in the later 1920s? No direct evidence of such theoretical proclivities has come to light, and his admiration for Tovey was primarily as fellow composer-pianist.37 One intri­guing clue to Britten’s theoretic outlook goes back to his piano lessons, aged eight to fourteen, with Miss Ethel Astle, teacher of the “Seppings method” of sight reading and transposition. Britten himself explicitly recalled Amelia Seppings’s primer as late as 1937, in terms far from irrelevant to his stylistic choices as a professional composer in the Thirties: “In this method transposition is made so simple, because the pupil is taught to feel a great sense of key relationships—which is valuable even in these days of atonality.”38 That the teenage Britten came of age in a local musical culture quite conversant with harmonic developments from Schoenberg, Stravinsky and others is obvious; but it is equally clear that culture lacked a developed theoretic vocabulary for describing such music. Nor could Britten expect much receptivity to the new at the RCM. The College examiner’s question upon the 16-year old’s admission—“What is an English public school boy doing writing music of this kind?”39—remains emblematic of a reactionary mainstream that Britten himself, “half-decided on Schönberg,” was already moving beyond. The need to decide one way or the other—for or against tonality—tells its own story about the Twenties debate. What Britten took directly from Bridge, as already observed, is hard to limn precisely. In later life, Britten recalls that he had started writing in a “much freer harmonic idiom” once under Bridge’s regime, adding “he gave me a sense of technical ambition.”40 His lessons began soon after the composition of Bridge’s Third 35 Evans, “Atonality,” 34, 45. 36 George Dyson, “Harmony,” and “Chromaticism,” in Groves’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 3rd ed., ed. H. C. Colles (1927; repr. New York: Macmillan, 1944), 2:538; 1:646. 37 Britten heard Tovey perform in 1931.The two composers played piano duets privately in 1939; Evans, Journeying Boy, 73; Letters From a Life, ed. Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed (London: Faber, 1991), 2:687–88. 38 Cited Mitchell-Reed, Letters, 1:82–83. Amelia Seppings, The Elements of Music Illustrated (London: Morton and Burt, n.d. [ca. 1902]). 39 Quoted by John Ireland in Murray Schafer, British Composers in Interview (London: Faber, 1963), 30. 40 Britten, “Britten Looking Back” (1963), Britten on Music, ed. Paul Kildea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 251, 253.

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Quartet, a work Britten certainly knew closely: “I also learned about bitonality from Bridge (one of his favourite later devices was to harmonise with two common chords simultaneously)—more than from Holst, whose music I didn’t know well then … . I studied Bridge’s own music avidly, of course. It was at this time that he was consolidating his later style, highly intense and chromatic, although never actually atonal.”41 Bridge himself was not the only influence, and in considering the harmonic dimension of Britten’s early music, one more name deserves mention: Gabriel Fauré. While Bridge’s own admiration of Fauré is well-known, his former pupil’s interest in the French composer is rarely invoked. Britten and Peter Pears performed La bonne chanson in 1958, but Britten encountered the work in 1936, if not before.42 The boldly juxtaposed common triads of Fauré’s songs offer a suggestive precedent for the kind of personal language Britten was to evolve himself during the Thirties. To get there, though, he needed to conduct a number of stylistic experiments. 2. “Days of Atonality”: Britten’s Sextet for Wind (1930) One such experiment is the Sextet for Wind Britten sketched some time between May and August 1930, just weeks before leaving school, aged 16, to enter the RCM. On 7 April he heard an all-Schoenberg concert (Op. 9, Op. 25, Pierrot) “on the Billison’s wireless,” and within a week had purchased a score of the Op. 19 pieces, which he performed later that month at school (along with works by Holst and Ireland).43 Diary entries for these months also record the writing of the motivically taut Quartettino, and the modal-diatonic Hymn to the Virgin. The Sextet, however, is not mentioned, perhaps because Britten abandoned its second movement.44 The main influences are clearly evident: Schoenberg and Scriabin principally, mediated by Bridge, and it’s just possible Britten knew Janáček’s identically-scored Mládi.45 But the score catches attention here less as a record of early stylistic models than as a snapshot of Britten’s rapidly evolving harmonic thinking. Even in this strikingly chromatic milieu, Britten continues to define tonal arrivals at pivotal moments of the form, though major-minor resources—actual triads—play very little role as local harmonies. Chromaticism is rife on the musical surface, a fin-de-siècle world of melodic appoggiaturas and creeping bass lines. Example 1 shows score excerpts from the first two thematic groups. For all the intricacy of inner-voice figuration, Britten follows 41 Ibid., 251. 42 Sophie Wyss sung Fauré’s cycle at a December 1936 concert at which Britten’s Temporal Suite was premiered; Letters, 2:784; see Andrew Martin Plant, The Life and Music of Christian Darnton (D.Phil. diss., University of Birmingham, 2002), 150. Britten likely knew La bonne chanson through Bridge. 43 Evans, Journeying Boy, 36–38. Britten chose a score of Pierrot among his graduation prize books. 44 Colin Matthews, Note in the score, published as Movement for Wind Sextet (London: Faber Music, 1996). 45 Philip Reed, note to the work’s first recording, Hyperion CDA66845, 1996.

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Scriabin by grounding highly diffuse harmonies in a classical phrase scheme. Two five-bar phrases (4 + 1), followed by a more leisurely continuation phrase, make a clear sentence. The harmony, meanwhile, unfolds in five- or six-pitch whole-tone groups. Key feeling varies; in a sense, this is the “constant modulation” Evans cited as a hallmark of chromatic music. Even so, a loosely functioning hierarchy asserts itself. The Sextet departs from an F# pedal point, then moves to a rhetorically prominent arrival on the conventional dominant region (spelt Db), clearly prepared and supporting a more triadic surface. The F# bass note below the first melodic phrase (Ex. 1, first measure) grows from an ex nihilo muted horn pedal whose harmonic function, for all its static persistence, remains ambiguously open—do we hear a tonic or a dominant?46 Upper-voice harmonies, meanwhile, float in a Scriabinesque modal situation with characteristically flatted fifth (C) and ambiguous major/minor third coloration over the pedal. In the first melodic phrase (at m. 9), the oboe’s prominent C# confirms a consonant perfect fifth over the tonic. The chromatic bass of the continuation phrase (m. 19 ff.) quickly slips down to a low G, underpinning a first climax (m. 23), pivoting further by tritone down to D. Melodically and contrapuntally, the passage’s strenuous buildup—echoing Schoenberg’s Op. 9, by way of Bridge’s Third Quartet—pits questing seventh leaps against sliding linear chromatics. In Britten’s second-theme group (m. 38 ff.), finally, the D bass acquires a supporting fifth (Ab), thereby achieving local stability as a tonicized second-key area. The touch-down on D major and the momentary hint of triadic euphony is transitory, but enough to reassert the residual pull of diatonic functions—a dominant to the Sextet’s F# home tonic. 3. Hexatonic Britten: Triad and Key in “Villes” (1939) The freshness that critics discovered in Britten’s music of the late Thirties reflects the composer’s return to triads as basic harmonic building-blocks. The early Sextet, with historical hindsight, is a Schoenbergian experiment, a path not taken. In Britten’s case, the music historian must jettison the cliché of a twentieth-century progression from triadic euphony to post-tonal idioms; the plot goes in reverse. The richness of added-note harmonies and beckoning appoggiaturas gives way in later scores to a comparatively simple surface—restricted to major or minor triads (often in close position). Britten’s early interest in Schoenberg, likewise, was superseded by attention to Mahler and Shostakovich. Amid many exemplars of the newly triadic ambience of Britten’s music in the Thirties, the proto-minimalist fixation on A-major chords in Young Apollo (August 1939) is only the most vivid: a casestudy in just how boldly radiant “simplicity” could be. But it is another score from 1939—the orchestral song “Villes,” composed for the Rimbaud cycle Les illuminations—that reveals facets of Britten’s insistent triadicism with particular clarity. Three aspects of “Villes” are readily audible to listeners and provocative for analysts: the marginalizing of tonic-dominant relations in favor of mediants, par46 Britten was to use a comparable opening gesture in the Op. 2 Phantasy (1932).

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Example 1: Benjamin Britten, Sextet for Wind (ca. May–August 1930), first and second thematic groups, excerpts

ticularly between chords with roots a major third apart; a focus on modal parallelism—the duality of major and minor—at various levels of structure; and the prominence of smooth (i.e., semitonal) voice leading. The harmonic language of “Villes,” in short, presents the central features of the hexatonic system, a mode of tonal coherence that often operates, as Richard Cohn notes, alongside familiar diatonic or octatonic models.47 That Britten’s music easily reveals a hexatonic aspect—as does work by Poulenc, Prokofiev, Vaughan Williams and any number of twentieth-century figures—should come as no surprise to analysts charting the history of triadic music after 1900. “Villes” is through-composed, its continuous rushing eighth-note motion matching the sequence of fleeting illuminations in Rimbaud’s verse: texture and tonal emphasis shift rapidly with each new image. Writing to the soprano Sophie Wyss before the premiere, Britten pointed out that “the poem […] was written in London and certainly is a very good impression of the chaotic modern city life.”48 Trimming Rimbaud’s prose original, Britten chooses to repeat the poet’s opening declaration—“Ce sont des villes!”—as a verbal refrain at four points later in his song; the text moves meanwhile between images of dream, “chalets de cristal et de bois” (Rimbaud’s defamiliarizing description of streetcars) and “vieux cratères.”49 47 Richard Cohn, “Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic Progressions,” Music Analysis 15 (1996): 33. 48 Letter of 19 October 1939; Mitchell-Reed, 2:714. 49 My commentary assumes the reader’s access to Britten’s score.

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New racing figurations arrive for “Bacchantes” (m. 39), “Vénus,” and references to the sounds of bell towers and unknown music from “châteaux bâtis en os.” To this point, the poem’s fantastical juxtapositions are matched in the song’s harmonic world, a jostling of tonal claims and counter-claims. At the climactic image of a “paradis des orages,” a V-I cadence in C major intervenes briefly (m. 60), before further chordal restlessness whisks the listener’s tonal-attention off elsewhere, to the eerily muted close over a low B pedal. For all its surface consistency of triadic vocabulary, “Villes” as a whole eludes any too-neat harmonic scheme. There are, nevertheless, clear patterns—above all in the song’s already-noted tendency towards root motion by major thirds. A quick sense of the harmonic and motivic milieu may be had by inspecting the voice leading of the opening more closely (Ex. 2). The Bb+ and G+ triads (i.e., B major and G major) traverse only a minor third, but the returning move, up a major third from G+ (metrically stressed) to B+, proves paradigmatic for what follows. Britten’s bass line through “de rêve” (m. 11) strides D-Bb-Gb, traversing two major-thirds in a row (brackets in Ex. 2 mark major-third shifts). A more assertive juxtaposition of major-third related triads follows the first “Villes!” refrain. The new phrase (see score, mm. 14–26) sits on an F pedal, root of an F+ triad framed symmetrically by Db+ and A+ triads.

Example 2: Britten, “Villes” (Les illuminations, 1939): motives and harmonies at the opening

Also prominent at the start of “Villes” are rapid major-to-minor chordal oscillations. The combination of root motion by major-third and modal mixture of the associ-

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ated triads argues a symmetrical harmonic dimension to the song—its exploration of so-called hexatonic pitch relations—rather than a diatonic background. Britten’s harmonies shift continuously by rising and falling thirds, and they do so in pairs of triads—a Petrushka­-like push-pull oscillation.50 The opening G+/Bb+ motion begins with Bb+ as the accented pole (through metric and durational emphasis), but as alternation accelerates, G+ gains the upper hand metrically. There’s a Chaplinesque jerkiness to the shunting rhythms of the first four measures. Chord “progressions,” meanwhile, seem fully reversible, or they might be said to wear themselves out by incessant repetition. A blurring of chord identity (Bb+ or G+, which is “home”?) in the opening moments is resolved by the m. 5 arrival of B+, a new sonority. Since shifts of mode (B+ to B-, e. g.) are ubiquitous in “Villes,” they deserve a leitmotivic name. I will refer to glitter, as at m.7, to describe motion by half-step displacement from major to minor third and back (or vice versa) within a common fifth (Ex. 2). Glitter, effectively, denotes a consecutive, self-reversing instance of Cohn’s P (Parallel) function. A second motive, shimmer, is identified in Ex. 2; this is a linear variant of glitter, unfolding a major-minor modal ambiguity by embellishing chromatic passing tones over a static triad root (the m. 9 shimmer oscillates between D- and D+ triads). What kind of tonal claims does Britten put into play in “Villes”? It would be simplistic to conceptualize the initial Bb+ chord as a straightforward home tonic— for one thing “Villes” doesn’t end in (or even on) Bb; and with glitter and shimmer in play, the tonal milieu is intricately non-diatonic from the start. Nor will it do to posit major-third shifts among triads as some alternate syntax, for Britten’s song does still admit occasional diatonic gestures (the V-I cadence, m. 60, e. g.). Neither a diatonic nor a hexatonic ground plan fits all Britten’s pitches; one might do better to consider “Villes” as the product of an interplay of tonal systems, and my discussion will concentrate on the basically eclectic character of Britten’s triad-rich idiom. Again: what sort of tonal hierarchy is in play, what sense of key do listeners experience? Example 2 tackles the question by attending to prominent half-step displacements (marked graphically with arrows) and makes a proto-Schenkerian attempt to distinguish dependencies from more structural pitches. Reading the top level of the graph (Ex. 2a) left to right, one sees first an upper-voice ascending arpeggio BD-F# preparing the arrival on B+ at the word “villes.” The motion is underlined by outer-voice counterpoint in parallel tenths. The following motion, by major thirds, recontextualizes the opening Bb+ as part of a chain of triads . The second tonal arrival of the passage coincides with the second “villes!” refrain: this landing on F+ (m. 14) becomes the launching point of a new major-third chain. Pitch hierarchy here is ambivalent. Not all analysts will accept the functional implications of old-fashioned Roman numerals in Ex. 2, but they capture, to my ears, one facet of the passage’s ambiguity.51 The apparent I to V tonic-dominant re50 On B and B as opposed triad roots in “Villes,” and for analysis of long-range tonal motion in Les illuminations, see Mark, Early Benjamin Britten, 182–200. 51 On tonal function in Britten’s triadic discourse, see David Forrest, “Prolongation in the Choral Music of Benjamin Britten,” Music Theory Spectrum 32 (2010): 1–25. Poulenc’s music offers

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lation spans the entire phrase, from an opening Bb+ to a closing F+. But the framing tonic and dominant encloses the complicating B+ arrival followed by a major-third chain;52 further tonal uncertainties of the opening involve the modally promiscuous glitter and shimmer motives. Those outer-voice parallel tenths (m. 1) trace a major-minor tetrachord (0347), formed at the intersection of the Bb+ and G+ triads (Ex. 2b). The same (0347) harmony recurs in the glitter motive on B, and then the shimmer on D (Ex. 2c). Plain major or minor triads crowd Britten’s musical foreground, but the middleground too sparkles with modal ambiguity. E+

E-

C+

CGLITTER

Ab+

G#-

E+

Northern

G+

G-

Eb+

Western

F#-

D+

Southern

F-

Db+

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2

2a

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B+

B-

Bb+

Bb-

Gb+

A-

F+

3 1

D+

D3a

SHIMMER

Db+

4

C#-

(8)

5

A+

6

7

8

Figure 1: Britten, “Villes,” opening: motion between hexatonic triad systems

The triad progressions parsed so far might be conceptualized visually as in Figure 1, as motions about a grid-like tonal space comprising four distinct chains of triads a major-third apart. Each chain is a six-pc hexatonic system, unfolding in a cycle of major and minor triads on three roots.53 Horizontal motions along each system feature the half-step displacements already familiar from shimmer and glitter. A single move changes triad mode (e. g., that numbered 2a on the grid, where B+ shifts to B-) or both mode and root (as at 4: D- to Bb+). Double horizontal moves change the root of modally identical triads by a major third (numbers 2, 5, etc.). Vertical or diagonal arrows trace moves between the four discrete hexatonic systems. Recalling the striding end of Britten’s opening phrase, then, the descending triad sequence traverses the Southern hexatonic system (numbers 4 to 5) before the chromatic shift Gb+ to F+ drops vertically to the Eastern (at 6); subsequent triadic maneuvers travel between all three roots in that system. a rejuvenation of triadic function comparable to Britten’s; see David Heetderks, “Open or Closed? Poulenc’s Major-Third Cycles of Minor Triads,” unpublished paper (2010). 52 Finding F+ (m. 14) to have a “less directional quality than conventional dominants,” Mark stresses its relation to B+ (m. 5) as a derivation of the tritone motto prominent throughout Les illuminations; Early Benjamin Britten, 182. 53 For grid representations of hexatonic middlegrounds, see Richard Cohn, “As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert,” 19th-Century Music 22 (1999): 213– 32. Formal properties of triadic systems are explored in Cohn, “Maximally Smooth”; and idem, “Neo-Riemannian Operations, Parsimonious Trichords, and their Tonnetz Representations,” Journal of Music Theory 41 (1997): 1–66.

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4. “Mes moindres mouvements”: . Hexatonic Progression, and a Somber Ending The prismatic quality of Britten’s “Villes” harmony reflects available tonal motions between hexatonic systems of triads. Example 3a reconfigures the Figure 1 grid into Cohn’s map-like schema of four pc-distinct hexatonic systems, supplemented by notational representations of “maximally smooth” cycles spanning triads of the Western and Southern systems. The symmetries of hexatonic space are apparent visually in the circular arrangement of each six-triad system. Between triads, smooth voice leading embodies the half-step displacements of alternating P (parallel) and L (leading-tone) functions. In the Southern system, for example, major and minor triads cycle smoothly, one pc at a time—F# to F, A to Bb, D to Db, and so on.54

Example 3: Britten, “Villes”: moving from Western to Southern hexatonic system 54 The circular arrangement in Ex. 3a follows Cohn, “Maximally Smooth,” 17. On formal properties of cycles, see Cohn, “Neo-Riemannian,” 33–37.

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The Figure 1 grid already shows frequent darting moves between hexatonic systems, with glitter and shimmer motives elaborating more local major/minor oscillation between triads. Example 3b homes in on a single phrase of Britten’s opening (corresponding to Figure 1, numbers 4–5). The vocal melody traces a Western-to-Southern pivot motion whose sounding logic reflects common pitch-classes (shown at Ex. 3c). The texture fuses a simultaneity of competing triadic claims. Lowermost in the texture one hears the singer’s rising G+ arpeggio (“c’est un peuple”); above in the strings is the characteristic oscillation of glitter, spelling out B+ and B- triads in conjunction with the voice’s B emphases. Together, voice and accompaniment triads reference the Western hexatonic system, then shift South at “Libans du rêve.” Britten’s melody sinuously interweaves falling thirds with halfstep displacements, outlining the trichord {D,Bb,F#} common to adjacent Western and Southern systems. The strongly hexatonic arrangement of triads at the opening of “Villes” gives way, later in the song, to a newly varied triadic discourse. To observe the smoothly alternating triads depicting Rimbaud’s urban revelers—“Bacchantes des banlieus” (m. 39)—is to encounter Britten’s interest in modal ambivalence and uncanny pitch dichotomies. The so-called slide motion at such moments (at m. 39, between A- and Ab+ triads) prefigures much of the characteristic harmonic uncertainty of Britten’s later operas.55 slide links simple triads, but its pc progression no longer articulates discrete hexatonic systems, and still later on, at the phrase “musique inconnue,” Britten’s dizzying tour of triads abandons clearly symmetrical harmonic formations. Britten himself described the ending of “Villes” as “simply a prayer for a little peace”—far from a glib comment in 1939, just weeks after the declaration of war in Europe.56 The penitential mood does depend on a motion towards a low, darklyhued B- triad (Ex. 4), and with so much of the emphasis throughout “Villes” falling on major triads—albeit tainted modally by glitter or shimmer—this SchubertianMahlerian modal shift certainly undergirds the somber effect in performance. But there is more to the passage, and I will highlight three expressive features briefly with reference to the Ex. 4 analysis: (i) a return to the hexatonic pairing of the opening; (ii) interpolated octatonic arrangements of triads; and (iii) Britten’s layering of adjacent hexatonic harmonies in contrasting registers.

55 On the leitmotivic centrality of slide in the opera Billy Budd (1951), see Philip Rupprecht, Britten’s Musical Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 90–96. The term slide is David Lewin’s; Riemann calls the same relation between triads a Gegenterzwechsel. 56 Letter to Sophie Wyss, in Mitchell-Reed, Letters, 2:714.

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Example 4: Britten, “Villes,” ending: Western hexatonic pole triads, octatonic interpolations

The song’s closing return to a Western hexatonic system is projected by a gracefully drawn-out phrase stretching between Eb+ and B-, two triads that share no common tones and thus together define opposing poles within the six pcs of the Western system. This pole relation—a simultaneity of three half-step displacements between triads—has a tonally transgressive effect; as Cohn argues, hexatonic poles undermine the coherence of a consonance/dissonance binary, depriving listeners of familiar tonal-perceptual bearings.57 Britten states the Eb+/B- pole relation twice, first (after the phrase “bons bras”) amid a series of chromatically driven chords, the second time (at “mes sommeils et mes moindres mouvements”) as the passage’s final bass motion. Both poles, meanwhile, attract modal ambiguity over their roots— Eb from the high-register glitter ostinato (G, major third of Eb+, moving to F#/Gb); Cb/B with the slower-motion Eb-D progression at “moindres mouvements” (marked P in Ex. 4; the single displacement is half of a glitter motive). The expressive and syntactic novelty at the close, then, is Britten’s slowing down of the nimble and self-reversing major-minor shifts in glitter and shimmer to end with a Mahlerian trope—the measured darkening coloration of a single Cb/B root. While Britten’s closing phrase is framed by Western hexatonic pole triads, its interior touches on alternate pitch symmetries, notably the octatonic collection that links E by minor-third cycle (to triads on F#, A, and C roots, i.e.). The octatonic dimension is marked in the lower system of Ex. 4 with closed noteheads, though its 57 See Cohn’s analysis of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in the present volume.

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most conspicuous intervallic sign is the singer’s drooping melodic tritone (E-Bb) at “mes sommeils,” in parallel motion with a tritone bass (A-Eb). The octatonic interpolations within a basically (Western) hexatonic phrase contribute to a motivically rich synthesis. The arrival of the final C bass pitch finds its upper-voice preparation in the singer’s graceful falling “major-seventh” figure (Bb-Gb-Eb-Cb). As at one earlier climactic moment (the prolonged dominant-thirteenth tetrachords at “paradis des orages,” m. 60), Britten makes his expressive point by a sudden shift away from simple triads toward sonorities of greater complexity. The singer’s dissonant B (on “moindres,” m. 81) is held over by suspension from the preceding Eb+ chord, smoothly fusing triads on C and E roots. Listening from the bass upward, the concluding B- triad of “Villes” apparently functions as a tonal anchor (if not a conventional home tonic).Yet it is precisely here, as the music’s frenetic rhythmic energies subside, that upper-register events assert unprecedented autonomy. With close-position triadic sonority central in “Villes,” the wider registral distances defined by the violins’ shimmer’, high above a static chordal bed (at m. 81) are something new. This particular shimmer figure is a variant (its passing chromatic thirds are major, not minor) arpeggiating the augmented trichord Gb-Bb-D, common term between Western and Southern systems. And Britten gives the last word—in the descending violin arpeggio, m. 83—a Southern hexatonic accent. By such delicate shifts of triad and mood “Villes” achieves a kind of local vertical synthesis of symmetrical triad systems previously heard only in succession. By such hexatonic “smallest movements,” Britten finds new expressive potential in simple triads. 5. “Veggio co’ bei vostri occhi” (1940): . Simultaneity of Triadic Function The mediant relations that saturate “Villes” are by no means a special effect for Britten. The song’s forthright triadic patterns conjure strangeness, transforming the most familiar chords into tokens of a vision removed from the everyday. But while the sense of key and home tonic in “Villes” is transitory, a hexatonic triadicism need not preclude stronger assertion of pitch hierarchy, as the opening of Britten’s Violin Concerto (also 1939) suggests.58 By the late Thirties, the composer was exploring hexatonic third relations in more straightforwardly diatonic environments. Both the second and third songs of the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo of 1940 project clear tonic triads (in C minor and G major, respectively), yet in each case, “simple” triads seem to blur against sharp intervallic discrepancies highlighted by registral contrast. This is more than Britten’s characteristically vivid response to poetic imagery; the blurring technique continues the vertical interplay of registrally disparate activities heard at the close of “Villes.” An interest in cognitive and harmonic

58 The Concerto’s F+ tonic is prolonged by a Db+ hexatonic counterpole.

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uncertainty—invariably between the layers of a stratified texture—becomes more pronounced in Britten’s later music.59 “Veggio co’ bei vostri occhi,” in mood and harmonic means the most limpid of the Michelangelo Sonnets, matches triadic euphony to the poet-lover’s invocations of celestial illuminations—the sun, or its reflection as moonlight. At the largest level the song’s G-major tonality unfolds a serenely classical structure. An opening tonic triad, G+ with fifth uppermost, moves swiftly to its relative minor (E-, at “son mosso,” m. 27), broaches mediant-hexatonic territory (emphasizing Eb+ and B+), but quickly returns to the home tonic, secured by a traditional V-I cadence and stepwise melodic descent. A coda briefly revisits the previous mediant-distant triads, but tonal closure in G+ prevails. Above the tonic triad, the tenor’s melody floats down from E to D, an unperturbed cover tone, the sun in the sky. The classical diatonic account just sketched reflects a coherent frame, and yet it leaves out much of what seems most expressive in Britten’s music, including the edgy dissonances. Britten’s root-position G+ tonic, however well established in the middle register, is inflected by tingling half-step dissonances; the classical triadic exterior seems to accentuate the stinging intervallic effects, when they arrive. Among many examples, the tenor’s gentle alighting on F#3—“lu-me,” m. 5—offers mild dissonance, quickly taken up and heightened by the piano’s F#+ arpeggio (m. 6). The direct clash of triads—F#+ against G+—is unmistakable, packed into the harmony-defining tenor register, and only with continued ascent does intervallic tension dissipate: higher-register F#s assume an overtone-coloristic identity,60 all dissonant friction finally vanishing in a simple leading tone-to-tonic resolution (m. 7). The tenor’s A# (m. 8) at once echoes the F#+ triads just passed, while locally defining a Purcellian false-relation (acting as Bb, a minor third against the piano’s G+ triad). Britten’s song dramatizes the textural interplay of chords and arpeggios, such that the mysteriously floating melodic arches do not always obey the gravitational pull of the chords beneath: the vocal B+ arpeggios at “volo con le vostr’ale” (m. 22), pulling against the piano’s C+ chordal pedal. Such effects intensify during the song’s central episode (mm. 27–39). Space allows for only a glancing analysis of this passage, but the central issue remains Britten’s interest in registrally defined harmonic ambivalence. Commentary here will focus on his ability to project more than one transformational path between triads juxtaposed in the same texture.

59 As at the opening of the 1962 War Requiem, for example; cf. Rupprecht, Britten’s Musical Language, 197–99. 60 Daniel Harrison’s register-specific model of tonal pitch relations—comprising root, chord and overtone space—is suggestive in Britten’s case. My thanks to Professor Harrison for sharing unpublished work.

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Example 5: Britten, “Veggio co’ bei” (Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, 1940), central episode: simultaneity of contrasting triadic progressions, treble and bass registers

Britten’s arrival on E- at m. 27 is the beginning of a tenor-register triadic progression, by slide, from E- to Eb+ (m. 31). Meanwhile, in the upper register, the motion to Eb+ traverses an alternate pathway, the Parallel progression unfolding in arpeggios, D#- to Eb+ (see letter a in the graph). The listener hears two chordal transformations, simultaneously: below, there is a change of root and mode; above, simply change of mode. To insist on the hegemony of only one of these two triadic pathways is to negate the simultaneity of registrally defined processes in Britten’s texture. Simultaneous triadic and registral claims intensify further in what follows. First, the lower Eb+ triads are challenged by upper-register D+ arpeggios (letter b). D+ above now begins a four-octave arpeggiated descent, breaching its upper-register confines to supersede Eb+ below as harmony-defining agent within the texture. The passage (letter c) has a through-the-looking-glass quality, as the relative position of “upper” and “lower” voices in the texture reverses itself. Treble becomes bass. Finally (letter d), the approach to the closing B+ triad (m. 39) is again plural, a process reflecting two simultaneous triadic pathways in contrasting registers. Above, the motion is a hexatonic major-third shift (Eb+ to B+, marked LP to emphasize voice-leading smoothness); below, the progression from D+ to B+ is of a different order, that of conventional transposition by minor third. Again, chordal motion sounds over-determined and Britten’s intricate juxtaposition of registrally distinct processes presents listeners with competing models. of triadic progression. In closing, one might consider both the intermediate Eb+ arrival (m. 31) and the B+ arrival of m. 39 on a larger level, as stages in an unfolding Western hexatonic triad system, one completed by the return of the song’s G+ home tonic. I have two concluding thoughts. First, it is worth emphasizing the evolving formal-syntactic dimension of Britten’s triadic modernism. The 1930 Sextet, while retaining a background diatonic framework of tonic and dominant key areas, largely eschews simple triads as elements of the note-to-note surface. By the

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time of “Villes,” Britten’s return to triadic consonance is blatantly audible, but the harmonic arrangement is strongly hexatonic-symmetrical in orientation, with prominent ambiguity of mode. The third Michelangelo song takes Britten’s harmonic ambivalence a step further. A proto-classical harmonic framework is reasserted, but the hegemony of the bass register—traditional determinant of a chord’s function—is challenged by competing voice-leading processes in higher registers. . While analysts of the hexatonic realm invariably model harmonic progression as a parsimonious motion between pitch-classes, Britten’s hexatonic music suggests a notion of voice-leading more attuned to the functioning of the “smallest movements” of harmony as experienced by most listeners—as pitches, within specific registers. A second conclusion picks up on the wording of my title, and returns us to the conceptual and historical context of tonality in early twentieth-century British music. W. H. Auden’s vision of “children casual as birds, / Playing among the ruined languages” comes from his 1940 “Anthem for St. Cecilia’s Day,” a poem inscribed to Britten. One might invoke Auden’s image as a gloss on the status of many artistic languages by the early twentieth century, including what is usually called tonality. While for many writers in the Twenties and Thirties, the survival of a living tonal tradition seemed a distinctly open question in the face of the revolution of atonality, the landscape several decades later appears very different. To very few musicians these days does tonality still appear as a ruin. Britten’s shifting attitude to triadic consonance in the Thirties and beyond can shape our own evolving historical view of tonality as an expressive resource, the center of an old and a new art. Bibliography Anon. “The Promenade Concerts.” Musical Times 53 (October 1912): 660. Anon. [“Bewildered”]. “The New Harmony.” Musical Times 55 (March 1914): 168. Beiche, Michael. “Tonalität.” In Terminologie der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, 412–33. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995. Britten, E. B[enjamin]. “Beethoven and Davy.” Musical Times 67 (May 1926): 448. Britten, Benjamin. Letters From a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten. Edited by Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed. 2 vols. London: Faber, 1991. — “Britten Looking Back.” 1963. In Britten on Music, edited by Paul Kildea, 250–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. — Journeying Boy: the Diaries of the Young Benjamin Britten, 1928–1938. Edited by John Evans. London: Faber, 2009. Clutsam, G. H. “The Whole-Tone Scale and its Practical Use.” Musical Times 51 (November 1910): 702–06; and (December 1910): 775–78. — “The Harmonies of Scriabine.” Musical Times 54 (March 1913): 156–58. — “More Harmonies of Scriabine.” Musical Times 54 (August 1913): 512–14. — “Questions of Modern Harmony.” Musical Times 56 (January 1915): 18–21. Cohn, Richard. “As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert.” 19th-Century Music 22 (1999): 213–32. — “Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic Progressions.” Music Analysis 15 (1996): 9–40.

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— “Neo-Riemannian Operations, Parsimonious Trichords, and their Tonnetz Representations.” Journal of Music Theory 41 (1997): 1–66. Damschroder, David. Thinking About Harmony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Davies, H. Walford. “Some New Scales and Chords.” Musical Times 61 (November 1920): 736–38. Davies, Peter Maxwell. “The Young Composer in America.” Tempo 72 (1965): 2–6. Dyson, George. “Chromaticism.” and “Harmony.” 1927. In Groves’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 3rd edition, edited by H. C. Colles 1:645–46 and 2:527–39. Reprint. New York: Macmillan, 1944. — The New Music. London: Oxford University Press, 1924. Evans, Edwin. “Atonality and Polytonality.” In Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, edited by Walter Willson Cobbett 1:28–47. London: Oxford University Press, 1929–30. Forrest, David. “Prolongation in the Choral Music of Benjamin Britten.” Music Theory Spectrum 32 (2010): 1–25. Foulds, John. Music To-Day. London: Ivor Nicholson, 1934. Goddard, Scott. “Benjamin Britten.” In British Music of Our Time, edited by A. L. Bacharach, 209– 18. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1946. Gray, Cecil. A Survey of Contemporary Music. 1924. 2nd edition. London: Oxford University Press, 1928. Heetderks, David. “Open or Closed? Poulenc’s Major-Third Cycles of Minor Triads.” Unpublished paper, 2010. Hull, A. Eaglefield. Modern Harmony: Its Explanation and Application. London: Augener, 1913. — “The Pianoforte Sonatas of Scriabin.” Musical Times 57 (November 1916): 492–95; and (Dec. 1916): 539–42. Hull, A. Eaglefield, ed. A Dictionary of Modern Music and Musicians. London and Toronto: Dent, New York: Dutton, 1924. Hyer, Brian. “Tonality.” In New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, 25:583–94. London: Macmillan, 2001. Keller, Hans. “The Musical Character.” 1952. In Benjamin Britten: a Commentary on his Works from a Group of Specialists, edited by Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller, 319–51. Reprint, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972. Lambert, Constant. Music Ho! 1934. Reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948. Lenormand, René. A Study of Twentieth-Century Harmony. 1913. Translated by Herbert Antcliffe. London: Joseph Williams, 1915. Lopatnikoff, Nicolai. “England’s Young Composers.” Modern Music 14 (1937): 204–07. Mark, Christopher. “Juvenilia (1922–1932).” In Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, edited by Mervyn Cooke, 11–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. — Early Benjamin Britten: a Study of Stylistic and Technical Evolution. New York: Garland, 1995. Matthews, Colin. Note in Benjamin Britten, Movement for Wind Sextet. London: Faber Music, 1996. “M.-D. C.” [M. D. Calvocoressi]. Review of Ernst Kurth writings. Musical Times 66 (April 1925): 333. Myers, Rollo H., ed. “Music’s Future: Tonal or a-Tonal?” Music Today: Journal of the I.S.C.M. 1. London: Dennis Dobson, 1949: 132–52. Newman, Ernest. “Arnold Schönberg’s Gurre-Lieder.” Musical Times 55 (January 1914): 11–13. Parker, D. C. “The Futurist in Music.” Musical Times 54 (September 1913): 589–90. Plant, Andrew Martin. The Life and Music of Christian Darnton. D.Phil. diss., University of Birmingham, 2002. Reed, Philip. Note to recording Hyperion CDA66845, 1996. Rupprecht, Philip. Britten’s Musical Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Schafer, Murray. British Composers in Interview. London: Faber, 1963. Seppings, Amelia. The Elements of Music Illustrated. London: Morton and Burt, n.d. [ca. 1902]. Tovey, Donald Francis. “Harmony.” 1929. In The Forms of Music, 44–71. New York: Meridian, 1957.

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— The Main Stream of Music. Cleveland: Meridian, 1959. Whittall, Arnold. “Individualism and Accessibility: the Moderate Mainstream.” In Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople, 364–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. — “Schoenberg and the English: Notes for a Documentary.” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 4 (1980): 24–33.

Roy Harris and the Crisis of Consonance Beth E. Levy In 1969, at the end of a rambling series of oral history interviews that extended for nearly seven years, American composer Roy Harris attempted to sum up his position in history. In response to the loaded question “Do you think of yourself as a traditionalist” he replied: Well, of course. I hope that I am going to be a contemporary classicist. A lot of people have called me that […]. I am trying to make forms which have contemporary rhythms, twentiethcentury harmony, twentieth-century instruments and forms as large as our nation. I am trying to write something which has a large proliferation, something which has a sense of dimension, something which has ritual in it, something which is not ashamed to believe something or not afraid to make a declaration. I don’t believe in ambiguity at all. I don’t think nature believes in it. Nature doesn’t try to have a rose grow on the pine tree.1

Presumably spoken more or less off-the-cuff, this is typical Harris. It bears his trademark nationalism, his unabashed embrace of artistic “truth,” and his characteristic botanical metaphors. Not too far below the surface it also reflects his attempt to distance himself from neoclassicism without yielding the resources of the classical tradition. Chief among these resources were the melodic contours and harmonic palette arising from the canon of common practice, resources that he used with conviction and imagination from his earliest works in the 1920s until the end of his life in the late 1970s. Musicologist Larry Starr, in his chapter on twentieth-century “Tonal Traditions” for the Cambridge History of American Music, observes astutely that “for virtually all American composers of this generation ‘tonality’ and ‘atonality’ were not central theoretical and stylistic issues, as they were for many European composers at the time […]. The music of Gershwin, Copland, and many of their distinguished contemporaries is incidentally ‘tonal’ by virtue of the character of its basic material […] rather than as a consequence of adherence to any preordained philosophical tenets.”2 Harris is indeed unusual among his compatriots for mak1 Roy Harris, Composer of American Music, interviews by Donald J. Schippers and Adelaide Tusler, 2 vols. (Los Angeles: Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 1983), 722–23. These interviews took place in 1962, 1966, 1968 and 1969, and they constitute one of the richest sources of information about Harris’s life. Hereafter this source will be cited in the text as OH with the relevant page number(s). For helpful perspectives on Harris’s complicated relationship to neoclassicism, see among others Henry Cowell, “Roy Harris, An American Composer,” The Sackbut 12, no. 3 (April 1932): 133–35; Peter Hugh Reed, “Roy Harris– American Composer,” American Music Lover 3, no. 11 (March 1938): 406–10; and Carol J. Oja, “A Quartet of New World Classicists,” Chap. 16 in Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. 271–75. 2 Larry Starr, “Tonal Traditions in Art Music from 1920 to 1960,” in The Cambridge History of

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ing such strong aesthetic pronouncements about melody, harmony, consonance and dissonance for more than five decades: already in the 1930s, with greater technical specificity in the 1940s and ‘50s, and with increasing indignation as his own largely tonal scores grew further and further out of step with the critical touchstones of younger composers. In this essay, I will show how Harris developed a theory of tonality and consonance for his own time and place and, perhaps most important, for his own personality—a theory firmly rooted in his understanding of Nature, but also self-consciously inflected by his changing situation in Depression-Era, postwar, and Cold War America. Tonality and consonance are, of course, not synonymous. Yet for Harris the relationship between the two was both obvious and far-reaching. Sidestepping the constraints of key signature and scale, Harris’s harmonic idiom was built, from the ground up, on the principle that both tonality and consonance could and should be defined in relation to a single, anchoring entity: the sounding fundamental tone. Investing this tonic note with all the weight of science and nature, Harris theorized a sense of tonality that was only vaguely related to his famous folk-based or Americana scores but quite concretely tied to his position at a cusp between two distinct understandings of organicism: a romantic emphasis on spontaneous growth and a modern preoccupation with systematic control. Harris came by his rich organicism more naturally than most. He was a farmer’s son, always ready with an agricultural analogy. In the oral history interviews, he explained: I was born into a family of farmers. Farmers don’t talk very much, the ones that I’ve known anyhow. They sit around the table, have dinner and very little is said. That doesn’t mean that they are not thinking, but they are thinking in other terms. They are not thinking in the conventional word terms. They are thinking in terms of the essence of things […]. I think, in a way, that is a wonderful and fortunate beginning for a person who is going to become a composer. This is because music is not a word language, but a time-space language. (OH, 2–3)

Despite his considerable activity as a critic and lecturer, Harris often labeled his commitment to composition as a shedding of intellectual baggage. When asked to speculate on the sources of his creativity, he maintained, “I think that it is a natural function for a naturally creative person to be creative. I think if he examines it too much, he’ll destroy it. My farmer’s background would say, ‘Digging up the potatoes to see whether or not they’re growing’” (OH, 41). In this worldview, training was both a necessity and something of a threat particularly if, like Harris, one’s formal education included a stint under the supervision of Nadia Boulanger when Franco-American neoclassicism was, as Carol Oja has shown, truly a trans-Atlantic phenomenon.3 Looking back on the aesthetics prevalent during and after his time in Paris, Harris recalled an unhealthy emphasis on dissonance at the expense of attention to form and melody: “We had a long period which I called modern academic. You could take the most obviously dull melodies and put them in the most square melodic de-

3

American Music, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 472. Oja, Making Music Modern, 231–84.

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signs with very little formal development, just boxlike pieces. But, you could make them very dissonant, and that made it modern. Of course, we’ve grown out of that pretty well because it was too easy to do” (OH, 112).4 Harris chose for himself what he believed to be a less traveled path. He explained: I concentrated harmonically on the development of modern consonance, exactly the opposite of the way most of them have been concentrating on dissonance […]. I felt the greatest part of music was a consonant thing, and of course, this was supported by my philosophical attitudes, that nature keeps the world in perpetuity through coordination, not through disorientation. I’m sure I’m right about it. Even the physicists say that. (OH, 288–89)

Clinching his argument with a not-quite-deferential bow to the hard sciences, Harris posited a natural truth in consonance—what he liked to call an “a priori value.” Hand in hand with this affirmation of faith came the more strident assertion that composers who did not share Harris’s convictions were false in some way, either to their own better judgment or to their audiences. In the 1960s, for example, the composer recalled his initial reaction to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring: “Melody was poor, there was hardly any harmony; it was all orchestration and rhythm and dynamics […]. What happened was that music was really doing exactly what we were doing in our marketing: it was all going into packaging. You see? Very few people have agreed with me” (OH, 286–87). With this single gesture, Harris effected a surprising reversal of conventional modernist wisdom: lyrical melody and consonant harmony, so often linked with pandering to the public, here became the tools that would save music from the perils of the marketplace that had driven poor Stravinsky to rhythmic and orchestral extremes. The lever that allowed Harris to make this reversal (and to make it respectable for mid-century readers and listeners) had nature at its fulcrum, with romantic assumptions at one end and scientific systematizing at the other. Harris’s melodic writing shows the varied aspects of his organicism in action. Treating the tonic note itself as a seed from which many scales might grow, he was inclined to write melodies in which a clear tonal center provides solidity while the superimposition of two or more modes allows for interestingly variable scale degrees.5 One particularly lovely example of this practice comes from the Symphony 1933, the work that brought Harris to national prominence (Ex. 1). A more thoroughgoing exploration of this principle appears in Harris’s Third String Quartet, 4 See also Harris, “Composing–An Art and a Living,” Music Journal 11 (January 1953): 31. “Harmony to a large extent has been developed on a strict tonality. The composer who would add variation to his harmonic texture and form, must learn how to preserve a sense of tonality while avoiding the worn-out authentic and plagal cadences and obvious harmonic textures. In the matter of harmonic textures, the composer must not make the mistake of thinking that he is being modern by simply sticking in arbitrary seconds, sevenths, and ninths to an otherwise trite harmonic procedure. If he wishes to heighten and multiply his harmonic colors, he must develop them in conformance with the physical laws of sound, namely, the overtone series. This holds equally true for the color of harmonies invented as well as their relationships.” 5 Biographer and expert on Harris’s music Dan Stehman sums up this aspect: “each phrase in the unfolding of a melody generally possesses a tonal center, though one often enriched through the application of a mixture of modes on the same tonic.” Dan Stehman, Roy Harris: An American Musical Pioneer (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 36.

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which is organized into a series of preludes (on pure modes) and fugues (on “mixed modes”) as follows: Prelude I (Dorian), Fugue I (Dorian/Aeolian) Prelude II (Lydian), Fugue II (Lydian/Ionian) Prelude III (Locrian), Fugue III (Locrian/Phrygian) Prelude IV (Ionian), Fugue IV (Mixolydian, Ionian)

Example 1: Roy Harris, Symphony 1933, first movement, mm. 174–94

At times, Harris intended his meandering melodies to evoke the pre-tonal music of the Renaissance. Pieces by Josquin, Victoria, and Lassus were among his favorite discoveries during his years in the Boulangerie, and no less an authority than Arthur Mendel ratified the analogy between Harris’s scores (in this case his Piano Sonata) and the “masterpieces of the sixteenth century.”6 All the same, we should not lose sight of the fact that Harris wrote from a particularly twentieth-century position. By calling himself a “modern” or “contemporary” classicist, Harris attempted to carve out a place for himself between, or at least alongside, Stravinskian neoclassicism and Schoenbergian serialism. This is most apparent in his theory of “autogenetic melody.” Obviously organic in conception, autogenetic melody attempted both to naturalize the Schoenbergian “Grundgestalt” and to fertilize the potentially sterile forms of neoclassicism, by grafting onto traditional structures an impression of continuous growth and development. Take, for example, the Passacaglia theme from the first movement of Harris’s 1936 Piano Quintet (Ex. 2). In the words of Arthur Mendel, this theme “is so eminently singable, so strongly diatonic and tonal in feeling, that one is surprised to realize that it contains every note of the twelve-tone scale. 6

Arthur Mendel, “Music: A Change in Structure,” Nation 134, no. 3470 (1932): 26.

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In this characteristic, which it shares with the other three themes of the work, it represents […] Harris’s conscious affirmation that one may employ the full resources of the twelve-tone system without falling into either chromaticism or atonality.”7

Example 2: Harris, Passacaglia theme from Piano Quintet (1936)

When it came time to record his Piano Quintet thirty years later, Harris himself took up Mendel’s rallying cry: The Piano Quintet was written as a conviction and prediction concerning the twelve-tone technique. At that time I was convinced, […] that the dodecaphonic restriction of no repeated notes in a twelve-tone row was the weak link in this school of thought. Guided by these convictions, I planned my Piano Quintet […] using twelve-tone melodic materials in such a way as to emphasize tonality rather than as an atonal technique to destroy tonality […]. In the Fugue (a triple fugue) the first subject is presented as an eleven-tone subject in which I purposely omitted the augmented fourth or diminished fifth (musica diabolus [sic] of the ancients, but a supreme entity of the Viennese School) until the last section in which it is used as a structural accent.8

In a way, this species of twelve-tone music represents the limiting case of Harris’s multi-modal practice: a chromatic scale can just as easily arise from a given tonic as a Dorian one. Yet Harris’s language of “dodecaphonic restriction” and “structural accent” shows his desire to situate his thinking in a distinctively twentieth-century context. He conceived of a twelve-tone music that would strengthen the gravitational pull of the tonic rather than breathing the air of other planets. In similar fash7 Arthur Mendel, “The Quintet of Roy Harris,” Modern Music 17 (October–November 1939): 26. It is worth noting that Harris recognized twelve-tone music as “a tradition,” though a small one, with some exemplary works, e. g. the Berg Violin Concerto. Nonetheless he noted that “A composer cannot invent a whole new vocabulary every time he writes a new piece. This is quite out of the question and is a little bit crazy. I mean demented.” OH, 119, 120. 8 Harris, liner notes for 1964 recording of the Quintet for Piano and Strings (Contemporary Records Contemporary Composers Series S8012).

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ion, his characteristically polytonal harmonies (at least in theory) typically affirm rather than undermine the power of a single, underlying root. Ever insightful, the critic Nicolas Slonimsky noted in an unpublished biography of the composer: “The Harrisian system of harmony has its own semantics, a blend of acoustics and psychology.”9 Harris seems to have preferred to articulate the intuitive, psychological side of his aesthetic, while leaving more technical explications to his students, close associates, and critical allies. Thus the most detailed exploration of Harris’s harmonic writing comes from a 1946 article by one of his pupils, the composer and conductor Robert Evett.10 Evett states outright that “Harris has always accepted tonality as the basis of composition, and polytonality as an intensification of the principle of tonality. His linear materials are based on the diatonic scales and their combinations, his harmonic textures on the major and minor triads, their inversions and combinations.” The three functions of harmony that Harris describes—enhancing resonance, inflecting a given melodic line, and achieving “architectural definition” or form—are perhaps unsurprising. More striking are the procedures Evett’s article outlines for understanding and creating harmonic progressions. In Harris’s harmonic universe, triadic building blocks are linked one to the next, not so much through the voice-leading of their individual members but rather through two other means of navigation: the first involves movement along a pathway of common tone relationships. A given chord is considered to be closely related, and even (depending on inversion and spacing) functionally equivalent to those chords with which it shares important members; for example, a C-minor triad in first inversion can substitute for a root-position Eb-major triad because their two lower notes, E and G, are identical. Evett used the illustration reproduced as Ex. 3 to show that “This system gives any triad direct access to triads on six tonal centers, and through the parallel set of relationships through the dominant and subdominant, close relationships to every tonal center except its own tritone […] [giving] any root easy, logical reference to eleven major and eight minor triads, and consequently enormous possibilities for inflection without losing a sense of tonality and without 9 Nicolas Slonimsky, “Cimarron Composer” (carbon copy of typescript, UCLA Music Library Special Collections, 1951), 114 (hereafter cited as CC). See also CC, 66: “Harris has always emphasized that he is a Man of Nature. His melodic inspiration comes to him from communion with nature, during his solitary walks, ‘listening to bird songs, looking at the blue sky through the thick green foliage of summer trees.’ In this he is entirely a romantic, with this difference: that he translates his immediate moods into a rational and self-consistent language of rhythms and modes. In Harris’s musical semantics, optimistic moods are expressed in modes with large open intervals at the tonic; the moods of sadness are translated into a narrow gauge of intervals. It is the old ‘ethos’ of the Greeks in a new psychological—and logical—form.” 10 Robert Evett, “The Harmonic Idiom of Roy Harris,” Modern Music 23 (January–February 1946): 100–107. Along with Slonimsky and Evett, other close associates of Harris who have produced scholarly treatments of his work include his friend and mentor Arthur Farwell, whose 1932 article, “Roy Harris” Musical Quarterly 18 (1932): 18–32, helped launch Harris’s career and Sidney Thurber Cox, whose master’s thesis, “The Autogenetic Principle in the Melodic Writing of Roy Harris” (Cornell University, 1948) was completed using examples provided by Harris himself. For details, see Beth E. Levy, “‘The White Hope of American Music’; or, How Roy Harris Became Western,” American Music 19 (2001): 131–67.

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going into complex harmony.”11 (Note that all eight minor and ten of the eleven major triads that he mentions appear here. To get the eleventh major triad, A-major, requires adding one extra entry to the subdominant chord series, raising the Cnatural to C#.) Harris was selective in deriving his common tone relationships; for example, while the root of a given chord can serve three functions, the major third, minor third, and perfect fifth above that root are only allowed to serve as roots of other triads.

Example 3: Common Tone Relationships as presented in Robert Evett, “The Harmonic Idiom of Roy Harris” (1946)

It should go without saying that although Harris’s harmonies are almost exclusively triadic, root position analysis at the phrase level is frustrating at best. In this respect, Harris resembles Claude Debussy, one of the few twentieth-century European composers whom Harris professed to admire. In contrast to Debussy, however, Harris placed great emphasis on cadential moments. Yet he damned the conventional dominant seventh chord as a “bastard harmony of a major triad mated with a diminished triad” (CC, 100) preferring instead to approach cadences through the superimposition of two triads with roots a third apart–for example, G (G-B-D) and B (Bb-D-F). Also unlike Debussy, Harris rigorously eschewed as many equal divisions of the octave as he could (including not just tritones but also whole tone and octatonic scales, augmented triads, and diminished triads and seventh chords). In fact, he considered most forms of musical symmetry not as reflections of a perfect natural order but rather as symptoms of a man-made artificiality that ran counter to organic unfolding. In a 1938 conversation with critic Peter Hugh Reed, for example, he praised the melodic construction of Gregorian chant for “the asymmetry of the design,” which he believed to be “closely related to the asymmetry of Nature.” Harris continued: “The design, one might say, grows out of itself; it is not symmetrical in the way that man-made things are, on the other hand it is not disproportionate, but its proportions are regulated by its growth from within in adjustment to its environments. Symmetrical patterns have their definite limitations. Symmetry, for example, belongs to industrialism.”12 11 Evett, “Harmonic Idiom,” 104–5. 12 Peter Hugh Reed, “Roy Harris–American Composer,” American Music Lover 3, no. 11 (March 1938): 407.

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Rather than relying on equal divisions of the octave, Harris’s second way of creating harmonic syntax without the tensions and releases of traditional voiceleading makes use of a carefully regulated spectrum of chord colors, stretching (in Harris’s words) from “savage bright” through less bright and neutral tones down toward “dark” and “savage dark.” The measure of a chord’s relative brightness or darkness has everything to do with the overtone series. Bright chords are those whose upper tones are supported by the overtone series generated by the fundamental; dark chords are those whose upper notes persist in dissonance with this fundamental series. According to this logic—and here I am paraphrasing Slonimsky’s paraphrase of Harris—the first inversion of a minor triad in open harmony (say, CE-A) has greater brightness or resonance than the first inversion of the major triad C#-E-A because the bass note C generates a fifth partial E while the series on C# does not. By contrast, the major 6/4 chord (again in open position) is considered more consonant than the minor 6/4 because, taking the tonic C as an example, the major third E is prominent in the overtone series on G while the minor third E is not.13 Similarly, major thirds (and their inversions, minor sixths) are more consonant at a distance from the root, while minor thirds and major sixths grow more dissonant with distance. The same basic principles that Harris applied to simple triads extend to his frequently polytonal writing, which is also organized according to common-tone relationships and categories of relative consonance and dissonance derived from the overtone series of the lowest sounding note. In fact, because of these priorities, it can be difficult in practice to distinguish between a Harrisian polychord and, say, a dominant ninth, eleventh, or thirteenth chord. We can find one such instance in the pastoral midsection of the famous Third Symphony, which features what Harris always called “bitonal” or “polytonal” string arpeggios underneath suitably bucolic woodwind fragments (Ex. 4).

Example 4: Harris, Third Symphony, arpeggiated harmonic background reduced by Don Stehman to block polychords

13 In Slonimsky’s words, “[Harris] points out that fifths become more consonant at a wider range because they coincide with the third, sixth, twelfth, and twenty-fourth partial tones; on the other hand, fourths become more dissonant when removed from the bass, because of the interference with the major third, which is the fifth partial of the fundamental tone.” CC, 114.

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Example 5: Polychords from “bright” to “dark” [as organized by Robert Evett]

Although he was writing well before the Third Symphony, composer and theorist Walter Piston reflected on Harris’s polytonality in 1934, writing that “while it is true that a combination of two different chords may have been used, it is equally true that it takes more than one chord to establish a tonality. In listening to [Harris’s] music one is practically always conscious of a tonal center. Whether or not the composer intended this to be the case is not quite clear […].”14 Piston’s parting shot has a significant element of truth. In Ex. 5, Evett attempted to organize Harris’s “basic polychords” into “a graduated scale from very bright to very dark.” Yet, even with the composer’s probable input, Evett had to acknowledge that the measure of brightness and darkness was somewhat subjective. Speaking for himself, Harris preferred to relate how he learned his harmonic colors by attempting to match in sound his own impressions of the gradually changing light he experienced near his childhood home in California. He recalled: I remember there was a period when I went up on a hill to see the sunset at the same time every day. Gradually, it came a little bit earlier and a little bit earlier. That was in the fall. I wanted to see […] if I could find the harmony of the mood if I could. Then I did the same thing with sunrises. I did the same thing at noon every day to see if I could find out what the pantheistic color was, what the sounds were that surrounded the valley below, and all that whole thing. I would listen very carefully, conceive a harmony, write it and play it to see if I got it right. It was a very relaxed, but concentrated way. That’s really the way one should study harmony, I think. (OH, 30–31)

When Slonimsky was preparing his biography, Harris told him that the idea for the Third Symphony’s “pastoral scene” was linked to an experience he had at the MacDowell Colony in the summer of 1926. He recalled “a tremendous storm of lightning, wind, rain, and hail, which began from an ominous calm, and grew in intensity to the greatest storm I ever witnessed” (CC, 138–39). There is, however, another more widely publicized narrative linked to the Third Symphony, one in which Harris wanted to capture in its single movement the entire sweep of western music history. He recalled: 14 Walter Piston, “Roy Harris,” Modern Music 11 (January–February 1934): 77–78.

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Given this continuously unfolding trajectory, saturated with its own sense of history, we would do well to examine the climax of Harris’s Gothic arch, the moment at which his cloudy pastoral polychords yield to the best known tune Harris ever wrote. If there were ever a melody unafraid to pledge its allegiance to tonality, this is it (Ex. 6). For all its rhythmic punch, the pitches of the fugue subject are essentially a collage of cadential formulas, each landing emphatically on tonic bedrock. In some circles, Harris has been called a radical among conservatives, a conservative among radicals, and the ambiguity of his position is closely tied to his ideas about harmony. If there is a radical element in Harris’s conception of tonality, it lies in the tremendous weight assigned to the tonic and the relative lightness/ looseness of the corollary key or scale. In a 1932 essay about Harris, composer Henry Cowell wrote: Modernism and originality have been so associated with harmony that if one performs for a sophisticated audience works with new harmonies, it is taken for granted as modern; but if one performs for them a work with old types of harmony, but with real innovations in rhythm, form, or even melody, it will be called old-fashioned, and the newer elements will pass unnoticed.16

During the 1930s and early 1940s, Harris advocated to bring these innovations to wider recognition, and he did so with some success. But it did not take long for his stance to become more frankly embattled. In a program note from the 1960s (written for the Piano Quintet), he declared: “Throughout my lifework, my purpose has been to affirm tradition as our greatest resource, rather than to avoid it as our greatest threat.”17 As I hope this chapter has shown, the particular tradition that Harris meant to affirm was built on tonality and guided by a quest for modern consonance. I am not the first to point out that Harris considered it part of his continuous mission to emancipate consonance. He was a conscientious objector in the midst of a crisis, or at least a crossroads, the point at which the supposed dissolution of tonality and the emancipation of dissonance became the very “historical truths” 15 OH, 387. This story is repeated with varying amounts of detail in Evett, “Harmonic Idiom,” 102–3; Robert Strassburg, Roy Harris: A Catalog of His Works (Los Angeles: California State University, 1974), 13; and in many interviews preserved at the Roy Harris Collection at California State University, Los Angeles. The instance in Evett’s article is particularly important: it lacks the retrospective contextualization, but includes the idea that the symphony “parallels the growth of the form [i.e. genre] itself: it begins with a single line in the middle-low register, then expands to a simple organum harmony, and grows to a richer fauxbourdon triad treatment, becoming always more concentrated, more heavily scored. Over a rich texture of constantly moving polychords, a set of variations progresses from woodwinds to brass, as the harmonic volume expands and becomes constantly brighter and more concentrated, breaking into the fugue.” 16 Cowell, “Roy Harris, An American Composer,” 133. 17 Harris, liner notes for 1964 recording of the Quintet for Piano and Strings (Contemporary Records Contemporary Composers Series S8012).

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Example 6a: Third Symphony, emergence of the fugue

Example 6b: Third Symphony, fugue subject

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Example 7: Harris, Ode to Consonance, mm. 1–16

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that this volume seeks to interrogate. Harris made his objections public. Indeed, in 1956 he wrote an Ode to Consonance (Ex. 7) which was heard the following season in Cincinnati, Chicago, Brooklyn, and Detroit and praised by Edward (not Olin) Downes for its “indefinable outdoor atmosphere.”18 A moment’s reflection will make plain that by the time something needs an ode it is already in serious trouble. All the celebratory tone in the world cannot obscure the fact. Perhaps John Keats recognized this in 1819, when his celebrated “Ode to a Grecian Urn” gave that relic everlasting fame and offered up a motto that Roy Harris came close to claiming as his own.19 But as Harris saw even in the 1930s, and certainly by the 1950s and 60s, beauty may be truth, truth may be beauty, but this is definitely not all we know or all we need to know. Bibliography Cowell, Henry. “Roy Harris, An American Composer.” The Sackbut 12, no. 3 (April 1932): 133–35. Cox, Sidney Thurber. “The Autogenetic Principle in the Melodic Writing of Roy Harris.” Master’s thesis, Cornell University, 1948. Evett, Robert. “The Harmonic Idiom of Roy Harris.” Modern Music 23 (Spring 1946): 100–107. Farwell, Arthur. “Roy Harris.” Musical Quarterly 18 (1932): 18–32. Harris, Roy. Composer of American Music. Interviews by Donald J. Schippers and Adelaide Tusler. 2 vols. Los Angeles, Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles 1983. — “Composing–An Art and a Living.” Music Journal 11, no. 1 (January 1953): 31, 78. Levy, Beth E. “‘The White Hope of American Music’; or, How Roy Harris Became Western.” American Music 19 (2001): 131–67. Mendel, Arthur. “Music: A Change in Structure.” Nation 134, no. 3470 (1932): 26. — “The Quintet of Roy Harris.” Modern Music 17 (October–November 1939): 25–28. Oja, Carol J. “A Quartet of New World Classicists.” Chap. 16 in Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Piston, Walter. “Roy Harris.” Modern Music 11 (January–February 1934): 73–83. Reed, Peter Hugh. “Roy Harris–American Composer.” American Music Lover 3, no. 11 (March 1938): 406–10.

18 Commissioned by the Sinfonia Foundation for the 1956 National Assembly of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Fraterity, the Ode to Consonance was dedicated to Thor Johnson, who conducted the Sinfonia Orchestra when it met in Cincinnati. Subsequent performances took place in Chicago: 6 July 1957 (Ravinia, All-Harris program); Detroit: 26 December 1958 (Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Paul Paray); Brooklyn: 9 November 1957 (Brooklyn Philharmonic, Siegfried Landau). Ironically, in one of his last oral history interviews, Harris states: “A person might, for instance, write a whole work for an orchestra which had nothing but the most brilliant consonances and no dissonances at all. We would be ready for something like this because we have already exhausted dissonance. There is nowhere else to go. It has been used as far as you can use it. However, consonance hasn’t made any great development for a long time. Polytonality has a great possibility there.” OH, 713. 19 For details on Keats see “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” http://englishhistory.net/keats/poetry/odeonagrecianurn.html. Keats’s other Odes include those to Psyche, the Nightingale, Melancholy, and Autumn; there’s also an Ode to Indolence. The Ode to Consonance was likewise not Harris’s only ode. He also wrote an Ode to Truth (for Stanford University) and an Ode to Friendship (to be performed in the Soviet Union).

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Slonimsky, Nicolas. “Cimarron Composer.” Carbon copy of typescript, UCLA Music Library Special Collections, 1951. Starr, Larry. “Tonal Traditions in Art Music from 1920 to 1960.” In The Cambridge History of American Music, edited by David Nicholls, 471–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Stehman, Dan. Roy Harris: An American Musical Pioneer. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Strassburg, Robert. Roy Harris: A Catalog of His Works. Los Angeles: California State University, 1974.

Samuel Barber’s Nocturne: An Experiment in Tonal Serialism Daniel Harrison Introduction Conventional wisdom holds that tonal and serial compositional techniques are incompatible.1 Serial works that seem to mediate between the two, such as Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, with its overlapping major and minor triads built into the tone row, can be seen as special cases. No less special are tonal works that incorporate serial gestures, but here the effects are rather more fraught. For while triadic segments can be folded into a row, as Berg did, these need not be foregrounded in the composition or otherwise made to be tonality-expressive; various manipulations of the row and its unfolding can see to that. But the aggregate-forming requirements of a twelve-tone row can easily frustrate if not overwhelm the framing and ranking requirements of tonal hierarchies. It goes without saying that the “classical” demands of the tone row in composition—that it be the chief source of structural pitch deployment—can hardly be met in this environment. Hence, whereas Berg could “compose around” and ignore the row’s tonal connotations in the Violin Concerto, a tonal composer must “compose around” and even against a row’s lack of hierarchy and anchoring. It is hardly surprising, then, that serial techniques in tonal environments have been described as “experiments.”2 Samuel Barber’s Nocturne: Homage to John Field, op. 33, (1959), is such an experiment, and, according to his leading biographer, a “tentative” one as well.3 Curiously, it takes place within a conservative genre, a circumstance that Barber underscores by explicitly honoring, in the subtitle, the genre’s comparatively littleknown founder rather than its leading exponent, a puzzlement to be discussed at the end of this essay. Figure 1 makes it immediately apparent that Barber made his 1 And by “tonal,” I mean here not only the common-practice classical repertory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but descendents and relatives of it as well—twentieth- and twentyfirst-century adaptations (both art and pop), and any other practices that mimic the harmonic style and tonal hierarchy of the lower overtone series. On the point of “incompatibility,” see Ernst Krenek, Studies in Counterpoint (New York: Schirmer, 1940), 1: “Avoid more than two major or minor triads formed by a group of three consecutive tones [in a twelve-tone row], as for instance: because the tonal implications emanating from a triad are incompatible with the principles of atonality.” Krenek could have overemphasized his point had he put “II–V–I” under the last three notes of the tone row. 2 See, for example, David Neumeyer, The Music of Paul Hindemith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 242. 3 Barbara B. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and his Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 403.

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Figure 1: Samuel Barber, Nocturne, mm. 1–5

homage by composing a strong overtonal foundation with characteristic 128 chordal arpeggios in the left-hand accompaniment and providing a John Field-like “chromatically decorated coloratura melody” in the right.4 This melody happens to be serially structured. Notice the right-hand part, which starts on middle C4, finds C6 in the middle of m. 3 after completing an aggregate, and then returns, via pitch-class retrograde, to middle C on the downbeat of m. 5. This gesture is built over an arcade of arpeggiated chords, all major or minor triads except for the [026] chords over an A pedal point in mm. 2–3. The emphasis given pitch-class C discloses a crucial departure from classic twelve-tone technique, for C is both the first and last pitch class of the row, which means that, strictly speaking, the Nocturne is not a twelve- but a thirteen-tone work: C6 is the pivot between the prime and retrograde versions of the tone row. The figuration leading up to C reinforces its delimiting function. Overcoming a rhythmically stuttering start, the melody catches on in m. 3 and rapidly accelerates upwards from the fourth octave before reaching the climactic C6. The sudden “stop & hold” there gives the pitch an exceptionally strong agogic accent. A similar technique is used to mark middle C in m. 5 as well as many other endings throughout the piece.5 This consistent treatment of row statements in the Nocturne suggests that their teleological directive is not to seek chromatic exhaustion in the aggregate, but to embed an opening/closing pitch into a tonal hierarchy after discharging chromatic debts. 4 The quoted phrase is from Robin Langley’s description of Field’s nocturne style in “Field, John,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), 8:777. 5 This feature was identified by James P. Fairleigh, “Serialism in Barber’s Solo Piano Works,” Piano Quarterly, no. 72 (Summer 1970): 13–17.

hierarchy aftervocabulary. dischargingThe chromatic debts. remarkably limited motivic An Experiment in Tonal Serialism our motivic morphemes, all of which are found in Figure 1. The tone row is further disciplined by a

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μ ¥. and its contour, characterized above disciplined as a kind ofby stutter, The tone row is further remarkably motivic vocabright-hand part utters onlya four motivic limited morphemes, all of ulary. The right-hand part utters only four motivic morphemes, all of which are e-order statements, strongly announcing row Theopening openingfigure figure ¢ | ¤.†¤ ¤μ ¥.  and and its itscontour, contour,characterized characterized found in Fig. 1. The above as a kind of stutter, are specifically associated with prime-order statements, rappel à l’ordre. The series of running sixteenths that follows in specifically associated prime-order statements, strongly announcingare row beginnings as a literalwith rappel à l’ordre. The series strongly of run- announcing row ning sixteenths that follows in m. 3—with same up-down contour of the openning figure, is also associated withthe primeas a literal rappel àmotion. The l’ordre ing figure—is also beginnings associated with prime-order ideas found in m. 4,  are less less typecast. typecast. ¤ ¤ ¤³ and ¤¸.³μμ, are m. 3, with the same up-down contour of the opening figure, is also a tone-row usage, imparting a teleological tonal spin to row order motion. The ideas found in m. 4, ¤ ¤ ¤³ and ¤¸.³μμ, are less typecast. d number of highly marked motives, may be These features of Barber’s tone-row usage, imparting a te the row inside the cornerstone of structure statements and associating them with a limite ent of surface decoration. But what, then, is seen as compensation for the refusal to place Nocturne? AFigure formal overview is presented in Figure breve 2. represents global tonal center; 2: Barber, Nocturne, chart. Square and to use form it instead as the dominating elem rounded breve is the upper fifth of the center; upstemmed half note is major third; upstemmed quarter note of is major sixth. the structural cornerstone the Nocturne gh, “Serialism in Barber’s Solo Piano Works,” Piano

These features of Barber’s tone-row usage, imparting a teleological tonal spin to row statements and associating them with a limited number of highly marked motives, 4 This feature was identified by James P. Fairleigh, “Serialism in Barber’s Solo Piano Works,” may be seen as compensation for the refusal to place the row inside the cornerstone of structure and to useQuarterly it instead as the 1970), dominating (Summer, 14–17. element of surface decoration. But what, then, is the structural cornerstone of the Nocturne? A formal overview is presented in Fig. 2. Part (a) represents the tonal centers of the work as members of an integrated “dissonant” tonic chord, A major with an added sixth, symbolized hereafter as AM+, with the initiating moments of the tonal span represented by measure numbers attached to the chord tones. A glance back at Fig. 1 shows the AM+ structure appearing as a tonic chord in mm. 2–3 (the first and second halves, respectively), an explicit linking of surface to depth that gives the Nocturne a tonality-driven form different in degree rather than kind from common-practice forms. Indeed, as part (b) of the example discloses, Barber’s Nocturne is cast in ABA’ ternary form, the generic default of the nineteenth-century piano nocturne. And like its models, the piece composes out tonic as it unfolds formally. Note that the bass-staff notes in the first and third sections are identical to those in the overtonal tonic at (a), but horizontalized and mostly notated according to their place in the generalized overtonal hierarchy. The contrasting middle section, fittingly enough, is not structured with tonal centers; the first part, mm. 20–4, is tonally opaque (hence, marked with an ), while the second, mm. 25–9, offers figurated amplified-root chords (i.e., generic verticalities over strong bass notes) that are generally Dominant in function. A return to overtonal opacity follows in a roughly 15-second, small-note cadenza filling out the remainder of m. 29. Sonata elements are overlaid on the ternary form, which the treble staff of Fig. 2(b) highlights. The first section is an exposition that moves from the opening

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A tonic to closing E dominant; the middle is an unstable development; and the third, a recapitulation that maintains A tonic focus throughout. The lower of the two treble-staff lines shows this most clearly, with the large-scale activation of G/7ˆ (as an agent of Dominant function) in the first part answered by the maintenance of. A/1ˆ in the third. The Tone Rows So far, the discussion of Barber’s Nocturne has not taken opportunities to interpret its tone row as anything other than coloratura filigree. Thwarted from underscoring atonal chromatic aggregation by its obsessive thirteen-tone behaviors as well as by ubiquitous tonal elements in the piece—ranging from details of accompaniment figuration to overall form—the row is also restrained by a limited motivic vocabulary, a figurative bell around the neck that prevents it from moving unnoticed anywhere except the surface. And even there, it proves to be dispensable, as tone-row organization is pointedly allowed to break down in the later parts of the development, mm. 25–9. The rhythmic and contour motives cited above are stripped out of their strict tone-row environment and presented essentially as counterfeit row fragments—so strong is the association of these motives with tone-row unfolding that a less loaded characterization does not come easily to mind—so that these measures sound of a piece with the strict-row measures but are in fact not organized by tone row at all. The emphasis on these features has steered the analysis close to substantiating the label “tentative” that was applied to row usage in the piece. Further, the weight of evidence that Barber subjected the row to a domineering tonal lordship has intimidated previous analysts of the work, whose readings are, if not tentative themselves, somewhat incurious about the state of affairs.6 Are there, however, enough incongruities to lead us past the apparently settled matter of the merely decorative and dispensable function of the tone row? Figure 3, a collation and analysis of all the row forms used in the Nocturne, initially suggests that there are not. Consider first only the top staff, leaving aside all the various annotations except for the slurs. The notes are taken from the righthand part of Fig. 1. The arhythmic representation in the present figure brings out an additional, previously unnoted discipline upon the row in mm. 2–3: the strict segmentation into three, T8-related 4-6 [0127] tetrachords—or, rather, into three pitch-spaced tetrachords, eight semitones apart and consistently ordered by the interval series 〈+5, –6, +11〉. This kind of pitch-space deployment is used throughout 6

Besides Fairleigh’s article cited previously, other studies of the Nocturne are found in James Sifferman, “Samuel Barber’s Works for Solo Piano” (DMA diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1982) and Laurie Young, “The Solo Piano Music of Samuel Barber” (DMA diss., University of Cincinnati, 1989). Another work of Barber’s that has received attention for its serial elements is the Piano Sonata, op. 26, which, besides being discussed in the studies just cited, is also the subject of Hans Tischler’s “Barber’s Piano Sonata, op. 26,” Music and Letters 33 (1952): 352– 54. Many of Tischler’s observations are pertinent to the Nocturne.

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Figure 3: Barber, Nocturne, Tone-row chart

the piece; most prime-order row statements are characterized by the consistently ascending zigzag linear vectors found in Fig. 3. A certain problem of melodic variety emerges from the analytical observations—pronounced articulation of row beginning and endings, small rhythmic vocabulary, and limited sets of pitch and contour gestures. At this point, we can see that the fundamental tone-row idea as an augmented triad {0,8,4} infilled with chromatic aggregate. The elements of the {0,8,4} triad serve as stable “nodes” of the tone row, while the infill is passing and unstable—suitable for filigree and ornament. The stability of the nodes is further underwritten by the limited possibilities for transposition and rotation. That is, if considered in pitch-class space, a transposition of the row in the top staff of Fig. 3 by four or eight semitones is equivalent to starting the given row on the ninth and fifth pitch classes, respectively, and amounts essentially to circulating the same pitch-class adjacencies. For this reason, the topstaff row is labeled P0,8,4. Statements of it that begin on pitch class 0, 8, or 4 will be said to belong to the same row-form family. What previous analysts have identified as a second row is shown on the staff below, labeled S0,8,4. This ordering underscores the fundamental tone-row idea by refilling the unstable space between the stable {0,8,4} nodes with different aggregate. Hence, it is not so much a different row as an adjustment of the first row. From the “semitonal offset” numbers between the staves, we can imagine the nodes to be connected by an elastic string that is bowed into the S(trecthed) version of the row:

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the closer to the nodes, the less semitonal displacement (i.e., 1), and at the midpoint between them, the most (2).7

Figure 4: Barber, Nocturne, mm. 5–10

The rhetorical purposes of the P and S rows can be identified in Fig. 4, which shows the music immediately following Fig. 1. The first row statement, mm. 5–6, a retrograde of P0, exposes all four of the tone-row nodes clearly for the first time; the agogic accents on pitch classes 0, 4, and 8 cannot be missed. This statement coincides with a shifting of tonal center into C Major, transforming the relationship between the first/last row element (pitch-class 0) and the tonal center from chordal third to chordal root. This promotion calls out the first stretched version, S0, which appears in m. 6 and is repeated in m. 8. (Imagine the S0,8,4 row in Fig. 3 with an 8va sign and compare with the statements in mm. 6 and 8; the elastic relationship to the P form is unmistakable.) Significantly, the S obliviates the “node & fill” revelation of the previous RP0 by passing quickly and unagogically through the intermediate nodes while locking in the coincidence of C as tonal center and chief pitch class of the tone row. The undifferentiated rhythmic profile of the row presentation, its immediate repetition, and the strong sense of overtonal arrival at C combine to give the impression that S0 functions here as rhetorical closure, sealing off the first part of the exposition. The beamed progression, part of this rhetorical function, will be explained later.

7 Sifferman, “Barber’s Works for Piano,” 114, noticed the similarity of interval succession between the two rows but did not investigate it further.

The second part, containing the move to C minor and Eß Major, is marked by the An Experiment in Tonal Serialism 267 appearance of a new tone-row family: P7,3,11, as designated in Figure 3.7 Obviously

The second part, containing the move to C minor and Efrom Major, markedform by on pitch-class 0 reflecting traditional organization—transposition theis“tonic” the appearance of a new tone-row family: P7,3,11, as designated in Fig. 3.8 Obviously reflecting traditional organization—transposition from the “tonic”ofform pitchto the “dominant” form on pitch-class 7—the entrance the Pon in m. 11 completely 7 row class 0 to the “dominant” form on pitch-class 7—the entrance of the P7 row in m. 11 recapitulates the the signature signature ¢ | ¤.†¤ ¤μ ¥. rhythm of the the opening opening row row form form and, as a result, rhythm of completely recapitulates and, as a result, acquires an initiating function that confirms the suggestion of closacquires an initiating function that confirms the suggestion of closing given by the ing given by the previous S 0 statements. But the presentation pointedly departs from the contour of both the original and the immediately preceding S0 statements, the presentation pointedly departs the contour of both previous S0 statements. differentiating the second part from But the first by this feature as well as by rowfrom family. the original and the immediately preceding S0 statements, differentiating the second part from the first by this feature as well as by row family. More information about the relationship of parts in the outer sections of the Nocturne can be gleaned from Figure 5, which collates the rows used in the exposition and recapitulation and charts 

the consumption of registral space, denoted by octave designators along the left vertical (e.g., “3” = C3–B3);

7

It is perhaps useful to remind the reader that there are only four distinct row families for a given P or S form, just as there are only four distinct forms of the 3-12[048] trichord.

Figure 5: Barber, Nocturne, register chart. Italics mark the initiating measure of row; left hand column indicates the octave using ASA standard (middle C = C4).

8

It is perhaps useful to remind the reader that there are only four distinct row families for a given P or S form, just as there are only four distinct forms of the 3-12 [048] trichord.

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More information about the relationship of parts in the outer sections of the Nocturne can be gleaned from Fig. 5, which collates the rows used in the exposition and recapitulation and elements to be noted include: – the consumption of registral space, denoted by octave designators along the left vertical (e. g., “3” = C3–B3); – the direction in which the rows move, indicated by an arrowhead; – the particular row form used, with labels drawn from Fig. 3 (“R” = retrograde); – the measure in which the row form begins, shown with italic numbers; and – the tonal centers noted in Fig. 2(b). The figure highlights the unusual registral behavior of the P7 statement in m. 11: its registral flatness contrasts markedly with the other row statements, almost all of which are upwardly directed. Only two, at m. 3 and its recapitulatory correspondent, m. 31, are downward, and these rhetorically balance the opening thematic launch by retrograding to the pitch of origin, creating a large registral arch that can be heard to magnify the shape of the accompanimental arpeggio figures. After its unusual launch, the second part of the exposition does, however, follow the registral template set by the first: an RP presentation from the fourth to fifth octaves that uncovers the “node & fill” row structure followed by two closing S forms ascending from the fifth to the seventh. To remain parallel with the trajectory of the first part, in which the first/last row element was eventually aligned with the local tonal center, the RP presentation in m. 14 begins on a different node, pitch class 3, and finishes as the tonal center shifts to E. Although Fig. 5 highlights the use of S rows for rhetorical closure in the exposition, the S3 row of mm. 15–19 has an additional and remarkable property not enjoyed by the S0 row of mm. 6–10, which the bottom part of Fig. 3 reveals: S7,3,11 preserves dyadic adjacencies of P0,8,4, but reverses their order. The “S7→P0 mapping” makes this apparent by showing the order-number mapping, with the extended dashes between numbers connecting the reversed dyads. (For example, consider the first two pitch classes of the S7,3,11 row, shown in the upper staff of the bracketed system in Fig. 3. These are pitch classes 7 and 1. Using the “S7→P0 mapping,” note that the first pitch class maps to the 7th, and the second to the 6th. Going now to these order positions in P0,8,4, discover that the respective pitch classes are 7 and 1.) This relationship between the two row families might be merely theoretical had Barber not composed a pointedly ambiguous S3 row unfolding of mm. 15–17, shown in Fig. 6. Despite the departures from strict ordering (noted as “anomalies” in the example), the row offers the dyads as harmonic, unordered intervals.9 These 9

It is, of course, impossible to determine what kind of events these “anomalies” are. Sifferman, “Barber’s Works for Piano,” 122, suggests that they are deliberate departures from the row to accommodate overtonal harmony. Given Barber’s deliberate forsaking serial ordering in mm. 25–29, this explanation cannot be dismissed. Yet the “missing” natural signs in m. 14 (as well as another in m. 12) may be uncorrected misprints. The “off by a third” substitutions of G and E for E and C, respectively, in m. 15 are more likely candidates for editorial correction. Note how the m. 17 version of the figure has the E and C in correct order, and note as well the

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Figure 6: Barber, Nocturne, mm. 14–19, right hand. Anomolies (mistakes?) in row usage are marked

sonorities belong to both row types, so that it could fairly be said that S3 row here proclaims its affinity to the P0,4,8 family. It is only with the second S3 row, mm. 17– 19, where the dyads are broken up and presented melodically, that the ambiguity is partly erased.10 Even so, dyadic invariance allows the S3 rows to reference the opening P0,8,4 while simultaneously fulfilling their closing, S-row function. Summary: The Opening Section Despite the clear formal and rhetorical features of the exposition, an interpretive summary of the section is difficult to produce. The remarkable similarity of melodic gestures—contour, interval, rhythm, direction—endows it with a certain immobility, which is abetted by the repetitive accompanimental figuration. The preceding discussion has of necessity highlighted changes over time—in row form, tonal center, register—since the progression of the these perhaps offers occasions for hermeneutic work. Indeed, the pervading sense of restriction in the exposition creates expectations for and highlights moments of difference. Thus, the RP presentations of m. 5 and 14 that make explicit the underlying principle of the row families are particularly noteworthy, followed as they are by repeated “change of subject” (and register) S rows, which suggest that the underlying principle is a touchy subject. But, even so, we are left with a vague impression that the piece is not comfortcorresponding passage in the recapitulation, m. 40, where the second—but not the first—of the two “wrong” notes is corrected. 10 But only partly, since the thirty-second-note diminution “flutters” between the two notes of the dyad, presenting them in both P0,8,4 and S7,3,11 order: e. g., in m. 17, E–A–E–A, C–D–C–D, etc.

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able in its skin despite the beautifully flowing cantilena and accompaniment, the familiar expressive rhetoric, and the lucid overtonal form. We await further clarification, which the development section supplies. The Development

The development, like the exposition, is in two parts, finished off by a free, small- 12 note cadenza that is almost lengthy enough to be considered its own part. The first part, mm. 20–4, gives the serial element greater structural influence than it has enjoyed up to this point while fully exposing it as a creature of tetrachordal transposition. All the while, John staff. Field’s arpeggios gamely soldier onisintothe interior. Figure The first developmental move confirm the suggestion that S7 7 analyzes the first part, condensing the arpeggios into block chords and separating them into a separate staff. The developmental move is to confirm the with suggespowersfirst (because of the dyadic-exchange property P0 tion that S7 has initiating powers (because of the dyadic-exchange property with P0) {7,3,11} nodes nodes with with the the ¢ | ¤.†¤ ¤μ ¥. rhythm rhythm characteristic characteristic of P-form exposi by marking each of the {7,3,11} of P-form exposition. Further development results from the intense focus on nodetheof inte to-node motion through development unpredictablyresults spacedfrom points imitation. Whereas the RP presentations of mm. 5 and 14 had tentatively uncovered the nodal structure of the unpredictably spaced points of imitation. Whereas RP pres tone rows, the opening of the development emphatically proclaims it. Alsothe amplified here, on two levels, is the teleological spin of row structure and presentation had tentatively uncovered the nodal structure encountered in the exposition. Just as the P and S row forms were anchored by a thirteen-tone technique in which the first and last notes of theit.row development emphatically proclaims Alsowere the same pitch class, the presentation of rhythmicized row nodes in the development proto Spresen ceeds from and concludes with the same teleological spinelement. Thus, S of row structure7 and 3 to S11 and concluding with S7 in mm. 19–21, and similarly with the S0,8,4 family in mm. 22–4.11 On a smaller scale, the figuration theS cycle is likewise end-directed, departing from the Pofand row forms were anchored by a thirteen-tone technique in one node and arriving at the next thanks to the rhythmic figure, whose five elements notes of row the same pitch class, theaccented presentation cover not only the nodal last tetrachord butthe also thewere following node, agogically as usual. nodes in deal the development proceeds andaspects c Other annotations on Fig. 7 with the harmonic andfrom linear of the passage. Under pressure from S-row saturation, the accompanimental arpeggios to Sdeform andgenerally concluding with S7 intetrachords, mm. 19–21,departing and similarly with the S 3 to S11into verticalized on the top staff whole-tone from the expositional norm of consonant triads. The deployment of S-row nodal enmm. 22–4.10 On a smaller scale, the figuration of tries creates gently ascending whole-tone step progressions, which the beams bring out, another departure from the generally diatonic progressions theneexposition. departing from one node and arriving atofthe As the pace of imitative entry picks up in m. 21, appoggiature chords contribute to the buildup, which culminates in the not highest chord five elements cover only tension the nodal tetr (third chord in m. 21), resolving to the relatively relaxed fourth chord, which in turn prefaces a low-tension E-minor triad on theas downbeat accented usual. of m. 22. A somewhat inelegant seam separates this chord from a T5 repetition of the preceding music that reestablishes Other annotations on Figure {7,3,11}. This 7 deal with thetakes harmonic the “tonic” {0,8,4} nodes after a period of “dominant” placeand lin passage. Under pressure from S-row sa

11 The anomaly noted in m. 21—the substitution of F4 for G4 in m. 21 in the midst of this very strict motivic treatment—is most likelyon a mistake. verticalized the top staff deform into generally whole-tone tetrach

the expositional norm of consonant triad. The gently ascending whole-tone step progressi

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- 13 -

As the pace of imitative entry picks up in m. 21, appoggiature chords contribute to the buildup, which culminates int he highest tension chord (third chord in m. 21), resolving to the relatively relaxed fourth chord, which in turn prefaces a low-tension Eß-minor triad on the downbeat of m. 22. A somewhat inelegant seam separates this chord from a T5 repetition of the preceding music that reestablishes the “tonic” {0,8,4} nodes after a period of “dominant” {7,3,11}. This takes place covertly, under cover of tonal occlusion, so what had been well marked in the exposition—the change from P0,8,4 to P7,3,11 row Figure 7: Barber, Nocturne, analysis of mm. 19–24

families—is in the development folded into a larger gesture. covertly, under cover of tonal occlusion, so what had been well marked in the expofamilies—is in the development folded sition—the change 0,8,4 to P 7,3,11 row The from P impressive exertion of row organization in the first part of the development is into a larger gesture. The impressive of row organization in thein first the development followedexertion by a surprising collapse. Starting m.part 25, of a move towards rhetorical climax has is followed by a surprising collapse. Starting in m. 25, a move towards rhetorical sound pitches pitches unorganized by climax has familiar familiar rhythmic rhythmic and and contour contour motives motives (¤¸.³μμ and ¤ ¤ ¤³) sound unorganized by any row. Just below this disintegrating surface, newly reactivated anycan row. Just below this too disintegrating newly reactivated {0,8,4} nodes can be {0,8,4}nodes be heard, but these are lost by surface, m. 28, along with the arpeggios. Figure 2 showed the emergence of amplified-root chords in this section, and these heard, butstructural these too role are lost m.obliterated 28, along with the arpeggios. Figure take over the leading frombythe tone rows. The strongest of2 showed the these is sounded in m. 29: a bass E supporting a dominant seventh-chord. Above, emergence of amplified-root thisrhythms, section, and take over familiar motivic figuration finally gives chords way toinnew pitchthese relations, andthe leading contour as the bass note decays; the remainder of m. 29 is filled out with a smallstructural role from the obliterated tone rows. The strongest of these is sounded in m. 29: note cadenza that consistently descends from the opening high point. Settling into an highly octatonic the cadenza peters out with an Above, allargando…molto and figuration finally a bass Eß nadir, supporting a dominant seventh-chord. familiar motivic two fermate over the octatonic-minus one set 7-31[0134679]. A short general pause ensues, andgives then follows the recapitulation. way to new rhythms, pitch relations, and contour as the bass note decays; the remainder of m. 29 is filled out with a small-note cadenza that consistently descends from the opening high point. Settling into an highly octatonic nadir, the cadenza peters out with an allargando…molto and two fermate over the octatonic-minus one set

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The emergence of the octatonic soundscape in the cadenza is puzzling, since no well-marked events that could have foretold it have been previously sounded in the Nocturne. A search for clues that may prove to be heuristically productive yields two pieces of evidence. One is the introduction of the S row type, first encountered in m. 6, which involved a change of nodal tetrachord from the non-octatonic 4-6 [0127] of P to the (possibly) octatonic 4-13 [0136] of S, but these tetrachords are not highlighted in the presentation of the row, and the change is not easily perceived. It is attended, however, by the other, a noticeable bit of accompanimental commentary: an unambiguously octatonic scale segment, 4-3 [0134], is sounded in the highest polyphonic melody line of mm. 6–7—a step progression highlighted by the beam in Fig. 4. This octatonic comment is partially retracted in the immediately following repetition, in which an appogiatura prefix, F, changes its character from octatonic to chromatic. In Fig. 4, a notated tenuto with upward stems (N.B., Barber’s notation) can be seen to bring out this altered line. This retraction is of a piece with the “change of subject” heard in the use of S to cover up the nodal exposure offered by RP, which two events occur nearly simultaneously. A trope of diffidence seems to be in play here, a kind of subtle reluctance to explore implications. This trope can also be read in other features already noted: the stuttering start of the opening melody, the short-breathed 13-tone row realizations, and the motivic laconism of both melody and accompaniment. The end of the development also participates in this reading; the octatonicism is puzzling only in that it seems not to result from clearly marked pitch relationships earlier in the piece, but by this very disconnection, it continues and fulfills a pattern of behavior. Here, this behavior is more overt than in the exposition. The nodal exposure of the development’s first part is much more intense than in the exposition, with the whole-tone implication of the {0,8,4} structure made explicit by step progressions and accompanying harmonies. Proportionate to the intensity of the exposure is the retraction, which involves the very disintegration of row organization and {0,8,4} articulation in favor of octatonic ideas. This is a more forceful and dramatic version of events in the exposition, where node exposure in the RP presentations was immediately succeeded by octatonic events. Whereas the exposition described a conflicted and hard-to-read relationship between tonality and seriality, the story of the development is clearer, and can even be told in a more dramatic tone: an attempted breakout of combined serial elements (pitches from S, rhythms from P) from the arcaded overtonal prison results in a struggle, during which the serial pitch relations are lost under the booming cannonade of amplified-root bass notes. The struggle ends inconclusively in neutral territory—downsloped, octatonic, and out of time. Recapitulation The resumption of A-section material in the recapitulation shows a number of signs of having been affected by developmental events. Most significant is the change in treatment of the nodal-exposure figure, RP0, which in the exposition (m. 5) had been

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followed by two S0 closures. After the corresponding passage in the recapitulation, shown in Fig. 8, the {0,8,4} nodes actually penetrate to overtonal structure, sounding as an augmented triad that diverts the tonal-center trajectory into F minor in order to make the required sonata-style adjustments. (In the formal diagram of Fig. 2, this moment is marked with an asterisk.) This reconciliation of serial and tonal elements ushers in a new attitude that subtly affects the remainder of the piece. Note, for example, the appearance of two successive RP8 exposure figures in the second half of the recapitulation that are not immediately covered up (mm. 38 and 39); the “teasing” quality of the figure is hereupon lost.

Figure 8: Barber, Nocturne, mm. 33–5

The registral profile of the recapitulation is also markedly different from that of the exposition, as confirmed by a look back at Fig. 5. The opening launch (and subsequent return) consumes three octaves compared with the exposition’s two, resulting from a doubling-back upon S0 during the acceleration phase in m. 31 in order to extend the zigzag ascent. This treatment gives the recapitulated opening gesture a more exuberant, emphatic effect, and it claims as well the seventh octave for initiating purposes from its formerly exclusive closing position. And, indeed, the recovery of the seventh octave at the end of the S8 statement of m. 42 is achieved by a gentler and less pronounced approach, as if the need to activate it were no longer a response to previous RP statements. Despite its relaxed attitude towards issues that troubled the exposition, the recapitulation nonetheless repeats the touchy treatment of the octatonic 4-3 [0134] scale segment in the accompaniment—exposed and then immediately retracted by a nonoctatonic prefix—but the results are different this time. Formerly, this event had prefigured an impasse at neutral ground, which was the small-note cadenza in the development. Now, it leads to a more stable kind of octatonic event: a three-octave descent in twinned octatonic scales, shown in Fig. 9. The differences are telling: small notes grow to normal size, the not-quite-complete octatonic chordal figuration achieves full scalehood, and the impasse in the development is in the coda made into a modest reconciliation, confirmed with a gentle touch by the final harmonic move of the piece, boxed in the example: the {0,8,4} nodal chord resolves into the final {0,8,3} tonal A major triad.

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Figure 9: Barber, Nocturne, mm. 44–5

Why undertake this experiment? Interpretive engagement with analytic artifacts has led to a rather conventional reading of the piece: an insecure and diffident exposition is followed by intense working out in the development and concludes with an irenic settlement in the recapitulation. This reading is consonant with other conventional elements of the Nocturne—its meter, form, manner of surface ornamentation, even its very title. A hermeneutical perplexity remains, however, which is the yoking of John Field to Arnold Schoenberg as inventors of a genre and technique, respectively. Field’s presence is, of course, explicit; Schoenberg’s, slightly less so (since one has to discover the serial elements rather than read them from a subtitle). Yet many previous commentators have noted the poor fit of Barber’s piece with Field’s nocturnes and have made strong cases that it is Chopin rather than Field who is honored.12 The subtitle thus is a bit of misdirection, and the diffidence detected in musical processes appears to extend even to the subtitling. Hiding behind Field is Chopin. 12 Sifferman, “Barber’s Works for Piano,” 78–93 adduces a number of features that are uncommon in Field’s nocturnes but typical of Chopin’s. Additional comparisons are offered by Young, “Piano Music of Samuel Babrber,” 154–60. Pianist John Browning, who premiered the piece, also concurs in “Samuel Barber’s Nocturne, op. 33,” Clavier 25 (January 1986): 20–21.

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This circumstance has us take a second look at Schoenberg, which allows some space to register a deep bewilderment: twelve-tone music generally bored Barber, and he was not above making fun of its groupies, even to their face: Paris, 1950. Samuel Barber arrives with violinist Chuck Turner. They are preparing Barber’s concerto for recording. Who is the rehearsal pianist? Why, Pierre Boulez. Barber kids the stoical Frenchman about the twelve-tone system. “Is the Habañera a row?” he asks. (He loathes the imputations of the serial elite. He persists in addressing the perplexed René Leibowitz as Mr. Ztiwobiel. “Well, if a composer can’t recognize his own name in retrograde, how can his listeners be expected … etc.”).13

Yet this scene comes shortly on the heels of the acclaimed piano sonata of 1949, in which Barber used twelve-tone rows for the first time, only adding to the bewilderment. For curiosity’s sake, one of the six rows used in the first movement of the sonata is shown in Fig. 10. It is remarkably similar in technique of construction to those in the Nocturne—partitioning of the octave into equal intervals and filling the space between these nodes with content identical in interval, rhythm, and contour.

Figure 10: Barber, Sonata for Piano, op. 26, m. 9

At this point, we can perhaps glimpse who stands behind “Schoenberg.” The use of multiple rows in a piece, the repetitive intervallic content in these rows, and the influence of tonal considerations upon row structure and usage are not hallmarks of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone techniques, but of Alban Berg’s. (Among the Second Viennese, it is Berg whose music Barber apparently found most listenable.14) Although it is not known how Barber acquired his serial technique—might he have been given a copy of Ernst Krenek’s Studies in Counterpoint (1940) by someone at G. Schirmer, their mutual publisher?—the clear technical affinities with Berg suggest that Barber had made a quiet study of that composer’s twelve-tone works. In 13 Ned Rorem, Setting the Tone (New York, Coward-McCann, 1983), 264. Heyman, Barber and his Music, 319, notes that the date is incorrect (Barber was in Paris in 1951, not 1950), as is the reason for Boulez’s employ (Barber wanted to conduct the violin concerto and thus needed not to be the rehearsal pianist). 14 The following diary entry is suggestive: “In the evening I escaped to the theatre and saw a heart-breaking performance of Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters,’ done by the Pitoeffs, and also two evenings given by the Hamburg Opera Company, celebrated for their staging. I was impressed by ‘Wozzeck’ done easily and effortlessly as if it were chamber music and, thus given, immensely effective; but by the second evening of Schoenberg and Dallapiccola—I was on to their stage tricks, which led all too directly back to the German 1920s, a style apparently suffocated by Hitler and now resuscitated, a little middle-aged and flaccid.” Samuel Barber’s travel log, 26 April to 26 June, 1955, Quoted in Heyman, Barber and his Music, 356. The location of the performances was Paris.

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particular, the interval-cycle quality of Barber’s rows, especially the one from the sonata shown in Fig. 10, is a Berg calling-card.15 Perhaps Barber’s ambivalent feelings about “modern” composition and his “tentative experimentation” with its signature technique are the reasons behind the misdirection in the subtitle and the expressive diffidence detectable in the composition: ostensibly honoring the founder, he models the work of a follower. Reading all the way through, might we conjecture that the Nocturne is an homage to Alban Berg? In that case, overtonal and serial techniques are not really incompatible after all if a nocturne on one side can make common cause, though secretly, with a violin concerto on the other. Bibliography Browning, John. “Samuel Barber’s Nocturne, op. 33.” Clavier (January 1986): 20–21. Fairleigh, James P. “Serialism in Barber’s Solo Piano Works.” Piano Quarterly (Summer 1970): 13–17. Headlam, Dave. The Music of Alban Berg. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Heyman, Barbara B. Samuel Barber: The Composer and his Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Neumeyer, David. The Music of Paul Hindemith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Rorem, Ned. Setting the Tone. New York: Coward-McCann, 1983. Sifferman, James. “Samuel Barber’s Works for Solo Piano.” DMA diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1982. Tischler, Hans. “Barber’s Piano Sonata, op. 26.” Music and Letters 33 (1952): 352–54. Young, Laurie. “The Solo Piano Music of Samuel Barber.” DMA diss., University of Cincinnati, 1989.

15 In this respect, it is instructive to read Dave Headlam’s description of Berg’s general twelvetone technique in The Music of Alban Berg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 194– 209, as commentary on the twelve-tone composer Barber could have developed into.

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