THE
ATONAL TRAIL
the logarithmal tables around 400 B.C. and that their rediscovery in the
seventeenth century is not a caesura in mathematics. Such argumentation
does not prove anything. The "caesura in modern harmony" was created
by Stravinsky's
Sacre du Printemps,
regardless of Schonberg's "innovations,"
because it was the most convincing and imaginative work of that period
and has been accepted as such by most contemporary composers. Music
history gives us many instances where such "fantastic innovations" were
not realized in a convincing way until several years after their invention.
(For example, the "fantastic innovations" of the early Italian "monodic"
composers. What they innovated around 1590 was fully and convincingly
realized only around 1605-1607 in the great works of Monteverde.)
Similarly, the innovations of K.P.E. Bach and the Manheimer School in
the 1750's came to full realization some twenty years later in the works
of Haydn and Mozart. It all goes to say that "pioneering" in art is
not necessarily the thing that counts. What counts is the convincing
"work of art" which establishes the style, the tradition, and ultimately
the cast of a historical period. Pioneering in music is only interesting for
historians and musicologists but not to history itself and certainly not to
the public.
Actually the innovations of Schonberg may have seemed "fantastic"
at the time they were formulated, but looking at them historically and
judging them by their intrinsic contribution to the evolution of the
musical language, they are neither "fantastic" nor revolutionary. They
are rather a theoretical conclusion drawn from a development of har–
mony which began at the tum of the seventeenth century and tortuously
but steadily moved on to the beginning of the twentieth century. By
basing his whole system on the independent and autonomous use
of the twelve semitones within the limit of an octave, Schonberg, in ef–
fect, has established a mechanistic basis for the art of music, and has
renounced any possibility of an organic foundation for the selection of
musical materials. It becomes evident that Schonberg stands at the end
of a period rather than at the beginning of a new one. His system is
the result of a gradual "emancipation of dissonance," over a period of
several hundred years, and not a
deus ex machina
invention of his own.
It is erroneous to measure the quality and permanent value of a
composer's work by his influence on his contemporaries.
If
we were to
apply such a criticism,
compo~ers
such as Meyerbeer in the nineteenth
century, and Alberti in the eighteenth century (the inventor of the so–
called Alberti bass) should be classed as first-rate composers. Besides,
it is an arbitrary statement that "the last forty years have evolved es–
sentially under Schonberg's influence." There were various, and, at
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