GEORGE EDWARDS
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to note its absence.") By the late nineteenth century, the idea of the avant–
garde was firmly established, and was associated with pseudo-Darwinian
notions of inevitable progress towards higher and more complex forms of
musical life. Those listeners who could not adapt to the new were presum–
ably fit only for the concentration camp of "music appreciation."
The tension between composer and audience reached a crisis in the
early twentieth century. Important new works routinely provoked riots or
scandals before eventually being absorbed into the maw of the standard
repertoire. With Schoenberg, the self-described "reactionary who was forced
to become a revolutionary," we reach the crux of the problem: a composer
whose works have inspired and influenced thousands of musicians (especially
composers), but which still retain enough of their original sting to repel the
average listener.
In
a brilliant series of works composed between 1899 and
1912, Schoenberg moved inexorably from the post-Wagnerism of
Verkliirte
Nachl
(refused for performance by a Vienna concert society because of one
forbidden chord) into the uncharted regions of atonality (or, as Schoenberg
unavailingly insisted, "pantonality"). These quintessentially modernist works,
with their extreme intensity of expression and avoidance of both conven–
tional tonal relationships and the kinds of textures, forms, and rhetoric these
relationships had supported, met with such hostility that Schoenberg and his
disciples retreated into the "Society for the Private Performance of Music"
between 1918 and 1921.
Schoenberg's postwar efforts to consolidate his compositional gains
aroused even more vituperation than had the more revolutionary works that
preceded them.
As
he codified the new harmonic world he had created into
the still notorious "method of composing with twelve tones related only to
one another," he clearly felt that the replacement of tonality with a new
harmonic system justified the revival of traditional motivic treatment, rhythm,
phrasing, and form. To most listeners, a work such as the Suite op. 29 must
sound (as it once did
to
me) like a grotesque parody of conventional music–
Brahms with all the pitches changed. Schoenberg'S twelve-tone works were
condemned, not only by the conservative retrenchment of the thirties
(populist in America, Fascist or Communist elsewhere), but also (and for dif–
ferent reasons) by the born-again European avant-garde of the fifties. Yet
they rank among the most courageous and successful attempts to write
modernist music which is also firmly attached to tradition.
The reception of Schoenberg's music should alert us to the fact that
music is currently in a much worse position than any of the other arts.
In
poetry, for example, new work is criticized for failing to reach the exalted
levels achieved by modernist works of Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, and Pound .
Whatever the limitations of these poets, they are now part of the canon.
