GG: Atonality and Serialism

["John P. Hill" <jphill@frank.mtsu.edu>]

Yo, Kids:

The discussion on GG and 20th C music has been interesting.
With regard to Kristen's original post:

>     One last question before we leave that old Mozart thread behind. A
> point was raised that perhaps Gould championed the more "alternative"
> composers because there was less tradition at stake and therefore less
> reputation to live up to.

I have a feeling that the young GG wanted to be different from his
peers in the selection of repertoire.  His distaste for Mozart and
certain stock concert pieces (Chromatic Fantasia, etc.) probably led
him to explore and champion pieces of new music.  During his youth,
20th century music was widely avoided by concert performers (still is,
to some extent) while embraced by the more academic music set,
particularly composers.  Since this repertoire can also be very
difficult to learn and perform, GG probably enjoyed being able to
perform it with ease and flair.  Even folks adept at Chopin and Lizst
might have some difficulty executing the Webern Variations from memory.
I think that, contrary to his many pronouncements, the young GG
probably loved to display his talents (show off?) at the keyboard.

It could be
> inferred from this that composers like Berg or Schoenberg, indeed the
> entire minimalist or atonalist school, provided a wide field of "throwaway
> pieces" that Gould believed he could raise to high art. Were the works of
> these composers low art to begin with?

I think that calling the output of the 2nd Viennese School "throwaway
pieces" is pretty absurd.  Many of these are *landmark* pieces in
twentieth century music, even though they don't appear as often as the
Pachelbel Canon on Laserlight and other budget classical CDs.  I'm not
sure what you mean exactly by "high art" vs. "low art" either.  Is a
Joplin rag "low art"?  At any rate, I'm certain that GG had great
respect for Schoenberg, et. al. and I very much doubt that his intention
was to "elevate" the music in any way.  He probably felt that he could
give these pieces the wider audience that he felt they deserved.


Schoenberg especially is a hot topic
> on the classical newsgroups, no one can seem to decide if he was a freak
> occurrence in the world of music whose compositions were at best a novelty,
> or if he was an unsung genius who is vastly underrated and deserves more
> respect. There can be little question that atonalism never really "caught
> on" as a style of western music

Schoenberg was *very* important;  anyone who doesn't acknowledge this
really hasn't looked at 20th century music very carefully.  He is
primarily responsible for the development of a melodic and harmonic
language that evolved from the logical burn-out of triadic, tonal-
center-based music.  And there is no question as to whether it "caught
on" or not.  Without Schoenberg, you have no Berg, Webern, Boulez,
Babbitt, Stockhausen, etc., etc.  Schoenberg formalized the idea of
*serial* composition and that idea developed into about six (or more)
decades of very important new music composition.


 and I wonder what it was exactly that
> Gould found so fascinating in the style. Was GG just being perverse when he
> said that Schoenberg would be revered as the greatest composer of the
> century?

Not at all.  GG genuinely respected Schoenberg as the guy who moved music
composition forward.  Who else are you going to rank as the most
influential composer of the 20th C?  Not Bartok, not Hindemith, not
Stravinsky, even.  What....Gershwin?


>     Here's a hypothetical guess. At one point I thought that perhaps Gould,
> with his taste for "skeletal" pianistic interpretation and his tendency to
> flesh out a score with his own humming and vocalization, found that the
> works of the atonalist school left him the most room between the notes
> within which to imagine his own counter-composition. When listening to
> Schoenberg's sparse framework of music, one can only imagine what intricate
> accompaniment someone like Gould would hear deep within the piece.

This is rather fanciful, but I doubt it.  And FWIW, Schoenberg's textures
are not uniformly spare, notwithstanding some of the Kleine Klavierstucke.
I think that getting all the notes and the expressive elements of these
pieces is enough without trying to "compose" new inner voices.  Ever try
to play something like op. 11?  Not skeletal.


>     But enough wild hypothesizing; why do the atonalists get the short
> shrift from the music world? Is it generally accepted that one who focuses
> their efforts on this unpopular body of work is a less competent - or less
> competitive - musician?

We should also differentiate between ATONAL composition versus SERIAL
composition;  they're not the same.  Serial technique involves the use
of the 12-tone row as the basic building block.  Each note of the
chromatic scale must be played before any tone can appear again.  The
first strictly serial work by Schoenberg is the Piano Suite op. 25.
Schoenberg's students (Berg and Webern) used serialism in their own
ways, with Webern being more strict and more a minimalist (at least
in terms of the *length* of his compositions).  Webern's use of
"klangfarbenmelodien" also ushers in serialization of other musical
elements than just pitch class.

Atonal works generally come from the first two decades of the 20th
century, before serial techniques were formalized by Schoenberg.
Indeed, Schoenberg's early works are really late Romantic in nature
with constantly shifting tonal centers and generally large-scale
forces.  His move toward smaller, more miniature pieces ushers in
atonality, wherein one really can't find any reliable sense of
tonal "home base".  Important works of this period would include
"Pierrot Lunaire" and "The Book of the Hanging Gardens", both
really worth checking out.

cheers,

jh