Schoenberg, Beethoven and Bach

            It is difficult to say exactly what parallels Morgan could draw between Schoenberg and Beethoven (or Brahms, Mozart etc.) In some respects the author goes to some length to demonstrate the transpositional characteristics seen in the music of Scriabin and that kind of motivic development could be seen as making “every note count.” The best example of this being Das Buth der Hangenden Garten, No 7 on p. 70 which shows the same voice leading of an augmented chord to an essentially quartal chord (with one augmented fourth present. To me, what makes Beethoven Beethoven was his ability to “emancipate” the motive and free it from the confines of a melody. The 5^th symphony is a fantastic example of this practice, in the whole piece there is virtually no melody to speak of, only groups of four notes brilliantly arranged. To our modern ears, this practice is quite tame, but for an audience that was used to the eight bar antecedent and consequent phrases this was revolutionary. Therefore, if the motif could be liberated from the melody, then it is not too far a stretch to say that tone could be liberated from key, thus we have Schoenberg’s famous quite about the “emancipation of dissonance” (which appears on p. 67 of the Morgan textbook).

            In the documentary on the famous 20^th century pianist; Glen Gould titled The Alchemist Mr. Gould goes out of his was to describe the relationship between Bach and Schoenberg. Mr. Gould stated that “both were puzzles that needed to be figured out.” It is both amazing and understandable to me how idealized Bach is in the theory world as his music represents an unmatched architectural complexity but still stands up to be beautiful. Schoenberg’s music and study of theory (not to mention his writings on the subject and influence on his pupils) deal, to a great extent, with that same architectural standard, there is a high degree of craftsmanship but the popularity seems (like Bach) to not have arose in the same way enjoyed by his contemporaries.

            Schoenberg’s writings on the subject of music theory and practice could by themselves warrant a comparison with the Romantic masters. As mentioned in the text, Liszt, Wagner, Brahms and Berlioz all wrote on the subject of music and many of them published texts on the philosophy of music (or in Strauss’s case the Treatise on Instrumentation revised by Berlioz, I own the Dover publication edition of this text). In many ways we can see this aspect of Schoenberg’s personality and output as a natural extension from the 19^th century’s emphasis on the written word and philosophy of all things that have to do with existing as a human. The only major difference in the circumstances between this period of Schoenberg’s output and his earlier counterparts was that Schoenberg lived in an age of established industrialization and urbanization which was still somewhat novel in 19^th century. Other comparisons could be made, but these stand out as the most prominent to me.