Intuition and the Tonal Precipice

Schoenberg: Piano Pieces, op. 11, Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16

Stravinsky: Petrushka

[click links above to hear recordings on YouTube]

Stravinsky’s The Firebirdand Schoenberg’sVerklärte Nacht are stunning summations of Russian, French, and German late Romantic style and achievements in orchestration and harmony. Countless lovers of these pieces have asked: why didn’t Stravinsky and Schoenberg just continue to compose music in these styles? That plea has a lot to do with the fact that audiences have had a challenging time following their development afterwards. But a more revealing question lies within: what in their own minds were Stravinsky and Schoenberg hearing/exploring in these early works that led them to pursue radically different directions than anyone would have expected?

Schoenberg and the Emancipation of Dissonance

From the beginning, Schoenberg was fascinated with the implications of Wagner’s harmonic ambiguity in his opera Tristan und Isolde. If Wagner could discover new harmonic horizons by changing the function of familiar chords, resolving them in such unexpected ways that no single musical key seemed to dominate or organize the music, then what might happen if the very structure of those chords was altered so that the chords themselves were no longer in the orbit of a key? And then suppose these strange chords progressed to other strange chords, rather than resolving to simpler chords that define a key? By removing the impetus of resolution to a consonant chord, would that not also remove the feeling of dissonance of the more complex chord? In this way, Schoenberg imagined a new world of harmony, the “emancipation of dissonance,” where no sound was subservient to another. As UCLA theory and composition professor Elaine Barkin proclaimed in one of my classes, “Just as Lincoln freed the slaves, so Schoenberg freed the chords!”

In the years following Verklärte Nacht, Schoenberg focused increasingly on the stranger, dissonant harmonies that appear in the middle of complex progressions, the ones that are highly unstable and quickly resolve to simpler chords. He lingered on these chords and searched for ways to connect them to other complex chords, rather than resolve to simpler chords. In this way, he discovered new harmonic worlds, all while avoiding a sense of traditional key center. Classical music to this point had always organized around a central harmony or a central tone. Schoenberg was breaking away from that assumption and creating music free of that hierarchy. Instead of tonality, he had created atonality—music that avoids defining a key center. 

Schoenberg’s “credo” during this period was revealing: Art belongs to the unconscious. One must express oneself directly. Not one's taste, or one's upbringing, or one's intelligence, knowledge, or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive.

The Three Pieces for Piano, op. 11 (1908) and Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16 (1909) communicate the excitement and originality of Schoenberg’s harmonic invention. He’s “off the grid.” The normal rules of harmony don’t apply and there is a sense of unparalleled freedom. The first piece in op. 8 begins with an echo of Wagner’s Tristan, but avoids triads or seventh chords. Progressions unfold slowly and smoothly, as if they are going to resolve, but they never do. And then…BAM! Texture and tempo change suddenly, radically. Notes of the chromatic scale seem to spill out from all over the keyboard. This was a sound new to our world, a fresh chaos, and one that continues to be harvested by composers more than a century later. In a substantial way, concert audiences still have not caught up or accepted this sonic world. We’ll discuss this reality throughout the rest of this series.

Five Pieces for Orchestra remains among the most original works for orchestra. Each piece is short, atonal, and features a different sound world. The atonal landscape demands equally original invention as to structure and unfolding of each piece.  Schoenberg reluctantly added titles afterwards at the publisher’s request. The ominous “Premonitions” ends with the sound of a vast cosmic clock. “The Past” is a slow, deeply expressive essay that explores subtle orchestral colors, including a memorable ostinato with the celesta and a recall of the clock motive. “Summer Morning by a Lake” is the best known of these pieces, for its use of a chord that changes colors with shifting orchestration. Careful listening reveals that the notes of the chord also subtly change, not just its color. Nevertheless, this piece is touted as an example of Schoenberg’s idea of a melody not of pitch, but of changing color, a klangfarbenmelodie. This is another of Schoenberg’s inventions that have influenced all composers who have followed.  

Stravinsky’s Petrushka Inventions

Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka(1911) is revolutionary in quite a different way than Schoenberg’s atonal explorations. Written just a year after The Firebird, Petrushka is not a work of summation, but rather a bold fresh musical perspective on nothing less than new ways to put a piece of music together. Stravinsky made so many discoveries in this piece that it has a special influential aura all its own, separate from the Rite of Springthat followed. For instance, American composers like Copland and Harold Shapiro specifically credited Petrushkaas a major influence in helping them develop their American sound and style.  

The new techniques in this 1911 piece alone reverberate through most music written since:
1) Complex ostinatos 
2) Pandiatonicism
3) Heterophony
4) Additive Rhythm
5) Polytonality
6) Collage or montage
7) Film Editing Techniques Applied To Music—superimposition, hard cut, jump cut, dissolve, cross cut, cutaway 

Complex ostinato— above all, Petrushka features Stravinsky’s mastery of the ostinato. An ostinato is a short bit of music repeated over and over. Nothing new about that. But Stravinsky discovered that an ositinato can become a foundation to hold together extremely complex composing music with a different rhythm on top of a simple ostinato or textures by layering multiple ostinato of different lengths together.

 Pandiatonicism—a new harmonic technique with all the notes of the scale either sounding together or used as non-functional color chords

Heterophony—a technique from non-Western music that builds a complex texture with a single  musical idea played by different parts simultaneously using different elaborations or variations.

Additive Rhytm—a new melodic technique where notes of a melody may be adde, repeated, or truncated so that the melody is familiar but never repeated exactly the same way.

Polytonality—two or more harmonies are layered together to create a new harmonic color.

Collage or montage—different musical textures layered together, a traditional technique deriving from counterpoint but now applied to different musical ideas

Film Editing Techniques—Stravinsky connects musical ideas in Petrushkamore akin to film editing than traditional harmonic progression or musical form. Note though, that he composed Petrushka in 1911, when cinema was in its infancy! In Petrushka, musical ideas are treated like visual elements. They may be superimposed on each other, contrasted abruptly like a hard cut, foreshadowed briefly like a jump cut, faded gradually into a new idea like a dissolve, moved quickly from detail to detail like cutaway shots, or alternating between developing two or more different ideas like crosscuts. 

Implications of Stravinsky and Schoenberg’s Early Discoveries

Stravinsky’s structural innovations then are actually editing techniques. They provided him not only a way to create dazzling original musical textures, but perhaps just as important, a way to organize a piece of music in a fresh way. In other words, these devices were a way to delineate different sections in a clear manner that did not require the sophistication of sonata form, a fugue, or other classical structures that depended on harmonic progression. They helped to free musical structure from harmony. But for all their invention and discovery, in Petrushka these devices still rely and build on standard harmonic practice. They extendtonality. And this quest to extend tonality becomes one of the most significant vectors in 20thcentury music. Bartok, Sibelius, De Falla, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Poulenc, Messiaen, Elgar, Britten, Vaughan Williams, Hindemith, Copland, Barber, and Bernstein are all composers who followed Stravinsky’s path with different degrees of invention.  

Schoenberg’s atonality was more than a discovery or a fresh perspective on tradition. It was a bellicose challenge to the entire tonal system that had structured music for the past 300 years. Stravinsky’s devices were magic tricks that gave new life to tonality. Schoenberg’s explorations went far beyond that, breaking past all the constraints of tonality that determine which chords should follow which chords. Petrushka was evolution. Five Pieces for Orchestra was revolution. By throwing away the anchor of tonality, Schoenberg had only his intuition and deeply powerful ears to guide him to organize a piece. Each atonal work created its own sonic and structural universe. Perhaps that’s the reason this music still sounds as modern today as when it was first performed.

Atonality and its “aftermath”—serialism—became the predominant vector in 20thcentury modernism. Berg, Webern, Varese, Ligeti, Cage, Boulez, Stockhausen, Sessions, Carter, Babbitt, Berio,and  Lutoslawski are among the many notable composers who followed Schoenberg’s path, each exploring and creating their own unique sonic universes.

Petrushkaand Five Pieces for Orchestra are in a sense the embryos of these two diverging paths of modernism. We can hear in them the essential elements of both. But both pieces mark only the beginning explorations of both composers in what was to be far more radical discoveries. Just a year or two later, both composers would make quantum leaps with Pierrot Lunaireand Rite of Spring. 

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