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The Archaeology of Postmodernity, Part II: The Emancipation of Dissonance
E. R. E.
Knutsson
December 14, 2009
From an
“archaeological” point of view, there are several striking parallels between
early
20th-century
At the turn
of the 20th century,
The ethnic
minorities most abundantly represented were the Czechs and the Jews, followed by
the Poles and Hungarians. Jacques Le Rider points
out that “the xenophobia aroused by the growth of the Czech colony, and
the spread of anti-Semitism made
Kaiser Franz Joseph of
As Stefan
Newerkla points
out, the basically tolerant laws “provided for the right to have
education in one’s native language and stated that no citizen should be forced
to learn the language of any other ethnic group.” Language became a prominent site for
inter-ethnic conflicts. Thomas
Wallnig emphasizes
the fatal consequences of “the massive struggle between the nationalities that
marked the final decades of the Habsburg monarchy”; the state was “unable to
establish ‘equal rights of all branches of the people’, since every change to
the status quo was interpreted as a political advance by one group at the
expense of another with state support.”
These
tensions were also felt in the world of music – an art form that occupied a
special place in the history and cultural identity of Vienna, as a major
repository for some of the greatest composers in the history of Western music
(Gluck,
Haydn,
Mozart,
Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, among others).
By the early
20th century, the Jewish impact on music and modernity had become so obvious
that critics demanded to “stem Jewish music and Jewishness in music before they
spread too far,” as Philip
Bohlman points out.
Richard
Wagner’s polemical writings — tracing
Jewishness in melody and speech, body and race (“inner spaces”) — “unleashed a
flood of responses to the presence of Jewishness in music, pro and contra.” The
rhetoric shared by Wagner and his detractors stressed the ontological interority
of music: das Judentum in der Musik
(Judaism or Jewishness in music). As Philip Bohlman notes,
Rather than
rejecting Wagner’s anti-Semitism as baseless prejudice, most Jewish responses
mounted counterarguments affirming the possibility of Jewishness in music, using
the same terms, if not case studies, as Wagner and often embracing the
racialization of music.
Thus,
Heinrich Berl in his essay Das Judentum in der abendländischen Musik (“Jewishness in Western Music,”
later published as a monograph with Wagner’s exact title, Das Judentum in der Musik) not only accepted
the charge that Jewishness in music inevitably embodied oriental traditions, but
even rejoiced in “the richness of Eastern influences.”
Richard Wagner
held that the capacity of Jewish composers only to reproduce enabled them to
enter European music history at a moment of historical collapse, in the
aftermath of Beethoven’s death in 1827. Bohlman
points out that “Wagner’s claim that Jewishness allowed only for the
reproduction of music [indirectly] opened the historical door, emancipating
Jewish music from ritual and recalibrating it as Western.” Since Wagner held that Jewish musicians
were essentially bricoleurs - i.e. ‘handy-men’ adopting relational
rather than rational approaches to assemble and enchain their performances from
bits and pieces – no Jewish innovations were to be expected.
On the other
hand, as Thomas
S. Grey points out, the Central European lingua franca of Yiddish was seen as
“emblematic of a tendency to appropriate and distort all genuine cultural forms,
from speech to writing to philosophical or political thought to singing, acting,
and musical composition.”
The
movement away from
classical tonality was thus radicalized with Gustav Mahler’s “tonal irony”, and
culminated with Schoenberg’s atonal revolution — the dissolution and abandonment
of tonal structures as an organizing system in favor of the radical
constructivism that emerged with twelve-tone serial music: “With the progressive
fragmentation of musical material — its decomposition into its smallest elements
— the hierarchically ordered tonal structures, together with the restrictions
they placed upon possible relations and combinations among tones, were
dissolved.”
The
‘emancipation of dissonance’, according to Carl Schorske, not only destroyed
harmonic order and cadential certainty: “By establishing a democracy of tones …
[the] tonal relations, clusters, and rhythms expand and contract ‘like a gas’,
as Schoenberg said.” Schoenberg, as
Leon
Botstein points out, “sought to transmute a German national heritage —
the pre-Wagnerian German tradition, seen as the universal in music — adequately
into the twentieth century. In this way Schoenberg sought to dominate the
musical world the way Wagner had, but in a manner in which all Jews … could
partake as equals. … Like the inter-war protagonists of Esperanto, Schoenberg
sought to fashion a new, valid universal modernist art in which both reason and
emotion could be communicated and to which no social class, religion or ethnic
group had claims of priority or higher status.”
Arnold Schoenberg
Since the
Renaissance, Western music has been
conceived on the basis of a hierarchical
tonal order, the diatonic scale, whose central element was the tonic triad,
the defined key. Musical events, thus, are not of equal importance: Some are
structurally important, while others are primarily ornamental. Music, like linguistic discourse, has traditionally been a time-oriented
structure that progresses from a beginning to an end. As Carl
Schorske emphasizes,
The task of
the composer was to manipulate dissonance in the interests of consonance, just
as a political leader in an institutional system manipulates movement,
canalizing it to serve the purposes of established authority. In fact, tonality in music belonged to
the same socio-cultural system as the science of perspective in art, with its
centralized focus; the Baroque status system in society, and legal absolutism in
politics. It was part of the same culture that favored the geometric garden —
the garden as the extension of rational architecture over nature. … The tonal
system was a musical frame in which tones had unequal power to express, to validate,
and to make bearable the life of man under a rationally organized, hierarchical
culture. To make all movement fall in the end into order (the musical term is
‘cadence’) was, appropriately, the aim of classical harmony in theory and in
practice.
Ethan
Haimo points out
that with Schoenberg’s atonal revolution, it simply becomes difficult or
impossible to determine which of the tones in the chord is the unstable tone,
and which are the stable ones:
When the
dissonance cannot be identified, its resolution cannot be directed. And when
that happens, the emancipation of the dissonance is at hand — not as the result
of theoretical speculation about the more remote overtones of the harmonic
series but as a consequence of the extension of the methods of chordal formation
to include multiple altered and elaborative tones. … Schoenberg was not
searching for stable intervals when he reached toward the more remote overtones
of the harmonic system; instead, his principles of chord formation made it
impossible to identify which tones needed resolution. The consequences of this
are profound. If dissonance cannot be identified, it cannot be resolved. And if
it cannot be resolved, then the very notion of consonance and dissonance becomes
moot.
Consequently,
some of the essential pillars of tonality were pulled down by Schoenberg: “The
lack of directed harmonic progressions throws the existence of a tonic into
doubt; the lack of hierarchy abolishes the diatonic scale as a referential
collection; the inability to identify the dissonance erases the distinction
between consonance and dissonance.”
Nicholas Cook points out the "thread of violent political imagery [that] runs through Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre," as when he (Schoenberg) writes:
The tonality must be placed in danger of losing its sovereignty; the appetites for independence and the tendencies towards mutiny must be given opportunity to activate themselves; one must grant them their victories, not begrudging an occasional expansion of territory. For a ruler can only take pleasure in ruling live subjects; and live subjects will attack and plunder.
Schoenberg talks of vagrant chords bringing about the destruction of the tonal system.
Cook
also points
out that ”the overlapping of insider and outsider identities that
coloured Viennese modernism is often seen as a specifically Jewish phenomenon,”
and that there was “a longstanding Viennese, or Habsburg, tradition … of
associating music and social structure.”
He draws attention to
“the network of terms connected with harmonic rootedness, terms which have a
technical musical meaning yet at the same time carry the imprint of the
political and racial discourses of fin-de-siècle
These
political and racial connotations tend to be spelt out more explicitly in
Schoenberg’s theoretical writings than Schenker’s, and the term Schoenberg uses
in his Harmonielehre to describe
chords that lack rootedness immediately reveals what is at issue: they are
‘vagrant’ chords. … Circumstances can turn any chord into a vagrant, he says …
perhaps he was thinking of the displaced Ostjuden (later he might have thought of
himself). … [A]t all events he [Schoenberg] assigns a range of equally dubious
attributes to his vagrants: they are ‘the issue of inbreeding’, their character
‘indefinite, hermaphroditic, immature’. It is possible for them to be
assimilated (Schoenberg’s phrase is ‘fit into the environment’), but when they
appear in large numbers they will ‘join forces’, and ‘through accumulation of
such phenomena the solid structure of tonality could be demolished’; elsewhere
Schoenberg says that vagrant chords have ‘led inexorably to the dissolution of
tonality’.
In the 1920s,
the conservative musicologist and critic Alfred Heuss attacked the “specifically
Jewish spirit” of Schoenberg’s music, which he saw as resulting from a “ruthless
tendency to draw the very last consequences from a narrow premise.” Annegret
Fauser points out that Schoenberg’s expansion of Wagnerian chromaticism
pushed “quasi-polyphonic voice-leading to extremes.”
According to
Arnold
Whittall, Wagner’s use of “half-diminished” seventh chords to promote
tonal ambiguity at moments of great dramatic tension and instability remained of
absorbing interest in the writings of Arnold Schoenberg:
[T]he very
“indefiniteness” of the Tristan chord has made it possible for theorists to
regard it as a post-tonal or even atonal entity, thereby promoting that very
breakdown of tonality of which Wagner’s own practice stopped short. … [T]he
tonally disruptive potential of the chord, and of Wagner’s use of it, was well
understood by those early twentieth-century theorists who were experiencing the
consequences for composition of the breakdown of tonal order and, as they saw
it, of the formal coherence that went with that order.
As Cook observes, Schoenberg ends up
undermining the conservative discourses from which he borrows: The way
Schoenberg turns a conservative argument against the archetypal ‘Other’ into an
affirmation of the role of the ‘Other’ in the future of German culture, might be
seen as “a deconstruction of the conservative discourse of
hybridity”:
It works by
taking a political stance, translating that into musical terms, developing the
musical argument, and then translating (or leaving the reader to translate) the
conclusion back into political terms.
In other words, it uses music to create an assertion about something
other than music — in rather the same way … that television commercials use
musical logic to make a point about hair dye or financial products (Cook,
p. 310).
Arnold
Schoenberg’s abandonment of tonality in 1908 and the development of the Second
Viennese School were both symptom and cause of an ever-widening gulf between
composers using music to make discursive political and aesthetic statements (a
product of analytical reason) and a public that still yearned for the
psychological satisfaction that comes from formal coherence.
From this
perspective, Schoenberg — at least in effect — can be regarded as Wagner’s
opposite, as a Jewish “Anti-Wagner”. Wagner successfully claimed for art,
according to Tim Blanning, “the
function previously exercised by religion and arrogated in modern times by
politics or economics.” Schoenberg dethroned
that position, by composing “irrational”, atonalistic, "liquid," “decentered”
music, twelve tones “in free circulation, without any firm hierarchy or even
distinction between the seven diatonic tones and the remaining chromatic
tones.”
As he declared in a letter (1909) to his colleague Ferruccio Busoni: “I strive for complete liberation from all forms … from all symbols of cohesion and of logic.”
Part III: Transvestism in Music
E.
R. E.
Knutsson
Permanent link:http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Knutsson-DeconstructionII.html
