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Webern and Atonality: The Path from the Old Aesthetic
Arnold Whittall
The Musical Times, Vol. 124, No. 1690. (Dec., 1983), pp. 733-737.
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Webern and Atonalitv
The path rom the
old
aesthetic
Arnold Whittall
A certain sort ofw orld-weary musical soph isticate has been
heard to remark with increasing frequency as the Webe rn
anniversary has approached that it seems more like the
centenary of his death.than of his birth. W ebern, it is im-
plied, is no longer a problem, and never has been for those
who 'really know' his music: less of a problem, anyway, than
Wagner, who did die in 1883.
Behind this attitude lies the assumption that, even if
We bern was not actually overrated as composer, inno vator
and influence in those heady post-war years ofto tal serialism
and intransigent, Darm stadt-promoted experiment, it is right
that his aphoristic, allusive creations should not, in these
mo re sensible times, make a very decisive imp act even
on the m ajority of modern-m usic enthusiasts. In any case,
Webernites cannot complain. There have been two com-
plete recordings of all the works with opus numbers; an
autho ritative as well as exhaustive Chronicle ofhis Life an d
Works has been written;' a volume of sketches2 and m any
of the works without opus n um bers have been published;
while for real specialists there is a Webern archive in
America, and an un ceasing flow of high-powered an d often
surprisingly digestible analytical articles, by G erma ns an d
Englishmen as well as Americans.
Webern will most definitely have disappointed anyone
who, in the early 1950s, expected the entire future of
Western m usic to hinge on the explorat ion and continua-
tion of his techniques. But simply because oft he sheer ease
with w hich later compo sers seem to have absorbed or by-
passed those techniques, it could be that W ebern has come
to be undervalued, even misunder5tood. In particular, tak-
ing W ebern for g ranted often seems to involve the evasion
of one of 20th-century music's most fundamental issues:
for the nature of wh at is commonly called 'atonality' is still
obscure, not least in its relation or non -relation to
tonality.
T h e attitude that Webern has never really been a problem
has a good deal to do with the widely-held view that the
Second Viennese School were not really radical at all, in
the sense of seeking and achieving a total break with the
past. Instead it was, in Scho enbe rg's familiar words, laying
claim to 'the merit of having written really new music which,
as i t rests on a tradit ion, is dest ined to become a t ra d i t i ~ n ' . ~
T h e tradition' to which Schoenberg was referring was not,
presumably, that of tonality, a principle he proclaimed 'no
H .
Moldenhauer :
An ion won Webern
(New York and Lo ndon,
1978)
Sketches 1926- 1945) (New York,
1968)
see
J .
Rufer: The W orks ofArnoldSchoenberg trans. D . Newlin (London, 1962),
nton Webern
w s
born
on 3 December 883
l o n g e r a p p l i ~ a b l e ' . ~ut the most essential function of
tonality was to provide an all-embracing un ity and coherence
at all levels of a compo sition, and it was this basic unifyin g
force, this fundam entally traditionalist aesthetic, rather than
the specific principles and practices of tonal harm ony as
such, that Schoenberg may have regarded as the only possi-
ble 'tradition'. T h e 12-no te method was so important, there-
fore, because it was able to provide a new kind of all-
embracing unity and coherence not necessarily severing
all points of contact with the old, but not depending on such
contacts in order to function effectively. Webern clearly
viewed his own 12-note compo sitions in this way, an d in
his lectures of the early 1930s, preserved in a studen t's short-
hand notes and published as Der Weg zur neuen Musik,j the
importance he attached to the traditional aesthetic and
technica l emphasis on uni ty i s ~nmis takable :~
Unity is surely the indispensable thing if meaning is to exist.
Unity, to be very general, is the establishment of the utmost
relatedness between all component parts. So, in music, as in
all other hum an utterance, the aim is to make as clear as possi-
ble the relationships between the parts of the unity: in short,
to show how on e thing leads to another.
And W ebern also made the large claim that 'composition
with twelve tones has achieved a degree of complete unity
that was not even approximate ly there b e f ~ r e ' . ~
Writers on Webern have not normally felt it necessary
to question the various assertions and assumptions in these
reported remarks. Nor have these writers questioned the
evaluation of his own musical development that Webern
offered in his later years, when he seemed to regard his
ear l ier , pre-12-note atonal composit ions simply as
preliminary, primitive steps on the path to the true new
music. And although it has quite often been argued that,
in its relative freedom, the pre-12-note atonal music of
Schoenberg, Berg and W ebern has m ore to offer the post-
12-note generation than the 12-note works themselves, this
argument usually carried the implication that such
'freedoms' are interestin g precisely because they seem to
be 'beyond analysis' : they confirm th e right of composers
not to be boun d by all-determining rules and systems; and
they pu t those interfering busybodies, th e technical com-
mentators, firmly in their place.
As far as
I
am aware, no writer o n We ber n has ever taker1
Lerrers ed. E. Stein (London, 1964),
104
(Vienna, 1960), Eng, trans.,
The Parh ro rhe A-eew Music
ed.
\Y'.
Reich (Bryn Mawr,
1963
op cit
(1963),
42
op cit,
8
4 7 - 8
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literally the most frequently quoted remark about his
pre -12-note music f rom the lec t~res :~
About 191 1 I wrote the Bagatelles for String Quartet (Op .9),
all very short pieces, lasting a couple of minutes perhaps
the shortest music so far. Here I had the feeling, 'when all twelve
notes have gone by, the piece is over'.
Not even the most aphoristic of Webern's early miniatures
for example, the fourth of the five
Stuckefur Orchester
op.10 (191 l), or th e third of the Drei kleine Stucke op.11
(1914) for cello and piano consists simp ly of a single
12-note statement with no repetitions of any kind. But a
compo sition for which th e remark is in one sense complete-
ly true is the third of the
Vier Stucke
op.7 for violin and
piano (1910), reproduced opposite, whose five principal
segments have the following pitch-class content:
T A B L E
Segment
(a) A B flat
(b) A
B
flat A flat
E
flat
D
C sha rp
(4
A A flat E flat D
C
sha rp E F C F sharp
B
(d)
A A sharp
G
sha rp C
B
(4 E flat C sha rp E
C
G flat G
1 2 4 6 7
8
9 10 11 1 2
Expressed in such summ ary terms, the principal 'rationale'
of op.7 no.3 seems to be a single statement of all 12 pitch-
classes, whose gradu al unfolding is embedded in a sequence
of repetitions which do not appear to obey a single, consis-
tent stru cturing principle: as Tabl e 1 indicates, th e collec-
tion is not built up by the simple addition of adjacent
semitones, or by any other evidently invariant 'motivic'
method. T h e repetitions do nevertheless con tribute to the
piece's thematic content it is mo re than a merely ' tex-
tural' composition and, as will be argue d more fully later,
it may well be possible to demonstrate an underlying
thematic unity, even ifthat involves nothing more substan-
tial than the recurrent 'composings out' of the initial
semitone: for example, the piano chord w hich ends the piece
in a register in which th e violin cannot participate can be
read as three pairs of augm ented octaves:
CIC
sharp; E flat/E;
G flat/G. But before pursu ing such matters it is desirable
to ask whether the search for a consistent motivic process
in such music is any more valuable than the search for
12-note orthodoxy.
T h e most influential developments in analytical techni-
que over the past 25 years or so have tended, however im-
plicitly, to support the assumption that all worthwhile
music, tonal or atonal, has unifying forces at work which
are more imp ortant, aesthetically and technically, tha n any
contrasting, diversifying elements; but the position is not
quite as uniform or as unthinkingly conformist as sum-
mary accounts occasionally suggest. One ambitious attemp t
at a history of all significant developments in earlier 20th-
Webern's op. 7 no.3; reproduced y permission of Universal Edition
(Alfred A Kalmus)
century culture has included the argument that what
distinguishes 20th-century modernism from all previous
manifestations o ft he radical spirit is the strength o fth e 'urge
to fragmentation'. Th is urge can lead to total aleatory chaos,
but may also foster the development of techniques for bring-
ing diverse elements ' into the most intimate relationship
with each other whilst at the same time p reserving the validi-
ty of the contradiction between them'.9 This formulation
is not unlike Stockhausen's declared intention 'to modulate
one event with another without destroying it, really discover-
ing those original qualities of som ething which are the m ost
characteristic, and which are strong enough to be m atched
with the stronger characteristics of something else leading
to real symbiosis'.1° And Stockhausen distinguishes this
'symbiosis' the mutually beneficial partners hip between
elem ents of different kinds from a crude, random collage
on the o ne hand and what he calls 'a synthesis in the old
sense where the components disappear' on the other.
At this level of generality it is all too easy to be temp ted
to dally in a warm b ath ofvag ue abstractions; but the distinc-
tion between a m usic which is essentially, and in the best
sense, synthetic and a music wh ich is symbiotic is not to
be dismissed as academic theory-making when so mu ch con-
fusion still exists as to how, and in what way, valid and
J. McFar lane : 'The Min d ofModernism ' , Modernisnr
1890-1930
ed. M . Brad-
bury and
J.
McFar lane (Harmondswor th , 1976),
81 88
lo Srockhausen: C onversarzonswith fir Composer, ed. J Cott (London, 1974),
191
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perceptible distinctions between a music called tonal and
a music called atonal can be made. Th e persistence of the
latter term, despite all the assaults on it from Schoenberg
himself onwards, is an indication that it may, after all, be
describing something real. But such is the force of tradi-
tional aesthe tics that even those who recognize th e logic of
the a rgumen t that, by definition, atonal music is quite like-
ly to negate most, if not all, of the most basic features of
tonal music may still instinctively resist the proposition that
a m odernist balance of discontinu ities, avoiding the ran-
dom disparities of collage but functioning more in terms
of polarities tha n of centralities, can function as a positive,
constructive aesthetic principle, creating new kinds of
coherence rather tha n a single kind of incoherence.
Ma ny w riters have responded to th e analytical challenge
of such highly compressed, expressionistic miniatures as
the Webe rn op.7 pieces simply by adapting fining down
traditional methods ofthe ma tic analysis. Single intervals,
even single notes, may be held to possess motivic signifi-
cance, and th e pieces to be built from interacting and varied
recurrences of these motivic elements. In op.7, for exam-
ple, one writer refers to extreme ly brief motifs of only a
few notes, sometim es only highly expressive isolated single
notes acting as motifs ,ll and anot her remarks that from
the technical point of view op.7 seems to be even more
strongly built on minor second relationships than the earlier
works .12 Th e most importan t a nd influential of recent
theorists of atonality, Allen Forte, has provided an inter-
pretation ofop.7 no.3 as what he terms a connected struc-
ture, w ith all the diverse elements interrelated throug h their
connectio ns with four basic collections of pitch-classes and
interval-classes which Forte term s Nexus Sets .13 It would
be grossly unfair to F orte to accuse him of a simple-mind ed
concern with unity-at-all-costs, and of a corresponding
failure to take due note of the symbiotic forces at work in
this piece. But the aesthetic principle that underlies his
analytical method clearly aims at the most refined explana-
tion of all the different levels and types of interactio n an d
interrelationship throughout the atonal repertory; and a
method concern ed specifically with surface formations may
complement Forte s approach without necessarily contradic-
ting its insights into the background .
T he m ain difficulty which stands in the way of develop-
ing a workable Th eo ry of Atonality as distinct from
developing ideas of thematic process which can apply equally
to tonally struc tured comp ositions is precisely that of
demo nstrating a convincing positive princ iple which atonal
pieces have in com mon. T h e very idea of analysis itselfseem s
to require something more than the mere description of
diverse surface details. Analysis involves interpretation in
terms of fundamental forces which persist from work to
l 1 F. Wildga ns: Anron IVebern (Lond on,
1966),
124
l 2
W. Kolneder: Anion Webern, trans. H. Searle (London,
1968),
64
l 3
The Srruciure of Aronai Music (New Have n and L ondon, 1973 , 126 31
work: hence the power o fth e Schenkerian concept of tonali-
ty, in which substructure is the purest kind of structure.
T o nter pret , and therefore to analyse, is not just to describe,
but to categorize, and it may be, to reiterate a formulation
made above, that an atonal composition can be usefully
analysed through the demonstration ofcontrasting categories
through polarities rather than centralities. (The relative-
ly new techniques associated with the application of
semiotics to musical analysis may eventually prove to be
ofva lue here, in view of their concern w ith all those features
that contribute to the textural character and structural
significance of an event.14)
Web ern s op.7 no.3 can provide a relatively simple model
for the analysis of polarities, not least because it is not one
of those early 20th-century works which in habit a twilight
world between tonal and atonal . Anyone who looks hard
enough for evidence of residual tonal features will probably
be able to find them in any piece: but to my ears the recur-
rences of A and the placement of elements fundamental to
an A tonality in op.7 no .3 are simply not organized in ways
to suggest that We bern wished to create suc h associations.
Th ey are stronger in other later pieces, such as the
op.12 songs, but that is another story.
Any com position of any period for violin and piano is likely
to exploit the evident and substantial differences between
the instrume nts, and op.7 no.3 is no exception, despite the
uniform ity o ft he extremely soft dynamic s. An d at least one
other of the basic textural polarities evident in th e piece could
equally well be present in a tonal compo sition: that involv-
ing sustaining and punctuatin g elements. Tab le 2 points
T BLE
Segtnenr
(a )
violin sustains a single note
piano punctuates (one note 3 times)
(b)
piano sustains: a legato statement
In RH
violin pu nctuates (4-note shudder ) :
piano punctuates 3 separate
semiquavers)
(c)
piano sustains: a legato phrase
with sustained bass note
violin punctuates with repetitions of
an ostinato and its transposition
(a )
piano sustains a 3-note cluster
violin punctuates: 2 statements of a
4-demisemiquaver group
(e)
piano sustalns a RH chord
piano punctuates:
2
LH statements
of E flatIG flat
up the distinctions. Th is analysis, using only minimal ver-
bal description, focusses on the superimposition and suc-
cession of surface events. It is so laid out that o nly the final
segment
e
involves one instru me nt alone, a nd this stresses,
in the simplest possible way, the sense in which the piece
may be said to end with its strongest contrast. Table 3,
describing further polarities, pursues this matter in rela-
tion to the registral and rhythmic profiles of the five
segments.
Althou gh T ab le 3 does not seek to divorce the final seg-
ment from all connectio n with its predecessors it shou ld by
l
see in particul ar J:J. Nat tlez: Varese s Densziy 21 5 a Study In Semiological
Analysis , Music Analysis, i
1982),
243 340
735
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NOKRIAN IIISI, h1.4K
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8/18/2019 Webern and Atonality_ the Path From the Old Aesthetic
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and so on. In W ebern we are more likely to hear the
lack
of tonal func tion occasionally even some devious allu-
sion to tonal function rather than an actual atonal func-
tion whic h relates every event distinctly to every other event.
An d it follows that even the most patently un iform, un ified
atonal composition, whe ther 12-note or not, cannot be con-
sidered in term s of such a universally accepted and perceiv-
ed grammar or syntax as exists for tonal music. However
persistent the elements of the old techniques, the old func-
tions, and with them the old aesthetics, cannot possibly
survive.
T h e early part o fth is article included the suggestion that
a little respectful scepticism ab out W ebern s view of his own
musical development might be salutary. It is certainly my
own belieftha t we are too ready to make assumptions about
the presence of the kind o funi ty which keeps contrasts strict-
ly subordinate, not only in th e pre-12-note music which has
been discussed here but in the 12-note music itself, where
polarities may be even more significantly deployed. If
Mireille Revisited
Steven Huebner
Charles Gouno d s career as an opera composer was marked
by some of the greatest successesbfthe 19th-centu ryFrench
repertory and by some of its most abysmal failures. Wh ereas
Faust,
first performed at the Thi.i tre L yrique in 1859, went
on to garner an international audience, suc h long-forgotten
efforts as
L a nonne sanglante
(1854) or
Polyeucte
(1878) belong
among the un fortunate works that received the fewest per-
formances at the 0pi.ra in the last century and have never
been revived. E ven th e initial success of a
Faust
or a
Romi o
et Juliette
(1867) did not preclude modifications for
revivals. So when a work that had a poor reception on its
premiere was given a second or even a third chance, it is
not surprising that the upheavals effected by Goun od were
almost always massive. Except for his first opera,
Sapho
(1851),
Mireille
(1864) has had th e most turbulen t history
oft he works in this category. But unlike most ofth ese operas,
it eventually obtained a place in the repertory and is now
the third most frequently performed of Gounod s operas.
It was in a version that featured, among other changes,
a reduction of the o ~ e r a s imensions from five acts to three,
with the attendan;removal of more than a quarter of the
original music, the conflation of two subsidiary roles (Tav en
and V incenette), the addition of an
ariette
in the manner
of the
Faust
Jewel Song, and the replacement of the tragic
ending with one in which the heroine suddenly recovers
from sunstroke, that
Mireille
first gained favour in a pro-
duction at the Opera Co mique in 1889. Between this revival
and the first rather poorly received performances at the
Th eit re Lyrique from March to Ma y 1864, the opera under-
Web ern really believed that composition with twelve tones
has achieved a degree of complete unity that w as not even
approxim ately there before , it may suggest nothin g more
than that he needed a good dose of Schenker to teach him
the real tru th about tonality. But in any case there is nothing
in his remarks to undermine the possibility that atonality,
whether or not expressed through the background controls
of the 1 2-note system, is truly a nd positively complem en-
tary to tonality a music ofarchitec tural dispositions rather
than grammatical functions, w here coherence and stability
are created throug h the com plemen tary balancing or juxta-
position of separate events, and where in the absence of
tonal, contrapu ntal voice-leading symmetrical factors may
have a decisive struc tural role. Th e W ebern centenary is
a good time to raise and explore such matters, however incon-
clusively, and to suggest that comp ositions we thou ght we
had digested painlessly may in fact be rather more subv er-
sive, and less eager to show ho w one thin g leads to another ,
than we had previously thought.
Gounod s Mireille is
revived y the E N at the
Coliseum this month
went other unsuccessful attempts to enhance its appeal.
A Covent Garde n production in sum mer 1864, for which
Mireille s ultimate recovery was first instituted, was followed
that December by a The it re Lyriqu e revival that introduc-
ed most oft he modifictions to be adopted in 1889. In 1874
there was an additional, ill-fated attempt at the 0pi.ra Com -
ique to restore many of the original features. Although h e
sanctioned the 1889 production, G ouno d was never ha ppy
about the truncated
Mireille.
Only after it had become a
perennial favourite would a director of the Opera Comi-
que, Albert Carri., risk a return to the five-act framework
on the suggestion oft he composer s w idow, in 1901. Carri.,
however, retained the infamous
valse ariette
and, because
Goun od s orchestration for parts of the Air de la Crau and
the tragic finale (both printed in full in the first edition of
the vocal score) had been lost, he staged these num bers in
abbreviated form. In 1939 Henri Busser and Reynaldo H ahn
launched another revival, which purported to be as close
to the M arc h 1864 version as the available docum entation,
including the au tograph full score, would allow. Th e miss-
ing orchestration had still not been found either in the
autograp h or in the 0pi.ra Com ique archives, so Busser filled
the lacunae himself. H is edition has been used for all subse-
quent performances at the O pera Co mique and elsewhere,
as well as for all complete recordings.
see J G Prod homme and
A Dandelot:
Gozrnod
sa
vr r
ses oeuures
(Paris,1 9 1 I),
ii 220
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You have printed the following article:
Webern and Atonality: The Path from the Old Aesthetic
Arnold Whittall
The Musical Times, Vol. 124, No. 1690. (Dec., 1983), pp. 733-737.
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[Footnotes]
14 Varese's 'Density 21.5': A Study in Semiological Analysis
Jean-Jacques Nattiez; Anna Barry
Music Analysis, Vol. 1, No. 3. (Oct., 1982), pp. 243-340.
Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0262-5245%28198210%291%3A3%3C243%3AV%272ASI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y
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