#atonalism

alright you asked for this and yes i did write this just now

My first impression of Schoenberg was how modern his music sounded. After listening for a while it began to cast a defining light over everyday subjectivity, the visual landscape and historical events fraught with darkness and disturbed wonder about who we really are. Human thought and experience had turned a corner at some point and found its natural expression in Schoenbergian atonalism. Schoenberg as musical psychologist of the 20th century.

Arnold Schoenberg, The Red Gaze - 1910

Too often Schoenberg has been written up as the composer who swept the decks clean after Wagnerian and Mahlerian excesses inevitably toppled over and who enforced order upon Romantic harmonic wanderlust. But Schoenberg has consistently proved as much a beginning, a figure who inspired musicians to dig ever deeper into sound, as any sort of historical endpoint. Cage, who managed to isolate something specific out of Schoenberg’s method and then moved it in a direction his onetime teacher could never have dreamed—or indeed approved—of, exemplifies how the influence proliferated. The late-period work of Cage’s friend and composer colleague Morton Feldman demonstrated how objectifying systemization could be applied to material tonal in its inference, creating a music of delicate, poised beauty. His piano work For Bunita Marcus (1985) sounds like tonality with all the usual anchors and landmarks rubbed out. The retort that Schoenberg mattered only to a narrow band of High Modernist fellow travelers—Carter, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Milton Babbitt—whose music never captured the imagination or the affection of the music-loving public is never far away, but classical commentators, too often lacking the analytical tools to listen outside their own area, have repeatedly ducked the task of explaining why this is not the case. The atonal genie Schoenberg freed from the bottle turns up in the most unlikely places. Anton Webern—arguably Schoenberg’s most famous pupil—became a poster boy for avant-garde composition. But in mid-1960s Sheffield, England, the guitarist Derek Bailey got bitten by the atonal bug after stumbling across a Webern LP. Bailey, then a jazz guitarist obsessed with Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery, heard Webern’s music dicing up sound in ways he hadn’t experienced before, which handed him new structures for improvisation. Jazz was out; free improvisation was in.

If Bailey, who became a guru of British free improvisation, feels too much of a musician’s musician around which to hang any claims about Schoenberg creeping beyond the confines of modern composition, how about Frank Zappa? Webern, Zappa said, “filled me with awe—I couldn’t believe anyone would write music like that,” and he revered Schoenberg equally. Sprechstimme helped Zappa to develop his approach to delivering a vocal. “A Nun Suit Painted on Some Old Boxes,” from his screwball film 200 Motels (1971), always sounds to me like an overt hat tip to his favorite Schoenberg work, Pierrot lunaire. Or how about Lou Reed, whose teenage interest in Lulu, the atonal opera by Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg, is another example of atonal music helping form a musical imagination? Lulu’s stark expressionism stuck with Reed, handing him the subject (and title) of a late album recorded with the metal group Metallica. Brian Eno, whose boundless sonic imagination helped shape albums by David Bowie, Devo, and Laurie Anderson, as a young man found himself enthralled by postwar modernism and concepts derived from Cage. Schoenberg’s solidly compacted scores, in which every note must count, might feel antithetical to ambient composition, the music for which Eno is most famous. Ambient pieces, usually electronic, exist not to be performed but as a means of using sound to accentuate the dimensions of a space. Eno’s harmonies, caressing the corners of a room, flowing around the architecture, have no need for representational musical narrative. His no-gravity music liberates notes from their usual tonal function through objectivizing algorithms, an idea that has always felt to me like a distant cousin of Schoenbergian tone rows zapping harmonic hierarchies.

One of my favorite Schoenberg pieces:

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