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Arnold Schoenberg's Journey
by Allen Shawn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002
272 pp.; $26
Reading Allen Shawn's Arnold Schoenberg's Journey reminded me of an anecdote Oscar Levant gave about Schoenberg in his Memoirs of an Amnesiac:
Once he was humming an unhummable theme with unnegotiable leaps between intervals which were in his usual atonal style. He turned to his wife and asked, "What is that?" She hesitated, stammered, and helplessly admitted that she couldn't identify it. "That is the main theme from the piece I dedicated to you," he explained sternly. That was quite a responsibility. The piece cannot be hummed unless you're a freak. But Mrs. Schoenberg was embarrassed.
High modernist art was notorious for its power to intimidate, and no modern master—not even the Joyce of Finnegans Wake—was more intimidating to his audience than the Austrian composer and painter Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). After throwing down his first gauntlet with atonal composition, where a piece has no central key, Schoenberg founded serialism, where a piece's melody is limited to the sequences of notes in a fixed "row" (usually twelve). The result upset listeners' expectations and left many baffled and disturbed, others downright contemptuous. (As Shawn notes, concertgoers at Schoenberg premieres were known to call for the composer to be shot or jeer to the point of making singers cry.) And yet Schoenberg, like Joyce, adamantly insisted that his revolutionary work was really quite accessible. "One must listen to it in the same manner as to every other kind of music, forget the theories, the twelve-tone method, the dissonances, etc., and, I would add, if possible the author," Schoenberg wrote in a letter.
Today the era of high modernism has receded into history. How does Schoenberg sound? Allen Shawn wants us to set aside our preconceptions and listen. All too often, he says, we are swayed by statements like Leonard Bernstein's: "The trouble is that the new musical 'rules' of Schoenberg are not apparently based on innate awareness, on the intuition of tonal relationships." Bernstein used Alban Berg's Violin Concerto as an example of 12-tone writing that nevertheless "exists somehow in a tonal universe where it's accessible to us in all its warmth and charm." Shawn takes Bernstein as assuming that absence of "warmth" and "charm" implies the lack of "an essential aspect of what makes music music." Arnold Schoenberg's Journey combines biography with examination of Schoenberg's key works, dedicated to revealing the accessibility lying beneath the unfamiliar surface of his style.
I took the book as an occasion to test Shawn's claim. I put myself in the position of a concertgoer contemporary with Schoenberg, listening over two months to recordings of 20 of his pieces in chronological order. I listened to each recording at least twice. Although I have found that I need as many as seven listens before I truly "get" most classical pieces, I did not afford Schoenberg's this many—because Shawn's thesis is properly that the music communicates more immediately than this. Moreover, repetitive sampling of full-length, high-fidelity recordings is a luxury of modern technology, unavailable in Schoenberg's time.
My particular musical training is fairly well-suited to appraising work which mostly appeared before the 1930s—when classical music was more central to the public experience, the default reference of "Do you like music?" was taken to be classical, and more people played piano because mechanical recording was in its infancy. I play piano and cello, have sung in choirs and local productions of musicals and operas, and have the "coffeetable" familiarity with classical music typical of middle-class people before the rock era. But I know only shreds of music theory, such that my reception of a piece of classical music is filtered through a lightly informed kind of gut intuition. Like most such people, I find that my affection for classical music attenuates after the Late Romantic period. I'd rather hear Beethoven over Bartok, and must admit having been somewhat biased against engaging Schoenberg by just the cranky New York Times articles over the years that Shawn bemoans.
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