A question on 12-tone Schoenberg

[Cato]

Schoenberg's 12-tone method is not guaranteed to create a compelling harmony. Classical harmony is more-or-less guaranteed to create something that doesn't sound ugly, but it doesn't guarantee a compelling harmony either. It is up to the composer to find something compelling within the constraints of whichever system. Clearly the 12-tone system puts a greater burden on the composer to find something beautiful within the constraints of the system.

For me, the proof of Schoenberg's system is not found in a logical or musical argument, but in the music he created using it.

0:) Amen!  0:)

Allow me to quote my own comments from Florestan's Romantic Salon:

If we agree that a certain lionization of the "Irrational" (usually seen as a reaction against the Enlightenment) is a hallmark of the 19th-century Romantics, then I do wonder more and more about the complaints against many of our 20th-century composers, as well as our contemporary ones.  The more I listen to them and our contemporary ones, I find that there is a great deal of expression of the "irrational" side, despite all the mathematical blather one sees in analyses about permutations, set theory, etc.   (And if I see Webern's music described one more time as "cerebral" I will reach for my revolver!     )

Because in the end the ultimate question is...how does it sound?  And when I hear e.g. Schoenberg's Violin Concerto, Hartmann's Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, the Shostakovich Tenth, Wyschnegradsky's assorted quarter-tone works, Penderecki's Threnody, Ovchinnikov's Symphony #1, Explosante-fixe by Boulez, Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin, our own Luke Ottevanger's piano  works and Karl Henning's Annabel Lee or Out in the Sun, I believe that I hear an expressivity that will rival that of the Romantics, whether traditional tonality is used, stretched, or even meticulously avoided, and whether these composers sneer at the notions of the Romantics or not.

I realize, of course, that many do not hear this emotional intensity because of the composers' non-Romantic idiom: my own unsuccessful attempt to interest people in my quarter-tone efforts (I lost count of the wrinkled noses and incredulous faces I saw, as soon as the first notes were sounded) gave witness to this fact.  Again, despite that, I viewed my own oeuvre, no matter how experimental (e.g. 19-tone quarter-tone scales), as a descendant of the Romantic heritage of the 19th century.

[PotashPie]

While it's true that craft and artfulness are what make good music, I think the emphasis is too much on that, and nor enough on the constraints of the 12-tone system itself. It's a non-harmonic system, in that it makes no provision for harmony, and is basically linear, which might make counterpoint, but is no guarantee of harmony.

The "harmony" produced by the 12-tone method is solely up to the whim of the composer. That's good, but I want the 12-tone system to be seen as it is.

Think of ordered rows: why are they ordered? They can be used as melodic or thematic lines, true, but that's not all.

"Ordering" a tone row creates fixed relationships within the row. Not just horizontally, in time, like a melody, but in intervallic ways.

In fact, for some purposes, a tone row can be seen not as a "line," but as a set of fixed intervallic relationships, which translates just as well to being presented vertically as it does horizontally, as a sequence in time.

This is where the true significance of "harmony" in 12-tone music can be found, in intervallic relationships.

This might be more well suited to less dense, more contrapuntal music, as in Webern. I can hear certain areas in his music where certain intervals are prominent in occurrence.

With tonality, the vertical 'harmonic' dimension is pretty well taken care of, and is part of the whole system, a logical result of the tonal hierarchy. If you build a triad on a step, it will have a function, and a quality, that is directly attributable to the tonal system to begin with. The composer goes from there.

Not as easy with 12-tone; the "harmony" is a result of the intervallic structure of the row in some way, or is almost totally arbitrary. This "arbitrary" aspect is where the composer must make the music sound good.

Someone mentioned "the irrational." I think this is a very Romantic notion, and is reflected in the work of Schoenberg and company. The "subconscious" was a hot topic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

[jochanaan]

I don't know what made you jump to that conclusion!

I said that it's gone the opposite direction, into non-harmonically based ways of thinking ("geometric," I called it).

CP tonality and its scale system are still ostensibly based on harmonic principles, but these are mere vestiges...

The "12-ness" of our ET octave is what drives more modern, post tonal thinking. Symmetry, divisions of 3 & 4, freer modal thinking, etc.

Speaking of "Pythagoran," it is the Pythagoran notion of stacking fifths (yes, I know they were originally 3:2s) that gave us our 12-division octave.

Our present-day ET system's fifths are ONLY 2 cents sharp. Our 12-division octave is definitely biased towards fifths, not thirds, which is where all the tempered tunings came from.

I seem to have misread your previous comment.  My only "excuse" is that perhaps I was slightly distracted.

...Think of ordered rows: why are they ordered? They can be used as melodic or thematic lines, true, but that's not all.

"Ordering" a tone row creates fixed relationships within the row. Not just horizontally, in time, like a melody, but in intervallic ways.

In fact, for some purposes, a tone row can be seen not as a "line," but as a set of fixed intervallic relationships, which translates just as well to being presented vertically as it does horizontally, as a sequence in time.

This is where the true significance of "harmony" in 12-tone music can be found, in intervallic relationships....

True.  In my one foray into 12-tone serial composition, during my college days, I constructed my row based on three groups of four, and further ordered the row so that the second group of 4 formed a chord that was the inversion of the first group.

[PotashPie]

[...In my one foray into 12-tone serial composition, during my college days, I constructed my row based on three groups of four, and further ordered the row so that the second group of 4 formed a chord that was the inversion of the first group.

Yes, divide and conquer. Why do you think 12-tone music has faded away?

I think it's not the method itself so much, but the fact that it's chromatic and uses all 12 notes.

Most people want to hear "tonality" in whatever form it takes, which means less notes. Tonality is dependent upon what is not there, what notes are left out.

There can be qualifications, though, such as Miles Davis' later work, which features a static groove, but with all this chromatic soloing over the top. I suppose the format and stylization "saved" it and it was still seen as "jazz," but a lot of jazz critics at the time did not like the new direction his music was taking.