A Deeper Dive into Pierrot Lunaire

The original ensemble at the premiere.
Schoenberg is third from the left.

Schoenberg's music is no state of normalcy.

It takes place in a realm that is otherwise

ringed around with taboos and that the

conventional language of art does not reach.

--Theodor Adorno

I just realized why I have always felt a special connection to Pierrot Lunaire. Way back in my late teens when I was first discovering classical music, including 20th century music (I found Stuckenschmidt's book on 20th century music in the local library), I had listened to some Schoenberg and found the idea of atonal music fascinating. At the same time a friend of mine who played piano and I (on electric bass) had a gig every Friday night at the local legion (the Canadian equivalent of the VFW) playing cocktail music. He was also into Schoenberg so sometimes, after midnight, when everyone was pretty liquored up, we would start doing surreal music. We would take a popular song but modulate up a semitone every verse. Then, as a finale, we would do free, atonal improvisations in the style of Schoenberg. Here's the funny thing, no-one ever came over and said, "hey, what is that crap, stop it!" I guess they just didn't notice. So when Malcolm MacDonald calls Pierrot Lunaire "a kind of surrealist cabaret act," I'm right there. I've felt very at home with Schoenberg's surrealist side from a young age.

(I have this fantasy that one night on her tour, Taylor Swift comes out and sings a Schoenberg lieder, maybe Herzgewächse! That's his op 20, written just before Pierrot. Now that would be actually cool. Instead of having pop music culture infiltrate the classical world, let's have the opposite.)

Forgive me a slight digression: I was very lucky in first year university to have an outstanding professor for my English literature class. We had been assigned to read the short story, written in 1914, by Franz Kafka titled "In the Penal Colony." The story is rather grim:

The story is set in an unnamed penal colony and describes the last use of an elaborate torture and execution device that carves the commandment that the condemned prisoner has transgressed on his skin as he slowly dies over the course of twelve hours.

At the next class our professor strode into the room, dumped some books on his lectern and said "This is a very funny story." And so it is, once you realize how comic the excesses in the story are. Also, it is interesting that Richard Taruskin in his discussion of Pierrot Lunaire (composed in 1912) describes Der Mondfleck as a "thoroughgoing irony ... and a much funnier one (in a bewildering sort of way)." He also says "From a bogus masterpiece of counterpoint, Der Mondfleck becomes a genuine masterpiece of self-mocking irony." All the theorists, including Charles Rosen, seem to have missed the joke, failing to notice that canon, fugue and palindrome present no challenge once you have emancipated dissonance. [Taruskin quote is from The Oxford History of Western Music, volume 4, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, pp 462-465]

Another delightful irony is that Pierrot Lunaire was, at the time, Schoenberg's breakaway hit: he and the original "singer" Albertine Zehme toured Pierrot for more than a decade. Nowadays, due to the tireless efforts of generations of theorists, we are forbidden to notice the jokes and the delicious delirium of this masterwork of expressionism.

Speaking of theorists, general writers on Pierrot have also missed the boat, an excellent example being the only book in English specifically devoted to the piece, Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire by Jonathan Dunsby. This book is so stifled by the author's academic Englishness that it goes to great lengths to avoid actually saying anything about the piece.

With the genre and the cult gone, the 'thorny surface' of Pierrot remains, and, though 'baffle' is a strong term, threaded throughout this volume will be found indications of how inherently ungraspable Pierrot is. [op. cit. p. 9]

Compare Taruskin's discussion of the first piece, Mondestrunken:

The music is very easy to analyze, since its all-important Grundgestalt--the intervallic shape or "cell" that provides the melodic and harmonic raw material--is presented at the very outset in the form of an ostinato in the piano part. It may be very easily traced throughout the piece... [The Oxford History of Western Music, volume 4, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, p. 461]

Yeah, "inherently ungraspable." Later on Professor Dunsby casually mentions that "elaborate, music-theoretic description .. would be inappropriate here." Though he details the shifting orchestration and dates of composition of the various pieces, actual discussion of the specific musical detail is avoided in favor of generalities: "densely chromatic harmony," "fragmentary interludes," "semiquaver figuration," "motivic repetitions," --after dozens of pages of this one longs for some actual concrete detail. Professor Dunsby's volume is a slim eighty pages, I guess if he had grasped Pierrot it would have been longer.

Mondestrunken (Drunk with Moonlight) and Der Mondfleck (The Moon Spot) are favorites with theorists, so let's look at another piece, number 8, Nacht (Night). The Grundgestalt is easy to pick out as this is a passacaglia. In melodic form, the ten-note motif is:

This is preceded by a brief introduction where the motif is compressed and buried deep in the bottom register of the piano. It continually reappears, in eighth notes in the piano:

And in the cello, in a varied form:

Also in the bass clarinet (in Bb):

The best explanation of how atonality works in Schoenberg is found in Charles Rosen's book Arnold Schoenberg published by the University of Chicago Press.

What Schoenberg, consciously or unconsciously, realized before anyone else is that the concept of themes and the system of motivic construction were bound up with a symmetrical system of harmony clearly oriented around a central triad... Schoenberg was not the first composer to abandon "triadic" harmony; but he was the first to realize fully the implications of such a revolution for all the other aspects of musical form. [op. cit. p. 42]

Th[e] emancipation of tone color was as significant and as characteristic of the first decades of the twentieth century as the emancipation of dissonance. [p. 48]

[A] new ideal of harmonic consistency is supported by Schoenberg's idiosyncratic form of motivic construction in parts of Pierrot Lunaire... A short motif of from three to fourteen notes provides the nucleus not only for the entire melodic development but for almost every note of the accompaniment as well. [p. 51] The harmony implied by these motifs pervades the music completely: they are meant to give any work composed by this method an individual and characteristic sonority. [p. 52]

Let's listen to Nacht with the score:

I think that the main reason Schoenberg remains controversial to this day, a hundred years after these pieces were written, while others like Stravinsky and Bartók are fully absorbed into the canon, is that he has been consistently misunderstood the whole time--including by Theodor Adorno!

References

Wikipedia article: In the Penal Colony

Wikipedia article: Pierrot Lunaire

   

 

Voice and guitar

A Concert by Lorenzo Costa

One of my favorite ensembles is voice and guitar. Due to an enlightened voice teacher, my very first public concert was a performance of Benjamin Britten's Songs from the Chinese in 1972 at the University of Victoria (British Columbia, not Australia). And by the way, the guitar part is quite difficult so I don't recommend it as your first voice and guitar repertoire!

The combination of voice and some guitar-like instrument is probably thousands of years old, though evidence is scarce. The first notated repertoire is for voice and vihuela in 16th century Spain and after that is a flood of music from Italy, France and especially England where we have the wonderful and extensive repertoire for voice and lute from John Dowland, Thomas Campion, Philip Rosseter, Thomas Morley and others.

Due to the collaboration of Peter Pears and Julian Bream, England saw an efflorescence of music for voice and guitar post-WWII with the previous mentioned cycle by Benjamin Britten and another by Lennox Berkeley. Britten also did some lovely folksong arrangements with guitar.

This post is prompted by a review by Jay Nordlinger of a concert by Karim Sulayman, an American tenor, and Sean Shibe, a British guitarist in New York. The concert was very well-received but ironically, my favorite section from the review was:

Speaking of sounds, I heard a dog not barking in this recital: Sulayman and Shibe did not talk. They did not lecture. They did not recite the program notes from the stage. What a blessing this was. It preserved the musical ambience of the evening. The program was ripe for pontification, and the musicians refused to indulge.

Yes, please let's lay this need for commentary from the performers to rest. In Europe it never happens.

Now let's have a listen to some of the songs by Lennox Berkeley from the cycle Songs of the Half-Light because we rarely get to hear them. None of the recent live videos are very accomplished so here is Pears and Bream with the first song.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47nMbO4evr8 

And Ian Partridge and Jukka Savijoki with the second and third songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuq7IPJhEW0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukw6lPdS13g

From 12-Bar to Twelve-Tone

A Musical Odyssey

It’s odd, but most of this odyssey, which to be authentic should take about ten years, actually transpired over a fairly brief stretch of time from when I was eighteen to when I was twenty. But it has taken me the rest of my life to really understand what went on and to marvel at what else has been going on in the musical world.

My mother was a Canadian old-time fiddler, which means she played jigs and reels for Friday night dances in small towns in Western Canada. And, I suspect, often for little or no money. None of that music had any attraction for me. My mother arranged for piano lessons for me when I was nine or ten, but I had so little interest I often forgot to go. Later, in my teens, when we had moved to Vancouver Island, I stumbled across an LP of Ferrante and Teicher, Juilliard piano grads who had a successful career playing easy listening and light classics. I remember quite liking their version of Malagueña.

But then I discovered rock music and started playing the electric bass. I soon found myself in a garage band (they always need a bass player) and we played our first gig six months later. I think we earned $16 but I don’t recall if it was each or all together. Based on this I can claim to have been a professional musician most of my life. We played Eric Burden and the Animals, the Rolling Stones, the Monkees, Herman’s Hermits and we attempted to play the Beatles when we could figure out the chords.

I need to stress that this band was not very good, didn’t last very long and was probably quite annoying to listen to. But we mostly had fun. When we discovered Cream we got into lengthy formless jamming. After a while I drifted into folk-rock under the influence of Bob Dylan. The peak of that career phase was probably when I performed “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” all fifteen minutes of it, at a little folk concert in a Chinese restaurant.

At some point a friend of mine played me a recording of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and that instantly converted me into a classical music lover. I listened to everything I could and stated buying budget LPs which at this time (1969/70) could be had for $0.99. As I was an avid reader and haunted our local library I soon discovered that there were actual books written about classical music. I read them all, but the only one I can recall is Stuckenschmidt’s history of 20th century music which is where I first heard about Arnold Schoenberg and his system of composition using all twelve tones of the chromatic scale.

Mind you, early on it was not Schoenberg that I listened to. The only recording I had was of Verklärte Nacht, which I did really like. Mostly I was discovering Debussy, Beethoven and Bach. It was a real thrill when I discovered, via a Christopher Parkening record, that you could play Bach on guitar. That pretty much set the stage for the next twenty some years of my life. Due to the good luck of traveling to Spain in the mid-70s and studying with Maestro José Tomás I had quite a successful career as a concert guitarist—by Canadian standards at least.

When that finally petered out and I retired due to frustration and burnout, I moved to Mexico and avoided music altogether for a few years. Then I made a fresh start, but this time as a composer. I had actually composed all along: first songs, then the occasional piece for guitar or ensemble, but it was always a fringe activity. Now I was going to do it on a more serious level. After several years of modestly acceptable compositions I realized that I hadn’t even understood what the challenge was!

The “challenge” of course, is what Schoenberg was aware of from his early years. As Theodor Adorno describes it:

In traditional music, and precisely in the great constructive composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, there was always still the attempt to achieve something like a balance between the schema and the uniqueness of each work of through-composed music. This resulted in a peculiar duality in the structure. One part is on the surface. This the part reached by the usual analyses based on the basso continuo schema and the theories of modulation and musical forms, and that is fully expressed in the general relations of tonality. But underneath this there is the second part, which Schoenberg called subcutaneous, a structure under the skin, which derives the whole from very specific germ cells and which first generated the more profound, true unity. Only this inner structure makes a difference in the work’s actual quality, but it, precisely, is barely perceived in traditional music by most listeners.

Understanding that, and composing music with that awareness is the actual challenge and one that I (and I suppose most people) was blissfully unaware of for nearly all my life. But it explains, for one thing, why the music of Schoenberg seems so much more substantial than most other music.

Here are his Five Pieces for Orchestra op 16 from 1909:

Two More Things to Give Thanks For

Notre Dame, restored

In April 2019 a fire destroyed much of Notre Dame de Paris, one of the monuments of Medieval civilization and the birthplace of polyphony. It is about to re-open, fully restored to as it was before the fire.

And a personal thanksgiving. Over the last few months, possibly years, I have been suffering a progressive hearing loss. In the last week it worsened to the point that half of my hearing was gone. Yesterday a visit to my doctor, who applied hydrogen peroxide and vigorous flushing, dislodged two large lumps of hardened earwax and today my hearing is fully restored! This happened to me once before, in my twenties. It is like being reborn. My world had slowly turned into purgatory or limbo, where sounds were half-heard, a ghostly existence. Now, the sound of my slippers on the floor is deafening! I have all those high frequency sounds back. Who knows, maybe I will be able to return to composing. Ah, sound!

A friend and I years ago exchanged lists of the things we hated the most. His list had all to do with places. Number one was having to move house because he has an enormous library. He pointed out that my list all had to do with sounds. One item would be if a student baritone saxophone player moved in next door. Agh!

So let's have a celebratory envoi. The Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 by J. S. Bach:

Thanksgiving

I don't usually do seasonal or topical posts, but this seemed a propos. Let us give thanks for Western Civilization.

We seem to be in the waning days of Western European civilization and its adjuncts. It had a pretty good run, synthesizing elements from Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Roman civilizations and cultures from around 1100 AD when Notre Dame in Paris was being built and Léonin and Pérotin were inventing polyphony up in the choir loft, to around 2000 AD when it all started to fall apart. See Jacques Barzun's book From Dawn To Decadence: 1500 to the Present for the details of the last phase.

This being so, we really don't need any progressivism in the arts, politics or culture. Down with the avant-garde, that moment is long gone. Instead, in this twilight of civilization let's explore what was before it is gone forever. I could do a list, from Organum to high Renaissance polyphony, to vivid madrigals to meltingly lovely French Baroque to transcendentally profound J. S. Bach, to brilliantly rambunctious opera by Mozart and on an on--and of course, that is just the music. What about the astonishing quantity and variety of poetry and prose? Or the stupendous architecture of the Medieval cathedrals, the synthesis of theology and philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the empirical wisdom of David Hume. And I am completely forgetting the artists: El Greco, Dürer, Hieronymous Bosch, Van Gogh... Really, a comprehensive list would take volumes.

Let us be deeply grateful for all the magnificent art and music and culture generally that those centuries have given us.

And I have avoided picking any really famous pieces!

Formal Discipline

This is going to be the opposite concept to the last post: there we had the phenomenon of musicians subjecting themselves to the Procrustean beds of Autotune, pitch correction and other kinds of editing and processing--all of which have the cumulative effect, as Fil points out, of erasing individuality and leaving a host of standardized human units. Why would we do that? He mentions fear, but there must be more.

Anyway, what I want to talk about here is something quite different: the idea in composition of choosing ahead of time to work within strict limits of form or texture. Some of these forms are rather hard to describe. Take the Baroque prelude as Bach and his claveciniste predecessors composed. It is a remarkably fluid form, but it certainly has a distinct character, particularly when it precedes a fugue or an allemande. The prelude is often arpeggiated harmonies with no clear melody; the rhythm might be very loose or improvisational and so on. It has characteristics, though they are loosely defined. But Bach sat down and wrote twenty-four of them in all the keys, preceding twenty-four fugues. The fugue is another form, though it is often described as more of a polyphonic texture. But again, especially in the hands of Bach it has a distinct character that contrasts nicely with the prelude. The fugue immediately establishes a clear meter and rhythm with a subject, a theme that defines a musical space right away. Then this space is expanded with other iterations of that same subject. There are a zillion ways to do this and Bach writes each of those twenty-four fugues in an entirely different way. The first fugue in the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier uses stretto--the piling up of the subject on itself--to a maximum extent. The next fugue uses no stretto whatsoever. Each fugue, like each prelude, is an entity in itself. Then a couple of decades later, Bach did it all over again with a new set of twenty-four preludes and fugues in all the keys. 

What I want to draw your attention to here is the returning again and again to the same kind of challenge and finding new ways each time to solve the problems. It's the new approach each time that is marvelous. This is the kind of creativity that has astonished every composer since. We find it especially admirable when a composer can, again and again, create something entirely new within very specific boundaries. Every Bach prelude and fugue sounds like no other kind of piece. Similarly, Domenico Scarlatti took up the keyboard sonata and composed five hundred and fifty-five of them, each one most definitely a Scarlatti sonata, but each one a unique individual. It is that combination of individuality within a form or genre that we find so compelling. Perhaps because it is a model of the whole problem of human society: how do we live as individuals within a community?

Lately I have been fooling around with poetry since I am in a dry spell as a composer. I first took up the very familiar and very easy form of the haiku: just three lines with five, seven and five syllables. And traditionally there is a mention of the season. Haiku tend to be inspired by nature. Over the last couple of years I have probably written five hundred haiku, most of them bad, or at least dull.

Recently I have been looking at Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg (and there are a couple of posts in the works) and in so doing I have examined the poetic form of the text. These twenty-one poems are taken from a German translation of an original set of fifty poems in French by Albert Giraud, the nom de plume of Emile Albert .Kayenbergh. The poetic form he chose is rather an obscure one, the Rondel Bergamasque originating in 14th century France (though obviously, from the name, previously coming from Bergamo). The form is quite strict: there are two quatrains and a quintet. The first two lines are a refrain that repeats as the last two lines in the second quatrain (a quatrain is a set of four lines and a quintet, of five). Then the first line comes again as the last line of the quintet. This gives the form as follows where the capital letters are an exact repeat: ABba abAB abbaA. Here is an example so you can see how that works:

A Columbine

Les fleurs pâles du clair de Lune,

Comme des roses de clarté,

Fleurissent dans les nuits d'été:

Si je pouvais en cueillir une!

Pour soulager mon infortune,

Je cherche, le long du Léthé,

Les fleurs pâles du clair du Lune,

Comme de roses de clarté.

Et j'apaiserai ma rancune,

Si j'obtiens du ciel irrité

La chimérique volupté

D'effeuiller sur ta toison brune

Les fleurs pâles du clair de Lune!

Of course the translator into English doesn't attempt the rhyme scheme:

To Columbine

The pale flowers of the Moonlight,

Like roses of clarity,

Blossom in the summer nights:

If I could pick one!

To relieve my misfortune,

I search, along the Lethe,

The pale flowers of the Moonlight,

Like roses of clarity.

And I would soothe my rancor,

If from the irritated heaven I obtained

The chimerical sensuousness

Of depetaling upon your brown fleece

The pale flowers of the Moonlight!

And neither does the German translator:

Columbine

Des Mondlichts bleiche Blüten,

Die weissen Wunderrosen,

Blühn in den Julinächten--

O bräch ich eine nur!

Mein banges Leid zu lindern,

Such ich am dunklen Stome

Des Mondlichts bleiche Blüten,

Die weissen Wunderrosen.

Gestillt wär all mein Sehnen,

Dürft ich so märchenheimlich,

So selig leis--entblättern

Auf deine braunen Haare

Des Mondlichts bleiche Blüten!

Since the poetic form evaporates when you translate, I decided to try out the form myself. Here is my third attempt:

Wildflowers

Wildflowers dance across the meadow

Rising to the nearby height

Los Picachos catch the morning light

Illuming every hollow.

This is no place for sorrow

Surrounded by such a sight

Wildflowers dance across the meadow

Rising to the nearby height.

I say I'm moving here tomorrow

Leaving urban noise and blight

But really it is so I might

Find inspiration in Nature mellow

Wildflowers dance across the meadow.

It was an interesting exercise. You write entirely different poetry depending on the form you choose. When I was young I just wrote free verse, but as T. S. Eliot once said "no vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job." Now I'm interested in the influence of form on content. If you are attempting a Rondel Bergamasque, be careful what rhymes you choose because you are stuck with them for the whole poem!

Here is Sviatoslav Richter with the second prelude and fugue from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier:

Glenn who?

Commodification and Correction

Theodor Adorno saw the promise of Enlightenment ideals betrayed by commercialism, standardization and the misuse of technology--this was certainly the product of his experience with the promise of modernity, the destruction of European culture by Naziism and disillusionment with the "paradise" of America. I'm much more of an optimist because my experience has been a happier one, but there are aspects in which one has to admit that Adorno was right. Let's let Fil from Wings of Pegasus give his observations:

The combination of fear of not being "perfect" along with the commercialization (or rather industrialization) of music has led us to a very unhappy place. Everything he is talking about here is purely technical. It really has almost nothing to do with aesthetics. And frankly, it's nuts. Every singer I have ever worked with has shaded or bent the pitch for enhanced expression. This A-440 equal temperament standard is, of course, useful, but players of bowed instruments, singers and even wind instruments shade the temperament to enhance the performance. And pop musicians used to do this a lot. Equal temperament is actually pretty sterile.

And at the same time, the situation for classical music, outside of a few oases of idealism, is not better, though certainly different. Our problem is that we turn out virtuosos and highly trained theorists and musicologists from a myriad of institutions and frankly, there are almost no jobs for them. There is a tiny minority who have won a place in the international virtuoso and scholar network, but for everyone else, there is little other than frustration. Mind you, we classical musicians can still get together and play chamber music to our mutual enjoyment while ignoring society and the wider audience. I don't know what pop musicians can do. Are there still "folk festivals"?