The war began in July 1914. But in 1909, five years before, Arnold Schoenberg composed his Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16 and, to my mind, they and other music from around this time, are like a premonition of the cataclysm to come.
How could Schoenberg sense the coming of a great disruption? Well, of course, I have no idea! But explain, if you would, how we got from the warm expressivity of Brahms' Clarinet Quintet of 1891:
to the tortured expressionism of Schoenberg's op 16 in just eighteen years? Or, even more surprising, how Schoenberg himself journeyed from the lush beauty of his Gurrelieder (begun between 1900 and 1903):
to the disturbing imagery and dissonance of his Pierrot Lunaire, op. 21, written in 1912, just two years before the war began? This video of No. 8, "Nacht" captures the eeriness quite well:
The monsters were indeed descending on Europe. But how did Schoenberg know?
The first world war was more the symptom than the cause. By 1914, all the big intellectual revolutions had already happened: Marx, Freud, Einstein, quantum mechanics. And all the big engineering revolutions: car, plane, electricity, radio, machine gun, camera, sound recording, etc. Invention of sociology, linguistics, psychiatry. Revolutions in music (Debussy) and painting (Cezanne). More happened in 1850-1914 Europe than in any other period in the history of humanity. Then we had penicillin later in the 20s and then the 3D structure of DNA and then the computer. And then it all stopped. More scientists than ever. Fewer major discoveries than ever. Why? Either things have become more difficult or we've become dumber.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting observation! There were also huge economic advances. But the question of why all this led to the enormous carnage of the First World War looms even larger. Could it be the case that some of these intellectual revolutions were bad ones? The question of why scientific discovery seems to have slowed is yet another puzzler. Perhaps these forces in society: technical advance, intellectual revolution and so on, but combined with social and political structures that were lagging behind instead of advancing, perhaps these different elements were just too out of phase with one another?
ReplyDeleteBut I have seen evidence that intelligence has declined one standard deviation since Victorian times (measured by reaction time).
Schoenberg kept a 'cloud diary' too, if I remember rightly, thinking it would help predict the outcome of the 1WW. And I'm surprised you didn't mention the Rite of Spring in this post. One often sees the 1913 premiere portrayed with a sense of foreboding.
ReplyDeleteOn intelligence, I thought the 'Flynn effect' had shown a significant increase in intelligence, generation to generation, since the early twentieth century.
I didn't know about Schoenberg's diary, but his music is indicator enough. I think of Stravinsky in quite a different context as his music relates so much to Russian culture and folklore--at least at this stage.
ReplyDeleteYes, the Flynn effect is widely known, but the research into reaction times is not. Still, does it seem like we are getting smarter every generation? Or the reverse?
The Flynn effect is about average intelligence. Perhaps at the very top of the distribution, people aren't quite as smart. Not because their brains are different but because the stimuli just aren't there. When you hear that time is relative, that painting need not be figurative, that music can rewrite harmony and still sound beautiful, that one can hear people talk thousands of miles away through a little box, that our subconscious plays tricks on us, that language has a scientific structure, etc., that gets your mind going in ways that pondering the deep philosophical implications of transgender bathrooms does not... I think living in a dumb era stultifies intellectual faculties even at the top.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't thinking so much about the music as about the premiere. A 'riot' in Paris -- the cultural capital -- one year before war, thanks to a provocative piece of art. Reactions to Rite had class, ideological and old/new society distinctions; the piece itself can be seen as a reaction against modern society; critics noted disapprovingly a German and Jewish influence (though largelt made up)...
ReplyDeleteYes, I didn't realise there was a convincing correlation between reaction time and intelligence. I would still think IQ is a superior metric (for now). (The Flynn effect has possibly ended, one should add.) There are those who argue that we have become a dysgenic society. It does seem that intelligent people simply aren't having the numbers of children they once would have (if any).
Anon, I think I agree. One can't increase intelligence, as I understand, but an intelligent person could reduce theirs, or at least let it wither from misuse. Yet, playing devil's advocate, I think of a society like North Korea, which is an arid intellectual climate, yet they clearly show great intelligence -- their success in building nuclear bombs has been remarkable. The Soviet Union was a dumb society, but did it see intellectual decline? I'm not sure. It may be that intelligence fares worse in a convenient society such as ours than in a brutal, testing society...
@Anon: Yes, living in an era that dumbs everything down likely does not stimulate intelligence! There are some interesting contrary examples in history when a cluster of brilliant minds seems to cast illumination over a whole time and place. Athens: 5th and 4th centuries BC with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Thucydides, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Pindar and a host of others. Or Elizabethan England with William Byrd, Thomas Morley, John Dowland, William Shakespeare, Francis Drake, and a host of lesser lights in the fields of economics, law, exploration and so on. Then there is 18th century Vienna with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.
ReplyDelete@Steven: I am not to the Rite of Spring premiere yet, but I have read essays by Taruskin in which he describes a situation where a great deal of publicity ahead of time tended to provoke a riotous response. More about that later. As for North Korea, the ethnic group with the highest average intelligence is Far East Asian which includes both Koreas, Japan and China. I think that Ashkenazy Jews are second.