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: