Path to New Music
I recently found a copy of Webern’s short but rewarding series of lectures given in 1933 to a small group of friends and fellow learners in quaint circumstances. The most startling two characteristics are its accessibility and his charisma. Apparently the manuscript survives because of a meticulous note-taker in the class who kept papers secure in neutral territory during the war; however, the reader is reassured every word printed in the book is a word that was Webern uttered.
His thesis can be traced to Goethe’s Theory of Color, which suggests, though in a scientifically unjustified way, certain substances in the world are as they are by nature. It is a pattern of our circumstances and self-driven task to discover more and more characteristics of natural elements to our surroundings as they exist in their own habitat. Though Hegel briefly supported Goethe’s theory in the face of Newtonian physics, he did so only to secure himself a higher stipend in a position that he did not want to lose. Though Goethe failed to justify a systematic model of our perception of color, he did provide a view of nature that others drew from in fruitful other ways.
Webern translated his idea of nature to music and realized that, as the human ear and intellect grow, so do our discoveries of more of the nature of what we hear as music. Humankind is only the vessel into which is poured what “nature in general” wants to express. Though far too simplistic and fatalist, this idea has meaning that Webern utilizes to explain why Schoenberg, Berg, and himself are so avidly convinced that the natural progression of music after Wagner and Mahler led toward atonality. In other words, there exists a natural trend in musical evolution that differentiates and progresses itself toward new music. And, according to Webern, this natural process should not be hindered. Seeing atonality as the natural offspring of late romanticism and early chromaticism will lead people to look upon new music “with the necessary awe at the secrets they are based on, at the mystery they contain.”
Further, the diatonic scale was not invented; it was discovered, as was the dichotomous idea of consonance and dissonance that objectivized the relativity of sound. By prioritizing comprehensibility, unity, and differentiation, the body of music flows through time in an ever-expanding enterprise toward new frontiers. The triad is also evidence that there are inherent laws of sound that we discover the more we deconstruct the continuum of noise because it is the reconstruction of the three most immediate overtones with the tonic.
As the space for musical ideas grew, so did the need for expanding orders and rules controlling the structural language of music. Diatonicism naturally led to chromaticism in the same way sound led to diatonicism; early church modes based on seven note scales served as a preliminary to the major/minor dichotomy, as well as dodecaphonic music. Accidentals, new cadences, and new musical densities were all results of this same process. Think of the mysterious “force” of music as a an iceberg submerged in water. We may not know from looking at its crown that, if all the water was drained from the oceans, the icebergs all connect at their bases (hypothetically of course). Webern is saying they do if we think of them as the nature of music as it divides the more attentively we listen to the air. It makes sense to categorize initial polyphony, dissonance, and the disintegration of traditional structures as a process of pulling more and more of that continuum into an equal field of view. We deconstruct, readjust, and re-categorize. And Webern is confident he is right: “These lectures are intended to show the path that has led to this music, and to make clear that it had to have this natural outcome.”
Despite the simplicity of speech, consistent redundancy, and unique aloofness in description, Webern’s lectures are apt and well-informed. His intellectual grasp of musical developments matches his ambition and ability to execute what he knew must be “new” music. He succeeded in establishing and controlling a language that was capable of musically expressing the mintue scale of quantum mechanics and grand complexity of general relativity in a few flashes of ivory kisses. He could shrink the largest of human pursuits into whispers of nothingness that fracture from themselves and sublimate into higher forms. In fact, the lectures are a dialectic translation of his music, in many ways. His music is considered to be some of the most difficult and least accessible music to experience with unlearned ears, but his prose is quite splendidly simple.
Most people refer to the Five Pieces for Orchestra Op. 10, or Five Movements for String Quartet Op. 5 as ideal portraits of his musical ideas. However, I urge the listener to explore his early works for a more intimate understanding. In particular, I recommend his String Quartet from 1905, 8 Early Lieder (especially song three), Slow Movement for String Quartet, and Movement for Piano, which darkly bounces into the off key realm of jazz. All utilize sweeping late romantic language in a way that allows the listener to discover Webern’s embrace of tonality before “nature” moved him beyond it.
Was it nature that brought him to his doorstep outside of Salzburg on the 15th of September, 1945 when an American Army soldier patrolling the occupied town drew his weapon and fired a bullet into the composer’s chest thinking he was intentionally disbeying the allied curfew. In fact, Webern stepped outside to enjoy a cigar to avoid disturbing his sleeping grandchildren, naturally.
