Second Viennese Sausages

Post-tonal theory has always interested me.  It's fascinating that composers were so bored with music sounding good that they found functional serialism and atonality at the beginning of the 20th century to turn music into numbers, creating atonal systems called pitch class sets, cells, and tone rows instead of melodies, harmonies, and what the classically-trained ear would consider "beautiful."

"Birds Singing Atonal Music" by Charles Moulton

Arnold Schoenberg (1874 - 1951) is to blame for this brilliant atrocity of musical innovation.  He created a 12-tone system that was born directly from late-German Romanticism, eliminating the hierarchy of chords and demolishing the need for a tonal center by using all 12 notes in some sort of order that could change at any given moment in musical time.  Apparently, writing music in a key was overrated; Schoenberg called the lack of a tonal center the "emancipation of dissonance," using chromatic melodies and chromatic harmonies in a way that these clusters of notes did not need to resolve.  Never had emancipation sounded so painful.  Nonetheless, he wrote many pieces, including piano and orchestral opuses.  Perhaps his best known work was Pierrot lunaire, an atonal German 21-song cycle for soprano voice and a five piece chamber orchestra.  As a pioneer in Expressionism, Schoenberg dealt with emotions of a modern human being in pre- and post- war: fear, confusion, rage, unsettling anxiety, a poor grip on stability, tension, and all the elemental and irrational drives of the subconscious.  Not surprisingly, his buddy was Freud.

Schoenberg's music was an angry rebellion against the status quo, and he loved it.  So did a bunch of other German white guys, including Alban Berg and Anton Webern.  Berg (1885 - 1935) somehow made a 12-tone row sound... good, tonal, familiar, with his musical choices using tone rows that might suggest chords and melodies found in traditional Western harmony.  This is made evident in his atonal opera, Wozzeck, about a poor soldier who was so messed up in life that he eventually murdered all of his friends before committing suicide.  The opera contains leitmotifs, pitch class sets that are identified with the main characters, and movements with orchestral music in sonata, rondo, and even fugue forms.  Webern (1883 - 1945), on the other hand, stuck to Schoenberg's tradition of constructing cringy, cannibalistic-like earworms, using serial technique in thorough-composed pieces with vast instrumentation; he also created actual pointillism in the music as tiny, wispy points of sound.  His pieces were not very long because of that- once he used all of the pitch class sets he wanted, he ended the piece.

The Second Viennese School sounded like a hot mess.  However, Schoenberg and his cronies did something that revolutionized how we listen to music: they made us actually LISTEN.  Because there isn't a steady beat to tap our foot to or a catchy, sing-songy melody that'll get stuck in our heads, what else is there to realize? Well, what's left is a focus on all the other stuff: dynamics. Instrumentation. Articulation. Timbre. Register. The actual environment of performance. The performer himself (women still didn't have free access, even to the New Viennese School #metoo).  Ironically, these are  all of the elements that music therapists have to pay attention to while using music in their practices.  Without Schoenberg, there would not have been the landmark styles of Messaien, Penderecki, Reich, John Cage, Oliveros, Skrillex.  If Schoenberg were alive in 2018, I think he'd probably be a gender-fluid, colorblind quantum physics teacher creating tone rows out of cohorts of didgeridoos used as the music to lure small atonal-singing children to ice cream trucks. 

If only modern society were so lucky.