The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg (Cambridge Companions to Music) by unknow

Author:unknow
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781139796064
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

Row sketches, temporality, and the art of presentation

This points us in turn to a fundamental aspect of Schoenberg’s thought and music: while the Idea itself is eternal and unchanging, we can only attempt to grasp the Idea through its representation in time. Carl Dahlhaus explained the Idea as something that can only be approached indirectly through its unfolding in time, with an analogy to Torah exegesis: “Revelation is not in itself a comprehensible message, but becomes one only in the reflections which it experiences in human consciousness. And there is no limit to their number.” 32 As Schoenberg wrote in “New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea,” “In a manifold sense, music uses time. It uses my time, it uses your time, it uses its own time. It would be most annoying if it did not aim to say the most important things in the most concentrated manner in every fraction of this time.” 33 Many of Schoenberg’s writings on the Idea focus on this crucial temporal dimension and the associated issues of recognition, memory, association, and understanding; this is the whole reason for the extended title for his book The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of its Presentation . In “Criteria for the Evaluation of Music,” he similarly foregrounds temporal issues, writing that the critic must determine, “Is the time-space adequate for the importance or the unimportance of the ideas? Are main ideas distinctly differentiated from subordinate ideas in space by adequate proportions as well as in emphasis, so always to secure the predominance of the object? Is the breadth of the presentation justified?” 34

There is similarly an implicit temporal dimension in Schoenberg’s comparison of the unity of musical space, noted above, to our capacity to recognize physical objects in different positions. As a corollary to the objects moving in space, they must also move in time (and it is noteworthy that one of the objects he mentions is a watch, which would presumably be ticking off the seconds as it was rotated in space). It is not coincidental, I believe, that the sketch materials for one of Schoenberg’s earliest twelve-tone pieces, the “Sonett” movement of the Serenade , demonstrate how important the temporal dimension was in representing the Idea ( Figure 12.6 ). As many have discussed, the piece is based on a Petrarch Sonnet with eleven syllable lines. Schoenberg sets this text with a vocal melody based on repeated statements of a twelve-tone row. As a result the vocal line rotates through the row, starting each line at a different point. To generate the vocal melody, Schoenberg created a slide rule that made it possible to rotate the row to see each possible combination of the order numbers and the pitch series. We can thus think of the slide rule at rest as potentially embodying the various rotations of the row that appear in the vocal line, and which he worked out in a series of sketches. But only by actually manipulating the device in time and space are the individual rotations revealed.

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