The Ellington Century (7 page)

Placed within the plush romantic orchestra, the alien xylophone sounded unvocal and immiscible. Its diabolical death rattle mocked the sound ideal of European music, the expressive voice. It did not breathe or vibrate, it just clonked. In the first decade of the twentieth century the xylophone became an emblem of the new as well as the Other. Its sound evoked states of being that were alternative geographically, racially, or psychologically. In Strauss's
Salome
it paced the frantic belly-shaking coda of the Dance of the Seven Veils; in Debussy's
Ibéria
, it initiated the sultry habanera of
“les parfums de la nuit”;
in
Gigues
it punctured the sound of a whining carousel like a throbbing migraine; and in
Jeux
it mocked middle-class morals with a shockingly modern
romance à trois.
It etched its alien imprint on Mahler's Symphony no. 6 (
danses macabres
and hard-driven death marches), Ravel's
Mother Goose Suite
(evoking the Balinese gamelan) and
Daphnis et Chloé
(satyrs), Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16 (sinister premonitions), Berg's Altenberg Lieder, op. 4 (snow and, later, unmeasurable pain), and Stravinsky's
Firebird
(the infernal Kastchei) and
Petrouchka
(the fatal interracial fight between Petrouchka and the Moor).

In all these works the xylophone's harsh matter-of-factness eroded the aesthetic foundation of European music, which could be summed up in the word
expression
. Music was supposed to be a simple voicelike communication, speech turned into song. Heeding Wordsworth's notion that a poet was a “man speaking to men,” nineteenth-century listeners imagined a symphony or concerto as a gendered lyrical utterance, a man
singing
to men. Composers emphasized instruments most reminiscent of the human (particularly the male) voice, including cello, horn, and clarinet, to make the entire orchestra sound like a magnified lyric baritone. Audience members felt that the music spoke to them directly in terms they immediately grasped, a condition I'll call “inter-subjectivity.” Assuming that the emotions expressed in the music, from the
pathétique
to the
eroica
, were universals, theorists and acousticians claimed that the devices for representing these emotions were not the conventions of a particular idiom or culture but sprang from the facts of physics and biology—an idea that remains surprisingly alive today.

The xylophone's antivoice drove the center of musical aesthetics away from human expression and toward tone color, whose relation to human consciousness was more mysterious than the familiar signals of feelings. Bypassing the ideal of expression, Debussy defined music as “colors and rhythmicized time.”
³⁶
Schoenberg's “Farben” (Colors), the third of his Five Pieces for Orchestra, elevated tone color above melody, harmony, or rhythm. In his
Harmonielehre
of 1911 he predicted that the music of the future would make melodies not out of pitches but of colors:
klangfarbenmelodie.
A quarter of a century later, Ravel's
Bolero
, an epic
klangfarbenmelodie
, confirmed the triumph of timbre over expression—and quickly achieved worldwide popularity.

The development of recording further aided and abetted the new primacy of sound.
Bolero
, popular as it was in the concert hall, came into its own with the advent of hi-fi stereophonic recording technology. Although the pursuit of high fidelity seemed like a technological development, recording changed all aspects of musical culture. By allowing any kind of music to be played at home, it undermined the brick-and-mortar hierarchy that placed the highest forms of musical art in concert halls and opera houses, the lowest in bars and brothels. Recorded music, reproduced without recourse to notation, erased the distinction between calculated composition and spontaneous improvisation. Its technology also determined musical form; Ellington built his “three-minute masterpieces” to fill one side of a 78 rpm, just as Stravinsky composed the movements (one to a side) of his Serenade in A.
³⁷
Soon
enough, the evolving capacities for sound storage and organization fed back on acoustical sound itself, so that live performances increasingly aspired to the sound and ambience of recordings. The art of orchestration now collaborated with the artistry of the recording engineer; classical and popular musicians alike would need to master both roles.

KIND OF WHITE: PIERROT LUNAIRE

Like Duke Ellington, Arnold Schoenberg was, at times, a painter as well as a composer. However, while Ellington's music merged aural and visual sensations effortlessly, in Schoenberg's music they collided explosively. The resulting music and paintings retain their power to disturb. Critics have treated them either as artistic breakthroughs toward a new representational system, or as medical data, the diaries of a mad musician, but choosing either one of these escape routes trivializes the music. Schoenberg's short-lived exaltation of musical color over melody and harmony, like Ellington's lifelong pursuit of the blues, sprang from a fundamental dissatisfaction with the framework of reality as it had come to be understood in European culture.

In 1905 Arnold Schoenberg struck up a fatal friendship with the painter Richard Gerstl at a Mahler concert in Vienna. Discussions with Gerstl soon led Schoenberg to try painting himself. In 1907 Gerstl moved in with Schoenberg's family and then ran off with Schoenberg's wife, Mathilde, mother of his two children and sister of his friend and teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky. When Mathilde returned to her husband, Gerstl committed suicide, on November 5, 1908. Even before Gerstl's death, Schoenberg's music was moving toward the “emancipation of the dissonance” that had been forecast, though not yet attained, in the final movement of his Second String Quartet (which he dedicated to Mathilde after the affair had ended). At the premiere, a month after the suicide, hostile members of the audience made catcalls and whistled into their house keys in protest, even though the quartet cadenced conventionally enough in F# major.

In the face of such vehement resistance to his music Schoenberg suddenly considered pursuing a career as a painter—a delusion perhaps born from a kind of Stockholm syndrome after the Gerstl affair. At the same time though he pushed the “emancipation of the dissonance” further in a series of increasingly radical compositions: Three Pieces for Piano, op. 11,
The Book of the Hanging Gardens
, op. 15 (song cycle), Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16 (the first piece entitled “Premonitions,”
the third, “Colors”), and the monodrama
Erwartung
, op. 17, all composed in 1908 and 1909.
³⁸

After this creative explosion Schoenberg entered a dry spell. His sense of isolation had deepened with Mahler's departure from Vienna in 1907 and his death in 1911. He feared that even his staunchest supporters, his two students, Berg and Webern, were becoming rivals more than disciples. Ever resourceful, Schoenberg took advantage of his composer's block by completing his
Harmonielehre
(Theory of Harmony), mainly traditional save for speculative talk about constructing chords in fourths rather than thirds (which Schoenberg had already demonstrated in his
Kammersinfonie
, op. 9) and constructing melodies from tone colors rather than pitches, or
klangfarbenmelodie.
Schoenberg's compositional floodgates would reopen only after another momentous encounter with a painter, Wassily Kandinsky.

Kandinsky and other artists associated with the journal
The Blue Rider
attended an all-Schoenberg concert in Munich on January 2, 1911. Kandinsky commemorated the concert in his painting “Impression III (concert),” which evolved from a realistic doodle to an abstraction in which, as Fred Wassermann writes, “the piano has become a dominant mass of black (bisected by a white band), smashing up against and vibrating with the overwhelming intensity of the yellow that envelops most of the painting.”
³⁹
The concert included the recent Second Quartet, op. 10 and Three Piano Pieces, op. 11. On January 18, Kandinsky wrote Schoenberg, whom he had never met, a letter with a portfolio of his works, proclaiming that “what we are striving for and our whole manner of thought and feeling have so much in common that I feel completely justified in expressing my empathy.
⁴⁰
Schoenberg responded on January 24 as if he had been thrown a lifeline:

I am sure that our work has much in common—and indeed in the most important respects: In what you call the unlogical and I call the “elimination of the conscious will in art.” I also agree with what you write about the constructive element. Every formal procedure which aspires to traditional effects is not completely free from conscious motivation. But art belongs to the
unconscious!
One must express
oneself!
Express oneself
directly!
Not one's taste, or one's upbringing, or one's intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these
acquired
characteristics, but that which is
inborn, instinctive
.
⁴¹

Schoenberg and Kandinsky met in person in September 1911. Kandinsky had been planning to publish “an almanac that would present a synthesis of the arts by mixing the radical new work of an international group of modern artists and musicians with folk art, Asian art
and ‘primitive' art.”
⁴²
Schoenberg contributed the essay “The Relationship to the Text” and the score of
Herzgewächse
, a setting of a symbolist poem by Maeterlinck for high soprano, celesta, harmonium, and harp for the publication. Four of his paintings appeared at the first Blue Rider exhibition in December 1911.

Herzgewächse
, with its otherworldly, séance-style sonority and super-high F on the word
mystisches
was the first indication of Kandinsky's influence on Schoenberg. The composer had come to this new artistic alliance already steeped in the Viennese expressionism of Klimt and Kokoschka, and he was devoted to the notions of the instinctual basis of life found in the writings of Strindberg and especially Otto Weininger, the suicidal author of
Sex and Character
, to whose memory Schoenberg had originally dedicated his
Harmonielehre.

As Carl Schorske chronicled, the fin de siècle Viennese vanguard saw their society as fundamentally deceptive. But what was the truth behind the false appearances? Schoenberg may have found an answer in Kandinsky's
Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
The painter presented the composer with an inscribed copy of his book on December 9, 1911. Just before publication he had added these words: “Schoenberg's music leads us into a new realm, where musical experiences are no longer acoustic, but purely spiritual. Here begins the ‘music of the future.”
⁴³
A trained musician, Kandinsky also praised the compositions of Debussy and Scriabin.

Kandinsky's speculative theoretical writings could not be more different from Schoenberg's textbooklike
Harmonielehre.
In “The Relation to the Text,” however, Schoenberg not only extolled
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
as a book he had read “with great joy,” but he developed Kandinsky's distinction between appearances and reality: “The outward correspondence between music and text, as exhibited in declamation, tempo and dynamics, has but little to do with the inner correspondence, and belongs to the same stage of primitive nature as the copying of a model.”
⁴⁴
Kandinsky's book presented three arguments. First he called for an art that would rise above “materialism,” with its concern only for appearances and “shapeless emotions such as fear, joy, grief, etc.” The new art would express “lofty emotions beyond the reach of words” in pursuit of “the internal truth which only art can divine, which only art can express by those means of expression which are hers alone.”
⁴⁵
Next he described a “spiritual revolution” using the figure of a triangle moving onward and upward. At the center
of this argument he cited Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, a movement that approached “the problem of the spirit by way of the
inner
knowledge.”
⁴⁶
Finally, Kandinsky discussed at length “the psychological working of color” as a way toward a fusion of the arts involving musical movement, pictorial movement, and physical movement. (Not surprisingly, Kandinsky's search for a
Gesamtkunstwerk
sprang from his experience of Wagner's
Lohengrin
.)
⁴⁷
Although, unlike Scriabin, he did not actually experience synesthesia, Kandinsky catalogued the effects of colors in terms of musical sounds:

A light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a cello; a still darker a thunderous double bass and the darkest blue of all—an organ.

…absolute green is represented by the placid, middle notes of the violin.

White…has this harmony of silence, which works upon us negatively, like many pauses in music that break temporarily the melody.

In music black is represented by one of those profound and final pauses.…The silence of black is the silence of death.

Light warm red…is a sound of trumpets, strong, harsh, and ringing.

Violet is…an English horn, or the deep notes of wood instruments (e.g. the bassoon).
⁴⁸

The purely spiritual was no vague region; psychic explorers from Swedenborg to Blavatsky had mapped it out in terms of numbers and colors.
⁴⁹
The Theosophical Society attached particular importance to the numbers three and seven; the society defined its mission in terms of three large aims and pictured the universe as seven bodies of spirit/matter.

During his brief but intense friendship with Kandinsky (which terminated with the outbreak of the First World War), Schoenberg applied occult ideas of the spirit to two major works, one,
Die glückliche Hand
(The Lucky Hand), a one-act opera already in progress, the other,
Pierrot Lunaire
, an unforeseen opportunity.
Die glückliche Hand
was begun in 1910 as a pairing to
Erwartung
, a contrast of masculine genius to feminine instinct straight out of Weininger. At curtain rise, the protagonist, simply called “Der Mann,” lies facedown: “On his back crouches a cat-like, fantastic animal (hyena with enormous, bat-like wings) that seems to have sunk its teeth into his neck.” Following the example of Kandinsky's opera
Der gelbe Klang
, written in 1909 with music by Thomas von Hartmann (a Russian composer who later became a follower of Gurdieff) and published in
The Blue Rider
in 1912, Schoenberg represented the creative work of Der Mann through a “color crescendo”: “It begins with dull red light (from above) that turns
to brown and then a dirty green. Next it changes to a dark blue-gray, followed by violet. This grows, in turn, into an intensely dark red which becomes ever brighter and more glaring until, after reaching a blood-red, it is mixed more and more with orange and then bright yellow; finally a glaring yellow light alone remains and inundates the second grotto from all sides.”
⁵⁰