influence in mid-to-late 20th-century music?cim08.web.auth.gr/cim08_papers/Schwarz-Phipps/Schwarz-Phipps.pdf · music of Anton Webern, suggesting anxiety in the relationship between

CIM08 – Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology - Proceedings

1

Musical culture / musical structure: What is the role of influence in mid-to-late 20th-century music?

David Schwarz

College of Music, the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, United States [email protected] http://web3.unt.edu/dschwarz

Graham H. Phipps

College of Music, the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, United States [email protected]

Frank M. Heidlberger

College of Music, the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, United States [email protected]

Background in Cultural Studies. Cultural Studies offers a large-scale theoretical opportunity for a clear approach to a complex problem involving a number of disciplinary components. In this talk we discuss the issue of influence in music, the anxiety that accompanies it in the nineteenth century (according to Bloom) and a dissipation of anxiety of influence over the course of the twentieth century. The theoretical approach is based on a close reading of Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, an examination of its reception, and a look at the implications of appli-cations of Bloom to music.

Background in Music Theory. A number of partially concealed or perhaps even disguised references to Arnold Schoenberg occur in the music of Anton Webern, suggesting anxiety in the relationship between these two composers of the Sec-ond Viennese School. Two types of such references will be examined: those that affect musical structure and those involving direct quotation. Examples are drawn from Webern’s opp. 21, 22, 24, and 30. Background in Music History. A case study of Paul Hindemith’s analytical and compositional approach to Webern’s Symphony op. 21 will discuss various modes of “misreading.” Hindemith attempts to “overcome” the non-tonal nature of We-bern’s serial techniques by detecting tonal centers and specific intervallic constellations. His quotation of the beginning of the first movement of Webern’s Symphony op. 21 in the third movement of his Pittsburgh Symphony is combined with other musical material that accentuates tonal centrality, thus negating the “gaze” of Webern in the sense of serialism. The “patriarchal” tonal nature of musical material appears in Hindemith’s “misreadings” as an absolute necessity beyond historical relativism.

Main Contribution. The panel opens with a discussion of the large-scale theoretical implications of Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973), turns to the work's reception, and briefly explores two particularly successful applica-tions of Bloom's theories to music. This portion of our presentation is interested in clearly laying out the cultural, aesthetic, and intellectual ideas that underwrite Bloom and that make an application of his ideas possible to music.

Implications. Despite clear differences between language and music (the distinction of the syntactic and semantic ar-ticulations in the former and their fused qualities in the latter to begin with), an application of Bloom's theories to music of the twentieth century can throw into sharp relief how twentieth-century music devel-ops in terms of relations between and among (anxious?) composers and their (patriarchal?) masters.


2

Cultural Studies Perspective

Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influ-ence originally published in 1973 out-lines a complex, arcane, and highly controversial theory of modern poetry in Romantic, Anglo-American tradi-tions. Bloom’s work is an implicit re-sponse to several aspects of mid twen-tieth-century literary and cultural criti-cism in the Anglo-American tradition: 1) the techniques and aesthetics of source study, 2) the analytical tech-niques of the New Criticism, 3) the im-peratives of post-structuralism and particularly deconstruction, and 4) late 1960s / early 1970s feminism. The book argues that the modern era (En-lightenment to the present in the An-glo-American traditions) has produced a history in which “strong” poets cast dark and anxious shadows over their followers, who, in order to become “strong” poets themselves, must para-doxically absorb and distance them-selves from their masters. Bloom’s six “revisionary ratios” describe how this absorption / distance is negotiated. The Anxiety of Influence owes an intel-lectual debt to Nietzsche and Freud, with evocative imagery from Judeo-Christian traditions. Bloom's reception The book has had a highly polemical and varied reception, from cautious respect to the well-known critiques of 1970s feminists especially Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Barbara Johnson. Geoffrey Hartman read the dark side of Bloom's Freud early on: “Freud sees life as possessing a binary struc-ture through the mercy of time: child-hood / adolescence, mother / wife, father / husband. This repetition, or second chance, is essential for devel-opment; to collapse the binary poles (and subtler oppositions) is fatal. Through this repetition we can redirect our needs by substitution or sublima-

tion. Family Romance, in the child, his quest for new or the real parents, is a ‘figurative’ prophecy of the loss to come and of the imaginative capacity for substitutes” (Hartman 29). Hart-man’s language suggests to me that for Bloom (or Bloom through the eyes of Hartman), modernity is a landscape at whose vanishing point resides the irrevocable gaze of the dead, supreme master. Lacan and post-Lacanian writ-ers have described the gaze at length as a displaced look, as a sense in which an object can be seen to impos-sibly “look back at the viewer”, as a primary agent embodying symbolic, castrating power. Indeed, the most powerful gazes often do not emanate from live eyes at all, but from the orbs of a blind man, a sardine can floating in the water, a building whose win-dows seem to gaze out at us from the screen, or, the gaze of a woman.1

In a more recent response to Bloom's psychic world, Lloyd Whitesell extends Hartmann's critique into the realm of homoerotic homophobia: “Bloom’s theory takes its momentum from a primal scene of Oedipalized re-lations between men. The classical Freudian Oedipal narrative elaborates a triangular relation of rivalry and de-sire, with a woman cast in the mediat-ing role. The men in this narrative es-tablish a bond of rivalry by vying for the same feminine object of desire. With Bloom, however, the loss of woman’s role collapses the triangle into a pas de deux. This means that the channels of masculine competition and desire are no longer separately routed; the manly clinch now stands for both struggle and embrace (White-sell 161).” Applications of Bloom to music Bloom's theories have been applied to literary texts since the 1970s; in more recent decades, they have been im-ported into music, and it is this path that we now will follow. We must be very careful crossing the divide be-


3

tween Literary History and Music His-tory. Literature and the critical ap-proaches to literature, for one thing, are made of the same kinds of signifi-ers—those of the language of this pa-per, marks on a page with signifiers and the concepts of signifieds trig-gered by them in the mind of a reader in social space. While music signifies in a wide variety of ways in a wide vari-ety of contexts, there is a “new” struc-ture of difference in the musical sign—the signifier on a page points to a sig-nified in the ear and mind of a listen-ing subject in social space.

Most of the writers on relations between language and music, veer around what for me is a central differ-ence in the sign structures of language on the one hand, and music on the other. In language, while the signifier and signified (after Saussure) are like two sides of a sheet of paper (cut one side and you cut the other), the syn-tactic and semantic articulations are distinguishable. To take Noam Chom-sky's famous "non" sentence: "color-less green ideas sleep furiously." This sentence has a poor semantic articula-tion, while the syntactic articulation is flawless; such an example is very diffi-cult to imagine in music. In music, the syntactic and semantic articulations are fused. This means that a divide and a difference in kind occurs when one moves from language to music. Does this mean that we cannot apply linguistic models to music? Not at all; but one must be aware of the differ-ences in articulation that occur when we do so. Applications of Bloom to music seem to work as theories of (ro-mantic) modernism writ-large. Bloom implicitly reads western culture build-ing to its pre-Enlightenment apex, to decline spectacularly in the Nineteenth Century and to come to rest in the Twentieth Century. If one understands music history in a similar way, an ap-plication of Bloom to such a history might sound like this: canonical west-ern music history builds to its apex in the late 18th Century to decline in anx-

ious romanticism in the 19th Century and come to rest in the 20th Century; while Bloom’s master poet is John Mil-ton; music’s master composer is Bee-thoven. Mark Evan Bonds and Kevin Korsyn There have been several particularly successful applications of Bloom's theories to music. These applications are particularly fruitful when an aspect of nineteenth-century music history is understood as the gaze of Beethoven meeting its mark in the eyes of Ber-lioz, Chopin, and Brahms. I will touch on two studies briefly—the work of Mark Evan Bonds (1992) and Kevin Korsyn (1991). Bonds argues that Ber-lioz's Harold in Italy is an anti-heroic work written in the shadow of Beetho-ven's Ninth Symphony; Bonds is cau-tious and discrete in his invocation of Bloom's six revisionary ratios. Bonds grounds his argument in a host of formal and syntactic features of Ber-lioz' work and strengthens his argu-ment with plentiful historical evidence.

Like Bonds, Korsyn discusses within the nineteenth century, Brahms’ Romanze Opus 118, no. 5 in the light of a precursor—Chopin’s Berceuse, Opus 57. Korsyn applies each of Bloom’s six revisionary ratios to the inter-textual echoes between Chopin and Brahms. While Bonds' article is primarily musicological, Korsyn's is musical-theoretical with details of analysis supported by Schenkerian voice-leading graphs.

While most successful applica-tions of Bloom's theories to music fo-cus on music of the mid to late nine-teenth century, Joseph N. Straus has argued that twentieth-century music (particularly music of the Second Vi-ennese School) lends itself to studies in influence. And it is to music of this repertoire that our panel now turns.

Music Theory Perspective Arnold Schoenberg, who at other times always had words of praise for his


4

former student and subsequent col-league Anton Webern, lashed out ve-hemently in response to the assertion brought to him in 1951 by Frederick Dorian that Webern was the first to write Klangfarbenmelodien. In an ex-tended one and one-half page type-script, Schoenberg reiterated a com-plaint shared many years earlier with his student Erwin Stein, “Webern im-mediately uses everything that I do, plan or say, so that—I remember my words—‘By now I haven’t the slightest idea who I am’” (Schoenberg 1974, 484). In 1940, when Webern was still alive, Schoenberg had assembled a series of notes about Webern’s per-sonal integrity, including the remark, “Webern committed (1908-1918) many acts of infidelity with the inten-tion of making himself the innovator” (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 443).

Although Schoenberg’s reac-tions may be considered petulant re-sponses to suggestions that he imag-ined as undermining his authority, ex-amination of some of Webern’s music may, in fact, corroborate Schoenberg’s statements. Just as “the gaze of Bee-thoven (may have) met its mark in the eyes of Berlioz and Brahms,” a number of partially concealed or perhaps even disguised references to Schoenberg in Webern’s music may suggest a similar anxiety in the relationship between these two composers of the Second Viennese School.

Reference in musical structure I suggest two different types of such references, those that affect musical structure and those involving direct quotation. Examples of the first type involve “verticalized melodies” in which segments of the tone rows are presented as sonorities that resonate with tertian sounds drawn from 18th-/19th-century tradition. Ex. 1 shows the beginning of the first two thematic ideas in Schoenberg’s op. 26 (compo-sed in 1923-24, first performed in 1924), (Ex. 1a) where the initial me-lodic and accompanimental trichords

(ordinals 1-2-3 and 7-8-9, respectively of P-0) match vertical half-diminished seventh sonorities that are a fourth apart;2 ex. 1b shows the correspond-ing trichords of I-0 that match Major-minor seventh sonorities also by fourth—the latter sonority being the involution of the former. Ex. 2 shows the beginning of Schoenberg’s op. 29 (composed in 1924-26, first performed in 1927) in which each of the three string instruments plays a series of common triadic figures. The resultant combination of these three triadic fig-ures involves hexachords from P-0, I-5, I-7, and once more P-0. Whereas the bassline follows the traditional 1-4-5-1 motion of an Eb cadence pattern, the resultant combinations of pitches suggest a series of like tertian forma-tions each expressing a root, split ma-jor/minor third, split perfect/augmen-ted fifth, and major seventh. As an expanded tertian formation, this pas-sage comprises an upward movement by second from root position Eb to first-inversion F to first inversion G to second-inversion Ab. Employment of these tertian or expanded tertian re-sources for verticalized successive segments of the row was one of the aspects of Schoenberg’s serial method from the 1920s.3

Among other duties Schoen-berg assigned Webern to supervise and conduct an early performance of the Bläserquintett (ISCM Festival, Zu-rich, Spring 1926) and the Vienna premiére of the Suite (March 5, 1930). Whereas Webern’s vertical sonorities do not constitute actual quotations from Schoenberg, undoubtedly his in-timate acquaintance with these two works by Schoenberg must be taken into account when one finds similar vertical dispositions of row segments in the younger composer’s works. Ex-cellent examples of this phenomenon are found in Webern’s three, so-called orchestral works. Ex. 3 shows tertian derived vertical sonorities that are matched by fifth in the second move-ment of Webern’s op. 21 Symphonie—


5

composed early in the year 1928, not long after he had supervised the per-formance of Schoenberg’s op. 26.4 Ex. 4 shows the beginnings of his Op. 24 Konzert with its alternate disposition of root with split major/minor third or fifth with the split third. This segment of the Konzert was composed in Sum-mer 1931, shortly after Webern had supervised the Vienna performance of Schoenberg’s op. 29. Ex. 5 shows the beginning of the 0p. 30 Variationen, composed in 1940, in which row seg-ments alternate between a chord with root, minor third, perfect fifth and ma-jor seventh and one with root, split third and perfect fifth.5

Reference as quotation The second type of reference is that of actual quotation. In July 1930 Schoen-berg was in Lugano, Switzerland, wor-king on the musical setting for the first scene of his twelve-tone opera, Moses und Aron.6 Although there is no writ-ten documentation to indicate We-bern’s actual knowledge of Schoen-berg’s setting, it is quite surprising to find Schoenberg’s verticalized BACH statements in the choral parts that open Scene One reappearing verba-tim—albeit in a completely different musical and dramatic context—in the second movement of Webern’s Saxo-phone Quartet, op. 22 (the segment in question sketched sometime not later than January 30). The two passages are shown in Ex. 6. Since Webern’s Quartet was not published until 1932 and Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron ap-peared in print only in 1958, we can only conjecture: Did Schoenberg and Webern discuss this BACH disposition prior to 1930? Which one of them con-ceived this setting? Was this another example of Webern’s “infidelities” in which he incorporated his master’s idea secretly into his own work? Or is it Schoenberg who re-configured We-bern’s setting? The settings are too much alike for us to suppose that one did not influence the other.


6

Music History Perspective The case of Paul Hindemith’s Webern reception is particularly interesting for the understanding of “misreadings” in terms of post-tonal music, and for the understanding of the historical context that lead to Hindemith’s “resignative” dogmatism of his later years. Historical context and theory Paul Hindemith’s interest in Webern originated in the early 1920s, when Hindemith acted as a board member for the New Music Festival in Donau-eschingen. He studied intensely We-bern’s chamber music and suggested performances of Webern’s music at the festival. His intentions become clear when he states in a letter that We-bern’s and Schoenberg’s music would contribute to the “moral dignity” of the festival, which would set it above other musical events (letter to Heinrich Burkhart, [1923], cf. Briner 1971, 45). Hindemith finally premiered the Baga-tellen op. 9, playing the viola in the “Amar-Quartett”. This performance re-ceived approval by Webern himself, who had attended the performance (Briner-Rexroth-Schubert 1988, 63).

With the publication of the sec-ond version of the song-cycle of “Das Marienleben” (1948), Hindemith pro-poses a system of chromatic tonality that he rigorously defends against the upcoming interest in serialism by the younger generation of composers. He explores several strategies of argu-mentation that leads into the dogma of the “tonal totality” of musical material (Hindemith 1963, 327). This “tonal to-tality” claims that any musical setting must be based on tonal relationships between intervals and chords (“harmo-nisches Gefälle”) with reference to a central tone, or a succession of central tones. Serialism denies, according to Hindemith, this tonal “gravity”, which is, according to his “Unterweisung im Tonsatz” an absolute necessity for any


7

kind of pitch combinations (Hindemith 1940, 185). As a consequence serial-ism actually limits the possibilities of the musical material, and thus is insuf-ficient for serious musical composition, as he repeatedly states in writings of his later years (Hindemith 1955, 296). Hindemith stresses the “ethical value” of music (Hindemith 1948) and argues that serialism deteriorates this value. In an increasingly heated argumenta-tion throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, raising stark opposition from younger avant garde composers, Hin-demith isolates himself from the con-temporary discourse of possibilities, characteristics and the epistemology of serialism within (or in opposition to) the tradition of Schoenberg and We-bern. His lecture “Sterbende Gewäs-ser” (Hindemith 1963) has been per-ceived and interpreted as a symbol of Hindemith’s dogmatism, mirroring his resignation and isolation as a creative composer (cf. Brinkmann 1984). Analytical “misreading” Although his rejection of twelve tone technique as a theoretical model is ob-vious, Hindemith showed vivid interest in the compositional strategies of works by Schoenberg and Webern, since he had accepted their extraordi-nary importance. In the course of the serialism discussion of the mid 1950s he analyses Schoenberg’s string quar-tet No. 4 and Webern’s Symphony op. 21 (see illustration). He makes ample notes in the scores of these works, us-ing his own sign system for intervallic and melodic structure. As can be seen in illustration one, Hindemith is par-ticularly interested in the canonic structure of the first movement of We-bern’s work as well as in vertical and linear interval patterns, with particular reference to tritones (green) and mi-nor seconds/major sevenths (red).

Particular emphasis is given to the tone D that Hindemith notes un-derneath bars 8 through 13 in the score. His search for tonal gravity within the network of serial operations

leads him to define D as a central tone of this passage that can be seen as a primary theme statement of the im-plied sonata form of this movement (Stroh 1975, 11). The marking of the tritone Eb-A (Harp, mm. 7 and 9) as an important interval can be also seen within the context of this D-tonality since the A represents the fifth, and the Eb the upper chromatic neighbor tone of D. Illustration: first page of the score of We-bern’s Symphony op. 21, first movement, with Hindemith’s notes (Briner-Rexroth-Schubert 1988, 241).

Compositional “Misreading”

Hindemith’s analysis of Webern’s Sym-phony op. 21 can be directly linked to his “Pittsburgh” Symphony (1958). Besides some folk song quotations that are indicated in the appendix to the score, Hindemith also quotes (but does not mention) Webern’s op. 21 in an episode of the third movement (m. 60-98). This quotation was discovered in the course of the edition of the work within the Hindemith Gesamtausgabe (cf. Metz 1985). The quote is not obvi-ous since it is part of a complex tex-


8

it is part of a complex texture that consists of several layers of musical events. Additionally the Webern-quote is modified in five ways (Metz 1985, 202): doubling of the rhythmical val-ues, transposition to the higher octave (two octaves in the Celesta), changes of orchestration, articulation and dy-namics as well as cuts and some in-versions of intervalls. The quote com-prises measures 1-13 of Webern’s symphony, with a repetition of meas-ures 1-6 after the thirteenth bar, and the addition of a “joint interval” (b-c, m. 89 in Hindemith’s score) that stems from the end of the exposition in We-bern’s symphony (m. 25). Four layers are presented simultane-ously (see music example):

1. The Webern quote is presented by woodwinds and Glockenspiel (“Gsp.” in score).

2. The first violin adds a pedal point flageolet in the fourth octave (eb), which coincides with the eb at the beginning of the ostinato (dou-ble bass and double bassoon).

3. The ostinato consists of the eight tones Eb – Ab – Bb – F – F# - A – E – D. The final pitch of this ostinato row, which is presented in very long rhytmical values at the end of the episode in Hindemith’s Symphony, reinforces the central tonality D that Hindemith found to be of importance in Webern’s ex-position.

4. A setting of contrapuntal voices in four solo cellos developing pre-vious melodic material, is tonally centered around Eb (Kappnik 2005, 172).

As mentioned before, Eb was marked by Hindemith in Webern’s score as a component of the tritone Eb-A that to-nally supports the centrality of D. Moreover this interval indicates the frame of Hindemith’s compositional layers, with the A as the opening pitch of the Webern-quote.7 The intervallic tension Eb-D can thus be defined as a tonal frame that pro-

vides a link between the heterogene-ous layers of this episode. It addition-ally refers to the thematic material that is used in this and the other movements of this symphony, as Hin-demith’s description of the main the-matic ideas in the appendix of the score edition shows8. The significance of this “misread-ing” Hindemith’s particular interest in, and quotation of Webern’s Symphony op. 21 reveals multiple modes of “mis-readings”: analytical evaluation, ab-sorption, distortion, deformation, and tonal reinterpretation. All five modes are integrated into a larger context, the symphonic movement, and hidden behind a totally contrasting narrative of that work (the celebration of Ger-man immigration to Pennsylvania), realized by a surface of folk song quo-tations that refers to “pure music” in Hindemith’s sense: the natural and unpretentious singing of farmers and carpenters, an ideal of “musica instru-mentalis” that Hindemith repeatedly proposed. The opposite of this ap-proach is represented by Webern’s highly intellectual, subtle and complex Symphony, although it alludes to mu-sical tradition as well (the genre of the Symphony, following roughly a sonata form in the first movement, incorpo-rating contrapuntal techniques and variation into the texture). Webern’s “transformed traditionalism” in this work is absorbed by Hindemith’s set-ting that not only disguises the quota-tion, but “overcomes” that serial de-sign of the work by – one might say rigorously, if not violently – forcing it into a Procrustean bed: that of har-monic centrality, stabilized by an osti-nato and a pedal point. As an episode on its own right the Webern-section in this movement follows the narrative of a melancholic reminiscence of “lost integrity”, which is quite aquivalent to Hindemith’s narrative of the “polluted” musical world as it is illustrated in his lecture “Sterbende Gewässer”.


9

Music example: Hindemith, Pittsburg Symphony, 3rd Movement, mm. 88-103. M. 88 presents We-bern’s m. 1, each measure equals two measures in Hindemith’s score. The example is simplified (reduced Cello section, no articulation and dy-namics).

References:

Bonds, Mark Evan. “Sinfonia anti-eroica: Berlioz’s Harold en Italie and the Anxiety of Beethoven’s Influence” in The Journal of Musicology Vol-ume 10, number 4 (Autumn 1992).

Briner, A., Paul Hindemith, Zürich: Atlantis, 1971.

Briner, A., Rexroth, D.; Schubert, G., Paul Hindemith. Leben und Werk in Bild und Text, Zürich: Atlantis, 1988.

Brinkmann, R., “Über Paul Hindemiths Rede Sterbende Gewässer” in: Hindemith Yearbook XIII (1984), 71-90.

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “In-fection in the Sentence: The Woman Author and the Anxiety of Authorship” The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, 2000), pp. 45-53.

Hartman, Geoffrey. “ Reviewed Work(s): The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom in Dia-critics, volume 3, number 1 (Spring 1973).

Hindemith, P., Unterweisung im Tonsatz, Vol. 1: Theoretischer Teil, Mainz: Schott, 1940.

Hindemith, P., Preface to the second ver-sion of the song cycle Das Marien-leben, Mainz: Schott 1948.

Hindemith, P., “Hören und Verstehen un-bekannter Musik” in: Giselher Schubert (ed.): Paul Hindemith. Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, Zürich: Atlantis 1994, 293-309.

Hindemith, P., “Sterbende Gewässer.” Lec-ture presented at a chapter meet-ing of the order “Pour le mérite”, Bonn, 28 July 1963, published in: Giselher Schubert (ed.): Paul Hin-demith. Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, Zürich: Atlantis 1994, 314-336.

Johnson, Barbara. “Gender and the Yale School” in Speaking of Gender Ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Rout-ledge, 1989), pp. 45-55.

Kappnik, F., “Hindemith und Harmonik-Konzeptionen in Dodekaphonie und Serialismus. Eine Re-Lektüre der Rede Sterbende Gewässer” in: Hindemith Jahrbuch 34 (2005), 154-185.

Kolodny, A.,“A Map for Misreading, or Gen-der and the Interpretation of Liter-ary Texts” in New Literary History, Volume 11, number 3 (Spring 1980).

Korsyn, Kevin. “Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence” in Music Analysis Volume 10, numbers 1/2 (March – July 1991).

Metz, G., “Das Webern-Zitat in Hindemiths Pittsburgh Symphony” in: Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 42 (1985), 200-212.

Milstein, Sylvina. Arnold Schoenberg: Notes, Sets, Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Neumeyer, D., “Hindemiths Auseinander-setzung mit der Reihentechnik” in: Musiktheorie 2 (1987), 55-72.

Phipps, Graham H. “Harmony as a Deter-minant of Structure in Webern’s Variations for Orchestra,” in Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past, ed. Christopher Hatch and David Bernstein (Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1993).


10

Phipps, Graham H. “’Nur kein Schade!’ Schoenberg’s Satirical Evaluation of ‘Atonality’ as a Guide for Inter-preting traditional Elements in We-bern’s Symphonie, op. 21,” in Dutch Journal of Music Theory 10/3(November 2005):247-56.

de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Translated and annotated by Roy Harris. (La-Salle, Ill: Open Court Press, 1986).

Schoenberg, Anton. “Anton Webern: Klangfarbenmelodie,” in Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974).

Schoenberg, Arnold. Sämtliche Werke, Ab-teilung III, Bühnenwerke, Reihe B, Band 8, Teil 2, Moses und Aron, Oper in drei Akten: Entstehungs-geschichte, ed. Christian Martin Schmidt (Mainz: Schott Musik In-ternational, 1999).

Straus, Joseph N. “The ‘Anxiety of Influ-ence’ in Twentieth-Century Music” in The Journal of Musicology Vol-ume 9, number 4 (Autumn 1991).

Stroh, W.M., Webern. Symphonie op. 21, Munich: Fink, 1975 (Meisterwerke der Musik, Vol. 11).

Stuckenschmidt, H. H. Arnold Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work, trans. Humphrey Searle (London: John Calder, 1977).

Whitesell, Lloyd. “Men with a Past: Music and ‘The Anxiety of Influence’” in 19th-Century Music. Volume 18, number 2 (Autumn 1994).

Notes: 1 p. 27. For a fascinating and very different ac-count of Bloom, see Paul de Man, “Reviewed Work(s): The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom in Comparative Litera-ture, Volume 26, number 3 (Summer 1974). For de Man “The substantial emphasis, in the de-scription of the six ratios, falls on temporal pri-ority: a polarity of strength and weakness…is correlated with a temporal polarity that pits early against late. The effort of the late poet’s revisionary reading is to achieve a reversal in which lateness will become associated with strength instead of with weakness…. If the sub-stantial emphasis is temporal, the structural stress entirely falls on substitution as a key con-cept. And from the moment we begin to deal with substitutive systems, we are governed by linguistic rather than by natural or psychological models; one can always substitute one word for another but one cannot, by a mere act of will, substitute night for day or bliss for gloom” (de Man 274). For de Man, Bloom’s Theory of Poetry is a theory of relations between text (the pre-cursor) and reader (the latecomer) (273) 2 This aspect of Schoenberg’s Bläserquintett was the subject of a paper, as yet unpublished, Graham H. Phipps, “Innovation Drawn from Tra-dition: The First Movement of the Bläserquin-tett, Op. 26, by Arnold Schoenberg,” presented at the 2007 meeting of the International Musi-cology Society in Zürich. 3 This aspect of Schoenberg’s Suite, op. 29, is addressed in Milstein (1992), 51-61. See also the review of this book by Graham H. Phipps in Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 50/1(September 1993): 153-56. 4 For a discussion of this property, Phipps (2005), 247-56. 5 A full explication of this phenomenon is found in Phipps (1993), 473-504. 6 As documented in Schoenberg (1999), 7-9, Schoenberg told Webern of the beginning of his work on Moses und Aron in a letter dated, July 25, 1930. 7 The same interval reoccurs on the fourth beat of m. 64 in the Violoncelli, creating, according to Metz, a “distorted” Tristan-chord progression (Metz 1985, 206, note 7). 8 In this regard one can interpret the opening theme of the first movement as a „motto“ since it beginns with an ascending major seventh eb1-d2.

Documents

influence in mid-to-late 20th-century music?cim08.web.auth.gr/cim08_papers/Schwarz-Phipps/Schwarz-Phipps.pdf · music of Anton Webern, suggesting anxiety in the relationship between