Schoenberg's Musical Imagination by Michael Cherlin

Abstract

220 AUSTRIAN STUDIES l6 (20 8) Europe were not to find itselfdestroyed by the political catastrophes inwhich the continent in fact found itself embroiled. The belief that 'all ispolities' isan inversion of the ethical order of things inwhich Geist is forced to submit to a political order that should in fact derive from Geist. Musil hoped to continue publishing by finding a foreign outlet for his aphorisms. Nothing came of this project, though the thoughts published here suggest that a public interested in specifically German cultural issues might have profited from some of Musil's observations, especially his ironies about 'die Kulturpolitik-Kultur', though this ironywould only have been understood, to be sure, by a rather specialized public. By contrast, Musil's speeches address a broad audience, for he wrote with thewider European political scene inmind when speaking in public. The first lecture, given inVienna in 1934, is a clear indictment of the danger thatMusil, a defender of personal freedom, saw in the spread of collective totalitarianisms in Russia, Germany and Italy. The lecture was a great success. His equally impressive lecture given in Paris in 1935 was a notable failure, since itsdefence of thewriter as the individual creator of culture was presented to a congress organized by the Communist Party to mobilize writers in defence of the Soviet Union. The audience in Paris did not want to hear Musil say that the individual is the creator of culture, nor that, in assuming the tradition that allows creativity, the individual renews what the past has bequeathed to the present. Musil implied that thewriter performs his function no better by becoming the voice of the proletariat than by accepting the dictates of the Nazi Party. He was excoriated for this liberal viewpoint (though Amann points out thatmany who excoriated him were purged shortly thereafter). A minor erratum: an inequality sign ismissing on p. 205 such that the text in parentheses reads that the abnormal is the pathological. Musil's opinion was that the pathological had become the norm. Nonetheless, for Amann's clear description ofMusil's liberal political commitment, this volume has a place of choice on today's overflowing shelf ofMusil criticism. University of Missouri Allen Thiher Schoenberg'sMusical Imagination. By Michael Cherlin. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2007. 397 pp. ?53. isbn 978-0-521 85166-4. Michael Cherlin's book appeared in 2007, on the brink of centenaries of the completion of a series of significant works within Arnold Schoenberg's uvre, from the groundbreaking Stnng Quartet inf sharp minor (Op. 10, 1907) to the monodr?ma Erwartung and the aphoristic Sechs kleine Klavierst?cke (Op. 19, both 1909). This apposite timing reminds the reader that interpreters of Schoenberg's music still grapple with the seemingly inexhaustible question first posed by his pupil, Alban Berg, in 1924: 'Warum ist Sch?nbergs Musik so schwer verst?ndlich?' This hermeneutic impasse has created a long-standing phenomenon that Cherlin alludes to in the introduction to his book; while Schoenberg, Schoenberg's music and Schoenberg's own writings about music AUSTRIAN STUDIES l6 (20 8) 221 are subjects of numerous musicological and analytical studies, there is no correspondingly strong presence of his music in the concert halls. Significant opportunities to hear live performances of theworks of thismost important of twentieth-century musical creators remain astonishingly rare. Cherlin's approach to the impasse is to create a closely interwoven series of studies that bring to the fore an interdisciplinary, open and questioning methodology. In doing so, he departs from several customary techniques of reading Schoenberg's music ? in particular, the processes of quantitative analysis, which he sets aside deliberately within his study ? whilst maintaining his essential support for such practices. This resistance to closure-oriented interpretative methods is characteristic of Cherlin's investigations throughout thebook. He explores a broad interpretative palette developed over some twenty years, enriching themes previously elucidated, as well as presenting new ideas. In trying to convey to his reader the importance of hermeneutic approaches based upon 'howmusic isheard and experienced' (p. 1), he celebrates ambiguity and dualism, instead of finding them problematic. Little wonder, then, that one of his approaches to Schoenberg's music is through...