The Emancipation of Dissonance: Schoenberg's Two Practices of Composition

Abstract

The concept of emancipation can connote both a process and the result of that process. This ambiguity certainly applies to Schoenberg’s ‘emancipation of dissonance’, as he himself called it, and is further enhanced by the association with social and subjective emancipation such as can be found in the musical writings of Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno’s broad historical perspective that sees the ‘emancipation of dissonance’ as the outcome of a development going back via Wagner to Monteverdi prompts two questions that are addressed here: (1) To what extent is Schoenberg’s atonal music linked aesthetically to Monteverdi’s so-called ‘second practice’ (seconda prattica)? (2) Given that Schoenberg identified the emancipation of dissonance as culminating not in his atonal works (c.1910) but in the twelve-tone compositions (c.1925), and insofar as the music written according to his ‘method of composition using twelve tones related only to one another’ partakes of a quite different aesthetic from the earlier ‘freely atonal’ kind, is it not appropriate to talk of two distinct musical practices in a way analogous to the discourse about early seventeenth-century music in which Monteverdi became embroiled? In Schoenberg’s case, however, the first practice follows the second, thereby reversing the earlier historiographical sequence.