The Musical Idea/-/-And the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Musical Idea—And the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation Edward Green The Musical Idea—And the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation. By Arnold Schoenberg. Edited, translated, and with a commentary by Patricia Carpenter and Severine Neff. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. [xxviii. 343 p. ISBN 0-253-21835-7. $ 27.95.] Bibliographic references, indexes. In 1995 Columbia University Press published this important work—and saw it rapidly go out of print. For reasons not known to this reviewer, and despite the clear evidence of an eager readership, the book was not reprinted. Eventually the copyright was transferred to Indiana University Press, and so once again it is in circulation. Thankfully; for it is the single best volume extant if one wishes to learn about the technical conception of music held by one of the greatest composers (and greatest music educators) of modern times. From the "Editor's Preface," we learn that Schoenberg had begun work as early as 1923 on a theoretical text which would present the nature of "the musical idea." The core of this book is a presentation, in English translation, of what appears to be his final attempt to consolidate his thought on the subject into a coherent publication. The German text was spread out over four small notebooks Schoenberg kept in the mid-1930s. Altogether there were about two hundred pages of entries, the first dated 5 June 1934, the last 15 October 1936. A chief difference between the 1995 edition, and this one, is that whereas in the former Schoenberg's original German and the English translation faced each other, page by page, in the current edition this "bilingual" format is dropped. For those [End Page 861] who wish to work directly with Schoenberg's original language, the Columbia edition is, by necessity, the one to use. Those who do not feel the need to do so may use the Indiana edition with confidence; I have read the original German carefully, and it is clear that Carpenter and Neff are excellent and faithful translators. Moreover, one "bilingual" aspect of the book remains: the "Concordance of Terms" which follows the core text. This "Concordance" is derived from other works of Schoenberg, both published and in manuscript, and thus provides useful points of comparison with the mid-30s "Gedanke" manuscripts which comprise the heart of this volume. As is well known, Schoenberg, in attempting to explain how musical thought takes place, advocated the concept of the Grundgestalt—the "idea" in its primal form. What exactly is that? And how exactly is it the source of an entire composition? Some light on these matters was shed by the publication in 1975 of Style and Idea (New York: St. Martin's Press), an anthology of Schoenberg's writings edited by Leonard Stein. The present work, however, sheds far more. As Walter Frisch writes in his "Forward," which is new to this edition, "The musical "idea" on which a piece is based is neither a theme nor a harmony, but something more abstract—a relationship between tones—and yet very real and recoverable by close analysis." (p. xiv). And as the editors Carpenter and Neff, observe in their "Preface": "Schoenberg's thought cannot be understood without understanding his organic bent of mind.... [He] fervently disagreed, however, with the prevailing nineteenth-century view of the musical organism—that it grows from a seed, like a plant. In this manuscript he presents a striking image. The musical work, he asserts, is a body, a tonal body, whole and centrally controlled. The inner force that gives it life is the idea it presents" (pp. xxii–xxiii). Lest this seem remotely "philosophic," this reviewer would like to make clear that the manuscript itself develops this concept in a richly technical manner, complete with dozens of clear musical examples. Among the many subjects Schoenberg investigates are "The Laws of Musical Coherence," the "Elements of Form," "The Difference between Gestalt and Phrase," "Sonority as a Formative Element," "Accentuation and Nonaccentuation," "Mirror Forms," "The Structural Capacities of the Scale," "Extramusical Means of Coherence," the "Origins of Repetitions," and "The Constructive Function of Harmony." Some of these sections are quite short...