Variation/<em>Variarions:</em> What Schoenberg's Approach to <em>Formenlehre</em> Can Reveal about His Musical Language(s)

Abstract

RETHINKING REPETITION: INTERROGATING SCHOENBERG’S WRITINGS ÁINE HENEGHAN ONTEMPORARY DISCOURSE ON MUSICAL FORM draws inspiration from the writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Specifically, the central tenets of the so-called New Formenlehre project can be traced back to his theoretical and pedagogical writings: his thinking on form, filtered through Erwin Ratz and, in turn, William Caplin, informs an analytical approach currently in vogue. And yet the concept of repetition, arguably the cornerstone of Schoenberg’s Kompositionslehre, remains trivialized at best and misunderstood at worst. In this respect, John Rahn’s remarks on repetition seem not merely apposite but essential for an understanding of the term: Repetition is . . . more than merely analytical in the sense of laying out all the relevant repeatable component elements of a piece, like a disassembled automobile engine; this would be trivial. The involvement of repetition as an action constituting time and life from the inside makes it equally constitutional for the spirit of music. To understand how this may be, it is necessary first to interrogate repetition minutely as to its particulars.1 C 26 Perspectives of New Music Rahn rightly problematizes the topic of repetition, pondering as he does the relationship between structure and repetition and grappling at the outset with the issue of cognition and recognition. He considers “a schema of bare repetition, A = {a, then-a},” describes how it is perceived in time (“first I experience a, then then-a, which is a again”), and poses questions about context and abstraction. Although he concludes that “a thing as grasped is itself abstracted from any possible context,” he acknowledges the problems with such an ontology: “the practical problem of Sichselbstgleichheit (Koyré 1961a)” and the theoretical one he describes as the “the cognitive chicken-and-egg problem—how can one abstractly constitute or cognize a thing before knowing what it is, before being able to re-cognize it?” Rahn’s invocation of the French philosopher Alexandre Koyré, who was himself immersed in the study of Hegel, accounts for the use of the expression Sichselbstgleichheit, meaning “equality-to-itself.”2 Philosophical discussions of this kind obviously appeal to composer and music theorist alike. In the same way that Rahn turned to Koyré when thinking about questions of equality and likeness (gleich means “equal” or “like”), Schoenberg found a resonance in the writings of another French philosopher—Henri Bergson.3 His personal library contains several of Bergson’s books in German translation,4 and his copy of Schöpferische Entwicklung (original French: L’évolution créatrice, 1907) is annotated: Schoenberg highlighted a passage with a marginal line and underlined for additional emphasis the phrase “von Gleichf örmigkeiten und Wiederholungen” (sur des similitudes et des répétitions ; translated into English, in the singular rather than the plural, as “[and all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives] on likeness and repetition”).5 The expressions Gleichförmigkeiten and Wiederholungen point not just to repetitions [répétitions; Wiederholungen] but also to similarities [similitudes] and equalities [Gleichförmigkeiten]—that is, to forms that are alike or equal [gleich]. These were the gradations with which Schoenberg was concerned. “Recognition,” for him, was “based on experience and on comparison [Vergleichung],” and he would describe objects as “related [verwandt], similar [ähnlich], or alike [gleich],”6 defining “similar” as that which is “partly the same [teils gleich], partly different [teils verschieden].”7 Reflecting on the intricacies involved in hearing and grasping such relationships prompted him to probe the concept of repetition. In what follows, I aim, taking my cue from Rahn, to interrogate repetition minutely as to its particulars using the writings of Schoenberg. My investigation prioritizes primary sources, some of which have not been examined before, and in so doing provides an important corrective to Schoenberg’s published work, revising our understanding of his theoretical contribution. I Rethinking Repetition: Interrogating Schoenberg’s Writings 27 conclude with an analytical vignette to demonstrate how these theoretical ideas find expression in the musical domain. Schoenberg’s writings abound with statements on repetition: • A motive is used by repetition.8 • The motive reproduces itself by repeating itself and bringing forth new shapes from itself.9 • Whatever happens in a piece of music is nothing but the endless reshaping of a...