Emancipation Of Dissonance Research Articles

Sketching a New Verticality: Varèse’s Atonal Sound and its Contexts—Schoenberg, Webern and Ruggles

Varèse’s music is still considered an isolated phenomenon, beyond comparison to any contemporary or former compositional approaches. With a few exceptions, no search for harmonic coherence other than chromatic complementarities and symmetrical pitch formations has been undertaken in the literature so far. Nor has the long-awaited accessibility to his documental archive since 2006 brought any analytical reassessments. This contribution makes use of a mutual integration of contour and interval analysis and sketch study (including annotated scores) in order to reconstruct Varèse’s harmonic thinking. The recognition of a specific ‘system’, based on registered expanded chromatic relations and expressed in peculiar figural morphologies that are not detectable through pitch-class reduction, calls for a further reconsideration of his positioning in the historical context. On the one hand, I will show how Varèse identifies significant structures intuitively used by Schoenberg in his atonal compositions and elevates them to actual constructive ‘principles’, thus overcoming a mere ‘emancipation of dissonance’. On the other hand, such harmonic features reveal the fundamentals of an ‘atonal sound’ also present in the music of other composers, as the examples from Webern (Op. 8 and 27) and Ruggles (Toys and Sun-Treader) show. This raises the question as to whether a common atonal language might exist beyond specific compositional techniques (free atonality, twelve-tone composition, dissonant counterpoint), whose ‘unwritten rules’ composers do not need to formulate in the sketches for each work.

Abandoning Narratives of Music and Prose. Arnold Schönberg and James Joyce.

The works of these two key Modernist artists exhibit a number of similar features: Joyce’s abandonment of personal and representational narration can be likened to Schonberg’s rejection of functional theories of harmony. Through rational constructions – based on structural constraints such as twelve-tone sequences and the Gilbert and Linati schemata – both artists systematically explore the limits and possibilities of their chosen material, with Schonberg’s emancipation of dissonance and Joyce’s highly artificial idiom in ›Finnegans Wake‹ expanding the possibilities of associating musical or literary meaning.

Dis-sonare - Auseinanderklingen in der Musik/ Dis-sonare – Sounding apart in music

Abstract The concept of dissonance is applied in all European languages to different notes sounding together. The varying evaluation of physical, perception psychology and aesthetic aspects from mediaeval times to the present has resulted in a wide variety of reasons given for the border between consonant and dissonant chords and the role of dissonance in the history of music. Since the 20th century the view of New Music that Schonberg’s emancipation of dissonance marked the end of tonality has contrasted with the uninhibited and expressive use of dissonance in largely tonal pop and film music.

Schoenberg and Redemption by Julie Brown

and Redemption. By Julie Brown. (New Perspectives in History and Criticism.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. [xiv, 259 p. ISBN 9780521550352 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781139949965 (e-book), $79.] examples, illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. Julie Brown's and Redemption newly testifies to the power of a composer's self-expressive prose. Two documents from 1934 to 1935 unlock the door to Brown's original intervention in the populous arena of scholarship: an understanding of the motivation behind turn to atonality, or as he called it, the emancipation of dissonance. confessional private essay Every young Jew (1934) and his Mailamm (American-Palestine Institute of Jewish Musical Sciences) address of 29 March 1935 are fundamental to Brown's evaluation of early acceptance of Richard Wagner's Deutschtum and his tract, in Music (1850). As she argues, the two works provide key evidence for motivation to strike out on a new path in composition as a means to redemption for himself as a and of German music. Reinhold Brinkmann has observed: Schoenberg's foundation of the Viennese atonality as a new paradigm for contemporary music, besides being embedded in a music-historical process, was indeed the reflection of a very specific and problematic historical, social, cultural and psychical situation in Vienna around 1900 (Reinhold Brinkmann, Schoenberg the Contemporary: A View from Behind in Constructive Dissonance: Arnold and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 197). To this understanding of the relationship between cultural circumstances and his compositional practice, Brown's book adds a new perspective on his turn to atonality, rooted in his statements of 1934 and 1935. Instead of a study predominantly driven by music-theoretical analysis of works (such as Jack Forrest Boss, Twelve-Tone [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014]), Brown presents Schoenbergian modernism as cultural discourse (P-2). Mailamm address reveals his youthful devotion to Wagner's Deutschtum--that nobody could be a true Wagnerian if they did not believe in Wagner's philosophy, his Deutschtum (Germanness)--and to Wagner's anti-Semitic views about Judaism in music (p. 25). Brown adds, The implications of this claim have been little explored in the literature. And even less explored is Every young Jew, which was unpublished at the time, and, Brown observes, only touched upon by previous commentators and never translated into English(p. 25). Although Moshe Lazar, Steven J. Cahn (in his Ph.D. dissertation), and Sabine Feisst have translated short segments of Every young Jew into English, Brown includes her own full English translation. Nachlass, the collection of his manuscripts, notes, and correspondence, record his life's journey: his conversion to Lutheranism in 1898; his immersion in the cultural and political atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Vienna; his moves between Vienna and Berlin during the rise of National Socialism; his return to the Jewish faith, beginning in 1921 with the incident in which he was denied access to the Mattsee spa and then formalized in 1933; and his exile to North America after Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933. For Brown, the Nachlass, including documents like the Harmonielehre, provides insight into the foundation of his two major developments in composition: atonality and the twelve-tone method. In Every young Jew, mentions six times his early longing to be redeemed from disgrace and shame for being Jewish. Brown views Every young Jew and Mailamm as expressions of Jewish self-hatred. I would look beyond the surface of the words self-hatred to see the documents as a cry of despair uttered by those who experience at first hand the fate of mankind, to paraphrase 1910 aphorism in which he characterizes the creative act that is art (Arnold Schoenberg, Aphorismen, Die Musik 9 [1909-1910], 159; trans. …

The Emancipation of Legal Dissonance

The article explains how an example drawn from the history music can help to illuminate the situation of legality in the European Union. The example refers to a decisive step that was taken by Arnold Schonberg in 1908. In the history of modern music, it came to be known as the “emancipation of dissonance”. It amounted to putting consonant and dissonant sonorities on an equal footing in the composition of music. The article argues, firstly, that methodologically unwarranted but, as regard their effects, “interesting” or “appealing” judicial divinations of law are to be considered the legal equivalent of dissonance in music. The article goes on to claim, secondly, that the European Court of Justice has become the chief purveyor of the emancipation of legal dissonance. The remainder of the article discusses different ways of coping with the situation that has been thus created for legality in Europe.

On 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance. Towards a Rhetoric of Youth

In this issue’s “In discussion” we publish a previously unreleased essay by Thomas Harrison, «Rhetoric of Youth, or Bridges to Nowhere». This article is meant as an introduction and a conversation starter. A responses by Valerio Magrelli will follow.

Lines, Masses, Micropolyphony: Ligeti's Kyrie and the "Crisis of the Figure"

LINES, MASSES, MICROPOLYPHONY: LIGETI’S KYRIE AND THE “CRISIS OF THE FIGURE” ERIC DROTT N AN ESSAY published in 1965, the critic Heinz-Klaus Metzger bluntly asserted that “good melodies can no longer be written.”1 That Metzger would arrive at such a stark, pessimistic appraisal of the melodic figure’s status in contemporary music is surprising, and somewhat ironic. He had long been a staunch advocate of the postwar musical avant-garde, acting as something of an in-house intellectual for the Darmstadt circle in the 1950s. Yet his comments, a decade removed from the heroic years of the Darmstadt school, recalled nothing so much as the sort of complaint that critics hostile to new music had often lodged against this repertoire: that having broken with certain conventions of Western art music, avant-garde composers had broken with immutable laws of aesthetic value; that these same composers had contented themselves in creating works that were I Ligeti's Kyrie and the “Crisis of the Figure” 5 a-melodic at best, and anti-melodic at worst; and that even if one were to admit that atonal music “can no doubt be sung, given time and patience,” the fact of the matter was that “the results will scarcely please.”2 But in contrast to such familiar critical tropes, Metzger’s claim that “good melodies” had grown scarce since the advent of atonality was not to be construed as a value judgment on new music. Rather it was the assertion of a historical fact, one whose social and historical implications needed to be confronted. The jagged lines that abound in the twelve-tone compositions of Schoenberg were not, in Metzger’s eyes, “a matter of ineptness, . . . a mistake on Schoenberg’s part” but represented the composer’s unflinching response to “an objective, historically reached, irreversible situation within the material dimension of music.”3 Metzger’s position here and elsewhere in the essay betrays a clear debt to the aesthetic theory of his former teacher, Theodor Adorno, especially in his contention that the renunciation of familiar tokens of beauty assumes a socio-political import. A simple moral calculus is at work in this argument, so that what appears to be an artistic defect is converted, by means of the critical function that it performs, into a social good. The renunciation of ‘singing’ melodies thus transforms into a quasi-ethical obligation, whereas the attempt to continue writing such figures would constitute an act of ideological deception, one that would mask the real ugliness of society as it exists behind a comforting illusion of aesthetic beauty. Metzger’s article betrays a debt to Adorno’s thought in a more concrete way as well. In recounting the historical bases for the ‘crisis of the figure,’ Metzger both draws from and expands upon the discussion of twelve-tone melody in Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. In tonal music, Metzger observes, the composition of melodic lines is constrained by the hierarchical nature of the tonal system as it is inscribed in the diatonic scale. This means that the ‘emancipation of dissonance’ liberates linear gestures at the same time as it releases dissonant sonorities from the obligation to resolve: “so with Schoenberg, with so-called free atonality, the figure became autonomous : in its melodic as well as in its harmonic aspect.”4 But the disavowal of tonality deprives figures of that which had furnished them with a sense of purpose and “substantiality.” The upshot of this, according to Metzger, is that the melodic freedom provided by atonality risks slipping into arbitrariness, into mere caprice: It is as though the emancipated musical figure, borne along by no pre-conceived system whatsoever, is no longer—in the Hegelian sense—‘substantial’: the isolated figures, freed from every heteronomy , constructed purely in themselves, are transformed. . . . [They 6 Perspectives of New Music become] ornamental in effect, and it does not seem that they should be of any greater value than trills, mordents and turns.5 The subsequent adoption of the twelve-tone technique by Schoenberg and his followers may be read as an attempt to create a durable system that would restore the sense of necessity that had been lost with the abandonment...

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

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.

1913: The Cradle of Modernism by Jean-Michel Rabaté

MLR, 104.4, 2009 1101 Leibniz, Jean Baptiste Rene Robinet, Bichat, and SirWilliam Lawrence, among others. In the second part Koelb approaches theways inwhich a dead past can affect the living present by examining Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Keats's Endymion (1817), Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), and Gautiers Spirite (1865). In Part m of his analysis Koelb focuses on 'the interaction ofmatter and spirit as a process of incarnation inwhich bodies take on the character of texts and texts the characters of bodies' (p. 12). Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1810), Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and various tales by Poe are offered as evidence of the demonic underside of a resurrection of the fleshand a death thatbrings one into life' (p. 145). Koelb's engaging thesis argues for an original connection between theApostle Paul and 'theRomantic century, but itisat times tenuous and even overstated.With regard to an age of revolution, one also questions the veracity ofKoelb's claim that 'thepolitical history of the time [...] had primarily indirect effectson thematters re levant' tohis enquiry (p. xi). However, in a study that admits topresenting a 'sample' that is 'not meant tobe exhaustive but rather illustrative' (ibid.), his selective analysis suggests an interesting currentwithin Romantic thought, prose, and poetry. University of Warwick Brian Haman 1913' The Cradle ofModernism. By Jean-Michel Rabate. Oxford: Blackwell. 2007. viii+246 pp. ?50 (pbk ?19.99). ISBN 978-1-4051-5117-7 (pbk 978 1-4051-6192-3). 1913 takes itsplace in a series of studies thatdissect cultural modernism by taking one year for an analytic snapshot. One thinks, for example, of Thomas Harrison's 1910: The Emancipation ofDissonance, Michael North's Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, and Marc Manganaro's Culture, 1922. As Rabate notes, his own chosen annus mirahilis has had its fair share of attention, with books by Frederic Morton and Virginia Cowles, and the weighty three-volume collection of essays edited by Liliane Brion-Guerry {VAnnee 1913: lesformes esthetiques de Vceuvred'art a la veille de lapremiere guerre mondiale). But Rabate's principal model is inmany ways Marjorie Perloff's magisterial The FuturistMoment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and theLanguage ofRupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), which takes the avant-garde preoccupation with techniques of'simultaneity as a spur to itsown presentation of themultiple currents converging in the vortex of avant-guerre European modernism. Like Perloff, Rabate wears his formidable scholarship lightly,and the pleasure to be gained from reading 1913 derives from the admirable fluencywith which different and sometimes unexpected strands of this protean cultural moment arewoven together. Of the many writers discussed here, it is perhaps Fernando Pessoa who best exemplifies in this pivotal year 'the difficult birth ofmodernism' (p. 204) as he looks for 'ways to combine his new-found ventriloquism with movements likeneo classicism, late Romanticism, Whitmanian lyricism, paganism, and modernism' 1102 Reviews (p. 155). In 1913 history ison the turn and itsactors are caught looking both back ward and forward, as thatmelange of tendencies indicates. Modernism emerges here as a volatile swirl of traditional and modern pieties in a world that finds itself'increasingly interconnected' (p. 11) but that also sees cosmopolitan values yielding increasingly to aggressive forms of nationalism. The year 1913 may mark 'the inception of ourmodern period of globalization' (p. 1), but it witnesses too the persistence ofRomantic fascinations, most damagingly in themystique ofwar and violence (as Rabate notes, artists such as Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska went towar because theywanted to?'All three could have easily avoided the draft, for reasons of nationality [...] or distance' (p. 208)). This 'emergentmodernism' made its own contribution to the belligerence of 1913, then?'the modern spirit appears as vivisective', Rabate accurately observes (p. 141)?and for that reason ithas undoubtedly brought us 'bad luck', as 1913 an nounces at the outset. Indeed, the curious fusion of the atavistic and thedefinitively new that underlies this early modernism and that is so distinctively announced in Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (premiered that year) fostered occultism and superstition at the very same time as itmystified the technologies of...

You Can’t Take Freud Out Of Vienna—Or Can You?

You Can’t Take Freud Out Of Vienna—Or Can You?

<em>1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance</em> by Tom Harrison

<em>1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance</em> by Tom Harrison

1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance

1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance. By Thomas Harrison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. [xii, 264 p. ISBN 0-520-20043-8. $30.00.] It is a delicate business, the history of ideas, and more delicate stilt to extract from its flow a moment of equilibrium between what was and what would be. Beginnings and endings are seldom tidy, and ideas are promiscuous, not crystalline and chaste. Nevertheless, it is tempting to reconstruct a sense of that mood of an era commonly known as its Zeitgeist. Around 1910 central European artists and intellectuals, poised between the languorous malaise of the tin de siecle and some dimly perceived catastrophe looming on the horizon, had reached a point of crisis. or about December. 1910, Virginia Woolf once observed, human character changed. In 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance Thomas Harrison attempts to explain how and why. Harrison's focus is narrow: central Europe, principally Germany, Italy, and the Hapsburg Empire, and those artists and thinkers who shared a sense that they were living on the cusp at a moment of near unbearable tension when both a death and a birth seemed to have taken too long in coming (p. 8). This is a diverse collection of minds--ranging from composers (Arnold Schoenberg) and artists (Vasili Kandinsky, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka) to poets (Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dino Campana) and philosophers and aestheticians (Giovanni Boine, Georg Lukacs, Martin Buber)--and for better or worse Harrison chooses expressionism as the aesthetic denominator for their commonly held insights. The central figure in Harrison's narrative is Carlo Michelstaedter, an Italian poet, painter, and philosopher, whose dissertation, Persuasion and Rhetoric, was completed in 1910 on the very day he took his own life at the age of twenty-three. If his death is symbolic of the impasse to which his ruminations had led him, the circumstances of his life are less emblematic of those tensions that set him and his contemporaries on their path. As an Italian Jew raised in the Adriatic port of Gorizia, where Italian, Slovene, and German cultures competed for dominance. Michelstaedter experienced firsthand the widening fissures of a multiethnic empire. As with so many thinkers of his time, Michelstaedter meditated upon the discrepancies between authenticity and language, poles that he represented as persuasion, the repose of being, and rhetoric, the continual agony of becoming. It is the recognition of the perpetual dissonance between the two that brought Michelstaedter and other expressionists of this study to the realization that dissonance itself lay at the core of being and of expressive necessity. In four chapters Harrison identifies the stages through which Michelstaedter and others passed on their way to this emancipation of dissonance. From a heightened awareness of a disrupted world of irreconcilable difference (The Emancipation of Dissonance) emerges a despair over those negative forces--chaos over order, death over vitality--that threaten disintegration (The Deficiency of Being). The paralysis of despair is overcome through inner resources of subjective insight (The Hole Called the Soul) that lead, finally, to a realization of the limits of language and rhetoric (An Ethics of Misunderstanding). In the end this recognition that no expression can be more than a form for pregnant but impregnable contents (p. 17) throws the project of self-realization back on the experience of self-loss from which it springs (p. 16). Common to all the figures Harrison treats is the feeling of disjuncture between the inner self and the outer world. Disgust with the materialism of the nineteenth century and a concomitant distaste for those related aesthetic movements of realism and naturalism was exacerbated in those regions where ethnic and cultural identities called into question the relevance of existing political and ideological institutions. …

Music of the twentieth century: style and structure

Repertory. Introduction. PART ONE: STRUCTURAL PRINCIPLES AND COMPOSITIONAL MATERIALS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSIC. 1. Tonality in Transition. 2. Harmonic and Motivic Associations and the Emancipation of Dissonance. 3. Triadic Harmony, Diatonic Collections, and Tonality. 4. Serialism. 5. Rhythm and Meter. 6. Orchestration, Tone Color, and Texture. PART TWO: MUSIC FROM 1900 TO 1945. 7. Avant-Garde Composition in Germany and Austria. 8. Avant-Garde Composition in France and Russia. 9. Musical Nationalism. 10. Neoclassicism in France, Germany, and England. 11. Neoclassicism and Populism in American Music. 12. Experimental Music in America. PART 3: MUSIC FROM 1945 TO THE PRESENT. 13. The Revival of the Avant-Garde. 14. Indeterminacy. 15. Electronic Music. 16. Ecleticism. 17. Recent Music in Europe and America. Index.

1910: the emancipation of dissonance

1910: the emancipation of dissonance