Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror • Hacker News Board

Re: Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror

#21

Post by odyssey7 » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 11:48 PM UTC

zengid wrote: post #15

As a music student, I was always amazed at the irony of Schoenberg's thesis about the "Liberation of the Dissonance", when 12 tone Equal Temperament is an arbitrary intonation system that limits the actual potential for freedom when creating harmony. Ben Johnston, an American composer who studied with Harry Partch, used extended Just Intonation, which is a system of unlimited harmonic capabilities, for several serial…

Schoenberg gave the scale some decent discussion in his Harmonielehre in the section on the major mode and diatonic chords. Overall, he was liberal and encouraging about the directions that music could go, and he led by example in producing his own compositions in his own way.

"And above all; this scale is not the last word, the ultimate goal of music, but rather a provisional stopping place. ... Whether there will then be quarter tones, eighth, third, or (as Busoni thinks) sixth tones, or whether we will move directly to a 53-tone scale that Dr. Robert Neumann has calculated, we cannot foretell. Perhaps this new division of the octave will even be untempered and will not have much left over in common with our scale. ... Probably, whenever the ear and imagination have matured enough for such music, the scale and the instruments will all at once be available."

I'd say that last prediction was very prescient!

Re: Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror

#22

Post by Velofellow » Sun, Feb 02, 2020, 12:47 AM UTC

antognini wrote: post #4

Schoenberg's music is admittedly hard to get into. But it is well worth spending some time with it because there is nothing quite like it. For a bit of context, Schoenberg's atonal style was the culmination of centuries of development of Western harmony. From the Baroque/Classical era onward, the direction of Western music was towards greater chromaticism extending harmonies further and further away from the simple m…

Thanks for the insightful comment! I agree about the difficulty in grasping his musical concepts. It certainly took me time.

For anyone interested - his tone poem “Verklarte Nacht” is a great work to understand the culmination of European musical ideas you spoke of. It has some of the chromaticism and an eye to Schoenberg’s future work while still having the immediate payoff of more traditional Western Music. It’s a striking and beautiful piece.

Re: Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror

#23

Post by zengid » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 3:10 AM UTC

odyssey7 wrote: post #21

zengid wrote: post #15

As a music student, I was always amazed at the irony of Schoenberg's thesis about the "Liberation of the Dissonance", when 12 tone Equal Temperament is an arbitrary intonation system that limits the actual potential for freedom when creating harmony. Ben Johnston, an American composer who studied with Harry Partch, used extended Just Intonation, which is a system of unlimited harmonic capabilities, for several serial…

Schoenberg gave the scale some decent discussion in his Harmonielehre in the section on the major mode and diatonic chords. Overall, he was liberal and encouraging about the directions that music could go, and he led by example in producing his own compositions in his own way. "And above all; this scale is not the last word, the ultimate goal of music, but rather a provisional stopping place. ... Whether there will t…

Great quote, thanks for sharing! Maybe I have misplaced my frustration on Schoenberg, when he doesn't deserve it. The hordes of academic composers who came after him and pumped out soulless 12-tone serialist pieces probably do deserve the scorn, though. :)