Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Schoenberg’s Klavierstück, op. 33a

This essay considers the sound of Arnold Schoenberg’s Klavierstück, op. 33a, discussing aesthetic effects of combinatoriality and pitch repetition. In taking John Rahn’s general advice regarding listening to Schoenberg “late at night with the lights off,” two compelling parallels with psycholinguistic phenomena emerge—one dealing with semantic satiation, and the other with a related experience called the verbal transformation effect. Volume 27, Number 1, March 2021 Copyright © 2021 Society for Music Theory Schoenberg in the Dark [1.1] John Rahn’s Basic Atonal Theory is wri en in a style that is sadly absent from today’s music theory textbooks. Quirky passages, such as his discussion of “pitches (or grapes, or housemaids),” which touches upon the limitations of referring to pitches as integers (19–20), or his off-handed comparison of pitch-class structure to jellyfish (95) offer humorous counterweights to the rows of mathematical symbols elsewhere in the text that many undergraduate readers would likely have found dispassionate or even impenetrable. Among the book’s more notably outré passages is the following exercise, recommended at the end of chapter one: Listen several times to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire op. 21. Read the text (in translation if necessary) and follow the score. Then listen to it again, preferably late at night with all the lights off. (If you enjoy listening this way, try also Schoenberg’s Serenade op. 24 and his third String Quartet op. 30.) (1980, 18) [1.2] Many passages in Rahn’s book are wri en from a listener’s perspective, addressing the sounds of things, their a ractiveness, and discussing the options one has of making sense of those sounds as either listeners or composers. But today, do we still recommend that students listen to atonal music (freely unordered or serial) in the dark? Presumably, Rahn recommends this because such a se ing would allow more acute hearing. Too often we fail to allow time for such pleasures, for our students or for ourselves. The sounds of atonal pieces can seem only supplementary to the relationships we typically teach about them, as an understanding of those concepts comes more easily from intensive scrutiny of scores. Unfortunately, an analysis that is not informed at all by aural understanding will inevitably amount to a mere description of a score. So, when we do simply listen to Arnold Schoenberg’s works (or to the works of other Second-Viennese composers) a entively and without score in hand, we may remind ourselves of their musicality—that is, privileging aural impressions over purely intellectual understandings—regardless of the segmentations and equivalencies with which so many analyses of Schoenberg’s works seem to be concerned. This musicality, which displays cohesion, a range of contrasts across various parameters, and even humor at times, seems less apparent when we listen with our eyes glued to a score. What time then, is left for the contemplation of sound itself? Notwithstanding the fact that Schoenberg did voice at least some suspicions about popularity, we must bear in mind that he did intend for his works to be heard, and that he hoped they would be understood on some level.(1) We may safely assume—or perhaps it is more appropriate to say that we should expect—that the sound of Schoenberg’s music should make some amount of musical sense. It stands to reason, then, that such musical sense is what should inform analysis initially. [1.3] But Schoenberg’s non-tonal music is not often easy on first-time listeners. This seems especially true of his instrumental music. Students can find it opaque, cryptic, or (even less charitably) needlessly complex and discordant, expressing only some kind of “art-for-art’s-sake” elitism. Nonetheless, Rahn’s imperative and the reasoning behind it occurred to me once more when I was thinking of hexachordal combinatoriality—that technique of twelve-tone composition developed by Schoenberg in which simultaneously unfolding twelve-tone row forms complement each other, creating twelve-tone aggregates in multiple dimensions.(2) Example 1 shows two hexachordally combinatorial row forms. In this case, it depicts the default combinatoriality that obtains when a row form (P0) sounds against its own retrograde (R0). Note that twelve-tone aggregates naturally accrue horizontally along each row form, but also vertically among the hexachords (i.e. discrete six-note halves) of both row forms. [1.4] Hexachordal combinatoriality is a staple topic of post-tonal music theory courses. Lamentably, it is entirely possible to teach the concept without referring at all to the sound of the music created by combinatorial textures and procedures. Likely, a conscientious instructor would go so far as to provide a listening or two to the piece under examination before lecturing on combinatoriality, but without guidance, context, and—I submit below—an important linguistic metaphor, that preliminary hearing will do li le in the way of clarifying the topic at hand. All of this is to say that students who are unappreciative of combinatoriality’s effect-as-sound would be right to question whether this concept that seems apparent enough from the look of the score is audible at all, or whether that combinatoriality was connected in any clear way to what we could understand to be part of that work’s aesthetic. This line of questioning recalls Lerdahl’s argument about the degree to which artificial compositional grammars (e.g., combinatorial techniques and textures) and natural listening grammars are mutually exclusive (1988). While Lerdahl’s points are certainly valid, this essay argues that twelve-tone technique in general, and combinatorial music in particular, goes a considerable distance in influencing how we make sense of what we hear. Or at the very least: serial music goes appreciably far in preventing us from making sense in certain wrong ways. [1.5] Even while we bear in mind Lerdahl’s distinctions and concerns, we might consider returning to Rahn’s suggestion, dimming the lights, and just listening to some combinatorial music before writing it all off. The discussion below engages with my impressions of Schoenberg’s Klavierstük, op. 33a—arguably the locus classicus for hexachordal combinatoriality in post-tonal music theory pedagogy—after listening to it with eyes closed. After only a few hearings, two things about the actual sound of the piece became apparent: The first concerned the effects of its hexachordal combinatoriality. The second involved the effects of immediate pitch repetition in combinatorial se ings. As it turns out, the nature of the second effect is directly dependent upon that of the first effect. Saturation and Satiation [2.1] From a compositional perspective, twelve-tone music is like an insurance policy against the perception of anything akin to tonality, or at least centricity (as we use the term now), arising from octave doublings or pitch repetitions. As Schoenberg broaches the idea of the twelve-tone system in his essay “Composition with Twelve Tones (1),” he carefully clarifies this objective of avoiding repetitions and doublings, lest any listener infer or construe a pitch hierarchy of some kind. Why such a set should consist of twelve different tones, why none of these tones should be repeated too soon, why, accordingly, only one set should be used in one composition—the answers to all these questions came to me gradually. Discussing such problems in my Harmonielehre (1911), I recommended the avoidance of octave doublings. To double is to emphasize, and an emphasized tone could be interpreted as a root, or even as a tonic; the consequences of such an interpretation must be avoided. Even a slight reminiscence of the former tonal harmony would be disturbing, because it would create false expectations of consequences and continuations. The use of a tonic is deceiving if it is not based on all the relationships of tonality. The use of more than one [row] was excluded because in every following set one or more tones would have been repeated too soon. Again there would arise the danger of interpreting the repeated tone as tonic. (1975, 219–20, emphasis original) [2.2] In other arguments compelled by a mixture of pride and the anxiety of influence, Schoenberg has claimed that his work has evolved naturally from tonal composers of Austro-German heritage that preceded him. But here he acknowledges a schism between the tonal and that which we call atonal. Through the passage above we understand the discontinuity Schoenberg knew his twelvetone music created. Nevertheless, to simply regard the twelve-tone system as a guarantor against accidental perceptions of tonality would be unfair. His innovations allowed for a great deal more— not least of all, an ability to sustain larger-scale forms in purely instrumental music (217). But without a mindful reading of the passage above, we cannot know how essential the rejection of hierarchy is to an appreciative hearing of Schoenberg’s post-tonal music.(3) [2.3] Hexachordal combinatoriality doubles down on aggregate completion, much like a second insurance policy. In combinatorial textures, pairs of simultaneously sounding row forms complement each other, completing aggregates of all twelve pitch classes twice as efficiently than textures fleshed out by solitary row forms. Combinatorial aggregate saturations further guarantee that listeners do not misguidedly ascribe any centricity to what they hear. Just before Schoenberg introduces his first example of hexachordal combinatoriality in the essay quoted above, he returns to the issue of octave doublings (236). His commentary on the technique itself occurs earlier, and still addresses the need to avoid unnecessary repetitions. Later, especially in larger works, I changed my original idea, if necessary, to fit the following conditions: the inversion a fifth below of the first six tones, the antecedent, should not produce a repet