Schoenberg and Liszt: Hexatonic Collections across the Great Tonal Divide

This article explores passages from Liszt's and Schoenberg's compositions that share the versatile hexatonic collection which can function within, without or somewhere in between a tonal harmonic framework. The underlying harmonic structure of the hexatonic-based passages from Liszt's oratorio St. Stanislaus (1875), Schoenberg's ‘Nacht’ from Pierrot lunaire (1912), and Modern Psalm, Op. 50c (1950), are almost identical, even though the works were written in distinctly different genres and at very different times. The extramusical associations in these works, in which the sublime or supernatural is represented by hexatonic-based symmetry, recurs in the compositions examined here.