We listen to music, and we hear things. Then we look at music, and we see things. But mostly the things we hear and the things we see are not the same things: the overlap is never very substantial, and often zero. The connection between means and ends typically eludes objective, or even intersubjective, description, except on a trivial level. This is the broader notion of "legibility", and in that sense, much music -- even music to which we assign high status -- is profoundly illegible. That is a problem, because it crimps the transmissibility of tradition.

There are corpora of analytical technique and of applications of analytical technique. From these emerge, to take one example, a notion of "common practice". We "know how" to "analyze" music from the "common practice" period. Very well, let us "analyze" two contemporaneous works: one by Mozart, one by Ditters. They have a lot in common, don't they? Do you see the problem?

This is what gave Schenker his opening. He recognized that there are higher layers, where the operations occur that allow us to distinguish between the supremacy of Mozart and the defiant inanity of Ditters. He also recognized (probably only intuitively, as he could not explain it) that what matters is not the existence of the higher layers, nor yet the ability to recognize them in a musical text¹, but the management of complexity at the interfaces between the layers. When we assess the "quality" of musical works, this is what we are assessing -- using, as one thinks, criteria unlike and beyond Schenker's.  That assessment is functionally adequate, in that we do it all the time, in real time, with high repeatability and high confidence; but very little of it is conscious, and very little of that can be expressed in transmissible form. So: still not good enough.

If we were going to "analyze" music, the purpose must be to explain the connection between means and ends. "Analysis" that falls short of that goal is waste motion, but that is nearly all "analysis". A few isolated, pinhole insights can be gained by the study of selected repertoire. We are so far sunk into learned helplessness that we celebrate those few microscopic successes and try to erect systems out of them: exhaustive, algorithmic, explanatory systems. We call this "learning", though it is mostly not transferable. The bar has been set that low.

Next time, we will try to inject a composer's perspective on analysis. Won't that be fun.

When we come back to the different respective impacts of Schoenberg and of Webern on successive generations, we will need to drag in Stravinsky, which may only be an indication of how tangled the whole situation is, or was. It will need a lot of unpacking.

Therefore, the next few installments of this series will be on a different track. The ultimate goal has always been to try to find a workable approach to pedagogy, because hitherto there has never been one. There has never been an effective framework for teaching and learning music. The problem starts at the level of terminology. The available descriptions of the rudiments of music arose from a ghastly farrago of historical accidents, going back over a thousand years. Subsequent discoveries could not even be classified, at the time they were made, as either cumulative or independent. The linguistic tools for transmitting those discoveries were so poor that they led then to tendentiousness and lead today to guesswork. It is a miserable and totally unworkable situation, because the rudiments of music make sense if their rationales are understood, but not if they aren't. The upshot is that no one is taught music: if they learn it, it is despite the teaching. And that, intrinsically, is a matter of luck, and luck is nobody's friend.

Suppose one wanted to clear away all that confusion: where to begin, and how justify that particular starting point? That, too, will need a lot of unpacking. Watch this space.

We need to compare Schoenberg and Webern, stylistically and technically, because we need to distinguish between their respective influences upon their successors -- and, regrettably, upon academic practice. But it is not going to be easy. Rather, it is not going to be easy to do with any kind of logical rigor; it might be easy to do on a basis of complete and utter handwaving, but that would be wrong.

Schoenberg and Webern influenced each other throughout their careers. While Schoenberg was living in Vienna and the two men were working closely together, the influences could be essentially immediate, sometimes even to the point of creating confusion about dates and priority. After Schoenberg left Vienna, not only were their verbal interactions constrained by the latency of correspondence, but the samples of work-in-progress that they could share with each other could only give a much more coarse-grained view into their creative processes. It is easy to spot certain parallels between their developments, but those parallels demonstrate, at a deeper level, the characteristic difference between them, which I waved a hand at last time by saying that Schoenberg liked to conflate whereas Webern liked to distinguish. Webern was also more interested than Schoenberg in consolidating stylistic and technical experiments.

One obvious parallel is that both composers went through a period of composing extreme -- still, to this day, fantastically extreme -- miniatures, before moving back towards larger and more legible forms.

This phenomenon should remind us of Robert Simpson's question whether an elephant were more concise than a flea, which then leads to the distinction between concision and ellipticality. My own view on this point is that concision is usually a virtue and sometimes an obligation, whereas ellipticality is seldom appropriate and usually unfair.

"My own view..." A red flag if ever. I could go on at great length giving examples of individual works, pointing out instances of ellipticality (mostly in Webern) and where/why it is a problem; but there are three problems with this.

1. I would not be able to appeal to consensus opinion.
2. I have struggled to eliminate ellipticality from my own works and my judgments would be influenced by that experience.
3. Most such observations would carry at least implicit rebuke, and I am not entitled to that, in light of the two points above.

Next time, we will try to find other ways to talk about the differences between these two composers and their effects upon the practice, theory, and epistemology of music during the period when those effects were greatest.

Score, audio rendering, and score video (YouTube) here.

It was in the ninth year of the reign of Lur the Trifling that the snows came. Prior to that, it had not snowed for so long that snow was only known by reputation; no one had any experience of it. At first, it was potentially amusing, as people slipped, and slid, and landed on their bum-bums. But the snow fell and fell and fell, without stopping, until it was yards deep and began to suffocate people in their buried houses; and still and on it fell, until only bits of the very tallest houses could be seen. One might come and go through one's garret window; but that did not make coming, or going, at all a wise thing to do.

Finally the snow stopped, after thirty-nine feet had fallen, layers crushing layers to the firmness of stone. The few people who were left began to realize that a really uncharacteristic misfortune had come upon them and that, even were the snow some day to melt, nothing would again be as it was. Yet they did not blame Lur the Trifling, could not, for, as they justly spake among themselves, Lur couldn't make it snow if you beat him with chains.

So another scapegoat must be found, but for some time, that goal was not pursued, as it seemed out of place, meet only to commonplace disasters and not to such an one as this. But eventually the food, and the firewood, and the ability to explain anything to children, began to run low. As if at once, it was discovered that the lore of a lifetime had ceased to apply: nothing was as one had thought. For only one example, there is not much meat on a cat, and that not easy to get, or to cook. Here or there, such epiphanies might be improving; but most were gall, and therefore somebody's fault.

Meantime, Lur the Trifling was growing weary of living (if the word will reach so far) on the top floor of his palace, whose windows had no balconies. Severed from his audience, he missed them, though he had not known he would, and though they missed him rather less. He would have liked to reach out to his people with vague words of comfort (key word "vague"), but mere occupancy of the throne did not endow him with any exceptional power to shout across drifts of snow.

But that is how his subjects were reduced to communicating, and their conversations turned increasingly to the question of blame. Setting aside, as mentioned, any thought of reproaching the head of state his person, it was nonetheless clear that the snow should have been prevented, and that prevention in general was the particular job of Those, or Them, In Charge.

Anticipating sovereign desire, a chamberlain had made search in the archives for relevant historical parallels, and found that once before, it had snowed likemuch: in the fortieth year of the reign of Swinn the Inexplicable, nine- greats-grandfather of the present ruler. Eagerly turning brittle pages, hoping to find pertinent advice, the courtier gradually fell into disappointment, as it became apparent that the records of the fourth-preceding century preserved as much fantasy as fact, if not more. The stomach dropped at the thought of reminding majesty that, on the only similar occasion, the snow had been melted, and the melt, in its millions of gallons, drunk, by a fire-breathing dragon, which had then proceeded westward at speed and voided the oceans themselves. It seemed to somehow make light of the current predicament -- quite apart from the complete implausibility of such a thing happening twice.

But...! The chamberlain had a sudden flash of insight, much above his pay grade, which caused him to sit back so quickly that his chair overset. Once he had been brought round and the bleeding stopped, he was pleased to find that he remembered his brainstorm: suppose a dragon, so far from solving the problem, had caused it? Not a fire-breathing, but a snow-blowing dragon: white as the snow itself and thus conveniently invisible, and of any useful size (a hundred feet tall, two hundred...?) Here was the exact needful propaganda, accommodating the people's righteous rage while aiming it towards an imaginary target, capable of withstanding infinite imaginary retaliation.

Rung were the bells, hoarse were the shouts, as the word spread quite literally from rooftop to rooftop: it was the dragon that did this thing, the dragon that had not been heard of for three hundred and forty-seven years -- and would probably not resurface for another three centuries and change. The whole exercise unfolded just as taught in the textbooks of public relations: minute variations in the story sparked sterile debate on the margins; divisions between strategies (hot pursuit, or preparation for next time?) emerged and were lovingly heightened.

It was yet the same day, late but before dusk, when the public discourse was gradually supplanted by awareness of a series of immense crunching sounds, each louder than the last, but so deep and vast that they seemed to come from every direction at once. Louder and inconceivably louder they grew, until the next one must have split every surviving eardrum in the city: then they stopped, and there was an awful pause, while every eye searched the sky in vain for the least gradation of white on white.

Then came the voice, enormous, hollow, withal somewhat tentative, even ingratiating. Slower than slow, from an invisible height it spoke, saying:

"Y'all need some help with this mess?"

... is ever "obvious", or "simple", or "complex", or "better", or "worse", to more than one person at a time.

We see why Rimsky was impressed with Glazunov's first symphony. It is more controlled than Rimsky's own first, composed under Balakirev's idiosyncratic micromanagement. At the time (1881), Rimsky had decided to prioritize control over imagination. This was a necessary step in his personal growth, even though the results have mostly not been valued highly for their own sake. Three years later, Rimsky revised his first, sacrificing some, but really only a little bit, of its imaginativeness, but greatly improving its sound by transposing it from E-flat minor to E(-natural) minor.

Glazunov's first is indisputably a significant achievement for a 16-year-old composer. Form is hard, and he mostly nails it -- the tempo game in the finale is not an entirely successful experiment. Voice is hard, too, and there is very little of it. We could go two ways with that: we could say there is not enough, or we could be impressed that there is any. When presented with a false choice like that, it is always best to cheat, so let us adduce our knowledge of his subsequent work, which is...mostly anonymous. So I say "not enough"; your mileage may vary.

We must think that if Glazunov had been born, say, fifteen years later, Rimsky would have been less indulgent of this work. But perhaps Rimsky's judgment is altogether discredited by his rejection, motivated by personal animosity, of Balakirev's C-major symphony, a finer work than anything either Rimsky or Glazunov ever composed -- more imaginative and more controlled, and the control is not merely of received models.

Schoenberg liked to conflate. Webern liked to distinguish.

They also both liked to experiment, but the fundamental difference between them expressed itself in the fact that Webern's experiments were more narrowly focussed than Schoenberg's, which makes it easier for us to see their purpose, and what and how he learned from them. It is also how, even without dates, we would be able to assign time-ordering to their mutual influence.

My purpose here is not to trace those strands through specific works but to point out why, in the postwar period, Webern's approach was preferred to Schoenberg's as a model for pedagogy and as a candidate embodiment of "inevitable" historical trends.

Both composers emerged from an intellectual climate that believed in historical progress. Toward the end of the Long Nineteenth Century, the task of the artist -- or the scientist, or the politician, etc. -- was to extrapolate from history in order to deduce what must happen next.

(NOTE @ 13 Feb. 2025: This post was initially posted in a truncated form that omitted everything below this point.)

It is always possible, often interesting, and sometimes even meaningful to point to historical trends of stylistic evolution. But when the (essentially political) notion of historical inevitability leads to such things as Boulez's declaration that

...any musician who has not experienced -- I do not say understood, but...experienced -- the necessity for the dodecaphonic language is ***useless***....

then it cannot avoid discredit, for it has no way to repudiate such hyperbole.

Boulez is not our topic here -- we have bitten off enough too much already, although some day we shall have to come back to the religious connotations of his distinction between understanding and experience. But when he speaks of "the dodecaphonic language", he is not only speaking for himself, but for the widely-shared notion that the 12-tone system exists (at least in part, perhaps even primarily) to create a sound-world.

Schoenberg tried to have this both ways. He granted Berg his own sound-world, though implicitly deeming it inferior. But the notion of "the emancipation of the dissonance" logically requires the suppression of harmonic contrast, which in turn must create a sound-world disjoint from that of the "common practice period". Webern cared a little less about this. But if all "historically inevitable" music must share a sound-world, and that one defined as a negative space, then what means of differentiation remain? (No: stop that: we are not going to ask whether that is even the right question. At least not yet.)

Last time, I called Schoenberg a narcissist. That is a grave and irresponsible accusation -- the best kind. But here, if you require such, is a bit of handwaving by way of justification.

First, credit where due. When Schoenberg backhanded Stravinsky (as he did most of his competitors -- hold that thought), he framed in it the familiar passive-aggressive sorrowful-headshake trope, by saying "I really liked Petrushka, parts of it very much indeed." The credit is for not saying which parts those were, because no one could care.

The next piece of the puzzle is Schoenberg's statement that in his new system -- which (more credit) he did not name after himself -- "one uses the row and then simply composes as before". What this neglects is the fact that, to Schoenberg, for nearly any of Schoenberg's competitors, "composing as before" would be a recipe for disaster. Certainly he would have been volcanically scornful of Shostakovich's or Britten's occasional "use" of the system, and although he would have placed Stravinsky's efforts to meet him on his own ground in a different category, he still would have found reasons to dismiss them.

(Alive to the appearance that I am merely nutpicking all of Schoenberg's bons mots, I will carve out the statement that "there is still plenty of good music to be written in C major", for the sole but paramount reason that it is true. Even so, the framing is passive-aggressive -- why did he think it needed to be said? -- and his "C major" was Schenker's, not that of any actual composer, whether Shostakovich, Britten, Stravinsky, Prokofyev, Sibelius, Nielsen, nor even Korngold or Elgar.)

Back to nutpicking! When Schoenberg backhanded Berg (a narcissistically ungrateful thing to do), he phrased it in some such terms as that Berg was writing operas and therefore for dramatic reasons could not forego the contrast between major and minor. The less important thing about this is that that contrast, even or especially in an operatic context, had gone out with Fidelio. The more important thing is that Schoenberg tips his hand: contrast is the thing that you forego.

And that shows us why the only one of his competitors whom Schoenberg never backhanded was Webern. There's the topic for the next installment.

It is a category error to try to refute a narcissist. Nothing that they say is about what it appears to be about. Rather, it is an allegory for some aspect of themselves.

Narcissism is itself a category error, because oneself is not the right thing to think about; but this, if it is not taught from earliest infancy, cannot be taught remedially in later life. So we could not refute Schoenberg, even were he (contra Boulez) alive, by pointing out that he was wrong either about the historical development of music or about himself.

But we may pay him the fairly high compliment that he was interestingly wrong. If we take his own words and practice at face value, then we must also adopt his erroneous post-facto justifications for them. But once we see that he was wrong, we can then see why he was wrong, and much light is shed upon the practices of his models, his followers, and his competitors.

The key work in this regard is Verklärte Nacht, where we see the emergence of serialism independently of either

1. the equal status of the 12 members of the equal-tempered collection, or

2. the suppression of harmonic contrast ("emancipation of the dissonance")

(NB. The suppression of harmonic contrast and the suppression of harmonic function are not the same thing.)