Raw Material: Schoenberg and Webern

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.)