Raw Material: Schoenberg and Webern II

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.