Augustus Arnone — Journal

Speaking of the intense chromaticism that characterized melodic sequences in the third movement of his Opus 10 quartet, arguably his first truly atonal movement. Schoenberg describes a unique contrapuntal environment wherein simultaneous individual voices are free to move without consideration of the vertical harmonies that they form.

“Evidently melodic progressions like [these] from the third movement [of Opus 10] cannot be accompanied by tonal triads, and if at all by chords, they would have to be transformed by alterations. Instead, one finds accompanying voices whose purpose is not harmonic at all; they even do not aim for chord production. Their function and derivation might, in the near future, be discovered as its author found them psychologically comforting when he wrote them. (Schoenberg CD 43)”

Interestingly, Schoenberg had evidentally not abandoned the idea that the resultant vertical structures might be construed as a series of functional harmonies, though this consideration was lacking in their composition. It seems to have not occurred to him that he was working within a non-linear medium. Nevertheless, at the same time that he was moving away from reliance on functional harmonic progressions he became ever more concerned with unity and inter-reference between parts, which took the form of continual transformation and reformulation of motives. His own self-admitted aesthetic aim at the time was
“how to create variety out of unity; how to create new forms out of basic material; how much can be achieved by slight modifications, if not by developing variation, out of often rather insignificant little formulations.”
This concern with interrelation would only intensify over the course of his career, taking the form of the inversions and retrogrades in his 12 tone rows, and eventually his combinatorial hexachords.

Heightened emphasis on pattern formation is precisely the result that Mcluhan declares as inevitable following from that dissolution of linear logic brought on by electric media’s ascent and proliferation.

“Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.”

Mcluhan is emphasizing a dichotomy here between two different modes of psychological organization, one that separates and groups elements into contained areas or concepts (hence classes), and one that apprehends the various elements of a given environment as integrated and interrelated. The earlier quote by Schoenberg belies the fact that he was intuitively wandering, seemingly unawares, away from the habit of classifying his harmonic materials within contained, functional chord structures. When one studies Mcluhan’s extensive research and commentary on the nature of these two modes of thought, it becomes obvious that Schoenberg’s drive towards unity and interreference was intrinsically linked to his abandonment of vertical considerations.

Mcluhan deals with the question of containment as an organizational principle in a discussion of cathedrals during the first several centuries of the second millenium as contrasted with those of the Baroque. Bear in mind that he explains the tendency towards specialized parts rather than integration as an effect of the proliferation of printed media, and so the centuries prior to the Gutenberg press did not exhibit the same perceptual bias. The fact that Gothic cathedrals have more in common with Schoenberg’s or Babbitt’s music than even nineteenth-century cathedrals stems from the overthrowal of print’s visual bias by twentieth-century electric media.

Mcluhan opens this discussion in The Gutenberg Galaxy with the statement: “Scribal Culture and Gothic Culture were both concerned with light through, not light on.(105).” With regard to the Gothic cathedral he’s referring to the use of stained glass and only partial walls to circulate light throughout the whole of the interior, rather than walling it off into separate rooms. In the words of Medieval scholar Otto von Simson:

The Gothic wall seems to be porous: light filters through it, permeating it, merging with it, transfiguring it … Light, which is ordinarily concealed by matter, appears as the active principle; and matter is aesthetically real only insofar as it partakes of, and is defined by, the luminous quality of light.(105)

Thus, in the Gothic cathedral the special objects, activities, and content pertaining to the various areas of the interior were not separated from each other, one did not wander from room to room taking in each specialized space one at a time. Rather, one took in the entire space as a panoramic whole, observing the interplay among the various contents scattered throughout the whole interior. “After Gutenberg,” Mcluhan explains, “the new visual intensity will require light on something. And its idea of space and time will change to regard them as containers to be filled with objects or activities. But in a manuscript age …space was not a visual container.(107) So by “light on” as opposed to “light through” he’s referring to the literal example of the use of light in these spaces, but really he’s talking about principles of apprehension and imagination that separate the age of print’s dominance from the ages before it, and from our own age dominated by electric media. The ramifications of this example can be extraordinarily illuminating when approaching contemporary aesthetics, musical or otherwise.

The Schoenberg example deals specifically with the organization of pitch. It very much demonstrates the principle of light through rather than light on in that groups of pitches are not “walled off” from each other and situated within functional harmonies. A chord itself is a kind of container, an exclusivity if you will – these pitches, not those pitches. His twelve-tone system of composing decimated the notion of pitch exclusivity, and thus of specialized harmonies or key areas, just by virtue of the fact that all the pitches were present all the time. Individual voices were free to infiltrate any part of the pitch spectrum, much like the latticework of light through the gothic cathedral, rather than coming together with the other voices to form specialized pitch content.

“Perfect adaptation to any environment is achieved by a total channeling of energies and vital force that amounts to a kind of static terminus for a creature. Even slight changes in the environment of the very well adjusted find them without any resource to mmet new challenge. Such is the plight of the representatives of ‘conventional wisdom’ in any society. Their entire stake of security and status is in a single form of acquired knowledge, so that innovation is for them not novelty but annihilation.“ (Marshall Mcluhan, Understanding Media, 69)

I’m sure this passage speaks to a lot of different people on a lot of different levels. I myself find it profoundly relatable to the deeply conservative musical environment I encountered during my conservatory/university years. Musicians coming of age in this time are faced with the challenge of having to enter into this environment and then deciding to what extent they will let the sightlines of their musical development be shaped by the demands placed on them by the environment. In a musician’s life of uncertain place or position, perfect adaptation to the institutionalized musical world can certainly have its appeal,  and so the struggle for artistic development becomes the struggle for anticipating and realizing the ideologies of whatever professors and panels/committees/adjudicators to whom they’ll apply for conferral of legitimacy and status. And for those that go through it and do adapt, their position as a kind of musical leader will depend on the acquired values and conventions which were the product of that adaptation. Naturally such a person will be quite hostile to any kind of innovation or change, for it will amount to the renunciation of precisely that accrued ‘knowledge’ which is the foundation of their claim to musical merit. Those panels and committees aggressively promote shared values, as anyone coming up in the academic music world can attest.

A person can become so preoccupied with optimal functioning within this environment so as to really have no aspirations or direction, or even value (if I may be a little unkind) apart from it. What is an artist really if not an expeditionary? There’s a Kafka parable which gets right at the heart of it, the one where the people have a choice to be kings or else to be couriers of kings. They all choose to be couriers and so go around shouting meaningless messages to each other.

Economics is a good word for it, It’s a bit like investing in stock, if everyone invests in something it has great value, if people stop investing in it then the holders find themselves with very little. I encountered this when I started to study 18th and 19th century performance practice and learned that many of the performance conventions that overwhelmingly predominate in our time are based in habits that formed around the mid-point of this century, and seem not to resemble much of what we can know about the musical cultures in which these classical works were spawned. Naturally, those venerable professors whose sole source of acquired knowledge rests in the perfect absorption of mid-century performing conventions are incredibly hostile to such sentiments, or to any suggestion that we (the people) should stray the slightest bit from prescribed and collectively accepted performance concepts. Of course, predictably a new economy has sprung up around the acquired knowledge of performance practice, with values just as deeply conservative as any more traditional conservatory example.

It’s why so many people admire Bob Dylan actually, the quintessential example of avoiding at all cost any kind of static terminus. How does the song go…. “you must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.” The kind of adaptation Mcluhan talks about precludes the possibility of any thought of “leaving.” In a letter to Milton Babbitt I found myself saying “I realize I’m speaking to the original Magi captain himself.” Gosh, we need people like this!