Thursday, July 19, 2018

A Couple of Duncan's Blog Flies Have Accused Me Of Knowing Nothing About "Serious Music"

I have read a lot of stuff this week to prepare posts and my eyes need a rest.  Here's a little piece I wrote in 2012.  I've given a few links that weren't in the original.   I especially recommend listening to the second one, a link to a Youtube of the recordings Eduard Stuermann made of Schoenberg's piano pieces, they are incredibly deep interpretations, beginning with the Op. 11.  Stuermann was one of Schoenberg's closest associates, he coached him on all of the piano works, I believe.  Some of the other links, like the one of Transfigured Night, are to live performances which I liked.  

Denying We Have Placed Ourselves On The Edge of Extinction: The Book of the Hanging Gardens

Alfred Brendel,  that great pianist,  once said that the reason Arnold Schoenberg's music was disliked wasn't that it was cold "musical mathematics", the most unoriginal of frequently parroted attempts at musical put downs*.   Brendel said that Schoenberg's music was hated because it was some of the most intensely emotional music ever written.   I  recall he mentioned the mono-drama Erwartung  and the early Three Pieces op.11 as examples.   Anyone who is really familiar with those pieces of  extremely condensed emotion expressed in  ultra-saturated, chromatic melody and harmony would find his description of Schoenberg's music confirmed.   It is some of the most emotionally intense music ever composed.

I've loved Schoenberg's music since the first time I heard the quintet arrangement of the First Chamber Symphony as a teenager.  It grabbed me in the third measure and it has never let me go.   The orchestral versions of it are even more intense. 

The Book of the Hanging Gardens is a song cycle from around the same time.  I've been listening to it for decades and have played piano for some of the songs.   I love the music very much for the same reasons I do every one of Schoenberg's published pieces.  It is extremely beautiful, the production of a musical genius of the same order as Beethoven or Debussy.   Milton Babbitt once said that fifty years after its composition,  music was till trying to come up to it.   The ensuing decades haven't done anything to resolve that situation.   But it is  not an easy work to love, being extremely disturbing.  Disturbing in a way that so far surpasses a superficially unsettling, lesser experience that it's really inadequate to describe what I mean.  It isn't merely in the sound or the words or the interplay of those, it is in the entire context of the work, its two creators and the context of all of them in the very real world of their creation.  The rest of this post is an attempt to merely begin at a description of what I mean when I say that.  Trying, as well,  to give some, small description of  the scope of Arnold Schoenberg's intellectual and artistic capacity, his position in intellectual and musical history and what the failure to listen to him tells us about us.   There is no recent creative genius I'm aware of who was so engaged in external world and who consciously and,  I would guess, unconsciously expressed that world in their art. 

The poetry that Schoenberg set is by the very deeply ambiguous and often repulsive Stefan George*.  There is no other possible description but that it is decadent.   It always seems to be pulled between sublimity and an abyss of destructive self-indulgence.  Schoenberg's music more surely is on the side of the sublime, though it openly chooses to involve itself in the amoral pit that the text plays on. 

George was enough of a fascist that when the Nazis took over Goebbels offered him the leadership of the Academy of Arts.    George refused.   Some think his refusal was not based in moral clarity but in his being enough of an effete aristocrat that he disdained the vulgarity of the Nazis.    He left Germany for Switzerland, not being able to tolerate the Nazis but not openly resisting them, dying within the year.      He had associates and followers who were Jewish (though George was somewhat antisemetic),  Nazis, anti-Nazi fascist (some of them were involved in a plot to kill Hitler).... He was also someone who was semi-openly gay even as the Nazis were beginning their oppression of gay people.   He was nostalgic for the declining Germanic military aristocracy.  I recall reading that he was attended by a Junker at his deathbed but am not sure if that's a myth or the truth.

Schoenberg's choice of poetry in many of his vocal works is extremely troubling or at least strange.   His colleague and associate Eduard Stuermann talked about how the extreme decadence of the poetry of Pierrot Lunaire seemed to inspire him, even as Schoenberg expressed skepticism about using it ("We'll have nothing to do with that!").  In that case the choice of poetry was the choice of Albertine Zehme, who commissioned the piece so she could perform it but, despite his misgivings, Stuermann said that something in the decadent poetry inspired Schoenberg.  He also pointed to his settings of George as another example.   As anyone can hear,  Schoenberg transformed such bizarre material into something that is emblematic of the intellectual climate and the disordered times.   The premier of Pierrot was 1912, two years before the First World War demolished the world Schoenberg grew up in.   He seems to have read the signs of the time and saw where they led.

I've repeatedly wondered why he would choose to set someone he must have known was as morally tainted as George.   The best I've come up with is that he was expressing the intensely troubled moral ambiguity of the period he was living in.   The absolute morality of  traditional religion was considered passe in his circles and with it an absolute sense of morality.   Much of philosophical writing during his life was the full and far from pure flowering of a brutal materialism that outright rejected morality in favor of a bloody interpretation of natural selection with individual, social and national expressions of its assumptions. 

And that was only one of the many streams of thought current in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century.   Many of those were anything from morally ambiguous to amoral to reveling in the depravity in the wake of an asserted death of morality.   As well there were the intersecting ambiguities of vision promoted by the pseudo-science of psychology as well as the alien, though far less ambiguous, findings of physics.**

Schoenberg lived in that milieu and he was certainly well aware of it.   He was a thoroughly modern man of his times, extremely well cultured and yet not of the same world.  And in Vienna from the late 19th century, through the first decades of the 20th century, the degenerating Austrian empire with its over-ripe to rotting brilliance, the First World War, the aftermath with the staggering inflation and material deprivation, the turn into fascism with the failure of impractical attempts at democracy and the League of Nations, and into the Nazi period and the Second world war,  exile in the United States,  the after war years and into the very beginning of the casual decadence of Southern California in the 1950s,  Schoenberg's witness was almost incomprehensibly broad.   Over all of that was the steady rise of scientific racism, antisemitism, racing to the horrible epoch of the Holocaust, something which endangered and impinged on him, interacting with choices he had made earlier in his life.  Beginning as a somewhat secular Jew, Schoenberg converted to Catholicism in time to have history make that choice extremely troubling in far more than just its implications.    He reconverted to Judaism in response to the Holocaust and wrote several of his greatest works as a direct result of facing the meaning of the history of the 1920s through the Second World War and its aftermath.   For a composer who was dealing so intensely with life in the last years of the 19th century (Transfigured Night),  experiencing the subsequent decades with a high degree of knowledge, intellectual and moral discernment, it is not any surprise that the musical language he expressed his experience in would become far more emotional as time went on.   By the time he reaches clarity in his reconversion compositions,  Schoenberg did more to express the first half of the 20th century than any artist in any medium.  His music expresses more about the subsequent years, under serious consideration, than anyone else I'm familiar with.   By comparison, few others can come away without seeming, in some way, less serious or even trivial.  When he arrives at  his final compositions there is a sense that he had made his final choice, he had committed to a moral vision if not a path in response to  as clear a view of the alternative as aware humanity has ever had.   The issues of moral choice that he faced, squarely, in his music, if not in life,  are unfashionable, rejected as old fashioned and unscientific.   That refusal to choose is a continuation of the same moral failure that led to the disasters of the 20th century.

To ignore Schoenberg's interpretation of his time,  the view of an extremely cultured artist, dealing directly with the horrors and moral issues that are made more exigent from our refusal to learn from our recent past is an indictment of our current intellectual life.   Refusing to hear an artist dealing directly with the dangers of leaning over and looking into the most profound abyss our species has created for our world in a way that is brave, unsparing and absolutely human, is an act of intellectual and moral cowardice.   The failure of the alleged intellectual class to engage with it is a symptom of the failure of our intellectual elite.   An intellectual class that remains indifferent to Arnold Schoenberg betrays its shallowness as certainly as any class that rejects the scientific or mathematical accomplishments of his time.   Imagine if the intelligentsia of the 19th century had rejected Beethoven and you can see what it means.  Considering Schoenberg's macrocosmic address of real life as it deals with issues of life and death,  morality and depravity,  that indifference is a manifestation of complete cowardice and self indulgence.  It is a choice for what lies in the dead abyss,  beyond the the garden terrace. 

* I'm aware of a form of that charge going back to at least the late 18th century.

** I am writing another post about the intersection between these and moral reform with the far from untroubled results.

16 comments:

  1. Arnold Schoenberg ≠ Harold C. Schonberg

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    1. Of course not. One was among the greatest composes in the history of Western Music, the was only a rather conservative newspaper music critic.

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  2. "Beginning as a somewhat secular Jew, Schoenberg converted to Catholicism in time to have history make that choice extremely troubling in far more than just its implications. He reconverted to Judaism in response to the Holocaust."

    Cue The Church Lady: "Well, how conVEEEEEEEEnient."

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    1. Let me guess, you copied that from some unfunny comedian. Though it's not much of a guess as that's where you get everything.

      So, you're saying Schoenberg should have remained a Catholic instead of returning to Judaism. How anti-Semitic of you.

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  3. "Let me guess, you copied that from some unfunny comedian."

    You didn't get the Church Lady reference? Okay, you're a cultural illiterate. That we already knew.

    But you're also stark raving bonkers and the least morally self-aware person in modern history.

    Kudos, my pathetic friend!!!

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  4. Simp's idea of high kulcha, some lame comedy routine, probably from Saturday Night Live, his idea of Moliere.

    When did you start using the royal "we"? I'm surprised you're not capitalizing it.

    Blah, blah *high school level insults* blah, blah. . . The erudition of Simels.

    So, Simps, when are you going to produce those citations you failed to produce last night? For you never would be too early, wouldn't it.

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  5. Citations? Get back to me when have some proving that Charles Darwin influenced the Spanish Inquisition and the entire history of European Christian anti-Semitism before 1800.

    You're insane, Sparkles. Period.

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    1. I don't think you know more about the Spanish Inquisition than you saw on a Monty Python skit and you heard an anti-Catholic bigot who knew no more than you did on the topic blow out his pie hole. In short, you're like most of the college credentialed idiots of our generation who never bothered to look up primary sourcing of much of anything. Ours is a generation of people made stupid by TV. You more than most.

      You are mentally deficient, Simps, though so are your audience, for the most part. The, maybe, 4 non-dolts that Duncan has left in his regulars certainly know you're an idiot but they're not really interested enough in the truth to bother to refute you.

      The Darwinist content in Nazism is so high that there really isn't any room for something as remote as the Spanish inquisition in Nazi eugenics.

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  6. Right. So there was no history of European Christian anti-Semitism before 1800. And thus it has nothing to do with the Nazis and the Holocaust. Glad we've got that settled.

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    1. First, this is your typical means of lying, to pretend that someone said something they never said, it's something you can see Trump doing about six times a week, you and he are essentially similar simpletons.

      Second, in order to see what inspired Nazis to murder Jews you have to see what they said about it, it's the only means of finding out what their reasons were. They said what those were, they had nothing to do with Christianity it had everything to do with contemporary biology, as Rudlph Hess said, "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology." He didn't say it was applied Christianity, he said it was applied biology. So did Hitler, so did all of the rest of them.

      I know someone as bigoted and mentally incapable as you are can't do even the light lifting it would take to comprehend that idea, but that's how it is.

      They did cite Tacitus, as I've pointed out, something which many scholars of Nazism have pointed out, only you've only skimmmed one book on the Nazi period, one that was written before the institution of the Final Solution, so you don't have the first idea about those kinds of things. And, as I proved on one of our go rounds over Berlin Diary, you obviously didn't read the whole thing as you didn't know what was in the book.

      You are a TV addled boob who thinks movies are the equivalent of grad school.

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  7. "In order to see what inspired Nazis to murder Jews you have to see what they said about it, it's the only means of finding out what their reasons were. They said what those were, they had nothing to do with Christianity it had everything to do with contemporary biology, as Rudlph Hess said, "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology." He didn't say it was applied Christianity, he said it was applied biology. So did Hitler, so did all of the rest of them. "

    A statement that could only be made by a jerkoff Goyim. Sorry, Sparky -- they did it because they were anti-Semites from generations and generations and generations of European Christian anti-Semites. Darwin was a convenient then contemporary excuse, not a sudden erruption of bigotry.

    Good fucking Jeebus, how can you not understand that?

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    1. You really are a totally fucking idiot, aren't you, Simps. What do you think, you can find out why someone does something by totally ignoring what they said about it? What do you propose instead, pulling it out of your ass, where you come up with everything you said.

      You don't understand natural selection, do you. You don't know the first thing, you only know that you're supposed to hate Christians because that's the side of bigotry you grew up in. You're really no different from the Republican racist yahoos, you're just a Yahoo from Jersey instead of Alabama so it's a different focus of your ignorant bigotry.

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  8. Here's a clue, Sparkles -- the only genuine in my face anti-Semites I've ever had to deal with in my life have been shithead suburban Irish Catholics. Trust me -- when that gets up in your stuff, you tend to find it offensive.

    Get back to me when you've had a similar experience from one of my Red Sea Pedestrian co-culturalists. Which I guarantee was never.

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    1. Hey, were they boys, why don't you hate boys. They were white, why don't you hate white people. They were city boys, why don't you hate city boys. I've known lots of asshole bigots from the New York City area, the biggest asshole racist, bigot of a gay man I met from New York City, he was Jewish, does that mean I get to hate Jews and blame them for what the fucking Brits did in Ireland?

      You whining about someone else being offensive, is like Trump whining that someone isn't being fair to him, you are the biggest asshole at Duncans, and considering some of your fellow a-holes at Baby Blue, that's saying something.

      Of course, just about every Jewish person around here who I've met is a nice guy, so I don't think that the ones like you are assholes because they're Jewish, though, as I said, lots of the people I've known from NYC were total assholes, ignorant, bigoted, parochial snobs whose only achievement in life was being born where they were. You are that kind of asshole, Simels, you have never worked hard enough to learn something to have that kind of achievement, you've never done anything important except scribble a few copied words about pop music in some stupid ad-flyer and lie about things like having met people there who committed suicide before you worked there. The only people who are impressed with you are people who are as ignorant as you are over at the mutual admiration club at Duncan's.

      You know what I call an ignorant, bigoted Jewish guy from the lesser, greater New York City area? I call him an asshole bigot, exactly what I call the ones from anywhere who are Catholics, Protestant, etc. All assholes come from the same place, the same one you find everything you pretend to know about things like the origin of Nazi eugenics.

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  9. Wow.

    Seriously — has anybody else ever read anything else so obviously nutso bigoted?

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    1. Hey, Simps, I know how fixated you are on yourself and your scribblage, focus on what I said, not on what you did.

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