Charles Ives (1874-1954)

(Ives at 15 [1889], two years before the composition of Variations on America)

Charles Edward Ives (b. October 20, 1874, Danbury, CT – May 19, 1954) was born in Danbury, Connecticut, the son of George Ives, a U.S. Army bandleader in the American Civil War, and his wife Mary Parmelee. The father's unusual music lessons were a strong influence on the young composer. George Ives took an open-minded approach to musical theory, encouraging his son to experiment in bitonal and polytonal harmonizations. Charles would often sing a song in one key, while his father accompanied in another key. It was from his father that Charles Ives also learned the music of Stephen Foster.

Ives became a church organist at the age of 14 and wrote various hymns and songs for church services, including his Variations on America (1891, published in 1949), which he premiered at a recital celebrating the Fourth of July. The piece takes the tune (which is also known as My Country Tis of Thee, and the national anthem of the United Kingdom: God Save the King or God Save the Queen) through a series of witty and sharply-varied permutations,


including an opening 3/4 fanfare,


a bitonal (one of the first) nightmare,


a gimpy 6/8 frolic,


and a Spanish romp.



Melodically, F harmonic minor: Do Do Re Ti Do Re Me Me Fa Me Re Do Re Do Ti Do
Harmonically, i iio6 V7 i6 V7 i iio6 i64 V7 i iio6 i6 V7 i to M6 downbeat

William Schuman arranged the work for orchestra in 1964, heard here in an abbreviated form.

***

Ives moved to New Haven in 1893, graduating from the Hopkins School, and enrolling the next year (September 1894) at Yale University, studying under Horatio Parker. On November 4, Ives's father died, dealing a blow to the young composer, who idealized his father, and to a large degree continued the musical experimentation begun by him, writing The Circus Band (1896), and Symphony No. 1 in D Minor as a senior thesis under Parker's supervision.


Upon graduation in 1899, Ives began working for the insurance agency of Charles H. Raymond & Co, and found a much more radical approach, in such works as Psalm 100 (1899), with its strident "Make a Joyful Noise" bitonality (C: I bII bVII I in the lower chorus against C: I in upper -- with bII and bVII being simply alarming upper and lower neighbor chords (the lamentably distorted recording below excerpts the beginning and the end of the work).



***

In Symphony No. 2 (1902, though an analysis of handwriting and manuscript paper suggests 1907-1909), Ives utilized musical quotes (such as in IV. Allegro molto's use of Lowell's Mason's When I Survey the Wondrous Cross; and Columbia, Gem of the Ocean), unusual phrasing and orchestration, and a blatantly dissonant 11-tone chord at the close.



***

Symphony No. 3 ("The Camp Meeting") (1904)

***

Central Park in the Dark (1906) evokes an evening of Manhattan nightclubs in Manhattan (playing popular music, including ragtime and Hello, My Baby by Joseph E. Howard [1878-1961]) against the mysterious dark and misty qualities of the Central Park woods, played by the strings. The string harmony uses shifting chord structures in tertial, quartal, and quintal harmonies. Near the end of the piece the remainder of the orchestra builds up to a grand chaos ending on a dissonant chord, leaving the string section to end the piece save for a brief violin duo superimposed over the unusual chord structures.

1907 saw the failure of Raymond & Co. and the first of Ives's bout with bad health (characterized as "heart attacks" by his family). At this time, Ives and friend Julian W. Myrick formed their own insurance agency Ives & Co., which later became Ives & Myrick, where he remained until he retired.

During his career as an insurance executive, Ives laid the foundation of estate planning, achieving considerable fame and wealth (many of his profession were surprised to learn that he was also a composer). In his spare time he composed music and, until his marriage, worked as an organist in Danbury and New Haven as well as Bloomfield, New Jersey, and New York City.

**


In The Unanswered Question (1908), the strings play very slow, chorale-like music throughout ("the silence of the druid"), as a trumpet occasionally iterates a short motif described as "the eternal question of existence." With each question comes increasingly shrill outbursts from the flutes -- apart from the last, which remains, yes, unanswered. The three disparate instrumental resources are designated to be spatially separate in performance (the recording below is of the final "make fun of the question" wind response, and the final insistent utterance of the trumpet).



Leonard Bernstein even borrowed its title for his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1973.

**

In 1908, Ives married Harmony Twitchell and moved into an apartment in New York, continuing a remarkably successful career in insurance, and prolific, though unacknowledged, compositional life, until he suffered several heart attacks in 1918, after which he composed very little.

***

Piano Sonata No. 1 (c. 1909)

Piano Trio (c. 1909–10)

Violin Sonata No. 1 (c. 1910)

Violin Sonata No. 4 ("Children's Day at the Camp Meeting") (c. 1911)

Robert Browning Overture (c. 1912)


String Quartet No. 2 (c. 1913)

A Symphony ("New England Holidays"): The Fourth of July (1913) (The cacophonous, concluding fireworks display in contrary musics, with a sputtering out of ashes in descending strings)



General William Booth Enters Into Heaven [Are You Washed] (c. 1913) (the calm finale depicting the founder of the Salvation army's encounter with the Almighty in the Hereafter - in a diffuse trombonic setting of the revivalist hymn Are You Washed in the Blood -- and henceforth, marching on with his poor vagabonds to the dissonant downbeats of piano drumming)



Three Places in New England (Orchestral Set No. 1) (1914): II. Putnam's Camp (two excerpts in contrary George-Ives-marching-band style bimetrics, sometimes utilizing two conductors or two hands with a memorized score)



Violin Sonata No. 2 (c. 1914)

Violin Sonata No. 3 (c. 1914)

Orchestral Set No. 2 (c. 1915)

***

Ives described his Piano Sonata No. 2 ("Concord, Massachusetts, 1840-60") (1915) as an "impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over a half century ago...undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne."

Rhythmically and harmonically, the work is adventurous, right down to its optional parts for flute and viola. In the second movement, Ives instructs the pianist to use a 14¾ in piece of wood to produce a dense but generally very soft cluster chord. III. Alcotts demonstrates Ives's fondness for the opening movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 , with multiple dramatic usages.



***


Symphony No. 4 (1916) [Quotation, Density, Fugue]
I. Prelude. Maestoso (for three contrary ensembles - offstage chamber group, onstage orchestra, and chorus singing the advent hymn Watchman Tell Us of the Night)



II. Comedy. Allegretto (a hustle-bustle of contrary musics)



III. Fugue. Andante moderato con moto

Beginning (an intentionally academic fugue, on the hymn tune From Greenland's Icy Mountains, noted in large pseudo-archaic note values -- subsidiary theme on another church melody, Crown Him Lord of All)



Ending (featuring an interior section of G.F. Handel's Joy to the World as its conclusion)



IV.



A complete performance of the symphony was not given until 1965, almost half a century after the symphony was completed, and more than a decade after Ives' death.

***

Serenity (1919) [Chant]

***

Ives's Concord Sonata and its accompanying prose volume, Essays Before a Sonata were privately printed in 1920.

In 1922, Ives published his 114 Songs, at his own expense, which represents the breadth of his work as a composer, including highly dissonant works such as The Majority. After seeing the volume during the 1930's, Aaron Copland published a newspaper article praising the collection.

***

Three Quarter-Tone Piano Pieces (1923) [This work, for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart, is an early example of microtonality in 20th-Century art music, and a jokey one at that, with quotations of America (My Country Tis Of Thee) once again]



***

Ives wrote his last piece, the song Sunrise, in August of 1926.

According to his wife, one day in early 1927 he came downstairs with tears in his eyes: he could compose no more, he said, "nothing sounds right." There have been numerous theories advanced to explain the silence of his late years, which seems as mysterious as the last several decades of the life of Jean Sibelius, who also stopped composing at almost the same time. While Ives had stopped composing, and was increasingly plagued by health problems, he did continue to revise and refine his earlier work, sometimes adding suspiciously modernist touhes to older works, as well as oversee premieres of his music.

After continuing health problems, including diabetes, in 1930 he retired from insurance, giving him more time to devote to his musical work, but unable to write any new music.

Remarkably, Ives, who actually avoided the radio and the phonograph, agreed to make a series of piano recordings from 1933 to 1943 that were later issued by Columbia Records on a special LP set issued for Ives' centenary in 1974 (New World Records issued 42 tracks of Ives's recordings on CD on April 1, 2006).

Ives continued to acquire more public recognition during the 1930's, with performances of a chamber orchestra version of his Three Places in New England both in the U.S. and on tour in Europe by conductor Nicholas Slonimsky and the New York Town Hall premiere of his Piano Sonata No. 2 by John Kirkpatrick in 1939, which led to favorable commentary in major New York newspapers.

At this time, Ives was also promoted by Bernard Herrmann, who worked as a conductor at CBS and in 1940 became principal conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra.


This was the decade when he met Lou Harrison, who began to edit and promote Ives's music, conducting the premiere of Symphony No. 3 (1904) in 1946. The following year, the work won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the composer giving away the money away (half of it to Harrison), saying "prizes are for boys, and I'm all grown up."



Ives revised and published his Concord Sonata in 1947 .


In 1951, Leonard Bernstein conducted the world premiere of Symphony No. 2 in a broadcast concert by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra; the Ives heard the performance on their cook's radio and were amazed at the audience's warm reception to the music.

Ives died in 1954 in New York City.

He left behind material for an unfinished Universe Symphony, which he was unable to assemble in his lifetime despite two decades of work, due as much to shifting conceptionsof the work as to ill health. There have been several attempts at completion or performing version.

Universe takes the ideas in the Symphony No. 4 to a higher level, with complex cross rhythms and layered dissonance along with unusual instrumental combinations.

Ives's music was largely ignored during his lifetime as an active composer, but since then his reputation has greatly increased.

One of the more damning words one could use to describe music in Ives's view was "nice", and his famous remark "use your ears like men!" seemed to indicate that he did not care about his reception. But Ives was interested in popular reception, but on his own terms.

Early supporters included Henry Cowell, Elliott Carter and Aaron Copland. Cowell's periodical New Music published a substantial number of Ives' scores (with the composer's approval), but for almost 40 years Ives had few performances that he did not arrange or back, generally with Nicolas Slonimsky as the conductor.

Later, around the time of the composer's death in 1954, Kirkpatrick teamed with soprano Helen Boatwright for the first extended recorded recital of Ives' songs for the obscure Overtone label (Overtone Records catalog number 7). Boatwright and Kirkpatrick recorded a new selection of songs for the Ives Centennial Collection that Columbia Records published in 1974.

Leopold Stokowski took on the Symphony No. 4 in 1965, regarding the work as "the heart of the Ives problem"; the Carnegie Hall world premiere by the American Symphony Orchestra led to the work's first recording.

Another major promotor of Ives was choral conductor Gregg Smith, who made a series of recordings of the composer's shorter works during the 1960s, including first stereo recordings of the psalm settings and arrangements of many short pieces for theater orchestra. During the 1960's, the Juilliard String Quartet recorded the two string quartets.

Michael Tilson Thomas is an enthusiastic exponent of Ives's symphonies as is composer and biographer Jan Swafford.

In 1991, Connecticut's legislature designated Ives as that state's official composer.

Musicologist D. G. Porter reconstructed a piano concerto, the Emerson Concerto, from Ives's sketches. A recording of the work was released by Naxos Records.

Ives was a great supporter of 20th-century music. This he did in secret, telling his beneficiaries it was really his wife who wanted him to do so. Nicolas Slonimsky said in 1971, "He financed my entire career."

[8875 Ravel / 8874 Charles Ives / 8874 Holst]

Gustav Holst (1874-1934) - The Planets (1916)

Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

The Planets (1916)

I. Mars



IV. Jupiter





VII. Neptune





Gustav Theodore Holst (September 21, 1874 - May 25, 1934) was an English composer and was a music teacher for nearly 20 years. He is most famous for his orchestral suite The Planets.

Having studied at the Royal College of Music in London, his early work was influenced by Ravel, Grieg, Richard Strauss, and fellow student Ralph Vaughan Williams,] but most of his music is highly original, with influences from Hindu spiritualism and English folk tunes.

Holst's music is well known for unconventional use of meter and haunting melodies.

Holst wrote almost 200 catalogued compositions, including orchestral suites, operas, ballets, concertos, choral hymns, and songs.

Holst became music master at St Paul's Girls' School in 1905 and director of music at Morley College in 1907, continuing in both posts until retirement.

He was the brother of Hollywood actor Ernest Cossart and father of the composer and conductor Imogen Holst, who wrote a biography of her father in 1938.

He was originally named Gustavus Theodor von Holst, but he dropped the "von" from his name in response to anti-German sentiment in Britain during World War I, making it official by deed poll in 1918

Holst was born at 4 Clarence Road, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England to a family of Swedish extraction (by way of Latvia and Russia). The house was opened as a museum of Holst's life and times in 1974. He was educated at Cheltenham Grammar School for Boys.

Holst's grandfather, Gustavus von Holst of Riga, Latvia, a composer of elegant harp music, moved to England, becoming a notable harp teacher.

Holst's father Adolph von Holst, an organist, pianist, and choirmaster, taught piano lessons and gave recitals; and his mother, Clara von Holst, who died when Gustav was eight, was a singer.[5] As a frail child whose early recollections were musical, Holst had been taught to play piano and violin, and began composing when he was about 12.

Holst's father was the organist at All Saints' Church in Pittville, and his childhood home is now a small museum, devoted partly to Holst, and partly to illustrating local domestic life of the mid-19th century.

Holst grew up in the world of Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Conan Doyle, Gauguin, Monet, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Puccini. Both he and his sister learned piano from an early age, but Holst, stricken with a nerve condition that affected the movement of his right hand in adolescence, gave up the piano for the trombone, which was less painful to play.

He attended the newly relocated Royal College of Music in London on a scholarship, studying with Charles V. Stanford, and there in 1895 he met fellow student and lifelong friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose own music was mainly quite different from Holst’s, but whose praise for his work was abundant and who later shared an interest in Holst teaching the English vocal and choral tradition (folk song, madrigals, and church music).

Holst was influenced during these years by socialism, and attended lectures and speeches by George Bernard Shaw, with whom he shared a passion for vegetarianism, and by William Morris, both of whom were among the UK's most outspoken supporters of the socialist movement.

It was also during these years that Holst became interested in Hindu mysticism and spirituality, and this interest was to influence his later works, including Sita (1899–1906, a three-act opera based on an episode in the Ramayana), Sāvitri, a chamber opera based on a tale from the Mahabharata, and Hymns from the Rig Veda, in preparation for which he took lessons in Sanskrit at University College London and acquired enough understanding to be able to make his own adaptations of Sanskrit texts.

To earn a living in the period before he had a satisfactory income from his compositions, he played the trombone in the Carl Rosa Opera Company and in a popular orchestra called the White Viennese Band, conducted by Stanislas Wurm. The music was cheap and repetitive and not to Holst's liking, and he referred to this kind of work as "worming" and regarded it as "criminal". His need to "worm" came to an end as his compositions became more successful, and his income was given stability by his teaching posts.

During these early years, he was influenced greatly by the poetry of Walt Whitman, as were many of his contemporaries, and set his words in The Mystic Trumpeter (1904). He also set to music poetry by Thomas Hardy and Robert Bridges.

In 1905, Holst was appointed Director of Music at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, London, where he composed the successful and still popular St Paul's Suite for the school orchestra in 1913.

In 1907, Holst also became director of music at Morley College.

These were the most important of his teaching posts, and he retained both until the end of his life.

During the first two decades of the 20th century, musical society as a whole (and Holst's friend Vaughan Williams in particular) became interested in old English folksongs, madrigal singers, and Tudor composers. Holst shared in his friend’s admiration for the simplicity and economy of these melodies, and their use in his compositions is one of his music’s most recognizable features.

Holst was an avid rambler. He walked extensively in Italy, France, and England. He also travelled outside the bounds of Europe, heading to French-controlled Algeria in 1906 on doctor's orders as a treatment for asthma and the depression that crippled him after his submission failed to win the Ricordi Prize, a coveted award for composition. His travels in the Arab and Berber land, including an extensive bicycle tour of the Algerian Sahara, inspired the suite Beni Mora, written upon his return.

After the lukewarm reception of his choral work The Cloud Messenger in 1912, Holst was again off travelling, financing a trip to Spain with fellow composers Balfour Gardiner and brothers Clifford Bax and Arnold Bax with funds from an anonymous donation. Despite being shy, Holst was fascinated by people and society, and had always believed that the best way to learn about a city was to get lost in it. In Gerona, Catalonia, he often disappeared, only to be found hours later by his friends having abstract debates with local musicians. It was in Spain that Clifford Bax introduced Holst to astrology, a hobby that was to inspire the later Planets suite. He read astrological fortunes until his death, and called his interest in the stars his "pet vice."

Shortly after his return, St Paul’s Girls School opened a new music wing, and Holst composed St Paul’s Suite for the occasion.

In 1913, Stravinsky premiered The Rite of Spring, sparking riots in Paris and caustic criticism in London. A year later, Holst first heard Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, an "ultra-modern" set of five movements employing "extreme chromaticism" (the consistent use of all 12 musical notes). Although he had earlier lampooned the stranger aspects of modern music, the new music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg influenced his work on The Planets.

Holst's compositions for wind band, though relatively small in number, guaranteed him a position as the medium's cornerstone, as seen in innumerable present-day programmes featuring his two Suites for Military Band. His one work for brass band, A Moorside Suite, remains an important part of the brass band repertoire.

Holst and wife Isobel bought a cottage in Thaxted, Essex and, surrounded by medieval buildings and ample rambling opportunities, he started work on the suite that would become his best known work, the orchestral suite The Planets. Holst conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the very first electrical recording of The Planets, in 1926, for HMV. Although, as his daughter Imogen noted, he couldn't quite achieve the gradual fade-out of women's voices and orchestra he had written (owing to the limitations of early electrical recording), it was a landmark recording of the work. The performance was later issued on LP and CD format.

At the onset of World War I, Holst tried to enlist but was rejected because of his bad eyes, bad lungs, and bad digestion. In wartime England, Holst was persuaded to drop the "von" from his name, as it aroused suspicion. His new music, however, was readily received, as "patriotic" and English music was demanded at concert halls, partly due to a ban on all "Teutonic" music.

Towards the end of the war he was offered a post within the YMCA’s educational work programme as musical director, and he set off for Salonica (present day Thessaloniki, Greece) and Constantinople in 1918. While he was teaching music to troops eager to escape the drudgery of army life, The Planets Suite was being performed to audiences back home. Shortly after his return after the war’s end, Holst composed Ode to Death, based upon a poem by Walt Whitman.

During the years 1920–1923, Holst's popularity grew through the success of The Planets and The Hymn of Jesus (1917) (based on the Apocryphal gospels), and the publication of a new opera, The Perfect Fool (a satire of a work by Wagner). Holst became something of "an anomaly, a famous English composer", and was busy with conducting, lecturing, and teaching obligations. He hated publicity; he often refused to answer questions posed by the press, and when asked for his autograph, handed out prepared cards that read, "I do not hand out my autograph". Always frail, after a collapse in 1923 he retired from teaching to devote the remaining 11 years of his life to composition.

In the following years, Holst took advantage of new technology to publicize his work through sound recordings and the BBC’s "wireless" broadcasts. In 1927, he was commissioned by the New York Symphony Orchestra to write a symphony. He took this opportunity to work on an orchestral piece based on Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, a work that would become Egdon Heath, and which would be first performed a month after Hardy’s death, in his memory. By this time, Holst was "going out of fashion", and the piece was poorly reviewed. However, Holst is said to have considered the short, subdued but powerful tone poem his greatest masterpiece. The piece has been much better received in recent years, with several recordings available.

Towards the end of his life, Holst wrote Choral Fantasia (1930), and he was commissioned by the BBC to write a piece for military band; the resulting Hammersmith was a tribute to the place where he had spent most of his life, a musical expression of the London borough (of Hammersmith), which begins with an attempt to recreate the haunting sound of the River Thames sleepily flowing its way.

Holst had a lifetime of poor health worsened by a concussion during a backward fall from the conductor's podium, from which he never fully recovered.

In his final four years, Holst grew ill with stomach problems. One of his last compositions, The Brook Green Suite, named after the land on which St Paul’s Girls’ School was built, was performed for the first time a few months before his death. Holst died on May 25, 1934, of complications following stomach surgery, in London.

His ashes were interred at Chichester Cathedral in West Sussex, with Bishop George Bell giving the memorial oration at the funeral.

In 2007, BBC Radio 4 produced a radio play by Martyn Wade called The Bringer of Peace, which is an intimate biographical portrait of Holst, with Adrian Scarborough in the lead role. The play follows his early dismay at his lack of composing success, to the creation of The Planets suite, with the play's seven tiers follow the structure of that work.

[8874 Ives / 8874 Holst / 8874 Schoenberg]

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)

[Arnold Schoenberg at 74, the year of A Survivor from Warsaw (1948)]

"My music is not modern, it is merely badly played."

"I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!"

Triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13) came honestly to Arnold Schoenberg from day one (b. Arnold Schönberg, September 13, 1874, Vienna, Austria), born to an Ashkenazi Jewish family in the Leopoldstadt district (in earlier times a Jewish ghetto), at Obere Donaustraße 5, and continuing to his death (July 13, 1951).


Although Schoenberg's mother Pauline, a native of Prague, was a piano teacher (his father Samuel, a native of Bratislava, was a shopkeeper), Arnold was largely self-taught, taking only counterpoint lessons with the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, who was to become his first brother-in-law.

In his 20's, Schoenberg converted to Lutheranism in 1898 and lived by orchestrating operettas while composing Two Songs for baritone, Op. 1 (1898); Four Songs, Op. 2 (1899); Six Songs, op. 3 (1899); and the string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), op. 4, (1899), which extended the traditionally opposed German romantic traditions of both Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms.

Fellow older post-romantics Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler recognized Schoenberg's significance as a composer --


Strauss when he encountered Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder (1903), and Mahler after hearing several early works. Strauss turned to a more conservative idiom in his own work after 1909 and at that point dismissed Schoenberg, but Mahler adopted Schoenberg as a protégé and continued to support him even after Schoenberg's style reached a point which Mahler could no longer understand (the elder composer even worried about what would be the fate of the younger after Mahler's passing). Schoenberg, who had initially despised and mocked Mahler's music, was converted by the "thunderbolt" of the Symphony No. 3, which the young firebrand considered a work of genius, and afterwards even spoke of the elder as a saint.

In Gurre-Leider, Schoenberg utilizes sprechstimme (song-speech) -- a form of heightened intonation, where pitches are touched upon and then immediately abandoned in upward or downward glissandi to the next noted pitch. This combination of semi-spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, was known as "melodrama," and it was a genre much in vogue at the end of the 19th Century.

***


Pelleas und Melisande, op. 5 (1903)

Eight Songs for soprano, op. 6 (1903)

String Quartet No. 1, D minor, op. 7 (1904)

***

Schoenberg began teaching harmony, counterpoint and composition in 1904. His first students were Paul Pisk, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg, the latter two ultimately constituting with their teacher a Second or New Viennese School, the first having been that triumvirate of G.F. Haydn, W.A. Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven.

***

Six Songs with orchestra, op. 8 (1905)

Kammersymphonie No. 1 in E Major, op. 9 (1906), premièred without incident the next year.

Two Ballads, op. 12 (1906)

Peace on Earth, op. 13 (1907)

Two Songs, op. 14 (1907)

***

After some early difficulties, Schoenberg began to win public acceptance, as at a Berlin performance in 1907 of the tone poem Pelleas und Melisande.

The summer of 1908, during which his wife Mathilde left him for several months for a young Austrian painter, Richard Gerstl (who committed suicide after her return to her husband and children), marked a distinct change in Schoenberg's work.


It was during the absence of his wife that he composed You Lean Against a Silver-Willow (Du Lehnest wider eine Silberweide), the 13th [!] song in the cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens [of Babylon]), op. 15, based on the collection of the same name by the German mystical poet Stefan George. This was the first composition without any reference to a key.

With this work, Schoenberg was at the brink of pantonal (Schoenberg's preferred term) or atonal (the critics' term - the one that caught on!) writing, with full-chromatic pitch collections alluding to no particular key or mode.

Also in this year, he completed String Quartet No. 2 in F-Sharp Minor (with Soprano), op. 10, whose opening movements, though chromatic in color, use traditional key signatures, yet closing sections, also settings of Stefan George, weaken the links with traditional tonality (though both movements end on tonic chords,) and, breaking with previous string-quartet practice, incorporate a soprano vocal line.


During these years, Schoenberg was also a painter of considerable ability, whose pictures were considered good enough to exhibit alongside those of Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, as part of the Blue Rider expressionist movement.

In a letter written to Ferruccio Busoni in 1909, Schoenberg expresses his reaction against the excesses of romanticism:

"My goal: complete liberation from form and symbols, context and logic.

Away with motivic work!

Away with harmony as the cement of my architecture!

Harmony is expression and nothing more.

Away with pathos!

Away with 24 pound protracted scores!

My music must be short.

Lean! In two notes, not built, but 'expressed.'

And the result is, I hope, without stylized and sterilized drawn-out sentiment.

That is not how man feels; it is impossible to feel only one emotion.

Man has many feelings, thousands at a time, and these feelings add up no more than apples and pears add up. Each goes its own way.

This multicoloured, polymorphic, unlogical nature of our feelings, and their associations, a rush of blood, reactions in our senses, in our nerves; I must have this in my music.

It should be an expression of feeling, as if really were the feeling, full of unconscious connections, not some perception of 'conscious logic.'

Now I have said it, and they may burn me."

***


Three Piano Pieces, op. 11 (1909)

***


Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16 (1909)

I. Premonitions



III. Summer Morning by a Lake



***


Erwartung, op. 17 (1909)

***

During the summer of 1910, Schoenberg wrote his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony, Schoenberg 1922), which to this day remains an influential study.

Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand or The Golden Touch) for Chorus and Orchestra, op. 18 (1910)

***


Each of the Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke (Six Little Piano Pieces), Op. 19 (1911) is aphoristically short, atonal (broadly speaking), and unique in character. All would loom large for Webern.

I. Leicht, zart (Light, delicate)
II. Langsam (Slow)
III. Sehr langsame (Very slow)
IV. Rasch, aber leicht (Brisk, but light)
V. Etwas rasch (Somewhat brisk)
VI. Sehr langsam (Very slow)

The first five movements were written in a single day, February 11, 1911 (note the numerology once again!). Shortly after Gustav Mahler died later that year in May, Schoenberg wrote the mournful sixth movement. The work was first performed on February 4, 1912 in Berlin, by Louis Closson, and published in 1913 with Universal Edition.

Interestingly, these Little Pieces were composed at the same time that Schoenberg was continuing work on his orchestration of the massive Gurre-Lieder. .

II. Langsam (just how atonal is this piece? -- the G-B ostinato could be an incomplete G chord and the final bass C-E a similar C. How about this analysis of the left hand... C: V i V i V #IVcluster IV bIII bII I, the latter a bizarre IM7 with the right hand)


III. Sehr langsame

VI. Sehr langsam (with its wonderful, frozen, often quartal harmony; strange resolutions; and final "like a breath" marking)

***

Herzgewächse (Foliage of the Heart) for Soprano, op. 20 (1911)

***


Dreimal Sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds 'Pierrot Lunaire', (Three Times Seven Poems from Albert Giraud's 'Pierrot Lunaire'"),


[Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) - Pierrot (c. 1719)]

commonly known as Pierrot Lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot), Op. 21, is a melodrama setting of 21 selected poems from Otto Erich Hartleben's German translation of Belgian-French writer Albert Giraud's cycle of French poems of the same name (1884). The work is between 35 and 40 minutes in duration.

A narrator (voice-type unspecified in the score, but traditionally performed by a soprano) delivers the poems in Sprechstimme.

The work originated in a commission by vocalist Albertine Zehme for a cycle for voice and piano, setting a series of poems by Giraud. Schoenberg began on March 12 and completed the work on July 9, 1912 (noted by one writer as "the barely credible span of six weeks"), having expanded the forces to an ensemble consisting of flute (doubling on a piccolo), clarinet (doubling on bass clarinet), violin (doubling on viola), cello, and piano.


After forty rehearsals, Schoenberg and Zehme (in Columbine dress) gave the premiere at the Berlin Choralion-saal on October 16, 1912. Reaction was predictably mixed, with Webern reporting whistling and laughing, but in the end "it was an unqualified success."

There was some criticism of blasphemy in the texts, to which Schoenberg responded, "If they were musical, not a single one would give a damn about the words. Instead, they would go away whistling the tunes."

The show took to the road throughout Germany and Austria later in 1912.

Pierrot is indeed three groups of seven poems: I. love, sex and religion; II. violence, crime, and blasphemy;


III. Pierrot's return home to Bergamo, with his past haunting him.

I. Mondestrunken (Moon-drunk)
II. Colombine
III. Der Dandy (The Dandy)
IV. Eine blasse Wäscherin (A Pale Washerwoman)
V. Valse de Chopin (Chopin Waltz)
VI. Madonna
VII. Der kranke Mond (The Sick Moon)

VIII. Nacht (Passacaglia) (Night)
IX. Gebet an Pierrot (Prayer to Pierrot)
X. Raub (Theft)
XI. Rote Messe (Red Mass)
XII. Galgenlied (Gallows Song)
XIII. Enthauptung (Beheading)
XIV. Die Kreuze (The Crosses)

XV. Heimweh (Homesick)
XVI. Gemeinheit! (Mean Trick!)
XVII. Parodie (Parody)
XVIII. Der Mondfleck (The Moonfleck)
XIX. Serenade
XX. Heimfahrt (Barcarole) (Journey Home)
XXI. O Alter Duft (O Ancient Scent)

Schoenberg's numerology comes to play again in great use of seven-note motifs throughout the work, while the ensemble (with conductor) comprises seven people. The piece is his opus 21, contains 21 poems, and was begun on March 12, 1912 ("12" as the inversion of "21"). Other key numbers in the work are three and thirteen: each poem consists of thirteen lines.

Pierrot uses a variety of older forms and techniques, including canon, fugue, rondo, passacaglia and free counterpoint. The poetry is a German version of a rondeau of the old French type with a double refrain. Each poem consists of three stanzas of 4 + 4 + 5 lines, with line 1 a Refrain (A) repeated as line 7 and line 13, and line 2 a second Refrain (B) repeated for line 8.

1. A
2. B
3.
4. (everything intervening as "C")
5.
6.
7. A
8. B
9.
10. (everything intervening as "D")
11.
12.
13. A

ABCABDA

The instrumentation of each song is varied such that no two successive numbers have the same combination of timbres. The entire ensemble plays together only during the last poem.
The atonal, expressionistic settings of the text, with their echoes of German cabaret, bring the poems vividly to life.

Pierrot Lunaire is a work that contains many paradoxes: the instrumentalists, for example, are soloists and an orchestra at the same time; Pierrot is both the hero and the fool, acting in a drama that is also a concert piece, performing cabaret as high art and vice versa with song that is also speech; and his is a male role sung by a woman, who shifts between the first and third persons.


I. Mondestrunken (Moon-drunk) (gotta love that ostinato!)



II. Colombine



III. Der Dandy (The Dandy)



IV. Eine blasse Wäscherin (A Pale Washerwoman)



V. Valse de Chopin



VI. Madonna




VII. Der kranke Mond (The Sick Moon)



VIII. Nacht (Passacaglia) (Night)



IX. Gebet an Pierrot (Prayer to Pierrot)




[Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) - The Red Look (1909)]

X. Raub (Theft/Loot)




[Black Mass]

XI. Rote Messe (Red Mass)




XII. Galgenlied (Gallows Song)




XIII. Enthauptung (Beheading/Decapitation)



XIV. Die Kreuze (The Crosses / Holy Crosses)



XV. Heimweh (Homesick / Nostalgia)




XVI. Gemeinheit! (Mean Trick! / Atrocity)



XVII. Parodie (Parody)



XVIII. Der Mondfleck (The Moonfleck)



XIX. Serenade



XX. Heimfahrt (Barcarole) (Journey Home / Homeward)



XXI. O Alter Duft (O Ancient Scent)



In 1940, Schoenberg recorded the work with Erika Stiedry-Wagner as the soloist. Other distinguished artists to record the cycle include Bethany Beardslee (Columbia Masterworks M2S 679) and Jan DeGaetani (1970).

The jazz singer Cleo Laine recorded Pierrot Lunaire in 1974, a version nominated for a classical Grammy Award.

The quintet of instruments used in Pierrot became the core ensemble for the The Fires of London, who formed in 1965 as The Pierrot Players to perform the work, and continued to concertize with a varied classical and contemporary repertory. The group performed works arranged for these instruments and commission new works especially to take advantage of this ensemble's instrumental colors, until it disbanded in 1987.

Over the years, other groups have continued to use this instrumentation professionally (current groups include Da Capo Chamber Players, eighth blackbird, Sounds New, the Emperion Players, and Earplay), and have built a large repertoire for the ensemble.

***

Four Songs for Voice and Orchestra, op. 22 (1913)

***

The Vienna première of the Gurre-Lieder on February 13[!], 1913 [!!], received an ovation that lasted a quarter of an hour, with Schoenberg give a laurel crown.

But the next month, on March 31 [the inversion of 13!] 1913 when Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1 was performed, in a concert featuring works by Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and Gustav Mahler, the thunderous applause contended with hisses and laughter during Webern's Six Pieces, op. 6. Though Zemlinsky's Four Maeterlinck Songs calmed the audience somewhat, according to a contemporary newspaper report, after Schoenberg's op. 9 "one could hear the shrill sound of door keys among the violent clapping and in the second gallery the first fight of the evening began". Later in the concert, during a performance of the Altenberg Lieder by Berg, fighting broke out after Schoenberg interrupted the performance to threaten removal by the police of any troublemakers. Mahler's Kindertotenlieder had to be cancelled after the police were called in.

World War I brought a crisis in development. Military service disrupted Schoenberg's life, such that was unable to work uninterrupted or over a period of time, and as a result he left many unfinished works and undeveloped "beginnings." At the age of 42 he found himself in the army. On one occasion, a superior officer demanded to know if he was "this notorious Schoenberg, then"; Schoenberg replied: "Beg to report, sir, yes. Nobody wanted to be, someone had to be, so I let it be me" (a reference to Schoenberg's apparent "destiny" as the "Emancipator of Dissonance").

The deteriorating relation between contemporary composers and the public led him to found the Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen in German) in Vienna in 1918. His aim was grandiose but scarcely selfish; he sought to provide a forum in which modern musical compositions could be carefully prepared and rehearsed, and properly performed under conditions protected from the dictates of fashion and pressures of commerce. From its inception through 1921, when it ended because of economic reasons, the Society presented 353 performances to paid members, sometimes at the rate of one per week, and during the first year and a half, Schoenberg did not allow any of his own works to be performed. Instead, audiences at the Society's concerts heard difficult contemporary compositions by Scriabin, Debussy, Mahler, Webern, Berg, Reger, and other leading figures of early 20th-century music.

By 1923, Schoenberg had developed a means of order which would enable his musical texture to become simpler and clearer, and this resulted in the "method of composition with twelve tones" in which the twelve pitches of the octave are regarded as equal, and no one note or tonality is given the emphasis it occupied in classical harmony. He regarded it as the equivalent in music of Albert Einstein's discoveries in physics, and Schoenberg announced it characteristically, during a walk with his friend Josef Rufer, when he said "I have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years."

This 12-tone, or dodecaphonic, system (an earlier scheme from Josef Matthias Hauer failed to catch on) was given the alternative name serialism by René Leibowitz and Humphrey Searle in 1947.

Works in this period include Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23 (1923 - note date and opus!); Serenade, Op. 24 (1923), Piano Suite, Op. 25 (1923), and Wind Quintet, Op. 26 (1924).

Following the 1924 death of composer Ferruccio Busoni, Schoenberg was appointed Director of a Master Class in Composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, taking up the post in 1926 after a bout with ill health. Among his notable students during this period were the composers Roberto Gerhard, Nikos Skalkottas, and Josef Rufer.

***

Four Pieces, op. 27 (1925)

Suite, op. 29 (1925)

***

Schoenberg was not fond of Russian (by this point, neoclassical) composer Igor Stravinsky, and in 1926 wrote a poem titled Der Neue Klassizismus (in which he derogates Neoclassicism and obliquely refers to Stravinsky as "Der kleine Modernsky"), utilized as text for the third of his Drei Satiren, op. 28.

Other works in this period include String Quartet No. 3, Op. 30 (1927); Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (1928); Von Heute auf Morgen (From Today to Tomorrow) opera in one act, Op. 32 (1928); Accompanying Music to a Film Scene, Op. 34 (1930); Six Pieces for Male Chorus, Op. 35 (1930, one of which, pertaining to cattle slaughter, presages the gas chambers); and Piano Pieces, Op. 33a & b (1931); and Three Songs, Op. 48 (1933)

Schoenberg continued in his Berlin position until the election of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in 1933, when his music was labeled (alongside jazz), as degenerate art, such that he was dismissed and forced into exile. His unfinished Moses und Aron, one of the first 12-tone operas, also dates to this year, and signals again his fear of the dreaded 13 (the original title being Moses und Aaron, 12+1 letters). Contrary to Schoenberg's reputation for strictness, this work, as others, draws on freely atonal or tonal materials.

The refugee emigrated to Paris, where he reaffirmed his Jewish faith; and thence to the United States in 1934, changing the spelling of his name from Schönberg. His first teaching position in the U.S. was at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston. He was then wooed by Los Angeles, where he taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, both of which later named a music building on their respective campuses Schoenberg Hall.

The expatriate settled in Brentwood Park, where he befriended fellow composer (and tennis partner) George Gershwin, declining to teach him, after he noted their disparate incomes (Gershwin's music was by far more money-making). Film composer Leonard Rosenman studied with Schoenberg at this time, as did John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Owen Reed.

Perhaps it is less of a surprise that Schoenberg became interested in movies during these years, particularly Hopalong Cassidy films, which Paul Buhle and David Wagner attribute to the films' left-wing screenwriters - a rather odd claim in light of Schoenberg's statement that he was a bourgeois turned monarchist.

During this final period Schoenberg composed a number of works, including a formidable Violin Concerto, Op. 36 (1936); String Quartet No. 4, Op. 37 (1936); and Kammersymphonie (Chamber Symphony) No. 2, E-Flat Minor, Op. 38 (1939).

The composer feared he would die during a year that was a multiple of 13. He so dreaded his 65th birthday in 1939 that his horoscope was prepared by composer-astrologer Dane Rudhyar, who told Schoenberg that the year was dangerous, but not fatal.

Somehow he carried on, writing Kol Nidre, Op. 39, for chorus and orchestra (1938); and Variations on a Recitative for Organ, Op. 40 (1941)

After becoming a naturalized citizen of the United States, Schoenberg composed Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, for Voice, Piano, and String Quartet, Op. 41 (1942); Piano Concerto, Op. 42 (1942); Theme and Variations for Band, Op. 43a (1943, transcribed for Orchestra as Op. 43b); Prelude to “Genesis” for Chorus and Orchestra, Op. 44 (1945); and String Trio, Op. 45 (1946).

***


A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46 (1947)

Beginning, surreal fanfares, sprechstimme, and a haunting premonition of the Shema Israel



Ending, with the full defiant statement of the creed



***

Fantasy for Violin and Piano, op. 47 (1949).

Schoenberg's serial technique of composition with 12 notes became one of the most central and polemical issues among American and European musicians during the mid- to late-20th century. Beginning in the late 1940's and continuing to the present day, composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Milton Babbitt have extended Schoenberg's legacy in increasingly radical directions. The major cities in the United States (such as Los Angeles, New York, and Boston) have been hosts for historically significant performances of Schoenberg's music, with advocates such as Babbitt and Schoenberg's own pupils, who have taught at major American schools (e.g. Leonard Stein at USC, UCLA and CalArts; Richard Hoffmann at Oberlin; Patricia Carpenter at Columbia; and Leon Kirchner and Earl Kim at Harvard). In Europe, the work of René Leibowitz has had a measurable influence in spreading Schoenberg's musical legacy outside of Germany and Austria.

***

Dreimal Tausend Jahre (Three Times a Thousand Years), Op. 50a (1949)

Psalm 130 “De Profundis”, Op. 50b (1950)

Modern Psalm, Op. 50c (1950, unfinished)

***

Superstition may have triggered Schoenberg's death. In 1950, on his 76 (7+6=13) birthday, an astrologer wrote Schoenberg a note warning him that the year was a critical one. This stunned and depressed the composer, for up to that point he had only been wary of multiples of 13 and never considered adding the digits of his age.

On Friday, 13 July 1951, Schoenberg stayed in bed -- sick, anxious and depressed. In a letter to Schoenberg's sister Ottilie, dated 4 August 1951, his wife, Gertrud, reported "About a quarter to 12 I looked at the clock and said to myself: another quarter of an hour and then the worst is over. Then the doctor called me. Arnold's throat rattled twice, his heart gave a powerful beat and that was the end." Gertrud reported the next day in a telegram to her sister-in-law Ottilie that Arnold died at 11:45pm, although rumor has it that it was actually 13 minutes before midnight....


[Schoenberg's grave in the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna]

Arnold Schoenberg's daughter, Nuria Dorothea, married Luigi Nono in 1955.

Many Schoenberg practices, including the formalization of compositional method, and his habit of openly inviting audiences to think analytically, are echoed in avant-garde musical thought throughout the 20th and into the 21 Century. Schoenberg's often polemical views of music history and aesthetics were crucial to many later musicologists and critics, including Theodor Adorno, Charles Rosen, and Carl Dahlhaus.

The Schoenberg archival legacy is collected at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna.

[8874 Holst / 8874 Schoenberg / 8873 Handy]