Context
From "New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea"
Arnold Schoenberg
The first three of these four concepts have been widely used in the last twenty-five years, while not so much ado has been made about the fourth, idea.
Unfortunately, methods in music teaching, instead of making students thoroughly acquainted with the music itself, furnish a conglomerate of more or less true historical facts, sugarcoated with a great number of more or less false anecdotes about the composer, his performers, his audiences, and his critics, plus a strong dose of popularized esthetics. Thus I once read in an examination paper of a sophomore, who had studied only a little harmony and much music appreciation, but who had certainly not heard much "live" music, that "Schumann’s orchestration is gloomy and unclear." This wisdom was derived directly and verbally from the textbook used in class. Some experts on orchestration might agree upon the condemnation of Schumann as an orchestrator, perhaps even without an argument. However, there might be other experts who would agree that not all of Schumann’s orchestration is poor—that there are gloomy spots as well as brilliant or at least good ones; they would also know that this accusation stems from the fight between the Wagnerian "New-German" School and the Schumann-Brahmsian-Academic-Classicist School, and that the critics had in mind such brilliant parts of Wagner’s music as the "Magic Fire," the Meistersinger Overture, the Venusberg music and others. Such brilliancy can but seldom be found in Schumann’s music. But some experts also know that there are very few compositions whose orchestration is perfectly flawless. More than two decades after Wagner’s death, for instance, his orchestral accompaniment covered the singers’ voices so as to make them inaudible. I know that Gustav Mahler had to change his orchestration very much for the sake of transparency. And Strauss himself showed me several cases where he had to make adjustment.
Thus, there is not the same degree of unanimity among experts of orchestration as there is between the sophomore girl and her textbook. But irreparable damage has been done; this girl, and probably all her classmates, will never listen to the orchestra of Schumann naively, sensitively, and open-mindedly. At the end of the term she will have acquired a knowledge of music history, esthetics, and criticism, plus a number of amusing anecdotes; but unfortunately she may not remember even one of those gloomily orchestrated Schumann themes. In a few years she will take her master’s degree in music, or will have become a teacher, or both, and will disseminate what she has been taught: ready-made judgments, wrong and superficial ideas about music, musicians, and esthetics.
In this manner there are educated a great number of pseudo-historians who believe themselves to be experts and, as such, entitled not only to criticize music and musicians, but even to usurp the role of leaders, to gain influence in the development of the art of music and to organize it in advance.
A few years after the first World War, such pseudo-historians acquired a dominant voice, throughout Western Europe, in predicting the future of music. In all music-producing countries, in France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, there suddenly arose the slogan:
"NEW MUSIC"
This battle-cry had evidently been created because one of these pseudo-historians had remembered that several times in the past the same battle-cry, or others like it, had furthered a new direction in the arts. A battle-cry must, perhaps, be superficial and at least partially wrong if it is to gain popularity. Thus we may understand Schopenhauer’s story of the surprise of one ancient Greek orator who, when he was suddenly interrupted by applause and cheers, cried out: "Have I said some nonsense?" The popularity acquired by this slogan, "New Music," immediately arouses suspicion and forces one to question its meaning.
What is New Music?
Evidently it must be music which, though it is still music, differs in all essentials from previously composed music. Evidently it must express something which has not yet been expressed in music. Evidently, in higher art, only that is worth being presented which has never before been presented. There is no great work of art which does not convey a new message to humanity; there is no great artist who fails in this respect. This is the code of honor of all the great in art, and consequently in all great works of the great we will find that newness which never perishes, whether it be of Josquin des Prés, of Bach or Haydn, or of any other great master.
Because: Art means New Art.
The idea that this slogan "New Music" might change the course of musical production was probably based on the belief that "history repeats itself." As everybody knows, while Bach still was living a new musical style came into being out of which there later grew the style of the Viennese Classicists, the style of homophonic-melodic composition, or, as I call it, the style of Developing Variation. If, then, history really repeated itself, the assumption that one need only demand the creation of new music would also suffice in our time, and at once the ready-made product would be served.
This is mistaking symptoms for causes. The real causes of changes in the style of musical composition are others. If in a period of homophonic composition musicians had acquired great skill in creating melodies—that is, main voices which reduced accompanying voices to almost meaningless inferiority in order to concentrate all possible contents in themselves—other composers may well have been annoyed by such a skill, which seemed already to degenerate into a schematic mechanism. They may then have been even more annoyed by the inferiority of the accompaniment than by what seemed to them the sweetness of the melody. While in this period only one direction of the musical space, the horizontal line, had been developed, the composers of the next period might have responded to a tendency that demanded the vitalizing of the accompanying voices also—that is, following the vertical direction of the musical space. Such tendencies might have provoked that richer elaboration of the accompaniment seen, for instance, in Beethoven as compared with Haydn, Brahms as compared with Mozart, or Wagner as compared with Schumann. Though in all these cases the richness of the melody has not suffered in the least, the role of the accompaniment has been intensified, enhancing its contribution to the common effect. No historian need tell a Beethoven, a Brahms, a Wagner to enrich his accompaniment with vitamins. At least these three men, stubborn as they were, would have shown him the door!
And vice-versa:
If, in a given period, each participating voice had been elaborated, with respect to its content, its formal balance and its relation to other voices, as part of a contrapuntal combination, its share of melodic eloquence would be less than if it were the main voice. Again, there might then arise in younger composers a longing to get rid of all these complexities. They then might refuse to deal with combinations and elaborations of subordinate voices. Thus the desire to elaborate only one voice and reduce the accompaniment to that minimum required by comprehensibility would again be the ruling fashion.
Such are the causes which produce changes in methods of composition. In a manifold sense, music uses time. It uses my time, it uses your time, it uses its own time. It would be most annoying if it did not aim to say the most important things in the most concentrated manner in every fraction of this time. This is why, when composers have acquired the technique of filling one direction with content to the utmost capacity, they must do the same in the next direction, and finally in all the directions in which music expands. Such progress can occur only step-wise. The necessity of compromising with comprehensibility forbids jumping into a style which is overcrowded with content, a style in which facts are too often juxtaposed without connectives, and which leaps to conclusions before proper maturation.
If music abandoned its former direction and turned towards new goals in this manner, I doubt that the men who produced this change needed the exhortation of pseudo-historians. We know that they—the Telemanns, the Couperins, the Rameaus, the Keysers, the Ph. E. Bachs and others—created something new which led only later to the period of the Viennese Classicists. Yes, a new style in music was created, but did this have the consequence of making the music of the preceding period outmoded?
Curiously, it happened at the beginning of this period that J. S. Bach’s music was called outmoded. And, most curiously, one of those who said this was J. S. Bach’s own son, Ph. Emanuel Bach, whose greatness one might question if one did not know that Mozart and Beethoven viewed him with great admiration. To them, he still seemed a leader, even after they themselves had added to the first rather negative principles of the New Music such positive principles as that of developing variation, in addition to many hitherto unknown structural devices such as those of transition, liquidation, dramatic recapitulation, manifold elaboration, derivation of subordinate themes, highly differentiated dynamics—crescendo, decrescendo, sforzato, piano subito, marcato, etc.—and particularly the new technique of legato and staccato passages, accelerando and ritardando, and the establishment of tempo and character by specific bywords.
Beethoven’s words: "Das ist nicht ein Bach, das ist ein Meer" (This is not a brook, this is an ocean) constitute the correct order. He did not say this about Philipp Emanuel but about Johann Sebastian. Should he not have added: Who is the brook?
***
While Bach produced work after work in a new style, his contemporaries knew no better than to ignore him. It can be said that not much of their New Music remained alive, though one must not deny that it was the beginning of a new art. But there are two points in which they were wrong. First, it was not musical ideas which their New Music wanted to establish, but only a new style for the presentation of musical ideas, whether old or new; it was a new wave in the progress of music, one which, as described before, tried to develop the other direction of musical space, the horizontal line. Second, they were wrong when they called Bach’s music outmoded. At least it was not outmoded forever, as history shows; today their New Music is outmoded while Bach’s has become eternal.
But now one should also examine the concept "outmoded."
One can find illustrations of this concept in our daily life rather than in the intellectual sphere. Long hair, for instance, was considered an important contribution to a woman’s beauty thirty years ago. Who knows how soon the fashion of short hair will be outmoded? Pathos was one of the most admired merits of poetry about a hundred years ago; today it seems ridiculous, and it is used only for satirical purposes. Electric light has outmoded candle-light; but snobs still use the latter because they saw it in the castles of the aristocracy where artistically decorated walls would have been damaged by electric wiring.
Does this indicate why things become outmoded?
Long hair became outmoded because working women considered it a handicap. Pathos became outmoded when naturalism portrayed real life and the way in which people talked when they wanted to finish business. Candle-light became outmoded when people realized how senseless it is to make unnecessary work for one’s servants—if one can get them at all.
The common factor in all these examples was a change in the forms of our life.
Can one contend the same about music?
Which form of life makes Romantic music inadequate? Is there no more romanticism in our time? Are we not more enthusiastic about being killed by our automobiles than the ancient Romans were about being killed by their chariots? Are there not still to be found young people who engage in adventure for which they may have to pay with their lives, though the glory they earn will pale with the next day’s front page? Would it not be easy to find numerous youths to fly to the moon in a rocket plane if the opportunity were offered? Is not the admiration of people of all ages for our Tarzans, Supermen, Lone Rangers and indestructible detectives the result of a love for romanticism? The Indian stories of our youth were no more romantic; only the names of the subjects have been changed.
One reproach against romanticism concerns its complications. True, if one were to look at scores of Strauss, Debussy, Mahler, Ravel, Reger, or my own, it might be difficult to decide whether all this complication is necessary. But the decision of one successful young composer: "Today’s younger generation does not like music which they do not understand," does not conform to the feelings of the heroes who engage in adventures. One might expect that this kind of youth, attracted by the difficult, the dangerous, the mysterious, would rather say: "Am I an idiot that one dares offer me poor trash which I understand before I am half-way through?" Or even: "This music is complicated, but I will not give up until I understand it." Of course this kind of man will be enthused rather by profundity, profuseness of ideas, difficult problems. Intelligent people have always been offended if one bothered them with matters which any idiot could understand at once.
Translated from the German by Dika Newlin.
