Tribute to Schoenberg

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 634, 24 August 1951, Page 15

Tribute to Schoenberg

Friday, August 31, at 8.30 p.m., Station 2YC will present a memorial programme to Arnold Schoenberg, the Vienna-born composer who died at Los Angeles on July 14 last. The pro&ramme includes excerpts from an early work, "Transfigured Night,’ and from the studio, Frederick Page plays the Six Piano Pieces, Op. 19. Here BESSIE POLLARD briefly . discusses Schoenberg's contribution to contemporary music. RNOLD SCHOENBERG (born at Vienna on Septem- * ber 13, 1874) for many years eked out a precarious living by orchestrating many thousands of pages of other composers’ theatre music, and by directing theatre orchestras. At the same time he was composing continually, His first notable

work, the string sextet, "Transfigured Night," inspired by a poem of Richard Dehmel’s, appeared in 1899. The stupendous "Songs of Gurra" (Gufre-Lieder)-which occupied him from 1900 to 1913--while still incomplete, earned for him on the recommendations of Richard Strauss and Gustay Mahler the Liszt Fellowship and a post as teacher of composition in the Stern Conservatory in Berlin. The F Sharp Minor String Quartet, Op. 10 (1907), was perhaps the last work to be supplied with a key-signa-ture indicating a specific tonality, Today Schoenberg’s name is permanently linked with what is called the twelvetone system (or "twelye-tone technique" as some of his pupils prefer to describe it), based on a chromatic scale of equidistant semitenes-the duodecuple scale. His essays in twelve-tone technique evolved fram Atonality (much as he disliked that term), a type of music where there is no relationship in tones and chords to any central keynote. As a composer, a theorist and a kind of musical scientist, Schoenberg made far-. reaching and important contributions to 20th Century musical resource with his "chords-in-fourths" and. his * twelve-tone system. In the illustration ("A") I quote the chord-in-fourths, which includes the twelve tones af the chromatic scale._ "B" quotes three themes from the Six. Piano Pieces, Op. 19, to be played from the 2YC studio by Frederick Page. From about his Opus 23 onwards (Five Pieces for Piano) Schoenberg evolved what is known as his "series of trows"--a system of melodic line building where all the twelve tones can appear in a row, grouped in well-defined arrangements. The series can be transformed in at least three ways: (1) by inversion ("mirror-reflection"), (2). "motus cancrizans" (crab-motion), or re-

peating the row backwards, (3) by inverting the crab. In October, 1933, because of his modernistic artistic trends and his Jewish descent, he left Nazi Germany and emi-’ grated to the U.S.A. where he continued teaching and composing, His most astounding work, Pierrot Lunaire, a setting for voice and a small instrumental ensemble of 21 symbolist oems by Albert Giraud, appeared in 912. In his book, Contemporary Music, Cecil Gray says of this composition: "Out of the unpromising material afforded by these highly artificial, precious and decadent little poems, Schoenberg has created a whole world of strange fascination and enchantment, of nameless horrors and terrible imaginings, of perverse and poisonous beauty and bittersweet fragrance, of a searing and withering mockery and malicious, elfish

humour, which the poet most assuredly never even contemplated. .. If Schoenberg had written nothing else, this work alone would be sufficient to assure him a-place in musical history." To most listeners Schoenberg’s compositions seem to be a mass of discords, as difficult to comprehend as they are to perform. His place in musical history may not be clarified perhaps for many years. Undaunted by the unflattering reception scmetimes accorded his works, Schoenberg never forced their claimshe was always sure that in the end their worth would be recognised and accepted.