Escaping from Bondage to Tonality

We have made analogies already between music and language. Languages and music depend on rules and structure to communicate in traditional ways. Yet there has always been, alongside the following of rules and conformity to structures, a countervailing current of creativity in which people have coined new words and expressions, ventured outside of standard grammar, and in other ways experimented with and pressed the boundaries of what is standard to create new possibilities for expression. Languages evolve, and whether we listen to older music or read older text, it sounds foreign to us and sometimes highly formulaic. What we notice most are the structures that are adhered to that no longer constrain us and the archaic expressions that stand out because they are no longer used as they once were. Something that was exciting and new at one point seems bland and uninteresting to those experiencing it in later times. That is because what some pioneered in the past, others who came after them imitated until the exception became the rule and the unfamiliar became familiar.^[1]

Are there any limits to how free one can be with words in language or sounds in music? What would it mean to throw off the limits of vocabulary and grammar and feel truly free to use any words at all with no regard for structure? In spoken language, it could be interesting, but it would also not convey meaning in the way that words and language traditionally have. Once music had stayed almost entirely within a key signature and a set of seven different notes (think do-re-mi, etc.), occasionally adding additional notes to liven things up but always returning to the original key. By the late nineteenth century, however, music had reached a point where it could move freely in almost any direction. Composers had been pushing musical language to its limits and had begun to feel no obligation to return at the end of a piece to the note or chord on which it had begun, as had been the norm in previous eras. This was akin to the discarding of rhyme and meter as constraints on poetry. A question that arose as a result was what, if anything, makes poetry “poetry” if it lacks those features that traditionally defined it. The same questions arose for music. Doesn’t music cease to be anything other than a blurry mess of sound without the traditions of key signature and harmony?

No name is more famously associated with pushing musical experimentation to the limits of tonality and beyond than Arnold Schoenberg. Having first pioneered free atonality (music without a tonal center), he is also famous for proposing a new approach to order in the midst of the chaos that he introduced, a form of music known as “serialism.” Schoenberg found the possibilities of atonal music with no constraints of any sort to be too endless. Imagine if poetry could contain any letters in any order. Experimenting with that absolute freedom soon becomes boring, while at the same time, the lack of any boundaries and constraints can be paralyzing to our creativity. Schoenberg adopted an approach that called for each of the twelve possible notes on traditional Western instruments to be used only once until each note had its turn. This is called serial music because the possible combinations of notes can be ordered in a series, or “tone row.” For those who are interested in exploring this further, here is a YouTube video by Vi Hart that explains the concept in an accessible way.

The Bible and Schoenberg’s Vision

Some of Schoenberg’s most important works explore biblical stories in some way, in particular an oratorio called Jakobsleiter (Jacob’s Ladder) and his opera Moses und Aron. The former marked his shift in the direction of the serial twelve-tone technique. He was a visionary and leading an exodus from older forms and ways of doing things. Neither work was completed by the composer. Both offer unconventional takes on the biblical story they explore. Here is his Jakobsleiter.^[2]

The work is inspired as much by the idea of modern human beings wrestling with God and spirituality as by the story in Genesis. Schoenberg wrote, “For a long time I have been wanting to write an oratorio on the following subject: modern man, having passed through materialism, socialism, and anarchy, and despite having been an atheist, still having in him some residue of ancient faith (in the form of superstition), wrestles with God (see also Strindberg’s ‘Jacob Wrestling’) and finally succeeds in finding God and becoming religious.”^[3] The reference to wrestling with God has the story in Genesis 32:22–32 in mind. As already mentioned, Schoenberg never completed work on Jakobsleiter. That is perhaps fitting, or at least appropriately symbolic, given how Schoenberg’s spiritual and musical quests opened up new possibilities that continued beyond the composer’s own lifetime.

Exodus from Egypt and Convention

In Moses und Aron, the latter is not the usual spelling of the name of Moses’s brother in German. This spelling is adopted because the result is that twelve letters are in the title. The significance of twelve tones for Schoenberg resonates with the symbolism of the number twelve in the Bible as first and foremost connected with the number of tribes of Israel. Here is a performance by the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra and the Opera Festival of Miskolc.^[4]

The mockery that Moses receives for his vision of one God, perfectly abstract and not to be depicted in images, conveys Schoenberg’s own feelings about the negative reactions to his own musical vision. The tension regarding what music should be is conveyed as Aron sings more melodiously and leads the people in worshiping the golden calf (see Exodus 32), while Moses’s own musical lines are much further removed from even echoes of traditional tonality. Schoenberg’s musical journey needs to be considered in parallel and in conjunction with his religious journey from his Jewish upbringing to Protestantism and back to Judaism. The incompleteness of the work may seem symbolic of the open-endedness of the revolution that Schoenberg was at the forefront of. The composer provided his own explanation for why he wrestled unsuccessfully with completing the final act of the opera: “The most incomprehensible contradictions in the Bible have given me the greatest difficulty.”^[5] As Jack Boss writes, “This opera is about unresolved conflicts, principally Moses’ inability to communicate the Idea of God to his people without images, and the conflict that causes in him with his passionate belief that God may not be represented in image.”^[6]

Concluding with a Psalm

One of Schoenberg’s last compositions included a setting of Psalm 130, De Profundis.^[7]

It is interesting to jump back from this end point of Schoenberg’s musical and spiritual journey to a work such as his Friede auf Erden (Peace on Earth), from the period when he had left tonality behind but before he developed the serial technique. It too has biblical connections, the poem that Schoenberg set being inspired by and alluding to a scene from the story of the birth of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke (2:14). Although obviously lacking a tonal center compared to works from earlier eras of music, we can also hear how the musical landscape is less radical a departure than that of Schoenberg’s later works.^[8]