“Alas human creators, if they be granted a vision, must travel the long path between vision and accomplishment; a hard road where, driven out of Paradise, even geniuses must reap their harvest in the sweat of their brows.”
Schoenberg, Auner (128)
The father of the twelve-tone method faced criticism and prejudice as a consequence to his vision of breaking tonality and traditional music norms. He himself felt the need to draft Composition with 12 Tones (1941), as a way to justify his brusque change from his earlier work and musical beliefs. In efforts to showcase the twelve-tone method, he released Opus. 33a, one of the most analyzed twelve-tone works, is based on a row notated in the treble clef of the piece: Bb-F-C-B-A-F#-C#-D#-G-Ab-D-E (Auner 129).
Schoenberg executed the twelve-tone method in a very particular way, by writing out the different types of rows with the use of tables, card files and the 12-by-12 matrix. “In a twelve-tone piece, the composer derives all the melodic and harmonic material of the work from the row” (Auner, 130). Schoenberg described this as “The unity of musical space”.
Schoenberg structured his rows in specific ways, in order to create various combinations of intervals between the pitches, which then opened the gate to many harmony possibilities. In Schoenberg’s mind, what mattered most was the “richness and unity of the material that could be generated form the row in interaction with its various transformations” (Auner 131). Is this richness and unity easily identified and appreciated by the common and traditionally coddled ear? Schoenberg emphasized that the goal of the twelve-tone method was the comprehensibility of the mind to grasp the logic of musical development. Did it succeed to be comprehensible? Something to consider additionally, is Schoenberg’s publicly released statement entitled “My Enemies”, which included some of the ways his music had been received and interpreted in political aspects:
I. a) Nationalistic musicians regard me as international b) but abroad my music is regarded as too German II. a) National Socialists regard me as a cultural-Bolshevik b) but the communists reject me as bourgeois III. a) Anti-Semites personify me as a Jew, my direction as Jewish b) but almost no Jews have followed my direction.
Auner (126)
Was the goal of the twelve-tone method ever achieved? Or was it simply meant to be a method that could only be fully appreciated by those who were open to understand it?
