I do, I miss it so much.  I feel so dumb sometimes.  Especially reading things I felt like I understood a year ago that I now scratch my head over.  And when I write.  I try to write in a more down to earth, filled with inflections and even sometimes visceral style but is that simply because I cannot use very many big words?  If so, good excuse, but lame nevertheless.

Sometimes I really miss John.  And that makes me miss Sean.  And the other way around.  Then, in a way Explosions in the Sky put it so apt, all the sudden I miss everyone.

I’ve been thinking hard about grad school lately, and that makes me feel dumb too.  Reading some of the course descriptions and requirements makes me feel very, very unprepared.  I think I want to do something in Cultural studies as it relates to sub-culture and punk/hardcore/metalcore music.  Kind of that progression of 20 or 30 years.  But I’ve read maybe three books on culture of any type be it mass, pop, sub, whatever.  Am I prepared for grad school?

Other times I think I only want to pursue that avenue because my friends are, and I want the prestige of having a masters degree.  To one up my parents (not for pride of being the first to do so but also for that reason.  If that makes sense or works somehow.)  I do see myself teaching someday.  But I still don’t know if that’s where I need to go right now.

I also want to get back into recording.  I need money to buy equipment to simply start doing it again.  I have bills, and debt, and it all takes such a long time to save (welcome to life, Chase!)  Builds to frustration so often.  And I kind of hate my job sometimes.  I mostly don’t like it because it isn’t beneficial to anyone, doesn’t matter, and isn’t what I was created to do.  But I’m working on being content and happy no matter the circumstance and that has actually been a really good thing.

I’m jealous too.  Of Ian, and Matt, and Justin, and Joe Bubenik here, and of Ian McDermott and all you other people who are married or about to be ’cause every day I want that more and more.  Caitlin and I have a good idea, nearly a plan to make it all work, but it’s all dependent and is hinged to circumstance and choices.  All of which take time, and I’ve been trying to patient for so long.

This “graduate and move away from those you love” is lame.  We need to make the commune work.  I miss those I love very much.  To see you, and hug you, and laugh all together.  I’m glad a lot of talk often.  We need that more than we think we do.

Track 3 on (  )  is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard in my life.  God is telling me to be patient still.

This hit me the other day, and this may remind many of you who were in Historiography of Von Ranke, who I think had something in a way.

Knowledge of truth is the vision of God.

What do you think?

how then can we even attempt to reach the otherwordly?  how truly impoverished humanity is in relation to G-d and how base our “knowledge” of him.

Final paper I wrote for Music History.

Arnold Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire Opus 21

With the turn of the twentieth century, modern musical composition began to stretch the boundaries of tonality as Wagner, Brahms and Strauss had defined it in the late 1800’s. Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is one such composer who arose during the late Romantic period. “In music history his name is associated with two epic ‘inventions’: the renunciation of tonal composition in the wake of the ‘emancipation of the dissonance’ in expressionist atonality around 1910, and, a dozen years later, the development of “composition with twelve notes related only to each other,” 12-tone music or dodecaphony” (Danuser, par. 6). Schoenberg’s pieces always received interesting reactions from the public in their performances. The listening public would often respond with anger, shouting throughout performances that what they were hearing could not be defined as “music” but as “noise.” In spite of this, the composer continued writing challenging and difficult music saying that his motivation for composing came from a necessity within and not because of anything else. Schoenberg felt like he “must” write the music that he did. Schoenberg’s work did not go on entirely unnoticed especially in the artistic community in Vienna. Schoenberg’s music was greatly appreciated by other composers of the time including Mahler and Stravinsky whom he influenced as well as the music of later atonal composers Anton Webern and Alban Berg.

Schoenberg grew up in the proverbial musical capital of the world, Vienna, in an ethnically Jewish, middle-class family. Unlike most composers, he never received any traditional musical training as a child but was entirely self-taught. He learned how to play the violin and eventually the cello as a school boy and Schoenberg started improving melodies as soon as his fingers were able to play the instruments. With each extant piece Schoenberg learned for each instrument, be it a Mozart concerto or whatever, he would immediately write compositions based upon that piece. This explains why his early melodies sound so much like the melodies of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. Most of these very early pieces are considered child’s play by both Schoenberg and musicologists alike and they are typically not included in his music output.

Eventually, Schoenberg befriended a Vienna Conservatoire graduate, Alexander Von Zemlinsky, who taught him “almost all he knew about the technique and problems of composition” (Reich 4). Zemlinsky was always considered by Schoenberg to be his closest friend and confidant as well as musical mentor and teacher. In 1901, Schoenberg married Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde making Schoenberg Zemlinsky’s brother-in-law. Zemlinsky incited the interests of Wagner to Schoenberg who was already an admitted “Brahmsian,” and Schoenberg’s early period was born.

Schoenberg’s musical output can be divided into four overlapping periods: his tonal period (until 1908); transitional (1905 to 1912) and atonal (1908 to 1923); serial (1923 to 1936); and stylistically diverse (after 1936) (CHWM 516). The works of his early tonal period consist of the string sextet Verklarte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”) in 1899, the symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande in 1903 and the symphonic cantata Gurrelieder (“Songs of Gurre.”)

After exhausting the extreme possibilities of chromaticism in tonal music, Schoenberg moved on to his next period. Major works from the transitional and atonal period include the 1908 piano song cycle Das Buch der hangenden Garten (“Book of Hanging Gardens”), the Five Orchestral Pieces and the magnanimous monodrama for solo voice and orchestra Ewartung (“Expectation”) composed in 1908-1909. Another drama, Pierrot Lunaire, is from this period and it is his crowning achievement, the piece that Schoenberg is known best for because of its use of Sprechstimme .

Atonality always had its own set of limits for Schoenberg and he continually struggled to give instrumental works breadth and length without some kind of text to help give the music some sort of forward direction. The reason for this is because one of the main ideas of atonality is the lack of musical cohesion. There are no developments of melody because, at least in Schoenberg’s atonal pieces, there is not very much melody to develop. Four of the Five Orchestral Pieces were under three minutes long. Due to these struggles, Schoenberg attempted to find a way to lengthen the instrumental development of his works which partially led to the birth of the twelve-tone method that he called “Serialism.”

During the First World War, the composer’s pen did not touch any staff paper (which seems to be true of many other composers during times of war, not just for Schoenberg.) After the war was over, the musical community in Europe had a bomb dropped on them. Schoenberg’s new style, twelve-tone Serialism, seemed, to the listening public, as a composers all out battle against “good” music. Schoenberg’s first deliberate use of tone rows and serial technique arose in the Five Piano Pieces Opus 23 in 1923. Schoenberg continued to use the technique in several other pieces including Variations for Orchestra, the Third and Fourth String Quartets and the Violin Concerto from 1936.

Schoenberg’s final artistic period combined all the elements of his musical evolution: tonal, atonal and serial. Some of his works from this period, such as the piano concerto Ode to Napoleon, the String Trio of 1946, are almost completely tonal. When asked if Schoenberg was “correcting his ways” he simply said that he still very much enjoys tonal music. Other works from this period include Fantasy for Violin and the fabulous opera Moses und Aron (“Moses and Aaron”) which is the second most important piece of Schoenberg’s in the author of this essay’s opinion. Moses und Aron is the combination of all of Schoenberg’s musical periods tonal, atonal and serial and is perhaps the most elaborate work he ever wrote because of its use of a large orchestra, two full choirs, at least eight soloists, costumes and several, large and detailed sets.

Taking a few steps back in Schoenberg’s development to his atonal period, we come across his most famous work and the focus of the rest of this paper, the melodrama Pierrot Lunaire. Pierrot Lunaire translates “Moonstruck Pierrot” in English. A Pierrot, according to the dictionary, is a “French pantomime, dressed in a floppy white outfit.” Pierrot Lunaire is a group of poems originally written in by Belgian symbolist poet Albert Giraud. The poetic story is an allegory of a masked pantomime poet’s, a “Pierrot-Poet’s,” scattered view of his own chaotic world. The translation into German was provided by Otto Erich Hartleben and Schoenberg adapted, reorganized and edited 21 poems for the melodrama which is divided into 3 cycles of 7 songs. The original collection by Giraud seems to lack any evident organization and the chaos of the whole may have been intentional, but for Schoenberg’s purpose an apparent structure was essential.

In the first cycle of 7, Schoenberg “first presents the poet reveling in the source of poetry, or moonlight, then succumbing to the terror of psychic dissolution” (Youens 32). The second and most important cycle depicts nightfall and “horror” the poet experiences because of poetic martyrdom.. In the third, and final, set of poems, the entire mood shifts from the imagery of moonlight to that of impending sunrise. The Poet, instead of hiding from the moonlight, or from the poetry, no longer fears and symbolically rises to become the master of his craft. Similarly, the poet masters himself and takes revenge on both the enemies of poetry as well as his own physical enemies. In the poem “Gemeinheit!” “Pierrot drills open his adversary Cassander’s skull to smoke tobacco through the opening” (Youens 32).

Schoenberg originally started working on Pierrot in March of 1912 while he was living in Berlin. When he met actress Albertine Zehme she requested that Schoenberg compose a large-scale work for “the speaking voice” (Stuckenschmidt AS, 60). Schoenberg immediately set out composing the music for what would become Pierrot Lunaire. Schoenberg did not finish the work until September of that year but rehearsing began during the summer months before Pierrot’s completion. The first performance of Pierrot took place in Berlin on October 9^th, 1912 and “to the astonishment of critics [it] resulted in an ovation for Schoenberg” (Stuckenschmidt AS, 61). Critic Alfred Kerr said that Pierrot Lunaire “allowed us to hear [what] appeared to me not as the end of music; but the beginning of a new stage of listening” (Stuckenschmidt AS, 61).

Pierrot Lunaire was not the first melodrama, as Max Schillings, Strauss and Schoenberg himself had composed works of the same style before but the reason why it is so revolutionary is because of its use of Sprechstimme (“Speech-song”). Also new to the genre of melodrama was Schoenberg’s emphasis on musical colors rather than actual harmonic and melodic progressions and chords. In Pierrot, “color means everything, the notes don’t mean anything at all,” according to Schoenberg. This complete lack of interest in the actual melodic content of Pierrot is exemplified in another Schoenberg quote from his Berlin Diary over how he “had not noticed that during a rehearsal of ‘Der Mondfleck,’ no. 18, the clarinet player was playing on an A-clarinet instead of on a B^b-clarinet” (Weytjens 130).

The piece I will be focusing on specifically for analysis is the seventeenth song of the work Parodie (“Parody”). Parodie is fast tempi piece for female voice, piccolo, A-clarinet, viola and piano. The song is around a minute and a half and can be divided into more or less two distinct sections. The A section is rather lively and feels like waltz on some sort of external stimulants. The section revolves around interval skips and runs that are outlined by is based on two tritones, G and C#, and, E and Bb found in the A section. That section is rather lively and feels like waltz on some sort of external stimulants. The B section is quieter and more playful in instrumentation, like a children’s song, especially in the twinkling 16^th and 32^nd notes in the high register of the piano. The end of the song has a brief return to the A section for 5 measures before concluding with a solo piano chord progression that is new material compared to the rest of the song. All the instruments are centralized around the flowing piano part that dominates the entire work. They are also united throughout the song by two specific canons: canons at the unison and canons by inversion.

The piece is entirely polyphonic without any of the instruments seeming to relate to each other harmonically as well as very pointillistic in their melodic content with large skips of diminished 5ths, major 6ths, 7ths and so on. Harmony between the instruments as a whole is not apparent and nearly nonexistent.

Melody, on the other hand, is rich throughout Schoenberg’s catalog but they do not readily appear so because of their lack of tonality. There is a lot of melodic development in Parodie in the non-chordal instruments but especially in the piano. The “theme,” if you can call it that, is based on two tri-tones previously mentioned, G and C#, and, E and Bb. There are also some very interesting melodic elements to the vocal line even nothing is actually “sung” in the traditional sense. The melody line is mostly step-wise and would sound quite melodic if the notation was sung rather than spoken. The most interesting part about how Schoenberg treated the voice in Parodie is in relation to the other instruments, specifically the piano.

Throughout the song, the piano is the driving force. The instrument does not stop playing for even a single measure. Most of the time, the piano has very fast 16^th and 32^nd notes which gives the piece a sort of “running,” or “rushing” kind of quality. The lack of rhythmic diversity could almost get to be unnerving but the rhythm of the vocals break up the monotony. The vocal line is set above the piano. What is meant by that is, rhythmically, through syncopated dotted 8^th notes, the voice sounds like it is skipping, or dancing, over top of the rushing stream of the piano. It is this interaction between piano and voice that gives Parodie as a whole the waltz-like, dance-like feel. It also sets the voice apart from the instrumental rush beneath it as well as makes the non-chordal instruments very distinct during there melodic runs.

To delve a little bit more deeply into the melodic element, the piano’s melodic organization has to be discussed because it is the focal point of Parodie. As mentioned earlier, Parodie is united by canons (or pitch-class) at the unison and canons by inversion. Canons at the unison are rather obvious and uninformative to discuss but focusing on the inversion sheds light onto the organization of the song.

If you draw a picture of a circle and place each of the 12 pitches equidistant around the circle and then draw lines straight across from one pitch to another (for example, A to D#, C to G#, B to F) you get what is called a mirror-axis. Schoenberg has used the mirror axis when composing Parodie and used “as a rule, the pitches G and its tritone C# are placed at the end of the phrases, at other resting points or as top notes of the phrases. Since they mirror themselves, they function as ‘pitch-centers’” (Weytjens 123). For example, at the very beginning of the song, measures 3 through 7, in the vocal, the viola and the clarinet there are 1 to 3 instances where the note C# or G is found as the top note in each instruments particular voice. While still being atonal, these two pitches act like cadences that organize the “chaos.”

In measures 13 and 14, and 25 and 26, the same cadences are found in the same instruments. Harmonic organization is also found through modulation. At the beginning of the piece, similar cadencial ideas are found with a modulation a minor down to another tritone E and Bb. The only difference is that instead of marking top notes, the end of phrases or at other resting points, the E-Bb tritone serves more for melodic organization. The tritone is dispersed throughout each melodic line rather than serving as an end mark.

The last major element of organization is found in Schoenberg’s use of symmetrical whole-tone scales, and nearly whole-tone hexachord scales. Schoenberg uses whole tone scales for inversion around the mirror axis rather than at random as many have suggested. In the first 7 measures of Parodie, in the very first phrase there is an almost whole-tone hexachord scale (a pentachord with one added note.) “The viola and Sprechstimme present the pitches Ab, Bb, C, D, E and Eb. The clarinet’s inversion, Bb, C, D, E, F# and B, results in four invariant pitches within the same whole-tone hexachord. In consequence, the viola, Sprechstimme and clarinet, taken together, build a stable harmonic area that is organized around the same whole-tone hexachord” (Weytjens 125). This hexachord serves as the main theme to Parodie and is repeated, albeit inverted, later in the piece in measures 16 through 18. The hexachord is presented and then again mirrored like it was at the beginning of the piece. This seems to me to be call and response, or a harmonic question and answer.

Parodie, though sounding at times quite chaotic and without any apparent unity, is in fact highly organized and melodically and harmonically thought out. Schoenberg did not randomly choose many “’abstract’ intervals” but instead chose “specific pitch choices, which appear to have been accurately calculated with a view to the harmonic consequence after inversion” (Weytjens 127).

As a whole, Pierrot Lunaire is a masterpiece of Schoenberg’s and unarguable so. It is highly organized, very well written musically and very well set lyrically. But I cannot help but feel like there is still something missing after experiencing it. Schoenberg’s music as a whole has this effect on me. It is frustrating that no matter how many times I listen to a work, a specific song or piece, I still cannot get my head around it. I believe that Schoenberg had some very good ideas with atonality and especially with Serialism on paper, but I think they were poorly executed in the sense that his music is nearly impossible to comprehend even on the fifth or sixth listen and completely impossible to feel no matter how many times experienced. The theory behind Schoenberg is extremely interesting, but I think that atonality has to married with tonality, or at least repetition (like what Stravinsky did,) for it to have any feeling and for it to be understood. Art is amazing in the sense that it can transport you to another place or make you feel emotions and experiences you have never felt before but only when that art is understood, or, if misunderstood, related to on some level. This is where I feel Schoenberg falls short because most of his work is misunderstood and not relatable.

Bibliography

Score & Recordings

Schoenberg, Arnold. Verklarte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire Score. New York. Dover Publications: 1994.

Schoenberg, Arnold. Arnold Schönberg, Sämtliche Werke, Abteilung VI: Kammermusik, Reihe A, Bd. 24, Melodramen und Lieder mit Instrumenten. Digital-Audio Stream. Brinkmann: 1996. Retrieved on April 24, 2005.

<http://www.schoenberg.at/6_archiv/music/works/op/compositions_op21_e.htm>

Schoenberg, Arnold. ­Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op. 15 Compact Disc. Elektra/Nonesuch Records, 1990.

Books

Ewen, David. Composers of Tomorrow. New York. Dodd, Mead & Company: 1971.

Grove, Sir George. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 1879. Ed. Stanley Sadie. New York: Grove’s Dictionaries, 2001.

Hanning, Barbara Russano. Concise History of Western Music. New York. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: 2002.

Leibowitz, Rene. Schoenberg and His School. New York. De Capo Press: 1970.

MacDonald, Malcolm. Schoenberg. London. J. M. Dent & Sons, LTD: 1976.

Stein, Erwin. Arnold Schoenberg Letters. New York. St. Martin’s Press: 1965.

Stuckenschmidt, H. H. Arnold Schoenberg. London. John Calder Publishers: 1959.

Stuckenschmidt, H. H. Twentieth Century Music. New York. World University Library: 1969.

Reich, Willi. Schoenberg: a Critical Biography. New York. Books That Matter: 1971.

Journals

Adamenko, Victoria. “Schoenberg and Mythic Conception.” Article. Journal of Musicological Research 2004, 23.3/4, 315-38.

Dineen, Murray & Gilbert, David. “A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life.” Review. Notes September 2004, 61.1, 130-1.

Weytjens, Stephan and Dealaere, Mark. “Analytic Approaches to Pierrot Lunaire.” Report of the Symposium. September 2000: 28-30.

Youens, Susan. “The Text of Pierrot Lunaire: An Allegory of Art and the Mind.” Pierrot to Marteau: an International Conference and Concert Celebrating the Tenth Anniversary of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute. Ed. by Leonard Stein. Los Angeles: U Southern California, 1987: 30-2.

Websites

McDonald, Malcolm. Schoenberg. London. J.M Dent & Sons LTD: 1976.

Muxeneder, Therese. The Man and the Composer. The Arnold Schoenberg Center. Retrieved April 18, 2005.

<http://www.schoenberg.at/1_as/bio/general_e.htm>

Schoenberg, Arnold. My Evolution. The Arnold Schoenberg Center. Retrieved April 18, 2005.

< http://www.schoenberg.at/1_as/bio/evolution_e.htm>

Danuser, Hermann. Essay. The Arnold Schoenberg Center. Retrieved April 18, 2005.

<http://www.schoenberg.at/1_as/essay/essay_e.htm>

Sherrane, Robert. Arnold Schoenberg & the Second Viennese School. Music History 102: a Guide to Western Composers and their music. The Juilliard School, New York. Retrieved April 18, 2005.

<http://www.ipl.org/div/mushist/twen/schoenberg.htm>

I think I’ve completely moved on now.  God has been showing me things about Himself and about myself that have made me very happy the past two days even though not everything revealed was a good thing.  He said to me a couple weeks ago that he’s tuning me in to himself, and that he’s going to make my spirit very sensative to his.  I’m very excited about that word because I’ve desired that closeness for a while now.
At the same time I need to “get over” (for lack of a more appropriate term) my sin struggle or he can’t fill the place I’m still harboring no matter how much I desire him to.  He has freed me of that sin though, but I often place the old man in the closet rather than in the grave.  Or at least I need to stop digging him up.  He’s rotting and he stinks.
The other thing he told me, I may have mentioned this, is how much I desire a woman who is genuinely interested in me.  No matter how much I want to “to find out” if I like any of the cute girls I see around here all the live-long day I need to wait.  I’m not worried about finding a mate, ’cause I know it’s His job to bring me one and I’m fine with that, but I’m antsy and desire the physical intimacy as well as the emotional.  It’s rough being 21.
Other than the money thing I mentioned on top, the last thing He’s spoken to me is that even though my struggle that has lasted 7 years (Johnny Cash’s amphetamine addiction lasted 7 years too, I think that’s interesting.  Hopefully that was a word from God too…) was not God’s perfect plan for my life, He always makes something good in result.  I’ve been able to share my struggle with Enoch and we’ve been helping each other and praying for each other.  Enoch has the most beautiful heart of anyone I’ve ever met.  Any girl would be more than blessed to have him.  I pray he gets a really good one.  Anyway, to the point.  Besides being able to help Enoch, another guy friend here at Greenville e-mailed me yesterday about him and I talking so I can help him with the same issue.  Thank you that you can use such terrible shit for someone to mess around in as a means to teach another.
God, give me a strength.

On another note, I’ve decided to try and write a song about what I’m thinking every day or so.  I think the first one will be titled “I Want a Dog.”  ‘Cause I’ve wanted a dog so bad this semester.  Dang you Greenville for not allowing animals in the houses!  Anyway, more on this later