Thoughts on Berg, Stravinsky, Mystery: Surgeon Metaphors Abound (Because Music is Inexplicable)






























I love the muddiness in Roussel's orchestration for his first symphony (i'm listening to it right now). I also enjoy it in Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra; you literally hear "new" things each time. Each time a new piece of the puzzle making the picture more complete but more confusing. It never ends. This is what I find in my favorite works. Art that makes you confused and tricked into entering again and again.
On the other hand, a composer like Stravinsky in his "neo-classic" phase, and even in the late serial works like Abraham and Issac and Threni, writes music with a surgeon's eye for incision. Each line there because of neccesity, because of concern for the whole. Stravinsky used to talk about "finding the right note" and in some wonderful pictures by Arnold Newman taken while composing his final masterpiece, the Requiem Canticles, show him painfully pondering over a couple notes on a miniscule scrap of paper. After finding the right combination and rhythm, he glues his little bit of sinew and vein into the body of his score. Surgeon. Get it? Body words? Okay. Yeah I know-I'm a great writer.
The effect of this careful consideration of each phrase, rhythm and motive, when expressed in Stravinsky's musical language, is one of complete clarity and purity. Every line is heard, every rhythm exacting a punch. Even when he goes apeshit crazy with polyphonic anarchy, most notably in his Variations (in memoriam Aldous Huxley), everything comes through, when conducted well of course. Stravinsky, Ravel: both Swiss watchmakers in their own ways. Also, two hot, hot asses.

At the other end of the surgical spectrum, there is Berg's Three Pieces, Altenberg Lieder, or even "Chamber Concerto", where there are moments where the polyphony is so bonkers, that the confused listener actually begins to think he is a bumblebee. These moments of organized chaos are so interesting to me, because what is happening is so elegant and ingenious; a complete orgy of logic and expression.
The complex and dissonant climaxes where dozens of independent voices interact are not simply Berg trying make a chaotic racket. He was too much of a supreme artist to even begin to flirt with what was to become a post-modern trick. Berg was a tortured soul who both had an urge to be the biggest heart-on-sleeve expressionist, and another desire to be the most obsessive artificer this side of Dedaelus.
Berg is an incredibly frightening figure for me. He intimidates me more than Stravinsky, or even Mozart, two artists who are admitably his betters. I have a poster of Schoenberg's portrait of him on my wall, and it really bothers me:





















He looks so bored, apathetic and sad. He was a wonderfully friendly and kind man by all accounts, but shy and reserved. But underneath his dreamy exterior lurked a brain and heart combination the most powerful duo since John Stockton and Karl Malone.
Even in writing in an atonal, largely dissonant style, he is able to express the most profound depths of emotion with a poet's eye for subtelty. Even a cold-hearted bastard like myself, who routinely steals from the elderly and spits on children, is moved when in Wozzeck, the tortured, impoverished and mentally unstable soldier visits the mother of his little boy to give them the little money he earned. This powerful scene, which could have lead to the most pathetically maudlin and sentimental music imaginable, packs its punch in its simplicity, a revelation after a sea of complexity and what many would call 'ugliness'. Wozzeck sing-speaks "Here's the little bit money I could earn for you. From the captain, and the doctor" over strings playing a sweetly quiet C-major chord, clear as day. After the madness and evil of the preceeding drama, and it's "mad and evil" 'atonal' music, Berg expresses the compassion and love among his poor people (and FOR poor people), of the simple/"common" man, in the most perfect way-the simplest, most common chord of all, C major.
He signed a couple autographs by quoting this profound bar.

There is a reason Berg is always more expressive, and more "moving" to listeners than his comrades Schoenberg and Webern: His music is more meaningful and more expressive.
Webern had no need to write music that could "communicate" a feeling to an audience. Berg did, and succeeded.

It is not Berg's "emotionialism", or "romanticism" or "expressionism" that is most interesting. (though it may be the most famous reason he's a popular atonalist). The thing that is most incredible about Berg, is his intellectual craftsmanship.
To return to the surgeon metaphors (AWESOME!), If one was to rank Webern, Stravinsky and Ravel as surgical craftsman and artisans next to Berg, it might appear that Berg is below the rest in terms of rigour and eye for detail, because his music is just so damn expressive and emotional. (I hate words and using them more than once. But mostly I hate words).
If one looks closer, one sees that it is the exact opposite. While Berg works on a huge living breathing patient with a complicated series of organs and tissues intertwining and depending on each other to work, the rest play with a battered version of the board game "Operation".

Alban Berg's obsession for detail and interconnectedness (word? I don't care. Words are gay.) is frightening. Again-it's why he intimidates me. It's actually more than an obsession. Let's use the example of my obsession with this one girl named Hannah that was in one of my classes. My obsession only reached the level of "looking her up on the internet", and staring at her during classes. Still, she was on my mind a lot, and definetly to an extreme points during the boring day.
If Berg's musical eye for detail, form, unity, thematic variation and structure was my obsession for Hannah, it would be of the psychopathic stalker type. I would have to break into her dorm room during the afternoon, steal her underwear, study the samples of her DNA, create a large plastic model of her double helixes and make love to them nightly while in a tree across the street with one eye in a telescope staring at her every move.

Here's an example of this frightening amount of thought put into every bar.
In Berg's opera Lulu there is a short little scene near the beginning where a painter chases the beautiful Lulu around trying to get her to kiss or make love to him. Now for a normal musical dramatist, the goal would be to express the playfulness, eroticism and predatory sexuality in this scene. Berg never simply chooses to write background music that highlights the drama. For example, if a character says he is sad, Berg doesn't simply make some sad melody or music. There is a level of distancing from his characters, because in Lulu his characters are shady, immoral, lying, rich, drug and sex-addicted, self-obsessed, women-hating bastards. He shows compassion for them by giving them beautiful music at times, but the music always manages to be slightly removed from the characters, as if you can never quite believe what they are saying. A profound observer of his characters and the meaning of the drama, Berg also makes sure the structure of his music mirrors the deep structure and meaning of the play. Thus the whole opera is a sort of mirror or palindrome, which mirrors Lulu's rise and fall.

So Berg has this scene where a painter begins chasing his subject around the studio. The music comes off as very playful, light and airy, but with just the right amount of irony and tension to get you involved (at least partially-again, these people are assholes) in what is happening on stage. So Berg is successfully "expressing" what is going on stage by writing good "sexual chase music" (which is hard to do).
However, a lot is going on under the music that amateur listeners, and even scholars without a score will not hear or understand. Lulu is written using the "12-tone method" laid out by his teacher and mentor, composer Arnold Schoenberg. Read the linked article if you are interested (you are not.). I'll just say it's a very strict and formal way of composing where you create an order of the 12 notes of the scale and use only that order for a whole piece-melody, harmony is all determined by that order. The goal of this music is to provide discipline and great unity in music that is atonal, and not in any major or minor key.
Most 12-tone music, despite being some of the most well-ordered and unified and thought-out music possible, sounds to most people, like complete shit. It's usually ugly, disjointed, and even "random sounding". This is quite ironic as the music is the most un-random music imaginable. But many hear Webern or Schoenberg and describe hearing "random notes played randomly, like a baby hitting keys on a piano".
This is a very huge topic and very controversial in music and very hard to understand, but I bring it up to point to the STRICTNESS of Berg's music. He is by choice, limiting himself by using a system (albeit quite freely at times) to create unity, form, structure and even "meaning", and inspire his creativity. Berg's 12-tone music is remarkably free and beautiful sounding, as he often rigs his 12-tone rows to produce tonal, or 'Normal' sounding melodic intervals, melodies, and harmonies.
Lulu uses a lot of 12-tone rows for its material, and sometimes combines them to produce new ones. Many of the characters have their own rows.

So back to the scene.
Berg's two characters in this scene, the Painter and Lulu both have their own 12-tone rows, or sets (or ordering of the 12 notes). The 12-tone order can be used regularly, backwards, or mirrored (turned upside down-notes that went up two steps now go down). So for the scene between them, he uses their rows and combines them. A normal listener has no idea this is going on despite possibly hearing that characters and situations seem to have certain melodies and harmonies associated with them.
So not only has Berg generated all his material from a very strict and many would say, COLD, LIFELESS system (How can one express emotions when doing all this mathematic controlling of the music you ask!), he uses this COLD, LIFELESS system to try to EXPRESS HOT-BLOODED EMOTION AND PASSION! WHAAAAAAAAAAA?
Somehow, the man manages to unite two polar opposites.

But there is millions of more things going on in this scene. I'll name the most obvious one. The Painter doesn't manage to catch up to Lulu till the end of the scene. The kicker: he whole chase, he SINGS IN CANON WITH HER!. A canon, if you don't know (and you actually have touched a woman), is when a melody starts, and then later before the melody is finished, another instrument or voice takes up the melody from the beginning. The most famous simple canon is "Row Row Row Your Boat". But in Lulu, Lulu beings the melody, and The Painter, who can't catch up with her, starts the melody too but always two bars behind his prey. It is only at the end, when he catches her and things slow down, that the two unify and he finally catches up to her.
That's just the beginning. There are things we will never find in there that he put there.

An artist like Alban Berg does what many people believe is only capable with "God": he manages to create Infinity. Am I blowin' ya mind??????????????


Every single note, quarter rest and harmony you hear in Berg, and mostly his Lulu, is there for infinite reasons. The perfections and imperfections of unity, the mystery, the open-endedness (Word?? I don't give a fuck. Go fuck yourself asshole.) is only rivaled in modern art by James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
The fact that either of them finished a damn thing is amazing to me.

I hate both of them.