Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - George Perle, Page 2

ALREADY EXISTING RELATIONS

PERLE

I am concerned everyone will be disappointed after hearing that introduction.

Jon Magnussen has called our attention to the wonderfully varied musical landscape that confronts us in today's world, as I do in the closing paragraphs of my book The Listening Composer .   I go on to propose, and perhaps Jon will agree, that this extraordinary proliferation of musical activity, and of musical institutions to promote every aspect and the full range of that activity, is not necessarily a measure of the vitality of our musical culture.   A generation of internationally famous figures has passed away and no similarly acknowledged figures have come along to take their place.   But perhaps we don't need any more Stravinskys and Schoenbergs.   Pierre Boulez has replied to this question, in respect to the latter, in an address on the occasion of the official opening of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute.   “As some of you may know, I am personally involved very deeply in establishing in Paris a different kind of institute, which at least until now does not bear the name of a composer, but rather describes an intention.   We – that is myself and a team of composers, technicians and scientists – are in the process of building a research institute (IRCAM) founded on the belief that many problems, even the most trivial of them, might be solved by the effort not of a single individual but rather of a whole group.   Just as the work of Schoenberg – based on his own technique and on the expansion of his musical thought in unexpected directions – enabled other composers to derive from their own thinking and their own technique, so in the same way a team of investigators not at all restricted to a limited number of individuals might help to solve some of the problems which, through either economic pressure or cultural restrictions, have proved very difficult, if not insoluble, in our musical society at this time.”  

Schoenberg himself, however, looked to the world of nature for an explanation of the harmonic language of so-called atonality, and in his 1927 article, “Problems of Harmony,” he found it in the more distant overtones, but only after tacitly retuning the 7th, 11th, and 13th partials.   Clearly, he wasn't comfortable with this subterfuge and concluded his argument for the derivation of the chromatic scale with the proposal that “should this proof be inadequate, it would be possible to find another, for it is indisputable that we can join 12 tones with one another, but this can only follow from the already existing relations between the 12 tones.”  

A composer will find it indisputable that we can join 12 tones with one another only because of the sense that he intuitively makes of his musical experience and the act of composing, and not because of any theories about the derivation of the 12 tones.   Schoenberg neither defined nor described these already existing relations, but if such relations already exist for the composer's ear, the listener's ear too will discover them.   In tonal music, variations on a thematic figure always occur as manifestations of already existing relations inherent in a background structure, and the listener's ear will tell them that this is also true of the reference in bars 9-11 to the first three bars of Schoenberg's Op. 11, No. 1.