Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - George Perle, Page 4

Claude Lévi-Strauss: “The first level of articulation”

PERLE

In my view such “already existing relations between the 12 tones”...

– I am reminding you here of what Schoenberg said, in case you argued with his retuning of the pitches of the overtone scales that prove the 12 notes of the chromatic scale were in the overtones and therefore they were legitimate.   But consider the possibility that you can't exactly monkey around with the overtones in that way and prove anything –

In my view such “already existing relations between the 12 tones” may be equated with what Claude Lévi-Strauss in his book The Raw and the Cooked calls “the first level of articulation, which is as indispensable in musical language as in any other, and which consists precisely of general structures whose universality allows the encoding and decoding of individual messages.” When Lévi-Strauss, however, describes that “first level of articulation” as “a function of the hierarchical structure of the scale,” he is referring specifically to the diatonic scale with its “fundamental, tonic, dominant and leading notes.”   Boulez shows the same limited understanding of foundational tone relations when he asserts that for the new music “there is no longer any preconceived scale or preconceived forms – that is, general structures into which a particular variety of musical thought can be inserted.”   Schoenberg placed himself in opposition to both Lévi-Strauss and Boulez in assuming the presence of “already existing relations between the 12 tones.”   We can probably attribute this persistent rejection of the term “atonality” to his understanding of that term, as signifying a kind of music that implies no “already existing relations,” no “general structures into which a particular variety of musical thought can be inserted.”  

In other words, to begin with, it's up to you to invent whatever you like (about the meaning of the precompositional notes). Or perhaps there are no precompositional implications?   For Schoenberg there were.   For Lévi-Strauss there were precompositional considerations, but he said what they were (and they couldn't be represented by anything, one of the Viennese atonalists might write).

There is very convincing evidence a piece like the second movement of the Lyric Suite is just as analyzable as a piece of tonal music, but Lévi-Strauss doesn't even consider the possibility.   Lévi-Strauss explains the elements from which he derives his “first level of articulation” as “drawn from nature.”   But does the precompositional whole-tone structure from which the phrase in bars 9-11 (Schoenberg, Op. 11) derives its harmonic character, seem less natural than the traditional hierarchical relations to which Lévi-Strauss refers us?   What Lévi-Strauss regarded as the irreplaceable elements of “a first level of articulation” have in fact been replaced, in bars 9-11, by another kind of precompositional structure which is just as “natural,” the division of the twelve-tone semitonal and “chromatic” scale into its two whole-tone partitions.   Indeed, not only the whole-tone scale but any other cyclic division of the twelve notes may function as an element of the “first level of articulation” that Lévi-Strauss requires of a genuine musical language.

Do we have to hear this excerpt again, or have I frightened you into agreement with me? (laughter)

The twelve-tone scale is inheritantly symmetrical: it divides the octave into equal intervals – 12 half steps or 12 perfect fifths – depending on how we choose to unfold the cycle of twelve notes.   The diatonic tonal system is inherently asymmetrical: it divides the octave into a series of seven unequal intervals – whole steps and half steps.   The whole tone scale, like the twelve-tone scale, also divides the octave symmetrically into 6 equal intervals and is therefore a subdivision of what I should have liked to call the “twelve-tone system,” had that term not already been taken over to refer to the more limited notion of music based on the Schoenbergian tone-row.   The extensive whole-tone sections of Debussy's Voiles and of the second movement of Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d'or suite are a kind of twelve -tone music.   In early Stravinsky and in much of Bartók cyclically derived symmetrical structures intersect with diatonic structures.