Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - George Perle, Page 5

ANALYSIS: Alban Berg, String Quartet, Op. 3, mvt. 1, mm. 1-10

PERLE

In the first ten bars of Berg's String Quartet, Op. 3, composed in 1910 when the composer was only 25 years old, interval cycles define harmonic areas and generate thematic elements.   My second example, let's hear it.

(PLAY: mm. 1-10.  [For an audio clip courtesy of the Vienna-based Artis Quartet, click here.])

(referring to a different recording)  That's a very early long-playing record.   I think it is an absolutely sublime performance of those first 10 bars.

Let's listen to it again.  

(PLAY: mm. 1-10)

In the first two bars, you have the octave F to F represented and divided into two halves.   Divided by the tri-tone. So you have F to B, (B is at the entrance of bar 2), and then you have the lower half of that grouping– F to B– represented melodically, via the whole-tone scale.   What you really have is F– E-flat– D-flat, then a neighbor double to the B.   And then the lower half is divided cyclically and symmetrically, in another way, by minor thirds: F– A-flat– B.  

Then something wonderful happens in the viola and 'cello which I wasn't going to take the time to discuss, but it is so interesting I am going to do it any.

You have F–A-flat, between the cello and the viola in bar 2.   Let's skip the next 2 notes, bar 3, and go to the third step here, which gives you G and F-sharp.   G and F-sharp have a special relationship to the opening interval: the F– A-flat.   They are notes that are inversionally related to the first two notes.   F to A-flat, A-flat goes down to G and F-natural goes up to F-sharp.   (Shall I tell them about sums, Paul?)

If you go on from there you will see that in the next bar the notes behave in the same way.   The F-sharp goes down to E-sharp and the G in the bass goes up to the A-flat.   So you've got the same distances, inversionally related distances, and if you have A-flat going down to G, and F going up to F-sharp, where the hell are you going to go after that?   That's a half step.

So Berg opens it up just like Bach does in the G major gavotte.   In the first 3 bars he couldn't move anymore, when he came to the end of his progression.   The movement is very interesting.   In the viola he fills in the half step with a passing note (he goes from A-flat to G to F-sharp).   Then he fills in the cello part which goes from F-sharp – which should have gone from F-sharp up to G, but, by putting the G an octave lower, he gives himself room for another passing tone.   Passing tones do not have to be by half steps; they can be by perfect fourths, and that's what you have here.   The F going down a perfect fourth, then it goes down another fourth.   So the 2 notes at the beginning of the third bar are passing notes.   And from there we remain with that collection of intervals for a while, until the fifth bar, where the G and F-sharp that were played together before, when you get to bar 6, they're repeated.   In other words what I said before holds here: they stopped because there is no place to go.

Then something absolutely wonderful happens, which you don't have to understand except with your ears.   At bar 7 the first violin enters and there's a complete whole-tone partition.   E-flat, F, G, A, B, C-sharp– the complete whole-tone collection.   And in the second violin and the viola, at bar 7, you have elements just of that particular whole-tone collection.   They are a part of the same structure that the violin gives you in its complete form.   So you have a B and A, D-flat, then you have (in the viola) the D-flat, D-natural as a passing note, and the E-flat that brings you back to the same partition that the first violin has.

Then you have something very interesting in the next bar.   (The 'cello is also playing part of the same collection.)   That whole bar is devoted to the whole-tone scale.   In the next bar, we go into the other whole-tone scale, the even collection, which is working just fine in the top 3 instruments.   But the 'cello is outside of that.   The cello is taking 2 notes as embellishments, as neighbor notes of the G-sharp in bar 10.   And the 'cellist feels that he's playing that.   You can tell from the way he plays it that he knows what's happening.   Let's listen one more time.  

(PLAY: mm. 1-10)

Any questions about this music?  

I think we can safely assume that Berg, like Schoenberg, at least sometimes intentionally derived his musical language from the “already existing relations” of a background structure – the cyclic division of the octave – that is consistent in principle with which Lévi-Strauss called the “first level of articulation.”  

We can bring the remaining member of the Viennese family into the circle, as well. From some of his last letters we learned that Webern regarded (music) composition not merely as an aesthetic activity but as something analogous to the investigations of the “researcher into nature [who] strives to discover the rules of order that are the basis of nature.”  

In conceding the possibility that his “proof” of the derivation of the chromatic scale from the overtones might be inadequate, Schoenberg asserted that “it would be possible to find another” proof.   However, I am not aware that he ever attempted to do so.   He and others had already found a source of the twelve-tones in the already existing relations of the interval cycles.  

Is this a good stopping point for questions?

BORISKIN

Does anybody have any questions of George Perle?   What he has talked about represents in a kind of microcosm the growth of the whole post-tonal view of the musical world.