Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - George Perle, Page 6

HAILEY	George, there was a very interesting discussion at the Jewish museum last night where they currently have an exhibition of Kandinsky and Schoenberg. The discussion got stuck on the question of atonality and abstraction and whether these two things have a relationship one to the other, which they don't. But there was one thing that was very interesting. If you look carefully at what Kandinsky or Franz Marc were responding to in Schoenberg's music, it relates to a passage in the Harmonielehre - in fact, the very one that you cite about dissonance being only a more remote consonance according to the harmonic series. So no matter what you think about the validity of that argument [atonality/abstraction], the main thing for both of them was the idea that Schoenberg had expanded upon the range of meaningful relationships, through what Schoenberg called the “emancipation of dissonance.” That both men, perhaps not understanding the musical language itself, found the very idea liberating - that it was possible to expand a frame of reference.
PERLE	It wouldn't be the first time that something wasn't discovered but somebody thought something was discovered that he'd already discovered in a completely different way. I think X-ray was discovered that way.
HAILEY	But I think that's the important thing: it wasn't the fact of the dissonance, it wasn't the fact of any kind of...
PERLE	Of course. It was his faith that nature would provide. And nature did provide, because the cyclic divisions of the octave are a way to get certain things to happen in music and you won't find them in the overtones. Schoenberg was a very intelligent man but it is hard to imagine anything less intelligent than to take the overtones and change the tuning of the partials that don't fit. Number 13 is not a good number. But Schoenberg doesn't leave the 7th out of the 7th chord, which is not provided. You have something else there. Nobody's ears are that bad that they would accept the 7th as given to you by the overtone system as the 7th of a dominant 7th . So what is your point?
HAILEY	The point, as you had suggested, is that the idea of symmetrical relationships does go back much further when we look at the late Liszt work, for instance. And that, as a method of explaining and constructing, this suddenly opens up a perspective that does relate Schoenberg to Debussy. It relates music that sounds very different to a family of innovations, a family of explorations in the early 20th century these have much broader consequences than even Schoenberg, Kandinsky or Mark might have [imagined].
PERLE	Well, Schoenberg wouldn't admit that Rimsky-Korsakov had more to do with the twelve-tone system than Bach. He kept analyzing Bach to discover the twelve-tone system. And of course there are a few… I forget whether it's in the first book or the second book where you have a twelve-tone theme. I wouldn't call it a twelve-tone theme but Schoenberg's willing to call it a twelve-tone theme. That's a very good point. Any other questions?
BORISKIN	I was actually struck, over the course of the paper, with Lévi-Strauss's references and the other references to “less natural” and “more natural,” and I was somehow struck for the first time whether maybe that is a misnomer? That is, talking about “less natural,” I'm wondering if there is a notion of ambiguity here? In talking about whole tone scales, or cyclic intervals, isn't the whole tone scale inherently more ambiguous precisely because it is symmetrically divided, unlike the major scales that we all learn when we start to play the piano? A key (C major-G major, for example) has become more perceptible to us, more identifiable and may be less ambiguous in and of itself, precisely because the scale is not divided symmetrically. What do you think about that? A whole tone scale is simply a scale where each of the intervals, the space between the notes, is exactly the same, and what Liszt tried to do – you mentioned Liszt and it's a perfect example – Liszt, in a kind of rudimentary way, built so many of his most forward-looking works on the diminished seventh chord, which is a cyclic series. And it has the same intervals – it's made up of minor thirds, a pile up of minor thirds. The beautiful thing about that is that you can constantly take the bottom note and put it on top and it'll send you in another direction. Take the next bottom note and put it on top and it sends you in yet another direction. And of course it opens up all kinds of new harmonic progressions, but it is ambiguous in and of itself in a way that, on a basic level, the traditional diatonic scale is not. This struck me in a way like never before when we were talking about “nature.” Should we really be thinking about what's “natural” as opposed to what's ambiguous in the basic construction of the scales?
PERLE	Well, I'm using the word nature in a kind of ironical sense. I mean, what is natural about numbers? (Everything I guess.)
BORISKIN	There are too many people here who can answer that question better than I can.
LANSKY	There's another perspective on the difference between what you might call the “twelve-tone view of the world” and the view of harmony that you are talking about, which I think is really sort of a simple one in a certain sense and that is that when you have something like the whole tone scale or a diminished seventh collection – basically those two, or the augmented triad – you've got a proliferation of similarities. So in a whole tone scale you have a lot of intervals that are the same, so you constantly hear a major second, a major third, and you're constantly getting a kind of self-similarity in the structure. The sort of axiomatic sense of the twelve-tone system, on the other hand, is one in which you've got all twelve pitch classes. (I mean, you can arrange them so that intervals are similar.) But in a certain sense this kind of intervallic similarity is at the basis of something that is quite evident when you hear a lot of major thirds, or a lot of major seconds – that you're getting something that has a kind of consistency to it that is similar to the tonal system. In the tonal system, for example, you get a lot of major seconds or a lot of perfect fifths, in a certain sense. So this is a different angle, I think, on the same thing you're saying. But maybe it's more evident to people who don't have a musical background in this respect. Does that make sense for you?
PERLE	I suppose.
LANSKY	That's what you always say. (laughter)