Ideas & Inventions
How much brain, heart, and freedom can help us be creative and expressive?
"Brain and heart are both necessary, for the creation and the appreciation of music, the composer said, deriding a popular notion that contemporary music is largely intellectual. “There was a tendency following the first war, of saying ‘Now we can write what we want – we have broken the bonds of the past.’ That was foolish. One could always write what one wants, but the question is, how good is it? I cannot write what I want – only what I must – what I am commanded by some higher force to write.
One must not strive to do something ‘new.’ One must only strive to give expression to the message within him; if in expressing this message, one develops something new in style or form, that is an accident and of no great importance. I personally always strive to write conservatively, in the classical tradition, but when I finish I find that I have not been able to remain within the conservative framework, because what I had to say demanded its own method of expression.”
From Style and Ideas
My music is not lovely.
[...]
My music is not difficult,
my music is played badly.
Explorations
Five pieces for Orchestra
Farben Chord
Chords with pitches 01348 or C-G#-B-E-A (not in order) is used in this piece.
Color combinatoriality
The pitches were arranged so that each of the 12 tones were used horizontally and vertically at least once before he could repeat the next set of 12 tones.
This works has been called Summer Morning by Lake and Farben/Color. Color was more important than a melody! He also started writing his book, Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony), at around this time.
Listen to three versions of Five Pieces for Orchestra movement 3:
Gesamtkunstwerk
Do-it-all: I was the libretto writer, composer, set designer, light designer, costume designer, blocking for staging.
Back then, there were sounds that were “allowed” and others that were “forbidden.” What are sounds that are liked or disliked? Should we listen to sounds we dislike?
Klangfarbenmelodien
“Sound coloring” is splitting a musical line between various instruments to add a different color/timbre or texture. Other composers explored this as well--Bach, Debussy, berlioz, Beethoven.
Scandal of 1913
Program
Anton Webern: Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6.
Alexander von Zemlinsky: Four Orchestral Songs on poems by Maeterlinck
Arnold Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9
Alban Berg: Five Orchestral Songs on Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg, Op. 4 Nos. 2 and 3.
Gustav Mahler: Kindertotenlieder
What type of music might make audiences fight today?
Should there be types of music that is allowed or forbidden?
Suite, op. 29
Listen:
What types of sounds do you hear? Do you hear emotion, comples musical ideas, or both?
"1st (movement) 6/8 light, elegant, brisk, Bluff / 2nd Jo-Jo Foxtrot / 3rd Fl. Kschw. Waltz / 4th AS Adagio / 5th IbeB Muartsch Var / 6th Film Dva / 7th Tenn Ski." (fifth sketchbook)
Dedicated to my "dear wife" Gertrud, whose musical monogram "eS-G" [E flat-G] is integrated into the music at the beginning and end of each movement.
Sliding Planner
Taking ideas out of the mind into toys
Strips of music paper with chromatic scales to find transpositions
The purpose of the object is unknown, probably related to symbols for the engraver
RODRIGUEZ: You tell me you are a creature of inspiration. Give me some idea of the process you follow.
SCHOENBERG: I see the work as a whole first. Then I compose the details. In working out, I always lose something. This cannot be avoided. There is always some loss when we materialize. But there is a compensating gain in vitality. We all have technical difficulties which arise, not from inability to handle the material, but from some inherent quality in the idea. And it is this idea, this first thought, that must dictate the structure and the texture of the work.
RODRIGUEZ: This brings us somewhat close to biology and theology. You bring to my mind the first words of St. John’s gospel “In the beginning was the Word.”
SCHOENBERG: Of course. What else? What else can I do than to express the original Word, which to me is a human thought, a human idea or a human aspiration? Only that I am always doing it better. More clearly, more distinctly, with better language. In other words, my technique adapts itself better to my ideas. But what is this about biology?
RODRIGUEZ: Merely this: that functions preceded organs, or better still, that the necessity of a function created the form and nature of the organ. I am evolutionist enough to believe that running was first a necessity before legs came into being; not that we first had a liver and then were we given a circulatory system to give the liver a job.
PROCESS
RODRIGUEZ: You tell me you are a creature of inspiration. Give me some idea of the process you follow.