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"Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it." Igor Stravinsky |
"Without music, life would be a mistake." Friedrich Nietzsche |
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| With all the options available to them at the beginning of the sixteenth century, composers were naturally drawn to themes and their variations. As scientists used the rules of logic to construct detailed explanations of the world's workings, and artists created complex paintings organized about the laws of perspective, so composers explored development in music. In this form of musical analysis the composer states a theme, and then exhaustively explores its variations. The complicated scaffolding of a single theme in the diverse compositions of Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms was possible because they all accepted certain agreed upon conventions of music, the most basic of which was the unity of key. Mozart, and later, Beethoven, were masters of the intricate manipulation of theme and variation. The seventy-piece symphony orchestra emerged early ih the nineteenth century to serve as a vehicle for this unique form. One result of this pervasive mind-set was that the observer was split off from what he observed in science, the viewer was separated from the landscape in illusionist art and the audience was divorced from the performer in music. Classical music listeners sat in neat rows that resembled the repetitive lines of type on a printing press and behaved like silent viewers standing outside the frame of a perspectivist painting, or scientists quietly observing the sky through a telescope. The rules of etiquette demanded that audience members of a musical concert sit passively and not tap their feet, sing, move, or even cough. The music we think of today as classical included no audience participation; there were no operatic sing-a-longs. The singular point of reference that expressed itself as the central home key of a composition beginning in the late Renaissance reached the epitome in the late eighteenth century in the person of an orchestra's conductor. The one person in the orchestra who did not play any instrument, he was yet the focus of the music. The entire orchestra was placed in such a way that the sound issuing forth from each instrument converged upon him. In this regard, the conductor resembled the viewer of an illusionist painting in that all lines of sight converged on one point. These works were planned as if they were to be seen by a monocular eye. The conductor of an orchestra was this eye's counterpart, a cyclopean ear, as it were. Like the sun in the Copernican system, he stood in the very center of a musical system, the orchestra cupping him on one side and the audience on the other. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the respective citadels of art, physics, and music each had as its foundation a comprehensive hierarchical structure that seemed secure. Startling new discoveries in all three fields would change them radically. Both the composer and the artist anticipated the trumpet blast that would bring down their walls. The modern painter introduced a solitary musician playing a Dionysian reed instrument. Featured first in a work by Edouard Manet, The Fifer , and developed further in one by Henri Rousseau, The Snake-charmer , this figure was soon resurrected by many different artists playing the haunting monodic melody of mythological times. The lone musician became the leitmotif of the new age. While the public was still applauding Beethoven's complex crescendos, the visual artists had presciently intuited the coming upheaval that would revolutionize art, music, and physics. As we shall see, composers, too, insinuated into their music the beginnings of this radical change. In the early years of the twentieth century, music was caught up in the same turmoil that enveloped art and physics. These changes were so profound that the Western world would never again be the same. While the principal events of the Renaissance were scattered over a two-hundred year span, a profound compression took place in the few years around 1905. In 1899 in Vienna, a chamber group performed the first major composition by the young Arnold Schoenberg, a string sextet entitled Transfigured Night that contained an unusual programmatic nature and strange harmonies which outraged conservative program committees. Schoenberg developed atonality in his 1909 Opus 11, No. 1, the first composition ever to dispense completely with "tonal" means of organization. Atonality was a dramatic departure from previous forms of music because it destroyed the central unitary principle of a home key. In an atonal composition there is no key. Each note has the same relative importance as all the others. As a result, dissonance becomes harmony. A Viennese critic called Schoenberg "a man either directly devoid of sense or one who takes his listeners for fools.... Schoenberg's opus is not only filled with wrong notes... but it is a fifty-minute-long wrong note."11 Thus it was that Einstein pulled the stool out from under the stationary observer in science at the same time Schoenberg finally dethroned the two-century reign of King Key. Since Picasso and Braque soon replaced the singular viewpoint in art with the multifaceted vantage of an insect's eye, relativity found concurrent expression in physical theory, the visual arts and music. Like relativity and Cubism, atonality did not emerge from nowhere. It was the conclusion of a progression that had begun with Beethoven, who experimented by wandering away from a home key in his later works. Later in the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner began to modulate from one key to another, disconnecting his motifs much as CÈzanne was doing in his still-life compositions. In the 1880s, fascinated by Eastern music, Claude Debussy began to compose music that departed from the unifying influence of central tonality. His musical "Impressionism" in PrÈlude ý l'aprËs-midi d'un faune (1894) ran parallel with the impulse of painters of the same era.
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