On Thu, 03 Feb 2005 12:24:44 -0500, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote: > I'm not entirely sure about not eliminating the consonant, though. Again, > I'm sloshing around in bad old guy memory territory, but didn't Schoenberg > alter one of the pitches in one appearance of a row in his Op. 25 Suite so > a consonant major chord was not produced? I analyzed that thing in the late > 1960s, and seem to recall that coming up in the discussion. But I surrender > to the better-prepared theorists among us!
I wrote a paper for an undergraduate Music History course on the first two movements of Schoenberg's Op. 25, and in at least those two movements I don't remember seeing that happen. However, there was a section at the end of the Praeludium that I totally failed to recognize as any form of the wonderful "tritone-bookended" (my own term) row that is used for this piece. I was able to notice that every pitch-class was used an equal number of times throughout a certain section, but I didn't grasp what exactly was going on. The Theory prof was no help either... he had analyzed the piece himself, and he had marked the same section as "undefined." But in any case, Opus 25 was much more than "emancipation of the dissonance" for Schoenberg. It was completely atonal, with the goal of completely eradicating emphasis of any one pitch and avoiding commonly-percieved structures that lend themselves to heirarchical organizations of importance. "Emancipation of the dissonance" was, if I remember correctly, the stage he went through in between his neo-Romantic emulation of Strauss and Wagner and his serialist phase. Since you brought up Schoenberg, I noticed an interesting thing the other day when I picked up a "collected writings" book in the bookstore (I think it was all letters he had written to various people). As you may know, Joseph Hauer created his own form of serialism, independent from Shoenberg and at roughly the same time. Schoenberg's first letter in that book completely decried Hauer's serialism, in fairly strong and direct language (I assume that the English translation watered down the original German), as utter rubbish. I never knew he had such a harsh dislike for competition! -- Brad Beyenhof [EMAIL PROTECTED] my blog: http://augmentedfourth.blogspot.com FinaleIRC (come chat!): http://finaleirc.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
