Cramer, The Schoenberg Circle's Utopian Performance Practice

The Schoenberg Circle's Utopian Performance Practice

Alfred Cramer
Pomona College

Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society
Baltimore, Maryland
November, 1996

Note: I have not included scores here, since they should be fairly easily available. You will probably sense the need to consult the scores of the following pieces as you read this paper:

Schoenberg, Three Piano Pieces, op. 11
Schoenberg, Six Little Piano Pieces, op. 19
Webern, Five Movements for String Quartet, op. 5
Webern, Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, op. 9

If you can't get the QuickTime plug-in you won't be able to hear the sounds. But all recordings except the Pro Arte Quartet's are easily available in any decent music library.

Part I

After studying Webern's Piano Variations with the composer, the pianist Peter Stadlen found that Webern deemed essential many details of which there was no hint in the score. He concluded that "an authentic performance . . . is impossible without direct tradition." In other words, one could not play Webern's music properly without access to numerous compositional intentions that had been left out of the score. Many others have held similar opinions, and it stands to reason that since the Viennese School took pains to develop a performance practice, an understanding of that practice should help us grasp the Viennese School's music.

For several years after the First World War, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, and their associates devoted themselves to meticulously rehearsed performances of new music. 1918 to 1921 was the period of Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances, and the Schoenberg Circle concentrated on performance in other venues during and after that period as well.

The Society for Private Musical Performances educated performers as much as it educated the audience. Kolisch, the society's most prominent violinist and eventually Schoenberg's brother-in-law, described how this happened:

^{1 (full text and citation)}

The central figures of the Viennese School's performance practice included Kolisch as well as the coaches who conducted the society's rehearsals. They were Webern, Berg, the pianist Edward Steuermann, and Schoenberg's composition student Erwin Stein.

Although a few people who participated in the Viennese School's performances are still very much with us, I think it fair to say that if we want to bring back the practice we will have to reconstruct it. Under some circumstances this might involve bringing together all available evidence in order to prepare editions like Stadlen's edition of Webern's Variations. But, notwithstanding Stadlen's experience, I believe codifying the execution of individual musical events was not the general purpose of the Schoenberg Circle's performance practice. The performance practice was not systematic or loaded with conventions in that way. To Edward Steuermann, the only set principles were the principles of "science," as his student Russell Sherman relates:

^{2 (full text and citation)}

A useful first step towards a reconstructed performance practice would be to restore the practice's aesthetic principles. Then we might try to make music in that aesthetic spirit. But in doing so we encounter a pair of paradoxes. The first paradox has to do with the fact that performance was always imperfect, that no performance could ever be definitive. In the Viennese School's practice, performers were to sublimate their own interpretive personalities in presenting a performance faithful to what was in the score, but at the same time the performances were to be lively, spontaneous, and often anything but literal readings of the score-expressive but not self-expressive on the part of the performer. It is as though the performer had to actively interpret in a completely passive fashion.

The Schoenberg Circle's performances made much of the structural features of compositions, but perhaps not in the way one would expect. They did not ordinarily "bring out" the structures that were apparent in the score. Instead, they found ways to play that would richly realize acoustic or instrumental phenomena latent in the score. The performances tended to eschew abstract analytical features that could actually be found in the score in favor of mechanical or sonic stimuli that were only potentially "in the score." Steuermann talked about Schoenbergian interpretation in mainly instrumental terms that made little or no reference to personal expression

^{3 (full text and citation)}

Thus, in his recording of Schoenberg's Piano Piece Op. 11, No. 2 Steuermann tweaked the written notes to give them a maximally sharp and evocative real effect. In Example 1a the F-sharp and G that appear to be simultaneous in the score somehow clash all the more when Steuermann plays the the F-sharp a bit early.

Listen to Example 1a:
Schoenberg, Piano Piece, Op. 11, No. 2, measure 13-16 as performed by Edward Steuermann
[citation]

In example 1b what looks like a trichord F-A-E-flat is given some sophisticated pedaling so that the E-flat sounds as a dotted-eighth accompaniment to the melody F-E-C-B-flat. And Steuermann succeeds through balance and a slightly offset pair of attacks in making the high E-D-sharp dichord sound like a quiet scream.

Listen to Example 1b:
Schoenberg, Piano Piece, Op. 11, No. 2, measures 37-39 as performed by Steuermann
[View Spectrograph]

Listen to Example 1c:
later in the same piece
[citation]

Following similar principles, Kolisch's Pro Arte Quartet makes the acoustic most of [Example 2]. The quiet dynamic and a way of beginning bowed notes gradually allows combinations of notes to evolve acoustically, so that even the simplest events trace a complex path of note-relationships. And there is an addition to the written notes: in this performance the windy-sounding noise of Kolisch's bow on the bridge sounds like an intentional part of the music. (It seems intentional and is probably not merely an artifact of the recording: Schoenberg's performance notes in his String Trio and elsewhere indicate that ponticello is to be played with the bow on the bridge, which gives this windy noise.)

Listen to Example 2:
Webern, String Quartet Movement, Op. 5, No. 4, measures 1-3 as played by the Pro Arte Quartet
[citation]

The difference between this type of performance and some others of the same music is worth examining more closely. Groups such as the Italian Quartet and the LaSalle Quartet make each note clear-and simple; in the spectrograph all the overtones begin together, since each note is begun crisply. Such is not the case in the performance by Kolisch and the Pro Arte. The overtones come in at different times; the performance thus becomes a stream of steadily evolving timbres, and it is more difficult to recognize the individual notes. In spectrographs this difference is visible as aligned versus non-aligned frequency components at the beginnings of notes.

Example 3: Webern, Bagatelle, Op. 9, No. 6, measures 1-2

[citation]

VIEW Spectrograph

LISTEN without spectrograph

Example 3 recorded by the LaSalle Quartet [citation] | VIEW Spectrograph | LISTEN without spectrograph

Example 3 recorded by the Pro Arte Quartet [citation] | VIEW Spectrograph | LISTEN without spectrograph

(On the graphs, the upper spectrographs show simple fast Fourier transforms, the normal method for spectrographs. They show all the frequencies present, with their strengths. The lower spectrographs are linear predictive codings. They essentially filter out any frequencies that do not last for a number of oscillations, so what you see are long-term phenomena such as resonances. In either graph you can see that with the LaSalle and Italian Quartets, all the frequencies begin together, as is not the case with Kolisch's Pro Arte Quartet. I thank Prof. Cristle Collins Judd of the University of Pennsylvania for her effort in making available the computers and software with which the spectrographs were created.) In sum, the structural relationships heard, then, are not what one would notice at first or second glance but rather at third or fourth; these relationships tend to be treated as timbres or effects rather than structures; and the performance practice involves a virtuosically idiomatic exploitation of the properties of instruments. Of course, the flow of the music also contributes to this fluid, timbral structuring. Sometimes it takes an extremely fluid tempo to avoid giving the listener the idea that the music is constructed out of small, identifiable units. Webern's recording of Schubert's German Dances shows such fluidity (I'm told it is typical 1920s Viennese rubato); it is hard to identify precise moments of articulation.

Listen to Example 4:
Schubert, excerpt from German Dance D. 820, arranged and conducted by Anton Webern
[citation]

And Steuermann's recording of Schoenberg's Little Piano Piece Op. 19, No. 5 steadily slows down, without any direction in the score.

Listen to Example 5:
Schoenberg, Little Piano Piece Op. 19, No. 5 as performed by Steuermann
[citation]

Steuermann made reference to this fluidity when he wrote that "it is a question of a music which does not unfold but rather unrolls."^{4 (citation)} That is, its appearance steadily changes; no relationships are static. The philosopher Theodor Adorno, a student of Berg's and a friend of Kolisch and Steuermann, pointed out that it challenged standard notions of analysis.

^{5 (full text and citation)}

This non-observance of structural analysis is a crucial element of the practice, in which musical understanding occurred only transiently, and usually during performance. Understanding the music is like understanding a single word: the process is not one of analyzing what letters are in the sentence; rather, it is a process of recognizing a unique sonic whole whose events run together and will sound different the next time you hear the word. Russell Sherman, Steuermann's student, made much the same point; he said that Steuermann's playing was not doggerel:

^{6 (full text and citation)}

By doggerel, Sherman seems to mean a type of speech or performance that is obviously and predictably structured-so that it is not necessary to listen closely. Doggerel comes to sound generic, the artifact of ultimately inadequate conceptualization, against Steuermann's individualized detailing.

* * * * * * *

Part II

It appears that preparation for performance was devoted to producing a vivid acoustic surface thoroughly grounded in idiomatic instrumental practice. This had the effect of diminishing the performer's own spontaneous self-expression. So did the welcoming of instrumental noise, the extreme exploitation of the pedal and other technical features of the piano, and in another story that I don't have time to tell, Kolisch's insistence on equal temperamant over the usual situational intonation of string players. The reconstruction of this performance practice is informed by a second paradox. Our problem is that the practice was conceived partly as a way to play music that even the composers believed had not yet been reliably understood. This limited understanding made it best for the performer not to have full expressive responsibility. But the Schoenbergians sensed that in the future people would be able to comprehend atonal music rationally, the same way they comprehended Mozart.

The music and the performance practice, then, are meshed in a particular belief in evolution. The Schoenberg Circle understood composition to be progressing, so that each new work was a stepping-stone in the advancing path of music. However, the evolution was perpetual; it always evolved, and never arrived. Schoenberg especially was never satisfied that he had found the best modern language, as Adorno noted:

^{7 (full text and citation)}

The performance practice was similarly utopian, in that it pointed toward a more perfect future of greater comprehension. It was also utopian in that such a perfection was impossible in the here and now. Or rather, in that such a state sometimes existed in the here and now-when artistic conditions were right-but they were only temporary, momentary, transitory. Utopias never last. The perpetual utopian striving might betoken artistic failure; but it also became an important aesthetic principle. Steuermann eloquently stated that under these conditions the utopia became real through the act of performance:

^{8 (full text and citation)}

"Is not music . . . so much alive because it was enclosed in cold signs on paper, to be brought back to life again and again like the grain in the earth?"^{9 (citation)}

Moreover, the act of performance brought one closer to the musical intention than mere analysis could. Again, Steuermann:

^{10
(full text and citation)}

One may compare the Viennese School's view of the musical future to the future suggested in 1905 by Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Einstein showed that the speed of light was not like the speed of an ordinary object; rather, it was a mathematical limit imposed on all interactions between objects. Relativity had profound implications for the geometry of the perception of the universe. Like relativity, the Viennese School's Music of the Future purported to mark the path to an advanced form of intuition analogous to relativity's advanced form of perception.

The "discoverers" of atonality and relativity believed in the existence of a truth that they could not quite comprehend. This belief led the Viennese School to bet on atonality, not knowing what the new musical logic would be like, not knowing which sorts of musical features would be found most expressive, not even knowing whether logic or emotion as we know it would exist under that higher truthfulness of the future. It seemed likely that the new principles would transcend familiar rational logic; it also seemed that the familiar way in which emotions were constructed would go by the boards.

I imagine that both the atonalists and the discoverers of relativity expected that by 1996 we would have incorporated their principles into our intuitions. But relativity entered popular consciousness without a full popular appreciation of the cognitive difficulty involved in intuiting it-think of Star Trek. Instead of treating the speed of light as a limit estranging Newtonian perception, Star Trek takes the speed of light as a vehicle allowing time travel within a thoroughly Newtonian universe. And nowadays, the difficulties of atonal music are usually deemed to be intellectual rather than cognitive. Perhaps consequently, most performances restate the score literally or else they make atonality sound like Tchaikovsky-they do to Viennese atonality what Star Trek does to relativity.

The example of Star Trek tells us that futurism nowadays is fantasy. To the Schoenbergians, futurism was serious prediction, even prophecy. Thus it may not be so easy to engage the Viennese School's utopian futurism in the late 1990s. There are difficult choices to make: Should a historically-informed performance make the music sound the way it did when it was new-which would hardly seem futuristic to us? Should the music be made to sound strange in the here and now? If so, how? Or should it be made to sound comfortable, in view of some ostensible progress beyond the Viennese School's artistic capacity (as though our faculties have evolved in the way they envisioned)? Historical performance practice always encounters impossible aesthetic translations; in this case the difficulty lies in performing the by-now old music of a future that never happened.

Abstract

Although it is recognized that Schoenberg, Webern, and their associates-Edward Steuermann, Rudolf Kolisch, and others-developed a sophisticated performance practice, the implications of that practice have been neglected. Musicologists tend to isolate compositional structures that are frozen on the page in considering whether (to mention a few recent views) the conduits for atonal meaning involve interval-sets or old-fashioned tonal tendencies and lyrical melodies. Most performers present little beyond what is written or else interpret atonal music with "Romantic" expressivity.

All are looking for musical meaning where it was not intended. The Schoenbergian performance practice reminds us that the Schoenberg Circle distinguished sharply between compositional procedures and musical expression. Their words and recordings testify to a performance practice that put expression beyond the performer's immediate intentional control in bringing out sonic features latent in the score. Thus they emphasized the pedal and other instrumental mechanisms; they used equal temperament instead of "expressive intonation;" and they used rubato only to demarcate formal sections. Resulting performances seem strange, fluid, and often opposed to the letter of the score.

This systematic depersonalization of performance practice was heuristic, not anti-expressive. Schoenbergians sought to avoid ways of thinking and feeling that would seem primitive in the expressive Utopia of the future. They believed future cognitions would discern expression not in the score but in the expressive process it represented, which for now could only be realized when a performance expressively transcended the performer's (and composer's) limited vision.

Citations

1. In this enterprise of Schoenberg's, those who cooperated were completely devoted to this task [of performance]. We worked day and night. We would make (I don't know) 200 rehearsals to perform a piece, if necessary. And this preparation was organized. [Schoenberg] appointed certain more experienced people, who were under his influence already for some longer time, with the task of conducting these rehearsals. Of course, he could not prepare everything himself, obviously. He did though, prepare many of the works himself and thereby set an example for us. . . . And this set a canon, a standard for performance which is, of course, still valid today. And I must say that the radiation of this enterprise is still felt today.
--Rudolf Kolisch quoted in Hoffman, "Reminiscences: A Schoenberg Centennial Symposium," 69.
(Return to text)

2. The basis of [Steuermann's] teaching was above all: no system. . . . You have principles; principles will accommodate. And you have common sense-and scientific phenomena, so that, for example, the balance between registers could be dealt with, or that if you play in the lower register, inevitably it's going a little slower than when it's in the upper register. These relativistic facts of science were definitely principles, but they were not prescriptions. There was no single right way of doing something.
--Russell Sherman quoted in Schuller, "A Conversation with Russell Sherman," 231.
(Return to text)

3. The pianist is apt to form his musical conception of a composition from its instrumental aspect. . . . First, he must pianistically understand (and not misunderstand) every single idea of the piece. Second, he must be able to build up these different ideas into one fluent stream of music. Third, he must do justice to that melodic-polyphonic element which, to my feeling, is the very essence of Schoenberg's music.
--Edward Steuermann, "The Piano Music of Schoenberg," 43.
(Return to text)

4. Steuermann, "Style," 120.
(Return to text)

5. Steuermann's use of analysis and interpretation is intimately allied to modern composing, a conception in which the structural, contrapuntal identifying features of each piece obtain against the outdated generalities of tonality. . . . To cite a very simple illustration, such thinking leads not to suppressing upbeats, other so-called secondary tones, and non-harmonic, especially "dissonant" elements, but rather to emphasizing them. . . . It largely implies the primacy of melodic line over bass functions, coinciding with the generally more polyphonic tendencies of new music. The legitimacy of this approach is confirmed by the fact that it converges precisely with those impulses of spontaneous musicianship which the academic type of analysis always stifles.
--Theodor W. Adorno, "After Steuermann's Death," 243.
(Return to text)

6. There is a way of playing . . . where the tones follow in a sort of doggerel couplet way, as opposed to what is, I think, less advanced in the present culture, namely a general rhetoric (in the best sense) and eloquence where tones have the capacity to cut across the grain and to make certain kinds of points of resistance, of imploring, of expletives-undeleted-that create a pattern of continuous throbbing energy, of human speech energy.
--Sherman quoted in Schuller, "A Conversation with Russell Sherman," 221.
(Return to text)

7. When Valéry remarked that the work of great artists has something of the quality of finger exercises, of studies for works that were never created, he could have used Schoenberg as his model. The utopia of art transcends individual works. . . . Musicians sense that they labour on music and not on works, even if such labour progresses only through works.
--Adorno, "Arnold Schoenberg," 171
(Return to text)

8. How far my interpretations were the full realization of Schoenberg's ideas I don't know. A composer like Schoenberg has a very far reaching imaginary vision of his music. The interpreter can only try to reach the sphere of this imagination, to bring the dead signs on the paper to life.
--Steuermann quoted in Schuller, "A Conversation with Steuermann," 183
(Return to text)

9. Edward Steuermann, "The Picture Puzzle," 102.
(Return to text)

10. Arnold Schoenberg once called the musical notation "das Bilder-rätsel," the picture puzzle, as every line of these traditional signs conceals as well as it reveals the secret meaning of the melody, the rhythm, the sonority.
It was created by magic-as we do not know what the "secret" of music is-and we can re-create it by magic only: the magic of devotion and sincerity.
There are limits to the possibility of understanding another human heart-we never can be sure how far we have succeeded in really identifying ourselves with the work we perform-but we must never stop calling for this "magical" condition, where even a misunderstanding will be closer to truth than abstract knowledge.
--Steuermann, "The Picture Puzzle," 101
(Return to text)

Bibliography

Theodor W. Adorno, "After Steuermann's Death." In Clara Steuermann et al., eds., The Not Quite Innocent Bystander.

Theodor W. Adorno, "Arnold Schoenberg," in Prismen (Berlin, 1955); translated as Prisms by Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967): 147-172.

Richard Hoffman and Leonard Stein, "Reminiscences: a Schoenberg Centennial Symposium at Oberlin College," Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 8/1 (June 1984): 59-77.

Rudolf Kolisch, "Religion der Streicher," in Zur Theorie der Aufführung. Ein Gesprach mit Berthold Türcke, Musik Konzepte: Die Reihe über Komponisten, Heft 29/30 (Munich, January 1983): 113-119.

Gunther Schuller, "A Conversation with Russell Sherman," in Clara Steuermann et al., eds., The Not Quite Innocent Bystander.

Gunther Schuller, "A Conversation with Steuermann," in Clara Steuermann et al., eds., The Not Quite Innocent Bystander.

Clara Steuermann, David Porter, and Gunther Schuller, eds., The Not Quite Innocent Bystander: Writings of Edward Steuermann [and others], trans. Richard Cantwell and Charles Messner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

Edward Steuermann, "The Piano Music of Schoenberg." In Schoenberg: Articles by Arnold Schoenberg [et al.], (1937, repr. Freeport, NY, 1971); substantially repr. in Clara Steuermann et al., eds., The Not Quite Innocent Bystander.

Edward Steuermann, "The Picture Puzzle." Philadelphia Conservatory of Music Yearbook (1949); repr. in Clara Steuermann et al., eds., The Not Quite Innocent Bystander.

Recordings

Arnold Schoenberg. Complete Piano Music. Edward Steuermann, piano (1958). Columbia Masterworks ML5216 (LP).
[Return to Example 1][Example 5]

Franz Schubert, arr. Anton Webern. "Deutsche Tänze." Frankfurter Funkorchester, conducted by Anton Webern (1932). Included in Webern, Complete Works directed by Pierre Boulez. Sony Classical SM3K 45845 (CD).
[Return to Example 4]

Anton Webern. Symphony opus 21; Pieces for string quartet opus 5 and 9 (1950). Dial Contemporary Classics No. 7 (LP). René Leibowitz, conductor, and members of the French Orchestre National in the Symphony, and the Pro Arte Quartet: Rudolf Kolisch, violin, Albert Rahier, violin, Bernard Milofsky, viola, and Ernst Friedlander, cello in the quartet pieces.
[Return to Example 2][Example 3]

Anton Webern. Complete music for string quartet (1970). Philips 420 796-2 (CD). With Quartetto Italiano.
[Return to Example 3]

Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern. Second Viennese school: the string quartets (1971). Deutsche Gramophon 419 994-2 (LP). With the LaSalle Quartet.
[Return to Example 3]

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