"Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas."
- Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
Arnold Schoenberg had considerable influence over the course of music in the 20th century, particularly through his development and promulgation of theories of composition in which unity in a work is provided by the use of a determined series, usually consisting of the twelve possible different semitones, their order also inverted or taken in retrograde form, and in transposed versions. Schoenberg's earlier compositions are post-romantic in character, followed by a period in which he developed his theories of atonality, music without a key or tonal centre. Schoenberg's most important opera is
Moses und Aron, of which he completed only two of the three acts. Schoenberg's music for orchestra includes a violin concerto, a symphonic poem based on Maurice Maeterlinck's medieval drama
Pelleas und Melisande and Five Orchestral Pieces. In addition to four string quartets and a late string trio, Schoenberg's post-romantic
Verklärte Nacht of 1899 is particularly noteworthy.
Gurrelieder, written between 1901 and 1903, is a work of Wagnerian proportions and mood, for solo voices, large chorus and orchestra. Other, later vocal music includes
A Survivor from Warsaw, written in 1947, for narrator, male voices and orchestra. Solo songs range from the 1909 settings of Stefan George in
Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Garden) to the cabaret songs he wrote for the Berlin Überbrettl in his earlier years.
Topic:
SPRECHGESANG
Words half spoken and half sung, speech or singing?
In
The Pierrot Lunaire, a study of madness --based on German translations of seven poems by Albert Giraud-- Arnold Schoenberg used the technique of 'Sprechgesang" to express the ideas from the poems. According to Schoenberg's own explanation, "the pitch is indicated, however left again immediately."
These are not "operating instructions", but interpretation instructions, requiring practice in order to express properly. The method remains controversial despite experimentation. Perhaps the "ambiguity" of the instructions, separates the inability to deal with the term "speech singing" from the interpretation in performance that NEVER followed instructions or methods, but was intended to be subject to a continual dialectic principle.
