DQ for Watkins, 38-44
Please be prepared to respond in either seminar meeting or in "Comments" on the course blog. In all venues, you must be prepared to cite specific passages (by page, paragraph, line, and quotation) in support of your responses—and specific works.
The goal of this section, parallel to the preceding section dealing with Schoenberg’s “pre-atonal” development, is to demonstrate links between Webern and the music of the past and his contemporaries, and to develop a more nuanced understanding of the early roots of Webern’s “mature” style in earlier works which might sound quite different than the late ones. In other words, as he has already done with Mahler and Schoenberg and as he will seek to do with a number of “radical” composers throughout this book, Watkins is seeking to locate Webern in the artistic, compositional, psychological, and philosophical context of his time; to see in Webern’s music a set of logical and understandable responses to (quoting our syllabus now) “the special problems and cultural issues that … confronted Euro-American composers” at this point in the early 20th-century.
(1) Note that Webern and Berg were both private composition students working with Schoenberg by 1904; this means, as Watkins points out, that they would have been witness to, and hence intimately aware of, the artistic and contextual factors that drove Schoenberg’s harmonic and formal experiments. How was this witness reflected in Webern’s contemporaneous works? Can we find parallels between Schoenberg’s and Webern’s works in this period? Listen, find out, be prepared to describe.
(2) What is the interaction between “color” (defined in both visual and sonic terms), form, and “nature aesthetics” in Webern’s works to 1915? Reflecting what other, parallel sources does he derive and exploit this interaction? Cite Watkins, describe in your own words, be prepared to link elements in Webern compositions and both musical and visual compositions of contemporaneous artists (hint: look at Perloff’s article on Webern and the visual arts, on WebCT under “Materials – Week 03 – Links”).
(3) Be prepared to articulate an overarching theory (or at least a thesis) that explains the influence of and relationship with texts in modernist compositions of this period. Your thesis should cite Mahler, Strauss, Schoenberg, and Webern among composers, and Goethe, Trakl, and the Symbolist poets at the very least. Citing specific works, specific characteristics, and specific (literary or musical) passages would be important.
(4) Further to (3) above: please feel free to prepare a detailed analysis (not formal, but verbal and interpretive) of the specific relationships between text and music in the two Webern songs presented on pp40-41. I would be glad to have a class discussion about motivic relations and text-setting in “Der Tag ist Vergangen.”
(5) In regards to Watkins’s discussion of Webern’s orchestral works in this period (pp41-43), please read and listen closely. For additional insight and for purposes of better-informed discussion, please read at least the highlighted sections of the Perloff article, cited above, and available on WebCT under “Materials – Week 03 – Links.” It’s my opinion that Perloff’s articulation vastly deepens and enriches our understanding of Webern’s orchestral-compositional procedures even in this early period: how would you summarize Perloff’s insights vis-à-vis Webern and Klee (among other artists).
(6) More interpretive and open-ended “jog discussion” question: how can we relate Klimt and Mahler, Klee and Webern, Kandinsky and Schoenberg—and what useful insights might these analyses across contrasting arts media (especially, again, the visual and sounding arts) help us understand the problems that composers understood themselves to be facing?
2 comments:
For question number one, Webern himself had something to say about this. Page 39 in the Watkins, "In 1906 Schoenberg came back from a stay in the country, bringing the Chamber Symphony. It made a colossal impression. I'd been his pupil for three years, and immediately felt "You must write something like that, too!" ... Under the influence of the work I wrote a sonata movement the very next day. In that movement I reached the farthest limits of tonality." Who can say it better than that?
5 and 2. Many of the ideas espoused by Klee and discussed by Perloff in reference to Webern are perhaps more easily described through analysis of Webern’s later music, for example, alternation/imitation, reflection/mirror or inversion, turning/transposition (Perloff, p. 187), and the idea of producing unity and thus comprehensibility out of many outside variants that are but manifestions of the Goethian idea of inner idea (Urform) (Perloff, p. 189, last paragraph, through p. 190, line 9). The simplest idea to discuss here in terms of Perloff and the information that Watkins gives us on pp. 41-43, that is, from what Watkins gives us about Webern’s orchestral pieces Op. 6 and 10, has to do with color, the subject of Goethe’s book Theory of Colors, which Berg gave to Webern (Perloff, p. 190). Also, color can be seen in terms of Goethe’s idea the “leaf is part of the whole” (Perloff, p. 189, lines 2-3). According to Klee a la Perloff (p. 187, 1st full paragraph ff), color and hue create a sense of depth, replacing traditional perspective. The gradations of color lead the eye and create a sense of movement or motion. One can see lines of squares that move up and down and sideways and so on in their gradations of color, and lead the eye up and down and sideways etc. It is easy to exchange the visual term color for the musical term tone color and say that the variegated tone color in Webern’s orchestra works of this period, usually called pointillistic or referred to as klangfabenmelodie, create a sense of depth, and could be seen replacing not traditional perspective but traditional harmony, perhaps, at least in the abstract way that Klee means about color replacing perspective. The gradations of tone color lead the ear and create a sense of movement or motion. One can hear lines of notes that move up and down and sideways and are gradated in varieties of tone color. There is a unity of line with a variety of tone color, like Goethe’s Urpflanze (Perloff, p. 189, 4th line from bottom ff). Now, Watkins does not speak in these pages about motivic considerations, but if I remember correctly from my earlier studies, Webern was, in these pre-dodecaphonic compositions, working with motivic units and their transformations, and so that would of course apply to the Goethian principles adopted by Klee that I mentioned above—Urpflanze/Urform, unity amidst variety resulting in comprehensibility, etc.
6. We can relate these artists and composers through applying a quote from Perloff: “similar formal techniques are used and similar aesthetic principles applied” (p. 186, lines 8-9). Klee and Webern, and Kandinsky and Schoenberg, actually studied similar texts—Goethe’s Theory of Colors and presumably Metamorphosis of Plants for Klee and Webern, and Kandinsky’s “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” for Kandinsky and Schoenberg. Klimt and Mahler obviously relate through the Viennese Secession and Klimt’s art work for it. Similar conjunctions exist among various artists and composers in the third quarter of the twentieth century who studied various Eastern philosophical texts and applied the concepts to the structures of their art and music, etc., and in other situations and eras as well. I do maintain, probably as a result of my “modernist” background, that the relations and conjunctions are best demonstrated in analyzing and comparing specific structural techniques and in giving evidence that the artist and composer in question studied and espoused in writing similar aesthetic ideas. Usually, that takes an intimate knowledge of the persons and their works in question; one needs scores and artworks and more time!
Lisa Lee
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