On December 21, 1908, several hundred men and women gathered at the Bösendorfer-Saal in Vienna, settled into their seats, and bore unexpected witness to one of the great revolutions in musical history. Heading the program that night was a new work for string quartet and soprano by a controversial young composer named Arnold Schoenberg, already known in Viennese music circles for his challenging style: tense, drawn-out Wagnerian harmonies, allowed only the briefest and rarest moments of respite. And indeed, as the first three movements of his piece unfolded — Schoenberg straight away twisting the four lines of the quartet, cat’s-cradle-like, into one splayed chord after another — the crowd could be heard growing increasingly restless. But none of this was, strictly speaking, out of the ordinary. Yet. Then came the fourth, and final, movement. Suddenly, and seemingly without preparation, Schoenberg abandoned any sense of a home key, or resolution, at all — and unleashed on the unsuspecting audience eleven minutes of total, unforgiving dissonance. There had been near-precedents: flashes of atonality in Debussy, Scriabin, and Strauss. But Schoenberg’s radicalism was of a different order. Unlike Debussy, he did not employ dissonance as a streaky, painterly effect. Unlike Strauss, his atonality did not just bubble up momentarily from otherwise conventional harmonic tensions, as though somebody had simply turned up the heat too high and accidentally caused simmering chords to spill over, for a second, into outright dissonance. No, Schoenberg used atonality, really for the first time in history, directly: as an all-encompassing, self-contained — and consciously abrasive — musical language of its own. The audience was, predictably, stunned. Schoenberg would later reminisce, perhaps a little romantically, that the crowd began to “riot.” The morning after the concert, one local paper ran the headline “Scandal in the Bösendorfer-Saal!” In another, the music critic called Schoenberg “tone-deaf.” The Neues Wiener Tagblatt published their review in their “Crime” section. Some close to Schoenberg speculated that the fourth movement was simply a crazed musical response to an ongoing crisis in the composer’s personal life. The previous summer, while writing the quartet, Schoenberg had discovered that his wife, Mathilde, was having an affair with their friend and neighbor, the painter Richard Gerstl. Richard and Mathilde eloped shortly after — but in October, following an intervention from Schoenberg’s pupil Anton Webern, Mathilde agreed to return home. A few weeks later, Gerstl set fire to most of his paintings, stripped naked, and hanged himself in front of the mirror that he used for self-portraits. He was twenty-five years old. Schoenberg, contemplating his own suicide, drafted a will in which he wrote: “I deny facts. All of them, without exception. They have no value to me, for I elude them before they can pull me down. I deny the fact that my wife betrayed me. She did not betray me, for my imagination had already pictured everything that she has done.” In the end, he did not follow Gerstl’s example. The String Quartet No.2, which premiered forty-seven days after the painter’s death, was dedicated “to my wife.” Others dismissed Schoenberg’s experiments as an adolescent attempt to trash the past, in keeping with the radical mood of the decade. But the composer, an austere and academic man, and living an otherwise bourgeois lifestyle, always insisted that his use of atonality was a rational decision. It was simply a matter of taking the inevitable next step in the evolution of Western music. The conventions of tonality, he would argue a few years later in his theoretical treatise Harmonielehre, had been worn out over the course of the nineteenth century — and melody and rhythm now needed to be decanted into a fresher idiom to ensure their survival. Whatever the ultimate explanation, what emerged from that night was a narrative that has stuck ever since: that tonality had come to its irreversible end, and that, for serious composers, there was now “no going back.” Thanks in part to the painter Wassily Kandinsky — who, after hearing the quartet in 1911, made his own “break” with pictorial tradition, going fully abstract — and especially to the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who saw in Schoenberg’s work the only truthful musical expression of the horrors of twentieth-century life, a connection was made, too, between atonality and the so-called “crisis of modernity.” The death of traditional harmony, the death of representational art, the death of syntax, the death of God: all the deaths, it was assumed, were intrinsically linked. It proved to be an intoxicating thesis. In the “high art” musical world, tonality became quickly associated with pastiche and compositional cowardice. And yet atonality, for all Schoenberg’s predictions that it would one day come to sound to us as natural as Mozart or Bach, failed to mature into a lasting idiom of its own. The result has been a profound sense of frustration: a musical culture stuck between a forbidden past and an increasingly irrelevant future. As the composer György Ligeti wrote in 1993: “[One] cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.” And all of this has fed into the favored grand narrative of our times: that we are culturally stuck, still unable to get our spinning wheels back out of the modernist ditch. Consider the cultural historian Jacques Barzun’s book From Dawn to Decadence, which appeared in 2000, in which he partitions the last five centuries into two basic chunks: the years 1500 to 1900, during which the West blossomed, and the hundred or so years since, in which we have witnessed a “tailing off.” Our society has become restless, Barzun writes, “for it sees no clear lines of advance.” He continues: “The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through.” As a
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence