Unraveling the Knots of the 12 Tones

NYT
October 14, 2007
Unraveling the Knots of the 12 Tones
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

MENTION the term 12-tone music to many veteran classical concertgoers and watch them recoil. Twelve-tone music? All those dreadful, aggressively dissonant pieces that a cadre of cerebral composers tried to impose on audiences for so long?

Mention 12-tone music to younger people and fledgling concertgoers, and for the most part they draw a blank. They don’t know 12-tone from “Ocean’s 12.” They just know what contemporary music they like and don’t like.

Among all segments of the audience major misconceptions persist about the 12-tone technique of composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920s. Schoenberg’s use of systematized sets of all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale — all the keys on the piano from, say, A to G sharp — was a radical departure from tonality, the familiar musical language of major and minor keys.

Seized with excitement over his breakthrough, Schoenberg predicted that the 12-tone technique would assure the supremacy of Germanic music for another hundred years. He could not have been more wrong. His system spread well beyond Germany, but with far less impact than he had hoped.

Still, the invention of the 12-tone system was arguably the most audacious and influential development in 20th-century music. Its impact can be heard today in works far removed from the knotty scores of composers like Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, Charles Wuorinen and its other formidable practitioners during its heyday in the third quarter of the last century. Elements of 12-tone style turn up even in Broadway shows and film scores. Yet an overwhelming majority of music lovers have no idea what the technique is, what exactly the music sounds like or what the fuss was all about.

Adaptations of the technique and aesthetic have become so integrated into concert music today that few listeners even notice anymore. Patrons at the season-opening gala of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at the Rose Theater last month might have been upset had they thought they were going to be confronted with some gnarly 12-tone piece. Yet the program included the premiere of Bruce Adolphe’s spiky “Crossing Broadway” for chamber ensemble, music that impishly blurs the distinctions between skittish 12-tone riffs and jazzy scat. The audience listened with pleasure and gave Mr. Adolphe a warm ovation.

The 12-tone movement was supposed to have engendered a revolution. In 1979 Mr. Wuorinen declared victory, at least in the realm of “serious” music. “While the tonal system, in an atrophied or vestigial form, is still used today in popular and commercial music, and even occasionally in the works of backwards-looking serious composers, it is no longer employed by serious composers of the mainstream,” he wrote. “It has been replaced or succeeded by the 12-tone system.”

Obviously this declaration was premature and ultimately wrong. Beginning in the mid-1960s a backlash emerged against 12-tone dogma. Minimalism, post-Minimalism and neo-Romanticism took root, along with various hard-to-label approaches to composition that found invigorating ways to combine tonal and atonal elements.

Before long audiences developed such animosity toward 12-tone music that its adherents, if not abandoning the technique, were disavowing the label. “If anyone writes program notes and says that I am a serial or a 12-tone composer, I am infuriated,” Donald Martino said in a 1997 interview. “I don’t want to prejudice people with that.”

By now the popular perception is that 12-tone music is passé if not dead. Yet the revolution may have surreptitiously succeeded, at least in part. Almost every composer of significance has had to come to grips with the method. You could say that once the 12-tone commando squad was defeated, the victors picked through the spoils, taking what they liked and ignoring the rest.

Now that decades of hostility are past, maybe it is time to reacknowledge the pervasive impact of this path-breaking development. It’s hard to ignore that at its worst the battle was debilitating. On one side were 12-tone composers who claimed the intellectual high ground, usually from secure posts in universities; on the other, composers who clung in various ways to tonal languages, cared about connecting with audiences and withstood the patronizing disdain of the tough-guy modernists in their midst. The critic Alex Ross tells the whole sorry story in his insightful, compulsively readable book, “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century,” coming out Oct. 23 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Happily, the best young composers today feel entitled to borrow from anything and anyone, and more power to them. Talk to those young creators about the standoff between the Babbitts and the Coplands of 20th-century music, and they react as if you were trying to explain some archaic history, like the schism between the Brahms and Wagner wings of late 19th-century German music. Who cares?

From what I can tell the 12-tone technique is seldom adhered to strictly anymore. Even in Schoenberg’s day his followers, notably his devoted student Alban Berg, found deft ways to inject elements of haunting tonal harmony into astringent 12-tone scores, most amazingly in Berg’s unfinished opera “Lulu.”

Still, if the application of the technique is loose, the aesthetic of 12-tone music — its deliberately disorienting sound world, its burst-open harmonic palette, its leaping lines and every-which-way counterpoint, its gleeful avoidance of tonal centers — is very much alive among exciting composers of otherwise strikingly different styles. Think of Judith Weir, Stephen Hartke, Kaija Saariaho, Steven Stucky and Thomas Adès.

For those unversed in music theory it may be worth explaining with a little more specificity what 12-tone music is and how it came about.

Tonality is a means of organizing pitch in accordance with the physics of sound. A fundamental tone — say, C in a C major scale — is central; the other pitches relate to it in a hierarchy of importance based on natural overtone relationships. Whatever happens, the music keeps returning to that fundamental tonal mooring. Variety, expression and development result when a composer plays with expectations and introduces ambiguity, letting the music drift to remote pitches and chords that are not part of the basic major or minor scale.

As music developed in the late 19th century, Wagner, Mahler, Debussy, Strauss and other path breakers pushed at the boundaries of that mooring and weakened the pull of the tonal center. Ten years into the 20th century the whole business was in crisis, Schoenberg argued. .

So he started composing in a harmonic language unhinged from tonality: atonality, it has been called. His works in this style, Expressionistic pieces like “Erwartung,” sound as if they were conceived almost through harmonic free association.

Yet Schoenberg revered order, form and tradition. So he took a conceptual leap. If all 12 pitches in the octave are to be used more or less equally, why not devise a system that ensured a kind of equality?

Instead of the old tonal hierarchy, or his short-lived experiment in harmonic free-for-all, Schoenberg specified that the 12 pitches be put in an order, or row. Once a pitch was sounded, it was not to be repeated until the entire row had unfolded. There were countless ways around this dictum, however, because Schoenberg adapted his technique so that the row could be transposed, gone through backward or upside down, broken into smaller units that were mixed and matched, and so on. Wiggle room was built in from the start.

This description may make the technique sound like a rigid methodology, but Schoenberg found it liberating. “I find myself positively enabled to compose as freely and fantastically as one otherwise does only in one’s youth, and am nevertheless subject to a precisely definable aesthetic discipline,” he wrote to a colleague. Besides, tonal music relies on patterns too. Whole spans of pieces by Mozart and Beethoven are generated through default patterns of pitches: arpeggios, scale passages, chords and the like.

If the human ear is conditioned to find music with tonal moorings satisfying, if we are “embedded in a tonal universe,” as Leonard Bernstein once put it, then 12-tone music discombobulates those aural expectations and shakes up the universe. A Berlin critic of Schoenberg’s atonal works wrote indignantly that the music “kills tonal perception.” Exactly! And that’s what’s so exhilarating. You are invited to take a vacation from tonality, to experience music without a tonal safety net.

Other composers also found Schoenberg’s invention liberating. One branch took the systematizing principle radically further by placing rhythms and dynamics as well as pitches into predetermined series; hence the term serialism. In the 1960s and ’70s 12-tone music and serialism were treated like scientific disciplines by composers working within universities, where their research, to call it that, was of interest mainly to other composers.

Alas, there are many stories of gifted young composers who initially felt no choice but to adopt 12-tone technique. David Del Tredici, for one, eventually made the break and was in the vanguard of composers who rejected the dogma and reclaimed tonal languages. He emerged from that experience bitter.

William Bolcom went through this experience too, though with fewer psychic scars, from what he has said. He was drawn to the music of Mr. Boulez and Luciano Berio as a young man, but also to the music of Darius Milhaud, with whom he studied, as well as a wide range of American vernacular music. In time Mr. Bolcom too shed what he considered an academic approach to composing and developed a vibrantly eclectic language, rich with allusion to American song, jazz, ragtime and rock. Still, he and Mr. Del Tredici are stronger and more precise composers today for having been through the rigors of 12-tone composition.

Several giants explored 12-tone technique as well: not only Stravinsky, whose move into the enemy camp shook up the world of modern music, but also Messiaen and Copland. Whether their explorations were driven by a competitive desire to be in the front lines of modernism or by honest curiosity, each grew immensely from devising his own adaptations to the 12-tone system.

I don’t mean to romanticize 12-tone music, which has given us lots of terribly cerebral pieces. But prosaic, dull tonal works of every description continue to be written as well. I would much rather hear Mr. Babbitt’s scintillating 12-tone piano pieces than, say, the lushly tonal “Tempest Fantasy” by the Poulenc-infatuated Paul Moravec, a piece that beat out distinguished works by Peter Lieberson and Steve Reich for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in music.

The refreshing lack of dogmatism among the new generation of composers seems to have spread to audiences as well. The brilliant pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard segues from Beethoven to Boulez, from Liszt to Ligeti on the same program, and today’s audiences just follow along, open to everything. As Elliott Carter, the dean of modernist composers, approaches his 99th birthday, he keeps challenging us with complex and ingenious new scores and is cheered by young and old at every premiere.

I doubt that Mr. Wuorinen spends much time regretting dogmatic pronouncements he made in the heat of the battle, since he is far too busy enjoying the recent burst of enthusiasm for his music, thanks in part to champions like the conductor James Levine and the pianist Peter Serkin. Certainly Mr. Wuorinen’s Fourth Piano Concerto is evidence of a stunningly complex approach to writing music.

But in a brilliant performance by Mr. Serkin with Mr. Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 2005, that concerto came across as audacious. You stopped thinking about tone rows and responded to the playfulness and ferocity of this formidable music.

In retrospect the major flaw in Schoenberg’s astute analysis of the crisis of tonality was the notion that pursuing an alternative had become a historical necessity. The development of 12-tone technique was no necessity. During the same period Bartok, Stravinsky and other giants were finding enthralling ways to adapt, transform and shake up tonality.

Instead Schoenberg’s great adventure was, as Mr. Ross puts it in his new book, “one man’s leap into the unknown.” But what a leap!