Webern and Atonality: The Path from the Old Aesthetic

Arnold Whittall
The Musical Times, Vol. 124, No. 1690. (Dec., 1983), pp. 733-737.
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Anton Webern was born

on 3 December 1883

Webern and Atonalitv

The path from the old aesthetic

Arnold Whittall
A certain sort ofworld-weary musical sophisticate has been longer a p p l i ~ a b l e ' .But
~ the most essential function of
heard to remark with increasing frequency as the Webern tonality was to provide an all-embracing unity and coherence
anniversary has approached that it seems more like the at all levels of a composition, and it was this basic unifying
centenary of his death.than of his birth. Webern, it is im- force, this fundamentally traditionalist aesthetic, rather than
plied, is no longer a problem, and never has been for those the specific principles and practices of tonal harmony as
who 'really know' his music: less ofa problem, anyway, than such, that Schoenberg may have regarded as the only possiWagner, who did die in 1883.
ble 'tradition'. The 12-note method was so important, thereBehind this attitude lies the assumption that, even if fore, because it was able to provide a new kind of allWebern was not actually overrated as composer, innovator embracing unity and coherence - not necessarily severing
and influence in those heady post-war years oftotal serialism all points of contact with the old, but not depending on such
and intransigent, Darmstadt-promoted experiment, it is right contacts in order to function effectively. Webern clearly
that his aphoristic, allusive creations should not, in these viewed his own 12-note compositions in this way, and in
more sensible times, make a very decisive impact - even his lectures of the early 1930s, preserved in a student's shorton the majority of modern-music enthusiasts. In any case, hand notes and published as Der Weg zur neuen Musik,j the
Webernites cannot complain. There have been two com- importance he attached to the traditional aesthetic and
plete recordings of all the works with opus numbers; an technical emphasis on unity is ~ n m i s t a k a b l e : ~
Unity is surely the indispensable thing if meaning is to exist.
authoritative as well as exhaustive Chronicle ofhis Life and
Unity, to be very general, is the establishment of the utmost
Works has been written;' a volume of sketches2 and many
relatedness between all component parts. So, in music, as in
of the works without opus numbers have been published;
all other human utterance, the aim is to make as clear as possiwhile for real specialists there is a Webern archive in
ble
the relationships between the parts of the unity: in short,
America, and an unceasing flow of high-powered and often
to show how one thing leads to another.
surprisingly digestible analytical articles, by Germans and
And Webern also made the large claim that 'composition
Englishmen as well as Americans.
with
twelve tones has achieved a degree of complete unity
Webern will most definitely have disappointed anyone
that
was
not even approximately there b e f ~ r e ' . ~
who, in the early 1950s, expected the entire future of
Writers on Webern have not normally felt it necessary
Western music to hinge on the exploration and continuation of his techniques. But simply because ofthe sheer ease to question the various assertions and assumptions in these
with which later composers seem to have absorbed or by- reported remarks. Nor have these writers questioned the
passed those techniques, it could be that Webern has come evaluation of his own musical development that Webern
to be undervalued, even misunder5tood. In particular, tak- offered in his later years, when he seemed to regard his
earlier, pre-12-note atonal compositions simply as
ing Webern for granted often seems to involve the evasion
of one of 20th-century music's most fundamental issues: preliminary, primitive steps on the path to the true new
for the nature ofwhat is commonly called 'atonality' is still music. And although it has quite often been argued that,
obscure, not least in its relation - or non-relation - to in its relative freedom, the pre-12-note atonal music of
Schoenberg, Berg and Webern has more to offer the posttonality.
12-note generation than the 12-note works themselves, this
T h e attitude that Webern has never really been a problem
argument
usually carried the implication that such
has a good deal to do with the widely-held view that the
'freedoms' are interesting precisely because they seem to
Second Viennese School were not really radical at all, in
be 'beyond analysis': they confirm the right of composers
the sense of seeking and achieving a total break with the
not to be bound by all-determining rules and systems; and
past. Instead it was, in Schoenberg's familiar words, laying
they
put those interfering busybodies, the technical comclaim to 'the merit of having written really new music which,
as it rests on a tradition, is destined to become a t r a d i t i ~ n ' . ~ mentators, firmly in their place.
As far as I am aware, no writer on Webern has ever taker1
T h e 'tradition' to which Schoenberg was referring was not,
presumably, that of tonality, a principle he proclaimed 'no
Lerrers, ed. E. Stein (London,

H. Moldenhauer: Anion won Webern (New York and London, 1978)

Sketches (1926- 1945) (New York, 1968)

see J. Rufer: The Works ofArnoldSchoenberg, trans. D. Newlin (London,

147-8

1962),

1964), 104

(Vienna, 1960), Eng, trans., The Parh ro rhe A-eew Music, ed. \Y'. Reich (Bryn Mawr,

1963)
op cit (1963), 42
op cit, 18

literally the most frequently quoted remark about his

pre-12-note music from the l e c t ~ r e s : ~
About 1911 I wrote the Bagatelles for String Quartet (Op.9),
all very short pieces, lasting a couple of minutes - perhaps
the shortest music so far. Here I had the feeling, 'when all twelve
notes have gone by, the piece is over'.
Not even the most aphoristic of Webern's early miniatures
- for example, the fourth of the five Stuckefur Orchester
op.10 (191 l), or the third of the Drei kleine Stucke op.11
(1914) for cello and piano - consists simply of a single
12-note statement with no repetitions of any kind. But a
composition for which the remark is in one sense completely true is the third of the Vier Stucke op.7 for violin and
piano (1910), reproduced opposite, whose five principal
segments have the following pitch-class content:
TABLE 1
Segment
(a)

(b)

A B flat
A B flat

(4 A

A flat

E flat

A flat
E flat
(d) A A sharp G sharp
(4
E flat
1 2
3
4

D C sharp
D C sharp E F C F sharp B
C
B
C sharp E
C G flat
G
5 6
7 8 9 10
11 12

Expressed in such summary terms, the principal 'rationale'

of op.7 no.3 seems to be a single statement of all 12 pitchclasses, whose gradual unfolding is embedded in a sequence
of repetitions which do not appear to obey a single, consistent structuring principle: as Table 1 indicates, the collection is not built up by the simple addition of adjacent
semitones, or by any other evidently invariant 'motivic'
method. T h e repetitions do nevertheless contribute to the
piece's thematic content - it is more than a merely 'textural' composition - and, as will be argued more fully later,
it may well be possible to demonstrate an underlying
thematic unity, even ifthat involves nothing more substantial than the recurrent 'composings out' of the initial
semitone: for example, the piano chord which ends the piece
in a register in which the violin cannot participate can be
read as three pairs of augmented octaves: CIC sharp; E flat/E;
G flat/G. But before pursuing such matters it is desirable
to ask whether the search for a consistent motivic process
in such music is any more valuable than the search for
12-note orthodoxy.
The most influential developments in analytical technique over the past 25 years or so have tended, however implicitly, to support the assumption that all worthwhile
music, tonal or atonal, has unifying forces at work which
are more important, aesthetically and technically, than any
contrasting, diversifying elements; but the position is not
quite as uniform - or as unthinkingly conformist - as summary accounts occasionally suggest. One ambitious attempt
at a history of all significant developments in earlier 20th-

Webern's op. 7 no.3; reproduced by permission of Universal Edition

(Alfred A. Kalmus)

century culture has included the argument that what

distinguishes 20th-century modernism from all previous
manifestations ofthe radical spirit is the strength ofthe 'urge
to fragmentation'. This urge can lead to total aleatory chaos,
but may also foster the development of techniques for bringing diverse elements 'into the most intimate relationship
with each other whilst at the same time preserving the validity of the contradiction between them'.9 This formulation
is not unlike Stockhausen's declared intention 'to modulate
one event with another without destroying it, really discovering those original qualities of something which are the most
characteristic, and which are strong enough to be matched
with the stronger characteristics of something else - leading
to real symbiosis'.1 And Stockhausen distinguishes this
'symbiosis' - the mutually beneficial partnership between
elements of different kinds - from a crude, random collage
on the one hand and what he calls 'a synthesis in the old
sense where the components disappear' on the other.
At this level of generality it is all too easy to be tempted
to dally in a warm bath ofvague abstractions; but the distinction between a music which is essentially, and in the best
sense, synthetic and a music which is symbiotic is not to
be dismissed as academic theory-making when so much confusion still exists as to how, and in what way, valid and
J. McFarlane: 'The Mind ofModernism', Modernisnr 1890-1930, ed. M . Bradbury and J. McFarlane (Harmondsworth, 1976),81, 88
l o Srockhausen: Conversarzons with fire Composer, ed. J . Cott (London, 1974),191

perceptible distinctions between a music called 'tonal' and

a music called 'atonal' can be made. The persistence of the
latter term, despite all the assaults on it from Schoenberg
himself onwards, is an indication that it may, after all, be
describing something real. But such is the force of traditional aesthetics that even those who recognize the logic of
the argument that, by definition, atonal music is quite likely to negate most, if not all, of the most basic features of
tonal music may still instinctively resist the proposition that
a 'modernist' balance of discontinuities, avoiding the random disparities of collage but functioning more in terms
of polarities than of centralities, can function as a positive,
constructive aesthetic principle, creating new kinds of
coherence rather than a single kind of incoherence.
Many writers have responded to the analytical challenge
of such highly compressed, expressionistic miniatures as
the Webern op.7 pieces simply by adapting - fining down
- traditional methods ofthematic analysis. Single intervals,
even single notes, may be held to possess motivic significance, and the pieces to be built from interacting and varied
recurrences of these motivic elements. In op.7, for example, one writer refers to 'extremely brief motifs of only a
few notes, sometimes only highly expressive isolated single
notes acting as motifs',ll and another remarks that 'from
the technical point of view op.7 seems to be even more
strongly built on minor second relationships than the earlier
works'.12 The most important and influential of recent
theorists of atonality, Allen Forte, has provided an interpretation ofop.7 no.3 as what he terms a 'connected' structure, with all the diverse elements interrelated through their
connections with four basic collections of pitch-classes and
interval-classes which Forte terms 'Nexus Sets'.13 It would
be grossly unfair to Forte to accuse him of a simple-minded
concern with unity-at-all-costs, and of a corresponding
failure to take due note of the symbiotic forces at work in
this piece. But the aesthetic principle that underlies his
analytical method clearly aims at the most refined explanation of all the different levels and types of interaction and
interrelationship throughout the atonal repertory; and a
method concerned specifically with surface formations may
complement Forte's approach without necessarily contradicting its insights into the 'background'.
The main difficulty which stands in the way of developing a workable Theory of Atonality - as distinct from
developing ideas of thematic process which can apply equally
to tonally structured compositions - is precisely that of
demonstrating a convincing positive principle which atonal
pieces have in common. The very idea of analysis itselfseems
to require something more than the mere description of
diverse surface details. Analysis involves interpretation in
terms of fundamental forces which persist from work to

l1

F. Wildgans: Anron IVebern (London, 1966), 124

H. Searle (London, 1968), 64

l 2 W. Kolneder: Anion Webern, trans.

l 3 The Srruciure of Aronai Music (New Haven and London, 1973), 126 - 31

work: hence the power ofthe Schenkerian concept of tonality, in which substructure is the purest kind of structure.
T o interpret, and therefore to analyse, is not just to describe,
but to categorize, and it may be, to reiterate a formulation
made above, that an atonal composition can be usefully
analysed through the demonstration ofcontrasting categories
- through polarities rather than centralities. (The relatively new techniques associated with the application of
semiotics to musical analysis may eventually prove to be
ofvalue here, in view of their concern with all those features
that contribute to the textural character and structural
significance of an event.14)
Webern's op.7 no.3 can provide a relatively simple model
for the analysis of polarities, not least because it is not one
of those early 20th-century works which inhabit a twilight
world between 'tonal' and 'atonal'. Anyone who looks hard
enough for evidence of residual tonal features will probably
be able to find them in any piece: but to my ears the recurrences of A and the placement of elements fundamental to
an A tonality in op.7 no.3 are simply not organized in ways
to suggest that Webern wished to create such associations.
They are stronger in other - later - pieces, such as the
op.12 songs, but that is another story.
Any composition of any period for violin and piano is likely
to exploit the evident and substantial differences between
the instruments, and op.7 no.3 is no exception, despite the
uniformity ofthe extremely soft dynamics. And at least one
other of the basic textural polarities evident in the piece could
equally well be present in a tonal composition: that involving 'sustaining' and 'punctuating' elements. Table 2 points
TABLE 2
Segtnenr
(a) violin sustains a single note
piano sustains: a legato statement
(b)
In RH

(a')

piano sustains: a legato phrase

with sustained bass note
piano sustains a 3-note cluster

(e)

piano sustalns a RH chord

(c)

piano punctuates (one note 3 times)

violin punctuates (4-note 'shudder'):
piano punctuates (3 separate
semiquavers)
violin punctuates with repetitions of
an ostinato and its transposition
violin punctuates: 2 statements of a
4-demisemiquaver group
piano punctuates: 2 LH statements
of E flatIG flat

up the distinctions. This analysis, using only minimal verbal description, focusses on the superimposition and succession of surface events. It is so laid out that only the final
segment (e) involves one instrument alone, and this stresses,
in the simplest possible way, the sense in which the piece
may be said to end with its strongest contrast. Table 3,
describing further polarities, pursues this matter in relation to the registral and rhythmic profiles of the five
segments.
Although Table 3 does not seek to divorce the final segment from all connection with its predecessors it should by

l 4 see in particular J:J. Nattlez: 'Varese's Densziy 21.5. a Study In Semiological

Analysis', Music Analysis, i (1982), 243 - 340

735

Segrnenr
(a) Both instruments have single pitches close together. (This A and B flat
form the central 'axis' between the highest and lowest notes used In the
plece. T h e highest is the piano E In b.6, the lowest the piano E flat in
b.12. There 1s no evldence of consisent mirror-symmetry.)
(b) T h e piano l ~ n ebegins to ascend, without repeating pitches, and the
violin to be reduced to a subord~naterole.
(c) T h e piano employs a very wide span. T h e vlolin part, deriving From its
Four notes In (b), is relat~velyregular in rhythm, perslstent, but enclosed
by the piano lines.
(4 Thls can be seen as a varied reversal of the roles of (a), the piano sustaining and the violin punctuating within a relatively narrow reglstral span.
(e) An 'inversion' of (4 to the extent that a single, sustained event is underpinned by a double, punctuating event.

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llT'ek(~1).528 pages, 403 music examples. 28.95

now be clear that its character is one ofthe most significant

contributors to the piece's atonality. It is not simply that
we would not expect the final chord of a tonal piece to contain a pitch not previously used in the composition, or to
consist of six different pitch-classes. The role of 'closure'
performed by Segment ( e ) is a mixture of pitch-class completion (the 12-note cycle) and textural, motivic complementation, especially with respect to Segment (a), but there is
also a strong sense of 'modernistic' contradiction. The chord
may be derived motivically from the minor 9ths in Segment
(6) i n d - via the diminished octaves, major 7ths and minor
2nds in Segment (c) - from the minor 2nd in Segment (a):
in these terms Segment (e) may well have 'the most intimate
relationship' with its predecessors; and yet at the same time
it Dreserves the 'validitv of the contradiction' between itself
a i d those predecessors. It has the stability of those other
segments - (a) and (6)- which contain reiteration rather
than motion, but in its density and registral depth it contrasts sharply with all that has gone before. In Segment (e)
one instrument has a dense but relatively widespread statement, and a texture which has grown from two to three
strands and on to the four Ditches heard simultaneouslv in
Segment (d)now reaches completion with six simultaneous
pitches.
In this particular composition, then, we might seem to
have an early example of the feature that David Schiff sees
as most fundamental to the music of one of the greatest living modernists, Elliott Carter: it is a music of 'simultaneous
oppositions'.15 Such modernism is certainly a prominent
feature of Webern's pre-12-note compositions, but it is complemented by a tendency which we might describe as modern
rather than modernist - a tendency in which, despite the
non-traditional language, the traditional concern with unity as an overriding structural and aesthetic principle remains
intact. Of course, whether the tendency is modern or modernist, we are likely to perceive degrees ofcontrast and similarity between successive - and simultaneous - events. But
these events cannot be described in terms of distinct,
definable technical functions such as are evident in tonal
music: consonances, dissonances, suspensions, passing notes

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and so on. In Webern we are more likely to hear the lack

of tonal function - occasionally even some devious allusion to tonal function - rather than an actual atonal function which relates every event distinctly to every other event.
And it follows that even the most patently uniform, unified
atonal composition, whether 12-note or not, cannot be considered in terms of such a universally accepted and perceived grammar or syntax as exists for tonal music. However
persistent the elements of the old techniques, the old functions, and with them the old aesthetics, cannot possibly
survive.
T h e early part ofthis article included the suggestion that
a little respectful scepticism about Webern's view of his own
musical development might be salutary. It is certainly my
own beliefthat we are too ready to make assumptions about
the presence of the kind ofunity which keeps contrasts strictly subordinate, not only in the pre-12-note music which has
been discussed here but in the 12-note music itself, where
polarities may be even more significantly deployed. If

Webern really believed that 'composition with twelve tones

has achieved a degree of complete unity that was not even
approximately there before', it may suggest nothing more
than that he needed a good dose of Schenker to teach him
the real truth about tonality. But in any case there is nothing
in his remarks to undermine the possibility that atonality,
whether or not expressed through the background controls
of the 12-note system, is truly and positively complementary to tonality - a music ofarchitectural dispositions rather
than grammatical functions, where coherence and stability
are created through the complementary balancing or juxtaposition of separate events, and where - in the absence of
tonal, contrapuntal voice-leading - symmetrical factors may
have a decisive structural role. T h e Webern centenary is
a good time to raise and explore such matters, however inconclusively, and to suggest that compositions we thought we
had digested painlessly may in fact be rather more subversive, and less eager to 'show how one thing leads to another',
than we had previously thought.

Mireille Revisited

Gounod's 'Mireille' is
revived by the E N 0 at the
Coliseum this month

Steven Huebner
Charles Gounod's career as an opera composer was marked
by some of the greatest successesbfthe 19th-century French
repertory and by some of its most abysmal failures. Whereas
Faust, first performed at the Thi.itre Lyrique in 1859, went
on to garner an international audience, such long-forgotten
efforts as La nonne sanglante (1854) or Polyeucte (1878) belong
among the unfortunate works that received the fewest performances at the 0pi.ra in the last century and have never
been revived. Even the initial success of a Faust or a Romio
et Juliette (1867) did not preclude modifications for
revivals. So when a work that had a poor reception on its
premiere was given a second or even a third chance, it is
not surprising that the upheavals effected by Gounod were
almost always massive. Except for his first opera, Sapho
(1851), Mireille (1864) has had the most turbulent history
ofthe works in this category. But unlike most ofthese operas,
it eventually obtained a place in the repertory and is now
the third most frequently performed of Gounod's operas.
It was in a version that featured, among other changes,
a reduction of the o ~ e r a ' sdimensions from five acts to three,
with the attendan;removal of more than a quarter of the
original music, the conflation of two subsidiary roles (Taven
and Vincenette),
,, the addition of an ariette in the manner
of the Faust Jewel Song, and the replacement of the tragic
ending with one in which the heroine suddenly recovers
from sunstroke, that Mireille first gained favour in a production at the Opera Comique in 1889. Between this revival
and the first rather poorly received performances at the
Theitre Lyrique from March to May 1864, the opera under-

went other unsuccessful attempts to enhance its appeal.

A Covent Garden production in summer 1864, for which
Mireille's ultimate recovery was first instituted, was followed
that December by a Theitre Lyrique revival that introduced most ofthe modifictions to be adopted in 1889. In 1874
there was an additional, ill-fated attempt at the 0pi.ra Comique to restore many of the original features. Although he
sanctioned the 1889 production, Gounod was never happy
about the truncated Mireille.' Only after it had become a
perennial favourite would a director of the Opera Comique, Albert Carri., risk a return to the five-act framework
on the suggestion ofthe composer's widow, in 1901. Carri.,
however, retained the infamous valse ariette and, because
Gounod's orchestration for parts of the Air de la Crau and
the tragic finale (both printed in full in the first edition of
the vocal score) had been lost, he staged these numbers in
abbreviated form. In 1939 Henri Busser and Reynaldo Hahn
launched another revival, which purported to be as close
to the March 1864 version as the available documentation,
including the autograph full score, would allow. T h e missing orchestration had still not been found either in the
autograph or in the 0pi.ra Comique archives, so Busser filled
the lacunae himself. His edition has been used for all subsequent performances at the Opera Comique and elsewhere,
as well as for all complete recordings.

' see J.G.Prod'homme and A. Dandelot:

ii, 220

Gozrnod: sa vre er ses oeuures

(Paris,191 I),

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Webern and Atonality: The Path from the Old Aesthetic
Arnold Whittall
The Musical Times, Vol. 124, No. 1690. (Dec., 1983), pp. 733-737.
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[Footnotes]
14

Varese's 'Density 21.5': A Study in Semiological Analysis

Jean-Jacques Nattiez; Anna Barry
Music Analysis, Vol. 1, No. 3. (Oct., 1982), pp. 243-340.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0262-5245%28198210%291%3A3%3C243%3AV%272ASI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y

NOTE: The reference numbering from the original has been maintained in this citation list.