Whittal - 1909 and After

1909 and after: High Modernism and 'New Music'
Author(s): Arnold Whittall

Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 150, No. 1906 (Spring, 2009), pp. 5-18
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.
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ARNOLD WHITTALL
1909 and after: high modernism and

'New Music'
In comments made in 1953, Elliott Carter went to the heart of what can
still be understood as modernism in music. Referring to compositions
by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern 'written before and after they started
to use the [12-note] method', he identified some 'really important features:
a high degree of condensation, lending itself to rapid change and the quick,
intense making of points'. In addition,
The use of equally intense melodic shapes, often broken up into short, dramatic fragments,
joins with a very varied rubato rhythmic technique to produce a new kind of what might
be called instrumental recitative. The rapid increases and decreases of harmonic tension,
quick changes of register, and fragmented, non-imitative counterpoint are also worthy of
note. This all adds up to a style of remarkable fluidity which seems to have been derived
from the late works of Debussy but seen through the expressive extremes that characterize
late German Romantic music, particularly Mahler and Richard Strauss.1
Carter's angle is a personal one, geared to a concert programme including

his new and challenging String Quartet no.i (1950-51), and his choice of
Debussy as a prime source for the various radical features he instances tells
us as much about his fidelity to those Gallic virtues he embraced during
his student years in Paris (1932?35) as about the imperatives affecting
Schoenberg and his students in Vienna before 1914. Nevertheless, the kind
of stylistic features and generic associations Carter identifies in a few deft
phrases provides a useful starting point for a discussion of the origins and
character of what, in 2009, is worth describing as 'the post-tonal century'
? the period in which challenges to tonality, as well as affirmations of it,
have been among the most significant features of the kind of 'serious music'
which
appeals to a longer span of attention and to a more highly developed auditory memory
than do the more popular kinds of music. In making this appeal, it uses many contrasts,
coherences, and contexts that give it a wide scope of expression, great emotional power
and variety, direction, uniqueness, and a fascination of design with many shadings and
qualities far beyond the range of popular or folk music.2
i. Elliott Carter, ed. Jonathan Carter's vision of 'a style of remarkable fluidity' does not aspire to
W. Bernard: Collected essays
and lectures, 1937?1995 some Utopian absolute. There is no indication of a desire to avoid the
(Rochester, NY, 1997), p.207. establishment of motivic identities, or to ban all repetition, at least on a
2. Carter: Essays and lectures, small-scale. The third of Schoenberg's op. 11 piano pieces, written in August
p.217. 1909, shows what Carter might have had in mind, and a glance at the last
THE MUSICAL TIMES Spring 2009 5
6 i9?9 and after: high modernism and 'New Music'
Ex.i: Schoenberg: Piano piece op.n no.3, last six bars (? Universal Edition)
sehr rasch_ ^-____^ A a a >
< jfiKf_ ^_ n7.
Ssb. * fifc #
/ /jf ?-j?p Dampfer pppp ppp
six bars confirms that while near-exact or varied repetition of small figures
is not excluded, the larger-scale contrasts probably have an even stronger
impact, reinforcing the unstable, expressionistic mood of the music (ex.i)
As a recent publication marking Carter's centenary makes clear,3 what will
now seem to many as an unashamedly elitist attitude is one particular way in
which Carter's compositional thinking can be linked to that of Schoenberg.
This connection has provided Richard Taruskin with ammunition for his
twin-barrelled attack:4indeed, from such an angle, the entire post-tonal, high
modernist enterprise can seem a cultural-historical disaster. Nevertheless, I
believe that such a conclusion misrepresents the nature of high modernism,
and also misrepresents what listening to music (whether being 'read' at the
same time or not) can involve. It is a misrepresentation that only makes
sense when it is proposed by a thinker with the theoretical perceptiveness of
a Heinrich Schenker. It might even be that we can learn as much if not more
from Schenker's incomprehension of post-tonal initiatives as we can from
many would-be defences of those initiatives.
3. Anne C. Shreffler & Felix

Meyer, edd.: Elliott Carter: Post-tonal/atonal?
a centennial portrait in letters
and documents (Woodbridge,Historians have long known that Schoenberg himself bridled at the notion
2008).
of 'atonality', ridiculing it as meaning, and only meaning, 'without tones'.
4. Richard Taruskin: The
In 1923, the same year that he completed his first fully 12-note composition,
Oxford history of western
music (Oxford, 2005), vol.5, the Suite for piano op.25, Schoenberg was writing that 'the expression,
chapter 65. "atonal music", is most unfortunate ? it is on a par with calling flying "the
Ex.2: Schoenberg: Piano suite op.25, 'Musette', bars 1-4 (? Universal Edition)
Rascher (J = 88)
art of not falling" or swimming "the art of not drowning"'.5 In another

short essay from that same year, he picked up on his declaration in his
Theory of harmony ? 'I believe that in the harmony of us ultramodernists
will ultimately be found the same laws as obtained in the older harmony,
only correspondingly broader, more generally conceived' - saying of
the new 12-note method that 'the avoidance of tone repetitions and triads
is not an eternal law but probably only one manifestation of a reaction.
We compose according to our taste, and this has placed restrictions on us.
Nevertheless, that we proceeded from this is not proof that we shall adhere
to it [indefinitely]. A new kind of tonality may be found again. Triads would
once again probably be possible'.6
It is arguable that this 'new kind of tonality' was evident as early as
the Suite op.25 itself, in the way that exploitation of invariant pitch-class
successions within the chosen group of series forms allows for, and even
encourages, the kind of emphasis on pitch centres which is most obvious
in the Musette's double drone ? G/Dl? (ex.2). And the Suite's immediate
successor, the large-scale Wind Quintet op.26, goes even further in its
5. Arnold Schoenberg:
evocation of Ei? as tonic and B!? as dominant in a context where those
'Twelve-tone composition'
traditional functions are suggested only to be contradicted, if not (neo
(1923), in Leonard Stein,
ed.: Style and idea (London, classically) mocked.
1975), p.210. Genuine atonality was never inconceivable in principle, just unappealing
6. Arnold Schoenberg: 'On and therefore difficult in practice as far as Schoenberg himself was concerned.
twelve-tone composition'
And because he kept his faith in that 'broader, more generally conceived'
(c.1923), in Joseph Auner:
A Schoenberg reader (New conception of those 'laws that obtained in the older harmony' his music
Haven & London, 2003), from 1909 onwards moves restlessly forwards and backwards along the
pp. 174-75. See also Arnold
Schoenberg, trans. Roy E. continuum bounded by tonal diatonicism at one extreme and wholly anti
Carter: Theory of harmony centric, anti-hierarchic atonality at the other. Schoenberg had already begun
(London, 1978), p.70.
to tangle with the semantic challenges involved in accurately describing
7. For a recent discussion
'ultramodern music' in the 1922 edition of his Harmonielehre, and continued
of these distinctions, see
Arnold Whittall: Serialism to confront that challenge to the end of his life. He proposed 'pantonality'
(Cambridge, 2008). (as well as 'extended' and 'suspended' ) tonality as alternatives to atonality,7
THE MUSICAL TIMES Spring 200$ 7
8 i9?9 ana1 after: high modernism and 'New Music'
and it is an interesting, as yet unfulfilled, objective for Schoenberg analysis

to attempt basic characterisations of each of his compositions after op.io
according to these broad categories. While complete agreement as to which
work fits precisely where is unlikely in the extreme, a general sense of which
compositions tend more towards pantonality and which tend away from it
is far from inconceivable. Such interpretations could provide a valuable
complement to categorisations that focus more on the continua bounded
by 'thematicism' and 'athematicism' or by concepts of relatively free and
relatively strict formal designs.
The ideal of progress

No trigger was more fundamental to Schoenberg's evolving high-modernism
after 1908 than his notion of the emancipated dissonance, a principle that
re-emerges after 1945 in Carter's idea of 'emancipated musical discourse'.8
Arguments have centred on whether 'emancipation' requires the total
rejection of all associations with tradition, not only of tonal harmony but
of thematic processes, formal models and textural conventions: and those
most passionately advocating the new start of a 'year zero' after 1945 were
inclined to claim that the need for such a purgative position was underlined
by the sense that the earlier year zero, around 1909, had not been followed
up with sufficient vision and courage. Even if the unprecedented upheaval
of the First World War helped to explain this failure, it was no excuse,
and there was a solemn determination, most obviously for a while at the
Darmstadt Summer School and in the position-taking that it encouraged,
not to allow the more recent cataclysm of the Second World War to justify
repeating the error.
The desire to innovate radically, to exclude all 'decadence' and to start
from scratch, is a classic Utopian swerve, an idealistic (and ultimately
escapist) trope that has uniformly failed to do justice not only to the
persistence of traditions but to actual historical events ? events which give
support to the claim that cultures are in a constant state of evolution and
transition, rather than proceeding by mutually exclusive leaps forward. As
musical compositions, and the institutions that co-exist with them, have
unfolded over the decades since 1909, it has become as difficult to regard
genuine atonality as a permanent, satisfying replacement for tonality as it
has to regard the period since 1809 (roughly speaking) as having no positive
effect on what began to happen around 1909. In 2009 it is just as plausible
to depict the short 19th century, between late Beethoven and early Mahler,
the years of 'high' romanticism, as a time when something emerged which
8. Carter: Essays and lectures, can also be labelled as 'early modernism' (formally innovative, but still
p.6. faithful to the basic principles of diatonic tonality). The important thing is
for such alternatives to co-exist, in a post-classical plurality that continues,
more progressively, more extremely, after 1909, and with renewed energy
from around 1970. It is the kind of materials that represent such plurality,
not extremist attempts to find newly integral models, that defines the
high modernism of the years between 1909 and c.1970, and that has most
fundamentally affected the late modernism that has followed on.
From this perspective, the birth of high modernism is to be found not so
much in the works Schoenberg and Webern composed in the years around
1909 which were exceptionally radical (avant-garde) in their repression of
thematic process and hierarchically organised harmony. In Ethan Haimo's
challenging formulation, 'beginning in August 1909, Schoenberg stopped
treating musical style as an evolutionary process and began thinking instead
in plainly revolutionary terms. The quality of newness became not just one
component of a larger picture: it became the central principle of the work,
to all intents and purposes, its raison d'etre.' This, in Haimo's terms, was
when Schoenberg tried 'to cut himself off from the past. This period might
be called New Music. It was brief, only a few years, approximately 1909 to
1911'.9
In turning away from revolution (it would take Webern rather longer
to follow the master along this road) Schoenberg was reconnecting with
the elements of high modernism explored before, and especially in the
unprecedented heterogeneity of the Second String Quartet op. 10, whose
disrupted first performance took place on 21 December 1908. Tempting
though it can be to seek to preserve a classical unity in one's reception
of op. 10, and to find ways of appearing to hear even the most radical and
sustained departures from diatonicism as enrichments or even prolongations
of that diatonicism, it seems to go against the aesthetic as well as the structural
grain to understand the work's ending as a resolution to end all resolutions,
perhaps after the model of Tristans eventual embrace of B major. Having
recently disputed David Lewin's argument that 'none of the local tonic keys
which one might detect during the course' of Tristan, and 'not even [...] the
explicit "final" B major [...] succeed in laying the Tristan chord to rest',10
I am all the more convinced that op.io's final F# minor/major (ex.3) â^s
to lay the music's most active post-tonal elements 'to rest', and that such
a 'failure' ? the suspension of decisive tonal closure, and of the functions
9. Ethan Haimo: Schoenberg's of tonal structural progression ? can be an enrichingly positive formal and
transformation of musical
language (Cambridge, 2006), expressive device in the world of post-tonal, high modernist composition.
pp.349, 354. Writing of the same passage, Severine Neff takes a different line. 'The
10. Arnold Whittall: review V?I cadence had always been the definitive element of a tonal work' and
of David Lewin: Studies
in music and text (Oxford, this harmonic formula is the closest to a universal principle that tonality provides. In
2006), in The Musical Times this light, it is not the juxtaposed or inverted events and weakened cadences of earlier
(Autumn 2006), p. 113. movements or even the atonal sections of Entriickung which definitively liberate the
io igog and after: high modernism and 'New Music'
Ex.3: Schoenberg: String Quartet no.2, Finale, ending (? Universal Edition)
MaBige Viertel immer mehr verrinnend

ft-o-^"""" "^f"""" ^^-o- ^_
^ A = ? = tt? -Q
jjfHji|i>^_ _;m^=_ JIô = =:
^ PP
sehr zart^__
h)?; ~ ~ ^r= A fJV \ *r^ f f ?^^ - ;

_ f^f o -ftp---o
:llt)4ô =j? V^ - o =fto^_ ^^F0 :
?p ?;^H_ -=====?
j^p sehr zart IZZZZIZIZZ
quartet from its tonality; it is this final F sharp major triad - paradoxically, a partial
resolution, which, therefore, by definition is not a resolution. It is this very triad that is the
ultimate 'breakthrough', conjuring the notion of change, of release 'from past cares' into
a new world, a new way of presenting a musical concept, an idea, of interpreting a poem
musically - and in this case a new, atonal language.11
My argument, by contrast, is that the 'new, atonal language' never needed

to assert 'release' from elements of tonality. The full, radical import of what
ii. Severinewas happening to Arnold
Neff: music in 1909 was very well expressed by Christopher
Schoenberg: Hailey
thein second
1996: string
quartet in F sharp minor, op.io
(New York, Schoenberg's
2006), emancipation
p. 184. of the dissonance served not only to colonize new terrain
within our universe of artistic expression but also to acknowledge that that universe might
12. Christopher Hailey:
include irreconcilable
'Introduction', in Juliane difference as a constructive principle. If Schoenberg no longer
occupies
Brand & Christopher a central position in our musical discourse ? a discourse that may no longer have
Hailey,
edd.: Constructive
a center ? his voice dissonance:
can still be heard among the plurality of voices, not least because he
Arnold Schoenberg
was among the first toand the
anticipate their dissonance.12
transformations of twentieth
century culture (Berkeley &
Paradoxically, perhaps, exploring
Los Angeles, 1997), p.xv.
the relevance of Schenkerian
perspectives to Schoenberg's Second Quartet encourages similar con
13. Catharine Dale:
clusions.concept
'Schoenberg's In the case of the third movement it is clearly true that 'the
of variation form: a
significance of a Schenkerian fundamental structure [...] is [...] usurped by
paradigmatic analysis of
a motive-derived
Litanei from the second construct through which a motivic shape present on the
most immediate
string quartet, level of structure
op.io', in is unfolded in the background also'.13 Yet
Journal of the Royal Musical
that usurpation does not simply generate chains of derivatives but disrupts
Association 118/1 (1993),
diatonic fundamentals
p. 103. See also Catharine in ways that Schoenberg presumably came to see as
Dale: Tonality and structure
unsustainable as far as his own compositional ethic was concerned. The
in Schoenberg's second string
quartet, objective
op.io was not the York
(New fantasy of abandoning all links with tonal thought
1993) with immediate effect, still less of reverting to wholehearted diatonicism:
rather, a more radical rethinking of tonality itself, and of its relationship
to thematic process would be required. In future, the purpose of using
traditional chords and progressions (outside the academic, pedagogical
sphere) would be to expand the types of relevant material available and
to set up interactions between quite different types of material, aiming
for a coherent balance of differences rather than a synthesis in which such
differences were resolved into a higher unity.
Schoenberg and high-modernist principles

On 10 January 1909 the Neues Wiener Journalpublished an interview with
Schoenberg in which he provided some candid evidence of the degree of
self-awareness that had characterised his development up to the age of
34. Keen not to appear exclusively iconoclastic, he suggested at an early
stage that 'much in me coincides with Reger, Strauss, Mahler, Debussy,
and others'. Even so, he was determined not to downplay the need for a
quality that he seemed to associate with unprecedented complexity. Thus ?
in discussing the nature of melody ? clarity, simplicity and concision should
not result in something 'primitive':
in general, melody seems to be understood as the most concise formation of a musical idea
with a lyrical character, arranged to be as clear as possible. But along with this simplicity
that makes a melody captivating, however, comes the other side of the coin: primitiveness.
It follows that our simplicity is different from that of our predecessors, that it is more
complex, but also that even this complexity will in turn be regarded one day as primitive.
Put on the spot, Schoenberg conceded that without improvements in

education, 'art will again become, as it was before, a concern of a select
group of the most cultivated people of the time', and his evident bitterness
at the experience of 21 December 1908 comes through in his comments
about the present limitations and failings of critics and public alike.14
Such fears about the inability of listeners to move with the high
modernist times find echoes in Carter's occasional comments, like those in
Banff (1984), about 'the regression of listening ability', and even 'a loss of
14. See A Schoenberg reader,
pp.57-60. the wish to pay attention to music [...] one of the many types of breakdown
of communication we are faced with at a time when focused attention is
15. See Elliott Carter: a
centennial portrait, p. 2 5 3. needed more than ever in our democratic and highly complex society,
16. Pierre Boulez: where choices of citizens are so important for their own welfare'.15 And in
'Conference sur Anthemes Carter's case, of course, the problem is the greater given his evident desire
2, as cited in Jonathan
Goldman: 'Understanding
to build on the foundations of Schoenberg's truly New Music, perhaps on
Pierre Boulez's Anthemes the grounds that even these works (as with op. 11 no.3) do not lose all contact
(1991): creating a labyrinth with 'recognisable musical objects'.16
out of another labyrinth',
MA dissertation, University In a series of aphorisms published in Die Musik later in 1909 Schoenberg
of Montreal (2001), p.79. returned ? abrasively ? to the subject of primitivism and melody:
12 i9?9 and after: high modernism and 'New Music'
melody is the most primitive form of expression in music. Its goal is to present a musical
idea through many repetitions (motivic work) and the slowest possible development
(variation) so that even the dense can follow it. It treats the listener the way a grown-up
treats a child or a sensible person treats an idiot. For the swift intellect this is an insulting
presumption, but that's the reason our grown-ups make it the essence of music.17
This sardonic broadside appears to be a defence of the kind of sophisticated

and allusive presentation of material which has sometimes been termed
'athematicism', and which is found in such demonstrations of 'New
Music' as the last of the op.16 orchestral pieces and the third of the op.n
piano pieces, as well as in Webern's opp.9, 10 and 11. For a more positive
statement of radical aesthetic and technical principles, written to someone
Schoenberg thought of as a kindred spirit, there is the pair of letters to
Busoni, dating from August 1909 and speaking less of melody than of form
('I strive for complete liberation [...] from all symbols of cohesion and
logic') and harmony ('expression and nothing else'). Schoenberg's embrace
of iconoclasm is so intense here that he even claims to be seeking not just
'variegation' and 'multifariousness' but 'illogicality' in his music.18
Rhetorically, at least, we are a long way from the kind of claims
Schoenberg would make in 1917, after he had had time to reflect on the
compositional consequences of apparent 'illogicality' in his own music ? as
also, perhaps, in Webern's. As Haimo has pointed out, by 1917 Schoenberg
was writing
that 'artistic exploitation of coherence aims at comprehensibility and that 'coherence is based
on repetition'. He made it clear that coherence, comprehensibility, and repetition were
indispensable components of musical thought. The compositions after 1917 and before
August 1909 are consistent with that aesthetic stance. Clearly however, op. 11 no.3 and the
other works that follow do not subscribe to those core aesthetic principles/9
It is not so much that op. 11 no.3 anc^ tne 'new kind of [...] instrumental
recitative' found in op. 16 no.5 that Haimo links with it are incoherent
and incomprehensible: rather, they are simply less representative of high
modernism than works (like the Second Quartet or Pierrot lunaire) which
retain links with more traditional kinds of thematicism and which regard
harmonic complexity as a continuum between centred and floating harmonic
thinking. Above all, the need for comprehensibility meant that invariants
and emphases of various kinds (assuming that they could never be totally
excluded) should not be suppressed, but positively exploited in order to
enhance the music's audible coherence.
ij. A Schoenberg reader, p.64.
As noted above, the phase in which 'Schoenberg breaks with tradition'
18. A Schoenberg reader,
and tries 'to cut himself off from the past' lasted only from 1909 to 1911, and
pp.69-77.
was, Haimo suggests, perhaps the product of quasi-parental unease about the
19. Haimo: Schoenberg's
transformation of musical running being made by Webern. Schoenberg soon 'returns to the axiomatic
language, p.3 37. assumptions that musical coherence rests on recurrence of theme and
Ex.4: Schoenberg: Das Buch der hangenden Garten, no. 15, ending (? Universal Edition)
Tempo [J = __h_A
c. 60]A_A
_ "A_\^\
?---^.^^
h? ../V-Â_q^^" ^^ A
$' itL^ \*lj ^ y\f O 1

<
/
Mr
/w?_I_.-?
? - -==-_?
rit. _
|t|-cr ^-^ ^?-^T *
motive, that the choice of pitch materi

tradition was something to be enlar
That is not to say, however, that he re
that had operated up to if not incl
and the Second String Quartet. Sch
Music' was less conducive to positiv
to high modernism than the more
truly complex) features which arose w
tradition involved the kind of dialog
to be found in op.io itself. Paying due
of op.io's composition, along with th
op.15, Haimo argues that 'just as op.i
[late in the finale] so as to maintain so
a whole, so too in op. 15 no. 13, Scho
[...] because he wanted the later movem
movements'.21 Yet the consistency
the tension between harmony tend
tending away from it. And there ar
its management of the possible pola
stable harmonic events, not least in th
20. Haimo: op. cit., pp.354?55
and final song seems to refer back t
21. Haimo: op. cit., p.289.
ending (ex.4). Schoenberg was already
THE MUSICAL TIME
14 1909 and after: high modernism and 'New Music'
and comprehensibility could be positive consequences of new 'laws' ? laws

which would acknowledge their comparability with traditional laws even as
they established their own particular distinctiveness.
Post-tonal resonances
The highly unstable circumstances of 1909?11 were, it might be argued,

repeated on a more extended timescale after 1945, when perceptions in
America and Europe about the technical limitations of the high-modernist
enterprise - the potential not realised - led to a new phase for New
Music. There are also parallels (imprecise but no less intriguing for that)
between the minimalist return to ostinato and heterophony after 1970 and
some aspects of neoclassicism after 1920. The sustained pursuit of New
Music ideals in composers as well-contrasted as Carter, Lachenmann
and Ferneyhough seems to have had no parallel between 1914 and 1945.
And it is surely very striking that high-modernist principles have become
particularly important to composers who in their earliest years might have
regarded them with disdain: not only Berio, Ligeti and Boulez but younger
composers as different as Birtwistle and Harvey, Dillon and Ades, Rihm
and Pintscher, Haas and Neuwirth. The emancipated discourse that finds
favour at the start of post-tonal music's second century suggests an embrace
of a late modernism springing from high modernism's continued dialogue
with the New Music's avant-garde aspirations. It might even be that it is
only now, a century later, that the full range of possibilities on offer in
1909 are beginning to be recognised. When the powers displayed by (for
example) Strauss, Sibelius, Stravinsky and Bartok around that time are
brought into the picture, the pluralist potential is clear for all to see, and the
resulting diversity places high modernism and late modernism alike under
the recurrent challenge of a modern classicism resistant to expressionistic
Dionysianism, if not to the seductive and still undervalued potential of
Schoenbergian suspended tonality.
The capacity of expressionist forcefulness to renew itself has not been
more impressively evident during the new century so far than in Boulez's
Derive 2 (begun 1998, first version 2002, second 2006), a work which makes
the genial exuberance of Sur incises (1996-98) seem relatively restricted
in comparison. Such inspired resistance to the sirensong of New Music's
urge to abandon accessibility can be found alike in the earthy vehemence
of Olga Neuwirth's piano piece Marsyas (2003?04) and the joyously
explosive between the 'rustic' and the 'sacred' in Jonathan Harvey's
String Trio (2004). Neuwirth 's response to the terrifying classical tale of
Marsyas's flaying alive is a complexity-resisting confrontation between
noises (clusters, glissandos) and textures which are harmonically focused,
ostinato-driven, and stylistically allusive. Messiaen and Ligeti seem to be
Ex.5: Neuwirth: Marsyas for piano, ending (? Boosey & Hawkes)
[J*=c.66]
8va
d/ljf r I?r if f_M

11^ ?^y^ T^fTfr rVr7"r r r rTrfr i f'f r r f r f r f r f rr^^
i ^?~?-g?-^j, ^
molto rail. _J = 44
(so dicht wie moglich)
1 ~ ?=- PPPP
\\ _ *"- --*~i
I _?^-_ ^y-wwvwwwwwwskwvwwvvwwwvwvvw
\\&*ri>r*rrfrrrrrrrrrrrrr^~ '^ ^ ^' 'j (p^ verklingen lassen
among the composers being not-so-metaphorically flayed ? or celebrated

('misterioso e tenero') ? here, while the use of diatonic collections (as at the
end, ex.5) in ways which suspend or extend, rather than confirm or deny,
traditional tonality, is evocative and eloquent. At the same time, it must be
acknowledged that music which has resisted similar levels of tonal allusion
can still preserve generic associations with toccatas and fantasias in which
rapid repetitions of pitch and rhythmic groups remain central: ex.6 is from
'Opus contra naturam' (2000) for speaking pianist by Bryan Ferneyhough,
a section of his opera Shadowtime. Not all late-modernist, post-tonal music
finds itself echoing tonal harmony, even if it echoes genres which were
often used by tonal composers.
THE MUSICAL TIMES Spring 2009 15
16 1909 and after: high modernism and 'New Music*
Ex.6: Ferneyhough: Shadowtime, 'Opus contra naturam', excerpt (? Peters Edition)
I i>^ "" -1
\ espansivo-sonoro
I 1-11:7-1
I 1 7:5 -,_____^^
scurrilo
,-5.-4-,
I I I p 'I ' I ' 5-1 I I I I I I I | I I I I J J J gMjag 1 1 ' 1
< f\-'i2? ?==zf/J-1 PP ~\\===-\f\-' PP \==

^ * ,x bi_4
\|yjp ~^~_J ^-
i - -^ ,x_j
> ? I
/ ffff f PP -'
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The second century?
Many other examples of recent music which continue the modernist initiative
could be given. That those ruthlessly radical attributes of New Music first
tried out in 1909 might finally fade and die after 2009 might be deduced
from the reluctance of most younger composers to acknowledge them, and
also from the degree to which ? as in recent Carter ? at least some of the
older composers feel the same way. As John Link has observed, Carter's
short orchestral piece More's Utopia (2004) ? one of the Three illusions for
orchestra ? is 'a political work, both a rejection of the totalitarian control
implicit in so many dreams of an ideal society, and a trenchant depiction
of the violent end that Thomas More's Utopian dream was heir to. More's
imaginary world (in Carter's staging) is an awful place', and even if Carter
still associates percussion ostinatos with 'dehumanising mechanization' the
kind of varied repetitions found in those 'long expressive melodies that
persist in spite of frequent and tumultuous interruptions',22 as in Symphonias
crowning 'Allegro scorrevole', confirm a sense of stabilisation that suggests
degrees of alignment with Boulez's 'recognisable musical objects' and,
through them, with those Schoenbergian 'tones of the motive' by means of
which comprehensible compositional working might be realised.23 As one of
the crowning glories of post-tonal music's first century, Carter's Symphonia
builds bridges both to Schoenberg's radical op. 16 no. 5 and to the kind of
late-romantic, Mahlerian echoes that Schoenberg, Berg and Webern used
in 1909, as if in acknowledgement that worthwhile music could never be
constructed on complete loss of memory, still less on intransigent refusals
of inheritance.
What began A CENTURY ago was a fundamental aesthetic reaction

against a mode of musical organisation and expression ? tonality
? that imposed precise, multi-layered relations and functions.
22. John Link: 'Elliott Emerging in its place was an aesthetic of suspension rather than of rejection,
Carter's "late music"?', in
Tempo 246 (October 2008), or distancing rather than of denial, resulting from the conviction that
pp.3-4. although the all-pervading syntactic constraints of classical tonality could
23. In an interview published never be entirely forgotten, they could be adequately complemented by the
in a South Bank Centre
looser, more literal modernity of paratactic succession. Many 19th-century
programme for 11 December
2008 Carter proclaimed that
composers seem to have felt that the very richness and distinctiveness of
'I develop all my ideas only the classical synthesis limited its capacity for continuation and renewal.
from harmonic structures
It had taken its conviction from the social forces that led civilisation from
and not from thematic ideas'
(p.6). Once those ideas are the Renaissance to the Enlightenment but discouraged agnosticism and
established, however, they
become in effect motivic as relativism. Such absolute order was incompatible with modernity, and an
well as harmonic, and even, affront to it. With regret, but with more pleasure than nostalgia, Utopia
when extended, 'melodic'. must be seen for what it is. Since it is probably more naturally hybrid than
the musical times Spring 2009 17
18 1909 and after: high modernism and 'New Music'
pure, great post-tonal music will invariably suggest associations with great
tonal music. But in suspending tonality, post-tonal modernism shows its
richest, most constructive response to the overwhelming need to provide
the contemporary world with a music as challenging and distinctive as any
other authentic manifestation of contemporary culture.

Whittal - 1909 and After

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Whittal - 1909 and After

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1909 and after: High Modernism and 'New Music'

Author(s): Arnold Whittall

1909 and after: high modernism and

Carter's angle is a personal one, geared to a concert programme including

THE MUSICAL TIMES Spring 2009 5

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3. Anne C. Shreffler & Felix

art of not falling" or swimming "the art of not drowning"'.5 In another

THE MUSICAL TIMES Spring 200$ 7

and it is an interesting, as yet unfulfilled, objective for Schoenberg analysis

The ideal of progress

THE MUSICAL TIMES Spring 200$ 9

Ex.3: Schoenberg: String Quartet no.2, Finale, ending (? Universal Edition)

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My argument, by contrast, is that the 'new, atonal language' never needed

Schoenberg and high-modernist principles

Put on the spot, Schoenberg conceded that without improvements in

THE MUSICAL TIMES Spring 200$ 11

This sardonic broadside appears to be a defence of the kind of sophisticated

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motive, that the choice of pitch materi

THE MUSICAL TIME

and comprehensibility could be positive consequences of new 'laws' ? laws

The highly unstable circumstances of 1909?11 were, it might be argued,

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among the composers being not-so-metaphorically flayed ? or celebrated

THE MUSICAL TIMES Spring 2009 15

Ex.6: Ferneyhough: Shadowtime, 'Opus contra naturam', excerpt (? Peters Edition)

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What began A CENTURY ago was a fundamental aesthetic reaction

the musical times Spring 2009 17

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