in that we’ll be starting directly with a piece of music on film

and, as usual, any of you who’d like to follow the score at the desk

I welcome to come and join me.

What a way to enter the 20th century!

Blazing with self-confidence,

back there in 1908,

this Spanish Rhapsody of Ravel's is totally unaware -or at least unconcerned-

that a crisis lurks just around the corner,

a life-and-death crisis in musical semantics.

But this music has no worries about the future,

it's immensely pleased with itself

it has a childlike faith that the tonality, on which it feeds, is infinite;

that tonality is immortal,

as long as it is continuously refreshed

and enriched by bigger and better ambiguities,

both phonological and syntactic ones, chromatic and metrical ones.

They're all there in that music,

all those elusive and seductive Either/Or's that we found

last time in Berlioz and in Wagner and Debussy; they're all there, and then some.

But all that wandering chromaticism we've been listening to

is still contained in a tonal framework,

and Ravel is telling us, through his music, that he sees no reason

why it can't go on forever similarly controlled and contained,

to the end of recorded time.

In other words,

we’re safe:

it's only 1908, and there's still Rosenkavalier to be written,

and a few more Puccini operas,

and the Firebird,

and who knows how many other similar delights.

Life is nothing but a joy.

But 1908, if the truth be told,

is not just a bowl of cherries.

Far from it,

there's something else in the air

a disturbance, a prescient feeling that all this smug optimism

can't last –neither tonality, nor figurative painting,

nor syntactical poetry, nor, indeed, the seemingly endless growth

of the bourgeoisie, or of colonial wealth, or of imperial power.

Sensitive minds are beginning to hint at a social collapse

a monstrous World War.

A premature flicker of fascism is already perceptible:

Marinetti's famous Manifesto of Futurism is about to appear,

glorifying war, the machine, speed, danger

and calling for the destruction of the past with all its traditions,

including music.

At the same time, on the other side of the musical moon,

Mahler is writing his Ninth Symphony, agonizing over

his reluctant and protracted farewell to tonality.

Even Scriabin in his Prometheus is waging a losing battle

to contain his own mystic chromaticisms.

And even Sibelius

is writing a Fourth Symphony filled with unresolved doubts and terrors.

And these troubling presentiments are particularly intense in and around Vienna

–the decadence and hypocrisy of this

over-waltzed Austro-Hungarian Empire–

are seen by the Viennese polemicist Karl Kraus.

(I don’t know if you know that name, but it's a very important

name, you should know it.)

Seen by Karl Kraus as glaringly reflected in the degeneration of language,

and are cruelly exposed in a harsh light of his critical writings.

If you don’t know the name Karl Krauss, look him up,

he’s a key figure,

in this first decade of the century.

And he knows what's coming.

Mahler knows too, but he is about to die

along with his beloved tonal music.

And there is a new composer,

still in his thirties, who also knows,

but who will live to do something about it.

And his name is Arnold Schoenberg,

who has already written a masterly work,

Verklärte Nacht ("Transfigured Night")

in which he has stretched those Wagnerian tonal ambiguities we found last week

to the snapping point.

The problems presented by Tristan and Isolde have now

grown to a point necessitating some radical solution.

The works have become not only chromatically unmanageable

but unwieldy, as well, in sheer size.

Like the dinosaur, they've simply grown too big.

Composers like Reger and Pfitzner are vying with each other

for some kind of Oscar to be awarded for the longest, thickest, and most

complex piece in the world.

And Schoenberg too made his bid with an early

super-Wagnerian monster work called Gurrelieder.

They were all, including Mahler, swept along by

the mighty "wave of the future" that Wagner, in his hyper-romantic egomania,

had predicted and initiated.

But how big can you get, how chromatically ambiguous, how syntactically overstuffed

without collapsing of your own sheer weight like the dinosaur?

There were just too many notes, too many inner voices, too many meanings.

And this was what caused the crisis in Ambiguity.

So, now in 1908, Schoenberg is already giving up the struggle

to preserve tonality, to contain those post-Wagnerian chromaticisms.

In this very year he is writing a Second String Quartet

that clearly announces the upheaval and his renunciation of tonality.

In the last movement of this quartet he resorts to the human voice,

a soprano who sings Stefan George's prophetic words:

"Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten" ("I feel air from another planet").

And it sounds like this.

And then she sings

"Ich fühle Luft

von anderem Planeten”

and indeed Schoenberg does feel that air

and we feel it too.

This Opus 10 is to be his last tonal piece for many years to come.

By Opus 11, we’re already breathing that new air.

Listen

You feel that new air?

Breathing it?

This is atonality –to use that awful and frequently misunderstood word.

Not the atonality of Debussy’s old tonal scale that we’ve studied last week,

which is always –if you remember– tonality contained.

This atonality is not contained, either diatonically or in any other way.

For better or worse, nontonal music has been born.

And the history of music has suffered a sea change.

And in that same year of 1908, but far away from all this

–an ocean and a continent away, in fact in Connecticut of all places–

the sharpest comment, the most trenchant description of the tonal crisis,

was made by an unheard, unhonored and unsung Sunday composer named Charles Ives.

Who also knew, though totally unaware of Schoenberg or any

of that upheaval, he knew something was up,

and proclaimed it in his half-playful, mystic, quirky way through

a marvelous little piece called "The Unanswered Question".

And this music says it all, better than a thousand words.

For this reason I'd like you to hear it –and and also to see it–

to see this almost graphic representation of the conflict.

Of course the question Ives proposes in his title is not a strictly musical one,

by his own say-so, but rather a metaphysical one.

Let me quote part of his descriptive foreword to the piece:

The strings play pianissimo throughout with no change in tempo.

They are to represent "The Silences of the Druids --Who Know, See and Hear Nothing."

The trumpet intones "The Perennial Question of Existence", and states it

in the same tone of voice each time.

But the hunt for the "Invisible Answer"

undertaken by the flutes & other human beings

[typical Ives cracker-barrel humor],

becomes gradually more active, faster and louder...

These "Fighting Answerers, as times goes on... seem to realize a futility

and begin to mock "The Question"–the strife is over for the moment.

After they disappear, "The Question" is asked for the last time,

and "The Silences" are heard beyond in "Undisturbed Solitude".

A charming idea, naive and profound at once.

But I've always thought of Ives’s Unanswered Question as not metaphysical one

so much as strictly musical question, whither music in our century.

Let me reinterpret the piece in exclusively musical terms,

there are three orchestral elements involved: the string ensemble,

a solo trumpet and a woodwind quartet.

The strings do, indeed, play pianissimo throughout with no changes in tempo, as Ives says,

but more important of anything about druids: they’re playing pure tonal triads.

And against this slow sustained purely diatonic background,

the trumpet intermittently poses his question:

a vague nontonal phrase.

And each time that is answered by the wind group

in an equally vague, amorphous way.

The repeated question remains more or less the same but the answer

is grow more and more ambiguous and hectic

until the final answer emerges as utterly gibberish.

But throughout it all, those strings have maintained

their diatonic serenity imperturbable

and when the trumpet asks his question for the last time whither music,

there’s no further answer except for those strings

quietly prolonging their pure D major triad into eternity.

Is that luminous final triad the answer?

Is tonality eternal? Immortal?

Many have thought so and some still do,

and yet that trumpet’s question hangs in the air, unresolved,

troubling our calm.

You see how clearly this piece spells out the dilemma of the new century,

the dichotomy that was to define the shape of musical life from then to now.

On the one hand, tonality and syntactic clarity;

on the other, atonality and syntactic confusion,

as simple as that, apparently, but not quite so simple as we shall see.

Tonal composers are going to be tempted into flirting with nontonality and vice versa.

And to cloud now this further,

all twentieth century’s composers however splitted they are,

write what they, are out of the same need for newer and greater semantic richness;

they are all, whether tonal or nontonal, motivated by the same drive:

the power of expressivity, the drive to expand music's metaphorical speech,

even if they do so in diametrically opposite ways, and split music apart.

And so we can see this twentieth century split as having had a common impetus,

much as river divides into two forks.

On the one hand, there were tonal composers, guided by Igor Stravinsky,

who were seeking to extend musical ambiguities as far as possible

by constant transformations, but always

somehow remaining within the confines of the tonal system;

while on the other hand nontonal composers, led by Schoenberg,

were seeking their new metaphorical speech through one huge,

convulsive transformation –namely, transforming the entire tonal system

into a new and different poetic language.

these two apparently hostile camps, with all their antagonisms and disputes

about which side really represented "modern music", actually

shared the same motivation: increased expressive power.

I have recently been reading a fascinating, nasty, turgid book

called The Philosophy of Modern Music

by the German sociologist and aesthetician Theodor Adorno.

It's curious that a book with this title should turn out to be

a double essay on precisely Schoenberg and Stravinsky,

thus reducing "modern music" to that specific dichotomy.

Now of course the book is loaded: Schoenberg is all truth and beauty,

while Stravinsky is everything evil.

But Adorno confirms what I've been saying by pointing out,

in his Hegelian way, that the Big Split is to be conceived dialectically,

or to use his language, as logical antinomies of the same cultural crisis.

Well, to use simpler language,

both Stravinsky and Schoenberg were after the same thing in different ways.

Stravinsky tried to keep musical progress on the move

by driving tonal and structural ambiguities on and on

to a point of no return, as we will see next week.

Schoenberg, foreseeing this point of no return,

and taking his cue from the Expressionist movement in the other arts,

initiated a clean, total break with tonality altogether,

as well as with syntactic structures based on symmetry.

It's interesting to note that Schoenberg was also a talented painter

(this is one of his self-portraits),

and in those early years of the twentieth century

he was making the same kinds of experiments on canvas

as he was making on music paper.

Actually this particular portrait isn’t half as expressionistic as

as a Kokoschka painting a year or two later,

but it’s the only slide I could find for the occasion.

Still it does tell you what I mean, doesn’t it?

We've already referred to some of those early musical experiments,

in Opus 10 and 11, where the break was made and free atonality came to be.

But the clincher was Opus 21

–that wild and spine-chilling masterpiece of expressionism