Read Online The Ellington Century by David Schiff - Free Book Online Page B

Schoenberg ratcheted up the colors and the comedy in part III. Here Pierrot returns to the daylight world (lit by a green sun) in a kind of sadomasochistic vaudeville. In number 18, “Der Mondspeck,” the color white, earlier a benign image of the imagination, returns as a symptom of obsessive compulsion as Pierrot vainly attempts to remove a speck of moonlight from the back of his coat. The instruments parody his pointless attempts to wipe the speck (genius? guilt? both?) away, “Wischt und wischt,” with a five-part double fugue scored mostly in the upper register; its twin subjects might be called Itchy and Scratchy. The songreduces the esoteric “devices” of fugal writing, imitation, stretto, canon, augmentation, retrograde, to so many nervous tics, deconstructing pedantry with pedantry. What remains, though, dazzles. All the counterpoint just turns into brilliant glitter, white like a diamond.
    There is no indication that Kandinsky ever heard Pierrot Lunaire. In a letter to Kandinsky on August 19, 1912, Schoenberg referred to Pierrot semi-apologetically as “perhaps no heartfelt necessity as regards its theme, its content [Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire ], but certainly as regards its form” and mentions his next project based on Balzac's Swedenborgian novel Seraphita. That project resulted in two works that mark the terminus of Schoenberg's colorized spiritualism. First came the orchestral song “Seraphita,” op. 22, no. 1, to a poem of Ernest Dowson, scored for an unusual ensemble of voice, twenty-four violins, twelve cellos, nine basses, six clarinets, one trumpet, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, xylophone (of course), and tam-tam. Whether its precise instrumental proportions reflect acoustical concerns or numerological symbolism, the song has a unique otherworldly but sensuous timbre.
    Schoenberg spent most of the war years working on a huge oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter , that might have fulfilled Kandinsky's prophecy of a higher art form. Like the contemporary visionary compositions, Scriabin's Mysterium and Ives's Universe Symphony , both intended for performances on mountaintops, Schoenberg's oratorio seems planned from the outset as a spiritual exercise whose dimensions would preclude actual performance. In the course of work on the oratorio, however, Schoenberg began to conceive a different way of relating the surface of music to an inner structure, the twelve-tone system, which would make its official debut in the unspiritual setting of a waltz, the last of Schoen-berg's Five Pieces for Piano, op. 23, written in 1921.
    INTERMEZZO: A PALER SHADE OF WHITE
    The occult spiritualism of Schoenberg and Kandinsky (and early Stravinsky) ended, musically, with the arrival of jazz, first heard in France as played by James Reese Europe's 369th Infantry Hellfighters Band. Within a few years most European composers abandoned expressionism for jazz-tinged “objective” styles such as neoclassicism or Neue Sachlichkeit. 52 Although at first perceived as just another exotic fad, jazz confronted European music with a pertinent, persuasive rendering of contemporary experience that proved to be surprisingly tenacious and,at first, seductive. Euro-jazz by Milhaud, Ravel, Hindemith, Krenek, and Weill dominated the new music scene of the 1920s.
    The eruption of jazz in European music incited a series of backlashes, both musical and political. Tone color and skin color remained linked, as evidenced by the discourse surrounding the 1928 Stravinsky/Balanchine ballet Apollon musagète , conceived as an apotheosis of whiteness. Balanchine's choreography followed Stravinsky's description of his score as a “ballet blanc, ” 53 that is, with dancers in tutus. In his Autobiography Stravinsky wrote that he had “pictured it to myself as danced in short white ballet skirts in a severely conventionalized theatrical landscape devoid of all fantastic embellishment”. 54 The music,