Giants of the Early Modern Style: Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartok, and Ives

The opening decades of the twentieth century saw musical developments that would determine the direction of Classical music to mid-century and beyond. Three giants stand out above the others, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Bela Bartok.

Upon his death, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) was regarded as the most important composers, if not the most important composer, of the modern era. In fact, Stravinsky and his experimentation led the way for many modern developments and furnished the tools for many composers who followed. Stravinsky’s creative life may be divided into three periods, with the central neo-classical period probably being the most important. Stravinsky’s life was also one of westward migration in which the life begun in Russia ended in Los Angeles.

Stravinsky’s earliest important works were produced in Paris in the first two decades of the century in association with the Ballet Russe. The greatest influences of this period come from two sources—his native Russia and the African art to which his friend Pablo Picasso introduced him. From Russia came unusual scales, in particular, the octotonic scale (today called the “diminished” scale in jazz). The scale is found in Russian music although it is not Russian but rather Turkish. The octotonic scale implies the simultaneous function of major and minor tonality by permitting the simultaneous sounding of the tonic chords of both. It is likely in this tonal anomaly that Stravinsky developed his most effective and influential treatment of modern music: polytonality. Polytonality is first evident in the ballets (i.e. the woodwinds of the “Omens of Spring” portion of Sacred du printemps) and remained a vital feature of Stravinsky’s music until the experimentation with dodecaphony near the end of his life. Moreover, a significant number of contemporary composers understood the value of the procedure and embraced it in their own music.

The octotonic scale beginning on the note C contains the notes C-D flat-E flat-E-G flat-G-A-B flat-C. The tonic chord of the key of C major contains the notes C-E-G; the tonic chord of the key of C minor contains the notes C-E flat-G. Curiously, there are only two possible octotonic scales. The one scale begins with a half step, as above, and the remaining notes in the pattern must fall into alternating half steps and whole steps. The other possible scale must also alternate half and whole steps, but begins with a whole step (D-E-F-G-A flat-B flat-B-D flat-D). Curiously, music based on octotonic scales did not reach its acme in the hands of Russian composers, but in the hands of contemporary Dutch composers.

The African influence that informed Pablo Picasso’s cubism also exerted heavy influence upon the music of Stravinsky. African art found its way into Paris from France’s territorial holdings in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Exhibitions and concerts were mounted frequently enough for both men to have experienced the art and the music directly. Stravinsky was so fascinated with the rhythmic aspects of African and African-influenced music that he even imposed upon the great impresario behind the Ballet Russe, Sergei Diaghilev, to bring ragtime music scores back to France during his frequent promotional trips to the United States.

The African influence is found in Stravinsky’s music in polyrhythm and his special brand of rhythmic alteration, additive rhythm. In polyrhythm, a common beat is shared, but the meter, rhythmic patterns, or accent patterns spin out independently in each drum part. In additive rhythm, beats are added to the initial meter. For example, a four-beat metric might be expanded from 1-2-3-4 to 1-2-3-4/1-2-3-4-5/1-2-3-4-5-6, etc. The effect is that of rhythmic “chugging.” The effect is primitive but vital, and very much in evidence in the early ballets. The polyrhythmic chugging is found in the “Dances of the Youth and Maidens” portion of Sacred du printemps, and is possibly the feature of the music that so offended the French public at the premiere of the ballet in 1913.

Stravinsky’s longest and most influential creative period was his second, which extended from about 1920 until 1951. During this time, Stravinsky no longer drew upon Russian and African sources for inspiration, but from eighteenth-century European classical music. The period is described stylistically as “neo-classical.” Neoclassicism was not exclusive to Stravinsky. It is defined as the use of any older forms as scaffolds for compositions in modern tonality. Hence a composer might use a trio sonata form, suite, or a sonata allegro to define the events within his music, but would compose the music using polytonal, dodecaphonic, or any other modern tonal method.

Stravinsky’s sense of neoclassicism went beyond just the use of older formal structures—he often started with an existing composition and reworked it to his liking. He affectionately and frequently referred to this procedure as his “raids upon the past.” One of the most readily recognizable “raids” is Stravinsky’s the ballet Pulcinella (1920) a reworking of a suite by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. The music is quite distinctive, with entire sections of Pergolesi’s works remaining intact and others modified by Stravinsky’s modern tonality. Doubtless, this hybridization by juxtaposition of two different musical styles is the starting point for the later “quotation music” of Eileen Zwilich. Pulcinella was clearly a stylistic turning point for Stravinsky, and the curiosity of its contrasts is likely the proof of his experimentation. Later neoclassical works do not so easily betray older pre-existent music, if older music was used, though the influence of older forms and older procedures remains evident.

Stravinsky’s interest also shifted in the late 1920s and early 1930s to the use of ideas and texts from both antiquity and sacred sources. As noted, other works draw upon forms such as the Baroque concerto, such as > Dumbarton Oaks, his orchestral concerto in the style of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti. The last work in the neoclassical style, the opera The Rake’s Progress, was modeled upon the general characteristics of Mozart’s operas.

Stravinsky’s final years were spent exploring the possibilities of Schoenberg’s twelve tone system. Curiously, Schoenberg and Stravinsky lived only a few miles from each other on Los Angeles, knew of each other, yet they did not meet. It was not until after Schoenberg’s death that Stravinsky, with the prodding of his personal assistant Robert Kraft, began to experiment with the twelve-tone system. Even then, Stravinsky did not draw directly upon Schoenberg’s music for inspiration, but instead upon that of Schoenberg’s disciple, Anton Webern. Webern’s music, despite the twelve-tone system, put to the fore intense “classicism” and consequently great economy of means, and hence appealed to Stravinsky.

Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was the link between high Romantic and Modern music. His earliest musical endeavors as a composer were heavily influenced by the neo-classicist Brahms and later by the apogee of Romantic music, Richard Wagner. His obsession with Wagner’s continuous polyphony and advanced harmony led Schoenberg to study the music in earnest, and his early compositions, such as Verklarte Nacht, are firmly in the emotionally intense, larger-than-life, late Romantic idiom.

By 1908, Schoenberg concluded through his own compositional efforts that the harmonic language of the late Romantics, epitomized by the music of Wagner, had run through its possibilities. Schoenberg began to experiment, going one the step beyond chromatic harmony, the device Wagner had so completely mastered and implemented. Wagner’s unusual harmonies, unresolved dissonances, and rapid key cycling essentially resulted in the obscuring of any key center; Schoenberg sought to obliterate tonal reference.

His earliest efforts are called atonality. Chromatic harmony used all twelve chromatic notes in the scale. In Schoenberg compositions of this period, he sought to retain the use of all twelve notes but to avoid any reference to the traditional major and minor scales, any of the normal melodic contours or harmonic progressions, and any of the intervallic relationships that had ‘signal’ functions in traditional triadic tonality. His treatment of dissonance also radically differed from the traditional concepts of its handling. Schoenberg simply did not resolve dissonant note combinations, nor saw a need to do so. In his view, his music represented the “emancipation of dissonance.”

Schoenberg’s atonal period is also identified as the musical equivalent of Expressionism in art. The best known work from this period, from about 1908-1914, is Mondestrunken (1912) a chamber work for female voice, piano, piccolo, flute, violin, viola, clarinet, bass clarinet, and cello. Based a series of poems and embodying the isolated modern artist as the puppet Pierrot Lunaire, the tragic clown character from the commedia dell’arte, Mondestrunken seems at first more like a study in distortion on the rhythmic, tonal, timbral, dynamic, and formal levels. In fact, it simply carries all the features that had become the normative in Romanticism one step further, and even the most bizarre feature can be traced to a source earlier in the Romantic style. Moreoever, both atonality and later dodecaphony are direct continuations of Western traditions reaching back centuries. To be sure, Mondestrunken uses Expressionist means to convey the unease of the early twentieth century, doubtless reflected more acutely in the music because it was composed on the eve of World War I. Other contemporary art styles sought to understand alienation and the increasing perception of the meaningless of life, and Mondestrunken perhaps draws some of its personality from the same sources as Surrealism and Dada.

Schoenberg also developed two new techniques that are found in Mondestrunken. and other works of the period: Sprechstimmeand Klangfarbenmelodie. Sprechstimme is a style of vocalizing that falls somewhere between singing and speech. Small “x”s in the score indicate that the pitches are approximated. In Klangfarbenmelodie, which is more common in instrumental compositions, the timbre of each note of a melody is varied when each successive note is played by a different instrument.

Atonality did not permit the creation of longer compositions unless a text served as the scaffold. From about 1917 until the early 1920s, Schoenberg worked to systematize his early advances. The result was his Twelve-Tone System, which is also today called Dodecaphony. It would inform all his later works and impact as well as the later works of his two students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Collectively, the three composers are known as the Second Viennese School. In the briefest of explanations, the composer constructs a tone row, that is, a melody that uses each of the twelve chromatic pitches within the octave. No pitch may be used a second time until all of the other pitches have been sounded. The composer can manipulate the row in a variety of ways to generate new melodies, pitch levels, and even “chords.”

Schoenberg’s students had very different temperaments. Alban Berg is regarded as the ‘Romantic’ of the group. The texts of his works reflect the same frightening assessment of life as Schoenberg’s. They are more tangible and perhaps more disturbing because they are set to stories that do not unfold in the bizarre but remote “other” world of Pierrot Lunaire, but in horrifying and potentially real-life situations. As in late Expressionist art and later Existential literature, life and the environment are hostile entities against which man cannot win. The opera Wozzeck is studied in the text. In the opera Lulu, the greatest of his masterpieces, Lulu is a high-born woman who is reduced by a series of circumstances to prostitution: her first client is Jack the Ripper.

Despite disturbing libretti, Berg did not seek, as Schoenberg had, to avoid all tonal references. Not only were tonal references permitted to stand when they inadvertently occurred as one of the functions of the tone row. Berg sometimes altered dissonances that occurred in the row to be more consonant if they did not support the dramatic action. Hence, Berg made his music more accessible and less rigid. Although his works can be unsettling, at least they are not incomprehensible. Berg died of a bee sting in the late 1930s.

Anton Webern is regarded as the classicist of the group. His methods embrace the utmost economy in his quest to define the absolute. In each work, Webern used only the minimal number of pitches to express his ideas, as if to distill all musical thought to its essence. Consequently, his compositions tend to be very poetic in gesture but also very short in duration, and the entirety of his life work can be heard in fewer than four hours. A central characteristic of Webern’s music for ensemble is Klangfarbenmelodie. Webern was shot dead on his front porch by a G.I. at the close of World War II. Webern violated curfew to light up a cigar and thus added to the common wisdom that smoking is not good for one’s health.

Bela Bartok: the Nationalist Thread in Modern Music

Bela Bartok (1881-1945) established himself first as a piano teacher and concert pianist in his native Hungary. By the 1900s, he became deeply immersed in the fever of nationalism that swept Europe. His interest in national music styles piqued, he devoted, along with friend and fellow composer Zoltan Kodaly, a significant amount of time and effort to making field recordings of the folk music of Hungary and neighboring countries. He developed an authority on the music of the Romanians, Turks, and Slovaks, as well as the Arab populations of North Africa. His field research was one of the first of the discipline known today as enthnomusicology.

Bartok shared his research by publishing piano versions of folksong melodies to which he added only rudimentary accompaniment. The labor reinforced his love of Hungarian and other ethnic music, and the exercise of setting only sparse but meaningful accompaniments that would enhance without obscuring the character or rhythm of the ethnic melody taught him to weigh the meaning of each added note.

In Bartok’s earliest period as a composer, the twenty years of the twentieth century, the profound influence of folksong is evident. The music could almost be described as “synthetic” folk music, that is, it retained all the authentic characteristics of ethnic music without being authentic ethnic music.

Later music reflected strong neo-classical tendencies, from media (i.e. string quartet) to form (i.e. sonata, passacaille). His harmonic and rhythmic language, however, even with the use of polytonality, drew heavily and unashamedly upon his Hungarian culture. His treatment of dissonance reflected his native musical origins, adding to the modern palette. Likewise, his rhythmic organization reflected the characteristic sophisticated syncopation of Hungarian folk song and dance. Bartok frequently delighted in watching famous pianists stumble through the counting during sight-reading.

Bartok excelled at instrumental rather than vocal music. As the text points out, much of Bartok’s music reflects a variety of moods and textures. Some pieces are atmospheric, almost Impressionist; others are primitive and brutal in the manner of Stravinsky’s early ballets; and still others delight in the rhythms of Eastern European folk dance. These descriptions tend to apply more to the piano music and the early music rather than later works. His compositions for instrumental ensemble adhere more to neoclassical tenets and, despite the ethnic influences, are truly cosmopolitan in character. The String Quartets, for example, stand as neoclassical exercises in the purest and most absolute of cerebral styles. As one might expect in neoclassical compositions, imitation, polyphony, and thematic transformation are often used to create tension and drive his music forward.

The Concerto for Orchestra is a notable exception to the severity of the late style. He had immigrated to New York in the early 1940s, where he had a grant as a research scholar at Columbia University. His grant ran out before he could finish his work and, in 1943, his health took a sharp and alarming decline. He received a commission for an orchestral composition and began work on the concerto in the same year. Realizing that he was dying, he set about to make the work one of his finest, but he also determined to incorporate in it features that would assure its protracted success. Hence the concerto is not difficult listening for the uninitiated, but rather geared to popular tastes. His purpose was not musical “immortality.” Instead he sought to make a vehicle that would support his family after his death. He ruefully referred to the concerto as “my life insurance policy.”

Honorable Mention: Charles Ives

American Charles Ives (1874-1954) had a less than exhilarating experience in his music composition studies at Yale University, and the condemnation of his experiments by the academy led him to the conclusion to seek employment outside the music business. Ives entered his father’s insurance brokerage, there achieving his first strokes of immortality with the invention of term life insurance and estate planning.

Like Bela Bartok, the music of Ives was rooted in the folk and popular music of his native land. For Ives, this music included ragtime, Protestant hymns (both traditional and revival), parlor and Minstrel songs, patriotic tunes, barn dance fiddle tunes, and the marching band music offered by every band in America since the Civil War. Many nineteenth-century American composers, especially those composers like Stephen Foster who worked in popular genres, forced the folk and popular music that had evolved through cross-cultural hybridization into the models furnished by European classical music.

Ives’ inspiration drew not upon European classical models, however, but upon the traditions of American improvised music, with all its mistakes, and the influence Ives heard in African influenced American music. These latter influences included polyrhythm and syncopation, irregular phrase lengths, and implied polytonality in the “blue” note. Ives reaction to these influences was not to absorb them and recombine them, but to use them as the starting point to strike out in startling new directions.

Ives worked at a time almost exactly contemporary to Stravinsky’s period with the Ballet Russe. He worked, however, in almost complete musical isolation and, consequently, his approach to polyrhythm and polytonality was unique and outside the European mainstream. In addition, Ives was extremely patriotic, and nearly all his works embrace and celebrate Americana.

Whereas Stravinsky applied the polyrhythm he heard in African music and ragtime to polytonality he adapted from the ocototonic scales, Ives took one step further out and combined entire pieces in a “poly” musical fabric. Ives, of course favored familiar American melodies, especially tunes of common folk, and he loved to quote these tunes in his compositions. His use went far beyond just quotation; rather he interwove and developed them within the larger structure. Hence one finds an implied interrelationship of music, time, and “space.” In the music of Ives, “poly” might mean something more akin what one might hear standing stationary as a parade passes and the music of successive bands overlaps. In the music of Stravinsky and his contemporaries, polytonality and polyrhythm are anchored to a common thread of superstructure. This common reference is also true of much of Ives’ music, but there are moments when Ives takes one step further out. His musical events can be completely independent of each other, ending only when one eclipses the other or they blend into a single, advanced and, to some ears, cacophonous texture.