Keywords on music

The Second Viennese School

Leopold Spinner, Philip Herschkowitz and Erich Itor Kahn are often attributed to the Second Viennese School around Arnold Schönberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg. In fact, Spinner studied with Anton Webern, and Herschkowitz with Anton Webern and Alban Berg. Kahn was at times in a lively exchange with Schönberg; as a pianist, he premiered Schönberg’s Piano Piece 33/a.

As a matter of course, this experience had a formative influence on their composing. Nevertheless, the Second Viennese School should not be thought of as a monolithic block. There were also connections to other musical orientations; in his French exile, Kahn wrote a Hommage à Ravel. He set Victor Hugo’s long poem Les Djinns to music, which had already animated César Franck and Gabriel Fauré to compositions. Spinner composed an orchestral work Prelude and Variations op. 18 for Igor Stravinsky’s 80th birthday, and he supervised Stravinsky’s works as an editor for the music publisher Boosey and Hawkes.

Atonality

In the first decade of the 20th century, Schönberg, Webern and Berg began to compose music that was no longer oriented towards a fundamental tone. It was a consequence of the development of harmonics at the end of the 19th century – and at the same time one of the boldest innovations in the history of music.

Similarly, it was not about banning tonality and setting a new standard. It was about expanding the possibilities of composing. “This is not a cut! On the contrary, it is an expansion of the knowledge of music’s past,” said Philip Herschkowitz in an interview.

In many of the songs presented here, appear Major and minor chords, those basic elements of European tonality that, in the 20th century, seem like foreign bodies, for example in Kahn’s Schlaflied, in the third variation in Lyrisches Konzert or in the song Schönheit from Spinners op. 25. This does not yet mean tonality in the sense of a paradigm, but it is an indication of a tie with the music of the classical-romantic era. Thereby sometimes the feeling arises, that there is a resonance of melancholy, a memory of earlier times.

The extent to which one perceives the tonal or atonal parts of a composition is also a decision for the listener.

Twelve-tone method

With one exception, all the songs are written in a technique that Arnold Schönberg described as a method of composition with twelve notes that are only related to each other. Schönberg thus spoke of a method of composition and not of a system, and certainly not of a style.

Composing is a process of different phases, and at a certain stadium, techniques such as the twelve-tone method can be helpful. The serial technique is about creating a sequence of tone pitches, and in the case of the twelve-tone row it is the twelve semitones of the chromatic total. The composer attains the tone pitches for the composition from the infinite number of possibilities for reshaping this series of twelve tones. Whether this process can be perceived by the listener is controversial, and it certainly varies from composition to composition.

The songs presented here are composed traditionally in phrases, melodies and harmonies – this is decisive for listening.

The situation in exile

To what extent was exile defining for their music? This question is a constant source of debate. Leopold Spinner vehemently rejected the idea of his music being performed in concert series that focused on the exile situation. A performance should take place out of interest in the music and not under the motto of reparation. This is understandable; after all, it is not an artistic criterion to have been expelled by the National Socialists. Even under the most difficult circumstances, these composers continued to write music. This commands our respect, but that doesn’t make their music any better or worse either.

However, it is important to acknowledge the exile situation of the composers: It explains why, to this day, this important music has not received the resonance it deserves.

The relation between language and music

In the post-war avant-garde of the 1950s, to some radical exponents it seemed suspect even considering to respond to the meaning of a text set to music; the music should only be concerned with its acoustic manifestation. In contrast, these three composers insisted on music in their settings that also considers the content of a text. However, the omission of tonality also led to a different approach to the words. Some effective means of musical expression, such as the major-minor contrast, are omitted, as well as the possibility of closing a formal section with a fifth or a cadence. Then again, other means of musical illustration seemed outdated and had become questionable.

Composers therefore had to find new ways of combining language and music.

In the first of the five songs after Nietzsche by Leopold Spinner, the piano abandons its traditional role. It no longer supports the vocal part but, on the contrary, becomes the singer’s opponent or even her shadow. The tones are sparse, consisting of single notes or two-notes that imitate and irritate the vocal part. The “great fear” the text relates to is staged in an almost cabaret-like manner.

In the poem Espenbaum, Paul Celan puts the murder of his mother into words. Here, any false emotionality would lead to kitsch. Herschkowitz avoids this by placing the fortissimo outbursts in the voice and the piano part on ostensibly inoffensive lines such as “Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine”. On the other hand, a line like “Meiner Mutter Herz ward wund von Blei” is set to music in a way that in the first instance seems banal: one hears pulsating repetitions in the piano. But then you realize the ambiguity of this supposed illustration: do we hear the gunshots or the mother’s heartbeat? In his music, Herschkowitz avoids doubling the text, which would only weaken it. Through his music, he gives Celan’s words a space in which they can unfold their impact.