If only I had
realised today (12.12.12.) was such – and yes, just like Schoenberg himself, it
works in the New World as well the Old World – earlier today whilst I was at
work in the Arnold Schönberg Center, I’m sure I could have dug out some choicer
nuggets. Here anyway is a typically laconic summation of The Method from Webern’s Path to the New Music: ‘To develop
everything … from one principal idea! That’s the strongest unity… But in
what form? That’s where art comes in!’
And from Schoenberg’s
own article, Composition with Twelve
Tones:
… the validity of this form of thinking is … demonstrated by the … law of unity of musical space, best formulated as follows: the unity of musical space demands an absolute and unitary perception. In this space, as in Swedenborg’s heaven (described in Balzac’s Seraphita) there is no absolute down, no right or left, forward or backward. Every musical configuration, every movement of tones has to be comprehended primarily as a mutual relation of sounds, of oscillatory vibrations, appearing at different places and times.
Most important,
here is the glistening Bauhaus-Musik of the Gigue from the op.25 Suite for
Piano, rendered all the more pristine and
dramatic by Maurizio Pollini:
Schoenberg n’est
nullement mort.
