The Great Defender

I recently found myself in the curious-for-me position of encouraging publicly a fellow member of a classical music list to which I sometimes contribute to give Schoenberg's "atonal" monodrama Erwartung another several listens before giving up on it as impossible to listen to because it "makes no musical sense." Wrote A.C. Douglas, that great defender of the atonal:

Far be it from my intent to come across sounding like a defender of the atonal, but if I may offer a suggestion...

While it's true that most (or, rather, most of my experience) atonal compositions are largely incoherent, self-indulgent crap musically, Erwartung is not among them. Schoenberg's hugely difficult Freudian monodrama (I know it's hugely difficult musically even though I've never seen the score) is instead richly powerful and darkly beautiful if deeply disturbing (what else?; it's Freudian, after all).

Much as appreciating and understanding a mature-period Wagner music-drama requires a considerable and only-with-effort-achieved mental paradigm shift for one whose sole and long-time experience of opera is of the Italian-form sort, so Erwartung requires a considerable and only-with-effort-achieved mental paradigm shift for one whose sole and long-time experience is of ordinary tonal music. The essential mental trick is an abandoning of one's musical expectations (N.P.I.).

By that I mean an abandoning of one's natural and largely culturally-determined musical expectations of, at some point or points, finding "safety" and release in tensionless tonic resolution(s), and an abandoning as well of one's expectations in the ordering of musical progression both of the melodic and harmonic sort; that subconscious (but not unconscious) feeling that one knows or can sort of "predict" measure-by-measure what's coming next. Those musical expectations are tough to dump overboard, and it requires a huge effort of will to accomplish, but unless accomplished will make any work not traditionally tonal forever inaccessible. Doubtless, this is no great loss, generally speaking, but in the case of a work such as Erwartung it's a loss of not inconsiderable dimension.

That apologia of mine brought immediate expressions of dismay from other members of the list who were by now expecting (again, N.P.I.), if inured to, my trashing of any music not essentially triad-grounded. My answer to them is, Erwartung, although often described as atonal, is nothing of the sort. The music may read as atonal on the page (as mentioned above, I've never seen the score, so can't vouch for that), and be analyzed as atonal by musicologists, but how the page reads doesn't count ultimately, nor do the opinions of musicologists. What counts — the only thing that counts — is how the music sounds, and in that respect Erwartung lacks the distinguishing hallmark of all truly atonal music of my experience: viz., it all sounds like musical gibberish. Erwartung sounds nothing like musical gibberish at any time, and careful listening will reveal that its musical "glue" — the at-bottom thing that makes it coherent musically — is that a tonic, or more correctly, tonics, are everywhere implied. The music may never land securely or restfully on any of those tonics, but that's beside the point, the point being that Erwartung doesn't sound atonal because it's not. It's polytonal; you know, like Bach or Wagner, only way, way more extreme.

One might be tempted to argue that the only reason Erwartung may not sound like musical gibberish is because of the logic imposed on the whole by the text of the sung vocal line. To anyone reckless enough to attempt such an argument my response would be to suggest to him that he mentally replace the sung vocal line with a trumpet, and hear the work through in that fashion. He'll quickly come to realize that Erwartung remains musically coherent sans any text at all. And that's because it's an at-bottom (poly)tonal work presenting itself as its disreputable atonal cousin only to the careless listener.

(I really love defending this work. It makes me feel so..., so... modern.)