Introduction to Schoenberg IX: the Defender of Tradition

I mentioned once before that Anton Webern wrote his PhD thesis on Heinrich Isaac's Choralis Constantinus. Isaac's dates (c. 1450 – 1517) coincide remarkably with those of Leonardo da Vinci's (1452 – 1519).

Isaac and Leonardo were exact contemporaries

We could call Isaac the first of the great Viennese composers, since he worked in the court of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor. Like most other great Viennese composers, Isaac came from elsewhere. It is truly befitting that Webern, one of the last of the great Viennese composers, himself born and bred in Vienna, should have devoted himself to studying Isaac, the first of the great Viennese composers. Perhaps due to his service in German speaking lands, Isaac was also known as Arrigo il Tedesco, although tedesco can mean Flemish as well as German in Italian. Isaac belonged to a remarkable generation of Franco-Flemish composers, whose talents were head hunted by leading courts across Europe.

A recommended recording of music by Isaac is this one from the Tallis Scholars (on the cover is a portrait of Maximilian I by Albrecht Dürer):

I became interested in Isaac because of Webern, and this remains one of my absolute favourite recordings of all time. I suggest starting with the motet Regina caeli laetare. The monumental motet, Virgo Prudendissima, was composed about 1507 for the coronation of Maximilian I – incidentally, the Mona Lisa was painted between around 1503-1506.  If you can find it, I also suggest listening to the recording by the Clerks' Group, of the exquisitely beautiful motet Angeli, Archangeli.

Isaac was also a contemporary of Josquin de Prez (c. 1450/1455 – 1521), the most celebrated Franco-Flemish composer of the generation. Josquin was, for centuries after his death, celebrated as the musical Michelangelo.

Josquin was celebrated as the musical Michelangelo for centuries after his death

Fortunately, Josquin is well served on record, as a great deal of his music has survived without lapsing into complete obscurity, or being lost to time like Obrecht. I suggest two recordings by the Tallis Scholars. Firstly, the Missa Pange Lingua:

Secondly, the Missa Ave Maris Stella available in a spectacular sounding ultra-high resolution 24/176 recording:

Josquin is widely regarded as the father of the modern imitative style of counterpoint. This is a way of writing where you get two or more voices entering one after the other, each voice coming in slightly out of synch, and each repeating a variation of the main theme. This sort of imitative counterpoint existed well before Josquin, but the difference is that the entire musical discourse starts to be so thoroughly pervaded by imitative counterpoint, that it effectively becomes structured around imitation.

However, it has been pointed out that Jacob Obrecht (1457/8 – 1505) came up with this way of writing, structured around imitation, well ahead of Josquin, and that Josquin may have just copied it from him. In which case, Obrecht is an utterly pivotal composer, whose critical impact on the entire course of Western music down through the centuries has so far been even greater than that of Arnold Schoenberg.

Jacob Obrecht: a key composer who forever changed the course of Western musical history

Obrecht tragically died prematurely of the plague before he gained fame, then lapsed into complete obscurity, to be buried by history. It is thought that Josquin's Absolve quaesumus Domine, which is written all in black notes, is intended as a tribute to Obrecht. The final phrase 'requiescat in pac, amen' can be interpreted as a symbolic representation of Obrecht's name. For an extremely listenable introduction to the music of Obrecht, I suggest the monumental middle period six-part motet Salve Regina, performed by the Tallis Scholars where you can hear the contrapuntal-imitative style at work:

Sadly, none of the late works in Obrecht's ultimate style are currently available. There were recordings of of Missa Malheur me bat by the A.N.S. Chorus and by the Clerks' Group. However, these are both out of print and even unavailable for download. Even more regrettably, his late masterpiece Missa Fortuna desperata has never, to my knowledge, been recorded. When you consider that these are such utterly seminal works in the history of Western music, without which works like Bach's Art of Fugue or Mass in B Minor could simply never have even existed, it seems such a crying shame. One day, I hope Obrecht will be rightly recognised as one of the greatest composers in history.

Irrespective of whoever was the first compose in this style, Josquin and Obrecht together are the fathers of the contrapuntal-imitative style of composition. The fascinating thing about the contrapuntal-imitative style of composition was that it was often fantastically complex in a way that quite puts Schoenberg in the shade. Another good example of this sort of complexity, that actually predates Josquin and Obrecht is Johannes Ockeghem's (c. 1410/1425 – 1497) Missa Prolationum. A recommendable recording of this comes from Bo Holten and Musica Ficta:

Ockeghem probably once taught Josquin. Ockeghem structures this mass as an immensely complex mathematical maze of interlocking periodicities consisting entirely of mensuration canons.

Not only that, but composers of this era tried to outdo each other in writing fantastically complex contrapuntal masterpieces. One of the best know of these is the celebrated Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis for forty voices:

There is also a spectacular 36 part canon, Deo Gratias, attributed to Johannes Ockeghem that has been recorded by Paul van Nevel:

Incidentally, a canon is a musical game of follow-the-leader. Each voice enters repeating what the leading voices does, but a little out of synch with the voice before it. Because it is structured upon repetition, a canon is effectively a form of serial music. Serial music is just music structured around repetition. Imitative counterpoint is essentially a form of serialism making Ockeghem and Obrecht the original serialists.

The techniques used by these all of these composers in handling thematic material consisted in the usual augmentation, diminution but also in retrograde, inversion and retrograde-inversion. These are precisely the techniques used by Schoenberg in his method of composition, and which he used to impose order in a sound-landscape, where, ever since Wagner, tonality has been on its last legs as a major organising principle. That is to say, Schoenberg was merely doing something that the old Franco-Flemish composers had long known about many centuries ago.

Another factor linking the Franco-Flemish school and the Second Viennese School is the absence of functional harmony. There are those who say that functional harmony is the key element of Western music. None of the composers of the Franco-Flemish school, or those of the Italian school that followed them from Palestrina to Monteverdi, wrote music with functional harmony. Schoenberg wrote about his twelve tone system:

my method of composition with twelve tones ... aims at replacing the form-building effect of functional harmony through another central force: through a row of unchanging tone relationships. 

From A Schoenberg Reader, 7.21 "Wiesengrund" (December, 1950) 

Not only that, but all of the compositions by the Franco-Flemish masters, as well as Tallis, are all atonal. That is to say, their music is organised along contrapuntal-imitative lines, rather than along tonal lines, centred around a dominant key. Some people find this deeply discomforting, and use the term "pre-tonal" as a euphemism, but this is like calling Schoenberg's music "post-tonal". The rich and powerful expressiveness of Renaissance polyphony totally explodes bizarre assertions that music has to be composed around a dominant tonal centre in order to be expressive, or even that tonality is somehow "traditional". Indeed, the majority of Western music is atonal—without tonal centre.

A further aspect of later Renaissance polyphony was that at times extreme chromaticism became highly popular. A good example of this is Timor et Tremor by Orlando Lassus:

Other Renaissance composers took this wild chromaticism to even greater extremes. A good example is Carlo Gesualdo. Some of the unprepared chromatic side-steps are so disconcerting that they make anything from the Second Viennese School seem rather tame—and invariably these sidesteps occur on words about sin, pain, death and guilt. I suggest listening to either O Crux Benedicta, Tribulationem et Dolorem or O Vos Omnes on this recording:

You get these absolutely bizarre and dizzying chromatic spirals, that can only be described as utterly delirium inducing. They are not for the faint hearted. And, it is all pretty much atonal.

Bach must have been aware of this older tradition of writing in a wildly chromatic style when he wrote the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue. The opening theme of the Fantasia actually contains nearly all of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Schoenberg points out that this theme comes close to a tone row. The Dux of the Fugue Number 24 of the first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier, on the other hand, is a complete tone-row with all of the notes of the chromatic scale. Schoenberg calls Bach the first twelve-tone composer. Schoenberg's compositional technique really consists of talking a sequence of twelve notes that have to contain the notes of the chromatic scale, and then treating these notes to contrapuntal-imitative serialist principles well-known to Bach and the Renaissance composers. All of the techniques Schoenberg uses can also be found specifically demonstrated in Bach's The Art of Fugue. Needless to say, Bach was Schoenberg's favourite composer.

As mentioned, I came to Franco-Flemish polyphony by way of the Second Viennese School. When I first listened to this older music, I found it incomprehensible to me. I wished I were listening to something easier that I could sing in the shower —like Schoenberg. Whereas the Second Viennese School was a natural extension of Brahms, Mahler and Wagner—Renaissance polyphony seemed so alienatingly "atonal" in style to me. Worse still, these older composers seemed to routinely write for a bare minimum of four to six voices, whereas modern counterpoint rarely seems to get more complex than two or three parts. However, there are some people who have grown up singing Josquin and Palestrina since childhood in church choirs who feel quite the opposite to me. They feel right at home in Renaissance polyphony. It is all about what you are used to. Webern said that one day children will be singing his music.

Nonetheless, I would say that a music lover would be just as profoundly impoverished and risibly ignorant for remaining unfamiliar with the likes of Josquin, Obrecht and Isaac, as an art lover who had never even heard of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, or Michelangelo.

Not surprising, Schoenberg often used examples from Josquin in his composition classes, especially when teaching counterpoint. By doing so he was only doing what generations of composers from Monteverdi, to Bach to Mozart have gone through when they had examples from Josquin held up to them when studying counterpoint. Alban Berg went even further to say that the Second Viennese School represents a return to the contrapuntal-imitative tradition of composition, after some centuries of wandering off this path towards a more homophonic-melodic style of composition. The music of the Second Viennese School represents a recapitulation of the grand tradition.

This means nothing less than that Schoenberg is actually a great traditionalist. He is such a traditionalist that he felt that post-Wagnerian composition needed a firm foundation again, and the order that emerged out the chaos of his so-called free-atonal period was this: a return to the contrapuntal-imitative mainstream of Western music.  Tonality after Wagner had failed to provide a structural foundation to music in the way it did in Beethoven's day. All post-Wagernian music tends towards only paying lip-service to tonality, whose foundations are constantly crumbling beneath the composer's feet. A restoration of order means nothing less than a restoration of the deepest traditions in music—a tradition reaching back to the days of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Schoenberg is the new Josquin

This makes Schoenberg the single most staunchly traditionalist composer in the entire history of Western music. That, I assure you, is the greatest truth about Schoenberg—the greater issue is whether you can handle the truth.