Neo-Neo Look: Avant-Garde in the Eye (Ear) of Once-and-Future Beholders

D uring the 17th century there was great interest amongst scholars and performers in the question of temperament and use of more ‘extreme’ keys. Old quarter-comma meantone tunings were gradually giving way to circulating temperaments (called ‘unequal’ temperaments today) where there was freedom of modulation. In meantone, pure major thirds are on C, D, E-flat, E, F, G, A, B-flat, whilst unusable thirds are on C#, F#, G# (A-flat does not exist!) and B; the ‘wolf’ fifth is from G# to E-flat. As the century progressed, there were increasing signs of dissatisfaction with the old tunings, and in the F-sharp minor Praeludia we see Buxtehude making a clear avant-garde statement to the world, for here is a piece which is totally unplayable in the old tunings.”
  —  Douglas Hollick.

The term ‘avant-garde’ usually means contemporary new music. But consider the premise that ‘contemporary’ is context-dependent—‘new’ is always new in the eye of the then-current beholder. Each age has its avant-garde, its innovators, anarchists. ‘Avant-garde’ can be accurately applied to innovative works of any era. Douglas Hollick notes that the avant-garde tends in each era to be linked to and critically dependent upon technology: the great organs of North Germany in the first half of the 17th Century were pushing the technology ‘envelope’ with the architectural requirements arising from their size and geometry; with the mechanics and mechanical engineering requirements associated with their pneumatics; and with metallurgical and 17th-Century machine-shop requirements in the production and machining of metal for the pipes. Electroacoustic music of the 1950s was comparably dependent upon then-current developments in electronics.


Dieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707) lived his whole life near the Baltic. Buxtehude grew up in Helsingør, Skåne, where his father was organist, tinkerer, and amateur metallurgist. The young Buxtehude served as organist at Helsingborg St. Mariae (1658 - 60) and Helsingør St. Mariae (1660 - 68). In 1668 he was appointed to St. Marien in Lübeck. Sadly, not much of Lübeck survived the WWII bombing of 1942. Although St. Marien was rebuilt, none of the original interior or Buxtehude-era pipe organs survives. We can therefore only make educated guesses about the sounds that Buxtehude composed and created there. But some of the most inspired and convincing conjectures imaginable come from Hollick.

M   ost of Buxtehude’s Praeludia are for organ with pedals. But BuxWV 162 is for manuals only, and it can be played either on the organ or the harpsichord.  Perhaps one of the least obviously ‘avant-garde’ works in the programme, it does show the desire in the later 17th Century for the freedom to modulate beyond the confines of the old meantone tuning, here moving to E minor, and desperately needing the dominant of that key, B major with its D-sharp. With the luxury of recording, it has been possible to use a variant of the normal meantone for this work and the Weckmann, with E-flat replaced by D-sharp. The final harpsichord work by Johann Christoph Bach probably dates from near the end of the century, and is in the (then) ‘very modern’ key of E-flat major. This is a key that is completely impossible in meantone, and clearly demonstrates the move towards greater tonal freedom in keyboard tunings by the end of the 17th Century.”
  —  Douglas Hollick, liner notes, Baroque Avant-garde.

Hollick’s performances reveal how Buxtehude’s improvisational works—toccatas, praeludia, chaconnes, passacaglia, canzonas, and so on—had to depart from then-conventional quarter-comma meantone tuning. There would’ve been horrific wolf-tones in meantone temperament. Do you hear the interval of C#-F as a diminished fourth, or as a major third? It depends on how the scale is tempered. Have a look at Bill Sethares’s excellent book for lots of examples and clear illustrations on the CD that comes with the book.

S ince, through the grace of God, music has so progressed and changed, it would be absurd if we had not tried to improve the keyboard, so that well-composed modern pieces should not be ruined, and a howl come out of them … Some would like to say that one should not compose in every key, such as C-sharp, F-sharp and G-sharp. But I say that if one does not do it, another will …”
  —  Andreas Werckmeister, Orgel-Probe, 1698.

The intense chromaticism in much of Buxtehude’s writing is the locus of much of his envelope-pushing. But there’s ample rhythmic iconoclasm in Buxtehude as well. For example, the insistent, repeated bass line is varied but lends an avant-garde Baltic / North German ‘straight-ahead’ quality to many of the pieces. Eighteenth-century Baltic Lutheran avant-garde, that is.

T hat’s a lotta ‘look’! [so extreme or excessive, in fact, that I really recommend that you reconsider what you’ve composed, and reflect on whether it will suit the client for whom the piece is intended]”
  —  Tim Gunn, Parsons New School for Design, ProjectRunway (BravoTV television series), 2007.

Toward the audience, this music maintains a ‘missionary’, ‘therapeutic’ intentional stance. As such, Buxtehude should be considered ‘avant-garde-proper’ instead of ‘neo-avant-garde’. In other words, Buxtehude didn’t compose in this way as a matter of personal cliché or throw-down creative novelty or cultural conquest or as a gesture of ironical fashion-conscious ‘lookism’. This music is ‘precarious’ but not narcissistically so. And that is part of Buxtehude’s enduring, sempervirens ever-green charm—part of the excitement and authenticity and power to captivate our ears and minds as Buxtehude’s music can do, even today. That is part of the ‘newness’ that Hollick so ably recreates for us. Baroque avant-garde!

H ollick’s wide repertoire includes major works like the Goldberg Variations and Clavierübung III of Bach, and also works by lesser known composers such as Kuhnau, Benda, Moyreau and Séjan. His programmes often have a particular theme (such as ‘Fantasy, Inebriation and Madness’ [!!] ), and his mixed harpsichord-and-organ programmes can be particularly interesting.”

• Douglas Hollick website
  
• Hollick D. Music of the Baroque avant-garde. (Riverrun Records, 2007.)
  
• Hollick D. Revolution. (Riverrun Records, 2008.)
  
• International Dieterich Buxtehude Society
  
• Barbour J. Tuning & Temperament. Dover, 2004.
  
• Beekman K, de Vries J, eds. Avant-Garde and Criticism. Rodopi BV, 2007.
  
• Burger P. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Univ Minnesota, 1984.
  
• Duffin R. How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care). Norton, 2006.
  
• Hopkins D, ed. Neo-Avant-Garde. Rodopi, 2006.
  
• Kuspit D. Psychostrategies of Avant-Garde Art. Cambridge Univ, 2000.
  
• Kuspit D. The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist. Cambridge Univ, 1994.
  
• Scheunemann D, ed. Avant-Garde / Neo-Avant-Garde. Rodopi BV, 2005.
  
• Sethares W. Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale. Springer, 2004.
  
• Slobin M. Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West. Wesleyan, 1993.
  
• Snyder K. Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lubeck. 2e, with CD. Univ Rochester, 2007.
  
• Wood P, ed. The Challenge of the Avant-Garde. Yale Univ, 1999.
  
• Ziarek K. The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event. Northwestern Univ, 2001.
  
• ArtForum.com 'avant-garde'
  
• DSM. Irish New Music: Back to the Future—‘Folk music’ Elements in ‘Art music’. CMT blog, 05-JAN-2008.
  
• DSM. Rolf Wallin: More Iconoclasm, Not Less. CMT blog, 29-JUL-2007.
  
• DSM. Cultural Colonies: Composers’ Integrity/Hermeticity vs. Markets. CMT blog, 09-APR-2007.
  
• DSM. Pražák Fractal Vista Overlook. CMT blog, 03-NOV-2006.
  
• DSM. The Once & Future Underground. CMT blog, 22-OCT-2006.

Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire: il Surrealismo Sardonico dell’Arte

DSM: The UMKC Schoenberg Ensemble (Jessica Goldring, soprano; Brendan Kinsella, piano; Luke Fitzpatrick, violin & viola; Wilfredo Pasamba, cello; Jonathan Borja, flute & piccolo; Mauricio Salguero, clarinet & bass clarinet; all exuberant 20-somethings) gave quite a nice performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire Op. 21 last night.

CMT: Yes! Composed in 1912, it’s a musical setting for singer-speaker(s) and chamber ensemble—a setting of 21 poems by Albert Giraud—and still, almost 100 years later, one of the most important music theater works written so far. What about the artistic environment around the turn of the century from which Pierrot emerged? What about Schoenberg’s working methods and intentions in composition at the time—he would’ve been 65 years old then. It’s clear and imaginative—each one of these twenty-one melodramas is very imaginative. But how to understand the music and the narrative?

DSM: It’s one of the first pieces of program music ever written for a chamber ensemble. To this day, Pierrot Lunaire is one of Schoenberg’s best-known works. I think it’s often said that it’s an ironic-satiric work. Schoenberg uses all of his notorious atonal composing techniques and the spoken-singing delivery called ‘Sprechstimme.’ This took the hinges off.

CMT: Though freely atonal, it doesn’t fully bear Schoenberg’s trademark tonal style: it includes canons like “The Moonspot” written in traditional canon form, as well as meandering duets like “The Sick Moon.” Just the same, Schoenberg managed to capture the sense of the poems through their surface and texture. Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire is a liminal sketch inspired by the text. It can’t really be a German satiric commentary on French elite aesthetics, could it? It can’t really be taken as an ironic broadside against Romantic artistic values. This isn’t shock-art at the audience’s expense. No, there’s a dark, surreal pulse to Giraud’s poems, just as there is in Schoenberg’s music. The liminality of it is sculptural. Isn’t Pierrot Lunaire musically coherent with the work of Picasso and Braque and other Cubists and Expressionists at about this same time?

DSM: I have no way of knowing if Jessica Goldring’s rendering of the Sprechstimme – Schoenberg’s invention of a style between speaking and singing – was performed as intended by the composer. I might give a listen to one or more of the recordings in the links below, to take stock of others’ interpretations. I know from Schoenberg’s own writings that he wanted razor-sharp rhythm as well as speech in a musical form. Schoenberg also warned that the performer must not produce singing speech but speech in a musical form, as he put it. Though Schoenberg was at pain to notate his score with great accuracy, the interpretation of his Sprechstimme instructions seems to be pretty variable. Unfortunately, Schoenberg’s full instructions are lost, and last night there were no subtitles to help us to understand the German text. And it was too dark in White Recital Hall to read the translation that was provided in the program.

CMT: And, unfortunately, Jessica Goldring’s German diction was not easy to understand. At one point in between two of the poems one of the UMKC recording staff approached the stage to check the microphone. White Recital Hall is a bit cave-like.

DSM: Looking at Schoenberg’s own writing, Pierrot’s character is in the music. But, surely you’re right, the words are crucial. Though I was unable to follow the score in the dark auditorium, the ensemble between singer and instrumentalists appeared to be fine. And I can definitely vouch for fine instrumental playing by the musicians.

CMT: The ad hoc flood-light they improvised from a hardware-store trouble-lamp and covered with a film of yellow plastic, sitting on the floor near Jessica’s feet and casting an upward glare on the underside of her chin and cheeks, and on beyond to the other players! The eerie shadow cast against the white acoustic reflection panels upstage from the piano! In shadow, Luke Fitzpatrick’s bowing looked like someone gleefully slicing a turkey on a Cotters’ Saturday Night! Or maybe Vladimir or Estragon in Waiting for Godot, sucking chicken bones clean . . .

W  ith a giant bow grotesquely
Scrapes Pierrot on his viola –
Like a stork on one leg standing
Sadly plucks a pizzicato.”
  —  A. Giraud, Serenade.

DSM: The references to night and the apparent madness of many of the Giraud poems also has echoes of Beckett’s Godot or maybe Kafka. Kafka’s Metamorphosis was 1915. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was 1907; Kirchner’s Self-Portrait with Model was 1910; Juan Gris, The Guitar, was 1914; Kasimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting, was 1916. Vasily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, was 1912; Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, was 1907); Fillipo Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto, was 1909; Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est, was 1918; John Singer Sargent, Gassed, was 1918; Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was 1913, Satie’s Parade, 1917. What we see in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire is a snapshot of the cultural and political milieux circa 1912! Alienation was in the air! When was Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time? Does that piece not owe some intellectual debt to Schoenberg?

CMT: It was 1940-41, while Messiaen was imprisoned. But there is much humor in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire compared with, say, the Hölderlin-Gesänge.


DSM: Well, it’s a black, bad, dodgy humor then. Whatever mirth there is is suddenly dispelled in the outbursts in several songs. The English text of ‘Gebet an Pierrot’ reads: “My laughter have I unlearnt! The picture’s brightness dissolves. Black flies the standard now from my mast.” This has echoes of the outcry on ‘Pallaksch’ at the end of the Hölderlin settings: a final cry of frustration. The bleakness is all the more palpable for this sudden contrast. Despite the humorous touches, though, Schoenberg resists the temptation to overdo the comic effects—except for the moments of comic vocalisation where words are sung glissando and ‘quasi-Flatterzunge.’

T hrough the bald pate of Cassander,
As he rends the air with screeches –
Bores Pierrot in feigning tender
Fashion with a cranium-driller.
He then presses with his finger
Rare tobacco grown in Turkey
Into the bald pate of Cassander,
As he rends the air with screeches –
Then, screwing a cherry pipe stem
Right in through the polished surface,
Sits at ease and smokes and puffs the
Rare tobacco grown in Turkey
From the bald pate of Cassander.”
  —  A Giraud, Gemeinheit

CMT: You don’t imagine that the translation of Giraud’s French by O. E. Hartleben, in Leipzig and Berlin between 1887-1893—which was then the basis for Cecil Gray’s translation of the poems into English in the 1920s—had an effect? No possibility of translators’ errors in accurately rendering Giraud’s intentions, transmuted through those different languages and cultures? These 21 songs have predominantly restrained dynamics and gentle textures in spite of the array of percussive passages. The timbres that Schoenberg devises for the ensemble are often very beautiful. The song “Mondestrunken” combines a flowing, gentle vocal line above four-note chords played tremolo. The song “Enthauptung” combines the soprano at the bottom of her register with quiet tremolo cello goo-gaws. Occasionally the texture is given impetus by loud outbursts from the piano. It is as if a malevolent troll were directing the proceedings. There are echoes of Pozzo’s aggression; in fact, the song “Gemeinheit” brings to mind Pozzo “riding” Lucky in Waiting for Godot. I wonder whether Beckett’s writing was informed by Schoenberg’s music . . .

DSM: Well, consider the evidence: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; two tramps are waiting by a sickly looking tree for the arrival of Godot; they quarrel, make up, contemplate suicide, try to sleep, eat a carrot, gnaw on chicken bones. Two other characters appear, a master and a slave, who perform a grotesque scene in the middle of the play. A young boy arrives to say that Godot will not come today, but that he will come tomorrow. Godot does not come and the two tramps resume their vigil by the tree, which between the first and second day has sprouted a few leaves, the only symbol of a possible order in a thoroughly alienated world.

CMT: Pozzo and Lucky, the master and slave—they are half commedia dell’arte characters and half marionettes. The language of the play has gravity, intensity, and conciseness—much like Pierrot Lunaire. And in Pierrot Lunaire we have bravura passages that are seemingly meaningless, reminiscent of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.

DSM: The simplicity of Pierrot Lunaire, in the histrionic sense, places it in the tradition of French playwriting. The adherence to three unities is evidence that this is Pierrot Lunaire’s dramaturgical lineage. The unity of place: Columbine and the other characters simply hanging around. This place is any place. It is perhaps best characterized as being the place where Godot is not. Godot—Pierrot Lunaire’s moonstruck unreasonable expectations—are not to materialize in any place comparable to the setting of Schoenberg’s play. The unity of time might be any sequence of days in anyone’s life. Time is really immobility, a social and existential molasses, although a few minor changes do take place during the play: the beheading, the journey home. But the act of waiting is never over. It mysteriously starts up again each day. Nothing is completed because nothing can be completed. The unity of alienation: despair is crucial to this piece, and it pervades all the lack of action and gives the piece its metaphysical color. In scene after scene the permanent, structural absurdity of the world is stressed. Absurd struggle, the human condition!

S  choenberg has created a whole world of strange fascination and enchantment, of nameless horrors and terrible imaginings, of perverse and poisonous beauty and bitter-sweet fragrance, of a searing and withering mockery and malicious, elfish humor, which the poet most assuredly never contemplated. All the diablerie of the Romantics pales beside its demoniac intensity, and the much-vaunted irony and cynicism of Stravinsky appear childish and insipid in comparison with the sardonic and inhuman laughter of Schoenberg’s sinister and menacing evocation. In all art and literature one can only think of Hoffman who has anything to compare to it. Even the creations of Poe seem colourless, mechanical, and soulless when placed by the side of Pierrot Lunaire.”
  —  Cecil Gray, Survey of Contemporary Music, 1929

CMT: Despite all that, Schoenberg’s portrayal of life’s obstacles asserts that the journey, while difficult, is worth the effort. It seems that Schoenberg’s expressed ‘pessimism’ is not so much a despairing of the human condition but instead a despairing of the established cultural and societal structures that stultify and depersonalize otherwise hopeful individuals. He’s inherently optimistic about the human condition, but acknowledging tension in a violent, oppressive world that strips people of their dignity, that robs their lives of meaning. The Giraud poems were a pretext for Schoenberg’s composing an incisive musical manifesto for the 20th Century! Amazing, for 1912! Well done, UMKC Schoenberg Ensemble!

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