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The term
expressionism
Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it ra ...
"was probably first applied to music in 1918, especially to Schoenberg", because like the painter
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (; rus, Василий Васильевич Кандинский, Vasiliy Vasilyevich Kandinskiy, vɐˈsʲilʲɪj vɐˈsʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ kɐnʲˈdʲinskʲɪj; – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter a ...
(1866–1944) he avoided "traditional forms of beauty" to convey powerful feelings in his music.
Theodor Adorno
Theodor is a masculine given name. It is a German form of Theodore. It is also a variant of Teodor.
List of people with the given name Theodor
* Theodor Adorno, (1903–1969), German philosopher
* Theodor Aman, Romanian painter
* Theodor Blue ...
interprets the expressionist movement in music as seeking to "eliminate all of traditional music's conventional elements, everything formulaically rigid". This he sees as analogous "to the literary ideal of the 'scream' ". As well Adorno sees expressionist music as seeking "the truthfulness of subjective feeling without illusions, disguises or euphemisms". Adorno also describes it as concerned with the unconscious, and states that "the depiction of fear lies at the centre" of expressionist music, with dissonance predominating, so that the "harmonious, affirmative element of art is banished". Expressionist music would "thus reject the depictive, sensual qualities that had come to be associated with impressionist music. It would endeavor instead to realize its own purely musical nature—in part by disregarding compositional conventions that placed 'outer' restrictions on the expression of 'inner' visions".
Expressionist music often features a high level of dissonance, extreme contrasts of dynamics, constant changing of textures, "distorted" melodies and harmonies, and angular melodies with wide leaps.
Major figures
The three central figures of musical
expressionism
Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it ra ...
are
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was as ...
(1874–1951) and his pupils,
Anton Webern
Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 188315 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern (), was an Austrian composer and conductor whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and stead ...
(1883–1945) and
Alban Berg
Alban Maria Johannes Berg ( , ; 9 February 1885 – 24 December 1935) was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with the twelve-tone technique. Although he left a relatively sm ...
(1885–1935), the so-called
Second Viennese School
The Second Viennese School (german: Zweite Wiener Schule, Neue Wiener Schule) was the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, particularly Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and close associates in early 20th-century Vienn ...
. Other composers that have been associated with
expressionism
Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it ra ...
are
Ernst Krenek
Ernst Heinrich Krenek (, 23 August 1900 – 22 December 1991) was an Austrian, later American, composer of Czech origin. He explored atonality and other modern styles and wrote a number of books, including ''Music Here and Now'' (1939), a study ...
(1900–1991) (the Second Symphony, 1922),
Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith (; 16 November 189528 December 1963) was a German composer, music theorist, teacher, violist and conductor. He founded the Amar Quartet in 1921, touring extensively in Europe. As a composer, he became a major advocate of the ' ...
(1895–1963) (''Die junge Magd'', Op. 23b, 1922, setting six poems of
Georg Trakl),
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential 20th-century clas ...
(1882–1971) (''Three Japanese Lyrics'', 1913),
Alexander Scriabin
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (; russian: Александр Николаевич Скрябин ; – ) was a Russian composer and virtuoso pianist. Before 1903, Scriabin was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and composed ...
(1872–1915) (late piano sonatas). Another significant expressionist was
Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók (; ; 25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hu ...
(1881–1945) in early works, written in the second decade of the 20th century, such as ''
Bluebeard's Castle
''Duke Bluebeard's Castle'' ( hu, A kékszakállú herceg vára, link=no, or ''The Blue-Bearded Duke's Castle'') is a one-act expressionist opera by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. The libretto was written by Béla Balázs, a poet and friend of t ...
'' (1911), ''
The Wooden Prince'' (1917), and ''
The Miraculous Mandarin'' (1919). American composers with a sympathetic "urge for such intensification of expression" who were active in the same period as Schoenberg's expressionist free atonal compositions (between 1908 and 1921) include
Carl Ruggles
Carl Ruggles (born Charles Sprague Ruggles; March 11, 1876 – October 24, 1971) was an American composer, painter and teacher. His pieces employed "dissonant counterpoint", a term coined by fellow composer and musicologist Charles Seeger ...
,
Dane Rudhyar
Dane Rudhyar (March 23, 1895 – September 13, 1985), born Daniel Chennevière, was a American author, modernist composer and humanistic astrologer. He was a pioneer of modern transpersonal astrology.
Biography
Dane Rudhyar was born in Paris on ...
, and, "to a certain extent",
Charles Ives
Charles Edward Ives (; October 20, 1874May 19, 1954) was an American modernist composer, one of the first American composers of international renown. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed ...
, whose song "Walt Whitman" is a particularly clear example. Important precursors of expressionism are
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most op ...
(1813–1883),
Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler (; 7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and the modernism ...
(1860–1911), and
Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss (; 11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a German composer, conductor, pianist, and violinist. Considered a leading composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras, he has been described as a successor of Richard Wag ...
(1864–1949). Later composers, such as
Peter Maxwell Davies
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (8 September 1934 – 14 March 2016) was an English composer and conductor, who in 2004 was made Master of the Queen's Music.
As a student at both the University of Manchester and the Royal Manchester College of Musi ...
(1934–2016), "have sometimes been seen as perpetuating the Expressionism of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern", and
Heinz Holliger's (b. 1939) most distinctive trait "is an intensely engaged evocation of ... the essentially lyric expressionism found in Schoenberg, Berg and, especially, Webern".
Arnold Schoenberg
Musical expressionism is closely associated with the music
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was as ...
composed between 1908 and 1921, which is his period of "free atonal" composition, before he devised
twelve-tone technique
The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition first devised by Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer, who published his "law o ...
. Compositions from the same period with similar traits, particularly works by his pupils
Alban Berg
Alban Maria Johannes Berg ( , ; 9 February 1885 – 24 December 1935) was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with the twelve-tone technique. Although he left a relatively sm ...
and
Anton Webern
Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 188315 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern (), was an Austrian composer and conductor whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and stead ...
, are often also included under this rubric, and the term has also been used pejoratively by musical journalists to describe any music in which the composer's attempts at personal expression overcome coherence or are merely used in opposition to traditional forms and practices. It can therefore be said to begin with Schoenberg's
Second String Quartet (written 1907–08) in which each of the four movements gets progressively less tonal. The third movement is arguably atonal and the introduction to the final movement is very chromatic, arguably has no tonal centre, and features a soprano singing "Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten" ("I feel the air of another planet"), taken from a poem by
Stefan George
Stefan Anton George (; 12 July 18684 December 1933) was a German symbolist poet and a translator of Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Hesiod, and Charles Baudelaire. He is also known for his role as leader of the highly influential literary ...
. This may be representative of Schoenberg entering the "new world" of atonality.
In 1909, Schoenberg composed the one-act 'monodrama' ''
Erwartung
' (''Expectation''), Op. 17, is a one-act monodrama in four scenes by Arnold Schoenberg to a libretto by . Composed in 1909, it was not premiered until 6 June 1924 in Prague conducted by Alexander Zemlinsky with Marie Gutheil-Schoder as the sop ...
'' (''Expectation''). This is a thirty-minute, highly expressionist work in which atonal music accompanies a musical drama centered around a nameless woman. Having stumbled through a disturbing forest, trying to find her lover, she reaches open countryside. She stumbles across the corpse of her lover near the house of another woman, and from that point on the drama is purely psychological: the woman denies what she sees and then worries that it was she who killed him. The plot is entirely played out from the subjective point of view of the woman, and her emotional distress is reflected in the music. The author of the
libretto
A libretto (Italian for "booklet") is the text used in, or intended for, an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata or musical. The term ''libretto'' is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major li ...
,
Marie Pappenheim, was a recently graduated medical student familiar with Freud's newly developed theories of psychoanalysis, as was Schoenberg himself.
In 1909, Schoenberg completed the ''
Five Pieces for Orchestra
The ''Five Pieces for Orchestra'' (''Fünf Orchesterstücke''), Op. 16, were composed by Arnold Schoenberg in 1909, and first performed in London in 1912. The titles of the pieces, reluctantly added by the composer after the work's completion upo ...
''. These were constructed freely, based upon the
subconscious
In psychology, the subconscious is the part of the mind that is not currently of focal awareness.
Scholarly use of the term
The word ''subconscious'' represents an anglicized version of the French ''subconscient'' as coined in 1889 by the psycho ...
will, unmediated by the
conscious
Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...
, anticipating the main shared ideal of the composer's relationship with the painter
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (; rus, Василий Васильевич Кандинский, Vasiliy Vasilyevich Kandinskiy, vɐˈsʲilʲɪj vɐˈsʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ kɐnʲˈdʲinskʲɪj; – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter a ...
. As such, the works attempt to avoid a recognisable form, although the extent to which they achieve this is debatable.
Between 1908 and 1913, Schoenberg was also working on a musical drama, ''
Die glückliche Hand''. The music is again atonal. The plot begins with an unnamed man, cowered in the centre of the stage with a beast upon his back. The man's wife has left him for another man; he is in anguish. She attempts to return to him, but in his pain he does not see her. Then, to prove himself, the man goes to a forge, and in a strangely Wagnerian scene (although not musically), forges a masterpiece, even with the other blacksmiths showing aggression towards him. The woman returns, and the man implores her to stay with him, but she kicks a rock upon him, and the final image of the act is of the man once again cowered with the beast upon his back.
This plot is highly symbolic, written as it was by Schoenberg himself, at around the time when his wife had left him for a short while for the painter
Richard Gerstl. Although she had returned by the time Schoenberg began the work, their relationship was far from easy. The central forging scene is seen as representative of Schoenberg's disappointment at the negative popular reaction to his works. His desire was to create a masterpiece, as the protagonist does. Once again, Schoenberg is expressing his real life difficulties.
In around 1911, the painter
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (; rus, Василий Васильевич Кандинский, Vasiliy Vasilyevich Kandinskiy, vɐˈsʲilʲɪj vɐˈsʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ kɐnʲˈdʲinskʲɪj; – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter a ...
wrote a letter to Schoenberg, which initiated a long lasting friendship and working relationship. The two artists shared a similar viewpoint, that art should express the subconscious (the "inner necessity") unfettered by the conscious. Kandinsky's ''Concerning The Spiritual In Art'' (1914) expounds this view. The two exchanged their own paintings with each other, and Schoenberg contributed articles to Kandinsky's publication ''
Der Blaue Reiter
''Der Blaue Reiter'' (The Blue Rider) is a designation by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc for their exhibition and publication activities, in which both artists acted as sole editors in the almanac of the same name, first published in mid-May ...
''. This inter-disciplinary relationship is perhaps the most important relationship in musical expressionism, other than that between the members of the
Second Viennese School
The Second Viennese School (german: Zweite Wiener Schule, Neue Wiener Schule) was the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, particularly Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and close associates in early 20th-century Vienn ...
. The inter-disciplinary nature of expressionism found an outlet in Schoenberg's paintings, encouraged by Kandinsky. An example is the self-portrait Red Gaze (se
Archived link, in which the red eyes are the window to Schoenberg's subconscious.
Anton Webern and Alban Berg
Anton Webern
Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 188315 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern (), was an Austrian composer and conductor whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and stead ...
's music was close in style to Schoenberg's expressionism, c. 1909–13, and subsequently his music "became increasingly
constructivist on the surface and increasingly concealed its passionate expressive core". His ''Five Pieces for Orchestra'', Op. 10 (1911–13) are from this period.
Alban Berg
Alban Maria Johannes Berg ( , ; 9 February 1885 – 24 December 1935) was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with the twelve-tone technique. Although he left a relatively sm ...
's contribution includes his
Op. 1 Piano Sonata, and the Four Songs of Op. 2. His major contribution to musical expressionism, however, were very late examples, the operas ''
Wozzeck
''Wozzeck'' () is the first opera by the Austrian composer Alban Berg. It was composed between 1914 and 1922 and first performed in 1925. The opera is based on the drama '' Woyzeck'', which the German playwright Georg Büchner left incomplete at ...
'', composed between 1914 and 1925, and unfinished
''Lulu''. ''Wozzeck'' is highly expressionist in subject material in that it expresses mental anguish and suffering and is not objective, presented, as it is, largely from Wozzeck's point of view, but it presents this expressionism within a cleverly constructed form. The opera is divided into three acts, the first of which serves as an
exposition
Exposition (also the French for exhibition) may refer to:
*Universal exposition or World's Fair
* Expository writing
** Exposition (narrative)
* Exposition (music)
*Trade fair
A trade fair, also known as trade show, trade exhibition, or trade e ...
of characters. The second develops the plot, while the third is a series of musical
variations
Variation or Variations may refer to:
Science and mathematics
* Variation (astronomy), any perturbation of the mean motion or orbit of a planet or satellite, particularly of the moon
* Genetic variation, the difference in DNA among individua ...
(upon a
rhythm
Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular re ...
, or a
key for example). Berg unashamedly uses
sonata form
Sonata form (also ''sonata-allegro form'' or ''first movement form'') is a musical structure generally consisting of three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation. It has been used widely since the middle of the 18th c ...
in one scene in the second act, describing himself how the first subject represents Marie (Wozzeck's mistress), while the second subject coincides with the entry of Wozzeck himself. This heightens the immediacy and intelligibility of the plot, but is somewhat contradictory with the ideals of Schoenberg's expressionism, which seeks to express musically the subconscious unmediated by the conscious.
Berg worked on his opera ''Lulu'', from 1928 to 1935, but failed to complete the third act. According to one view, "Musically complex and highly expressionistic in idiom, ''Lulu'' was composed entirely in the 12-tone system", but this is by no means a universally accepted interpretation. The literary basis of the opera is a pair of related plays by
Frank Wedekind
Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (July 24, 1864 – March 9, 1918) was a German playwright. His work, which often criticizes bourgeois attitudes (particularly towards sex), is considered to anticipate expressionism and was influential in the deve ...
, whose writing is virtually a "reversal of the expressionist aesthetic", because of its complete indifference to the characters' psychological states of mind, and portrayal of characters whose "personalities have little or no basis in reality and whose distortions are not the product of psychological tension". The plainly evident emotion of Berg's music is dislocated from its cause and "deflected onto something else impossible to define", thereby contradicting its own intensity and undermining the listener's "instinctive obedience to emotive instructions", contrary to expressionism, which "tells its listeners pretty unambiguously how to react". In contrast to the plainly expressionist manner of ''Wozzeck'', therefore, ''Lulu'' is closer to the ''Neue Sachlichkeit'' (
New Objectivity
The New Objectivity (in german: Neue Sachlichkeit) was a movement in German art that arose during the 1920s as a reaction against expressionism. The term was coined by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the director of the ''Kunsthalle'' in Mannheim, wh ...
) of the 1920s, and to
Bertolt Brecht
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a p ...
's
epic theatre
Epic theatre (german: episches Theater) is a theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners who responded to the political climate of the time through the creatio ...
.
Indeed, by the time ''Wozzeck'' was performed in 1925, Schoenberg had introduced his
twelve-tone technique
The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition first devised by Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer, who published his "law o ...
to his pupils, representing the end of his expressionist period (in 1923) and roughly the beginning of his twelve-tone period.
As can be seen,
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was as ...
was a central figure in musical expressionism, although Berg, Webern, and Bartók did also contribute significantly, along with various other composers.
References
Sources
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Further reading
* Albright, Daniel. 2004. ''Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. .
* Behr, Shulamith,
David Fanning, and Douglas Jarman. 1993. ''Expressionism Reassessed''. Manchester
Kand New York: Manchester University Press (cloth); 0719038448 (pbk).
* Celestini, Federico. 2009. "Der Schrei und die Musik: Mahlers Klänge in Weberns Orchesterstück op. 6/2". In ''Webern21'', edited by Dominik Schweiger and Nikolaus Urbanek, 55–71. Wiener Veröffentlichungen zur Musikgeschichte 8. Vienna: Böhlau. .
* Crawford, John C., and Dorothy L Crawford. 1993. ''Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Music''. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. .
* Franklin, Peter. 1993. "'Wilde Musik': Composers, Critics and Expressionism". In ''Expressionism Reassessed'', edited by Shulamith Behr, David Fanning, and Douglas Jarman, 112–120. Manchester: Manchester University Press. .
* Hailey, Christopher. 1993. "Musical Expressionism: The Search for Autonomy". In ''Expressionism Reassessed'', edited by Shulamith Behr, David Fanning, and Douglas Jarman, 103–111. Manchester: Manchester University Press. .
* Harrison, Daniel. 2004. "Max Reger Introduces Atonal Expressionism". ''
The Musical Quarterly
''The Musical Quarterly'' is the oldest academic journal on music in America. Originally established in 1915 by Oscar Sonneck, the journal was edited by Sonneck until his death in 1928. Sonneck was succeeded by a number of editors, including Ca ...
'' 87, no. 4 (Winter: Special Issue: Max Reger): 660–680.
*
Hinton, Stephen. 1993. "Defining Musical Expressionism: Schoenberg and Others". In ''Expressionism Reassessed'', edited by Shulamith Behr, David Fanning, and Douglas Jarman, 121–129. Manchester: Manchester University Press. .
* Lessem, Alan. 1974. "Schönberg and the Crisis of Expressionism". ''
Music & Letters'' 55, no. 4 (October): 429–436.
* Neighbour, Oliver W., "Glückliche Hand, Die", ''Grove Music Online'' ed. L. Macy (Accessed
2-06-2005.
* Neighbour, Oliver W., "''Erwartung''", ''Grove Music Online'' ed. L. Macy (Accessed
2-06-2005.
*
Kandinsky, Wassily. 1914. ''The Art of Spiritual Harmony'', translated by M. T. H. Sadler. London: Constable and Company. Unaltered reprint, as ''Concerning the Spiritual in Art''. New York: Dover Publications Inc. . Revised edition, as ''Concerning the Spiritual in Art'', translated by Michael Sadleir, with considerable re-translation by Francis Golffing, Michael Harrison, and Ferdinand Ostertag. The Documents of Modern Art 5. New York: George Wittenborn, 1947. New translation, as ''On the Spiritual in Art: First Complete English Translation with Four Full Colour Page Reproductions, Woodcuts and Half Tones'', translated by
Hilla Rebay. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946.
*
Poirier, Alain. 1995. ''L'Expressionnisme et la musique''. Paris: Fayard. .
*
Samson, Jim. 1977. ''Music in Transition''. London: J. M. Dent & Sons
External links
Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna
{{Authority control
1910s neologisms
20th-century classical music
Modernism (music)