Webern and Multiple Meaning
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4993676 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Arnold Whittall (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1987 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 333 |
| Publication date | 1987-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Music Analysis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0262-5245 • E-ISSN: 1468-2249 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/854209 |
| OpenAlex | W2331351619 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 2 |
Of the first generation of twelve-note composers, Webern is usually regarded as the most progressive, at least as far as harmony is concerned.* In Schoenberg and Berg the dividing line between that advanced variety of tonal harmony termed 'vagrant', or 'roving', and the chordal textures of certain twelve-note compositions is, to put it mildly, often unclear. But with Webern, even before he adopted the twelve-note method, it is surely a different story. I emphasize that I am not referring here to the possibility of some essentially new kind of tonality in Webern, but rather to survivals of the old kind of tonal harmonic construction. And the last Webern piece in which we might confidently claim to observe some consistent vestige of the old tonality is the first of the Op. 12 songs, composed in 1915, where a text concerned with the arrival of night is set to a melody that gives only mildly ambiguous priority to pitches diatonic to F major a priority that, in general, the piano accompaniment conspicuously fails to support. Yet even if Webern's rejection of tonality as traditionally conceived was whole-hearted, his attitude to old forms and textures, we are usually told, was hardly less reverential than Schoenberg's. And a particular speciality of Webern's was the twelve-note canon a perfect vehicle, we might think, for a new twelve-note tonality, given the traditional canon's particularly delicate dependence on the integration of horizontal and vertical planes. We might therefore expect Webern's twelve-note canons to exploit the properties of the compositional system in question as subtly as Bach's tonal canons display the riches of that system, whether or not we choose to regard those twelve-note properties as more essentially 'tonal' than atonal. Yet the diversity of critical and analytical responses to this aspect of Webern's art exposes differences in hearing and understanding that make a general consensus about the nature of his achievement difficult to imagine
Art · Linguistics · Literature · Psychotherapist · Diverse Musicological Studies · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Theater, Performance, and Music History
| Citations per year | 0.04 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2002 - 2002 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |