'Pierrot lunaire' and the Resistance to TheoryAuthor(s): Jonathan DunsbyReviewed work(s):Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 130, No. 1762 (Dec., 1989), pp. 732-736Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/966750 .Accessed: 22/09/2012 04:28

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'Pierrot lunaire' and the resistance to theory Jonathan Dunsby

Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire itself is a pretext for the points in this article, which is not primarily about music theory - though it will conclude in that area - or indeed about the music of Pierrot, but about musical discourse. Pierrot is, however, an obvious lever, because of its omnipresence in twentieth-century musical consciousness - and there is no need to consider here the continuing significance of Pierrot since 1912 for composers, performers and the concert audi- ence. For anyone contemplating the trends and motivations of musical discourse, Pierrot offers a rich field. I use the word 'discourse' to mean, in its simple, conventional sense, the spoken or written treatment of a subject. I shall begin by asking, and attempting to answer, three practical questions about attitudes to Pierrot, questions which correspond approximately to a tripartite view of musical discourse. These three little discussions each reveal, in different ways, a resistance to theory which is endemic in musical dis- course, and we might wish to follow Paul de Man's lead in believing it to be inevitable. It certainly has historical depth, as some extracts from early writings on Pierrot serve to illustrate in more extensive discussions; and these lead finally to a confrontation of the underlying issue in this kind of enquiry, the question of the epistemological status of musical discourse, that is, whether musical discourse serves to make music an object of knowledge, a question which will have to remain open.

As a preliminary, it is worth exposing why this must be an open question. The literary theories of post-structural- ism challenge musicians to redefine some deep-seated habits of thought. For instance, there is decades' worth of musical discourse worrying, in one way and another, about the use of verbal language to engage so-called musical 'lan- guage'. This use has often been scorned as an artificial, indeed as an anti-musical tendency. And our most presti- gious theory is constantly praised for its attempt to convey perceptions about music in a quasi-musical notation. Music theorists scoff at the critics' metaphors: critics scoff at the theorists' metalanguages. Yet writers like de Man have offered critiques of literary theory in which the very prob- lem is held to be the interaction of language with itself, texts about texts being doomed to articificality, indeed to an 'anti- reading' tendency. If the fundamental problem of musical discourse is the inevitable opposition between language and

metalanguage, then musical discourse, in so far as it is an extrinsic representation of music, ought to be immune to any recognisably deconstructive critique. If, however, musi- cal discourse is clearly not immune to deconstructive cri- tique, then there exists a much stronger affinity between discourse and music than has been admitted in the past by those who are genuinely suspicious of theory in all its forms. These two conditional points of view form an on- going puzzle which motivates the following enquiry.

Schtinberg, ever a formalist at heart, here tries to reduce his atonal chaos to order by casting the eighth piece, 'Nacht', as a passacaglia, while the seventeenth and eighteenth are labyrinths of double canons, mirror-canons and canons cancrizans com- pared with which the final chorus of the Gurrelieder is as simple and spontaneous as a folk-song.1

The first of the three practical questions is this: why, from a structural point of view, has there been so much comment on those contrapuntal forms of continuity in Pierrot which in fact occupy little of the actual music? Gerald Abraham's A Hundred Years of Music includes typical commentary:

Abraham's book was first published in 1938, twenty-six years after Pierrot appeared and twenty-four after its publi- cation, and the Abraham went through new editions in 1949, 1964 and 1974, so a raised eyebrow may be excused when we are informed that 'each piece is scored for voice and two or three of the instruments', a claim which is true of fewer than half the items. But more to the point, he did have tech- nical knowledge of nos.8, 17 and 18, and the idea that Schoenberg was 'ever a formalist at heart' has some cre- dence. Abraham was nothing if not tenacious in this view. 'In Pierrot lunaire', he wrote in a different source, '... [Schoenberg] relies more and more on canon and inversion and ostinato for purposes of structure as well as of texture'.2 Ostinato - perhaps. Inversion - this term has no determi- nate meaning in context, and is simply lobbed at an appar- ently rebarbative creation as probably somehow relevant. Canon - no. Abraham exemplifies what it is to have a good point which is not sustained through a detailed reading of musical text and context. Schoenberg was entirely aware of

1 Gerald Abraham, A Hundred Years in Music (London, 1974), 285 2 Abraham, The Concise History of Music (London, 1979), 808

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the Pandora's Box he was opening in 1908 and the next decade or so, well aware of the restraints he had to impose upon himself in Pierrot by accepting the refrain form of the poems, by adopting the plot of non-recurrence of ensemble timbre, and so on. All of this is evident in what he himself wrote about the work, and much more on the same lines can be inferred from the score. To return to, and answer, my first question, the preoccupation with contrapuntal forms of continuity in Pierrot has been a diversion which conveniently defers other issues; its best excuse is contem- plative wonder at the evident manipulative skill of a few of the melodramas; its worst excuses are the dutiful musico- logical search for a genetic origin of twelve-note music and the equally dutiful attempt to note reassuringly that Schoenberg was extremely clever in traditional musical ways.

Why, secondly, in perceptions of the music, are there so many dogged investigations of pitch-structure, if, as Charles Rosen was bold enough to write, 'pitch can no longer be given the central position [here] in the hierarchy of musical elements'3 - as Schoenberg knew very well when he ago- nised in his Berlin Diary over how he had managed to con- duct a Pierrot rehearsal without noticing that the clarinet was at the wrong pitch? Anyone will be excused for reading Pierrot as a pitch structure. Stravinsky has not been alone in wanting to value it as a 'brilliant instrumental masterpiece'. Nor can it escape the attention of any singer that many of the pitches, which Schoenberg asked to be clarified before

the glissando of the speaking voice cuts in, are in a clear musical relationship to the instrumental material - and his preface to the score seems to take this for granted, with its comment that 'in singing the pitches are maintained; in speech-song they are of course presented, but immediately abandoned via a rise or fall [in pitch]'. The problem is, one may suspect, the time-honoured distinction between theory and perception. In theory, there are any number of fascinat- ing pitch relationships to be studied in Pierrot which, per- ceptually, one only wishes could be seized from the act of listening, but many simply cannot be, even if we assume some kind of inscrutably complex material determination of perception. If these forlorn conflicts are in play even at the touchstone level of pitch, no wonder theorising about other aspects of Pierrot and the repertory of which it is a consum- mation has been resisted so thoroughly. Third, and briefly: from the compositional point of view,

what has the 'light, satirical tone' of Pierrot, as emphasised by Schoenberg himself, to do with the heavy, committed readings of text and music to be found throughout the liter- ature? Here again it is worth listening to Stravinsky, who deprecated in Pierrot the dated aestheticism of Beardsley. One must wonder how many modern musicians have much idea what Stravinsky is talking about, let alone appreciating what he, who had lived through a personal, composer's reaction to passing cultural waves, actually didn't like about Pierrot in its 'aestheticism'. It is in the nature of theory, how- ever broadly conceived, to be serious, and it must be in its nature not to be able to assimilate whatever turns its face against the serious through satire. These are examples of what I understand by a 'resistance

to theory'. I am not here essentially concerned with 'musi- cal rhetoric' but I am indeed concerned with the subtext and probable headline of that matter, the interdisciplinary afterglow of the deconstructive approach. And I do not mind leaning a little on Paul de Man's observation, which I rec- ommend to those American music researchers who are dis- playing a belated taste for Barthesian semiology: in de Man's memorable phrase, 'Up till very recently, French crit- ics never bothered to read at all ... all of them treat lan- guage, in its function as carrier of subjective experience, as if it were transparent'.4 While I cannot see the study of 'rhetoric' as a paradigm for musical thought nowadays, the hermeneutical impulse behind this buzz-word is welcome as an antidote to the relativism which it can inform, and to the positivism which both can hope to transcend.

I noted earlier that it would be important to look for some historical depth in these deliberations, for traditional evi- dence that people have, so to speak, not 'bothered to read at all'. The evidence to be presented is necessarily lean, but selected because it is both acute and representative. I have also chosen to avoid the mainstream of Schoenberg com- mentary - for instance, Keller, or Maegaard, or Lessem - which exudes contemporary resonances that, for me at least, inhibit the particular kind of commentary needed here. First is a quotation from Louis Fleury's article of October 1924 entitled 'About "Pierrot Lunaire"':

3 Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg (New York, 1975), 58

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Of course it was Schtinberg's own personality that I most wished to become acquainted with, and I was not disappointed. In that small, active man, always in motion, with a piercing and roving eye and mobile lips, simple in dress and in manner, and without a semblance of pose, there is nothing that suggests the hunter after sensational success or the upstart pining for advertisement. If his name has made a stir it is certainly in spite of himself. All that I had heard of him, of his solitariness and inaccessibility, of his life far from distractions and wrapped up in his work, was fully confirmed by such relations as I had with him. One thing may be confidently asserted, and that is his absolute sincerity.5

The mythic imagery here deserves little comment: the eye is not dull and disinterested, but 'piercing and roving' as one would expect of a superman; Schoenberg is solitary and inaccessible, like a president; he is 'wrapped up in his work', just like that unsanitary idealist Beethoven; and above all, placed as an epiphany, Schoenberg is endowed with 'abso- lute sincerity' - presumably not visibly. What merits greater comment is the extent to which all of this is figural, rather than credible. What, after all, is necessarily wrong with being a 'hunter after sensational success'? Even if it were wrong in some anthropologically determinable way, Schoenberg took obvious pleasure, not only in the artistic achievement of Pierrot, but also in the simple fact of its suc- cess at what Fleury would doubtless call the most unworthy level; the composer even ventured to apologise for the fact.6 And how was Schoenberg 'wrapped up in his work', this

model-builder and bookbinder, planner of subway systems, addicted to tennis, enduringly transatlantic in his litigious approach to daily life? As for sincerity, I doubt that the satirist, as Schoenberg avowedly was in Pierrot, should ever be accused of such a lofty sentiment: perhaps Fluery would have avoided the epiphany had he been writing a few years later and known of Schoenberg's dubious attempt to pillory Stravinsky in the op.28 no.2 'Satire'. Musical hagiography may always reveal such contradictions. The question is whether such contraditions are of the essence of musical hagiography, bearing in mind also that music analysis is a species of textual hagiography dedicated to revealing, as I have commented elsewhere, how music works and not how it fails to work.

Here is a different example from the halo of comment which has encircled Pierrot, again from the early days. Paul Bekker wrote a newspaper column in 1921 which was a recantation, nearly a decade on, of his initial denial of Pierrot's value. He now regards the work as excellent, not- ing that, even if space permitted, verbally he could not make the actual qualities of this music amenable to the under- standing:

Schoenberg is not only a jew, bolshevist and nihilist, he is not only impotent, but indeed the medics have investigated him and

5 Frangois Lesure, Dossier de presse de Pierrot Lunaire (Geneva, 1985), 184-5

6 Arnold Schoenberg, Stein, ed., Style and Idea (London, 1975), 51. His somewhat unnerving admission is of 'trying to act on [his] own behalf as an historian'.

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proved scientifically that he suffers from infantilism. That's all well and good, but it has no further consequences. The force which mocks all these things lies in the true work of art.7

There follows an ecstatic description of the culturally iso- lated world of Pierrot, which can be heard only with 'open ears', perceived only in a 'free play' of the senses. And how does this come about?

Today, only one thing is to be desired: wherever there is spiritual life, let serious people capable of feeling come together without preconceptions.8

For all that this appears to be commendably progressive, it uses a textural device to which Bekker has fallen his own victim; for the death of the author has already been guaran- teed in the assertion that the work of art must be accepted purely on its own terms, so that the embarrassingly Jewish, bolshevist, nihilist, infantile composer, clearly not serious in himself or capable of feeling, has already been excluded from the charmed circle of those worthy to imbibe this remarkable new music.

In both the foregoing cases we have been dealing, not with reportage, but with narrative design that, theoretically, the writers would surely deny as literal. This is just surmise; but it is hard to believe that either Fleury or Bekker would stick to their 'evidence' under cross-examination, and their plea of narrative licence could hardly be disallowed on precedent or in the light of subsequent discourse. Perhaps none of this would matter much, if it were restricted to hagiography and vilification, and thus of little interest to the music theorist. Yet such explicit narrative manipulation in biography and criticism finds its implicit counterpart in what might be called, somewhat ironically perhaps, techni- cal commentary on the music. Thus Ernst Rychnovsky writ- ing in 1913 in Die Musik:

This musical mele of all the instruments, the dissolution of tonality, the stifling of rhythmic feeling, the unnaturalness of the reciting voice, which is childish when it seeks to be childlike, this is nothing but a defamation of the concept of music and I would like to learn from the grave whether the development of music will really have gone the way on which Schoenberg embarked in the 'Pierrot Lunaire' songs.9

There is much of interest here. The 'musical m lee of all the instruments' did become, after all, a technical byword in accounts of Pierrot as one generation after another admired the sonic resources Schoenberg drew from five players and eight instruments, never once used in the same combina- tion through twenty-one melodramas. The 'stifling of rhyth- mic feeling' perhaps refers to the variety of articulation in Pierrot, to the listener's difficulty in most of the music of determining its metre: another commentator noted the 'rhythms that are so persistently varied as to become monotonous'.'0 Over the 'unnaturalness' of the reciting voice Rychnovsky earns a little less credence but also a lit- tle more: on the one hand, he betrays his lack of familiarity with contemporaneous fashion, with Viennese theatrical

declamation, with Lhar, Humperdinck and Gerlach, with the Berlin cabaret, with Karl Kraus's recitations; on the other hand, the interpretation of Schoenberg's Sprech- stimme was to become a permanent obstacle to the assimi- lation of Pierrot, and Rychnovsky could have had the grim satisfaction of knowing that this aspect of the composition never did come to be seen as 'natural' - Sprechstimme may have been a stimulus to the development of extended vocal technique, but it did not itself become a universal technical precedent because it is not a particularly successful way of writing for the voice.

As for the 'defamation of the concept of music', this is a classic - selected because it is archetypal - of the resistance to theory. If theory is a consensus on the principles of how to proceed, then in this very liberal sense of the term Pierrot was a concept of music already written before Schoenberg sat down to do it in 1912. His contemporaries might have been forgiven if they had pointed out some of the following inevitabilities: that it was high time the mae- stro did a 'commedia' work, since everyone else of note had either done so or was about to; that Wagner, as Humper- dinck and many others believed, had for the moment virtu- ally exhausted the possibilities of the conventionally pitched human voice and other heightened kinds of vocal expressiv- ity were to be tried; that a restricted medium was, as many composers were showing, an antidote, long before the prac- tical exigencies of the Great War were even thought of, to the supermedium of the symphony of a thousand, especially when individual players were becoming so proficient and instruments so reliable as a result of the industry, both technological and human, of the nineteenth century; that the conventions of tonality were so very obviously in 1912 not to be expected of Europe's best composers, self-evident- ly of Schoenberg, who had been ploughing a new furrow for four years, but even of Stravinsky, whose Petrushka of 1911 gave some indication and whose Rite of Spring confirmed in grand style; that what has recently come to be called the 'multi-piece' was therefore a highly-valued form of which Pierrot, in terms of its motivic recurrences and structural paraphrases, is an unexceptional example.

Most contemporaries didn't, as it were, read the historical text. In our current terms, they perhaps didn't have the means to read the text. Rychnowsky's 'concept' of music is enshrined in his german word 'Begriff', something that is 'seized', and no wonder he feels that it is being defamed by Pierrot, since he doubtless took much trouble to absorb the musical heritage which had become his value system, and since he regarded it as a 'language'. Human beings tend to be merciless in defending their actual language, that princi- pal agent in maintaining their identity. And they tend to interpret other activities as if they functioned in the way in which language functions. This tendency is nowhere more apparent than in Schoenberg's own view of music as a disci- pline, which perfectly matches the linguistic model of the trivium: 'grammar' is pursued throughout the Harmo- nielehre and in the later pedagogical works; 'rhetoric' is the basic paradigm for Schoenberg's idea of 'Darstellung', of understanding music as a system of 'presentation'; 'logic', and the nature of a strictly 'musical' logic, preoccupied

7 Lesure, op. cit., 43 8 ibid., 44 9 ibid., 51 10 James Huneker in Lesure, op.cit, 21

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Schoenberg in the now-famous 'Gedanke' manuscripts. And no wonder there was no finality in all this endeavour. As de Man puts it in his notorious essay, the elements of gram- mar, rhetoric and logic amount to 'a set of unresolved ten- sions powerful enough to have generated an infinitely pro- longed discourse of endless frustration'.11

I referred at the beginning of this essay to what was called the 'underlying issue' in this kind of enquiry. The enquiry over, I offer some closing remarks on that issue, which is, as noted already, an epistemological matter.

The human sciences, which embrace so much that they must always be suspected of revealing the contradictions and imponderables of an underlying philosophical treadmill, breed alienation in the interested layperson. A field of learn- ing as comprehensive as music similarly breeds alienation among those viewing its subdisciplines. Yet over and above this endless embedding of misunderstanding, which is in musicology often a wilful and therefore at least trivial misun- derstanding, we must cling to the possibility of thinking in credible new ways. If, as some literary critics say, not only do we seem to dislike theorising, but part of the very power of theory is that it entails its own abnegation, I can't think of a good reason not to listen and learn from them, since this mechanism seems so characteristic of discourse about music.

Even more encouragingly, why should it not also be that musical discourse has its own mode of development which is relatively independent? This is highly likely, if we know to however limited an extent what we're doing, given that music itself is the nearest experience we have to an alterna- tive native 'language'. Umberto Eco pointed out that - in my exaggerated words - musical discourse was centuries ahead of modern literary theory. Perhaps this meant, more explicitly, and assuming Eco knew what he was talking about, that structuralism was always in the foreground of musical discourse, but surfaced everywhere else as a cul- tural preoccupation only in the mid-twentieth century. If that is so, it needs to be driven home in non-language disciplines like ours that 'everywhere else' structuralism has now drift- ed by. If we as musicians have resisted new theories because we were already used to the conflict inherent in theory, that is no excuse for failing to ask now whether the eras of unacknowledged leading are gone, whether the moment of meeting did not pass a decade or two ago when 'structure' became fashionable, and whether in the future, as in the past, we should not again expect to become isolat- ed, perhaps in a new age when, to be specific, there are no independent theories of music, but only theories of how to compose it.

This article was first given as a paper at the 1989 Annual Meeting of the Royal Musical Association, which was dedicat- ed to topics on Music and Rhetoric.

Jonathan Dunsby is Professor of Music at the University of Reading

11 de Man, op. cit., 13

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