I established this page for a research assignment. I'll leave it here as a resource for anyone interested.
Under Control: Introduction to Social and Artistic Themes of Musical Expressionism
Daniel Nielsen
December 2000
As the most disparate musical idiom of its time, expressionism maintained a personal insight into human identity and disavowed the reproduction of material existence. This was not a disparagement of form in general, however, but a pursuit for forms of fitting artistic voice. Twentieth-century philosopher and aesthetician Jean-Paul Sartre noted about artistic representation, "Every psychic fact is a form, and has a structure" (Sartre 144). Arnold Schönberg, the quintessential German expressionist in matters of music, described the roots of this structure: "In music there is no form without logic, there is no logic without unity" (Amis, Rose 74). Form, therefore, will exist in all art, and will result of some preexisting unity. The undertaking, then, is to determine forms well suited to the aim of expression. Many modern thinkers have viewed Pablo Picasso's distinctive and evolutionary early style of cubism in this light, although, as he noted, it should not be considered an invention simply of intellectual impulsion. The precedent loss of pregnant form, and, with it, the loss of the essential human voice in art, according to the expressionist, can be directly identified in this statement by painter Paul Klee: "A major consequence of the expressionist creed has been the emphasis on the structural, namely the elevation of structure to an expressive means. Impressionism, at its most characteristic, no longer even recognized structure" (Long 52). This "expressionist creed" persistently sought the essence of human nature and motivation through the creation of new forms, and, in effect, offered a lasting critique of the time's predominant cosmology.
Where traditional tonality amounts musically to representational imagery, Schönberg sought a new, open schematic unity of atonality--or, as he preferred, "pantonality" (Everdell 281)--that offered his work a uniquely authentic and expressive voice. One need only glance the field of early-modern musical form to witness the effects of the Second Viennese School, composed of Schönberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg. These characteristics include, but are certainly not limited to, Sprechstimme, which combined recitative vocalization with quasi-sung melody; Klagenfarbermelodie, sometimes referred to as "pointillism," which involved a difference in timbre among successive notes; the tone row, which matched the expressionist preoccupation with using only the concentrated, necessary, and essential artistic material available to them; and twelve-tone, or dodecaphony, a systematic utilization of the chromatic scale. Berg's opera Wozzeck is a very interesting, representative, and well known, if sometimes uncharacteristically lyrical and nostalgic, piece in which to discern these musical qualities.
While artistically expressionism was in many ways a revolt against naturalism, this did not make for an aesthetic unappreciative of the natural world. {+description of naturalist determinism} As Sartre noted, "an image is a certain type of consciousness. An image is an act, not some thing. An image is a consciousness of some thing" (Sartre 145). Webern held great affinity for nature, for in it he found a unifying truth much like that in the human spirit. Music scholar Paul Griffiths writes of Webern, "Here he found an approach to nature akin to his own: at once analytical and contemplative, attentive to the tiniest detail and yet searching for the coincidence, the general principle." In Webern's words: "For a start I want to progress in the purely physical knowledge of all these phenomena. . . . Experimenting, observing in physical nature is the highest metaphysical theosophy to me" (Griffiths 279).
Behind expressionist hermeneutics in general, which contemporary social theory considerably analogized, was a growing realization of the person's worth in the cultural process. Expressionism, holding that the common, unindoctrinated person best reveals personal human truth, contained a strong humanist leaning. The twelve-tone system demonstrates this idea, for no one key is given the power to control and limit the means of expression. Thus expressionism was a timely movement; it drew on the philosophical undercurrents that so agreed with its intentions.
Marxism touched almost every corner of social conjecture, because it was responsible for the development of key terminology. The concepts of ideological oppression and imperialism, false consciousness, and inevitable proletarian revolution were useful tools for the expressionists. In this sense, the expressionist movement was a movement especially for the disenfranchised. As Herwarth Walden, notable contributor to the expressionist cause, wrote of folk art, "Only these anonymous artists expressed what moved them, and spoke in a way they could understand, because they could not speak in any other way" (Long 322). Still, all this did not save expressionism from the criticism of those such as the Dadaists, many of whom attributed the movement to bourgeois erudition, not essential human need.
A then-gathering social force that shared many concerns with those of Marxism--notions of oppression, false consciousness, exploitation, robbed power, revolution against an ideology, etc.--feminism is a theme that should not be underestimated in the development of twentieth-century Western culture. The feminists at the turn of the century constitute one of the most significant modern waves to contest the social order of the time, which they viewed to impose a role of powerlessness, utility, and subordination on the woman's caste. While it is a difficult task to find much record of women well recognized as expressionist composers in the early twentieth century, the same is not true for the domains of literary and visual arts. Writer Getrude Stein and artists Gabriele Münter and Marianne von Werefkin were afforded equal involvement, voice, and status in the movement, a practice not common in Wilhelmine Germany (Long 37).
Jazz was generally well regarded by the expressionists, because in so many ways it perfectly realized the ideals they set forth. The jazz musicians generated music from their own personality. Forms, harmonies, and techniques were integral, but were bent purposely. Almost every musical element had witnessed some distortion and exaggeration, though a subtlety and unity existed even within musical multiplicity. Polyrhythms, polychords, and polytonality would become trademarks of jazz, along with unusual modalities, quarter tones, syncopation, marked dissonance, "blue notes, cries, growls, hums, moans, [and] shouts" (Kernfeld 413). All of these musical attributes and more would lend this art form an unique expressiveness. Important also was the folk tradition of jazz, for it demonstrated the idea that the bourgeoisie were not the keepers of artistic worth. Jazz was a movement of the masses, reflecting experience through the lens of the human spirit, and its growing popularity imbued it with dripping Marxist and expressionist appeal.
The reader will notice periodic reference to the expressionist painters, sculptors, and architects; this is because the modes of expressionist thought are inextricably intertwined. This parallel in the realm of visual art developed contemporarily to the Second Viennese School, and with it Schönberg maintained close ties. He nurtured an enriching friendship with the luminary expressionist Wassily Kandinsky, compiler of the groundbreaking journal Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), and, under the tutelage of Kandinsky, became a noteworthy amateur painter himself (Morgan 295). In music, serialism and the loss of tonality corresponded to the loss of perspective in art.
Matisse served as a most important precursor to this artistic revolution. His paintings, rife with brilliant color, expressive brushwork, and flat composition led critic Louis Vauxcelles to term his school "the Wild Beasts," or Les Fauve. Fauvism took much of its influence from Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, the Nabis, and the neoimpressionists. Due to its unconventional use of the artistic elements, it quickly gained notoriety and came to embody the first energized, although short-lived, twentieth-century art movement (Rigby).
As far as musical precedent is concerned, Beethoven made use of form without becoming formalist, drew heavily on his own interpretive abilities, often made persistent dissonance a welcomed guest, and incorporated folk themes into his compositions. While by no means an inducted expressionist, he was beginning artistic reform down a path to that inevitable end. Other musical implements later useful to the movement would see development by Mahler, who afforded strong support to Schönberg's musical ventures, and Wagner before that.
But what is the nature of the inner consciousness? While an answer to that question is far beyond the scope of this paper, many thoughts on the matter were developing in the master narrative of the turn of the century. Freudian psychoanalysis was exploring the "dark drives, hidden ambitions, and hallucinatory visions of the realm of the subconscious," themes that would dominate the works of expressionist writers August Strindberg and Franz Kafka, painters Kandinsky and Oskar Kokoshka, and composers Schönberg and Berg (Martin, Drossin 50). The existentialist thinkers gave further definition to these human motivations by forging a philosophy with many psychological implications. What they termed "angst," "despair," and "forlornness" (or "abandonment") were born directly of the human condition.
World War I demonstrated these concepts with incredible vividness. The imposition of will, greed, and conviction then without question threatened human life globally, and conditions were only worsening. In the time of the Weimar Republic to follow the First World War, a foreboding set of anti-Semitic motivations would take shape and eventually come to control the mindset of the German public.
Nazism had a very direct effect on the lives of expressionist musicians. In many ways this political scheme represented socially the antithesis of the expressionist's cultural reformation. This made the expressionist mode of thought a competitive value system, and a prime target of Nazi suppression. Supplying additional difficulty to the lives and work of the expressionists, many were Jews living in Germany. World War II would have a particularly intense effect on the three "greats" of the Second Viennese School. Schönberg had foreseen Adolf Hitler's rise to power, and in 1933, due to the Nazi influence, was removed from his auspicious position at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. He would later leave Europe for the United States (Neighbour 705). The effect of the war on Webern was even more devastating. Workers' groups were crushed and his radio post retracted, forcing him into more routine work. Although Webern spent most of the conflict in isolation, he was able to visit his daughter in the last weeks of the war. There he was mistakenly shot by an American soldier (Griffiths 271). Berg died in 1935, before the beginning of World War II, but during the Nazi rise Schönberg feared that Berg, due to his affirmed Aryan roots, would take to the spell of German Nazism, if only to have his compositions performed in the Reich (Kater 203).
As mentioned by Webern early in this paper, religion for the expressionists was often a mystic quest to intuit sacred truth; this process, given a fitting interpretation, is in many ways the aim of the artist. It was for this reason that religion, and especially theosophy, was taken very seriously by the expressionists. Although Schönberg for many years adopted Lutheranism until finally returning to Judaism after a period of religious independence, he was at no time unreligious. Important for him was to question and generate a meaningful faith (Neighbour 705).{revise sentence}
Fundamental shifts in science and technology were an important ingredient in the mix of ideas impinging themselves on the mentality of the times. The Machine Age had arrived, and its implications were widespread. The photographic camera was capable of capturing an almost exact likeness, which only better illustrated the necessity of the expressionist voice. Meanwhile, accepted views on the most basic constructs of thought regarding the physical universe were in transition. Albert Einstein's decomposition of physical theory to its most basic axioms and restructuring to a coherent role of truer nature revealed the extent to which tradition may be flawed, and paralleled almost exactly Schönberg's process of reexamination. Webern, much like Schönberg, considered it his goal to discard the insignificant and to create concentrated music possessing unity, contrast, and expressiveness. Erwin Schrödinger, Louis de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, and Niels Bohr further confirmed the importance of this idea, as they continued to expand and alter the understanding of physical substance on the quantum level.
This idea is a sort of socio-scientific evolution, and it reminds one of the contribution Charles Darwin made to the story of the human role and human potentiality in the universe. Much like existentialism, his is an idea that may upon first meeting seem cynical, but does not really steal any value from the human experience. It in fact ennobles the human spirit, for that spirit is not under a constant controlling force, but empowers itself, and offers to itself the potential for betterment. This is in many ways directly at odds with the neoclassicist approach, in which man is limited and imperfect. The Darwinist mode of thought also contains within it the idea Darwin referred to with reservation as "survival of the fittest." In this way, but not to be taken as Darwinisticism, it reminds one that whoever exerts the greatest power is given better chance of temporary survival, which is a theme very much consonant with Marxist interpretations of expressionism. While Darwin set forth this theory in the Victorian age, it did not fully enter the social consciousness until the turn of the century, and gradually became an integral thread in the fabric of the master narrative.
At this same time, in Russia, Igor Stravinsky developed his own brand of essentially expressionist music, drawn from the stylings of the Mighty Handful and even of the French impressionists and post-impressionists. With these tools in hand, Stravinsky in his later years showed a very remarkable talent for musically projecting the character of primitivism. This is best illustrated by his The Rite of Spring, which demonstrates a theme of interest to expressionists across the Western world, who often looked to tribal and uncontaminated art for forms that described the spirit of the human condition. Stravinsky, in this work, offers musical forms much like those of tribal art.{unnecessary sentence?} Art historian Wilhelm Worringer gives this reasoning:
"One goes back to the elemental stages of development because one hopes to become
closer to nature in doing so. And the unnaturalness that has been so ridiculed and
disdained in recent painting is finally nothing other than the result of such a return
to nature, although to a nature not yet filtered through the rationalizing optics
of a European education, and from whose chaste purity and symbolic effective
power the average European can learn nothing." (Long 12)
As Worringer indicates, it is precisely the intense, evocative, and contrasting nature of the piece that makes for music of such enduring value. Stravinsky used rhythmic harmonic clusters; polyrhythms; short, pounded, fragmented motives; intense, irregular accents; bold harmonies; and unusual instrumentation to effect this style. Much like Picasso after war, Stravinsky emotes the raw forces and contrasts of the bloody Bolshevik revolution, even if only in symbol.
The soul of expressionism lies in an honest search for the creative means to inner truth. The life of the expressionist movement and its legacy is a story questioning presumption, fighting limitation by selective control, and diversifying forms of expression. The artistic language of expressionism deeply seeks commonality, and with it makes an open appeal to the individual. This movement not only complemented the notions of its time, but transformed the human identity.
Works Cited
Everdell, William R. The First Moderns. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. 268-282.
Amis, John; Rose, Michael. Words About Music. NY: Paragon House, 1992.
Gardner, Howard. Creating Minds. NY: BasicBooks, 1993. 188-226.
Morgan, Ronald P. "Expressionism." Kerneld, Barry. "Jazz." Ed. Don Michael Randel. The New
Harvard Dictionary of Music. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. 295-296.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Trans. Forrest Williams. Imagination. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1962.
Ed. Rose-Carol Washton Long. German Expressionism. LA, Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
Martin, William R.; Drossin, Julius. Music of the Twentieth Century. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1980.
Neighbour, O. W. "Schoenberg, Arnold (Franz Walter)." Griffiths, Paul. "Webern, Anton
(Friederich Wilhelm von)." King, Alec Hyatt. "Stravinsky, Igor (Fyodorovich)." Ed.
Stanley Sadie. New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London: Macmillan, 1980.
Kater, Michael H. Composers of the Nazi Era. NY: Oxford UP, 2000.
Rigby, Ida K. "Fauvism." The Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. Release 9.01. Grolier, 1997.