From Joe, on Schoenberg (part 1)
Dear friends,
I hope this message finds you recovered from the holidays and into 2024 thriving! This is Joe Bricker, one of the artistic directors for concertnova. Over the next few weeks, you’ll receive a few newsletters like this one to get you excited for our next performance on January 30th at 7:30 PM at Memorial Hall.
Every new year brings reflection, and I’ve been reflecting on my own musical journey and how lucky I feel to be in Cincinnati. The city’s welcoming spirit and dedication to adventurous cultural programming makes me excited about where we’re going, and the new year allows me to reflect on where I and we have already been.
At our January 30th performance, and the subsequent piano recital on February 1st (with artist-in-residence Levi Hammer at First Unitarian Church!), concertnova presents several works of Arnold Schoenberg, notably including the United States premiere of Levi’s arrangement of Pelleas und Melisande. 16 years ago, long before I was a member of this organization (in fact, I was ten years old, intent on becoming a soccer goalkeeper), concertnova performed a concert entitled “Demystifying Schoenberg”, which began a storied tradition of engaging with works that are maybe a bit more, confronting, on the ears.
Schoenberg’s music is best known for his creation/utilization of a technique called “serialism”, in which sets of notes (“tone rows”) are determined and manipulated according to set procedures, therefore “generating” the composition. This kind of music can often sound unfamiliar or scientific, but also, by going against traditional emotional musical practice, leads to breakthroughs that, in some ways, lead to electronic/computer music and the juxtaposition between academic art and popular art, eventually reconvening back together with drum machines and deep house techno(side note: don’t get me started on how everything’s connected).
However, in Pelleas und Melisande, we find Schoenberg before he went away from standard harmonic practice, and find a composer responding to the mountain of work of Wagner. The musical priorities of the 19th century focused largely on pushing harmony past where people thought it could go, and when Wagner began flipping that priority on its head to focus on voice-leading and dramatic development (meaning literally the drama), composers saw this as the end of music, as they knew it. Schoenberg saw this as an opportunity, in response to Wagner, to experiment with motif-based composition, linking themes to characters and objects, which help develop the musical story. It’s gorgeous writing that helps us (or at least me!) see the link between centuries of musical tradition.
This new arrangement by esteemed Schoenberg scholar Levi Hammer, a longtime friend of concertnova, is modeled in the tradition of Schoenberg’s own Society for Private Musical Performances. Schoenberg, his composer colleagues, friends, and students gathered to perform concerts of large modern works arranged for chamber ensembles in an attempt to avoid the increasingly rowdy Vienna audience, who were proving to be unwelcoming of experimentation. This allowed for serious connoisseurs of new music to gather in a safe-space and be challenged. This new arrangement is in the same spirit of those works, reduced from a massive orchestra down to thirteen musicians, conducted by Hammer himself.
In the next newsletter, I’ll discuss some of the other works performed on our January 30th concert, as well as discuss Levi’s residency. I’m writing this from a gate at CVG and I am so excited to dig into Schoenberg’s early output with you all. I’ll end each time I write with some strange recommendation to brighten your day:
To be a good student of Schoenberg’s music, I’ve been trying to learn a bit more German, and I now cannot get this children’s song out of my head:
Ich bin Schnappi, das kleine Krokodil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVRw7jtSiEA
All the best,
Joe Bricker and the team at concertnova
