By Howard Ho
Daily Bruin Contributor
Fifty years after his death, Arnold Schoenberg remains an
enigmatic figure in music, both as a creator of masterpieces as
well as chaos. Celebrating his life while dealing with his
music’s impact, several musicologists met Saturday at the
conference “Whose Schoenberg: A Modernist Between
Continents.”
A former UCLA music professor, Schoenberg was famous for
inventing the 12-tone system of composition, a guaranteed way to
make the musical equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. While he and
his students regarded this as the future of music, audiences today
find it difficult to swallow the seemingly incomprehensible
sounds.
Overlooking the ocean, the Villa Aurora housed the conference.
Once entertaining intellectual elite from around the world, the
home exemplified the European-American connection at the heart of
the conference, emphasizing Schoenberg’s exile from Austria
during the Nazi era. Recently, Schoenberg’s original
manuscripts were sent back to Austria, because the Schoenberg
family failed to secure its funding demands in Los Angeles, which
illustrates the general apathy Americans have toward the
composer.
“How do you sell Schoenberg to an audience that may not
necessarily gravitate towards him? How do you start the journey?
It’s very hard,” said panelist Paul Holdengraber, the
head of the LACMA Institute for Art and Cultures.
Indeed, musicians still grapple with the artist who rebelled
against centuries of tonal tradition. Music students of UCLA must
enter Schoenberg Hall, which pays homage to the man who taught
composer John Cage and pianist Leonard Stein among others.
But Schoenberg’s importance is relative, as a composer in
the audience noted, “I think the symptom of all the
migrations of archives back to Europe is one of the prices we pay
for having a very unique and new cultural situation in Los Angeles.
The fact a composer might not have heard some Schoenberg work is
not shocking at a time when it’s just as crucial to have
heard a Seminal Sonic Youth album.”
Michael Cherlin, a professor from the University of Minnesota at
Minneapolis, portrayed Schoenberg as the link between the Romantic
era, with the lush melodies of people like Chopin, to the Modern
era, with the cold, detached sound of Pierre Boulez and Milton
Babbitt. Though later Schoenberg works were artistically
controversial, he was initially influenced by Romanticism and
actually sounded lovely, not austere.
“Debussy’s famous comment was that Wagner was a
sunset who was mistaken for a sunrise. Perhaps Schoenberg was a
sunrise who could never get over the sunset that had preceded
it,” Cherlin said.
A case in point is Schoenberg’s “Music For A Film
Scene,” which has no specific film in mind.
“Someone needs to make a film for this music,”
demanded Joseph Auner, professor from the State University of New
York at Stony Brook. Leonard Stein, Schoenberg’s friend,
amended that a film was made, but was not on par with the
music.
Indeed the ambivalence about Schoenberg’s importance to
this day remains a testament to his unique attraction. His music is
at once repulsive and entrancing, flexible and obdurate. He is a
genius to many, a composer’s composer, whose life we are only
beginning to understand.
“We are beginning to think of Schoenberg’s music all
over again in light of his life and his life in view of his music.
Some of the scholars who are beginning to change the subject of
Schoenberg scholarship are intensely concerned with the ways that
this music is a part of several very important moments in …
history over the course of the 20th century and, more than
anything, the product of a very complex man,” said UCLA
musicology professor Susan McClary.
In a society that craves high-speed, Hollywood-hyped, mass media
presentations, Schoenberg seems to be a hard sell. Confronting this
issue, the Los Angeles Philharmonic created its Schoenberg Prism
series as a vehicle for performing the works of the oft-neglected
master, including the “Transfigured Night” in January
and “Pelleas and Melisande” in March.
Yet one notices that the pairing of Schoenberg’s works
with standard works by Brahms, Mozart and Beethoven suggests the
Philharmonic’s underestimation of its audience.
“If you bring people something good, not a
McDonald’s view of culture, but something hard and difficult,
in which we value difficulty, you will lead them on a
journey,” Holdengraber said. “If you give people
something that they can eat but not immediately digest, they will
come back for more. We probably want difficulty in an era in which
we are surrounded by soundbites.”