The sources of Schoenberg's "Aesthetic Theology"

Nineteenth Century Music

Volumn 19, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 252-262

  Covach, John ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 62449237041     PISSN: 01482076     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/746221     Document Type: Article

References (74)

1. Arnold Schoenberg, "Composition With Twelve Tones" [1941], in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, trans. Leo Black, ed. Leonard Stein (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), pp. 214-44. This essay originated in one that was given at Princeton University in 1933
2. see Schoenberg, "Vortrag / 12TK / Princeton," trans, and ann. Claudio Spies, Perspectives of New Music 13 (1974), 58-136
3. Fred Lerdahl, "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems," in Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition, ed. John A. Sloboda (Oxford, 1988), pp. 231-59 (p. 251)
4. Martha M. Hyde, Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Harmony: The Suite Op. 29 and the Compositional Sketches (Ann Arbor, 1982), p. 25
5. Schoenberg, "Composition with Twelve Tones," in Style and Idea, pp. 214-15
6. Carl Dahlhaus, "Schönbergs ästhetische Theologie," in Bericht über den 2. Kongress der Internationalen Schönberg- Gesellschaft 1984, ed. Rudolf Stephan and Sigrid Weismann (Vienna, 1986)
7. trans, as "Schoenberg's Aesthetic Theology," in Schoenberg and the New Music: Essays by Carl Dahlhaus, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 81-93
8. Dahlhaus traces the history of absolute music in Die Idee der absoluten Musik (Kassel, 1978)
9. The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago, 1989)
10. His discussion of Nietzsche's role in this history is dealt with at length in his Zwischen Romantik und Moderne: Vier Studien zur Musikgeschichte des späteren 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1974)
11. trans, as Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980)
12. A thorough consideration of Schopenhauer's influence on Wagner can be found in Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford, 1983)
13. On this point, Dahlhaus departs markedly from Adorno's position on Schoenberg's development; see Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music [1949], trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York, 1973)
14. This position with regard to interpretation closely parallels the one put forward by hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer; see esp. his important Truth and Method [1960], trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (2nd rev. edn. New York, 1989)
15. James Hepokoski has explored the Gadamerian influence in Dahlhaus's writing in his "The Dahlhaus Project and Its Extra-musicological Sources," this journal 14 (1991), 221-46. The debate between the possibility of recovering the past as it was (Schleirmacher, Dilthey, Betti) and historically impacted interpretation (Heidegger, Gadamer) continues to be a central issue within hermeneutic philosophy
16. See the introductions and selections in The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany, N.Y., 1990)
17. and Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Ormiston and Schrift (Albany, N.Y., 1990)
18. For a discussion of the various ways in which Schoenberg used the terms Gedanke, Idee, and Einfall, see Charlotte M. Cross, "Three Levels of 'Idea' in Schoenberg's Thought and Writings," Current Musicology 30 (1980), 24-36
19. See also the concordance of terms provided in Schoenberg, The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation, ed. and trans. Patricia Carpenter and Séverine Neff (New York, 1995), pp. 369-77. While the publication of The Musical Idea will provide scholars with a more indepth treatment of some of the key components in Schoenberg's thought, this unfinished manuscript is focused primarily on the technical aspects that constitute the presentation of the musical idea; thus the more abstract and philosophical - and I will argue, mystical - aspects of the idea are barely expanded from writings we already have from the composer
20. See my "Schoenberg and the Occult: Some Reflections on the 'Musical Idea'," Theory and Practice 17 (1992), 103-18. The reader is referred to that article for more thorough considerations of the material summarized in the next several paragraphs
21. Schoenberg, "The Relationship to the Text" [1912], in Style and Idea, pp. 141-45
22. See Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, The Blaue Reiter Almanac, ed. Klaus Lankheit (new edn. New York, 1974)
23. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (New York, 1977)
24. and Arnold Schoenberg-Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents, ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch, trans. John C. Crawford (London, 1984)
25. For a careful discussion of Kandinsky's interest in the writing of Steiner and in Theosophy generally, see Sixten Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting, Acta Academiae Aboensis, Ser. A, vol. 38, no. 2 (Abo, 1970)
26. Ringbom surveys the occult component in early abstract painting in his "Art in 'The Epoch of the Great Spiritual': Occult Elements in the Early Theory of Abstract Painting," Journal of the Warpurg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966), 386-418
27. for a more general survey, see Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art (Boston, 1988)
28. Schoenberg, "New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea" [1946], in Style and Idea, pp. 122-23
29. Schoenberg, "Franz Liszt's Work and Being" [1911], in Style and Idea, p. 446
30. Severine Neff, "Schoenberg and Goethe: Organicism and Analysis," in Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past, ed. Christopher Hatch and David W. Bernstein (Chicago, 1993), pp. 409-33
31. Erich Heller, "Goethe and the Idea of Scientific Truth," in The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought (New York, 1975), p. 7
32. Summaries of Swedenborg's thought can be found in Sig Synnestvedt, The Essential Swedenborg: Basic Teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian (New York, 1970)
33. and John Howard Spalding, An Introduction to Swedenborg's Religious Thought (New York, 1956)
34. For a fuller treatment of Swedenborg's clair-voyance, see Wilson Van Dusen, The Presence of Other Worlds: The Psychological/Spiritual Findings of Emanuel Swedenborg (London, 1974)
35. and The Natural Depth in Man (New York, 1972)
36. Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal (New York, 1967), pp. 29-53
37. Dore Ashton, A Fable of Modern Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991)
38. H. H. Stuckenschmidt (Schoenberg: His Life and Work, trans. Humphrey Searle [London, 1977], pp. 234-35) describes how taken Schoenberg was with Balzac's novels, and with Séraphita especially. A letter from Berg to Schoenberg, dated 21 December 1912, suggests that Schoenberg was very fond of Louis Lambert as well
39. see The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence: Selected Letters, ed. Juliane Brand, Christopher Hailey, and Donald Harris (New York, 1987), pp. 134-36
40. Immanuel Kant, Dreams of a Spirit Seer, trans. and com. John Manolesco (New York, 1969)
41. For early twentieth-century discussions of this issue, see Ernst Cassirer, Kant's Life and Thought [1918], trans. James Haden (New Haven, 1981)
42. and Paul Carus's 1902 commentary in Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Can Qualify as a Science (La Salle, Illinois, 1902)
43. Walter Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel (New York, 1980)
44. Schopenhauer's engagement with Goethe's color theory may be found in his Über das Sehen und die Farben of 1815. The relationship between the young Schopenhauer and the much older Goethe is recounted in Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), pp. 177-90
45. The Hegel-Goethe relationship is discussed by Karl Löwith in his From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (New York, 1964), pp. 3-29
46. A useful volume devoted to modern assessments of Goethe's science is Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal, ed. Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 97 (Dordrecht, 1987)
47. While Hegel's philosophy played no role in Schoenberg's thinking about the Gedanke, his notions about the dialectical forward progress of history made their way - however tacitly - into almost every justification Schoenberg ever offered for his turns to atonality and the twelve-tone method
48. Steiner's writing on Goethean science can be found in his Science of Knowing: Outline of an Epistemology Implicit in the Goethean World View [1886], trans. William Lindeman (Spring Valley, N.Y., 1988)
49. Goethe as the Founder of a New Science of Aesthetics [1888], trans. G. Metaxa (London, 1922)
50. and Goethe's World View [1897], trans. William Lindeman (Spring Valley, N.Y., 1985)
51. His commentaries for the Kürschner edition (1884-91) are collected in Goethean Science, trans. William Lindeman (Spring Valley, N.Y., 1988)
52. Steiner's biography is recounted in The Essential Steiner: Basic Writings of Rudolf Steiner, ed. Robert A. McDermott (New York, 1984)
53. and in Steiner's own autobiography, The Course of My Life [1925], trans. Olin D. Wannamaker (New York, 1951)
54. This argument is especially central in Steiner, The Science of Knowing
55. Schoenberg, "Hauer's Theories" [1923], in Style and Idea, pp. 209-10
56. See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York, 1969)
57. Music is discussed in detail in the third book of vol. I, bk. 3, par. 52 (pp. 255-67)
58. and in vol. II, chap. 39, "On the Metaphysics of Music" (pp. 447-57)
59. For a careful treatment of Schopenhauer's philosophy, see Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer
60. and Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy
61. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, p. 260
62. Pamela C. White has explored Schoenberg's study of Schopenhauer's philosophy in her Schoenberg and the God-Idea: The Opera Moses und Aron (Ann Arbor, 1985)
63. and "Schoenberg and Schopenhauer," Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 8 (1984), 39-57
64. For an account of the occult scene in Vienna as well as in Europe generally at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, see William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, 1974)
65. James Webb, The Occult Establishment (La Salle, Ill., 1985)
66. and The Occult Underground (La Salle, Ill., 1988)
67. While I have opted for an interpretation of Schoenberg's mysticism that situates with regard to trends in turn-of-the-century Vienna, Alexander L. Ringer has interpreted Schoenberg's mysticism in terms of the Jewish tradition. See his Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as Jew (Oxford, 1990)
68. For a fuller treatment of Hauer's writing, see my The Music and Theories of Josef Matthias Hauer (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1990)
69. and "The Quest of the Absolute: Schoenberg, Hauer, and the Twelve-Tone Idea," Black Sacred Music: A Journal m Theomusicology 8 (1994), 157-77
70. For discussion of the Hauer-Itten relationship, see Dieter Bogner, "Schönberg-Hauer: Vom Chaos zum Ordnung," Parnass Sonderheft 2 (1987), 48-55
71. and "Josef Matthias Hauers 'Zwölftonteppich: Zur geistesgeschichtlichen Stellung des Komponisten," Morgen 5 (1981), 273-80
72. For a careful account of the Gurdjieff circle and de Hartmann's role in it, see James Webb, The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers (Boston, 1987)
73. see also Thomas and Olga de Hartmann, Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff (rev. and expanded edn. San Francisco, 1964)
74. In his Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World (trans. Willard R. Trask [New York, 1956], pp. 145-48), Victor Zuckerkandl outlines his notion of the "third stage" on which music occurs, and much of this discussion could be mistaken for Hauer's or Kandinsky's writing. Consider, as an example, the following passage: "Those who believe that music provides a source of knowledge of the inner world are certainly not wrong. But the deeper teaching of music concerns the nature not of 'psyche' but of 'cosmos.' The teachers of antiquity, who spoke of the music of the spheres, of the cosmos as a musical order, knew this" (p. 147)