Art takes twists and turns. It finds new ways for humanity to express itself through sound and vision and all of our other senses and sensibilities. When the avant-garde sharpens a new cutting edge buy discovering a new way to work with new materials, and new equipment we see that expression expand beyond the realms of imagination of the earlier generation of creators.
This applies to all artistic media whether we are considering paintings, sculpture, dance, theatre, novels and novellas, poetry, perhaps even food and drink, but nowhere more so than in the realm of music. Some composers hone their art way beyond what is considered normal, they deliberately deviate from the norm, some more than others. Music in the abstract is often atonal in what one might think of as analogous manner to a work by drip paint modern artist Pollock is visually atonal.
Writing in the International Journal of Teaching and Case Studies, Alexi Harkiolakis of The American College of Greece, in Paraskevi, has considered the music of Arnold Schoenberg and how the composer embraced atonality. Harkiolakis is a student at the college but previously studied music composition with Greek composer Spiros Mazis and electric jazz guitar at the Philippos Nakas Conservatory with Yiannis Giannakos. He also studied piano at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City.
Harkiolakis is keen to understand what is needed to start a revolution in art, specifically a musical revolution. A revolution, he suggests, begins with an idea. Schoenberg had several big ideas…first the free atonal style and then the 12-tone method of composition, and others. Schoenberg’s earlier works sound surprisingly tonal, albeit highly chromatic, explains Harkiolakis. Chromatic meaning not adhering to conventional scales and musical modes, but using all the tones and semitones across the musical scale without necessarily considering a strict key signature. In other words, in the scale of C major one would use only the piano’s white keys to progress through the scale C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C, the conventional “Doh-Rae-Me”. Whereas a chromatic scale would utilise the black notes too, the sharps and flats and so we might progress C-C#-D-D#-E-F-F# and so on. Mixing notes out of conventional key signatures is often described as having atonality whereas conventional melodies might be thought of as being more natural and tonal.
In a case study of Schoenberg’s work, the Second String Quartet Op. 10 for string quartet and solo soprano, Harkiolakis examines and analyses the musical, personal, and socio-political factors that may have influenced Schoenberg to abandon his late romantic style in favour of this kind of free atonality. In exploring the musical, personal, and societal motives that could have played a part in driving Schoenberg towards this revolutionary style, Harkiolakis finds that it is rather unlikely that a single factor was the spark for this particular revolution, rather several disparate factors fed the musical revolutionary flames.
Whatever the spark, kindling or tinder might have been, a quote from Schoenberg writing in 1937 offers us an insight that suggests that it was an inner drive that pushed him to new places:
I knew I had to fulfil a task, I had to express what was necessary to be expressed and I knew I had the duty of developing my ideas for the sake of progress in music, whether I liked it or not.
Harkiolakis, A. (2020) ‘Arnold Schoenberg’s embrace of atonality: a brief case study for music educators’, Int. J. Teaching and Case Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp.95–104.