“The pre-World War I works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, "give a glimpse of a new universe of emancipated discourse, unfortunately quickly abandoned when Schoenberg returned to the classical musical shapes upon adopting the twelve-tone system."”

—  Elliott Carter

Elliott Carter (1977). The Writings of Elliott Carter, p.186. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Cited in Albright, Daniel (2004). Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226012670.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The pre-World War I works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, "give a glimpse of a new universe of emancipated discourse, …" by Elliott Carter?
Elliott Carter photo
Elliott Carter 6
American composer 1908–2012

Related quotes

“If…[Alban] Berg departs so radically from tradition, through his substitution of a symmetrical partitioning of the octave for the asymmetrical partitionings of the major/minor system, he departs just as radically from the twelve-tone tradition that is represented in the music of Schoenberg and Webern, for whom the twelve-tone series was always an integral structure that could be transposed only as a unit, and for whom twelve-tone music always implied a constant and equivalent circulation of the totality of pitch classes.”

George Perle (1915–2009) American composer

Page 98
See: Common practice period, Twelve-tone technique
The Listening Composer

“Collections of all twelve pitch classes can be differentiated from one another only by assigning an order to the pitch classes or by partitioning them into mutually exclusive sub-collections. The ordering principle is the basis of the twelve-tone system formulated by Schoenberg, the partitioning principle the basis of the system formulated around the same time by Hauer. In Schoenberg's compositional practice, however, the concept of a segmental pitch-class content is represented as well, as a basis for the association of paired inversionally related set forms. On the relation between Schoenberg and Hauer see Bryan R. Simms, "Who First Composed Twelve-Tone Music, Schoenberg or Hauer?" Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute X/2”

George Perle (1915–2009) American composer

November 1987
Page 101, note 2
The Listening Composer

“By the time of his Fourth String Quartet, inversional symmetry had become as fundamental a premise of Bartók's harmonic language as it is of the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Neither he nor they ever realized that this connection establishes a profound affinity between them in spite of the stylistic features that so obviously distinguish his music from theirs…Nowhere does he [Bartók] recognize the communality of his harmonic language with that of the twelve-tone composers that is implied in their shared premise of the harmonic equivalence of inversionally symmetrical pitch-class relations.”

George Perle (1915–2009) American composer

Pages 46-47
The Listening Composer

Luciano Berio photo

“Alas, this industrialized twelve-tone horse, dull on the outside and empty inside, constantly being perfected and dragged to a new Troy in shadow of an ideological war long since fought and won by responsible minds like Schoenberg, with neither systems nor scholarship for armor!”

Luciano Berio (1925–2003) Italian composer

"The Composer on His Work : Meditation on a Twelve-Tone Horse", in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music : A Continuing Symposium (1996) edited by Richard Kostelanetz and Joseph Darby

“The crucial and monumental development in the art music of our century has been the qualitative change in the foundational premises of our musical language--the change from a highly chromaticized tonality whose principle functions and operations are still based on a limited selection, the seven notes of the diatonic scale, from the universal set of twelve pitch classes to a scale that comprehends the total pitch-class content of that universal set. We can point to the moment of that change with some precision. It occurs most obviously in the music of Scriabin and the Vienna circle, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, in 1909-1910, and very soon afterwards, though less obviously, in the music of Bartok and Stravinsky. I think it is safe to say that nothing of comparable significance for music has ever occurred, because the closing of the circle of fifths gives us a symmetrical collection of all twelve pitch classes that eliminates the special structural function of the perfect fifth itself, which has been the basis of every real musical system that we have hitherto known.”

George Perle (1915–2009) American composer

Pages 42-43
The Listening Composer

John Cage photo

“The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time. The 'frame' or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time. No rhythm will be beyond the composer's reach.
NEW METHODS WILL BE DISCOVERED, BEARING A DEFINITE RELATION TO SCHOENBERG'S TWELVE-TONE SYSTEM”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

1930s
Source: 'The Future of Music: Credo' (1937); in: 'Silence: lectures and writings by Cage, John', Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, 4/SILENCE

“His partitioning of the octave in the first ten bars places Varèse with Scriabin and the Schoenberg circle among the revolutionary composers whose work initiates the beginning of a new mainstream tradition in the music of our century.”

George Perle (1915–2009) American composer

Page 12
The Listening Composer

Wassily Kandinsky photo

“[ Schoenberg's ] music leads us into a realm where musical experience is a matter not of the ear but of the soul alone, and at this point the music of the future begins.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote of Kandinsky, 1911; in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, transl. Michael T. Sadler (1914); reprint. New York: Dover, 1977), p. 17
1910 - 1915

“We have all been affected as composers, as teachers, as musicians by recordings to an extent that cannot possibly be calculated as yet or predicted for the future. The music which is being most widely disseminated and most widely discussed, and therefore most widely imitated and influential, is that music which is available on records. The music that is only published is very little known. I don't think one can possibly exaggerate the extent to which the climate of music today is determined by the fact that the total Webern is available on records, that the total Schoenberg is becoming available.”

Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) American composer

Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812.

Franz Marc photo

“A musical event in Münich has brought me a great dolt.... an evening of chamber-music by Arnold Schoenberg (Vienna).... the audience behaved loutishly, like school brats, sneezing and clearing their throats, when not tittering and scraping their chairs, so it was hard to follow the music. Can you imagine a music in which tonality (that is, the adherence to any key) is completely suspended? I was constantly reminded of Kandinsky's large composition which also permits no trace of tonality.... and also of Kandinsky's 'jumping spots' in hearing this music [of Schoenberg], which allows each tone sounded to stand on its own (a kind of white canvas between the spots of color). Schönberg proceeds from the principle that the concepts of consonance and dissonance do not exist at all. A so-called dissonance is only a mere remote consonance – an idea which now occupies me constantly while painting..”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

In a letter to August Macke (14 January 1911); as quoted in August Macke; Franz Marc: Briefwechsel, Cologne 1965; as quoted in Boston Modern - Figurative Expressionism as Alternative Modernism, Judith Bookbinder, University Press of New England, Hanover and England, 2005, p. 35
Franz Marc visited a concert with music of the composer Arnold Schönberg on 11 Jan. 1911 with Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Gabriele Münter and others; they played there compositions of Schönberg he wrote in 1907 and 1909: his second string quartet and the 'Three piano pieces'
1911 - 1914

Related topics