Welcome to segment two of Program Six, entitled
The Explorers. In this segment, Arnold and I have the privilege
of delving into 20th century works that showcase innovations in musical
language as well as new kinds of interaction
for the string quartet players. Our first group of composers,
the Second Viennese School, includes Arnold Schoenberg
and his pupils, Anton Webern and Alban Berg.
They brought about change that sent music on a course towards dissonance,
atonality and finally a new system of pitch organization,
the serial or 12 tone technique. Our second group of composers is American
and they demonstrate a conscious effort to steer away from European influence.
This group includes Charles Ives, John Cage, and Steve Reich. All were
in some way affected by European composers include Schoenberg but sought a distinctly
modernist or experimental expression of their own. We begin with the founder
of the Second Viennese School, Arnold Schoenberg.
There is so much to talk about, write about and even gossip about
regarding Arnold Schoenberg's second string quartet written in 1908.
It was not only the boos, hisses, and laughter
that greeted the first performance of the work,
or the adding against all tradition of a soprano part,
it was not only that the quartet was written
during a turbulent time in Schoenberg's life
in which his wife first left him for another man
and that her return resulted in her lover's suicide,
it was also the moment when this particular work
flirted with leaving traditional harmony behind in the form of atonality,
which eventually led to a revolution in music
through Schoenberg's codified system of 12 tone composition.
In his Second String Quartet, Schoenberg rejected the idea that
any of its four movements were atonal.
He maintained that since each ends in a distance key,
the work as a whole represents only a transition towards atonality.
The first movement, massig moderato,
is clearly music of the late and very ripe romantic period and filled with a sense
of longing and melancholy. The second movement,
sehr rasch, very brisk, is a scherzo with occasional strings of notes that
seem to foreshadow strict 12 tone writing. The mood is somewhat playful, but
slightly macabre. With the introduction of "Oh du lieber
Augustin," oh dear Augustin, a popular Viennese
street song that Schoenberg transformed into
something more ghoulish.
[MUSIC]
The last two movements are with soprano and each employs the poetry
of Stefan George, "Deep is the sadness that suddenly
comes over me." The opening line of George's poem
"Litany" that is sung by the soprano conveys the third movement's atmosphere
of sadness, longing and anguish. The fourth movement Entruckung, "Rapture",