Integrative Explorations Journal
TOWARD A DESCRIPTION OF INTEGRAL ATONALITY* Elizabeth A. Behnke Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body Felton, CA INTRODUCTION In his monumental work Ursprung und Gegenwart (The Ever- Present Origin), Jean Gebser announces the emergence of the integral world and suggests that the shift from tonal to atonal music is one manifestation of this emerging consciousness- structure. My purpose here is to clarify how atonality points to, and makes concretely present, the integral structure.1 Since, as Gebser himself points out, "something new can only be discovered if one is aware of the old,"2 such clarification also demands a brief description of the ways in which tonal music manifests what Gebser has termed the mental structure. I shall then attempt to show how atonality becomes the "self- concretization of time."3 Finally, I shall raise a terminological question: should atonality be called "music," or do the implications of the term "music" suggest that a new name might be found for atonality? The problem of atonality may be introduced with a comparison between two compositions written around 1908. The first of these, Schönberg's 2nd String Quartet, op. 10, opens in the key of F-sharp minor, although frequent modulations to other keys continually threaten the security of the tonal center. In the second movement of this work, Schönberg introduces the well-known melody "Ach, du lieber Augustin . . . alles ist weg," as if to forewarn the listener that something is indeed "gone," "lost," "used up." The tune itself, initially heard in the second violin, is compressed in time, then fragmented into motivic shapes that gradually lose their connection with a tonal center and finally disintegrate (see measures 164-86). A soprano joins the quartet in the third movement, a setting of Stefan George's "Litanei" (from Der siebente Ring, 1907); the "longing" inscribed in the poem finds musical expression in chromatic figures that continually shift from one tonal frame of reference to another, although the key signature of E-flat minor is indicated throughout. But in the fourth movement, Schönberg dispenses with a key signature altogether. This movement--generally cited as the first piece of atonal music--is a setting of another poem from Der siebente Ring, "Entrückung" ("Release"). The atonal setting brings to life such lines as "Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten" ("I feel an air from other planets") and "Ich löse mich in tönen, kreisend, webend" ("I dissolve into tones, circling, wreathing").4 Yet the final sonority of the piece is a tonic chord (F- sharp major). The fourth movement did indeed open with an inspiration, with a breath from an entirely new realm of possibility, and did accomplish a temporary release from tonality. But the closing chord reveals an unwillingness to emigrate to the new world where tones dissolve and interweave. A similar ambivalence presides over all of Schönberg's work: although he rejected the diatonic scale and the functional harmonic relationships characteristic of tonality, substituting the tone row and the intervallic transformations of dodecaphonic music, he retained the forms and expressive devices of tonal music. Henri Pousseur writes: Schönberg's music, because of its transitional position in musical history, is the perfect model of a semantically ambiguous, uncertain, partly contradictory structure. With or without wishing to, Schönberg calls unceasingly on traditional organising energies, constantly refers back to the types of meaning that he wished to abolish, and these relationships are forever coming between the hearer
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