# Schoenberg's 'integration of melody and harmony''



## Joris (Jan 13, 2013)

One of Schoenberg's methods to provide structure to his increasingly atonal music was the 'integration of melody and harmony into a unified space through the use in both collections of notes ...and reordering;...'

What's so notable about this? In tonal music this happens too, but just with tonal chords. What does 'unified space' mean, and what's meant with integration exactly? I don't really get this at all


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

First of all, who's saying this? Schoenberg was explicit about his music being based on traditional methods through and through, especially in his later years. Next, neither I nor he believe in the notion of atonality. There is always at least one tonal center heard in his later music at any given time. There's a reason why he used the term "pantonality" instead, and why the term "atonality" was applied to many composers, like Mahler, Reger, and Debussy, who are not considered "atonal" today (although I personally believe that Debussy's mature music is further away from traditional tonality than anything by Schoenberg).

But to get specifically into the meat of the issue here, the idea of fusing the vertical (harmony) and horizontal (melody) dimensions of music was not by any means new (it had been more or less the norm during the Renaissance, and accomplished very well indeed by Bach), but it had fallen to the wayside to a large degree with the emphasis on homophonic melodic writing during the Classical and Romantic periods.

In Strauss's Salome, there's a scale normally associated with the title character, fusing two segments of the octave divided at the tritone. It is heard melodically many times throughout the work, but near the end, when the guard goes down to execute Johanaan, we hear it presented as a rumbling, dissonant chord in the low strings. Can one hear this and recognize it? Probably not consciously. All the same, Strauss is exchanging material between the horizontal and vertical dimensions in a way that would have been unthinkable to many in previous decades.

In the case of Schoenberg, the opening of the Chamber Symphony No. 1 provides a good example of this. The first full harmony we hear is a large stack of perfect fourths, a sound used by composers like Scriabin or Satie in their more mystical moods, but never in the context of traditional voice leading or tonal relations. Here Schoenberg resolves it to a major chord via several chromatic transformations. Then the next thing we hear is a string of rising fourths from the horn, which become thematic (horizontal) as well as harmonic (vertical), and the interval of the fourth (as well as the tritone, or augmented fourth) is important throughout the work in both capacities.

This becomes, as the quoted statement implies, more true the further one gets into Schoenberg's music, and the 12-tone method works perfectly to achieve just this sort of integration within a chromatic space, because both vertical and horizontal are coming from the same source. Note that the same method can be used to give primacy to triads (Berg), non or ambiguously triadic harmonies (Webern), or, as in Schoenberg's music, both.

Does that make sense?


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## Joris (Jan 13, 2013)

Yes it makes sense, especially because of the contrast with homophonic music, thanks a lot for your time !

Walter Frisch says this in his _Schoenberg and His World_ (1999).

Interesting to note is that in the History of Western Music/Grout, the writer describes Schoenberg's _Saget mir, auf welchem Pfade_ as 'One of Schoenberg's first entirely atonal pieces', although he admits that Schoenberg disliked the term.


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## Joris (Jan 13, 2013)

I fail to see where the stack of perfect fourths in the first harmony are in chamber symphony #1, I just see a lot of 2nd/7ths 
What am I doing wrong?


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

The chord that occurs halfway through the second bar (the first _full_ harmony, as what precedes it sounds like an Fm7 in first inversion without a fifth) is comprised of the following. Remember that the horns and clarinet are transposing instruments.

Cello/Bass: G
2nd Horn: C
Viola: F
1st Horn: B-flat
2nd Violin: E-flat
1st Violin/Oboe/Clarinet: A-flat

There's an octave gap between the last two notes, but it's the next one in the ascending fourths sequence anyway.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Joris said:


> One of Schoenberg's methods to provide structure to his increasingly atonal music was the 'integration of melody and harmony into a unified space through the use in both collections of notes ...and reordering;...'
> 
> What's so notable about this? In tonal music this happens too, but just with tonal chords.


Without disagreeing with the meat of what has already been said, I don't think we should exaggerate the continuity between Schoenberg and the past. It is true that any number of precedents can be found in "tonal" music for harmonies being used as melodies and vice versa, but there are _some_ ways in which Schoenberg's integration of horizontal and vertical had genuinely new implications.

Schoenberg's integration of horizontal and vertical was heavily, if not primarily, intervallic: i.e. the reason a certain melodic fragment can be considered motivically equivalent to a harmony is not because they share the same pitch content but because they share the same intervallic content. That, it seems to me, is what Schoenberg's integration of horizontal and vertical really accomplishes: it makes intervals, not pitch content and therefore not scale degree function, the primary arbiters of motivic relationship. In order to get at an accurate comparison of Schoenberg's music and that of the past, then, it's not enough to look for examples of melodies being used as harmonies and vice versa; we also have to look for examples of motivic relationships defined by intervals rather than by pitch content or scale degree function.

In "tonal" music, a dominant seventh chord expressed melodically will obviously be perceived as the equivalent of a dominant seventh chord expressed harmonically, but it will not necessarily be perceived as the equivalent of a half-diminished seventh chord, harmonically _or_ vertically. This is because dominant sevenths and half-dimished sevenths have different pitch content and therefore different functions with respect to a tone center. But in Schoenberg's music they _are_ motivically equivalent since dominant seventh chords and half-diminished seventh chords are intervallic inversions of each other. Since the focus has been shifted to intervals rather than pitches, the relationship of the chords to a tone center becomes less important in determining whether the two chords are motivically related to each other. (Which is not to say that there is no tone center or that a tone center can't be important for other reasons; I agree with Mahlerian on that point.)

Schoenberg wasn't the sole inventor of this either; examples can be found in Strauss, as has already been mentioned, as well as Bartok and arguably Debussy. But it has little precedence in pre-1900 music that I can see, and the fact that Schoenberg elevated it to a general compositional principle does, I think, justify calling it "new" when compared to the music of the past.


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