# Schoenberg and the Unconscious



## millionrainbows

After composing using the 12-tone method, I noticed that musical effects are created which have tonal allusions, even though this is somewhat random, and no tonal thinking or function is involved. It's as if the ear/brain seeks patterns which make harmonic sense. 

This is the unconscious at work, always seeking pattern and meaning. As long as the phrase is rhythmically coherent, it has a good chance of sounding meaningful, almost as if it is tonal, even though it is the result of tone row operations and nothing more.

This fits in perfectly with Schoenberg's modernist aesthetic. He obviously also heard these patterns when he composed. This is probably what Allan Shawn meant when he contended that Schoenberg probably "heard everything he did as 'tonal."

12-tone music is not really tonal, though; it has no harmonic functions or hierarchy. But it does create harmonic effects which sound unmistakably musical and meaningful (tonally). But this is like seeing "ducks in clouds." The pattern of a duck is there, but we know that it's just clouds.


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## millionrainbows

Yeah, it depends on how far you want to stretch the meaning of "tonal." The part about "the ear/brain seeks patterns which make harmonic sense" seems to be the reason for anyone hearing atonally-based music as tone-centric. Man seeks patterns, perhaps because of his hunter/predator programming. Just look at a tiled floor, and you will involuntarily start seeing patterns of rows, squares within squares, etc.


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## millionrainbows

12-tone is linear and polyphonic, but the 'harmonies' which result from the intersection of lines are strange, dense, bizarre, and devoid of tonal meaning or implication. They therefore fall into the area of unconscious association. Schoenberg's art is revealed as one of contradiction, of tension, of strife between the 'light' of rationality and the 'darkness' of the irrational and unconscious.


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## millionrainbows

I love knowing more about modern music, and the more I know, the more it increases my pleasure in listening to it; but there will always be an element of mystery to it. I don't need to 'dumb down' to delve into modern music, or turn my intellect or knowledge off, or set it aside, or sink into the music as one might slip into a hot bubble bath. Modern music and art demands more of the listener. The idea of confronting or challenging the audience is a modernist idea. I wish to engage the art full-on, without apologizing for my intelligence.

With Schoenberg and company, I see their art as being dualistic. The 12-tone method, because of its intrinsically non-tonal, linear, non-vertical tendencies, sets up a dialectic, i.e. a contradiction that serves as the determining factor in the interaction.

The opposites are linear elements vs. vertical or harmonic elements; this can be posed as the rational vs. the irrational, the conscious vs. the unconscious, mind/brain vs. senses/body, light vs. dark, or the known vs. the unknown. Nietszche and Freud had espoused their idea of the unconscious, derived from earlier ideas of Schopenhauer.

Therefore, as in much art, in 12-tone music there will be an element of mystery, or the unexplained.

In tonality, pitch/harmonic material is intuitively and intrinsically grasped because of the pervasive, system-saturated, and totally integrated nature of all the tonal elements, including horizontal elements which change in time. All elements can be derived from tonality's original tone-centric nature.

With Schoenberg's 12-tone, the method is not axiomatic, by any means. Devices must be used and strategies must be devised in order to create vertical, harmonic elements, none of which are provided for in the method or its row material. Thus, we see Milton Babbitt and Elliot Carter's interest in 'all-interval rows' and rows with special qualities.

Just in listening to Schoenberg, we are confronted with strange, non-functioning verticalities which nonetheless evoke emotional tensions, feelings, and strange 'states of being' in us. This is the non-rational side, the unconscious side of our psyche, which is beyond the purview of our rational mind.


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