What is the connection between high culture, the modernist revolt, and the city?

What is the connection between high culture, the modernist revolt, and the city?

“The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. It is the place where the diffused rays of many separate beams of life fall into focus, with gains in both social effectiveness and significance. The city is the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning. Here in the city the goods of civilization are multiplied and manifolded; here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civilization are focused: here too, ritual passes on occasion into the active drama of a fully differentiated and self-conscious society.”

Vienna in the early 1900s

• An ideal type of a traditional cultural city. Some industrialization, but largely a center for the consumption of wealth: empire, religion, education and culture.

• By 1910, Vienna reaches its highest population: over 2 million residents, making the city Europe’s fourth largest. Following the World Wars, many Czechs and Hungarians return to their ancestral homelands. (2008 pop: 1.678 million.)

• “The actual role played by the arts during the period in question is undeniable. More than just a convenient premise for latter-day historians, the arts really were an important ingredient in the glue that held Viennese society together” (Kallir 1984: 8).

Franz Josef I

In the early 1900s, Vienna enjoys its final years as capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, presided over by Emperor Franz Josef I (who reigns from 1848-1916). His heir apparent is Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose 1914 assassination in Sarajevo sparks the Great War and, by 1918, the Empire’s demise.

A court society that traces its history several centuries back sustains an active ball season and elevates the Viennese Waltz to world fame (e.g., Johann Strauss’s 1867 Blue Danube).

Rituals of status: High culture and “classical values” serve to celebrate and consolidate power and prestige of aristocratic and imperial society.

While Germany the nation-state is rather new (1871) compared to Austria-Hungary, German language and culture prevails throughout Vienna.

Schoenberg, 1921: “I have made a discovery thanks to which the supremacy of German music is ensured for the next hundred years.”

Left: Adolph Hitler’s birthplace in Braunau am Inn, Austria.Right: Hitler in Vienna, 1838, for the Anschluss (Austrian annexation).

18th and 19th century composers were drawn to the city due to the patronage of the Habsburgs, making Vienna the European capital of classical music.

The First Viennese School: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven.

Traditions of the past dominate the curriculum of Vienna’s schools and universities. Stefan Zweig: “It was a dull, pointless learning that the old pedagogy forced upon us, not for the sake of life, but for the sake of learning. And the only truly joyful moment of happiness for which I have to thank my school was the day I was able to shut the door on it forever.

Above: Vienna State Opera house.Below: University of Music and Performing Arts.

“Vienna’s musical past was legendary, and the city’s inhabitants, who could claims such luminaries as Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms in their collective ancestry, were almost all, regardless of social and economic class, self-appointed music experts. This overwhelming interest in things musical was equaled only by the extreme conservatism of the public’s tastes, and the combination proved inimical to any composer who dared challenge the status quo. Hissing or whistling through the hollow ends of their door keys was the way concertgoers routinely expressed their disapproval of the unfamiliar… The rudeness of the Viennese public was matched only by that of the Viennese press. The quality of the writing was so abysmal that today Austrians still use the adjective ‘journalistic’ as a derogatory term” (Kallir 1984: 22).

The legendary scandals greeting Schoenberg’s premieres are part of a tradition of Viennese high society’s cultural conservatism.

Arts: Gustav Klimt (Vienna Art Nouvea/Secession Movement), Emil Jakob Schindler, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele (Austrian expressionism)

Sciences: Sigmund FreudPhilosophy: Ludwig WittgensteinArchitecture: Otto Wagner, Adolf LoosMusic: Gustav MahlerLetters: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur

Schnitzler (Junges Wien)Journalism: Karl Kraus (Die Frackel), Theodor

Herzl (founder of modern political Zionism)

“Much has been written about the institution of the Viennese coffeehouse, with its complimentary newspapers and obligatory little glasses of water. Home away from home (or, for victims of Vienna’s chronic housing shortage, home itself), post office, and social club all rolled into one, the coffeehouse has gone down in history as the place where, in the late nineteenth century, vanguard intellectuals met to shape the future” (Kallir 1984: 16).

Left: Café Griendsteidl, Vienna’s leading literary coffeehouse in the 1890s.Below: Schoenberg, 2nd from right.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1946) is born into a poor Jewish shopkeeper’s family from Vienna’s Second District ghetto, on the ‘other side’ of the Danube Canal.

Early musical training came from playing chamber music and amateur orchestra while a junior bank clerk. Although as a composer he was almost entirely self-taught, his music was influenced by individual lessons with Oskar Adler and Alexander von Zemlinsky.

Zemlinsky is especially significant; only three years older, he introduces Schoenberg to the cultural and social heart of Vienna. “Over the course of the next five or six years, he logged in several hundred nights at the opera, and by the time he was twenty-five, he had seen each of Richard Wagner’s operas close to thirty times” (Kallir 1984: 16). Zemlinsky introduces Schoenberg to to the circle of rebellious young musicians at the Café Griensteidl.

Schoenberg also paints and writes extensively.

Schoenberg’s star pupils, they elaborate and extend his innovations in atonality and twelve-tone technique.

Artists and intellectuals advocate a social, political and moral break with Vienna’s imperial past and bourgeois values.

Social Democrats and Liberals begin criticizing the Empire and calling for workers’ rights.

Artists revolt against bourgeois sentimentality. Adolph Loos, architect: “Ornament is crime.” (Cf. Walter Gropius & Bauhaus)

An aesthetic movement of the early 20th century in painting, film, literature, and music.

Emphasizes the expression of emotion, often distorted into angst.

In Austria, epitomized by the painting of Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka.

Kokoschka: “It is not my trade to unmask society, but to seek in the portrait of an individual his inner life, that measure of all things, and never to rob humanity of its value.”

Egon Schiele, “Death and the Maiden” (1915)

Oskar Kokoschka, “Bride of the Wind” (1913)

Schoenberg’s first creative breakthrough, circa 1909: the suspension of tonality.

Expressionism directed toward the modernist goal of breaking with bourgeois convention (e.g., the orthodoxy of tonality).

Schoenberg: “When I compose, my decisions are guided only by sentiment, by the sentiment present in form. It is this which tells me what to write, everything else is excluded. Every chord is created and placed under compulsion, the compulsion of an expressive need, but perhaps also of an inexorable, but unconscious, logic of harmonic construction.”

Pointedly not the direction pursued by French atonal composers. “In essence, two avant-guardes were forming side by side. The Parisians were moving into the brightly lit world of daily life. The Viennese went in the opposite direction, illuminating the terrible depths with their holy torches” (Ross 2007: 45)

Observance of a single tonic key as the basis for composition. From this note, melody structured within regular intervals: the first (tonic), fourth (subdominant), and fifth (dominant) triads, major/minor chords, etc.

A musical invention of only two centuries before Schoenberg’s time.

Adorno on tonality’s effect in classical music before Schoenberg: “It was as if every musical particular was subordinated to an established generality. By listening appropriately, starting from there, one would be able to deduce the development of its particulars and to find one’s way with relative ease. Traditional music listened for the listener.”

Example of atonality: Schoenberg, Three piano pieces (1909).

Schoenberg’s second creative breakthrough, circa 1928: dodecaphony.

“[T]he individualistic doctrine have been carried to its furthermost limits, and the mainspring of the tonal system shattered, [Schoenberg and his school] now turned to the reorganization of the musical means on the basis of a new structural order without belying the expressionist stand” (Rognoni 1977: 50).

Example: Alban Berg's Violin Concerto (1935).

“I was driven into paradise”: Like a number of European composers and radical intellectuals (including Adorno) fleeing the Nazis , Schoenberg finds himself in Los Angeles, the stronghold of America’s “culture industries.”

Teaches first at USC, then UCLA (1936-1944). John Cage takes music classes there around 1936-1977.

Schoenberg’s legacy takes root in a surprising foundation. “Of the multifarious strands of American music, one in particular began to prosper in the university environment: composition informed by twelve-tone technique… In the late sixties and early seventies, twelve-tone composers were reaching the height of their influence. By some accounts, they effectively took control of university composition departments across the country” (Ross 2007: 401, 489).