Schoenberg and Americans he Influenced

Album design in which Arnold Schoenberg is the “cornerstone” with Leon Kirchner above and Roger Sessions to the left (courtesy of Naxos of America)

One week from today, Albany Records will release the album Transformations. This recording was conceived by violinist Elizabeth Chang as a reflection on profound teacher/student relationships from her artistic heritage. The earliest of the teachers is Arnold Schoenberg, born in 1874 and a leading pioneer in exploring alternatives to the harmonic progressions of tonal music. Roger Sessions was born about two decades later in 1896. Sessions’ primary teachers were Horatio Parker and Ernest Bloch; but he formed a friendship with Schoenberg when both of them were in California (Schoenberg in Los Angeles and Sessions in Berkeley). Leon Kirchner, born in 1919, would study with both of them and would go on to teach Chang at Harvard University. As usual, Amazon.com is taking pre-orders for this new release.

Curiously, the three composers on this album are presented in reverse chronological order. Thus, the album begins with Kirchner’s second duo for violin and piano, with Chang performing with pianist Steven Beck. Kirchner wrote this piece late in life, in 2002 at the age of 82.

For the better part of the twentieth century, too many of the compositions that pursued Schoenberg’s desire to depart from the need for a tonal center tended to constitute what might be called “agenda music.” That agenda might be distilled to the motto, “I don’t care if you like it, this is how things should be!” By 2002 Kirchner no longer had to worry about having an agenda.

The duo was composed as a tribute to the violinist Felix Galimir, whom he had first met at the Marlboro Music Festival. Galimir had been a close personal friend of Berg, and in 1936 his string quartet recorded Berg’s Lyric Suite. He joined the Marlboro faculty in 1954 and remained at that post until his death in 1999. In many respects the Lyric Suite is distinguished by the way in which the composer honors both tonal traditions and the new ambitions of his teacher, Schoenberg. To some extent there is a sense that Kirchner was reflecting on that balance in composing his 2002 duo.

Sessions is also represented by a duo composed late in life. In this case the violin was paired with a cello (performed by Alberto Parrini); and the duo itself was Sessions’ last piece of chamber music, written at the age of 82. This composition is stricter about avoiding a tonal center than Kirchner’s duo would later be.

However, Virgil Thomson once wrote that, for all of Schoenberg’s efforts to transcend tonality, the rhythms of his music always seemed to revert to the late nineteenth-century traditions of Vienna. While Sessions was not subjected to a similar influence, the attentive listener will quickly recognize that it is through his command of rhythmic patterns that this duo charts a well-defined course from beginning to end. This piece is preceded by an earlier (1953) solo violin sonata, in which Sessions adapted Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique to his own purposes; but this is another piece in which the listener is best guided by the rhetorical development of rhythms.

The album then concludes with the one Schoenberg selection, his Opus 47 “Phantasy” for violin and piano, composed in Los Angeles in 1949. I have to confess that I have a strong personal attachment to this music. In the late Eighties, when my wife and I were living in Los Angeles, we would make annual trips to Santa Fe every summer to see the opera performances. The summers were also devoted to a chamber music festival, which used to have rehearsals open to the public during the day. As a result, I had the good fortune to listen to violinist György Pauk and pianist Ursula Oppens prepare this “Phantasy.” I also had the chutzpah to ask Oppens if she wanted a page-turner, because I really wanted to follow the score while listening to them; and she was kind enough to allow me up on stage.

Needless to say, reading the score well enough to turn the pages at the right time was no easy matter; but I managed to do all that was required of me without fumbling. Unfortunately, seeing what both musicians were playing did little to penetrate an overall sense of opacity. However, towards the end of the piece, Pauk said (very audibly) “Now we dance!” This rehearsal took place decades before I had encountered Thomson’s observation about Schoenberg. However, thanks to Pauk, this was the first time I began to appreciate how to get caught up into Schoenberg’s rhetorical command of rhythm! As a result, I could not listen to the recording of Chang and Beck without thinking of Pauk and Oppens; and, even without having the score pages to follow, that sense of rhythm unfolding into dance made for a thoroughly enjoyable listening experience.