Anton von Webern's Drei Lieder, Op. 18: Analysis

[@johnappleseed8369]

Webern is one of my all time favorite composers, it's great to see a video on him!

[@frankmaiorano5340]

The common denominator between Johnny Appleseed and Anton Von Webern was the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg.

[@johnappleseed8369]

@@frankmaiorano5340 Holy fuck, mind blown. I'm not a Christian and I haven't read all of Swedenborgs works but I have read some of them, I never noticed before that Webern referenced Swedenborg before. Are you my fucking HGA?

[@kittyandthekatz8046]

Very much enjoy your presentations - thank you!!

[@flatboost]

Great Samuel! Many thanks!

[@danteperez9436]

Extraordinary analysis. Great content.

[@samuel_andreyev]

Thanks!

[@onlykarlhenning]

Interesting show!

[@red_ford23]

These videos are important to me. I studied music theory in the 1990s with jazz composition in my head. It's nice to go back to what I skipped over and find them.

[@okilfeathermusic]

Nice work, like Mr. Appleseed below says, there is so little decent Webern material on KZbin that this is most welcome. Off the cuff I would add that his tone-row seems to be ordered to afford the composer some Schönberg-type stripped-of-all-functionality seventh chords (P4/b5); one can get these trichords from pitches 1-3, 5-7, 6-8, 9-11 and 12-2 of the tone-row. Of course, as you mention, he dashes the row all over the three instruments liberally but those chords do get a look in in various places.

[@samuel_andreyev]

Owen Kilfeather Thanks for your feedback. You're right about the 7th chords. Personally, though, I really don't hear this piece harmonically, the harmonic rhythm is just too fast for that. Any harmonic effects are local and fleeting..

[@okilfeathermusic]

You're right about that, I suppose those chords didn't make it off the sketch paper, to all intents and purposes.

[@jsh31425]

Samuel-- General comment on your music analysis videos. I *really* like what you're doing here. My main suggestion for taking these videos to the next level: many many more audio examples. For me, the gold standard for music education videos is Bernstein: Bernstein at a piano explaining by informal demonstration Beethoven and Schoenberg. I don't know if you're enough of a pianist to do something similar; or, if not, what the copyright issues are for including more recording excerpts. But the connection between your wonderfully organized thoughts, and the experience of the sounds, is the thing missing from these videos right now. Just some food for thought. You're doing tremendously good work here. Please keep it up!

[@samuel_andreyev]

jsh31425 Thank you for your feedback. I've only just learned how to edit videos. My more recent ones contain more sound samples. Unfortunately I don't have a piano in my home, and I'm limited to short excerpts anyway for copyright reasons, but I will try to include more and more examples.

[@samuel_andreyev]

jsh31425 btw, I agree about Bernstein. Talking about music, and presenting it to a non-specialised public, is an art, and it takes great skill. I'm learning to do it as I go..

[@parsa.mostaghim]

thanks Sameul, learned a lot. didn't think you can use tone rows so freely🎈

[@goingfortheone1]

I absolutely agree on the phenomenological aspect of listening to Weberns 12-tone use in particular. To me its almost a very zen or eastern meditative experience. You can only be in the present, you can't predict the future and most likely you can't recall the past (at least I can't memorize the tone rows and their permutations). This leaves you with a constant present, attention only to the moment and what you are hearing. What you didn't mention that is actually, I think, a crucial element in his style of aesthetic is also the pointillist technique, especially in his orchestral works. Not only can you not predict the next pitches, you also can't predict the next heart timbre, they are in constant flux. In this Webern is even more modern (or more ancient) and more radical in his aesthetic, I think, than Berg or Schoenberg, who based the intonation and logic of their phrases (though in pitch organization they are novel) on romantic music. Weberns laconic pointillism is totally different.

[@samuel_andreyev]

Commentators often forget that Webern doesn't care whether or not you hear the structural underpinnings of his work, and that's especially true of this piece, since the row contains little or no structural redundancy (as opposed to later works like Op. 24). The structures in op 18 have no direct bearing on the listener's perception, only an oblique one. Phrasing, expression and colour are more important. I wouldn't call this a pointillist work, incidentally. It contains real phrases that are surprisingly long given the work's brevity. Finally, Webern's enduring modernity stems from his profound understanding of musical history, particularly the Franco-Flemish polyphonists, on whom he based his doctoral studies.

[@goingfortheone1]

Ah yes. I think there is a difference here with Schoenberg, who DID think that one can hear the 12-tone row? And yes, Webern sounds totally new and ancient at the same time, that's what makes him so exciting to me. I was talking more of Webern in general and especially about his orchestral works in regards to pointillism, not this work in particular, true.

[@samuel_andreyev]

goingfortheone1 Yes. Schoenberg thought of the row as a mega-theme (see the 4th Quartet, or the Variations op. 31) and worked with it motivically, much in keeping with the Brahmsian technique of developing variation. In thzt sense Schoenberg remained forever tied to the ethos of romanticism, something Boulez and others have criticized him for. Webern's project is distinctly different and, paradoxically, by looking backwards to ars nova and Bach's more elaborate contrapuntal works, became arguably more modern.. but I still love Schoenberg :)

[@samuel_andreyev]

goingfortheone1 Yes. Schoenberg thought of the row as a mega-theme (see the 4th Quartet, or the Variations op. 31) and worked with it motivically, much in keeping with the Brahmsian technique of developing variation. In thzt sense Schoenberg remained forever tied to the ethos of romanticism, something Boulez and others have criticized him for. Webern's project is distinctly different and, paradoxically, by looking backwards to ars nova and Bach's more elaborate contrapuntal works, became arguably more modern.. but I still love Schoenberg :)

[@goingfortheone1]

Oh me too. Schoenberg is genius in instrumentation, orchestration, keeping his music exciting even with a very rigid technique. Though I do enjoy his free-atonal works perhaps even more than dodecaphonic ones. (Exception would be the piano concerto, which is absolutely stunning)

[@DeflatingAtheism]

In practical terms, I think Webern's employment (loose though it is) of the 12-tone method in this piece functions more as a protective measure against octave doublings, or against having a note proximate to another note of the same pitch class but different register. For every bracketed expression of the tone row, the F natural will be towards the beginning, and the G natural will be towards the end, so there is a more-or-less equidistance between notes of the same pitch class, despite the liberties with which the row is sounded. The precise interval relations between successive pitches of the tone row aren't crucial, since those horizontal adjacencies aren't preserved in the resulting music.

[@nathangale7702]

Thank you for pointing out that the specific tone row is mostly irrelevant to how we experience and enjoy the music. Every time I hear a tone row (including in this video) my initial thought is "Yep, that sounds like a tone row...I wonder if it's actually the same one as all the others I've heard before." I've never thought that one tone row stands out more than another, that it was particularly catchy, clever, or anything else. Now that I have that notion out of the way, I can enjoy the music.

[@mischacarlberg6631]

This is only true if the goal is to make music that is strictly non-harmonic. I can name many twelve tone rows that sound better than others because they are more harmonic.

[@DeflatingAtheism]

Characteristics of the row are very much salient to a person's perception of 12-tone-serialist music, even if practically no one is able to follow all the tone rows in all their transpositions and retrogrades throughout a piece. I have been impressed with the construction of many tone rows, but I think if you're approaching the row itself as a _tune,_ you're limited from the outset. Rather, the row is the building block of a piece of a piece of music, whose surface level may or may not involve tunes.

[@coolvevo7577]

Appreciate the insight

[@henrygingercat]

V. interesting- thanks. A couple of questions: Once you know the row it's usually easy to see where the pitches come from but did Webern have any system for which of them were to be combined vertically into chords? And how is rhythm organised in serial Webern?

[@samuel_andreyev]

peter owen This piece is dodecaphonic, not serial -- there is an important distinction to be made there. The rhythms are freely invented, as are the groupings of pitches into chords. Thanks for the questions.

[@C0NTR4B455]

Thanks for this very informative video. You raise many interesting points some of which I have likewise pondered re Webern. The question of "Naivety" in regard to Webern's general awareness of how his music might ever be firstly actually performed with any degree of success and secondly be assimilated by the general concert going public. The question still remains an open one to some degree in 2024 let alone 1924. Many other such questions have intruiged me over the years: Did Webern really believe his music sat very comfortably in the great Germanic Austrian tradition going back to the First Viennese school? The answer appears to be "Yes". So what exactly in the light of that did he make of the (at best) indifference and (at worst) hostility towards his art? Even the beloved Mahler (supportive of Schoenberg) was apparently completely baffled by the music being presented. And the general public although finally picking up on say the Gurreleider (at which point Schoenberg had of course moved quite beyond its idiom) had been left far far behind. And so into this strange situation lands a work like Webern's op 18 with its immense denands upon the performers, almost absurd musical gymnastics and outlandish intervallic leaps and dives. I have often found myself just bursting out laughing after the second movement at the sheer audacity of it all. Its still to my ears utterly shocking in its originality and brevity. And yet the apparently naive/innocent Webern it seems believed it was simply another piece of music serenely existing in the pre existing tradition. Something doesn't quite tally here but I am not quite sure what it is ... Understanding Webern is something I continue to ponder...

[@xencage]

Fantastic channel! I hope you will consider covering George Crumb, and Xenakis.

[@samuel_andreyev]

Thank you. I will be covering Xenakis fairly soon, and I am thinking of Crumb as well.

[@nicksatie4722]

Thank you

[@LendallPitts]

Thank you.

[@elsieparker6983]

Thanks for posting this. I've looked at song #2 "Erlösung" of this set, and the tone row is F# A F G# E G Eb B D Bb C# C, correct? The 3rd song, "Ave Regina" I have for the row E Eb G C B G# F# G Bb A ( he backtracks on F#, Bb, C and Eb which he as already used) and then D C#. Webern does not keep the repetition of his row so intact in this 3rd song. If you have a way to analyse the 3rd song, please do. The score being in C makes it easier to see the rows, but very much trouble for the Eb clarinetist. I think the Eb clarinet and guitar parts are just as difficult to perform as the voice part.

[@mayarasmussen2599]

fascinating

[@MrInterestingthings]

I've read several bios on Schonberg but here is the letter that I've been NEEDING! I can't believe he is lecturing Der Busoni ! This idea was already happening with Virginia Woolf and others in verbal writing but few in music ! I can't believe it hasn't been anthologized everywhere by now. One hears multifariousness in many composing now. It is the thing that makes sense in our time . Focus seems very unrealistic to me somehow. I find it hard to even listen to Mozart and Hadn now - a melody is a beautiful thing and ony that can make me feel something real is happening in the older 3 and 4 voice part music where the parts are all unified .

[@alexgellermann2773]

I love Webern

[@paxwallacejazz]

Here's my overly simple question. Did Berg attempt to use 12 tone procedure in the most tonal way possible?and did Webern attempt to use it in the most non tonal way possible. They do sound somewhat antithetical.

[@DeflatingAtheism]

I can't speak for their intentions, but I do think Webern consciously tried to avoid tonal implications in his serial compositions, and highlight tone combinations like [014] and [016] that would typically be avoided in tonal or diatonic composition. You will notice, however, at 21:25, that there is an enharmonically-spelled Db Major chord between tones 3 and 5, and a diminished chord between tones 8 and 10. Whether we ever actually hear these tones in conjunction in this piece is another matter!

[@paxwallacejazz]

Here is Bernstein's question why do so many profess real love for the works of Berg? But few actually feel that about Schoenberg. I am very fond of Schoenberg and chilled and arrested by Webern. But Berg piano Sonata as a transitional piece and his Violin Concerto I do love.

[@richtrophicherbs6463]

why the four line stave? very confusing.

[@samuel_andreyev]

It's not a four-line staff. The top line is a bit faint due to poor image compression.

[@warrenstutely1093]

Never mind zen it easily relates to medieval ,especially English,mysticism. Also wonderfully lyrical music. Thanks so much. Warren

[@warrenstutely1093]

Christian medlieval mysticism in music. Instead of trendy zen. Read more in "local" traditions !!!!

[@SaccidanandaSadasiva]

If I was in a deserted island I would take the complete works of J.S.Bach, A.Webern and Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart. I need nothing else than the divine music of bach, the minimalism of webern and the craziness of captain beefheart. You?

[@richtrophicherbs6463]

should the first note be an E flat. I hear a semitone, not a whole tone, between the first two notes.

[@juanborjas6416]

Screw key signatures, they are also useless to me 😂 Thank you for this video, it is very helpful.

[@OperaCantata]

Thank you for the video. I wonder why there are 12 tones and not 30 tones or not 5 tones? Luigi Nono's Il Canto Sospeso and Zimmermann's Die Soldaten are written almost in the same style but developed it even further. And I would rather call this a style of music than a technique. As a listener and a person who lacks much theoretical training (though I have a very trained ear) I find that many people (e.g. celloguy in the comments section) tend to put too much effot into studying the technique. This technique is but a technique. It can be applied for different styles of music. In particular, some music for Tom and Jerry was written through the means of that technique. In fact, you can write many different styles of music without breaking the rules of this technique. So the predominant aspect of that piece and other Webern pieces is the style of music that Webern wanted to write in, he wanted this result through one technique or another. In fact similar results can be achieved without this technique. And now let me explain the result. I do not consider this music to be purely atonal. It's certainly not like noise music. I would rather call this multitonal or music with an extreme tonal eclecticism, or better, extreme expessionism. It's quickly changing tonalities. If you listen to some small sections of this piece you will hear some genuine harmony and later you will understand that there can be found some genuine continuity within it. So this extremely localised method of perseption might be demanding but it is the key to understanding the piece. By the way, Shoenberg wasn't the the only person who developed this technique. It was developed independently by several different composers (including some Russian composers).

[@samuel_andreyev]

Excellent comments. As Schoenberg (and many others) have pointed out, the term 'atonal' is somewhat nonsensical because it literally means 'music without tones'. And under the umbrella term of 'atonal' we find pieces with extraordinarily different expressive aims and technical means. As a category, its only use is defining pieces of music negatively in terms of what they are not, with regards to a presumed normative practice of writing late romantic harmony. Otherwise, it's really too big and too vague to mean much of anything at all.

[@ballefranz7059]

21:10

[@victorarul8897]

I would argue against the music of the 2nd Viennese school being the first instance of conceptualised music that is atonal, consider the music associated with the haka.

[@tuttifrutti2229]

WHen I hear Webern I think of BAch and Brahms

[@celloguy]

I know that this is probably sacrilege amongst admirers of 'serious music' amongst which I certainly consider myself. But... I have to say that I think Webern's Im Sommerwind shows more promise and imagination and is more rewarding than any of the 12 tone works. The Straussian and Mahlerian models are obvious, but there's something absolutely unique here - the piling up of unique moments of sound, micro-miniatures stacked up next to each other, mosaic like, like something from Kurtag or Boulez or Janacek or Stravinsky, but more extreme. Also there's a clarity and austerity in the sonority compared to Strauss and Mahler that is quite intoxicating - the music is pellucid, shimmering and absolutely ravishing, but also has a certain rawness and clarity, something like the Cooke completion Mahler's unfinished 10th, that, combined with its halting, fragmented, intangible narrative mode, I find extremely attractive and mysterious. There's such personality here that I feel was all squeezed out in the later 12 tone works - fine they're crystalline and polished, and the elements I describe here are taken to pointillist extreme, but the loss in pleasure is catastrophic and I think also that expressive range of the music that the technique allows is crippling. 12 tone works express and parse what range aspects of human experience, present what valence? I would say the field is very narrow and largely involved with Anxiety, chaos, alienation, panic, and dislocation. And just typing that list, I have just realised that that is exactly what humans feel (according to dr. Peterson's work) when hierarchy is removed. Hierarchy is one of the central requirements for meaning, because meaning is in the moral domain and always requires a goal towards which we can move, or that we can subvert. In art, and especially music, this requires an exceptionally refined and complex sensitivity to the materials at all levels of analysis, the hierarchies that they naturally present, but also which the history of the art up to that point has presented. I think the expressive range of music actually did increase over time between the renaissance and the modern era, possibly contrary to what you said on the Jordan Peterson interview recently, by which I really do mean the range of what could be expressed, in pure sonority and also specificity and Affekt, and certainly not in quality or depth. Bach contains everything, perhaps, but only implicitly - Janacek, Berg, Schoeck, Ives do things affektively that are only on the absolute edge of the edge of Bach's radar, let alone Tallis' if at all. But! The 12 tone technique, with its rejection of hierarchy as you say, instantly sterilises and vitiates itself at the core of what music is - it's not *merely* the *control* of sound (though hilariously, we are so prone to producing hierarchy as creatures, and then interpreting hierarchy in whatever we see and hear, that the element of choice on the composers part had to be limited to the extreme and ironed out! Berg of course, chose not choose antitonal tone rows, and I think history has shown that he was right to do so), as if this was some sort of abstracted phenomenon that we had been partaking in ubiquitously for millennia as the human race.

[@celloguy]

This is by no means a railing against atonal music in general - I love Feldman, some of Carter, Berg etc. Etc. But I do recognise that it's very difficult to produce appealing and affektive art in this region, and contrary to Schoenberg's claims, do not think it will ever be as popular and enter the public consciousness at large like say a piece by Bach, Chopin, Mahler or Shostakovich has. Many or most of post war composers that have been most successful in picking through the morass of styles available to them have found a language that lies somewhere between tonality and atonality, and that can use this as another expressive parameter to draw on (Berg being the main progenitor of this technique I would say, and Ives too, though to different ends, and much more diffuse and delayed influence in this regard) - Dutilleux, Ligeti, Messiaen, Kurtag, Lutoslawski perhaps, and then even Ades and Benjamin. The thing to note here though is that the unbelievably differentiated styles, so extreme along their own paths in all parameters of music, in all of these cases, except Ligeti, allowed these brilliant musical minds only about a decade of truly great original composing, before falling largely into imitation of themselves. There are purely tonal composers too... Arvo Part is a strange combination of Webernian strictness in form and process, and commitment to primordial tonal implications, creating music that is superbly successful and pure on its own terms while the technique held firm, and then all deviations from the strictness instantly vitiate its power, so that again, there is only about a decade of really strong music that he produced - development of the technique lead to a weakening of it. Adams is maybe the most often played living composer (a guess, could also be arvo part? Or John Williams!) and of the minimalist inspired guys, the most fully aware of his place in history - he draws on the biggest wealth of sources. "Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy", a clear response to his 12 tone training whilst at university. I remember resisting this when I read it in my teens when I was in a Carter phase, but I realise more and more the wisdom in it. I have to say that I think his most successful work is still Harmonielehre, where the integration of minimalist and turn of the century modernist styles is most brazen and exciting. Ok now I'm rambling. Thoughts on any of this?

[@samuel_andreyev]

It's great to see such thoughtful remarks here. Thank you for taking the time to write. It's clear that this is not, and can never be, a normative practice of music. Op. 18 is by all accounts an extreme and highly esoteric development, even by Webern's standards. But so what? When you look at a Mondrian painting, do you regret that it doesn't look like Rembrandt? Would you have preferred that Webern go on to be an imitator of Mahler? His student pieces, written in a tonal idiom, are actually rather clumsy, although they are fascinating to listen to.

[@celloguy]

Samuel Andreyev what I object to is that the 12 tone technique was a very personal response and solution to a personal crisis that Schoenberg had. There's a reason he never formally wrote it down for others to use, and also that he made his famous comment about there still being pieces in C major to be written. Webern takes Schoenberg to even more ascetic extremes, again fine if that is his true course, and it could maybe be argued that it was given the proclivities in even his tonal works towards miniaturisation, extreme dynamics, tiny gestures ( I agree that his early works are clumsy in some regards, as one would expect of student efforts, but also they show incredible originality and promise that I don't think he fully realised, as say, Berg did. Of course he shouldn't sound like Mahler, but Berg didn't, even although he also clearly has the same starting place, and I would say integrates his history much more fully and satisfyingly into his music.) The negation of the "organic" wisdom of history, which is the sum total of the greatest minds acting at peak capacity, by instead constructing an alternative rational system, is actually not so different psychologically from the totalitising desire that we saw from the communists and fascists in precisely the same time in history , aimed at a rationally constructed utopian goal, but unpredictably disastrous when carried out because we simply don't know the affektive load of what our (meaning laden) communication holds. There's a parallel too with communist thought in wanting to remove hierarchy, and that being in the end catastrophic to meaning! Now before you think I've gone off the deep end, I'm not for a moment suggesting that 12 tone music is equivalent or as bad as fascism or communism or any such nonsense. Merely that rationally constructed systems are unpredictable and weak compared to the collective development of humanity for the last however many thousands of millennia. To get back to Schoenberg, the 12 tone technique as I said was a very personal technique for him, and maybe, possibly, it could be argued that Webern happened to require the exact same technique to express what he needed to express, even if this meant a radical reduction in the range of what he could express, as it certainly did for Schoenberg. But I guess my larger objection is the taking up in the post war era of Webern as some kind of God to imitate, which lead to fetishisation of the technique as some sort of road forward when in fact Schoenberg had shown a single, radically personal road inward.

[@celloguy]

Samuel Andreyev for the record I would value Schoenberg's 'atonal' period much more highly over the 12 tone period. And I think it's incredibly telling that tonal implications begin to creep into those magical last works like the String Trio.

[@samuel_andreyev]

Some points in response. • The tonal system is an 'alternative rational system', seen from the vantage point of the early renaissance. Magnificent as it is, it had to be constructed. Triadic harmony doesn't exist in nature. • Webern was obsessed with Renaissance polyphony from his student days onward. Renaissance vocal music, not being able to rely on virtuosic instrumental figurations, tended to place a great deal of emphasis on sophistication of compositional technique, and a high degree of abstraction. Berg and Schoenberg had vastly different expressive impulses. • I agree that Schoenberg's works pre-1920s are more satisfying, with some exceptions (love the String Trio!) • Webern can't be blamed for armies of postwar composers misunderstanding his work. Blame them, not him :)

[@tbonenfant]

The soprano will overbalance the e-flat clarinet? Really? Maybe the lower register, but anything in the clarion register or higher, my money is on the clarinet.

[@franckmousset4022]

Peut-être l'œuvre de Webern la plus difficile à écouter (avec le Trio opus 20).

[@samuel_andreyev]

Franck Mousset c'est vrai qu'elle est particulière..

[@briansmith9455]

come on! talk about the Webern murder conspiracy!!! just kidding, of course. great video as usual.

[@magnusloven2041]

"if you were to blink, you would just miss half the piece" ok i'm having whatever he's on

[@jrod9777]

dawg this is jus a 30 minute video tearing into Webern lmfao

[@ИМельниченко]

cutie