When I was not yet twenty, I heard Webern's Five Movements for Strings, Opus 5, for the first time at a music festival, and studied the score. I then wrote an essay on it for the Leipzig Zeitschrift fur Musik, which published my first piece of music criticism.

In this essay I contrasted Webern and Schoenberg, especially the Schoenberg of Opus 19 and Opus 11. My reservations about Webern would perhaps take a different form nowadays from what they were even ten years ago. I maintained that tendencies which in Schoenberg derived from the need for self-expression and which arose spontaneously and, as it were, irrationally, were given a rationalized and systematic form in Webern. This was already evident in the exhaustive motivic development of the Five Movements, Opus 5. Compared to the unprotected openess of Schoenberg which I so greatly admired, I found the Webern reactionary. I scented reification in his postulate of a maximum of interconnections. It was comparable to what happened later on, in classical twelve-note technique, where the density of organization was intended to make good the loss of the tonal system of relations. In this respect Webern was to be classified among the exponents of traditional, that is, thematic music. Eimert points out that although 'he was the first to abandon the merely linear dimension of the row, he did not do so by integrating the row within a three dimensional sound world', but that he had gained 'space by splitting up the row into motivic particles and by inserting, as it were, the flat surfaces into each other, thus creating a relief-like network set fast in the sound material, a structure whose material nature and modes of interlocking have only recently become fully transparent'.

In an analogous way, in 1957, I interpreted the function of counterpoint as a device for reconstructing the musical space that had been lost. There can be no doubt that that too was what was meant later on by the totality of the relationships distilled from the individual note. Webern did not think in parameters; what he did was to intensify motivic and thematic music in a way that surpassed Schoenberg and he did so in order to eliminate what may be thought of as the fortuitous residues which survived into both atonality and twelve-note technique. But we should add that this greater concentration of the relationships and the tightening up of technique does not necessarily make the musical end-product, the composition, denser and more compelling.

There is quite a simple explanation for this. As an instance of this canon-like interlocking of the row shapes, Webern's Concerto for Nine Instruments is undoubtedly one of his most authentic works. However, the last movement has nothing like the intensive and compelling effect to be expected from his musical method. It resembles a joyful conclusion. The traditional march accompanies the departure of the nine musicians; it is almost consciously archaic in fact. Instead of the universality of the serial relationships putting their stamp on the material, we find ourselves reminded rather of eighteenth-century cassations, which are scarcely in keeping with the times. There is a wide chasm between the means and the end result.

This calls for closer scrutiny, not in order to find fault with Webern, but because of its aesthetic and technical implications. How many relationships should be looked for depends on the character of the work, the nature of what is to be composed, the simplicity or otherwise of what is to be represented in the composition. The totality of relationships as such, their profusion or absence, are not indispensable features of the work's truth-content. They have no merit in themselves, nor do they automatically provide guarantees of musical meaning.

Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, p.289-290

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Spontaneity as irrationality, remediated by rational, systematic forms.

Hands up, who has ever heard the saying "we had to kill the pig to save it's life."

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Even grumpy, crusty ol' Adorno chooses unprotected openess over sudoku music. You know, music where :

"once you get the knack of the strategies that work, filling them in is a fairly mechanical exercise, more like proofreading"

Hooray for Adorno, keeping lit the lamp of irrational, unprotected openess in art.

(1962 he's writing this.)

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"we find ourselves reminded rather of eighteenth-century cassations"

'Free Jazz' that after a prolonged section of 'free-ness' capitulates to a 'walk' with a 'chang-chang-a-chang' on the ride.

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Adorno also loves him some Berg--and loves Berg for the same reasons he loves Schoenberg. About Berg he says:

Berg's music inclines towards that experience of the amorphous and the diffuse in erotic impulses, which tends to be repressed. It is the antipode to everything spick and span, to the clean lines of cubism which confuse form with the will to extirpate all impulses alien to the self in all the restorational schools of modern music.

(Adorno, Berg's Discoveries in Compositional Technique, p. 182 and 183)

Restorational schools of modern music. Restorational schools of modern music. Do words mean anything anymore? Did they mean anything in 1962?

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As wonderful as Adorno's hurt words are when slung against the mirrored limo windows of corporate bop and the stinky tapestries of performance art posturing, when we take into account that these words are over 40 years old the admiration doesn't diminish, but is instead accompanied by a disbelief that they are still as germane now as they were then.

This of course brings to mind Reich and his notions about human error, in particular

We find a great part of this enormous error in the inability of the masses of people even to think about their position in nature; in their tendency to follow blindly the heresies taught by individuals and, beyond that, to persecute and torture anyone who tries to clarify this error

Reich, Ether God and Devil, p. 25

But it must be working for someone, and so...