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Heroes and saints, part 2

July 21, 2017
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I cannot forget that Abigail Adams said, “Remember the ladies.”

I recently wrote a blog about several of my “heroes.” I was not oblivious of the fact that my five choices were all of the dangly-bits gender, and I promised in that entry to follow up with one on women who were also my heroes — those who embody character that I admire and would aspire to, if I were a better person than I have managed to be.

Top on my list of women who are my heroes I would place my wife of 35 years, but I will not be writing about her, for deeply personal reasons. Let us simply acknowledge that there is now a constellation that bears her name, made up of the brightest stars, cast up into the nighttime sky.

As with the previous posting, there are some women who most of the world would add to the list. I will never be as brave or as eloquent as Malala Yousafzai. If someone had shot me in the face, I’m sure I would have lain low for the rest of my life, looking back nervously over my shoulder and jumping at Fourth of July fireworks. But Malala continues to speak out forcefully for the education of women. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, when she was 17, which is the age my granddaughters are now. I think of them as mature for their ages, but Malala — wow. They don’t hand out Nobel Peace Prizes for being class president or state legislative page. She is one in a billion.

They do hand out Nobel Peace Prizes for upholding democracy in the face of authoritarian military juntas, though. Aung San Suu Kyi has one. She spent a total of 15 years under house arrest in her native Burma for speaking out against the repressive government, and finally managed to bring democracy back to her nation. (I recognize that all heroes run the risk of clay feet. Malala so far has avoided that fate, but Aung San Suu Kyi nearly blew decades of good will in the world by failing to condemn violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Burma. One always has to forgive something in one’s heroes. Not one of us is perfect.)

But my personal pantheon comprises five women who have something to give me on a more personal level; they embody traits that I would aspire to and that among them are fervent curiosity; a willingness to include everyone in the circus of humanity; an ability to feel not just sympathy, but empathy; a refusal to accept the conventional wisdom; and a burning aliveness. The each see the multiple layers of existence not as contradictory, but as accumulative.

Toni Morrison — Another Nobel Prize winner, this time for literature, Morrison has the fierce physiognomy of a Tibetan temple’s guardian demon. She suffers not fools gladly. But, as with the Buddhist demons, when you accept her for herself, she turns out to be a guide, not a gatekeeper. I especially appreciate that, although she can walk through walls — indeed, chew the walls up and spit them out — she does not cave in to the conventional definitions laid out for her by society.

When asked about feminism in a 1998 interview in Salon magazine, she said, “In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can’t take positions that are closed. Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book – leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.” 

She has done a great deal for feminism by being the powerful woman she is. It may be “off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I’m involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don’t subscribe to patriarchy, and I don’t think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it’s a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things.”

And geez, can she write.

Agnès Varda — French New Wave cinema broke away from the conventions of studio filmmaking in the 1950s and ’60s, with a fresh approach to storytelling. Varda is often including in their ranks, but really, she isn’t in anyone’s army. She is peculiarly and significantly her own. It is often hard to tell whether she is making documentary or feature film. Her fiction often includes bits of real life, and her documentaries are often so imaginative that the only way you can categorize them is to call them “personal essays” in film language.

She is clearly in love with the things of this world, from her first feature, La Pointe Courte, from 1954, which focuses as much on the physical settings and objects in the small fishing village central to her story, as it does on the two main characters. There are wooden sheds and fishing nets lingered over lovingly by the camera, which moves ever so slowly, giving us all the time we need to pay attention. She dares us to be bored and challenges us to transcend that boredom by paying attention to the wealth she has spread before us.

In The Gleaners and I, she begins by following the poor as they gather bits of food left in the farm fields — a practice written into French law. But, the movie goes on to look at many people who have found value in things forgotten and discarded, including artists who make work from found objects. This includes herself. She said in an interview “I’m not poor, I have enough to eat.” But she points to “another kind of gleaning, which is artistic gleaning. You pick ideas, you pick images, you pick emotions from other people, and then you make it into a film.”

There is no doubting Varda’s feminist bona fides, but her argument is found not in politics, but in human relationships, and in the unembraceable fact that we all die. We wait for the biopsy results with the pop star in Cleo from 5 to 7, we watch the suffering of the poor wraith as she winds down to a cold death in a ditch in Vagabond, and we see Varda’s own love for her husband, Jacques Demy, as he slowly winks out of this life in Jacquot de Nantes. In all of them, death is not a literary device, but a vivifying fact of life we all must face with — if nothing else — creativity.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg — There are many reasons for admiring Ginsburg, not the least of which is her sparkling wit. Even as she becomes older and slower, the words that come out of her mouth always a bit more hesitatingly as age grips her ribcage are often ripping funny. There is always light flashing in those eyes. Whenever she shows up on a C-Span panel discussion, I stop flipping channels and sit through the duration. I love hearing her.

And certainly one admires the legal career which lead her to the senior position on the U.S. Supreme Court (in age, if not in length of service). She is always on the right side, even if not always on the winning side. Her dissents are deeply felt and forcefully written.

One also admires her fashion choice, wearing that lacy jabot across the front of her judicial robe. She was the third woman to administer the oath of office to a president, and the first Supreme Court justice to preside over a same-sex wedding.

And there is her love of opera; she has even appeared several times as a supernumerary in opera productions. And her long marriage to her late husband, Martin Ginsburg. I have a warm regard for anyone forming so close a bond for so long a time.

But the single quality I most admire in the Notorious RBG is the fact she could be friends with the late Antonin Scalia. How, you ask, could this have been possible. Scalia was the most ideologically inflexible of the justices during his term, and the most biting in his writings, whether in the majority or in dissent. Truculent and pugnacious, he had a nasty turn of phrase and seemed to ooze contempt for those who disagreed with him. Yet, Ginsburg and Scalia had a famous friendship in the court. They went to opera together. For years, the Scalias and the Ginsburgs had dinner together every New Year’s Eve. (His friendship with RBG is the one single redeeming feature I can cite in Scalia’s favor).

Nan Goldin — Seeming a universe apart from the high-achieving Supreme Court justice is an artist known for her snapshots of her drug-using friends. Goldin, now 63, made her name with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in 1985, a slide show with music accompaniment that was presented via a Kodak Carousel transparency projector presented against the walls of a gallery. Along with the hundreds of slides, a recording of music by the Velvet Underground, Charles Aznavour, Nina Simone, James Brown and Richard Strauss played, underlying both the rebellious and romantic nature of the lifestyle portrayed — that of the gay subculture, the heroin chic, the damaging personal life of Goldin herself.

It is painful to look at these lost people, with their bruises, smeared eye-liner, tangled hair and thousand-yard-stares. One critic called them “the beaten down and beaten-up,” with “gritty disheveled miens” photographed in “dark and dank ramshackle interiors.”

An edited-down version of the slide show was published a year later as a book. It would be hard to turn those pages and feel there was anything to admire in them, other than the color and composition of them as photographs. But they are redeemed by two contradictory things: their truth and their romanticism. Goldin was not pointing her camera at this lifestyle to admonish it, but to document it; she was not outside it, but a part of it. It was a harsh self-inspection. But it also, while telling hard truths, explored the deep and abiding search for meaning in life. The need for transcendence, for escaping the banality of bourgeoise existence. Surely we are more important as individuals than as cogs in a societal machine.

For a more in-depth analysis of Goldin’s work, check out: https://richardnilsen.com/2013/08/30/the-goldin-mean/

Anne Iott — There are people who are bilingual, but Anne Iott is so in a very specific way: She is an artist, but she was also the chair of the art department at Tidewater Community College in Virginia Beach, Va., for many, many years and was fluent both in art and in administration. This is — if you haven’t been subject to either or both — extremely rare. To be able to converse meaningfully with artists about art in their own language, but to be able to function efficiently in the bureaucratic atmosphere of academe is more than a talent, it is a genius.

As an artist, she is first a painter, but that is just the start. There is hardly an art form or medium that she hasn’t essayed brilliantly. There are prints, collages, photographs, assemblages and in recent years, artist books, which she seems to spin out of her like a tree grows apples.

Certainly her prolific drive to create would nominate her for this list, but it is rather more than that. Anne has a special genius for seeing in other people that which they do not see in themselves. She has helped uncounted people with their careers and with their lives. I know; I owe my career as a writer to her. When I was teaching as a lowly adjunct faculty member at TCC, she finagled a position for me at Norfolk’s Virginian-Pilot newspaper as a freelance art critic. She knew I was a better writer than teacher. I wound up writing one or two reviews each Sunday for the paper, which gave me the confidence and experience to sign on full-time to the Arizona Republic when my wife and I moved to Phoenix, Ariz.

But it is not mere gratitude for her constant support and aid that I put her on this list, but rather for the particular ability to see other people clearly, even when they don’t see themselves, to go out of her way to make life better for other people. Anne has made a good life for herself, but she has also made good lives for all those she has helped. Nothing feels so good as to be seen. Really seen.

All those on these lists, both men (in a previous post) and women embody qualities I love and admire in them, and would wish to be able to emulate. I can try, but even when I don’t succeed, these are the lodestars of my better self.

Heroes and saints

July 11, 2017
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Everyone has his heroes. Of course, the definition of “hero” changes through time and according to who is making the list. In Classical literature, the hero was the one who could translate the will of the gods into history. For some nowadays, we call heroes those who save little children from burning buildings. For others, they call schoolteachers “hero,” or their fathers, or someone else they admire. We have fallen a great way since Achilles became the man who bought us ice cream when we were toddlers.

But really, it has gotten even worse. I remember when the question turned bureaucratic and we began substituting the phrase “role model” for hero. The language is the poorer for it. So is the culture.

But perhaps something less ambitious is appropriate these days, since it is not as if we can believe in the epic hero, the Siegfried or the Aeneas. The 20th century destroyed any illusion we might have had about nobility, and the democratizing replacement has proved sadly short on transcendence.

And in the 20th century, those who aspired to translate the will of the gods brought disaster and destruction to the planet. One thinks of the mythic aura that the propaganda machine set as a halo around Adolf Hitler and the Übermensch, and the idea of heroism now has a stink about it that is hard to shake off. We cannot take seriously the idea of the single human who transcends human limits and converses with the gods. Clay feet for everyone. The cult of personality has left us with Kim Jong Un. However dangerous he may be, he still looks like a parody. So does Mr. Trump, with his dangling neckties and slouch walk, orange skin and ferret-fleece head. Sad.

No, we cannot take any of these pint-size heroes seriously.

Not that there isn’t still a hunger for such. How else can you explain the tsunami of superhero movies, with their rippling chests and spandex tights? Or, for that matter, the rise of so many authoritarian and would-be authoritarian regimes around the globe?

In the ancient myths, heroes were defined by a single act, often resulting in their deaths, making for few retired heroes. But it isn’t the paroxysm of the heroic act that we seek anymore, or can accept — after all, you can’t make a sequel if your hero has been killed and translated into a constellation in the night sky.

And neither can we believe anymore in the “will of the gods.” Whatever gods may have survived Nietzsche have retired to their corners to let the last remaining deity any culture fervently believes in fight it out with himself as Sunni and Shia.

That doesn’t mean we can’t have personal heroes, those we feel embody the values and achievements we care most about. For some, those heroes play sports or lead insurgencies, or make millions of dollars in real estate. They aren’t exactly “role models,” because we don’t truly aspire to put in the hard work required to meet these goals. But we like to imagine that, given the right circumstances — mostly in our daydreams — we might be like them.

Certainly there are a few heroic people who the large proportion of the world’s populace can admire. At least those who feel the warm pumping of humanity beating in their veins.

It’s hard not to think that, despite the recalcitrant and reactionary stubbornness of the Vatican, that Pope Francis is trying his damnedest to reform the Roman Catholic Church. Not in all particulars, of course, but he has clearly made clear he is less judgmental and more inclusive than anyone at the head of the church, perhaps since its founder. He has sent out olive branches to Muslims, to atheists, to homosexuals, even to the Orthodox Church. Now, if he could just do the same thing for women.

And there is an overpowering force of acceptance and forgiveness in the Dalai Lama. Yes, perhaps he giggles just a wee bit too much, and there are the political ramifications of Tibetan separatism, but the Dalai Lama seems to be able to function as a spiritual leader to everyone from Buddhists to atheists — and even to fundamentalist Christians, who recognize in him, if not the spirit of “true religion,” at least that he means well.

And I have to admit that these two men are heroes to me, too. Perhaps one sees their limitations, but then, Siegfried and Aeneas had notable shortcomings as well. (Siegfried was none to bright; he didn’t know the meaning of the word “fear.” Someone should have bought him a dictionary. And Aeneas, well, as far as heroes go, he was sliced from a large sheet of cardboard.)

Who would I put in my personal hagiography? It changes from time to time, as new heroes emerge and former ones snap off their clay feet at the ankles. But for the purpose of writing this short entry, I want to nominate five names. These, then, are my personal heroes, more than bureaucratic, and perhaps a tad less than monumental.

David Attenborough — Pretty much anyone who has seen the 91-year-old BBC TV presenter recognizes immediately the genuineness of his enthusiasm and his complete lack of vanity, with his white hair blowing around his head as he climbs trees in the rainforest or rides under the waves in a submersible. Attenborough, unlike most presenters, not only writes his own material — which is delightfully free from the usual nature-film cliches — but is his own producer. In fact, he was the head of BBC programming for years. He is not just a talking head, he is our surrogate for discovery. Everything he presents, he seems to be finding out for the first time and wants us to share it with him.

“I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.”

If nothing else, his longevity onscreen is unmatched. His first nature film was made in 1954, which for those of you who are math-challenged, was 63 years ago. I am a geezer, but I was in first grade when he made Zoo Story for the BBC. Although he has slowed down, he still provided the voice over for a sequel to The Blue Planet.

I wish I had his enthusiasm and his energy.

Werner Herzog — If Attenborough is the avuncular voice of nature films, Herzog is the voice of nature biting back. His Bavarian-accented English is hypnotic — you cannot turn away. But it is the voice of doom. Make that in capital letters. But there is a kind of smile behind the terror. For Herzog, life is nasty, brutish and short, but it seems to amuse him. If it isn’t bears out to eat you, it is albino crocodiles, or Viet Cong shooting at you in the jungle.

“I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.”

If that isn’t enough, then take this one: “I am fascinated by the idea that our civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.”

How is it, then, that his films are so life-affirming and joyous? It must be because he throws himself into the Maelstrøm with abandon. One sees him like Slim Pickens as Maj. Kong in Dr. Strangelove, riding the nuclear bomb like a bucking bronco.

It is the documentary films primarily that I am talking about. He also makes some of the most daring feature films — how can you top Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, or Fitzcarraldo? — but it is the many, many documentaries that Herzog shows his peculiar Weltanschauung. Again, like Attenborough, there is never an ounce or a gram of cliche. Every utterance is original, but more to the point, true — at least as Herzog understands it.

As the late Roger Ebert had it, Herzog “has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons, or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular.”

Brian Lamb — If Werner is a wolf, then Brian is a lamb. In the current political climate, where everyone yells at the top of their lungs, spewing venom and spit, Lamb is the quiet center of a vortex. Lamb invented C-Span, made it happen, and managed it from 1975 until he retired in 2012. He still shows up on the TV network, asking simple, direct questions of those in the news, without rancor, and seemingly without any agenda other than getting at the facts. I have never heard him raise his voice; I have never heard him express a political opinion. To this day, I cannot tell whether he is liberal or conservative, so close to the vest does he play it.

On the other hand, one believes he leans to the liberal side, if for no other reason than his happy toleration of diverse points of view. Diversity tends to be a liberal virtue. Nevertheless, I cannot tell for sure.

Lamb manages to make C-Span more than just a static camera in the Senate or on the House floor. On weekends, there is Book TV, and then, there is History TV on C-Span 3. You hear engaging lectures and panel discussions from every spot on the political spectrum — again, all played straight, no comment, no angle. Wow. For my money, Lamb is a secular saint.

John Lewis — You see his face behind the podium and you hear his deep, sorrowful voice and you know this is the pure expression of humanity, straight, no chaser. There is a moral power to his utterance. One imagines him reading a shopping list and making you feel like a better person for it.

Now 77 and a Congressman from Georgia’s Fifth District, Lewis is the soul of dignity. He has been through great suffering, was beaten and jailed, watched his mentor murdered in Memphis, fought for Civil Rights and now, as one of the few remaining voices of the Struggle, speaks not for African Americans, not for Americans, but for human beings. If we were any of us a hundredth as noble as he is, we should be proud. If we were to be visited by some alien civilization, I would want Lewis to speak for humanity as we were introduced.

John Waters — We make no bones about it, John Waters is an indifferent filmmaker. Many of his films are notable, but more for their outrageousness than for their cinematic virtues. Not that saying such would much bother him; he seems to know just where he fits into film history.

But it is Waters the man that I wholly admire. He can be funny — he usually is — he is often ironic, although he says he eschews irony, he knows the borders of good taste and makes sure he stays on the far side of the line, but there is an essential and unquenchable goodness about his vision.

I first noticed this in one of his lesser films, Pecker, about a young man devoid of irony who makes a splash in the New York art scene. Waters could easily have lampooned the nabobs of that scene as shallow and exclusionary — and he does have some fun at their expense — but in the end, he finds room for them in his universe, too.

It is admirable that he can be sharp but accepting also. There is a loving gentleness behind the kitsch and Waters never, ever looks down on his creations. He recognizes the silliness of human behavior, but counts himself among the silly. I would trust my life to Waters.

So, these are my saints, at least for the moment. There are more of them, but this gives you a range of them. There are women, too; I hope to write about some of them in the future. And even some political figures, although I might be hard pressed to name any of them currently living.

Do I live up to their example. Hardly. But in my mind, I try my best, which is all any of them can, or have asked.

 

An earnest plea

July 8, 2017
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Please forgive me for what I am about to do.

Over the past five years, during which I’ve written nearly 500 blog entries, the least popular among them, according to the page views, have been those concerning music. People don’t seem to like reading about music, and worse, about classical music.

But today, I’m going to do far worse. I’m going to write about the Second Viennese School — the so called “atonal” and twelve-tone composers who have been blamed for destroying serious music in the 20th century.

The three primary composer in this supposed school are its founder, Arnold Schoenberg, and his two students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. There are many things to be said about them, not the least of which is that they are three very different artists, whose music can hardly be mistaken for each others’, but what I am most interested in doing is undoing the misunderstandings about their work, primarily about Schoenberg’s music.

Schoenberg by Egon Schiele 1917

Because I want to say at the outset that I find Schoenberg’s music — for the most part, and there are exceptions — ungodly beautiful and moving.

Schoenberg shares with Johann Sebastian Bach that the most common and simple-minded things said about them are patently untrue. People, even those who should know better, believe that Bach’s music is somehow mathematical and logical, whereas if you have ears to hear, you find some of the most irrational sounds, and deeply and profoundly emotional music ever penned. Bach’s music is not rational, but Baroque, which means florid, extravagant, formally adventurous, like the extended keyboard cadenza of the Fifth Brandenburg, or the unpredictable trailing series of odd comet-tails at the end of the C-minor Prelude of the first book of the Well Tempered Clavier.

Schoenberg, likewise, is seen by those who don’t know his work well enough, as dry, academic and formulaic.

And, because Schoenberg in his later career, came up with a “system” of writing music, he is also seen as somehow dry, academic and formulaic, as if his music were somehow a hyper-complex form of sudoku. In fact, Schoenberg is a hugely Romantic composer, whose music — again with a few exceptions, is as emotional as the most fraught moments of the St. Matthew Passion.

Another similarity between the two composers is that Bach, before Schoenberg was one of the most dissonant composers in music history. We’ll get back to that.

But first, let’s look to Schoenberg’s actual career and output. His first works, which were enthusiastically received when premiered, include such late-romantic period pieces as the Gurre-Lieder and Verklaerte Nacht, which are both so fervent and passionate that they make Wagner’s Tristan sound like Haydn. Gurre-Lieder is a huge undertaking, lasting almost two hours, with 150 orchestra players, including 10 horns and 6 tympani, and another 200 singers in the choir. It was first recorded by Leopold Stokowski in 1932 and it took 27 sides of 78 rpm discs.

Simon Rattle conducting Gurre Lieder

Gurre-Lieder has since been recorded scores of times, but each is a major event. The music is profoundly chromatic, taking up where Wagner left off. But, for all that, it shares with the music of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss the orchestral complexity and harmonic richness of late Romanticism.

Verklaerte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”), written originally for just six string players and later orchestrated, is less expensive to perform, and therefore gets frequent hearings in American concert halls. I once heard the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur play it, and I was overwhelmed. The music has both such power, and such shimmering surface beauty, that it is hard not to have your breath taken away.

But, of course, it is not this music that most people think about when they think of Schoenberg. Actually, it isn’t really the music they think about at all, but the theory, the words, which can sound mechanical, whereas Schoenberg’s music is anything but.

Which brings us back to JS Bach.

The word often used for Schoenberg’s music is “atonal.” And along with that, it is seen as overwhelmingly dissonant. And it is true that Schoenberg saw that the chromaticism of late-romantic music was stretching the limits of traditional tonality. After Tristan und Isolde, the standard harmony was so consistently modulation-oriented that it hardly made sense to call a piece “in D major,” or “E-minor.”

Schoenberg hated the term, “atonal,” and for good reason — his music remained tonal throughout his career, although in a complex and disorienting way.

Bach, again, was a hugely dissonant composer. Just take any of his chorales and play only the off-beat chords and you find it sounds rather like Schoenberg. With all those appoggiaturas, passing tones, suspensions and pedal-tones, notes grate on other notes constantly. But the containing tonality of Bach’s language means that these dissonances are always resolved, so the overall effect is one of consonance. But just look at those notes on the page: constant and pungent dissonances.

With the emphasis on chromatic modulation in Schoenberg’s music, it led him to create music that uses the expectation of dissonance resolution to keep us hooked-in to the harmonic sound-world of Western music, while never letting us reach that final resting place. It is akin to keeping the 12 pitches up in the air like a juggler, with no way to stop.

This creates strong emotion in the listener; it is often a nagging, unpleasant emotion, one of alienation and anxiety, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t emotional. Schoenberg felt that the emotions appropriate for the 20th century — a century of war, genocide, deicide, dislocation and fear — should be appropriate to its era, and its music should explore these honest emotions rather than playing to the sweet-and-light expectations of audiences used to Dvorak and Schubert.

So, Schoenberg’s music uses the expectations of harmony and subverts them to create emotion. It is hardly dry or mechanical; it is in fact, often unbearable, not because it is ugly, but because it strikes so close to the bone, so unnerving in its accuracy when conveying such emotions.

Just listen to A Survivor from Warsaw, or the second string quartet, or the piano concerto. This is great music, of profound and raw emotion.

If you listen understanding the music not as aimless atonality, but frustrated tonality, drawing out the expected and hungered-for resolution, you will hear it fresh and anew, freed from the cliches about Schoenberg’s “method.”

“Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten.” (“I feel air from another planet.”)

The method so decried in the latter half of the 20th century is serial technique. With his first so-called atonal works, Schoenberg found it was harder than he thought to escape the apparent resolution of his dissonances into the schema of major-minor tonality, and sought a way of ensuring he could avoid being heard as writing in a key. So, he invented — slowly over several decades — dodecaphonic composing. In its simplest form, it requires the composer to use all 12 tones of the octave serially, before using the first tone again. A “tone-row” would create a repeating pattern of those 12 notes that substituted as a kind of melody, or at least a kind of content for the music.

It should be noted that Schoenberg himself never gave himself over to the technique completely. He mixed and matched. He once later complained, “There is still much music to be written in C major.”

Berg painted by Schoenberg 1910

It is his acolytes who took up the cudgel of 12 tone music and hammered it home with such relentless humorlessness that it practically destroyed concert-hall music. Serialism was extended to include not only pitch, but rhythm, also, destroying any ability for an average educated listener to comprehend the music as an esthetic pattern.

But, that is later, and a misapplication of Schoenberg’s example.

His two primary apprentices each took 12-tone music in divergent directions.  Alban Berg managed to force 12-tone music into a harmonic framework, the way Schoenberg had attempted to make impossible; Anton Webern gave up tonality altogether and began exploring timbre and pitch as tantalizing new sounds, in an of themselves: If you want music as sudoku, it is with Webern you should travel, not Schoenberg.

Berg was, if anything, more romantic than his mentor. His operas, Wozzeck and Lulu, are shattering emotional experiences, and his violin concerto is one of the most noble and profound pieces of music written in the past 100 years.

In the concerto, Berg arranges his tone row in such a way as to make major and minor triads almost inevitable. To create his organizing tone row, he stacks on top of each other, a G-minor chord, a D-major chord, an A-minor, and an E-major chord, and follows them with a tail that plays out the beginning of a scale. Throughout the concerto, the 12-tone technique manages to imply tonal centers.

Webern by Max Oppenheimer 1908

Webern, going in the opposite direction, uses his tone rows to make delicious pings and squawks in the orchestra. To those who love it, the music scintillates. What you enjoy in it are novel sounds and novel arrangements. Whereas Berg is on-the-sleeve emotional, you could believe that with Webern emotion is irrelevant to music. (The composer would disagree).

It is Webern’s brand of serialism that took hold as the century progressed, and taken up by such later composers as Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez. If you have a problem with such music (I find Babbitt’s music tedious, but Boulez’s Répons is glorious), then blame Webern, not Schoenberg.

It is certainly true that you probably don’t want Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire playing in the background while you serve dinner guests, or listen to the String Trio through headphones as you sit back comfortably in your easy chair to spend an hour reading Proust. It isn’t easy listening, nor was meant to be. The music demands your intense attention, both intellectually and emotionally: You must give yourself over completely to the music, and then, you will discover one of the great composers, a colleague of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Mahler.