Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony, Formalism, and Adorno's Critique of Twelve-Tone Composition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nowhere else is the secret agreement of light and progressive music more succinctly proven true than here. Late Schoenberg shares with jazz—and, incidentally, also with Stravinsky—the dissociation of musical time. Music drafts the image of a world that—for better or for worse—no longer knows history. —Theodor Adorno I shall bring together two perspectives in this paper, one a formalist perspective growing out of my work with Schoenberg's concept of extended tonality, the other a critical perspective growing out of my work with the writings of Theodor Adorno. According to the first perspective, in his First Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, and in works like it Schoenberg explored what I shall call tonal centrality without pitches. By this I mean a kind of tonal orientation not centered on one, and only one, pitch or even on a central group of pitches, but instead a tonal orientation built on relationships created by intervals and patterns of intervals (which leads ultimately to an orientation built on the intervallic properties of a tone row). In works such as the First Chamber Symphony, the vehicle of tonal centrality shifts from tonic pitch orientation to tonic intervallic orientation. As a result intervals and interval patterns become the vehicles for tonal form, thus antedating Schoenberg's experiments with serialism. Like Adorno, I find a premonition of serialism in Schoenberg's Symphony. Adorno's reading of nascent serialism differs significantly from mine, however, for mine is restricted to the framework of the introductory theme to the Symphony, while his treats the Symphony's first theme as a point of departure for a critique of the later twelve-tone technique in general. I shall begin my analysis of the opening measures to the Symphony, and turn to Adorno's critique later. Example 1 is a short score reduction of the opening measures to the First Chamber Symphony. In the example, several pitches have been removed (E, C, and G-flat in m. 3, and A in m. 4). The pitches remaining show the prevalence of the interval of a perfect fifth (and its inversion the perfect fourth) in these measures. All the pitches in Example 1 can be seen as members of a series or cycle of fifth relations. I have sketched such a cycle as a simple listing of integers beneath the example.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".