I may be getting ahead of the timeline covered in our class thus far but just couldn’t resist blogging about this article when I stumbled upon it during my research. The article titled “Still a Challenge, Schoenberg’s ‘Pierrot’ Cycle Nears the Century Mark,” written by Zachary Woolfe and published in The New York Times, revolves around one of the most significant pieces by Schoenberg, within atonal tradition of music composition. Before moving forward with discussion about the article, however, it is imperative to look back at the history of Schoenberg’s tradition, as well as the confusing and rather shocking nature of Pierrot Lunaire. 

Arnold Schoenberg was a composer of Austrian origins, whose “…name would come to personify pioneering innovations in atonality that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century art music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, a widely influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation, and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.” (Wikipedia. Read more here).

Upon listening to Schoenberg’s pieces, one will not have a hard time understanding why his “experimental” music did not receive public appeal, especially following Brahm’s and Wagner’s traditions. Nonetheless, Schoenberg’s tradition of composing with twelve notes came to be one of the most highlighted issues within European and American societies of musicians. Moreover, it had an enormous influence upon contemporary music performance practice in the States. It is crucial to understand the influence of Schonberg’s tradition on the development of “new” music and the break from firmly established Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner.

Pierrot Lunaire is a melodrama based on a cycle of a twenty-one poems by Albert Giraud. Schoenberg’s accompanying music is atonal and certainly not pleasing to most ears, especially untrained ones. Nonetheless, the piece is a staple in Schoenberg’s tradition, and, as the article proves, is still under the spotlight a century later. Part of this piece can be heard here.

The writer, Zachary Woolfe, comes to disagree with the note provided by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra stating, “After all these years “Pierrot” continues to shock audiences,” arguing that it is not as much “shocking” anymore as the enormous influence of the piece on the music of twentieth century has developed, hence today’s audience is much more perceptive of the performance compared to that of in the start of the same century, when the work was first introduced. As also noted in the article, “The Chicago orchestra experimented with different strategies to jolt the work’s audience once again.” This included providing the audience with more contextual material by introducing biographical and historical backgrounds, as well as translations of the texts slowly projected behind the performs. The idea behind the performance was to transport the audience back in time.

What Mr. Woolf argues, however, is that “…the aim of performance shouldn’t be to try to transport us to another time or to simulate cultural conditions that are not our own. The point should be to present a work so that it speaks to us in ways that may not have been possible when it was new.”

Even though, I agree with the writer to some extent, I feel there is a contradiction within his statement. Especially in the case of this particular performance, I believe that by transporting us to another time or simulating cultural conditions that are not our own, the work in fact speaks to us in a way that may not have been possible when it was new. It is true that contemporary audience are already absorbed by the influence that “Pierrot” shed upon development of music throughout the twentieth century, hence one way or another the composition will speak to us in a way in which it had not been possible when it was new. And yet, it is only by transporting us back and by simulating cultural conditions of “those” times that we are able to grasp the magnitude of the work and perceive it within much larger sphere. Of course, one can simply go to such performance, ignorant of its full context, and perceive it as it comes. Whether it would be a right thing to do or not is debatable.