It was against such a stark panorama that Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Debussy, their earlier counterpart in the reformation of sensibility, labored to form a musical, syntax of more penetrating and living poetry. Richard Strauss's famous boast that he could set a glass of beer to music contrasts sharply with Debussy's later response to his world:

A blade of grass stirred from its sleep makes a really disquieting noise.

The crucial difference here is that Debussy's sensitivity leads not to sentimentality but to a more pungent commerce with the particulars of the sensible world. This reemergence of intense concern for the small things is a sign of artistic vitality. Compare the above with a line on an injured snail from Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis:

Whose tender horns being hit, Shrinks backwards in his shelly cave with pain.

The essence of Schoenberg, Debussy, Berg, and Webern was the acute, almost palpable response to the most minute patterns of life. They expressed this in a new voice of polychromatic sounds of momentary durations. The fluid immediacy of impresssonism and the starker psychology of expressionism began to lose their distinctiveness and prove permeable and complementary. The last magnificent statements of the musical expressionistic esthetic were Alban Berg's operas Wozzeck (1921) and Lulu (1935), and his Violin Concerto (1935), an elegy written upon the death on Mahler's daughter Manon. The neurasthenic romanticism of Mahler was transmuted in these works to a testament and a valedictory. The plasticity of musical idioms was clearly responding to a mellower comprehension of what had happened to man as a result of the conflagration. Composers were succeeding in speaking in the distorted world of Kafka and Wilfred Owen. Berg's works, directly descended from Mahler's Ninth Symphoney, perhaps the supreme symphonic masterpiece of the century, formed a melancholy Agnus Dei. A most moving expression of this mood of lachrymose serenity is found in "The Drinking Song of Earth's Sorrow" set by Mahler in his Das Lied von der Erde (1909):

Listen to the song of trouble,

The derisive laughter of the soul.

When trouble comes

The garden of the soul is laid waste.

Joy withers and dies, and the song.

Dark is life, is death.

III

AFTER THE DEATH of Berg in 1936 many composers began an impulsive dizzying concatenation of extreme experiments. Schoenberg himself continued writing masterworks until his death in continued writing masterworks until his death in 1951. The younger radicals seized upon his abstract serial period of the 1920's and upon the exceedingly astringent works of the meticulous Anton Webern astringent works of the meticulous Anton Webern (1883-1945), as their sources of inspiration. The genuinely revolutionary effect of the turn-of-the-century ferment, and the principle which has animated today's avant-garde, was that expressionism and impressionism were subsumed by a new language. Schoenberg had termed his achievement the "emancipation of dissonance." Insofar as the avant-garde moves toward the conclusion that music is the audible world itself, subject to its own capricious organization, the responsible avant-garde is esthetically atavistic. Ours is in reality a period of secondary musical change. The contemporary avant-garde is secondary because it prosecutes the logical implication of the earlier innovations. In the brief period from the symphonies of Mahler (beginning in 1885) to the symphony of Webern (c1923) the architecture, sonorities, and phychology of music were recreated. The only significant development since then have been Edgar Varese's employment of the daily persuasiveness of the city as part of his musical material; Olivier Messiaen's elegant experiments in multiple asymmetrical rhythms; and John Cage's interpretation of Webern's principle of the "music of silence" to mean that music fundamentally consists of random sounds within a formal background of silence. Schoenberg stated his fecund principle in 1932 as follows:

A piece does not create its formal appearance out of the logic of its own material; but, guided by the feeling for internal and external processes, in bringing these to expression, it supports itself and their logic and builds upon that.

Schoenberg's famous twelve-tone system liberated music, not from tonality as is commonly claimed, but, less ominously, from the ancient laws of harmony. His system represented not the loss of all order but the penetration to a simpler more elastic and potentially liberating order.