Bernstein wants to suggest that these same processes are at work in music, "transforming" basic musical material into its complex "surface" form. This is an appealing thought. Reiteration and variation of thematic material is certainly a fundamental principle of Western music, and poetry as well. If Bernstein could demonstrate an affinity between the mechanisms of musical variation and of transformation in language, he would be making a real contribution to aesthetic theory.
BUT THIS IS one rabbit that never gets pulled out of the hat. Bernstein derails himself right at the start with his gross misuse of syntactic terminology. When he applies such transformations as "conjoining," "transposition," "embedding," and even "deletion," to music, he does so without regard to their linguistic meaning. The musical transformations share only the names with their counterparts in language.
And when he throws in all of the devices of classical rhetoric, from alliteration to auxesis, he has left linguistics somewhere back in the dust. His claim that every note in the first movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony can be derived from the first two bars is unassailable, but it is also vacuous. With all of the "transformations" at his disposal he could just as easily derive all of Western music from those same two bars.
But Bernstein is a musician, after all, and when he talks about music without all the linguistic dross he is both entertaining and instructive, as he was during ten years of Young People's Concerts. There is nothing new for musicians in his analysis of Mozart's G minor symphony, Beethoven's Sixth and music of Berlioz and Wagner, but from the point of view of the layman he covers a lot of ground in a palatable way.
His occasional forays into literature are also, occasionally, rewarding--his discussion of asymmetry and ambiguity, for example. But here, too, linguistic analogies often lead him astray. There is something crudely reductionist about his view of poetry as prose dressed up by poetic transformations, and his claim that the sound structure ("phonology") of poetry works against structure and meaning ("syntax" and "semantics") ignores the work of linguists and literary critics alike.
WHEN BERNSTEIN'S survey of Western music arrives at the 20th century, his emphasis on innateness and universality suddenly takes on new significance. The 19th century ended "with a life-and-death crisis lurking around the corner." Mahler's Ninth Symphony, a great song of death, is the last, barely tonal expression of a bloated Romanticism dying of its own weight. The new century will have to face the disintegration of tonality, a process which began nearly a hundred years earlier with the Beethoven of the Gross Fuge and the last piano sonatas.
This crisis, according to Bernstein, divided modern composers into two warring camps "the way a great river divides into two forks." The Viennese school, led by Arnold Schoenberg, "gave up the struggle to preserve tonality;" Igor Stravinsky and his followers represented a "last ditch stand" against "the rampages of chromaticism." Bernstein's language gives the lie to his pose of dispassionate neutrality, and for that matter his own music plainly shows both his distaste for atonality and his adoration of Stravinsky.
Whither music? The final, triumphant answer is "yes," by which Bernstein means "tonality." He believes that his preference for tonality is more than a matter of his personal taste, that it is an innate, physical necessity. The very existence of the Viennese school's atonal music, not to mention non-tonal music of other cultures and the pre-tonal music of the Renaissance, argues that tonality is not universal, but Bernstein claims that Schoenberg denied his own inner instincts, and, outrageously, that "Schoenberg to this day has not found his public."
RECALLING HIS explanation in the first lecture of the harmonic series he says that tonality is based on immutable physical laws. It's true that some of the essential structures of Western music are to be found in the overtone series. Values of consonance and dissonance and some tonal relationships are facts of nature and not arbitrary cultural conventions. But the harmonic series doesn't explain the development of tonality, a complex system of relationships and progressions of tension and release, stability and instability--embodying all of the conventions of Western harmony. Above all, tonality involves a central, tonic note which is felt to be predominant. It was this aspect, with all its consequences that Schoenberg's system of 12 equal tones rebelled against.
Bernstein, who knows better, often finds tonality where there is none. According to him, the strings in Ives' Unanswered Question play nothing but "pure tonal triads" in C major. What he doesn't say is that the final chord is unresolved, because he wants to claim that "eternal, immortal tonality" is the answer to the solo trumpet's question, which Ives, after all, meant to be unanswered.
And later, listing contemporary composers who have been thrown back on their "innate, long denied sense of tonality," he says that Stockhausen's Stimmung "spends seventy minutes in B-flat major." In fact, Stimmung is a radically minimalist work consisting of six vocalists humming and chanting a low B-flat fundamental and its various overtones--seventy minutes of some kind of B-flat chord, but not the key of B-flat major by anybody's definition, and certainly not anything resembling tonality.
BERNSTEIN'S CASE for Stravinsky is eloquent and convincing. He quotes Theodor Adorno, a dogmatic advocate of Schoenberg who accused Stravinsky of hiding behind an insincere mask of eclecticism. Bernstein defends the neoclassical mask as a reaction to the extreme subjectivity of overblown Romanticism and draws interesting parallels to the poetry of T.S. Eliot. But here, too, his polemic dislike of Schoenberg leads him to inaccuracy and self-contradiction. Having accused the serialists of mechanically turning out music that is "form without content," he now condemns them for discarding the order imposed by diatonicism. Stravinsky's "great save," neoclassicism, is "the concept that could finally impose some aesthetic order on this modernist chaos."
Schoenberg once said that his music wasn't modern, it was just badly played. That is no longer generally true, but it applies to Bernstein's misrepresentation of him. The most convincing argument for Stravinsky on these records is Bernstein's new recording of Oedipus Rex, a neoclassic masterpiece, while Schoenberg is represented only by an excerpt from the Op. 23 piano pieces and a few bars of Pierrot Lunaire--Bernstein hammers out the flute part with one hand and growls the sprechstimme two octaves lower.
In the end, Bernstein's treatment of Schoenberg suffers from the same dogmatism he criticizes in Adorno. His failure is a failure to listen to the music on its own terms. He imposes his tonal expectations on works that have a different internal logic. He points triumphantly to the Bach chorale quoted at the end of Berg's Violin Concerto, without recognizing it as a historical allusion like those he found in Stravinsky and Eliot. Berg used tonal devices frequently for certain kinds of effects, but rarely as a basic principle of his music.
Aesthetic theory has found no way to distinguish between the mediocre and the great, no way to tell us what is art. That, finally, is the unanswered question. Bernstein speaks well on Stravinsky's behalf, but the proof is in his conducting. And no amount of pseudoscientific analysis will prove Schoenberg wrong. His music speaks for itself.