Communicating Atonal Music: Alban Berg as Lecturer and Dialogue Partner

• Published in: Musicologica austriaca Vol. 2024
• Main Author: Kordula Knaus
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Österreichische Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft 01.02.2024
• Subjects: 20th century; atonality; berg, alban; modern music; music communication; musical avant-garde; performance studies; schönberg, arnold
• ISSN: 1016-1066; 2411-6696

As a result of the new aesthetics and compositional techniques of musical modernism around and after 1900, the expectations of a concert and opera audience and the actual musical production of the musical avant-garde increasingly drifted apart. Scandal concerts multiplied and heated debates were carried out in the feuilleton. Musicians reacted to this discourse not only by establishing their own communities of interest and presentation platforms for new music. In addition, there was an increased interest among composers to communicate their music to an audience in such a way that it was understood. Introductory lectures, essays, interviews, program notes, and conversations increasingly accompanied performances or new releases of new music. These composers’ statements have been used by musicological research so far largely as sources of information about the respective works. Hardly has research reflected upon the fact that these utterances are (1) communicative acts that presuppose a real or imagined audience and are (2) embedded in a discursive framework to which they respond directly or indirectly.In the article, I discuss these two aspects using examples from the composer Alban Berg. The first is his Wozzeck lecture, which he held for the first time in 1929 on the occasion of the Oldenburg premiere of the work and repeated several times in the following years at other performance venues. In the lecture, Berg uses more than fifty sound examples on the piano to refer primarily to recurring chords and harmonies. Clearly discernible here is the performative strategy of conveying to the audience a specific sonority of non-tonally bound chordal combinations through concrete, sensual auditory impressions. Berg also emphasizes the compositional regularities in Wozzeck, which can be read as a reaction to the repeated reproach of the press that modern music does not follow any regularities. Similar considerations are present in the radio dialogue “What is atonal?” which was broadcast on Radio Wien on April 23, 1930, as a fictitious dialogue between Berg and the journalist Julius Bistron. A detailed analysis of the dialogue script shows that Bistron acted as a representative of various audience segments throughout the lecture. The last section of the article suggests how theories of communication, media, and performance can be used for the examination of such lectures and dialogues and how this deepens our understanding of these communicative acts within the highly controversial field of new music in the twentieth century.