AOS 2: Music in the 20th Century Serialism Background Information to Five Orchestral Pieces

 Five Orchestral Pieces 1909 by Arnold Schoenberg is a set of atonal pieces for full orchestra. Each piece lasts between one to five minutes and they are not connected to one another by the use of any musical material.

 Richard Strauss requested that Schoenberg send him some short orchestral pieces with the possibility of them gaining some attention from important musical figures. Schoenberg hadn’t written any orchestral pieces since 1903 as he had been experimenting with and developing his ideas of atonality in small scale works.

 He had had a series of disappointments as some of his works for both chamber orchestra and larger ensembles had been dismissed by important musical figures as they did not understand his music. As a result of this Schoenberg withdrew further into the small group of like minded composers e.g. The Second Viennese School.

 Schoenberg uses pitches and harmonies for effect not because they are related to one another.

 He is very concerned with the combinations of different instrumental timbres rather than melody and harmony as we understand and use it.

 Schoenberg enjoyed concealing things in his music; he believed that the intelligent and attentive listener would be able to decipher the deeper meanings.

 Schoenberg believed that music could express so much more than words and that words detract from the music. As a result of this belief titles for the Five Orchestral Pieces did not appear on the scores until 13 years after they had been composed.

 In Schoenberg’s pre-serialism music a code he used was a group of 6 notes / semitones called a hexachord. These notes can be played together to form a chord or played one after the other to form a melodic motif.

 The recurring hexachord in ‘Peripetie’ is made up of the following pitches (arranged in ascending order); A, Bb, C, C#, E, F and can be heard from bar 82 in the horns. These pitches can be arranged in either of the two ways described above; they can then be transposed and played in any octave throughout the piece.

 The compliment of the hexachord can be constructed by using the other six pitches that have not been used in the horn hexachord. These pitches in ascending order are B, D, Eb, F#, G, G#. The compliment can be manipulated in the same ways as the above hexachord.

 1952 saw a revision of Schoenberg’s score and edits were made to mark which instrument was playing the main melodic line, Principal Voice and the next most important melodic line, Secondary Voice.

English German Abbreviation Principal Voice Hauptstimme H’ Secondary Voice Nebenstimme N’

 The above abbreviation would be used in the score to pinpoint when an instrument takes over the role of principal or secondary voice and when an instrument no longer has either of these roles it is marked with .

 ‘Peripetie’ is structured in 5 different sections. It could be classed as a broad version of rondo form as the A section returns after each contrasting section. See below table.

Section Bars Section A 1-18 Section B 19-34 Section A’ 34-43 Section C 44-58 Section A’’ 59-66

 However, each time the A section returns so many developments have taken place they are barely recognisable as statements of a theme at all. As a result of this it is not a typical example of rondo form that we would recognise from the Baroque or Classical eras.