Marc Chan

Abschied (Part 2): Quartal Harmonies and Handfuls of Earth

I.

The “LH chord”. How innocuous it looks. Two perfect fourths, one stacked on top of the other, a sandwich of equidistant tones, two notes taking five half-steps in either direction from middle C. For Schoenberg, it was a new sound “discovered involuntarily, a symbol proclaiming the new man who so asserts his individuality.” But the novelty of its construction, its newness, is haunted by the presence of the past in how the chord recalls (re-lives) the Medieval stability of fourths in an age where thirds have hegemony. This is a haunting that refuses to be ontologized: neither old nor new; neither consonant nor dissonant; neither stable nor unstable; it exists in a dialectical relationship that is not one or the other, but both. The “LH chord” remembers, but it also forgets. It both enshrines and erases. Sounded immediately after the first “RH chord”, itself rich in tertian associations (D major added 6th? Dominant 7th?), the “LH chord” neutralizes the chord that came before it, recontextualizing the cumulative sonority so that all such associations, all such memories, are immediately eradicated. Listen again here.

II.

The systematic stacking of fourths in either direction (up or down) can lead to a chord containing all twelve tones of the chromatic scale. Upwards:

Downwards:

This property is unique to perfect fourths since a fourth does not divide the octave symmetrically. The superimposition of all major thirds would only give us only three tones before the same notes are repeated. The superimposition of all minor thirds would result in four. In order for all twelve tones to be accounted for in a tertian scheme, one has to devise a combination of both major and minor thirds. Fourths, I suppose, have the directness of simplicity.

III.

There are four pitch-distinct quartal trichords (three-note chords constructed by the superimposition of fourths) played by the left hand in Schoenberg’s op. 19 no. 6:

Cumulatively, these four trichords exhaust the aggregate. They are all systematically derived from the opening “LH chord” and deployed throughout the piece in the order of their derivation. This concern for the order in which the twelve chromatic notes appear describes a kind of nascent twelve-tone organization, thus:

We should notice, of course, the deviations from the rule. In measure 5, the “A” is missing. In measure 9, the “E-flat” is missing, and the “A-flat” and “B-flat” are reversed (the relationship is one of inversion). These are not to be considered unwanted, though they are flaws and imperfections, for they reveal the human participant, the ear that elects an alternative, a choice made to rebel against the seeming inevitability of the rule of law. 

IV.

A side-note on the visibility of flaws in a work of art: the photography of Barbara Bosworth comes to mind. Her work involves the stitching together of photographic panoramas, and though the seams are easily hidden, she leaves them behind in the completed shot. Her fingerprints, the crude black line that runs down the image, mar the landscape: it is the audible noise of a blemished, human participant.

V.

The right hand has but three quartal trichords,

but their derivation and deployment is as systematic as in the left hand. Here, Schoenberg derives the chords from fourths moving upwards instead of downwards:

Here too are deviations from the rule. In measure 8, we have a C-natural and D-natural rather than the expected C-sharp and D-sharp. In measure 9, the “E” is missing. In its place we have an “A”. But what moves me the most is that the final trichord in the series (the A-D-G) is missing; it is a silence imposed from without because we know what should be there, we expect it to be there like an afterimage, but see and hear that it is not (and can never be due to the finality of the double barline); this silence haunts us and asks us to ponder its absence, prompting us to inquire why its work was left incomplete. Would it be too fanciful, too far-fetched to replace the “its” of the previous statement with the possessive adjective “his” instead, knowing that Mahler died leaving his tenth symphony unfinished, asking the question: why his work was left incomplete?  

VI.

Most of the deviations from Schoenberg’s rule of stacked fourths involve a dropped note. The most striking deviation then can be said to occur in the right hand at measure 8, when the two notes that are altered change the chord so dramatically that we lose the characteristic perfect fourth that distinguishes the trichord’s sonic profile (more specifically, instead of perfect fourths we find an augmented fourth and a diminished fourth):

That this deviation occurs in the most sonically-distinct measure of the piece is, I would suggest, no accident. Here, the spaciousness of the music gives way to a claustrophobic, almost cluster-like chord. Two quartal trichords are, for the first and last time in the piece, sounded together:

Adding to the claustrophobic throb, are the interweaving of two distinct minor 9th melodies (that we recall from earlier on in the piece), that try, for the first and only time, to rise rather than fall:

This sounding together of so many strands that are packed so tightly together makes it difficult, if not impossible, for us to disentangle melody from harmony, chord from line.

There is a sense that the distinctness of its component parts, its trichords and melodies, are swallowed up, buried under the accumulation of so much sound and density. It is a touching scene to be sure, but we are overwhelmed because Schoenberg, in choosing that very moment of burial to break with the established pattern, to deviate from his plan, acknowledges that no matter how diligently we map out our lives, the very act of living expresses an article of faith, for death and heartbreak always come at us unannounced and no amount of preparation can steel us for goodbyes.

VII.

“His two nearest relatives, his father-in-law, the painter Carl Moll, and his brother-in-law, the leader of the orchestra at the Vienna Court Opera, Arnold Rose, threw the first handfuls of earth into the gaping grave.”

(a recollection by Mahler’s friend, Josef Bohuslav Forster)

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