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“A Surrogate for the Soul”: Wittgenstein and Schoenberg

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Interactive Wittgenstein

Part of the book series: Synthese Library ((SYLI,volume 349))

Abstract

One need not be a confirmed Humean in order to observe the effects of habit. When it comes to the contingencies of history, the conjunction of facts and a propensity to relate them to one another might indeed give rise to philosophical confusion. The practice of yoking Ludwig Wittgenstein and Arnold Schoenberg as intellectual comrades-in-arms of sorts seems to have already become commonplace. The prima facie appeal of such a practice is undeniable, and, indeed, one could hardly find a text on Fin-de-Siècle Vienna that does not underscore at least some similarity between the two great men—their biography, their cultural background, their intellectual projects, their personal fate. In such collage works, historians and philosophers alike often share an enthusiasm for bold brush strokes, which certainly serve a purpose within their overall perspective: to paint a picture of a cultural period to highlight common themes. Yet the thrust of the present essay is, in this sense, antithetical. This is an essay about differences, and some of my brush strokes will be cautious and inevitably tentative. I contend that what sets Wittgenstein and Schoenberg apart from one another is much more interesting philosophically than the historical contingencies that seem to force them together.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hilde Spiel, Vienna’s Golden Autumn, 1866–1938 (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 170.

  2. 2.

    William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 139.

  3. 3.

    Ibid., p. 213.

  4. 4.

    Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), especially chs. 3 and 8. See also Allan Janik, Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), ch. 1.

  5. 5.

    See, e.g., Aldo Gargani, “Techniques Descriptive et Procédures Constructives: Schönberg-Wittgenstein” in J.P. Cometti (ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein (SUD Numéro Hors-série, 1986), pp. 74–121; Friedrich Wallner, “Webern und Wittgenstein: Verbindlichkeit durch Elementarisierung” in Roderick M. Chisholm, Johann Chr. Marek, John T. Blackmore, and Adolf Hübner (eds.), Philosophy of Mind - Philosophy of Psychology. Proceedings of the 9th International Wittgenstein Symposium (Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1985), pp. 482–485.

  6. 6.

    The reverse case is relatively rare. See, e.g., Wolfgang Hufschmidt, “Sprache und ‘Sprachgebrauch’ bei Schönberg.” Zeitschrift für Musiktheorie, 1974, pp. 11–20; James K. Wright, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, 2nd edition (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).

  7. 7.

    Stanley Cavell, “Philosophy and the Unheard” in Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff (eds.), Music of My Future: The Schoenberg Quartets and Trio. Isham Library Papers 5. Harvard Publications in Music 20 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 182.

  8. 8.

    It is noteworthy that Cavell relies here on a 1967 paper by David Lewin on Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron. Lewin’s paper was written without the benefit of Schoenberg’s so-called “Gedanke manuscripts”, which contain the composer’s most elaborate attempt to explicate his philosophy of composition. The scholarly edition of these manuscripts appeared only recently in Arnold Schoenberg, The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of its Presentation, ed. P. Carpenter and S. Neff (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

  9. 9.

    See, e.g., Arnold Schoenberg, “Twelve-Tone Composition” in Style and Idea, ed. L. Stein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 207–208.

  10. 10.

    For the record, the single appearance of the name Wittgenstein in Schoenberg’s literary estate is found in a letter dated November 21, 1913, in which Schoenberg asks his publisher to send a few of his lieder to Frau Bahr-Mildenburg—presumably, Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, the great Austrian soprano—c/o Frau Wittgenstein at Salesianergasse 7, Vienna. Apparently, the reference is to Justine Wittgenstein née Hochstetter, wife of Paul Wittgenstein, Ludwig’s uncle, who had been residing at this address at the time. See Allan Janik and Hans Veigl, Wittgenstein in Vienna: A Biographical Excursion through the City and its History (Wien: Springer-Verlag, 1998), pp. 198–199.

  11. 11.

    See Martin Alber’s comprehensive essay “Josef Labor und die Musik in der Wittgenstein-Familie” in Martin Alber (ed.), Wittgenstein und die Musik: Ludwig Wittgenstein-Rudolf Koder: Briefwechsel. Brenner-Studien, vol. 17 (Innsbruck: Haymon Verlag, 2000), pp. 121–137.

  12. 12.

    I use the following abbreviations for Wittgenstein’s standard editions:

    BB:

    The Blue and Brown Books

    CV:

    Culture and Value

    D:

    Denkbewegungen: Tagebücher 1930–1932, 1936–1937

    LC:

    Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religion

    LW I:

    Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. I

    LW II:

    Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. II

    NB:

    Notebooks 1914–1916

    PG:

    Philosophical Grammar

    PR:

    Philosophical Remarks

    PT:

    Proto-Tractatus

    RPP I:

    Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. I

    RPP II:

    Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. II

    TLP:

    Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

    Z:

    Zettel

    References to the Nachlass are by MS or TS number according to G. H. von Wright’s catalogue followed by page number. Translations from the Nachlass or from other primary sources in German are my own.

  13. 13.

    Ernst Hilmar (ed.), Arnold Schönberg Gedenkausstellung (Wien: Universal, 1974), p. 160.

  14. 14.

    See Eric Blom (editorially revised), “Labor, Josef” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 10, p. 342. This mistake is reproduced in Janik and Veigl, op. cit., p. 124, and was perpetuated for at least the next 20 years by the recently published second edition of The New Grove Dictionary. See Eric Blom and Malcolm Miller, “Labor, Josef”, The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed 30 September 2002), http://www.grovemusic.com.

  15. 15.

    See Leon Botstein, “Music and the Critique of Culture: Arnold Schoenberg, Heinrich Schenker, and the Emergence of Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna” in Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (eds.), Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 3–22.

  16. 16.

    E. Fred Flindel, “Paul Wittgenstein (1887–1961): Patron and Pianist.” The Music Review, 32(2), 1971, p. 110.

  17. 17.

    See Spiel, Vienna’s Golden Autumn, pp. 171–172.

  18. 18.

    Flindel, “Paul Wittgenstein (1887–1961): Patron and Pianist,” p. 119.

  19. 19.

    Paul Griffiths, Modern Music: A Concise History, revised edition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), p. 50.

  20. 20.

    Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life. Young Wittgenstein: 1889–1921 (London: Duckworth, 1988), p. 33.

  21. 21.

    Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990), p. 78. The subject matter of these exchanges remains unknown. Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, a thoroughly atonal work, received its première in London in 1912 under the baton of Sir Henry Wood. Whether or not this fact was reflected in any way in these arguments, it is still undeniable that by the time the arguments reported by Pinsent took place, the crisis of the tonal idiom in music, epitomized by Schoenberg’s middle period music, was already imminent, and recognizably so, in the high profile works of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler.

  22. 22.

    Alber (ed.), Wittgenstein und die Musik, p. 46.

  23. 23.

    Quoted in Werner Kraft, Karl Kraus: Beiträge zum Verständnis seines Werkes (Salzburg: Müller, 1956), p. 195.

  24. 24.

    See Paul Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect (London : Thames and Hudson, 1994).

  25. 25.

    For an illuminating discussion of this comparison between Wittgenstein and Loos see John Hyman, “The urn and the chamber pot” in Richard Allen and Malcom Turvey (eds.), Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 137–152.

  26. 26.

    Karl Kraus, Half Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths: Selected Aphorisms, trans. H. Zohn (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 69.

  27. 27.

    Schoenberg never approved of this title, although it has remained in use until the present day. Schoenberg’s atonal period extends roughly between 1909 and 1923. It is characterized by an initial outburst of creativity that produced works like Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, Erwartung, op. 17, and Die Glückliche Hand, op. 18.

  28. 28.

    Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 136.

  29. 29.

    See Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, ed. L. Stein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 216–217.

  30. 30.

    Cf., e.g., Cavell, “Philosophy and the Unheard,” p. 177.

  31. 31.

    Georg Henrik von Wright, The Tree of Knowledge and Other Essays (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), p. 90.

  32. 32.

    Felix Salzer, Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1952), pp. 5–6.

  33. 33.

    Salzer remained a champion of Schenker’s theories all his life. At various times he edited two journals, first Der Dreiklang and later The Music Forum, which were dedicated primarily to the study of Schenker’s theories. His famous pedagogic textbook Structural Hearing (op. cit.) is an attempt, rendered quite successful by many, to enhance Schenker’s ideas and methods and rework them into a systematic course of study.

  34. 34.

    Felix Salzer reported this to Brian McGuinness. I am grateful to Professor McGuinness for relaying this information to me (personal communication, 3/1/2002).

  35. 35.

    Brian McGuinness, personal communication, 2/16/2000. I will have more to say about Wittgenstein’s attitude toward Schenker below.

  36. 36.

    This striking reference appears in the form of a handwritten comment—“Schenkersche Betrachtungsweise der Musik” (TS 213, 259v)—on the occasion of introducing the concept of “family resemblance.”

  37. 37.

    Georg Henrik von Wright, “Ludwig Wittgenstein in Relation to his Times” in Brian McGuinness (ed.), Wittgenstein and his Times (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 116.

  38. 38.

    Rudolf Haller, Questions on Wittgenstein (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), p. 80.

  39. 39.

    Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. C.F. Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), vol. 1, p. 194.

  40. 40.

    Cf. ibid., pp. 293–295.

  41. 41.

    The Ursatz is made of a fundamental line, or Urlinie, which is a linear descent to the root of the triad. The Urlinie is accompanied by an “arpeggiation” in the bass (Bassbrechung) from the tonic to the dominant and back.

  42. 42.

    Milton Babbitt, “Review of Structural Hearing by Felix Salzer,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 5, 1952, p. 262.

  43. 43.

    See Robert Snarrenberg, Schenker’s Interpretative Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 145–150. I am indebted here to Snarrenberg’s useful survey of a variety of primary sources.

  44. 44.

    In his 1938 lectures on aesthetics, Wittgenstein uses a similar image of someone who admires a sonnet admitted to be good without knowing English (LC, 6). Again, for Wittgenstein, music exemplifies the point being made: there is an intimate link between artistic experience of art and what he calls Menschenkenntnis, our knowledge of human nature (cf. PI II xi 227).

  45. 45.

    At some point Schenker wanted to publish an inflammatory essay titled “On the Decline of Compositional Art: A Technical-Critical Investigation.” His publisher, Emil Hertzka, who was also the music publisher of Mahler, Strauss and Schoenberg, undermined this project.

  46. 46.

    For instance, he accused Richard Strauss of trying to mask the primitive design of his music with heavy orchestration, with noise and polyphonic clatter, and of resorting to vulgar, extra-musical narratives in order to solve problems of musical continuity. As for Max Reger’s music, Schenker’s attempt to analyze Reger’s quintet op. 64 suggested to him that the celebrated German composer had been abandoned by all instincts for music. It is noteworthy that Spengler expressed a similar opinion of the totally aloof character of Reger’s music: “In the real command of a language there is a danger that the relation between the means and the meaning may be made into a new means. There arises an intellectual art of playing with expression, practiced by … Reger in music” (Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 2, pp. 136–137).

  47. 47.

    These disputes can be seen most openly in Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre (1910) and in the second volume of Schenker’s Die Meisterwerke in der Musik (1926).

  48. 48.

    Thus it becomes quite clear in what sense Wittgenstein’s judgement of Schenker’s view of music must have been forthcoming to an extent, as Felix Salzer reported, and perhaps even why he also told Salzer (concerning the latter’s own rendition of Schenker’s theory) that he hopes that Salzer “has boiled it down” (reported by Brian McGuinness, personal communication 2/16/2000).

  49. 49.

    See Eran Guter, “Wittgenstein on Musical Experience and Knowledge” in Johann C. Marek and Maria E. Reicher (eds.), Experience and Analysis, Contributions to the 27th International Wittgenstein Symposium (Kirchberg am Wechsel: Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, 2004), pp. 128–130.

  50. 50.

    The term “vertical” in this context is adopted from Michel Ter Hark, Beyond the Inner and the Outer: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology. Synthese Library, vol. 214 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), pp. 33–42.

  51. 51.

    By “internal relation”, Wittgenstein means a relation that is given with, or at least partly constitutive of, the terms adjoined. Such a relation cannot be established by examining the relata, since we could not identify the relata independently. The relata are adjoined in practice, so their relation is effected by the way we identify things. Thus, an internal relation is to be found in grammar. Wittgenstein’s great insight was that musical meaning is an internal relation, or a grammatical relation, not a relation between music and something else. Indeed, as Roger Scruton correctly observed in a recent paper, “analytical philosophy of music has grown around the question of musical meaning, which became articulated, during the twentieth century, in ways that were inimical to Wittgenstein’s vision” (Roger Scruton, “Wittgenstein and the Understanding of Music”, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 44(1), 2004, p. 1).

  52. 52.

    It is noteworthy that, traditionally, the term Harmonielehre does not denote primarily a kind of abstract treatise on the nature of harmony, but rather refers to a practical handbook designed to teach a beginning pupil how to become a composer of tonal music through an explanation of rules and their application, accompanied by a standard regimen of examples and exercises.

  53. 53.

    Wittgenstein stated this idea explicitly as early as 1915: “Nor is a melody a mixture of tones, as all unmusical people think.” (NB, 41; cf. PT 3.1602 and TLP 3.141)

  54. 54.

    Hypothetical objects, such as the vibrations of the air, the miniscule apparatus of the inner ear etc. are patently excluded (cf. PR §218).

  55. 55.

    I modified Peter Winch’s translation.

  56. 56.

    Regrettably, as it happens in many of Wittgenstein’s remarks on music, his non-standard use of technical terms in music (e.g., “melody”) often results in the obfuscation of his philosophical point.

  57. 57.

    Indeed, as Robert Morgan points out, we can see that even in Richard Strauss’s most progressive music, such as his operas Salome (1905) and Elektra (1908), while stretched to its outermost limits, tonality is still present as an underlying control. See Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp. 32–33.

  58. 58.

    Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with History, pp. 172–174.

  59. 59.

    Reported by Enzo De Pellegrin from an interview with G.H. von Wright, which took place in Helsinki, Finland in early summer of 1999. I am grateful to Dr. De Pellegrin for relaying to me relevant segments from this conversation.

  60. 60.

    Quoted in John King, “Recollections of Wittgenstein” in Rush Rhees (ed.), Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 71.

  61. 61.

    Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music, p. 22.

  62. 62.

    See Brian McGuinness, Maria Concetta Ascher and Otto Pfersmann (eds.), Wittgenstein Familienbriefe. Schriftenreihe der Wittgenstein-Gesellschaft, vol. 23 (Wien: Verlag Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1996), pp. 131–133. It is noteworthy that this symphony was the first to exhibit Bruckner’s mature style, which was greeted with fierce hostility by the Viennese audience and critics in its premiere in 1877—Brahms condemned Bruckner’s works as being a symphonische Riesenschlange. I may also add, as an anecdote, that young Gustav Mahler was one of the very few people in the audience who stood up applauding at the end of the performance.

  63. 63.

    Quoted in Michael Nedo, “Wittgenstein, die Musik und die Freundschaft” in Bruna Bocchini Camaiani and Anna Scattigno (eds.), Anima e paura: Studi in onore di Michele Ranchetti (Macerata: Quodlibet, 1998), p. 106. This letter, officially proclaimed to be unpublished and inaccessible, is in the possession of the Austrian National Library in Vienna.

  64. 64.

    See Leon Plantinga, Romantic Music: A History of Musical Style in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), pp. 435–440.

  65. 65.

    See note 59 above.

  66. 66.

    It is noteworthy that Mahler’s critics fiercely condemned precisely this character of Mahler’s music, calling his works “gigantic symphonic potpourries.” In a eulogizing essay on Mahler, Schoenberg explained: “The characteristic of the potpourri is the unpretentiousness of the formal connectives. The individual sections are simply juxtaposed, without always being connected and without their relationships (which may also be entirely absent) being more than mere accidents in the form.” (Schoenberg, Style and Idea, p. 462)

  67. 67.

    See Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, ed. P. Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 130.

  68. 68.

    In a passage from 1938, Wittgenstein wrote: “Lying to oneself about oneself, lying to oneself about one’s own inauthenticity [Unechtheit], must have a bad influence on one’s style; for the result will be that one cannot discern within oneself between what is genuine and what is false. This may explain Mahler’s style, and I am in the same danger” (quoted in Rush Rhees, “Postscript” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, p. 174). A further consideration of the deeply personal ethical tenor manifested in Wittgenstein’s general attitude toward Mahler falls beyond the scope of the present essay.

  69. 69.

    David Pinsent entered in his diary on October 4, 1912: “The second half of the concert began with two selections from Strauss’s Salome: Wittgenstein refused to go in for them, and stayed outside till the Beethoven, which followed.” Quoted in McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life, p. 124.

  70. 70.

    Wittgenstein even attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to promote a performance of Labor’s string quintet in Cambridge. See ibid., p. 125.

  71. 71.

    The fact that both remarks, written a week and a half apart, were entered in code signifies that Wittgenstein considered them sensitive.

  72. 72.

    Georg Henrik von Wright, “Ludwig Wittgenstein in Relation to his Times,” pp. 116–117.

  73. 73.

    Quoted in Maurice O’C. Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein” in Rhees (ed.), Recollections of Wittgenstein, p. 112. This remark is dated back to 1930.

  74. 74.

    See Heinrich Schenker, “Johannes Brahms,” Die Zukunft, 19, 1897, pp. 261–265. I am indebted to John Daverio for this insight.

  75. 75.

    In order to understand this obscure, somewhat unfocused passage correctly, three points should be taken into consideration. First, Wittgenstein’s remark concerning his inability to imagine several voices should be placed here in brackets. Later passages addressing the issue of contrapuntal music suggest that the problem concerning imagining several voices is not related to the present issue (cf. MS 163, 54 – CV, 40). Second, the terms “string quartet”, “symphony” and “oratorio” do not denote musical forms in any technical sense (the notion of symphony as a musical form is ambiguous at best). Rather, they denote musical formats that are intrinsically related to a broad and highly complex cultural context (cf. LC, 8). Third, Wittgenstein’s final, distinctly Spenglerian qualification should also be placed in brackets. This comment anticipates Wittgenstein’s conceptual concession to cultural relativism, and as such it is irrelevant to our present concerns.

  76. 76.

    Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 1, p. 152.

  77. 77.

    See Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 2, p. 435.

  78. 78.

    See Alexander Rehding, “The Quest for the Origins of Music in Germany Circa 1900,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 53(2), 2000, pp. 345–385.

  79. 79.

    See Guido Adler, “Musik und Musikwissenschaft,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters, 5, 1898, p. 29.

  80. 80.

    Carl Stumpf, Die Anfänge der Musik (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1911).

  81. 81.

    See McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life, pp. 125–128.

  82. 82.

    See, e.g., Charles S. Myers, In the Realm of Mind: Nine Chapters on the Applications and Implications of Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), p. 56.

  83. 83.

    See, e.g., C.W. Valentine, “The Appreciation of Musical Intervals,” The British Journal of Psychology (1912).

  84. 84.

    See Charles S. Myers, “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music,” The British Journal of Psychology, 1, 1905, pp. 397–406; and “The Beginnings of Music” in Essays Presented to W. M. Ridgway (Cambridge, 1913).

  85. 85.

    Rehding, “The Quest for the Origins of Music in Germany Circa 1900,” pp. 371–380.

  86. 86.

    Jeremy Yudkin, Music in Medieval Europe (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), p. 43.

  87. 87.

    It is noteworthy that historically the plainchant is a precursor of the recitative, which Wittgenstein brings as an example. Recitative differs from plainchant mainly in its precise rhythmic notation, its harmonic support, its wide melodic range and its affective treatment of the words. In this respect, plainchant makes a far better example of the significant irregularity exemplified by phenomena akin to language in music.

  88. 88.

    This characteristic was brought out most clearly by the great dispute in the sixteenth century concerning the practice of polyphonic composition. One of the main claims against polyphony—advanced, for example, by Galilei in his Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna (1581)—was that its unequal rhythms, melodies and tempi, or its mingling of voices, impede communication, and that only uncluttered voice can communicate clearly. See John Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 26.

  89. 89.

    For a discussion of Wittgenstein’s particular stress on speech, see J.C. Nyíri, “Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Secondary Orality,” Grazer Philosophische Studien, 52, 1996/1997, pp. 45–58.

  90. 90.

    Indeed, in an angry little essay from 1923 titled Untergangs-Raunzer or “decline-whiners” (an obvious allusion to Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes), Schoenberg lashed out at “all these Spenglers, Schenkers, and so forth,” who live the life of intellectual parasites, feeding on the works of art that they oppose. See Schoenberg, Style and Idea, pp. 203–204.

  91. 91.

    See Ethan Haimo, “Schoenberg and the Origins of Atonality,” in Brand and Hailey (eds.), Constructive Dissonance, pp. 71–86.

  92. 92.

    Botstein, “Music and the Critique of Culture,” op. cit., p. 17.

  93. 93.

    See Carl Dahlhaus, “Schoenberg and Schenker,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 100, 1973/1974, pp. 209–215.

  94. 94.

    Schenker actually used the term Schichten (layers) as a technical term, denoting the long-range, mid-range and short-range melodic trajectories, divided under the headings background, middleground and foreground.

  95. 95.

    Heinrich Schenker, Die Meisterwerke in der Musik (Munich, 1926), p. 25; quoted in Dahlhaus, “Schoenberg and Schenker,” p. 210.

  96. 96.

    It is noteworthy that Schoenberg’s decisive leaning toward function in contradistinction to Schenker’s leaning toward ornament in accounting for non-chordal notes aligns Schoenberg with Adolf Loos in a way that sheds a new light on the apparent asymmetry between the two, which I sketched in the first section of the present essay (“Leads and Impasses”). As I pointed out, Loos did not regard architecture as an art, whereas music, at least since the nineteenth century, was regarded as the ultimate art, the art to whose condition all other arts should aspire to rise. Yet, if we acknowledge Schoenberg’s quasi-linguist emphasis on function in his approach to music, as we must, then we should also acknowledge that, within the framework of the Krausian dichotomy between the urn and the chamber pot, Schoenberg’s art seems to fall peculiarly on the side of the chamber pot rather than on the side of the urn. Here, I believe, lies the real asymmetry that obtains between Loos and Schoenberg; hence we should concede that, while endorsing Schoenberg’s middle-period atonal music, Kraus and Loos nonetheless might have overlooked the true nature of Schoenberg’s project.

  97. 97.

    Schoenberg, Style and Idea, p. 369.

  98. 98.

    Kraus, Half Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths, p. 64.

  99. 99.

    Schoenberg’s apparent appeal to a sort of Romantic “big bang” theory of artistic genesis does not justify the conclusion he draws from Kraus.

  100. 100.

    Schoenberg, Style and Idea, p. 218.

  101. 101.

    Ibid., p. 244.

  102. 102.

    Ibid., pp. 287–288.

  103. 103.

    Ibid., p. 207.

  104. 104.

    Ibid., p. 215.

  105. 105.

    Dahlhaus, “Schoenberg and Schenker,” op. cit.

  106. 106.

    Schoenberg, The Musical Idea, op. cit., p. 416.

  107. 107.

    Schoenberg never wanted his “method for composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another” to be freed of the conditions in which it had been conceived or of the ethical implications which it embodied. In 1923, 2 years after he had already began experimenting with the use of 12-tone rows in his music, Schoenberg gathered 20 of his students in order to stress upon them that “ ‘you use the row and compose as you had done it previously.’ That means: ‘Use the same kind of form and expression, the same themes, melodies, sounds, rhythms as you used before.’ ” See Schoenberg, Style and Idea, p. 213.

  108. 108.

    Quoted in Snarrenberg, Schenker’s Interpretative Practice, p. 89 (my emphasis).

  109. 109.

    Kraus, Half Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths, p. 65.

  110. 110.

    The fact that we hear the first and the last tones of the 12-tone row as being the same is beside the point. In doing so, we merely hear an interval of an octave; a tonal phenomenon that the 12-tone system professes to undermine ultimately.

  111. 111.

    Musical gestures that pertain to dynamics, form, performance practice etc. are excluded here.

  112. 112.

    Obviously, here Schoenberg is exposed as being in the grip of the so-called Augustinian picture of language, which has been the elusive target of Wittgenstein’s philosophical attack in his Philosophical Investigations (cf. PI §1).

  113. 113.

    Schoenberg, Style and Idea, pp. 107–108.

  114. 114.

    Note that Wittgenstein jotted down this comment on 26.9.1946, only a day after writing one of his most elaborate passages on musical understanding.

  115. 115.

    See, e.g., Joseph P. Swaine, Musical Languages (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), ch. 6.

  116. 116.

    J. C. Nyíri, “On Esperanto: Usage and Contrivance in Language,” in Rudolf Haller and Johannes Brandl (eds.), Wittgenstein – Towards a Re-Evaluation, Proceedings of the 14th International Wittgenstein-Symposium, part II (Wien: Verlag Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1990), pp. 303–310.

  117. 117.

    Rudolf Carnap, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in Paul Arthur Schlipp (ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. XI (La Salle: Open Court, 1963), p. 26.

  118. 118.

    From the very beginning, Esperantists were concerned about the aesthetic aspects and values of their language over and above one of its initially professed objectives, which was to serve as a vehicle for scientific communication. In the first publication in Esperanto in 1887, Zamenhof had already published three poems, and since then, the growing original literature in Esperanto has served as a device for the elaboration and testing of the aesthetic rules implicit in the structure and principles of the language. See Pierre Janton, Esperanto: Language, Literature, and Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), ch. 4.

  119. 119.

    Carnap, “Intellectual Autobiography,” p. 69.

  120. 120.

    Karl Kraus, Rückkehr in die Zeit in Werke, vol. VII: Worte in Versen (Munich: Kösel, 1959), p. 236. English translation is taken from Alexander Goehr, “Schoenberg and Karl Kraus: The Idea Behind the Music,” Music Analysis, 4, 1985, p. 71.

  121. 121.

    I am grateful to Inbal Alexandron-Guter, Jaakko Hintikka, Enzo De Pellegrin and to the late John Daverio for helpful suggestions concerning some of the issues discussed in the present paper.

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  1. Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Max Stern Academic College of Jezreel Valley and Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Eran Guter

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  1. Thaliastr. 118, Vienna, 1160, Austria

    Enzo De Pellegrin

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Guter, E. (2011). “A Surrogate for the Soul”: Wittgenstein and Schoenberg. In: De Pellegrin, E. (eds) Interactive Wittgenstein. Synthese Library, vol 349. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9909-0_4

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