"Away with Motivic Working?" Not So Fast: Motivic Processes in Schoenberg's Op. 11, No. 3

[1] Arnold Schoenberg's third Piano Piece op. 11 is at the heart of an international controversy about whether its melodies, harmonies and rhythms are carefully worked out according to larger patterns or, alternatively, are sheer by-products of expression and (perhaps) improvisation. Does op. 11, no. 3 manifest "amotivicism," a complete avoidance of motivic recurrence, or does it continue to use motivic relations and processes to create long-range coherence in ways similar to the first two pieces in op. 11? I believe a case can be made for the latter, if we keep two principles in mind, both of which are consistent with Schoenberg's own statements about "motive" in his mature work, Fundamentals of Musical Composition (1967). First, motives can appear in a wide variety of parameters--pitch, interval, contour, or rhythm (among others)--and can be of any size, though relatively small units are more typical.(1) We will be concerned in this article with small pitch-interval successions (two intervals, three pitches) and small set classes (with a cardinality of 3). Second, my main criterion for recognizing a motive as such in Schoenberg's music is that it be repeated or varied in such a way that the sequence of motive forms participates in some kind of directional process, which Schoenberg characterized as "development" or "growth."(2) In Schoenberg's atonal music, this directional process does not normally include every possible melodic segment or simultaneity in a passage (this allowance for intervening material parallels Schoenberg's motivic analyses of tonal music in Fundamentals, in which the segments are generally well-founded but do not include every possible legitimate segmentation). But as long as a proposed process accounts for a majority of possible motives, I believe that both motives and process are worthy of recognition.(3) I will discuss specific examples of this phenomenon in the latter part of my article.[2] Before I present my own analysis of the Piano Piece op. 11, no. 3 to illustrate my argument for motivic processes therein, it is important to review the literature that has sprung up around this piece, to get a better understanding of the "international controversy" I referred to at the beginning of this article. Much of the literature in English tends to rely on Schoenberg's early writings and those of his students to support the claim that op. 11, no. 3 was among the first of his pieces to exemplify an "intuitive aesthetic," and is therefore free from overarching formal, harmonic, rhythmic or motivic patterns. Supposedly, it shares those characteristics with other works Schoenberg composed in the late summer of 1909: the fifth of the Orchestral Pieces op. 16, and Erwartung op. 17. Among the authors who take this stance are Joseph Auner, in the 1989 article in the Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute that coined the term "intuitive aesthetic," and Aine Heneghan, in a more recent article in Musical Currents from the Left Coast (2008) that describes a "volte-face" in Schoenberg's compositional philosophy after op. 11, no. 3 and works similar to it. Their articles characterize op. 11, no. 3 and the other pieces of its era as lacking motives, motivic variation and motivic development.Example 1. Part of a letter from Arnold Schoenberg to Ferruccio Busoni, dated August 13, 1909 (translated by Antony Beaumont; a larger excerpt may be found in Beaumont 1987, 389)[3] The principal source to which these authors appeal is Schoenberg's August 1909 letter to Ferruccio Busoni that includes the phrase paraphrased in my title, "away with motivic working out" (according to the typical English translation).(4) This phrase comes in the midst of a passionate description of (and argument for) the young composer's new avant-garde aesthetic, directed at a well-known pianist and fellow composer who had already shown some sympathy to Schoenberg's ideas, and whom Schoenberg was desperately trying to convince to perform the three pieces of op. …