Unable to Escape Schoenberg

Unable to Escape Schoenberg

Even when I’m reading fiction, I can’t escape music: in Vikram Seth’s novel, The Golden Gate, the music of Schoenberg is anathema to the protagonist.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

Ah, autumn in New York. It’s always been my favorite time of the year. Part of the reason is that it’s the start of the concert season, a rare moment when jadedness is briefly suspended in anticipation of what’s to come in the months ahead. But more personally, autumn is the time when I embark on reading fiction again, after devoting myself to reading recent books about music during the spring and summer months.

So, after getting through George Rochberg’s collection of essays with its provocative multifaceted assessments of the music of Arnold Schoenberg (which I mused upon here last week), I started Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate. As a form junkie, whatever the artistic medium, I was immediately intrigued by this novel written exclusively in sonnets—even the author bio and table of contents adhere to the form—but I must confess to being prompted to read it for a musical reason as well. Hearing excerpts from Conrad Cummings’s opera-in-progress based on this book in a performance produced by American Opera Projects last weekend was an inspiration as well as an overdue guilt trip to pick up a book that has remained on my shelf unread for years.

But if I thought I was escaping the arguments I triggered here last week, boy was I wrong. In the second chapter, a couple who recently started dating attend a chamber music concert at Stanford featuring works by Mozart, Brahms, and Schoenberg—spelled the Germanic way, Schönberg, in the novel. In fact, Schoenberg’s music is the centerpiece of the program, much to the chagrin of the male protagonist who opines:

This sandwiched Schönberg is a pain

If only they would condescend
To shift this crap to either end,
We could arrive late or early.
Thank God I’ve brought my earplugs.

I just can’t escape this stuff! But it raises an interesting point. In the world outside our seemingly hermetically-sealed new music bubble, the ascetic atonal music of the Second Viennese School is still the radical new music within classical music. To those of us within the bubble, that music is as old fashioned as Mozart and Brahms by this point, but our having moved past this era is a fact to which the community outside is still largely oblivious. Sure, Philip Glass made it onto South Park several seasons back. But for most people with a passing knowledge of—for lack of a better term—classical music, the history runs as follows: There’s the old stuff, which is soothing but boring and, well, old; and then there’s the new stuff that no one likes because it’s boring and gnarly.

A composer friend of mine is thrilled that his name is being appropriated for characters in three different novels that will be published in the near future. But we need to get the word out into contemporary fiction about the music we’re composing as well.