What is the connection between high culture, the modernist
revolt, and the city?
“The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of
maximum concentration for the power and culture of a
community. It is the place where the diffused rays of many
separate beams of life fall into focus, with gains in both
social effectiveness and significance. The city is the form
and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the
seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the
academy of learning. Here in the city the goods of
civilization are multiplied and manifolded; here is where
human experience is transformed into viable signs,
symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is
where the issues of civilization are focused: here too, ritual
passes on occasion into the active drama of a fully
differentiated and self-conscious society.”
Vienna in the early 1900s
•
An ideal type of a traditional cultural city. Some industrialization, but largely
a center for the consumption of wealth: empire, religion, education and
culture.
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By 1910, Vienna reaches its highest population: over 2 million residents,
making the city Europe’s fourth largest. Following the World Wars, many
Czechs and Hungarians return to their ancestral homelands.
(2008 pop: 1.678 million.)
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“The actual role played by the arts during the period in question is undeniable.
More than just a convenient premise for latter-day historians, the arts really
were an important ingredient in the glue that held Viennese society together”
(Kallir 1984: 8).
Franz Josef I
In the early 1900s, Vienna enjoys its final years as capital of the AustroHungarian Empire, presided over by Emperor Franz Josef I (who reigns from
1848-1916). His heir apparent is Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose 1914
assassination in Sarajevo sparks the Great War and, by 1918, the Empire’s
demise.
 A court society that traces its history several centuries back
sustains an active ball season and elevates the Viennese Waltz to
world fame (e.g., Johann Strauss’s 1867 Blue Danube).
 Rituals of status: High culture and “classical values” serve to
celebrate and consolidate power and prestige of aristocratic and
imperial society.
 While Germany the nation-state is rather new (1871)
compared to Austria-Hungary, German language and
culture prevails throughout Vienna.
 Schoenberg, 1921: “I have made a discovery thanks to
which the supremacy of German music is ensured for
the next hundred years.”
Left: Adolph Hitler’s
birthplace in Braunau am
Inn, Austria.
Right: Hitler in Vienna,
1838, for the Anschluss
(Austrian annexation).
Above: Vienna State Opera house.
Below: University of Music and
Performing Arts.

18th and 19th century composers were
drawn to the city due to the patronage of
the Habsburgs, making Vienna the
European capital of classical music.
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The First Viennese School: Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn and
Ludwig van Beethoven.
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Traditions of the past dominate the
curriculum of Vienna’s schools and
universities. Stefan Zweig: “It was a dull,
pointless learning that the old pedagogy
forced upon us, not for the sake of life,
but for the sake of learning. And the only
truly joyful moment of happiness for
which I have to thank my school was the
day I was able to shut the door on it
forever.
The legendary scandals greeting
Schoenberg’s premieres are part of a
tradition of Viennese high society’s
cultural conservatism.
“Vienna’s musical past was legendary,
and the city’s inhabitants, who could
claims such luminaries as Mozart,
Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms in their
collective ancestry, were almost all,
regardless of social and economic class,
self-appointed music experts. This
overwhelming interest in things
musical was equaled only by the
extreme conservatism of the public’s
tastes, and the combination proved
inimical to any composer who dared
challenge the status quo. Hissing or
whistling through the hollow ends of
their door keys was the way
concertgoers routinely expressed their
disapproval of the unfamiliar… The
rudeness of the Viennese public was
matched only by that of the Viennese
press. The quality of the writing was so
abysmal that today Austrians still use
the adjective ‘journalistic’ as a
derogatory term” (Kallir 1984: 22).
 Arts: Gustav Klimt (Vienna Art Nouvea/Secession
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Movement), Emil Jakob Schindler, Oskar Kokoschka,
Egon Schiele (Austrian expressionism)
Sciences: Sigmund Freud
Philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein
Architecture: Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos
Music: Gustav Mahler
Letters: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler
(Junges Wien)
Journalism: Karl Kraus (Die Frackel), Theodor Herzl
(founder of modern political Zionism)
“Much has been written about the institution of the Viennese
coffeehouse, with its complimentary newspapers and obligatory little
glasses of water. Home away from home (or, for victims of Vienna’s
chronic housing shortage, home itself), post office, and social club all
rolled into one, the coffeehouse has gone down in history as the place
where, in the late nineteenth century, vanguard intellectuals met to
shape the future” (Kallir 1984: 16).
Left: Café Griendsteidl, Vienna’s
leading literary coffeehouse in the
1890s.
Below: Schoenberg, 2nd from right.
 Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1946) is born into a
poor Jewish shopkeeper’s family from Vienna’s
Second District ghetto, on the ‘other side’ of the
Danube Canal.
 Early musical training came from playing
chamber music and amateur orchestra while a
junior bank clerk. Although as a composer he
was almost entirely self-taught, his music was
influenced by individual lessons with Oskar
Adler and Alexander von Zemlinsky.
 Zemlinsky is especially significant; only three
years older, he introduces Schoenberg to the
cultural and social heart of Vienna. “Over the
course of the next five or six years, he logged in
several hundred nights at the opera, and by the
time he was twenty-five, he had seen each of
Richard Wagner’s operas close to thirty times”
(Kallir 1984: 16). Zemlinsky introduces
Schoenberg to to the circle of rebellious young
musicians at the Café Griensteidl.
 Schoenberg also paints and writes extensively.
Schoenberg’s star pupils, they elaborate and extend his
innovations in atonality and twelve-tone technique.
 Artists and intellectuals advocate a social, political and
moral break with Vienna’s imperial past and bourgeois
values.
 Social Democrats and Liberals begin criticizing the
Empire and calling for workers’ rights.
 Artists revolt against bourgeois sentimentality. Adolph
Loos, architect: “Ornament is crime.” (Cf. Walter
Gropius & Bauhaus)
 An aesthetic movement of
the early 20th century in
painting, film, literature,
and music.
 Emphasizes the expression
of emotion, often distorted
into angst.
 In Austria, epitomized by
the painting of Egon
Schiele and Oskar
Kokoschka.
 Kokoschka: “It is not my
trade to unmask society,
but to seek in the portrait
of an individual his inner
life, that measure of all
things, and never to rob
humanity of its value.”
Egon Schiele,
“Death and the
Maiden” (1915)
Oskar
Kokoschka,
“Bride of the
Wind” (1913)
 Schoenberg’s first creative breakthrough, circa 1909: the suspension of
tonality.
 Expressionism directed toward the modernist goal of breaking with
bourgeois convention (e.g., the orthodoxy of tonality).
 Schoenberg: “When I compose, my decisions are guided only by
sentiment, by the sentiment present in form. It is this which tells me
what to write, everything else is excluded. Every chord is created and
placed under compulsion, the compulsion of an expressive need, but
perhaps also of an inexorable, but unconscious, logic of harmonic
construction.”
 Pointedly not the direction pursued by French atonal composers. “In
essence, two avant-guardes were forming side by side. The Parisians
were moving into the brightly lit world of daily life. The Viennese went
in the opposite direction, illuminating the terrible depths with their
holy torches” (Ross 2007: 45)
 Observance of a single tonic key as the basis for composition.
From this note, melody structured within regular intervals: the
first (tonic), fourth (subdominant), and fifth (dominant) triads,
major/minor chords, etc.
 A musical invention of only two centuries before Schoenberg’s
time.
 Adorno on tonality’s effect in classical music before Schoenberg:
“It was as if every musical particular was subordinated to an
established generality. By listening appropriately, starting from
there, one would be able to deduce the development of its
particulars and to find one’s way with relative ease. Traditional
music listened for the listener.”
 Example of atonality: Schoenberg, Three piano pieces (1909).
 Schoenberg’s second creative breakthrough, circa 1928:
dodecaphony.
 “[T]he individualistic doctrine have been carried to its
furthermost limits, and the mainspring of the tonal
system shattered, [Schoenberg and his school] now
turned to the reorganization of the musical means on
the basis of a new structural order without belying the
expressionist stand” (Rognoni 1977: 50).
 Example: Alban Berg's Violin Concerto (1935).
“I was driven into paradise”: Like a number of
European composers and radical intellectuals
(including Adorno) fleeing the Nazis , Schoenberg
finds himself in Los Angeles, the stronghold of
America’s “culture industries.”
 Teaches first at USC, then UCLA (1936-1944). John
Cage takes music classes there around 1936-1977.
 Schoenberg’s legacy takes root in a surprising
foundation. “Of the multifarious strands of
American music, one in particular began to
prosper in the university environment:
composition informed by twelve-tone technique…
In the late sixties and early seventies, twelve-tone
composers were reaching the height of their
influence. By some accounts, they effectively took
control of university composition departments
across the country” (Ross 2007: 401, 489).
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