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Prompt: Responding to Tyranny ( Korngold and Schoenberg). Use this paper as a model for your paper 2 for Music Appreciation with Kevin McBrien....

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Mus 15, Mon 9am 22 November 2019 Responding to Tyranny After Germany experienced a major shift from monarchy to the Republic of Weimar, its inhabitants experienced new freedoms and Berlin became the center for artistic experimentation. However, the civil liberties of assembly, religion, and the flourishing arts did not last long. Financial and social problems led to a growing distrust of the government. Citizens turned towards radical organization, giving rise to the extreme nationalist Nazi Party. A number of constraints were placed on the arts: performances were canceled, sheet music was pulled from stores, and many Jewish, canonic works were banned and labeled as “Non-German.” Botstein believed that as composers, one might ask themselves how to “respond to the new realities, accompanied, as they were, by an overriding sense of an unprecedented distance from the

 ow does one respond to this landscape so far from our reality, and remembered past,” (267)? H who is our exact audience in the midst of all of it? The purpose of composers during this transitional period was blurred. The hateful rhetoric that continued to spread as the Nazi Party coined degenerate art with racist and homophobic elements caused people to flee from Germany. In search of a life free from Nazi reign and its restrictions, most waves of people that fled found themselves in the United States. The émigrés’ reactions to this major shift were gracious towards their creative freedoms yet were disillusioned from the language barrier and grief of leaving a life behind in another country thousands of miles away. To assimilate into American culture, some actors and

visual artists settled on East Coast while many composers were drawn to Southern California for its cheap land, good weather, and promising future. Concert life in the United States was limited to a small number of well-established orchestras and musical institutions that were privately funded. Émigrés were overwhelmed by the rigid, money-driven, film industry’s dominance in Hollywood (McBrien). Of composers, conductors, and musicians that took creative refuge in the U.S.; one success case was that of Erich Wolfgang Korngold from Austria. Though Korngold struggled with his transition, he found his place as a staple figure in the film industry. Korngold, although never questioned on his musical ability, felt insecure while grappling with the marriage of concert music to the stage and screen. The ways in which the two fit together was unfamiliar to him - the dialogue, the sound effects, these extra sounds took away from the score. Music for the cinema had its restrictions as it had to fit certain time frames for specific shots. Still, he was held to extremely high standards and his name began to hold significant weight in this new realm of entertainment. Goldmark describes Korngold as “entirely aware of the fact that he [was] in the minority— perhaps even in a singular position in Hollywood—regarding the amount of deference he received as a composer he developed/gained more and more say in cinema scores and how shots were edited,” (249). Korngold’s “Faith in Music!” highlights the composer’s straying away from the idea that “art that should mirror its time,” He believed that no common man would want to emulate “for his fellow man the headlines screaming of atom bombs, murder, and sensationalism found in the daily paper," (255). Beethoven’s work did not echo the horror’s of the Napoleonic Wars, nor did Schubert’s. This deflection of political unrest is demonstrated in Korngold’s “Old England, Robinhood” with triumphant elements from the wind and brass

section; distracting the listener from a forlorn atmosphere and bring about lighter emotions with the power of concert music in the cinema. Korngold aimed to create music that was an escape from the sorrow felt by the people of a crumbling country. While some composers felt that crafting music with an intention to transform the audience into a different time was the duty of composers, others found this notion to be untrue. After being dismissed from his teaching post in Berlin, Arnold Schoenberg moved to Los Angeles where he struggled finding an outlet that allowed his creativity to flourish. While he found this area to have a “general resistance to modern music,” and the film industry to deny his requests for film scores, he eventually settled down, teaching at UCLA (McBrien). After American entry into World War II following the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Schoenberg could not ignore “agitation aroused in mankind against crime,” (Auner 291). This was clearly a more responsible route to take as opposed to Korngold’s acts of denial through his whimsical, fantasy worlds created in his music. To this Austrian composer, music should comment, reflect, and mirror music of its own time. Feisst mentions that his use of atonal music that was largely unpopular was “considered "out of Hollywood,"(107). Ode to Napolean” is not only direct and personal address to the immediate distress but it emulates battle-like emotions and irksome tones. Schoenberg; however, contrasting Korngold’s belief of a “genuine artist” by responding to the events happening around him. While Korngold chose to shy away from relevant, horrific events, Schoenberg addressed them head-on. When considering whether or not the composer's true duty is to address the eminent political turmoil, it is evident that anything short of a response is not appropriate or just. A true composer will not sit idly by as the world that they are composing for is sitting in shambles. I do

not agree with Korngold’s statement, as it is shying away from an event that calls for attention. With the influence that early composers held, it would be most ethical to voice for the majority of people to call out against oppression, especially if it infringes upon civil liberties. To use their leadership position to harness the raw emotion of the masses is far more honorable than distracting them from the crisis. Had I been a composer during the rise of the Nazi Party, I would be using my leadership position, like Schoenberg, to take action against the promotion and acts of racism. He felt it necessary to form a musical statement in acknowledgment of the war and even wrote “A Survivor from Warsaw” shortly after the end of the war. Just as the greats before him, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schiller, Schoenberg stated that he “knew it was the moral duty of the intelligentsia to take a stand against tyranny,” (Auner 291). I would not emulate the style of Copland with his perception of “Wild West” in Copland’s Billy the Kid u sing tonal methods to misguide the audience's attention. To ignore immediate issues on any level - political, social, or economic - is ignorant and an act of moral injustice.

Works Cited Auner, Joseph Henry. A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life. Yale Univ. Press, 2008. Goldmark, Daniel, and Kevin C. Karnes. Korngold and His World . Princeton University Press, 2019. Feißt, Sabine. Schoenberg's New World: the American Years . Oxford University Press, 2017. Clementz, Molly. “Lecture” Music Appreciation, UC Santa Barbara, Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall UC Santa Barbara McBrien, Kevin. “Emigres in America: Displacement, Adaptation, and the Composer’s Duty,” Music Appreciation, UC Santa Barbara, Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall UC Santa Barbara Schoenberg, A. (1947). A Survivor from Warsaw. Schoenberg, A. (1942). Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte. Bujić Bojan. Arnold Schoenberg . Phaidon, 2011. Copland, A.(1938) Billy The Kid. Wild West...