In essence Mann treats music as a novelist treats any subject, and although there are clear examples of Adrian's music being grounded in reality, such as the irresistible comparison between his early orchestral impressionism and Debussy and Ravel, his development of
twelve-tone technique and Schoenberg (to whom it is really indebted) and a later comparison of the Faust cantata to Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," it is ultimately irrelevant to hear Leverkuhn's music outside of Mann's literary depiction of it.
Eventually, Berg was to prove his loyalty to Schoenberg, his revered former teacher, by outwardly embracing his
twelve-tone method.
"Schoenberg's music and thinking have been the focus of scholarly discussion for several decades," Peles said, "and 'Schoenberg's
Twelve-Tone Music' does a masterful job of pulling many of these discursive threads together while tremendously enriching our understanding of this music."
This seems to me a more useful and elastic way of treating the relations between tones than the
twelve-tone method.
Given the protagonist's specialization in
twelve-tone structure, perhaps it is not surprising that chapter events may reverse, flashing backward in time, sometimes to a dramatic scene leading to an event that has already concluded--and really of no consequence.
Even when Donaldson's poems seem, at first glance, to be nearly random collections of syllables within a given structure, such as the fourteen lines of "A Touretter's
Twelve-Tone Sonnet," there is a method to the madness, and the words flow like they could only ever belong together:
The excavation of Bernstein's
twelve-tone structures, however, belies his rhetoric on serialism (including his famous lamentation at Copland's turn toward
twelve-tone techniques) and disproves the common assumption that Bernstein dabbled in and then dismissed serialism.
The
twelve-tone system of music may not be every music-lover's idea of pleasant sound, but it was a revolutionary form of musical expression that has not been rejected by musicians.
** Sixteen year olds were asked to compose a sixteen measure composition for four performers in 4/4 time based on the
twelve-tone row used by Berg in his violin concerto.
Schonberg's rigorous
twelve-tone approach was alien to Czechoslovak composers in the great majority of cases, and this was also true of the hermetically compact and in Czechsolovakia virtually unknown music of Anton Webern.
Donald Duck of the mail, and the
twelve-tone row of the adored.
Webern is the most refined, the most complex, the most rewarding of twentieth-century composers, whose short pieces encapsulate the whole history of music in under three minutes, despite being written entirely within Schoenberg's
twelve-tone system ...