Day 27. A song that you wish you could play

Schoenberg - Suite, Opus 29 (Septet)

I've always loved this piece, and would give anything for the opportunity to play it. This is the Variations movement. Both the Boulez and the Craft recordings are good. It's a classic modernist piece that belongs to its time, but is always bold and inventive.   One Amazon admirer writes: Razor-sharp 12-tone hardcore work, features curious sonic effects...Noted old binary dance steps give the work the appearance of something like Decadent/Expressionistic Austrian jazz: very scary, and very Schönbergian.   Another: The Suite, Op. 29, is a world in itself. It is absolutely harmonious and even melodious, ,but harmony and melody have been put upside down and right side left. Some will say it is right side wrong, but forgive them because they don't know what they are talking about. It is true he does not work on the basic notes of the scale but rather on their antagonistic second tier notes, background degrees. To end up on another note than the tonal sounds awkward, unbalanced, chaotic, but Schoenberg thus shows, demonstrates and illustrates the fact that all the music before him is just a convention that has been elaborated over some thirty centuries and that it has no naturalness at all. All music is man-made and then it can be de-constructed, re-constructed and even manipulated. Schoenberg thus manipulates tonal notes and basic rules dealing with them, but he also manipulates intervals and systematically works with undesired intervals, supposedly unharmonious intervals, both within the musical line of one instrument, or between the musical lines of two instruments supposedly playing together and there they definitely play one against the other in the orchestra. Chaotic they say? Absolutely not, except if you take chaotic in the meaning any physicist is going to give to that word when dealing with Brownian movement. But that chaos creates the most stable and ponderous, forbidding and imposing matter that can exist in the world. Schoenberg just implements that chaos to music and if you listen to it in order to rebuild the experience you may have in real daily life where everything is chaos and yet order at a higher level over this chaos you get fascinated and enthralled, but also awed and impressed... Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID