simple sunday
August 20: Sunday
Life can be pretty exhausting sometimes, is it not? After three weeks, I'm really starting to settle into Vienna. And by that, I mean, I'm becoming my old California college student self again. A slightly anti-scoail gamer, contnet to sit in front of my computer while eating and listening to music.
But while I'm listening to music, why not listen to a Vienna native?
Arnold Schoenberg!
Yes, Schoenberg, the bizarre and brilliant Austrian hero of German expressionism and atonality in the early 20th century.
Due to my focus on the First World War, I'm interested in all kinds of art from the early 1900s and war era, from music to sketches to writings to paintings, whether by soldiers or former soldiers or just by citizens at the time who were living and creating art through this very dark era of European history.
I was so lucky to be acquainted with Schoenberg's music pretty early on, when I was in the Academic Decathlon in high school and we did a year that focused on early modernism in music.
The Schoenburg piece that was chosen is below: Nacht, or "Night", the eigth piece in the creep-tastic melodramatic poem-play "Pierrot Lunaire." Take a listen to it, turn it up loud, turn off the lights... get in the theatrical mood.
And listen.
...And listen.
So, I hadn't listened to this song since I was in 12th grade, and that really got to me just as hard as it did before.
With a name as simple as "Night," you can really imagine anything occurring in the song. Because it's night. It's darkness. It's scary. It's not really "Night" - it's "Fear." And Schoenberg's jilted atonality just helps with that fear.
Screw getting lost in Vienna, this is real fear!
Now, despite the nightmarish stimulation that the song has on the imagination, it does actually come with an established plot.
... It's about giant black moths that kill humans by eating their hearts out.
See, way better than anything I could have imagined!
But in all seriousness, I do enjoy expressionism, even to the extremely dissonant extents that Schoenberg brings it. I see the early 20th century as a time when the Old Europe was swiftly approaching a clash with the New Europe - this clash being the First World War. Much of the art and music leading up to this point - modern, reactionary, twisted and strange - seems to me like a warning, a preparation for the new time to come.
But that's just me.
