Arnold Schoenberg and the Intertextuality of Composing and Performance

Abstract

A composer's musical sketches can be fascinating objects, recording choices made and paths abandoned. Over the past century we have accumulated a substantial scholarly literature on sketch studies, much of it concerning the provenance, cataloguing, restoration, archiving and reproduction of sketches of great composers in the classical art-music tradition. Yet can we treat sketches as more than historical documents? In my recent work on the music of Arnold Schoenberg I have argued that it is possible for a composer's sketches not only to record the stages in the compositional process but also to influence modern interpretations and performances of works. As part of this ongoing project I have adopted an intertextual model that integrates aspects of cultural studies, sketch studies and music analysis. In this article, as an example of how this model can be employed, I will concentrate on one example taken from a sketchbook that Schoenberg used in 1917 to record the main ideas for his oratorio 'Die Jakobsleiter' ('Jacob's Ladder'). I argue that we can make sense of the sketch book's 'ungrammaticalities,' a term I have adopted from the work of literary theorist Michael Riffaterre, if we have an understanding of Schoenberg's sense of his own place not just in the 'great composer' narrative of Austro-German music history that dominated Western Europe through much of the late nineteenth century and the twentieth, but also of his place and role in the immediate context of the First World War.