Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Schiano, Michael Jude

Titel

Arnold Schoenberg's Grundgestalt and its influence

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

1992

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Arnold Schoenberg's notion of a Grundgestalt or basic shape continues to intrigue music theorists. It is an idea that is at once intuitively useful and insightful. After all, it is an analytical view that applies both to Schoenberg's work as well as to the masterworks that Schoenberg revered, thereby supporting his position that his own compositions are in many ways not unlike those of his predecessors. But Schoenberg did not clearly define the term, and, in fact, left its meaning open to many interpretations. Perhaps, to him it was a principle of art that transcended a simple and practical definition. This dissertation considers the Grundgestalt from several perspectives. First, we examine Schoenberg's own remarks concerning the Grundgestalt and other related phenomena such as the motive, developing variation, the musical idea, motivic liquidation, and so on. From this, we gain some insight into the issues Schoenberg associated with the Grundgestalt. We then examine the Grundgestalt as perceived by Erwin Stein, Josef Rufer, and Patricia Carpenter; they studied with Schoenberg at different times, and provide us with quite conflicting accounts of the Grundgestalt. As a composer and teacher, Schoenberg would have had ample opportunity to rethink many of his ideas, and indeed it seems probable that his conception of the Grundgestalt evolved during his life. We then return to Schoenberg's own writing in order to study the implicit role of the Grundgestalt in his musical analysis. Several analyses are extremely suggestive regarding the potential formal properties of the Grundgestalt, and from here we develop a means of more clearly understanding the issues involved in a Grundgestalt analysis: the background motivic progression, and the background motivic network. By understanding Schoenberg's work, we are able to shed light on some more general problems of motivic analysis, including those associated with theorists whose work was influenced by Schoenberg. Among these theorists are Deryck Cooke, Hans Keller, and Rudolph Reti. Finally, we apply our understanding of the Grundgestalt principle to the development of a new model for motivic analysis, and apply that model to the Scherzo of Mendelssohn's Octet for Strings.