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(2921 words)American Magic and DreadFrom the Crying Aesthetic to ZooropaTracing Revolution from Schoenberg to U2 by ADMThere is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts.… It is a small happiness of Nausea.— Jean-Paul Sartre,
Nausea
 It started when Bono walked into the studio one day with those fly shades…It was like a wholemoving into a more ironic point of view.—The Edge, U2The big players: Schoenberg, Cage, Coltrane, Sex Pistols, U2.The big ideas: Commodification, Authorship, Intensity, Revolution.To an early twentieth-century composer, nausea is praise. A retch proved the power of themusic; it declared the ability of the composer to overcome a century’s worth of stale rewrites andflaccid additions to the musical canon. The music of Arthur Schoenberg, for example, forced hisaudience to confront the anxiety of the time, even in a discipline that traditionally had been astronghold of beauty and order. By dispensing with established musical structures andreplacing them with an impenetrable assortment of dissonance, atonality, and finally twelve-tone theory, Schoenberg uprooted classical music, and made his audience ill. A potent glory liesin such an accomplishment, but only briefly, because after a time, the composer exhausts hisaudience. Listeners wander off, perhaps looking to be moved in other ways.Schoenberg lost his lay audience because of his obsessive attention to composing. Designs toointricate to hear sacrifice popularity for intellect, clarity for self-satisfaction. After Schoenberg,music moved toward an avant-garde that could reach the masses without destroying theintegrity of the composer. Had Schoenberg written symphonies aimed at appealing to hisaudience’s aesthetic sensibilities, his feeling of artistic significance may have been ruined. Themusic discipline for nearly a century seems to have been yearning for a synthesis of innovation, beauty, and intellect that would have a broad, appeal to the untrained ear. This movementdrove the careers of many major figures in twentieth-century music in Classical, Jazz, Punk, and
 
Rock, but is perhaps best exemplified in the works of Schoenberg, John Cage, John Coltrane, theSex Pistols, and, today, U2.Each of these artists, in attempts to reach the best form of music (for both themselves and theiraudience) had to balance many elements, artistically and personally. They each found ways of coping with the necessary commodification of their music, their authorship of a given piece, theintensity and predictably of their lives and work, the deconstruction of previous rules of music,and the construction of new ones. Over the last hundred years or so, the ways in which artistshave addressed these concerns has changed significantly, but their actions seem to be movingaway from the obsessive composer alienating his audience, toward the ironic band parodyingand commodifying themselves to critical applause. In tracing music from Schoenberg to U2, wewill see shifts and cycles from severity to laughter, from the modern to the postmodern, fromnausea to elation.This is a piece which never fails to move and impress me, but always leaves me feeling a little bit sick.—Leonard Bernstein, on Schoenberg’s
Pierrot Lunaire
(1912)Schoenberg, in his prime (c. 1900-1915), did not have to worry about selling records. Young and brilliant, he spent his hours wondering at the reinvention of music. His approach could affordto be purely intellectual, if only because the people he needed to impress were those who couldunderstand what he was doing, and who would (at least temporarily) put questions of euphonyaside. The mathematical relationships of one note to another, the exploration of the twelvetones, the use of dissonance concerned Schoenberg more than the broad appeal of his music. Hisis a deep music, one which pushes beyond the ear, and into the higher functions of the mind.One might argue that Schoenberg brought the modern preoccupation with science into hiscompositions, discovering the underlying truth of music through a scientific method.In the process of discovering the truth, Schoenberg descended so deeply into his music, healienated his audience. Possibly, he had no desire to hold onto an audience beyond academicsand composers, but his impact on music may have been greater had his compositions been ableto appeal to the listener’s sense of beauty and harmony. Instead, obsessed with authorship,Schoenberg wrote music that lingers in the collections of the few who understand what he didto music.
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Perhaps Schoenberg’s disciples were more concerned with commercial success than themasters. One of his apprentices, Anton Webern, wrote many extremely short pieces, each justlong enough to fill one side (three minutes) of a 78-rpm record.
 
Perhaps angered with the state of his contemporary musicians, and tired of the same old thing,Schoenberg dispensed with the old rules to bring a level of intensity and unpredictability tomusic. Other artists of the period were engrossed in ideas of banality and regularity. Thegreatest novel of the period, James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, chronicles an average man’s average day inDublin, ironically alluding to Homer’s Odyssey, a epic of heroes and beasts. T.S. Eliot yearnedfor regeneration of a cultural wasteland, in which people spoke flatly of a cultural tradition theyknew nothing about. Schoenberg’s work reacts against the sullenness of culture, challengingaudiences to question long-held tenets about the nature of music.The intensity of his work grows because of its unpredictability. Because only the mostknowledgeable composers can predict the direction of a given piece, his work to everyone else asa chaotic assemblage of notes. The jarring notes of “Moonfleck,” a portion of his
Pierrot Lunaire
,are innovative, to be sure, but as Bernstein suggests, they also inspire nausea. To Schoenberg,however, this reaction is not necessarily negative. If he intended to overcome his audience’ssense of unchanging drudgery, nausea is an appropriate response: we can appreciate the geniusof the music without enjoying its sound.If someone kicked me—not my music, but me—then I might com-plain. But if they kicked my music…then who am I to complain?—John CageAfter Schoenberg faded, certain members of the musical avant-garde seemed to realize thedanger of obsessing over composition, of losing the ability to laugh at oneself. Composersmoved toward methods of including their audiences in the production of the works, a majorstep that took away the hierarchy involved in one person defining high art for an audience of millions. Where Schoenberg tossed many of music’s rules, and replaced them with complexformulas, the new avant-garde departed almost altogether from composition. In extreme cases,such as some of the work of John Cage, the composer contributes only the idea for the piece, notthe specific notes or elements. Cage’s most famous work,
4'33"
, involved a pianist sitting insilence for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, the only sound being the audience’s. “Compositions” suchas these de-emphasized the role of the artist while more directly involving the audience, albeitreluctantly, in the production process. Such a reliance on the audience removed the music fromthe composer’s identity, thereby dissipating the kind of bonds Schoenberg felt toward his music.Where in Schoenberg, the music alienates the audience, in Cage the audience is wrapped up init, and the composer is alienated. Works such as
4'33"
once again reject traditional standards of music, even the recent ones Schoenberg established, but fail to posit a new standard.

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