nomos - law, melody and the deconstructive in webern

Nomos/Nomos: Law, Melody and the Deconstructive in Webern's 'Leichteste Bürden derBäume', Cantata II Op. 31Author(s): Craig AyreyReviewed work(s):Source: Music Analysis, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Oct., 2002), pp. 259-305Published by: WileyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3840793 .

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CRAIG ayrey

Nomos/Nomos: Law, Melodyandthe Deconstructive in

Webern's 'Leichteste Burdender BAume', Cantata II

Op. 31

0. Degree zero. Webern's last completed work, the Second Cantata Op. 31

(1943), is a radical renovation of his mature serial practice.1 Celebrated by the

post-war avant-garde as a precursor of integral serialism and the 'degree zero' of composition, the work foreshadows this tabula rasa. Which shows, of course, that there is no absolutely new beginning. In music history, the Second Cantata is a classic instance of what Derrida calls the 'non-originary' origin.

Barthes defined the degree zero of writing as 'the search for a new style, for a zero level or spoken level of writing, ... the anticipation of a homogeneous social state' (Barthes 1967, p. 87), which attempts to overcome 'necessary' division (of languages, classes and modes of expression) through creative acts of freedom from institutionalised 'style'. Although the dimensions of necessity, of the institutional conventions that situate Webern's writing in the Second

Cantata, are expertly detailed in Zuber (1984) and Bailey (1991), the dimensions of freedom in the work and their relation to necessity, or 'law' as I will call it, remain unexamined: analytical 'degree zero'. My purpose in this article is to probe this relation.

1. Adorno's reception ofthe Second Cantata countermanded that ofthe post- war avant-garde and foregrounded degree zero as Barthesian 'speech'. He described the work as a 'breakthrough' (Adorno 1999, p. 104) on the evidence of its expansive new complexity constituted by harmonic diversity, melodic and rhythmic freedom, and formal variety. Perhaps, in the end, Webern had found the means to realise the apparently unrealisable 'desire to force the

[twelve-note] technique to speak' that Adorno identified in the attempt 'to lure from the alienated, rigidified material ofthe rows that ultimate secret which the alienated subject is no longer able to impart to them' (Adorno 1973, p. 109; translation modified).

'Breakthrough' and the 'ultimate secret': these terms have related senses in Adorno's writing. The first makes a rare appearance outside Adorno's Mahler

(Adorno 1992), first published in 1971, where it designates a moment when the

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260 CRAIG AYREY

primary material of a work is integrated with opposed, 'foreign' material.

'Breakthrough5 is, in Robert Samuels's words, a 'utopian image' (Samuels 1995), utopian in the sense that the integration is, for once, a successful mediation ofa subject (identified with the primary material ofthe work) and its other. The utopian image that is Webern's Op. 31 is imagined somewhat

differently. It describes the work as an event in which the series and its

structures, the objectively constituted primary material, bridge the gap between series and the expression of the compositional subject without resort to alien or traditional models. (A negative example is the expressive mode of

Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 4 which, in the service of 'compre? hensibility', activates the outmoded motivic-rhetorical subjectivity of Brahms as the alias for individual expression.)2 The meaning of Adorno-Webern's 'ultimate secret' would seem to be nothing other than a breakthrough to the

mystery of how systematic structure comes to 'speak' in an individual

compositional voice, of how subjectivity congealed in the object becomes communicative and is redeemed from all forms of alienation.

This achievement, if indeed it is successful, cannot be divorced from Webern's technical virtuosity so admired by the avant-garde. If serialism is made to speak in the Cantata it is the result of an exaggeration of organisational strictness and complexity as Webern discovers meta-contrapuntal devices which drive its serial systems into abstraction and, eventually, into silence. The attributes of constructivist objectivism are forced to withdraw from perception, and the material, formerly 'alienated' by its identity with its serial deter-

minants, is now mysteriously redeemed by a further alienation, from sound itself. Blanchot argues in favour of this 'liquidation of counterpoint' (Adorno's phrase) in which contrapuntal organisation survives as 'the memorial of a

rigour that is impressed on us only as a memory or absence and leaves us

always free (dangerously free) in our listening' (Blanchot 1969, p. 510).3 Extreme intensification of the principle of order is deployed to a counter-

objective end - the restoration of the effect of freedom and spontaneity, together with the exposure ofthe work to esthesic contingency - and Webern's music once again recreates that illusion of coherent, 'natural' expression so

prominent in his compositional aesthetic.4

2. The new freedom was hard won. Webern's lectures of the early 1930s,

published as The Path to the New Music (Webern 1963), record his struggle with the secret of how subjectivity comes into being from determined (and often largely pre-determined) structures. His engagement with this (Adornian) compositional imperative is the more intense for its resistance to explicit statement. What can be heard as whisper beneath his constructivist theoretical discourse is that expression emanates from, is wrought from, or is inscribed in 'law' or 'laws', and that subjectivity proceeds from objective structure, the

? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2002 Music Analysis, 21/iii (2002)



Webern's 'Leichteste Burdender BAume' 261

particular formation from the general model, and actual musical freedom from abstract necessity.

Webern's position is stated most directly as follows:

Something is expressed in notes - so there is an analogy with language. If I want to communicate something, then I immediately find it necessary to make myself intelligible. But how do I make myself intelligible? By expressing myself as clearly as possible ... We have a special word for this: comprehensibility. The highest principle in all presentation of an idea is the law of comprehensibility. (Webern 1963, p. 17; Webern's emphases)

To this it need only be added that intelligibility, clarity and comprehensibility (as in Schoenberg's 'Composition with Twelve Tones' (Schoenberg 1975,

p. 218)) are reducible to and achieved by obedience to the law of unity, 'the utmost relatedness of all component parts ... [and] surely the indispensable thing if meaning is to exist' (Webern 1963, p. 42). Unity is the transcendent

law, in relation to which all others are metonymies. Even in the late works and letters to Willi Reich ofthe early 1940s (Webern

1963, pp. 58-66), Webern never abandons the hierarchy in which system and law dominate freedom and expression: if there is a movement towards mediation of this dialectical couple, it is always intended only to ameliorate the constraints of law and serial order by increasing, not diminishing, the distance between the abstract, pre-compositional calculation of systems and the work that issues from them, disguising the laws or making them inaudible, invisible, and evident only as traces (this is the Derridean sense of Blanchot's 'memory or

absence'). At the same time, though, Webern continues to grapple with the problem of

how the series can simultaneously resist this retreat into the ideal, and be

presented in the work as a discrete musical idea that is somehow both an

expressive formation and structurally generative. In order to maintain the

activity of the composing subject within the regulated system of serialism, the series must be both a singular musical idea and a universal law for a complete composition, so that it constitutes, at the same time, an individual being and a

primordial law (by analogy with the laws of nature or an ethical principle). Ideally, then, the series must be both present and absent, particular and

universal, material and abstract, real and ideal. In his frequent assertion that the series guarantees unity,5 Webern attempts

to transcend the logic of either/or by asserting an impossible logic of both/and, a logic that does not invoke the semantic depth and structural richness of

ambiguity but a cold fusion of dialectical couples which deems the

requirements of the series as unitary principle to be satisfied if 'something that seems quite different is in fact the same' (Webern 1963, p. 53). Webern's mature project (beginning with the Symphony, Op. 21) is to extend the domain

Music Analysis, 21/iii (2002) ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2002



262 CRAIG AYREY

of the series so that nothing escapes it, progressively closing the gap between

genesis and structure so that these two aesthetic dimensions are brought as

nearly as possible into complete identity. The drive towards ever greater serial

unity and lawlikeness maximises the logical derivation of motivic and harmonic formations from the series and aims at the incontrovertible identity of musical

material, eliminating the fortuitous and accidental. The unity of musical space is determined as an almost impregnable serial edifice, in which the series, when

presented either horizontally or vertically, also controls the complementary dimension and places the whole composition under the rule of serial law.

3. The achievement of Webern's compositions ofthe 1930s is the most exacting realisation of the 'goal' of the history of music, the moment when 'the twelve notes have come to power' (Webern 1963, p. 52).6 Taking up the implications of Webern's idiom, this is to say that the twelve single pitch-classes of the chromatic scale are empowered by their formation into an ordered unity subject to a system of laws. As in any legal system, the laws govern particular necessities and conditions: the centripetal laws of ordering and imitation satisfy the imperative of identity, and the centrifugal laws of variation ('the forerunner of 12-note composition' (Webern 1963, p. 52)) respond to the drive to

differentiation, without which identity would be insignificant repetition. Theoretically, then, the system is closed by the pitch-duration reciprocity of canon and the mutual dependence of material identity and difference.

This closure is put into practice almost violently in Opp. 21-8 where the

exploration of the reciprocal system of laws mediates the poles of identity and difference by installing these structural necessities in the internal organisation of the series. The identity of the series as a unified formation in the

composition now gives way to similar ordered sets within the series. Since these internal series-segments can only be similar and not identical, they also

exemplify the law of variation and are motivically commensurate with

segments from other forms of the series; and under combinatorial or other

systematic conditions, segments of different series forms or transpositions may even be identical. As a result, the series as an ordered intervallic unity is

exploded into fragments; the work becomes, in the scientific sense, its own

analysis, one which can be read from the systematically-administered positioning of small interval complexes or pitch-classes within a maximal relational field.

Such a reading informs Adorno's critique ofthe 'sclerosis' and 'regression to the primitive' afflicting the String Quartet, Op. 28: Webern sits before the

opening of the Quartet 'with his hands folded as if in prayer' (Adorno 1999,

pp. 102-3) worshipping his abstractions, perhaps also hoping that music will

ensue; he realises twelve-note technique by renouncing composition for 'the schemata of the rows translated into notes'; and when, in the late chamber




Webern's 'Leichteste Burden der BAume' 263

works, 'the ripest fruits of canonic imitation fall, as it were, of their own will into the lap of the composition, without the necessity of further efforts in this

direction', silence is 'the rest of his mastery' (Adorno 1973, p. 110). For

Adorno, then, this music fails by regressing to the calculable. The laws of

identity, imitation and variation have become automated, and what has been subtracted from them is the necessity of a decision beyond the decision simply to apply the law, to set the system of laws in motion.

The aesthetic situation Webern creates in this late period approaches the

judicial insufficiency of supposing, in Derrida's words, that 'if the act simply consists of applying a rule, of enacting a program or effecting a calculation, we

might say that it is legal, that it conforms to a law, and perhaps, by metaphor, that it is just, but we would be wrong to say that it is just' (Derrida 1992a,

p. 23). Or, in Adorno's formulation, Webern conceals 'the demand made by the rows with the demand ofthe work itself (Adorno 1973, p. 110).

4. It seems to me that in his last works Webern goes in search of what one

might call 'aesthetic justice' in a work, its 'demand' in relation to the series as

law, without ever being able to name it, precisely because this 'justice' exceeds the order of the calculable.7 Webern's calculative declaration that 'something that seems quite different is in fact the same' is an exaggeration that betrays the

impossibility of his vision of absolute aesthetic closure. The cold fusion of ideal and real, law and expressivity in the series takes place only abstractly, in

theory; in practice, the series as unitary principle is sundered by the

hyperbolisation of the law of unity in the internally-symmetrical series, or -

when, anecdotally, Webern decided that to realise a work in sound would be to diminish its pure ideality8 - hyperbolic unity in abstraction leads (logically) to the negation of the possibility of expressivity except as auto-communication.

One reaction to the impossible, therefore, is to take refuge in the sweet

solipsism of music unperformed. Another, the case ofthe Second Cantata, is to subvert the totalising power of the series by conceiving musical structure as the differance of the universal-systematic and the singular-expressive, as a site traced by the effects of law and subjectivity. In this, Webern - like Adorno's

Schoenberg (or Beethoven) - recovers the productive antagonism of law and

expression as a generator of significant musical form; but he also breaks with the classic-romantic conception of this relation in which the category of individual expression - or, to quote Lawrence Kramer, 'pleasure' - in relation to law 'shuttles between assent and transgression' of the law (Kramer 1995,

p. 228). Structure as differance should not, however, be equated with either

mediation, or a modernist synthesis of the dialectical couple (law and

expression), or a holding of oppositions in balance. Law remains the dominant force in Webernian structure. When law is subjected to compositional subjective force - to the force of expression which I call 'expressivity' -




264 CRAIG AYREY

structure, as the locus of the interaction of dissimilar forces, displaces and

appropriates law in the work for itself to embody a transformation of serial law into something beyond the series.

5. Expressivity in 'Leichteste Biirden der Baume', the fourth movement ofthe

Cantata, but the first to be composed, is constituted by an expansion of the

principle of identity which activates silence, spacing, diffusion and connection. These effects, produced by the intensified abstraction of multiple systems,9 are

clearly instigated by the text, a neo-Symbolist nature lyric extracted from

Hildegard Jone's longer poem 'Der Wind':

Leichteste Burden der Baume trag The lightest burden of the trees ich durch die Rdume: die Dufte. I draw through the spaces: their fragrance. Bring dir der Linde Gestalt [I] bring you the form of the lime tree fern her, aus leisestem Hauch. from afar, on softest breath.

In the Cantata's religious context, this description of the diffusion of the

fragrance, the essence or ideal form, ofthe Lindenbaum by the wind (the T of the poem)10 can be read as a metaphor for the ineffable divine presence ordering the real world: in the fifth movement ('Freundselig ist das Wort'), the solo bass sings, 'What other power could there be among us but the Word?'

(bars 17-24) at the moment when the canonic and duration schemes of 'Leichteste Biirden' are most obviously reprocessed. The wind, the Word, are identified in both movements with the linear statement of series, defined in Webern's letters to Reich as the 'law' ofthe work (Webern 1963, p. 63). The I-

persona of 'Leichteste Biirden' is therefore a trope of law embodied in the

ethereal, intangible movement of air which inhabits spaces - gaps and silences - and is carried by the voice ('the softest breath') and solo violin/horn in the basic ordering P-R-I-RI (Ex. la).11

Webern's vision of the transcendental unity of all things requires that this

expression of law is also made concrete in the sequence of chords

accompanying the melodic line, in musical objects which create spaces and are subject to spacing. The voice is the wind and the chords are the trees; and so a naive representation of nature arises from the simple mimesis of linear and vertical. This simplicity is marked by unpredictability and irregularity: free-

associating celesta and harp pitches disturb the linear-vertical opposition, while, without obvious motivation, the forte and sforzando chords violently interrupt rather than support the melodic line. There are also unpredictable absences in the one-to-a-bar regularity of the instrumental chords; the first of these absences defines die Rdume ('spaces') by a literal space (bar 7), the second

{der Linde Gestalt) clears a space for the notion of Gestalt (form, shape, idea),




Ex. 1 Serial analysis, canonic structure and instrumental chords

to o o

dd

s

3

(b) [] = duration without pitch attack * =inexact pitch attack " P (voice) -i_j_i_j_u_j_\. i' j j j j j j:_j._j_j j j. i i j

_J-^ r-i j!_r r itJ j J Jj i ii?j:?.J Ji J J-?j j, J1 .j?j_jj: ,j j j, i_o_UiJ

_J-(J?J- -U4- 0-

wwl = fl, ob, cl, bn ww2 = picc, sax, bcl

W w

r w n H ffl H w dd o 5? 0 W

u w

dd >= a



w Ex. 1 (continued) to ON

9T 3

o o

to o o to

j j j j._n-j_r_j. j j j j j j._j:_j_j j i-_ixj -IRU

L. ?+o4-

J.JJ J._J+-J_JLhU_J_j_J,|V 1J1 JtJi_ij_L-U-i-OJJh-

-J-L?-e-?--?e*-o-eH-?- } 1- '? -LJL

Zl ww2 bp. Y2 (X2) || Y

br. X

4-2B (10,0,1,2) 3-12(3,7,11) 3-12 (1,5,9) 3^B (3,7,8)

X3(Y3)

>?

ww2 Y2(X2)

4-4B(4,7,8,9)

=fe:

3-12(3,7,11)

Zl ha

4-2B (10,0,1,2)

wwl Zl

4-2B (10,0,1,2)

n >

5




heavily marked in Webern's compositional thought, and the last allows the

lightest breath (leisestem Hauch) to be heard and felt. These expressive silences are the product of structural gaps created by verticalising the canonic

presentation of the series in which the sum of the durational values of the verticalised pitches defines the duration of silence between successive chords of a canon (Ex. lb).12 Canon itself structures silence.

6. But canon is also silenced structurally, and placed beyond perception by three further operations:

(1) the canons intersect so that segments of different series appear in succession (see Ex. la, serial topography);

(2) the real, sounding durational values of the canons are absent because the duration of each chord itself is unrelated to the durational sequence of the canon (see Ex. lb, values in square brackets);

(3) the chords are often imprecisely placed in the canonic scheme, though they always occur within the temporal space of the operative durational value (see Ex. lb, asterisked durations).

Canonic audibility retreats in response to the expressive force of the

repetition of verticals instigated by the text. If the arboreal chords are to stand as substantial and alike, structural forces of similarity and connection must come into play in the vertical dimension. From the two distinct forms of the series as ordered sets (P/R and I/RI), Webern constructs three chord classes

(Z, Y, X), each of which has one or more variants (Ex. lc, level 1, and Ex. 2). The pitch-class similarity in the chord sequence is defined in Ex. 2 by set-

class identity (Z/Zl, Y/Y2, X/Xl), maximal pc similarity (X/X2) and superset inclusion (Y/Yl, X/X3). The chords with dual classification (Y2/X2, X3/Y3) are similar in different ways to both classes. These similarity relations are determined by Webern's particular configuration ofthe properties ofthe series itself. P and I exhibit identical forms of set-class 7-1 and 5-1 which contain a number of positionally similar pcs and dyads (Ex. 3a). The two 7-1 sets

(trivially) maintain Ffl as constant, and exchange E/Gtf (P/I 4-5), a property that grounds the relation of Y3, X3 and XI (Ex. 3b); and the exchange of P/I 2- 3 and 6-7 is exploited by Webern to establish the invariant chord X, set 3-4B

(3,7,8), by means of the trichord equivalence of I 2-4 and P 5-7. The two 5-1 sets (10,11,0,1,2) hold Q as constant, and exchange Bb/D (P/I 9-10); chords Z and Zl (set 4-2) draw on this invariant segment. The exchange of P/I 8-9 and 10-11 is not activated in this serial generation of chords but, in telescoped form, it completes the mirror of the exchange structure of set 7-1. Cutting across the 5-1/7-1 division, the equivalent segments P/I 6-8 define the

transpositionally-related chords Y and Y2/X2 (set 3-12).




268 CRAIG AYREY

Ex. 2 Chord classes

When the instrumentation and dynamics of the chords are presented, the result is a hierarchy of invariance (Ex. 4) that differentiates the chords and defines two chord classes (X and Z) as maximally invariant constants. In the

piece itself, the identity of each class is deployed functionally: chord X cadences each vocal phrase (bars 5, 8-9, 17-18), Z frames both sections 1 and 2, and Y defines the beginning of internal melodic phrases (bars 6, 10, 16, 19-20).

7. This invariance grounds a complex symmetry of verticals (Ex. 5). Both sections of the piece exhibit a nested structure of chords (Ex. 5a): class Z frames class Y frames class X, disrupted only by an irregular distribution of silences (0) and the single occurrence of X in section 2 (bar 17) which separates the equivalent Y/0 pair framed by X in section 1 (bars 6-7). The complete sequence of chord classes is doubled in this progression of chords.

Bailey's analysis of the palindromic organisation of all instrumental groups except the strings (wwl, ww2, br, br, ww2, wwl; ww2, br, ww2, wwl) defines the first presentation ofthe chord-class sequence (Zl, Y, X, X, Y, Z; ete.) (see Bailey 1991, pp. 304-5). The second is articulated by instrumental invariance, the succession of stringed-instrument chords (including the harp) Z-Y1-X1,

Zl-Y(harp)-X3/Y3-Zl. As Bailey's analysis suggests, it is likely that Webern

designed the chord sequences as an essentially spatial distribution of

verticalities with the framing and nesting functions described in Ex. 5. Yet the combination of pitch-invariant and transposed chords seems to be controlled by linear principles of connection in which the outer voices of each





Ex. 3 Relations of P and I series

(a) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

P/R

I/RI

7-1(3,4,5,6,7,8,9). 5-1(10,11,0,1,2).

(b) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Y2/X2:3-12 (3,7,11) 71. . on nn n ? 9. XI: 3-4 (3,4,8) , Zl: 4-2B (10,0,1,2)

** U lyi fl# >r hp t,J y

J '?

y ** * P/R

Y3/X3: 4-4B (4,7,8,9)

X: 3-4B(3,7,8)

Yl: 4-19 (1,2,5,9)

I/RI ' <r T V ^J Vrf^f p"

E

X: 3-4B(3,7,8) Y: 3-12 (1,5,9) Z: 4-2 (10,11,0,2)

section unfold inversionally related prolongations of chord Z's D/Bb by an ic3 ascent to F/Cjj (chord B), prolonged in turn by the neighbouring dyad F/A (chord Yl).13 The lower-register Gt)s and Gtfs of chords X and XI at first exit from the top-voice prolongation, but in section 2 the higher-register G naturals

(chords Y2/X2) become prolongational as the symmetrical inversion, around

Bb, of the Ctf of section 1. All primary and secondary dyads in the second

Music Analysis, 21/iii (2002) > Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2002



270 craig ayrey

Ex. 4 Hierarchy of invariance

section invert those of the first; the symmetry is disturbed only in the

prolongation of B/G (bars 15-20) which transforms the equivalent passage (bars 4-10), but re-invents Cfj as a tertiary, rather than secondary, prolongational tone.

The inversional prolongations project the basic serial relation P/I (the two distinct ordered set-forms of the series) onto a higher, totalising structural level. Webern mobilises, or attempts to mobilise, the serial functions of inversion and retrograde, and through large-scale centrifugal and centripetal connections, to construct these functions as a dynamic temporal process. Within each section, the prolongations are also themselves palindromic (for

Ex. 5 Large-scale structure

strings: l_ wwl ww2 br. str. Zl Y X || Yl 0 br. X ww2 wwl str. Y 0 Z || Zl ww2 0 Y2/X2 hp. br. ?tr. ww2 str. wwl

|| Y X 0 || X3/Y3 Y2/X2 0 Zl Zl ||

Bring dir der LindeGetutt feraherwuleiKMenlUuch. [bonitolo]

B ffi ur"U -i Sfc U" u

m

mn

fic4] lic31 ^

4-2 (0 z_

3-12 3-4B 4-19 0 3-4B 3-4 3-12 0 4-2 4-2B Y X Y X_ Y Z Z

3-12 3-12 3-4B 0 4-4B 3-12 0 4-2B 4-2B Y/X Y X_(Y) Y(X) _Z

= maximal invariance within choid class (pc set content, register, instnunentation)





example, in the top voice, Bb-Q-A-Q-Bb, Bb-G-Q-G-Bb) which adds the serial principle of retrograde to the large-scale structure. Once clarified by this linear structure, the sequence of chord classes can be read in the same way, as

palindromic for each section -Z-Y-X-Y-X-Y-Z (Ex. 5c) - and, since the sections display equivalent sequences, palindrome is projected across the whole

piece, hinging on the two class Z chords in bars 12-13. As the result of what Bailey terms the 'superposition' of forms (Bailey 1991,

p. 306), none ofthe overtly reductionist schemes of Ex. 5 produces absolutely identical structures for the two sections. But in addition to her superposition of melodic line, the symmetries of instrumental groups, binary and circular formal designs, the analysis in Ex. 5 reveals that the instrumental groups' symmetries are reinterpreted by the linear connection of repeated pitches. What emerges from the constellations of chord, instrumental group and

registral disposition is a multiplicity of structures in distinct but interactive dimensions ofthe piece which, as a whole, does not project a single concept of

structure, except perhaps the palindromic principle itself. The result is a

multi-systematic construct in which each dimension is organised along at least one line of regularity or symmetry without being definitively integrated into a unified totality.

In this sense, 'Leichteste Biirden' is anti-structural, even in the counter-

balancing repetition in the chord sequences. (Repetition in 'Leichteste Biirden' is always temporally spaced or diffused, differentiating rather than identical, mimetic rather than presentational.) Yet, extrapolating Blanchot's intuition that counterpoint survives in late Webern only as the 'memorial' of rigour, the

profound meaning of Ex. 5 is that the survival of contrapuntal features in the

large-scale structure of 'Leichteste Biirden' is this memorial content, the Derridean trace of serialism in actual structure. Serialism therefore becomes an

'other', endowed, nevertheless, with 'an essential autonomy' (Gasche 1986, p. 187) within the primary material of the piece (analogous to the self, and the

composing subject), as exemplified in the structures of Ex. 5.

8. The two section structures gather repetition into an internally mimetic

general structure that overrides Webern's phrasing ofthe text (indicated as 11 in Ex. 5a) yet responds to the text's reflexive structure and content (Ex. 6). 'Ich', the wind, in section 1 brings fragrance to 'dir' in section 2; and each poetic image has a mimetic counterpart, so that, like Webern's palindrome, the poem folds back on itself. This recursiveness is signalled by the assonance of the first and last phrases (leichteste Burden/leisestem Hauch).

That such correspondences were not lost on Webern is suggested by the

penultimate paragraph of The Path to the New Music. Asserting the value of

'cancrizan, canon, ete.', he writes, 'we find an analogy in language ... in

Shakespeare, in alliteration and assonance. He even turns a phrase backwards.




272 craig ayrey

Ex. 6 Textual mimesis

Karl Kraus's handling of language is also based on this; unity also has to be created there, since it enhances comprehensibility' (Webern 1963, p. 56).14 The schemes in Ex. 5 imitate the textual structure by folding back; they hinge on the silence between the sections which separates chords Z and Zl, formerly paired in bars 2-3. Now, in bars 12-13, the instrumental groups (strings/wwl) are exchanged and Zl begins the process of folding the structure of section 2 back into that of section 1, so that eventually the strings/wwl succession ofthe two chords appears as Zl/Zl - mimesis is always differential, a reflection rather than the repetition of the thing itself. Furthermore, the apparently schematic succession of series forms in the vocal line (P/R, I/RI) is a mimesis ofthe textual structure. Each pair of series retreats to its opening Fjj, so that the structure of the text is expressed in the structure of its declamation.

Although all dimensions are highly differentiated, this homology of text, melodic and instrumental structures originates, as we expect in Webern, in an

abstract, ideal unity from which a multi-systematic complexity is derived. This creates the effect of spontaneity, diversity and flexibility - the activity of the

composing subject that, following Schoenberg, Webern understood as the

'presentation' of the idea.

Inversion, retrograde and palindrome are the presentational modes of

spacing, diffusion, connection and mimesis in 'Leichteste Biirden' which shape both the specific content of the text and Webern's simple opposition of the

linear, ethereal, Gestalt-btaring voice and the impermeable instrumental verticals. Without its textual instigation, the configuration of the musical idea

(in the sense of the conception of the piece as a whole) might seem routine,

unimaginatively retrogressive or neoclassical. The harmonic repetitions and rotations certainly resemble late Stravinsky (Requiem Canticles, for example^). And, as indicated by Webern's description of the piece as an introductory recitative (Webern 1963, p. 63), its excessive textural formality is partly determined by a neoclassical respect for the force of genre - in this case, a

flexible, expressive vocal line accompanied by non-contiguous chords.

Webern, however, composes against the genre of recitative in two ways: he

gives the definitive texture a semantic charge as the representation of the





content (natural images) of this specific text, and in the effort to make music from it rediscovers classical homophony; secondly, the ingenious complexity of serial technique diverts the genre away from the structural spontaneity and

waywardness of recitative whose naturalness of expression does not survive here far beyond the poem's expression of nature. This 'Introduction' loses contact with all functions of recitative except that of the opening statement of a musico-dramatic argument - but even here the argument is symbolic and structural rather than dramatic, worked out in notes rather than the text. The

piece plays with the generic impossibility of a systematically organised recitative and, beneath its formalised surface, breaks the law of genre, deforming it in order to harness predetermined structural necessity to the recitative's characteristic freedom and unpredictability.

9. There are, then, oppositions in all dimensions of the structure of 'Leichteste Biirden' produced by the force of expressivity in relation to serial law. The unknown territory beyond serial organisation as calculation is envisaged on the final page of The Path to the New Music (1932):

Only now is it possible to compose in free fantasy, adhering to nothing except the row. To put it quite paradoxically, only through these unprecedented fetters has complete freedom become possible!

Here I can only stammer. Everything is still in a state of flux ... It's for a later period to discover the closer unifying laws that are already present in the works themselves. (Webern 1963, p. 56)

Where Webern stammers, there are supplementary laws even more funda? mental than that ofthe series which, he implies, is not the ground ofthe laws of musical structure. Webern's obsession with law may have prevented him from

formulating the notion of a structural principle beyond the series in any way other than as an excess of law. But in relation to the earlier assertions of absolute and achieved laws of comprehensive unity, the intuition of 'closer

unifying laws' is a progression from the assumption that serial law is universal and fully revealed to a realisation that the law is not a given and transparent universal but is construed in singular works.

Like the man from the country in Kafka's fable Before the Law, Webern seems to have realised the doorkeeper's explanation of this singularity - that, although 'everyone strives to reach the law' and the door to it is aways open, 'no-one else could ever be admitted here, since this door [leading to the law] was intended for you' (translated in Derrida 1992b, p. 184). Furthermore, the man from the country is refused entry to the law not finally but indefinitely; the door is never in fact closed to him. Derrida reads this as a metaphor for the




274 CRAIG AYREY

inaccessibility of law in itself: the law is 'not to be seen or touched but

deciphered' (Derrida 1992b, p. 197). Although the law is assumed to be accessible in the sense that it can be read, this readability veils the law (and therefore makes it intangible): the law is therefore 'unreadable to the extent to which the presence within it of a clear and graspable sense remains as hidden as its origin' (Derrida 1992b, p. 197).

We can unpack the immediate significance of Derrida's reading by observing that, in the context of a musical structure already fully determined by a system of laws, the 'closer unifying laws' which Webern leaves posterity to decipher (that is, indefinitely defers), are an instance of the Derridean unreadability of musical law: everything about them (origin, clarity, presence) remains obscure, even to their creator. Webern does not, therefore, preside over the work as the

giver of divine law (to whom all would already be revealed in formulation ofthe

law) but identifies himself with the work. Both the composer and the work are, like Kafka's man from the country, subjects that stand before the law. But Webern intuits the doorkeeper's advice: as a composing subject, he dares to enter the law in order to decipher its singular application to him, to his

subjectivity manifested in the work, and penetrates the universality of serial law to find its relation to a particular force of expression.

10. It is possible that what Webern intuited in this quotation from The Path

(Webern 1963, p. 56) is the differance of law and expressivity as presented in the large-scale structure of 'Leichteste Biirden' (Ex. 5) - one form of aesthetic

justice in relation to the series. However, nine years later (in 1941), soon after 'Leichteste Biirden' was composed, he announced in a letter to Reich a new

conception of the series as a fusion of law and 'melody', a concept I read as a theoretical prescription for aesthetic justice.

This is crystallised in the platonic concept of nomos:

I read in Plato that 'Nomos' (law) is also the word for 'melody'. Now, the melody the soprano sings in my piece as the introduction (recitative) may be the law (Nomos) for all that follows!

As with Goethe's 'primordial plant' - 'with this model and the key to it, one can straightaway invent plants ad infinitum ... the same law will be found to apply to all living matter'! Isn't that the meaning of our law of the row, at its deepest? (Webern 1963, p. 63; Webern's emphasis).

Nomos (law) is an important new concept: it allows the principle of music as 'natural law as related to the sense of hearing' (Webern 1963, p. 11) to reclaim the most naturalistic musical form, 'melody', which is now not itself administered by the law but is law embodied in an expressive form and (to retrieve the predominant meaning of nomos in Plato's Laws) dispenses the law ofthe state.15 Webern assumes an equivalence of this latter sense of nomos and





Goethe's primordial plant (Urpflanze) combined in the category of melody which now analogises both legal rule and biological model. Investigating this

entanglement of Goethe and Plato, Barbara Zuber concludes that Webern

partially conflates these concepts because both are taken to mediate the

dialectical tensions of 'identity and difference, and constituting and modifying moments' (Zuber 1984, p. 336);16 that is to say, the concepts imply that the

series is either a mediation of a platonic ideal form (nomos) or Goethean Gestalt

(Urpflanze) and it is the series's manifestations in actuality which differentiate and transform it.17 Zuber therefore summarises nomos as 'a rhythmic-pitch configuration form, in which the laws of material and presentation, the ideality of the row and Gestalt [Goethe's 'form' or 'shape'] as a specific rhythmic and

pitch Idea are mediated' (Zuber 1984, p. 335). Yet this tidy dialectic of material and presentation, ideal and actual,

mediated as the fusion of pitch and rhythm is true only in the narrow structural sense (model and instance) that Zuber defines for it. As a mediation of law and

melody, nomos fails and unravels almost as soon as it is formulated. Since it is a

pre-synthesised concept in theory, nomos fails to maintain the ontological

separateness of law and melody; nor does it preserve the dialectical antagonism of construction and expression essential to Adorno's concept of mediation (see Paddison 1993, pp. 105, 146). It is here that we need Derrida's notion of

differance, in order to uncover the instability within nomos, its internal

differance - its differing/deferring co-existence, of ideal (universal, law) and

actual (singularity, expressivity) in theory and at each moment in the

composition - and to conceive the effect of this instability as a positive (or at

least non-negative) one.

11. In Webern's late letters, this differance is traced by inverted commas:

melody is invariably qualified as 'melody'. Does this signal a partial translation of nomos, or that the vocal line in both movements is not conventionally melodic? Or does it indicate a more productive disparity, that in neither

movement is Webern's 'melody' identical to the series, even when, in the second letter to Reich, he says categorically that melody and series in

'Freundselig ist das Wort' are the same thing? Like the melody of the fifth

movement,18 the vocal line of 'Leichteste Biirden' is composed from

contiguous series forms, and is therefore (pace Webern) distinct from the

series itself (Ex. 7). The two short stanzas of the text, followed by cadential

instrumental phrases, unfold P/R and I/RI forms of the series respectively; both are therefore folded back to end on the initial F#, and pivot on the tritone

C that overlaps the series pair in each stanza. Each stanza-form therefore

constitutes a closed, unified statement of the series in which the distinction

between P and R, I and RI forms is erased. Melodically, though, the exact

inversion of the series pairs is differentiated by the length of the text phrases




276 CRAIG AYREY

(both are set syllabically), so that the first stanza ends on P/R 7 (G) and the second on I/RI 9 (D). And whereas the first stanza is cadenced by a violin solo, the corresponding event in the second stanza, the horn solo, is followed by three harp pitches. Already, then, there is diversification, augmented by variations in the durational pattern of each stanza.

The durations in Ex. 7 are those abstracted by Bailey as a 'synthetic model' from the various presentations of canons in the piece. This abstract durational

sequence is presented once in the instrumental accompaniment of the first

stanza, but even then it is ingeniously disguised;19 all other presentations are

variants, similar to those ofthe vocal-line phrases (asterisks in Ex. 7 indicate the variants in each series: P9, R9, 18-9, RI4-1). Since the melodies are identical neither to the series nor to each other, they exist in a potentially mimetic relation of imperfect inversional pitch symmetry and rhythmic repetition.

12. The unexpected fruit of Webern's rcoraos-inspired serial research is a radical

simplicity: melody has been rediscovered, the 'space a musical idea can occupy' (Webern 1963, p. 14) is enlarged and reverses the tendency towards contraction of the internally symmetrical series of Webern's earlier works. But it is clear that, in practice, Webern understands nomos only as a

temporarily synthesised duality of ordered duration and pitch sets. First, the

melody of 'Leichteste Biirden' does not, as Webern seems to have intended in the letter to Reich, 'provide the law for all that follows' in the Second Cantata: the law-giving function is left to the series alone which applies, as a general law, to the diverse configurations and canonic schemes of the other movements; yet with the exception of 'Freundselig ist das Wort' these are unrelated to the model of 'Leichteste Biirden'.20 (This may be the reason for the latter's eventual position as the fourth movement of the Cantata, at the beginning of

part 2. Is the Cantata the vestige of an unrealisable vision, of law emanating from an actual rather than ideal musical formation?)

Here Webern encounters the dilemma of all 'just' decisions which, on the one hand, 'must always include singularity, individuals, irreplaceable groups and lives', and on the other, 'rule, norm, value ... [and] a general form'

(Derrida 1992a, p. 17). Only in its general form, the series, can the nomos apply to the Cantata as whole. The nomos is already a singularity included in the

universality of the series, and, as a singularity, the nomos has no general form other than the law applied to it. 'Leichteste Biirden' is therefore the unique expression of Webern's conception of nomos. Secondly, in 'Leichteste Biirden'

itself, the nomos as 'melody' is internally divided as a living musical form of the

complete series and the abstract pitch-rhythmic ordering in which it is

grounded. The demands of the individual living form, the 'melody' {nomos as

expressivity) are not sacrificed to serial rule, even while exemplifying it, yet in this act of aesthetic justice the nomos as serial law is deformed: as soon as the





Ex. 7 Synthetic model and derived chords

XI 3-4(3,4,8) Y2/X2 3-12(3,7,11)

(a)

I I

X 3-4B (3,7,8) Zl 4-2B (10,0,1,2) r

4 ni v *t

wm P/R

y ifi- *J |i

^

2 3 4 5 6 9 10 11 12

P: Leich?tes?te Bur-den der Bau?me, *trag ich durch die

R: L <-

_solo violin] -te. Diif- *die -me Rau-

Y3/X3 4-4B (4,7,8,9) Yl 4-19(1,2,5,9) I-1-1

(b) X 3-4B (3,7,8) Y 3-12(1,5,9) Z 4-2(10,11,0,2) l-1 i-1 I 1

tf <i tJ ^ ^ \i

* ifl j. i|J. j ^p

IrtU

2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10 11 12

I: Bring dir der Lin-de Ge?stalt *fern?her* aus lei?s

RI: [*_*_*harp][*_horn solo] _Hauch. -tem

* = duration of syllables/pcs altered in the vocal/solo instrumental line

nomos is verticalised in the instrumental parts, the 'melodic' folds back into the abstraction of pc set-class segments of the series as the only logic that can oversee the discontinuous presentation of the series and survive the spacing of the chords by silence. Each silence, however, is measured by the canonic durations ofthe segments, and so the nomos is not absent in these sonic gaps; its

inaudibility in the instrumental silences is the non-presence rather than the absence of sound, the retreat of the nomos-as-law to the virtual.

There are, then, two manifestations of the nomos, one real or actual

('melody'), the other ideal or abstract (the series). Once the series is actualised as melody, this composed form is transformed into other, vertical forms that

depend on the abstract model of the series for their validation as expressions of the nomos. Since the two dimensions of nomos are inseparable, the division within nomos is real but undecidable (that is, 'differantiaP).

Music Analysis, 21/iii (2002) ) Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2002



278 CRAIG AYREY

13. From Urpflanze to Nomos. In The Path to the New Music this division

appears as a pervasive ambiguity about the kind of law embodied in the twelve- note series. The ambiguity is the manifestation of the tension between

expressivity (as natural expression) and serial administration that later surfaces fused in the concept of nomos. Webern makes no distinction between the law

(or laws) of nature and the laws of legality and justice. He moves easily, almost

thoughtlessly, between law conceived judicially ('obedience', 'unprecedented fetters', 'practical need' for the law, 'adherence to the law', 'the law forced itself

overwhelmingly upon us') and the law conceived naturally ('free invention' on the basis of the law, 'variations on the theme', 'natural development of the law' and Goethe's 'primordial plant5). But the duality is not equally weighted, and, unlike the division in nomos, is decided in advance. Free invention, variation and differentiation are infinitely deferred by being regularly, almost

automatically, folded back into the privileged unity of the series (creating the

'unparalleled density of relationships' that Adorno observed in Op. 28 and

contemporaneous works (Adorno 1973, p. 110)) and always regress to the

'comprehensive unity' of the universal model exemplifled by the Urpflanze: 'the root is in fact no different from the stalk, the stalk no different from the

leaf, and the leaf no different from the flower: variations of the same idea'

(Webern 1963, p. 53). Although Webern appeals here to a law of nature which, he emphasises, 'applies to everything living' (including, by implication, music), we know that he values idea more than its actualisations or appearances, the universal more than the particular, and identity more than difference or variation.

In brief, Webern's conception of a natural law is more like a rule to be

obeyed than a principle of animate being. He privileges law as rule and assimilates the primordial plant to it, subordinating nature to legality. This, I

think, is related to his rejection of the organicist-teleological version of 'thematicism' which, in the same lecture, he declares that he can do without

('the 12-note row as a rule is not a "theme". But I can also work without thematicism ... the row ensures coherence' (Webern 1963, p. 550). Instead of the motivic-thematic type of development, Webern's preference for a process of generating material which does not form the narrative structure of a

composition begins to come into theoretical focus. The progression from the model (primordial plant or series) to its issues (individual pieces) is a

generation of complete, complex and organic forms from a similarly complete and organic form. The series itself is a composition, a small form, from which

larger forms can be generated. In this process the linear, temporally present technique of developing variation is suppressed and opposed to a more abstract

generation of actual material forms from a primordial one (the series as an ideal

form) by means of canon and contrapuntal imitation. Since serial canons are

overlapped and tiled, abstract forms that invoke variation rather than





development, variation in the idea - the series and its canonic presentation -

fully represents variation in sonic reality. Given this conception of serial structure, the importance to Webern of

Goethe's primordial plant would seem to be primarily theoretical, to assert in

theory the organic power of the series as a biological law, and to emphasise organicist multiplicity in our perception, to encourage us to hear both

proliferation and diversity and the overdetermined unifying impulse of the actual compositions - that is, to hear both the model and its transformations. Webern's oddly inert understanding of the Urpflanze as model for the series transforms Goethe's concept into a spatial template. A series is not a universal

primordial form but a singular composed entity: if the primordial plant were to exist as mimesis of the series, Goethe's model would have to be made to reflect the ideal principles of Webern's serialism - serialism as a universal, non-specific pitch and rhythmic ordering of the total chromatic presented canonically. Furthermore, until specific contrapuntal or thematic processes are applied to it, the series has no inherent principle of generation or transformation.

This lack may explain Webern's truncation (italicised in the quotation below) of Goethe's text.21 In Heitner's translation, Goethe writes that

with this model [the primordial plant] and the key to it an infinite number of plants can be invented, which must be logical, that is, if they do not exist, they could exist, and are not mere artistic or poetic shadows and semblances, but have an inner truth and necessity. The same law [Gesetz] will be applicable to every other living being. (Goethe 1989, p. 256)

Goethe's 'law' (Gesetz) refers to the 'inner truth and necessity' of diverse plant forms and not to the model ofthe primordial plant itself (Zuber 1984, p. 334). Far from relating all plant forms to this model as if conforming to a rule, the law of inner truth and necessity is constituted by the similar structure and

processes of generation of actual and potential plants. Such a law is also a

critique of the platonic doctrine of actuality's semblance of Ideal forms, of

reality's loss of truth in relation to the Idea. Webern ignores Goethe's contradiction of Plato because, it would seem, to reject Plato would be

incompatible with his understanding of the Urpflanze as a natural form of the

Idea; and Webern therefore restricts himself to the generalised notion of the infinite invention of musical material from a model so that the Urpflanze can be assimilated to Plato's doctrine of ideal form and its multiplicity of actual manifestations. If, as Webern insists, a series must be actual, unique and

omnipresent in a piece, it cannot exemplify Plato's conception of the Idea which is present only virtually.

In discovering nomos, Webern found a concept of the series that, unlike the

Urpflanze, theorises a force of expression emanating from law. The series, conceived as a nomos, is now provided with a theoretical underpinning for its




280 CRAIG AYREY

real existence in a composition as a discrete musical form and individual melodic being, and not only as the ideal, abstract model for its differentiated and derived appearances that a logical application of the Urpflanze would

imply. Nomos therefore allows Webern a more comprehensive realisation in

practice of his theoretical insistence on the pervasive real presence of a unique series as the idea of a work.

14. Writing to Reich about 'Freundselig ist das Wort' (the second movement of the Cantata to be composed), Webern emphasises in nomos the prior fusion of pitch and rhythm as melody which then becomes the law of the individual

piece, perpetually restated as canon:

a voice gives out the law - in this case the soprano soloist - that's to say the

'melody' - but the Greeks had the same word for that as for law: 'Nomos'. So the 'melody' has to 'lay down the law'.

... nothing happens any more unless it's agreed on in advance according to the 'melody'! It's the law, truly the 'Nomos'! But agreed on in advance on the basis of canon!

Naturally the 'row' in itself constitutes a law, but it needn't also be the 'melody'! But since in my case it in fact is, the row takes on a quite special importance, on a higher level so to speak, rather like the choral melodies in Bach's arrangements. (Webern 1963, p. 63)

As nomos, the series is elevated from the ground of the composition to become its expressive subject: its partial, virtual or fragmented, presence as a constellation of ordered and reordered sets now infuses the structure as a theme derived from melody which is itself an individual configuration of the abstract pitch-rhythmic series. Nomos entails a development ofthe conception of the series itself which is no longer simply an ordered pitch set to which canonic or other rhythmic schemes are applied: pitch and rhythm are now

integrated into a structure which is potentially melodic, and if this structure is to function as the law of the composition, complementary and subsidiary forms will be generated from it, and not by schemes external to the series (such as those in the contrapuntal tours de force ofthe 1930s); nor will the series merely ground a freely-composed motivic network, as in Webern's first serial works

(in which structure is so radically unrelated to the properties of the series that Shreffler is led to describe the works as 'some of his most irrational and

disorganised' (1994, p. 277)).

15. Consequently, each dimension of the nomos has a distinguishable generative or transformational force. When the melody is folded back along the retrogrades of P and I (see Ex. 7), the last four pcs of each form, sets 4-2B and 4-2 {trag ich durch die Rdume and aus leisestem Hauch) are doubled and

given a structural priority as chords Z and Z1 which sound with the beginning





of series P in the voice, bars 2-3 (Ex. 8). The extremities of P and I are therefore connected, in accordance with the framing assonance (leichtestej leisestem) of the text. This conjunction of textually associated sets begins the diffusion of such segments in the instrumental chords, a diffusion that brings the linear and vertical into various degrees of identity.

In actuality, the abstract pitch-rhythmic similarity of the melody and

chords, the nomos that unites both dimensions under a single law, is realised as a mimesis of the linear and vertical. Each chord reconfigures the melody vertically and carries with it the text-segment defined by its horizontal series-

segment. The melody, incorporating the nomos, is therefore brought to earth in the verticals. Here Webern grasps and instantiates an ancient, pre-Socratic sense of nomos revived by his contemporary, the political philosopher Carl Schmitt. Schmitt's Der Nomos der Erde (1950) recovers the primordial meaning of nomos as, in Samuel Weber's summary, 'nothing other than a

Teilung and Verteilung, a partitioning and distribution - of space, but most of all of the earth - which Schmitt calls a Landnahme, or literally, seizing of the earth' (Weber 1998, p. 61). Nomos in 'Leichteste Biirden' exemplifies this

primordial meaning: divided and distributed in the verticals, it becomes

concrete, spatial, and - reconfigured in the arboreal metaphor - grounded in the earth.

So interpreted, the becoming arboreal of the melody, the wind/voice/breath, brings the metaphors, synonyms and other semantic equivalences of the poem into adjacency, thus revealing the text's pervasive mimesis. This process is not driven by a narrative or discursive impulse;22 it centres on the single synthetic phrase Burden der Baume, the essentially linear fragrance and Gestalt of the vertical natural object so that object and essence are combined.

In bar 5 (Ex. 8), the appearance of chord X (set 3-4B), generated serially from RI 4?2, draws the identical set from Burden der Baume in the voice (bars 4-5), as if to cadence the phrase with a repetition of the same set; the total instrumental content of bar 5, set 5-21 (3,4,7,8,11) replicates that ofthe vocal

phrase so that, serially, the identity of I/RI 5-2 and P/R 4-8 is brought to the surface. This articulatory function for set 5-21 and Burden der Baume is

projected through the piece as a cadential sign. At the end of the second vocal

phrase (bars 8-9) the same integrated musico-textual object provides the context for die Dufte, thus bringing together the terms of the metaphor fragrance/burden of the trees, and replicating the significant subsets of 5-21, 4-7 (3,4,7,8) and 4-19 (7,8,11,3), first displayed in bar 5 (see Ex. 8, level 2, boxed sets).

With two exceptions, the projection is consistent in section 2: the final vocal

phrase (aus leisestem Hauch) is framed by 5-21 (1,2,4,5,9) while the following cadential horn phrase is contextualised by 4-19 (3,4,7,11). The first exception, at fernher (bar 16) cadences this phrase with chord Y (3-12 (1,5,9)), but since




282 CRAIG AYREY

X W

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eu

r^"i6^" ili j-

"? s

7! Hflv

s

i"8 NN

U v

-* 3 ."8 -3 -?8

I ..A' S ?*

11 ? 4"

kJli

^3U

^3ffl

=r*

ajftt^-l

_2 1?

4 3 *?

3 3 33 rrs?w

x!s 1 4

is 5- 3*

T?

S5 3=

3, ? Si

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AfwM'c Analysis, 21/iii (2002) ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2002



284 CRAIG ayrey

the vocal Gestalt fernher is replicated in the vertical, this clearly parallels the cadential function of the set repetition in bar 5. The second exception, at Gestalt (bars 14-15), is complex. Here chord Y2/X2 (R 8-6, der Baume) extracts set 3-12 (3,7,11) from the superset 5-21 as ordered in bar 5 and re-

contextualises it in the whole-tone set 4-24*1 (see level 2), preceded by an instrumental silence.

Why does the whole-tone emerge here quasi-cadentially, at a pause in the third line of the poem? Is the passage, in fact, whole-tone or an accidental collection of ic4? The vocal set here, 5-3B (4,5,7,8,9), contains two contiguous ic4 dyads (Gjj-E, A-F), the second of which sets Gestalt, a concept of universal

significance for Webern but particularised here as Linde Gestalt, the 'form of the lime tree', a Romantic sign of escape from an imperfect world (Schubert's Der Lindenbaum is a tree of consolation), but also suggests the southern exotic, the exoteric - categories of the Other. In the chromatic universe, the 'other' excluded from yet dominated by it is the major third, the definitive consonance of tonality, and by extension, the doubling of ic4 into the augmented triad which by equal division into whole tones generates the whole-tone scale. Yet the whole-tone and chromatic are not purely opposed since the whole-tone scale shares the principle of equal division with the total chromatic. The otherness of the major third introduces disunity into the chromatic universe, a

disruption also embraced by the ordered melodic form of the series in which

ic4 is prominent. Interval class 4 'becomes', is heard as, the major third when textual ideas

articulate its linear expressions in the vocal line. These associate Burden (b. 3), Baume (b. 4), Diifte (bars 8-9) with Linde Gestalt', the minor-sixth inversion adds trag ich (b. 6) and Hauch (b.18) to this complex, while set 3-12, the doubled major third, parallels der Baume (bars 4-5) and Gestalt fern ... (bars 14-16). The resultant constellation of essence (Burden, Dufte, Gestalt), object (Baume), distance (Gestalt fern...), and breath (trag ich, Hauch) also includes the vertical statements of 3-12 (Gestalt fern ..., chords Y and Y2) which always occur with a major-third segment of the melody (bars 4, 10, 15, 16, 20) and move within the melodically defined network of associations. The internal differentiation and polysemy of Gestalt, playing on the ground of the major third, is therefore revealed - Gestalt as fragrance and essence, shape (of the trees and chords Y/Y2), and as the means of its own diffusion (trag ich, Hauch) - a polysemy produced by the relation of the series with this particular poem. The diffusion of major thirds, the definitive Gestalt of 'Leichteste Biirden', becomes explicit in the silence that emphasises this interval (bars 14-15) and in chords Y/Y2, but it is also ubiquitous vertically in the ic4 constant of the outer voices (see Ex. 5), so that each chord is framed registrally by the Gestalt.

This structure evades the status of a musical idea (in the sense of the basic

shape of a motive or theme) from which the piece might have been developed





organically; Gestalt in 'Leichteste Biirden' is a mobile, multi-directional diffusion from the interior moment in the piece where it becomes explicit. As constellated by Webern, the properties of the Gestalt freely pervade the work,

just as the wind draws the Gestalt through space. The wind tropes the new

principle of non-thematicist unfolding, while the instrumental solos escape the voice registrally as if Gestalt as fragrance has been set free.

Further images of escape, in the form of the isolated celesta and harp pitches, play among the apparently stable, systematic melody and instrumental

chords; some of these pitches function cadentially, confirming adjacent pcs in the voice or instrumental solos - G# (b. 4), B (b. 5), F (bars 11, 15), Fjj (b.12) -

and others are singular and unintegrated - Djj (b. 2), G (bars 3, 6), Gjj (b. 16). The remaining pcs, E and Fjj, are defined as singularities both registrally and

serially as the remainders of the partitioning of RI by the three chord classes Z, Y, X (see Ex. 7b). As it progresses along RI, this chord sequence first isolates

E, the lowest pitch of the piece which evades any prolongational function in that register (see Ex. 5) as if leaping over the registral frame of the bass line to assert itself as an illusory ground with no textual or structural motivation. Fjj, the second pc remaindered by the chord sequence, already has a privileged framing role as the first pc of P and I; this function is projected by Fjj's occupation of the highest register of the piece and marking of phrase boundaries (bars 1, 5, 12, 13, 18). Eventually, in bars 21-2, Fjj develops into a cadential motive (Fjj-G-D-FjJ, celesta/harp verklingend) echoing the first three notes of the vocal line in bar 13 (Fjj-Djj-G; Bring dir der ...)', and in

conjunction with the adjacent final chords of the last three bars, the motive

reconfigures the total pitch content of b. 13, set 7-zl8B (6,7,10,0,1,2,3) which therefore becomes the set-class frame for the whole of section 2 (Ex. 8, level 3). A similar registral extremity in bars 8-18 projects set class 4-2 (equivalent to the opening chord A) in the highest notes of the melodic line (B-A-CjJ-Bb), during which the violin leaps upward to the A (b. 12), transgressing the Fjj frame in imitation ofthe diffusing die Dufte. In this way, set class 4-2 projects a

transposition of chord A to provide a linear counterframe to Fjj, reaching over the section division and drawing die Dufte through linear space in order to connect the terms of its semantic field, fernher (b. 16) and Hauch (b. 18).

16. Each configuration of the nomos could be said to constitute, by analogy, what Derrida calls the 'fresh judgement' essential to the exercise of justice:

This 'fresh judgement' can very well - must very well - conform to a preexisting law, but the reinstituting, reinventive and freely decisive interpretation, the responsible decision of the judge requires that his 'justice' not just consist in conformity, in the conservative and reproductive activity of judgement. ... For




286 CRAIG AYREY

a decision to be just and responsible, it must ... be both regulated and without regulation: it must conserve the law and also destroy it or suspend it enough to have to reinvent it in each case, rejustify it, at least reinvent it in the reaffirmation of the new and free confirmation of its principle. Each case is other, each decision is different and requires an absolutely unique interpretation, which no existing, coded rule can or ought to guarantee absolutely. (Derrida 1992a, p. 23)

The vocal melody is itself a freely decisive interpretation of the series as law which is conserved and reinvented: and each presentation ofthe nomos within the

piece is at once a reaffirmation and reinvention of that unique form which

escapes the status ofthe mere rule. The canonic structure controlling 'Leichteste Biirden' both requires calculation and transcends it since each canonic event, each instrumental chord or isolated pitch is deliberately rather than

automatically placed. No serial rule determines either which collections are to be verticalised as chords, or the Ausfalle,23 or isolated pcs; yet once these choices have been made, the calculable, in the form of the rhythmic durations of canon, comes into play as a structural force. Webern seeks aesthetic justice in relation to the series by attempting, in Derrida's phrase, to 'negotiate the relation between the calculable and the incalculable' (Derrida 1992a, p. 28). The presentations of the nomos are not automatic, predetermined forms or segments of the series but

performative compositional acts which in each case involve a decision that

applies the nomos to the specific, individual, singular structural situation. As performative utterances of and from the nomos, the instrumental chords

also maintain the 'irruptive violence' that Derrida observes in all

performatives, whether they institute something or reinstitute a conventional

practice: 'the instant of decision is a madness', says Derrida quoting

Kierkegaard (Derrida 1992a, p. 26), something that comes from somewhere other than theoretical rationality - in this musical context, from the composer's subjectivity mediated by the serial systems. The instrumental chords violate the nomos because they cannot avoid fragmenting it and breaking down its

melodic form into the abstract set-class; punctuating and puncturing the nomos

presented in the voice, the chords allegorise this performative violence, the violence of morphological transformation from linear to vertical, series to

segment, wind to trees. The resulting sequence of chord classes (Z, Y, X) attempts to do justice to

the nomos by avoiding an automatic or thoughtless application of the law so that the singular, irreducible palindromic structure of Ex. 5 arising from the discontinuous segments of the nomos is at once non-congruent with the series,

expresses its predominant intervals, and instantiates universal serial principles

(retrograde and inversion). This large-scale structure does not lie outside the

series but extends the series's structural domain beyond the linear or vertical

motive, perforating the border of series and non-series; it is a compositional





step beyond the serial that divides the composition into nomos and structure, a

poietic decision that cuts the aesthetic totality ofthe work in two. Structure, as

symbolised in Ex. 5, is something other than the mediation of ideal and real, law and expressivity: the stability and centrality ofthe nomos is challenged and

displaced by the larger-scale structure which moves into the position of the

dispenser of structural laws.

This, too, is a performative compositional decision and, as such, is not 'without a certain dissymmetry and some quality of violence' (Derrida 1992a,

p. 27) - dissymmetry in relation to the nomos which is 'violently' transformed in the super-calculational act of justice applied to it by the large-scale structure. In Derrida's 'force of law', both justice and violence are inextricably bound to the performative which is always a transformative (Derrida's word is

'revolutionary') force in relation to law or the status quo. Violence threatens law but also belongs to it since all laws are founded as the violent inauguration of a new law (see 1992a, pp. 35-6). Yet, as in the large-scale structure of Ex. 5, 'the foundation of a new law plays, if we may say so, on something from an anterior law that it radicalises, deforms, metaphorizes or metonymizes [... and

this] effaces or blurs the distinction, pure and simple, between foundation and conservation' (1992a, p. 41).

17. If we now continue to read 'Leichteste Biirden' with Derrida, the first instrumental chord (Z) dismembers, is violently prised from, the nomos that stands here as the 'anterior law' radicalised, deformed and metonymised in Ex. 5. When repeated, this first chord inaugurates the sequence of chord classes in and of which repetition is the rationale. Repetition here is therefore also the

repetition of the inaugural founding violence of a new law: repetition conserves this law (of large-scale structure) and, going beyond Derrida now, creates the content ofthe new law. That there can be no rigorous distinction between these two types of violence proceeds from what Derrida calls 'the paradox of

iterability' (1992a, p. 43) in which any inaugurating, or 'originary', event - if it is to have any effect of meaning, which is to say any foundational status - must have the capacity for repetition. Foundation depends on this repeatability as the ground of its foundational status (it has no other ground); yet, because each

repetition is a (contextual or morphological) transformation of the 'first time', the foundation can only 'alter itself so as to have the value of origin, that is, to conserve itself. Consequently, iterability 'inscribes conservation in the essential structure of foundation' (1992a, p. 43) so that there is a 'differantial contamination' - an inextricably bound difference and deferral of meaning or status - between the violence of foundation and conservation. It seems to me that this is exemplified, perhaps uniquely, by the chord sequences of 'Leichteste Biirden' which do not merely represent but present iterability in relation to (serial) law, a presentation of which music is singularly capable, not




288 CRAIG AYREY

as critical reflection, but in fact.

18. To recapitulate: the large-scale structure, the new law, is founded by the first instrumental chord which, by means of its conservational repetition and

transformation, brings the structure into being; this structure deforms the dual differantial existence of the nomos (anterior law) as both law and melody. To

continue: the exclusively vertical presentation of iterability gives that dimension a certain priority over the nomos's linear form. This is a further

radicalising, metonymising effect of performative violence, an effect whose force reaches beyond the instrumental chords to the vertical organisation of the whole.

As in all Webern's later music, 'Leichteste Biirden' exhibits a harmonic

consistency that ranges from invariance to small collections of related sets (see Wintle 1982 and Whittall 1987). The first movement ofthe First Cantata, Op. 29 ('Zudender Lichtblitz des Lebens') is a classically systematic example of this consistency: combinatorial forms ofthe series are tiled in order to produce a systematic rotation of chords. But in this case the chords do not replicate series segments because they arise from the relations among different forms of the series; that is, from particular properties of the grid of 48 transpositions (see Bailey 1991, p. 70). The chords are formed outside the series itself, and the serial control of the vertical pitch content resulting from the simultaneous

unfolding of combinatorial linear forms is subservient to the principle of

systematic rotation. 'Leichteste Biirden' surpasses the First Cantata in that all recurrent chord sequences are series segments, but this calculated verticality also grounds expanded presentations of the series beyond the application of rule. In this way, structural extension of the series is further pursued into the

virtual, eliding the opposition of linear and vertical and binding together the

elegant textural differentiation of strata (melody, chords, free particles in celesta and harp), without implying that this serial virtuality axiomatically integrates the texture or materialises in actual functional or referential harmonic collections.

19. The series's virtual presence in any dimension depends on its total set content (limited here to sets of useful size, trichords to nonads). An imbricated

segmentation of P and I forms (Ex. 9, showing hexads only) generates the list of sets (Ex. 10a) which incorporates the traditional trichord/tetrad/hexad segmentation of series, but extends it to include all possible sequences including those formed from the extremities of the series, for example, 11..2

(= 11,12,1,2). The result (summarised in Ex. 10b) is a relatively small number of set-classes (7 hexads, 9 pentads and heptads, 8 tetrads and octads, 6 trichords and nonads), of which 3-3, 3-4, 4-4, 4-18, 4-19, 5-3, 5-21, 5-z38, 6-15, 6-zl9 and their complements are most frequently represented. Ex. 10a





Ex. 9 Imbricated segmentation of P/R

6-15B(10,ll,l,2,3,7)_ 6-Z19 (7,8,10,11,2,3)_

6-Z19B (3,4,7,8,10,11)_

. 6-15 (4,5,6,8,9,0)_ 6-Z44B (0,1,4,5,6,9)_

6-Z44 (0,1,2^,9,10).

6-15(3,4,5,7,9,11). 6-Z4 (3,4,5,7,8,9)_

6-Z3 (3,4,5,6,8,9)_

6-15B (0,U,6,9,10L

6-Z37(10,ll,0,l,2,6)_

6-Z36(10,ll,0,l,2,7)_

P/R

also shows (a) that three equivalent segments of P and I are invariant, 6-z4 (P/I 2-7), 5-1 (P/I 8-12), and 4-3 (P/I 8-11), and (b) the incidence of positional exchange, sets 4-7 (P/I 2-5 and 4-7), 3-4 and 3-4B (P/I 2-4 and 5-7), 3-3 and 3-3B (P/I 8-10 and 9-11).24

These abstract properties ofthe series do not allow any particular outcome to be predicted, except that, at a certain level of structure, the series might gravitate to the most frequently represented sets and over-rule the set-class collection produced by a normative, unimbricated segmentation (i.e. 6-z3/z36, 4-4/4-19/4-2, 3-3/3-4/3-3B/3-1). Frequency of representation also grounds the most inclusive analyses of set-complex and generic-profile. Kh6-15 contains all series subsets except 5-1, 5-6, 5-zl7 and 5-22, and (axiomatically) the other hexads. Each extraneous pentad belongs to K or Kh6-zl9/z-44, with the exception of 5-1/7-1: although this pair is included in K6-z3/6-z36 and

K6-z4/6-z37, it exists as a distinct non-hexachordal organisation (as suggested by Ex. 3 above). Kh6-z3/z36, 6-z4/z37, and 6-zl9/z44 are more exclusive than Kh6-15 and therefore insist on highly specific and focused set structures for the series. Analysis of the series's generic profile confirms that its primary genus, G8 (atonal), is generated from the most frequent trichords, 3-3 and 3-4; this

genus includes all series hexads, the majority of pentads and tetrads, and,

significantly, all the series set classes of'Leichteste Biirden' (see Appendix l).25

20. In Ex. 8, level 3, these theoretical results largely hold true in practice: with several significant, textually motivated exceptions, all the supersets are those most frequently represented in the series. (Set names in boxes indicate sets

grounding pitch structure in the series at this level; set names and pc content

corresponding to series segments are printed in bold.) Levels 2 and 3 show that most sets correspond to segments ofthe series, either literally (in pc content) or as set-classes. The crucial point here is that this is not a trivial or automatic outcome of the presentation of the series: the vertical conjunction of series

Music Analysis, 21/iii (2002) > Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2002



bd Ex. 10 a) Pitch-class set content of P and I forms to O

I

3 CfQ

1-6 6-Z3 (3,4,5,6,8,9) 2-7 6-Z4 (3,4,5,7,8,9) 3-8 6-15 (3,4,5,7,8,11) 4-9 6-Z19B (3,4,7,8,10,11) 5-10 6-Z19 (7,8,10,11,2,3) 6-11 6-15B (10,11,1,2,3,7)

6-Z3B (3,4,6,7,8,9) 7-12 6-Z4 (3,4,5,7,8,9) 8..1 6-15B (1,4,5,7,8,9) 9..2 6-Z19 (1,2,4,5,8,9) 10.3 6-Z19B (9,10,1,2,4,5) 11. .4 6-15 (9,10,11,1,2,5) 12..5

6-Z36 (10,11,0,1,2,7) 6-Z37 (10,11,0,1,2,6) 6-15B (0,1,2,6,9,10) 6-Z44 (0,1,2,5,6,9) 6-Z44B (0,1,4,5,6,9,) 6-15 (4,5,6,8,9,0)

6-Z36B (10,11,0,1,2,5) 6-Z37 (10,11,0,1,2,6) invariant 6-15 (10,11,0,2,3,6) 6-Z44B (10,11,0,3,6,7) 6-Z44 (6,7,8,11,0,3) 6-15B (3,4,6,7,8,0)

1-5 5-3 (4,5,6,8,9) 2-6 5-6 (3,4,5,8,9) 3-7 5-3 (3,4,5,7,9) 4-8 5-21 (3,4,7,8,11) 5-9 5-Z17 (7,8,10,11,3) 6-10 5-21B (7,10,11,2,3) 7-11 5-16B (7,10,11,1,2) 8-12 5-1 (10,11,0,1,2) 9..1 5-13B (10,0,1,2,6) 10..2 5-Z38B (6,9,10,1,2) 11..3 5-22 (5,6,9,0,1) 12..4 5-Z38 (4,5,6,9,0)

5-3B (3,4,6,7,8) 6-12 5-6B (3,4,7,8,9) 7..1 5-3B (4,5,7,8,9) 8..2 5-21B (1,4,5,8,9) 9..J 5-Z17 (1,2,4,5,9) 10..4 5-21 (9,10,1,2,5) 11..5 5-16(10,11,1,2,5) 12..6 5-1 (10,11,0,1,2) 1-7 5-13 (10,11,0,2,6) 2-5 5-Z38 (10,11,0,3,6) 3-9 5-22(11,0,3,6,7) 4-10 5-Z38B (0,3,6,7,8) 5-11

7-3B (10,11,0,1,2,3,7) 7-6B (10,11,0,1,2,6,7) 7-3B (10,11,0,1,2,6,8) 7-21B (0,1,2,5,6,9,10) 7-Z17 (0,1,2,4,5,6,9) 7-21 (4,5,6,8,9,0,1) 7-16 (3,4,5,6,8,9,0) 7-1 (3,4,5,6,7,8,9) 7-13(3,4,5,7,8,9,11) 7-Z38 (3,4,5,7,8,11,0) 7-22(2,3,4,7,8,10,11) 7-Z38B (7,8,10,11,1,2,3)

7-3(9,10,11,0,1,2,5) 7-6(10,11,0,1,2,5,6) 7-3(10,11,0,1,2,3,6) 7-21 (10,11,0,2,3,6,7) 7-Z17 (6,7,8,10,11,0,3) 7-21B (3,4,6,7,8,11,0) 7-16B (6,7,8,9,0,3,4) 7-1 (3,4,5,6,7,8,9) 7-13B (1,3,4,5,7,8,9) 7-Z38B (1,2,4,5,7,8,9) 7-22 (1,2,4,5,8,9,10) 7-Z38 (1,2,4,5,9,10,11)

invariant

o >

>

W

to o o

1-4 4-4 (4,5,6,9) 2-5 4-7 (4,5,8,9) 3-6 4-4 (3,4,5,8) 4-7 4-7 (3,4,7,8) 5-8 4-19 (7,8,11,3) 6-9 4-19B (7,10,11,3) 7-10 4-17 (7,10,11,2) 8-11 4-3 (10,11,1,2) 9-12 4-2B (10,0,1,2) [Zl] 10..1 4-5 (0,1,2,6)

4-4B (3,6,7,8) 5-12 4-7 (3,4,7,8) 6..1 4-4B (4,7,8,9) [X3/Y3] 7..2 4-7 (4,5,8,9) 8.3 4-19B (1,4,5,9) 9..4 4-19 (1,2,5,9) [Yl] 10..5 4-17B (10,1,2,5) 11..6 4-3 (10,11,1,2) 12..7 4-2 (10,11,0,2) [Z] 7-5 4-5B (10,11,0,6) 2-9

8-4B (7,8,10,11,0,1,2,3) 8-7 (10,11,0,1,2,3,6,7) 8-4B (6,7,9,10,11,0,1,2) 8-7(9,10,11,0,1,2,4,5) 8-19B (9,10,0,1,2,4,5,6) 8-19 (0,1,2,4,5,6,8,9) 8-17 (0,1,3,4,5,6,8,9) 8-3 (3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0) 8-2(3,4,5,6,7,8,9,11) 8-5B (3,4,5,7,8,9,10,11)

8-4(9,10,11,0,1,2,4,5) 8-7(9,10,11,0,1,2,5,6) 8-4(10,11,0,1,2,3,5,6) 8-7(10,11,0,1,2,3,6,7) 8-19 (6,7,8,10,11,0,2,3) 8-19B (3,4,6,7,8,10,11,0) 8-17 (3,4,6,7,8,9,11,0) 8-3 (3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0) invariant 8-2B (1,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) 8-5 (1,2,3,4,5,7,8,9)



N>

O O

W

3

c cr

8-18(2,3,4,5,7,8,10,11) 8-18B (7,8,10,11,1,2,3,4)

9-3B (7,8,10,11,0,1,2,3,4) 9-4B (10,11,0,1,2,3,6,7,8) 9-3B (9,10,11,0,1,2,3,6,7) 9-4B (9,10,11,0,1,2,5,6,7) 9-4(9,10,11,0,1,2,4,5,6) 9-12 (0,1,2,4,5,6,8,9,10) 9-3 (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,8,9) 9-3B (0,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) 9-3(3,4,5,6,7,8,9,11,0) 9-1(3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11) 9-5B (2,3,4,5,7,8,9,10,11) 9-10(1,2,3,4,5,7,8,10,11)

8-18B (1,2,4,5,7,8,9,10) 8-18(8,9,10,11,1,2,4,5)

9-3(8,9,10,11,0,1,2,4,5) 9-4(9,10,11,0,1,2,4,5,6) 9-3(9,10,11,0,1,2,3,5,6) 9-4(10,11,0,1,2,3,5,6,7) 9-4B (10,11,0,1,2,3,6,7,8) 9-12 (10,11,0,2,3,4,6,7,8) 9-3B (6,7,8,9,10,11,0,3,4) 9-3(3,4,5,6,7,8,9,11,0) 9-3B (0,1,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) 9-1 (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) 9-5 (7,8,9,10,1,2,3,4,5) 9-10(7,8,9,10,11,1,2,4,5)

Ex. 10 b) Summary of set classes in P and I forms (number of representations in brackets; set classes in bold appear in 'Leichteste Biirden')

?Z3/Z36 (2) Z4/Z37 (2) ?15 (4) Z19/Z44 (4)

5-1/7-1 (2) 5-3/7-3 (4) 5-6/7-6 (2) 5-13/7-13 (2)

16/7-16 (2) ?Z17/7-Z17 (2) ?21/7-21 (4) 22/7-22 (2) ?Z38/7-Z38 (4)

?2/8-2 (2) ?3/8-3 (2) ?4/8-4 (4) ?5/8-5 (2) ?7/8-7 (2) ?17/8-17 (2) ?18/8-18 (4) ?19/8-19 (4)

3-1/9-1 (2) 3-3/9-3 (10) 3-4/9-4 (6) 3-5/9-5 (2) 3-10/9-10 (2) 3-12/9-12 (2)

w w w 2

r E n H w C/5 H ffl W o o w

0 w

td >?? c w

s.



292 CRAIG AYREY

forms is elaborately calculated to allow the vertical dimension to be controlled

by the series's literal or transposed subsets. For example: in bars 3-4, set 6-15

(1,4,5,7,8,9) equivalent to I 3-8, arises from the conjunction of three series

segments - P 3-4, I 3-4 and RI 8-6 - a pc collection determined partly by canon and partly by the exchange and other reorderings of proximate pcs in the P and I forms (as shown in Ex. 3). While, axiomatically, all transposed subsets are contained in one of the transpositions of the series, no such transposition appears in the piece. In the case of transposed subsets, Webern has rediscovered in the serial context the relational function of set-class

unsupported by an ordered form of the total chromatic. Series segments can be presented in transposition as new constellations of singular serial events

(chords, isolated pcs, simultaneities) thus affirming the series-identity of the collection but escaping from its literal form. Untransposed subsets are

similarly divided since they are never presented in serial order but correspond to segments of the series as serially unordered tropes.

Levels 2 and 3 are designed as a graduated expansion of segmentation strategies. The supersets of level 3 function as a sequence of diffused series

segments, while level 2 is a phenomenological segmentation of all simultaneities greater than 2. This is the level on which the integrated chords of level 1 are diffused as sets from the series by their conjunction with other events and often surpass serial identity, only to be grounded once more in the

synthetic series segments of level 3. Read together, the levels reveal framing or connective structural functions for the sets. The union of 5-13 and 6-15 frames section 1 (bars 1-2, 12-13) with the extension to section 2 (b. 13) forming the

hinge of the piece (see Ex. 5); and when the complements 7-13 and 5-13B

emerge as the frame of section 2 (bars 13-15, 22-3), 5-13 frames the whole

piece which ends, therefore, with the mimetic inversion of its opening set. Sets 5-zl7 and 6-zl9 effect the semantic coupling of die Dufte (b. 8) and fernher (b. 16), while, as discussed above, 4-19 and 5-21 ground the relation of Biirden der Baume and die Dufte (bars 5, 8-9, 20).

Yet there are significant points of vertical breakdown where the horizontal

organisation alone preserves serial coherence. Each case is a structural image of

absence, as escape or gap. At trag ich durch die Rdume (bar 6), the texture does not constellate a series segment but maintains the textural distinction of chord, isolated pcs and vocal line so that the only coherent analysis is to oppose the

large, predominantly instrumental set 7-21 (5,6,7,9,10,1,2) to the vocal line set 4-2 (10,0,1,2), which diverge from set 5-21, the vertical attack beginning b. 6. Thus the point at which the wind, the agent of diffusion, enters the text as the

speaking subject leads to a rupture in the sequence of series segments, then to the instrumental silence at die Rdume which interrupts the regular chord

sequence. When the solo violin impersonates the escape of die Dufte in bars 10-

12, a similar vertical breakdown occurs, and until chord A sounds in bar 12, the





violin's 6-z3 and the instrumental 6-z37 are unintegrated serially. In section 2 there is no comparable rupture, except for the serially unintegrable harp D(t (b. 21): the resultant gap on level 3 (between 5-21 and the final 5-13B) keeps the anomalous and structurally uncontrollable in play almost to the end. This is the meaning, perhaps, of the appearance of set 5-2/5-2B at the conclusion of both sections (bars 12, 22), a set lying outside the series produced by an instrumental chord and singular melodic pitch (the violin's high A, the harp's anomalous Djj). Similarly, the complex of simultaneities framing section 2

(level 2, bars 13-14, 21-23) is a structurally unstable frame uncontrolled by the

series at this level; the series is absented vertically, without a return of the earlier absence of the vertical (as chords), as if the differance of melody and

chords, of the wind and the trees through which it moves, is being restated within the connection of Bring dir and trag ich expressed by these mimetic

complexes of non-series sets. The various types of rupture on level 2 entail that level 3 cannot provide a

ground of coherence or set connection on the larger scale, even though the

sequence of supersets and synthetic series segments does reveal a particular presence of the series in the form of its predominant hexads 6-15/15B and 6-

zl9/19B. Since all other boxed sets on level 3 hold inclusion relations with both

hexads, the serial presence at this level is the presence of a series structured by them - in effect, reconfigurations ofthe series to begin on P/I 3 or 6, or P/I 4 or

5 (see Ex. 9), that trope the basic series by resetting its boundary pcs. Such a differentiation of the series would be unremarkable if the series were only a referential principle of pitch rotation - as, for example, in Webern's first serial

compositions which display a succession of simple forms of the series from which melodic and harmonic material is freely invented. But in Op. 31, the set- class properties of a single basic series are configured differently in each movement. 'Leichteste Biirden' shows little of the surface hexachordal clarity of, for example, the first movement which begins by unfolding the primary set- class division ofthe series, 6-z3/z36 (I 1-6, 7-12, P 1-6, ete). (This division is

explicit once in 'Leichteste Biirden' as 6-z36/6-z3, the vocal/violin melody in bars 6-12). On level 3 the distinctive hexachordal ground of 6-15 moves the

series's point of division so that the series is internally differentiated from its

primary hexad structure and framing tritone Fft/C but continues to satisfy the

requirement that it should be omnipresent. Each presentation of a series

segment is a 'morph', a differential re-presentation in the guise of unordered forms of 6-15, the succession of hexads (6-15, 6-zl9, 6-z3, ete), or their extensions and contractions (5-21, 7-13, 8-19, 5-13B). The morphic presence ofthe series means that it can be present while literally absent: presence ofthe

morph is absence of the full, ordered series, and describes the series's self- differentiation.

This process eventually unpicks the serial principle itself when it is




294 CRAIG AYREY

expanded from literal series segments to encompass set-classes and maximally related sets (non-series sets related as n-1 to series segments). Metaphorically, the series is a 'melody' woven into the surface structure, a fabric of multiple threads that supports the formal-structural patterns and designs. Diffused series forms represent the series even though strict adherence to the ordered series is abandoned: the pitch series of the nomos are transformed by its

presentation as re-ordered set classes, a transformational mode that reinstates a thematic function for the series as a pervasive, differentially presented Idea without instigating motivic development.

21. The tension in The Path to the New Music between the dynamic, teleological force of developing variation and Webern's essentially contrapuntal, spatial conception of serialism as pre-composed calculation is resolved by recessing the thematic into the deepest ground ofthe pitch structure. Such a withdrawal and radical redefinition of the concepts of theme and 'thematicism' is informed by Webern's overt exploration of the theme as a compositional issue in the

Variations, Op. 30, a work which recent commentators agree contains no conventional theme that could be subject to traditional techniques of variation

(see Hasty 1988, p. 293, and Whittall 1996, p. 282). Hasty (1988) and Whittall

(1996) have concentrated on the music of what happens, exploring the ways in which Webern develops, even 'composes out' (Whittall) dimensions of

juxtaposition, rupture, continuity and synthesis, processes which become the 'theme' ofthe work: theme is therefore elevated, or perhaps reduced, to the level of the morphology of musical gesture. Webern's own explanation bases the work on the two contrasted motives presented in the opening bars, the pitch and

rhythm of which are subject to independent and simultaneous transformation; the first 20 bars constitute the 'theme' (Webern 1963, p. 62). Although Webern's description appears to preserve the traditional distinction between the general categories of motive and theme, his subsequent remarks indicate that the 20-bar 'theme' is a formulaic convention and that the motivic takes over

the function ofthe thematic: the opening motives are, Webern writes, 'reduced' in differential content because they contain internal pitch retrogrades, inversions and rhythmic diminution; and since these properties are projected throughout the piece as the ground ofthe 'various variation ideas', he declares that the contrapuntally intricate composition of the series contains the work's 'entire content in embryo! In miniature!' (Webern 1963, p. 62). The concept of

theme has shrunk as a result of this intensification to the succession of small- scale mirrors which constitutes the Idea ofthe work; theme has become a virtual form whose material reality is the series as a pitch structure divested of its

rhythmic articulations as motive or melody. 'Theme' is, quite simply, the musical Idea as an ordered pitch-class construct.

In 'Leichteste Biirden', the thematic function of pc collections is virtualised





further, intensifying abstraction in order to achieve a measure of freedom: unordered pc sets diffused from the series universalise, or make 'thematic', the

component segments ofthe nomos. Whether these sets represent the series must remain undecidable, because although each presentation of a series subset

appears to refer to a particular ordered subset of the series (that is, to a

singularity), the decision relies on the abstract generality of set-class. Set-class

identity therefore becomes the universal rule that governs the singular forms of the series, but in order to function as a rule, it abandons the general laws of serialism and the specific features of the nomos. The freedom here is that of

combinatoriality and the serial trope, yet neither of these principles is fully or

explicitly present in the piece. Each appearance ofa series subset is the result of a performative compositional or, since we are in an analytical situation,

interpretative decision which can never be definitively said to prove serial law.

22. Whether - finally, definitely - the freedom of vertical set-class organisation does justice to the series is a decision that lies beyond the serially calculable, and has an infinitely provisional status. This inscrutability puts us in a position comparable to that of Derrida as a reader of Kafka. If 'Leichteste Biirden' can be accepted as a text, then, as in Before the Law, 'the text would be the door ... The text guards, maintains itself- like the law, speaking only of itself, that is to

say, of its non-identity with itself... It is the law, makes the law and leaves the reader before the law' (Derrida 1992b, p. 211). In Kafka's fable, the

countryman is not the only figure 'before the law': the doorkeeper, standing with his back to the law, both shields its content and represents its force. As critical interpreters of the text we are posited as doorkeepers, as guardians of this autonomous (auto + nomos) text who 'have to appeal to a law [now also the

text] and appear before it, at once to watch over it and be watched by it ... All

interrogate it naively on the singular and universal, and none receives a

response that does not involve differance: (no) more law and (no) more literature [plus de loi et plus de litterature]' (Derrida 1992b, p. 215). Except that, in our context, Derrida's differantial equation would have to be distanced from its reference to the framing of literature by the laws of genre, other texts, and intellectual property, to become: (no) more theory and (no) more (musical) structure. (Webern alone, in advance, has passed the doorkeeper to cross the threshold leading to the law and its aliases assembled here.)

23. 'Justice', Derrida writes, 'remains, is yet, to come ... [T]here is no justice except to the degree that some event is possible which, as an event, exceeds

calculation, rules, programmes, anticipations, and so forth' (1992a, p. 27). This 'to come' is exemplified by Webern's intensification of abstraction in his




296 CRAIG AYREY

unrealisable quest for ideal synthesis - the serial control of linear and vertical,

melody and harmony, sound and silence - which clears a space for the 'excessive' decision and a dimension of compositional freedom. When the canonic schemes are pushed beyond audibility and the series's pitch structure is universalised as set-classes, the material of the work, constituted primarily by the nomos, is liberated by this partial renunciation of explicit serial ordering and becomes free to coalesce in formal structures (Ex. 5) and expressive configurations (Ex. 8) that exceed serial calculation. And these semi-serial structures begin to restore to serialism the 'natural' structural rhythms lost in the abandonment of tonality.

Nevertheless, tonality as a 'natural' totality persists as a memory: the

parameters of each singular event, multiply determined by inert abstract

systems, mirror the integrated organisational complexes of tonality (motivic, harmonic, formal, voice-leading) without, however, achieving a comparable appearance of natural parametrical coherence. What Webern does achieve is a

rediscovery of the universal categories of repetition and contrast, similarity and

difference; that is, the recovery, in the end, of something repressed in his artistic maturity. This points to an irreducible differance within the Second Viennese School. Unlike Webern, Schoenberg and Berg stand before serial law not as supplicants or guardians but in positions of dominance; they occupy pre- deconstructive sites in which law is implacably opposed to expressivity (Schoenberg) or dissolved into expression (Berg). Adorno's sensitivity to this differance is legendary: Schoenberg treats the series as the 'mere pre-formation of material', superimposes a compositional procedure and thus 'does violence to the row' (Adorno 1973, pp. 109-10); Berg seeks to absent serial technique, rendering it 'unnoticeable' by adjusting the formations of tonality to it (1973, p. 108). By contrast, Webern's nomos is a deconstructive event that makes the

question of a work's aesthetic justice as an application of law to the series and its properties particularly acute; nomos defines a decisive moment in the deconstruction of totally administered musical structure, the moment when the

challenge to the domination of law from expressivity contains a quasi-ethical sense of responsibility to the law. Positioned between two poles - between deconstructible law and undeconstructible justice - nomos exists 'in the

interval', to appropriate Derrida's positioning of deconstruction, 'that

separates the undeconstructibility of justice from the deconstructibility of droit (authority, legitimacy, and so on)' (1992a, p. 15).

24. Beyond 'Leichteste Biirden', beyond the hyperbolisation of the organic, beyond the musical Idea and its presentation, lies the Boulezian vision of a serialism beyond the serial, of laws beyond calculation: 'melody' as an irreducible singularity eventually supplants law, Webern's rule-weighted hierarchy is overturned and differance as nomos moves from calculable-





incalculable reciprocity of law and melody to these and other impossible syntheses.

And so there will always be more 'to come'. Abstraction ofthe series leaves a

void to be filled by other explicit or unarticulated laws of structure, raising the issue of aesthetic justice anew in relation to supplementary laws which are deconstructible because constructed and interpretable. Any musical work which cannot be reduced only to structural systems, principles and designs would be a Derridean 'possible event', one which waits for recognition of the

performative decisions it contains as just in relation to its determining laws. To

discover or make explicit the laws of a composition is a condition of the

possibility of deconstruction. To recognise the differance of the singular event

and the aesthetic justice of compositional negotiations, on its behalf, with

general legal principles is to begin a deconstruction, to unground the finitude of structure, unleash Blanchot's 'dangerously free' listening, and open the work to infinitely provisional decisions that are more or less violent insofar as they are decisions.

If, in Derrida's words, 'deconstruction is justice' (1992a, p. 15), this does not refer only to the identification of the undecidable but also to the necessity -

if there is to be any human action - of making a decision on matters that are

finally (and therefore infinitely) unknowable (see Derrida 1992a, pp. 54-6). Deconstruction, as Webern demonstrates, takes place in practice, in works, not

(only) in theory.




298 craig ayrey

Appendix Pitch-class set genera tables

counts 12 8 8 11 16 12 0

squos 0.070 0.051 0.065 0.141 0.102 0.090 0.024 0.144 0.108 0.081 0 0.016

(b) Squos (in descending order):





(c) Reduced set genera table Gl G3 G4 G5 G6 G8 G9

3-1 o 3-3 o 3-4 o 3-5 o 3-10 o 3-12 o 4-2 o 4-3 o 4-4 o 4-5 o 4-7 o 4-17 o 4-18 o 4-19 o 5-1 o 5-3 o 5-6 o 5-13 o 5-16 o 5-Z17 o 5-21 o 5-22 o 5-Z38 o 6-Z3/Z36 o 6-Z4/Z37 o 6-15 o 6-Z19/Z44 o

counts 2 1 1 1 3 16 3

squos 0.011 0.008 0.017 0.012 0.024 0.144 0.027

(d) Squos (in descending order)

NOTES

1. I am grateful to Jonathan Dunsby for his valuable comments on an earlier version of this article.

2. See Boulez 1992, pp. 209-14.




300 craig ayrey

3. '... memorial d'une rigueur qui ne s'impose plus a nous que comme souvenir ou comme absence et nous laisse, dans notre entente, toujour libres (dangereusement libres)' (my translation).

4. See Johnson 1999, pp. 212-36 (Chapter 6, 'Webern, Nature and Modernism') and Shreffler 1994. Shreffler argues that Webern's adoption of twelve-note serialism emanated from a desire to 'reflect Nature's order in music', so that 'the technique served as a metaphor for the ineffable in nature and heaven' (Shreffler 1994, p. 335).

5. See in particular Lecture VIII (Webern 1963, pp. 54-6).

6. Once the 'hidden natural laws' of music (Webern 1963, p. 12) contingent on and

including the twelve-note series have emerged into consciousness as the revealed truth of the history of music, what is exposed is not only the 'comprehensive' and 'unusual degree of unity' of serial works (ibid., p. 53) but the unity of tradition and the new: 'the practical need for this law [the series] is completely clear to us

today. We can look back at its development and see no gaps' (ibid., p. 52).

7. Shreffler's elegant argument for Webern's early serial practice as a development of motivic compositional thought, the 'melodic' conception of the series, and the

necessity of abstracting the series in order to allow 'its properties to become more

generally applicable to the whole piece' (Schreffler 1994, p. 308) suggests that the

re-emergence of these principles in the late works is a swing back to the pole of maximum differentiation after the exploration of the limits of identity in the mature serial works. In the early serial period, though, Webern has yet to

negotiate the relation of law and freedom in his conception and application of the series. As Shreffler demonstrates convincingly, the 'ineffable' rows of Webern's first serial works diffuse their properties throughout the works that are dominated by these properties. The series hovers over the work, guaranteeing unity as a quasi-mystical presence without structural effects qua series. These works exceed the calculable in relation to the series: but, as I will argue later, Webern's late works recognise the unavoidability - if the series is to function as more than an external model for systematic unity - of both calculation and the incalculable, of legal necessity and judicious freedom.

8. Moldenhauer quotes a passage from an article by Cesar Bresgen, Webern's

neighbour in Mittersill: '[Webern] explained once ... that he no longer needed to hear his work performed; the work sounded "in itself he himself could hear it

completely with his inner ear. Once it was committed to notation ... Webern deemed the real work complete ... [A] rendition could by no means recreate it so

perfectly' (Moldenhauer 1978, pp. 620-21). Moldenhauer takes a sceptical view of this statement (it was contradicted by Webern's daughters) and implies that

Bresgen understood Webern naively. But a retreat into the ideal on Webern's

part, suggested by the trajectory of his late thought, remains a potential response to the impossibility discussed here.

9. This is not the received view ofthe structural consequences of Webern's canonic

technique. Kathryn Bailey concludes, from her excellent analysis of the ways in which canon in Op. 31 has become 'a tool not a texture', that the retreat of the




Webern's 'Leichteste Burdender BAume' 301

canonic system of pitch-rhythmic organisation into abstraction is to absent a primary structural dimension from audibility, to reduce both the expressive function of canon as a texture and the fundamental coherence of the work in sound: when neither 'the recognisable imitation of melodic contour or rhythm ... is replicated, the only common ground between the voices (the same number of notes within a fixed time span) is too abstract to be heard' (Bailey 1991, p. 425, n. 31). Like Adorno, she identifies the retreat of canon as an aesthetic loss, even failure ('the validity of music in which the method of organisation cannot be heard may be seen as questionable' (ibid., p. 11)), and implies that Webern's technique in Op. 31 is the apotheosis of Adorno's 'liquidation of counterpoint' in the late chamber music (Adorno 1973, p. 95). (Although Philosophy of New Music was written in 1940-41 before the composition ofthe Second Cantata, it was first published in 1948. Adorno makes no specific reference here to any work by Webern later than the String Quartet, Op. 28.) Both critics leave open the question of what, other than absence, abstraction and repetition, constitutes the structural or expressive content of Op. 31 as an aesthetic form.

10. Julian Johnson reads the poem a little differently, identifying T as the fragrance, the 'lightest burden of the trees'. His perceptive interpretation of the Second Cantata contains a suggestive discussion of the importance of fragrance as a topic of expression in Webern (Johnson 1999, pp. 182-3).

11. The pcs ofthe series in Ex. 1 and throughout this essay are numbered as P 1-12 and I 1-12. Retrograde forms are indicated by retrograding the P or I ordering (for example, R 1-12, RI 1-12). This enables the identity of R-related series segments to be indicated clearly for example, in Ex. 1, the chords in bars 4 and 10 (RI 8-6 and I 6-8). I am indebted to Bailey (1991, pp. 126-7) for the serial analysis and canonic structure of the piece. Bailey was the first to solve convincingly the riddle of canonic technique in 'Leichteste Biirden', and, with a few minor exceptions, my reading follows hers.

12. The canonic structure displayed in Ex. lb can be summarised as follows (the relation of rhythmic augmentation/diminution between dux and comes is identified by the first durational value of each canonic voice) :

Canon 1, dux (semibreve): I (sax, gl, cel, hp, str, hp), RI (hp, str, gl). comes (minim): P (voice), R (voice), I (voice), RI (voice).

Canon 2, dux (crotchet): RI (str, ww2, br, gl), I (br, ww2, wwl), R (str, ww2, hp), P (gl, str. pizz, ww2). comes (minim): R (wwl, cel, str, cel), P (cel, hp. br, wwl).

13. The existence of a prolongational rather than associative linear structure in 'Leichteste Biirden' is likely to be a matter of contention. Needless to say, the analysis in Ex. 5 does not conform to the criteria for prolongational structure elaborated by Joseph Straus (Straus 1987). Yet Straus's 'associative' analyses exhibit neither a comparable ic consistency uniting structural (top and bass) voices, nor the inversional relationship of ics around the structural pitches of the dissonant tonic sonority (chord class Z). I would suggest, therefore, that these types of consistency create the conditions for melodic prolongation of the structural voices - the systematic departure from and return to Bb (top voice) and




302 CRAIG AYREY

D (bass) - and that these voices are fused as harmonic events by their consistent ic4 relationship (the one exception, ic3 in bar 20, is structurally inessential).

14. Webern's sensitivity to the structure of poetic texts seems to me evident in all his vocal music, although the sensibility in the serial works is alien to traditional notions of expression. Webern was himself a poet (see Moldenhauer 1978, pp. 65-7, 203-5) and the author ofa stage work, Tot, Sechs Bilder fiir die Biihne (1913). Moldenhauer's description ofthe 'utterly "musical"' conception of this work refers to gradated dynamics and tempi as performance directions, and the dramatic use of silence (ibid., p. 200).

15. Webern's attraction to nomos may have been instigated by J. M. Hauer's use of the term as the title for his Op. 1 (1912) and Op. 19 (1919), or the parenthetical reference to nomos as the law (Gesetz) of atonal melody in Vom Wesen des Musikalischen (Hauer 1913). Webern's understanding of the concept is more sophisticated than Hauer's, who (in the first edition of Vom Wesen, 1920) states that the law of atonal melody, 'i.e. its "nomos", consists of the fact that, within a certain pitch series itself, no pitch may be repeated and none may be left out' (as translated in Gustafson 1977, p. 91). Hauer's revision of this formulation in the second edition of the book (1923) foregrounds the importance of intervallic character: Thr "Nomos" besteht darin, dass immer und immer wieder alle zwolf Tone der Temperatur abgespielt werden miissen' (Hauer 1923, p. 51). The crucial correspondence of Hauer and Webern is, of course, the association of nomos with melody, and the structure of melody.

16. 'Webern's iVomos-Begriff enthalt auch die Spannung der Dialektik, die dem Goetheschen Urphanomen eigen ist. Er reprasentiert die Vermittlung zwischen Identischem und Differentem, zwischen konstituierden und modifizierenden Momenten.' My translation.

17. This reading is supported by Webern's conviction that 'wherever we cut into the piece the course of the row must always be perceptible. This is how unity is achieved; something surely sticks in the ear, even if one is unaware of it' (Webern 1963, p. 55).

18. Presumably, Webern refers to the soprano 'aria' ofthe fifth movement, bars 17- 45. The melodic line is formed from the following series segments, in succession (overlappings generated by the TI3-related series are omitted): RI11, 10-4; P8, 1-9; RI10, 10-1; P7, 1-9; RI9, 10-1; P6, 1-9; RI8, 10-1. See Bailey 1991, pp. 129, 408-9.

19. The synthetic model appears in the canon controlling the R form of the row, but in retrograde and disguised by omissions of attack and its distribution among the instrumental parts (as discussed above).

20. 'Freundselig ist das Wort' resembles 'Leichteste Biirden' in texture (solo soprano and instrumental chords), canonic technique (four imitative parts) and motivic content. The durational pattern of the 'Freundselig' canon comprises values 4-7 (or its retrograde form, values 4-1) ofthe 'Leichteste Biirden' model (see Ex. 7) with the addition ofa crotchet. See Bailey 1991, p. 129, Ex. 3.17, for a detailed analysis of this passage.





21. Webern's quotation appears in Webern 1963, p. 63. Zuber considers the possibility that the passage may have been omitted in the process of the letter's

publication. But even if this is the case, it does not alter the fact that Webern ignores its import in theorising the Urpflanze as a structural concept.

22. Unlike the interaction of piano and voice in 'Dies ist ein Lied fiir dich allein', Op. 3 No. 1, as analysed by Dai Griffiths (Griffiths 1996, pp. 301-14).

23. This term, adopted by Bailey from German Webern analysts, designates 'a note that is missing from one voice, because it is present in another at the time when it is needed' (Bailey 1991, p. 49).

24. This method of analysing the harmonic content of a series recalls David Lewin's early theory of 'segmental association' in twelve-note music (Lewin 1972). Lewin's criteria for segmental association are more exacting and developed than those presented here. The difference between the two approaches is that where Lewin is always concerned with conditions pertaining to the recognition of the series in any segment, my purpose is to explore the ways in which the series as nomos is diffused and extended in set classes associated in set complexes.

25. In the reduced set genera table (c), G8 absorbs the whole of G2 (whole-tone) and G4 (augmented), except for set class 3-12, thus confirming the atonal control of the whole-tone and major-third content of the series. The latter, however, survives in the ic4 common to both progenitor sets, 3-3 (0,1,4) and 3-4 (0,1,5).

REFERENCES

Adorno, Theodor, 1973: Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and

Wesley V. Bloomster (London: Sheed and Ward).

_, 1992: Mahler: a Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

_, 1999: 'Anton Webern', in Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

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Barthes, Roland, 1967: Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston: Beacon Press).

Blanchot, Maurice, 1969: 'Ars nova', in UEntretien infini (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 506-14.

Boulez, Pierre, 1991: 'Schoenberg is dead', in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, trans. Stephen Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon), pp. 209-14.

Derrida, Jacques, 1992a: 'Force of Law: "The Mystical Foundation of

Authority'", in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson

(eds.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge), pp. 3-67.

_, 1992b: 'Before the Law', trans. Avital Ronell and Christine Roulston, in




304 CRAIG AYREY

Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge),

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Gasche, Rodolphe, 1986: The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of

Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1989: Italian Journey, eds. Thomas P. Saine and

Jeffrey L. Sammons, trans. Robert R. Heitner (New York: Suhrkamp). Griffiths, Dai, 1996: 'So who are you? Webern's Op. 3, No. 1', in Craig Ayrey and

Mark Everist (eds.), Analytical Strategies and Musical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 301-14.

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Composition of Anton Webern', Music Analysis, 7/iii, 281-312.

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Musik (Vienna: Haslinger). Johnson, Julian, 1999: Webern and the Transformation of Nature (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press). Kramer, Lawrence, 1995: Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley:

University of California Press). Lewin, David, 1972: 'A Theory of Segmental Association in Twelve-Tone Music',

in Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone (eds.), Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory (New York: Norton), pp. 180-207.

Moldenhauer, Hans, 1978: Anton von Webern: a Chronicle of his Life and Work

(London: Gollancz). Paddison, Max, 1993: Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press). Samuels, Robert, 1998: Mahler's Sixth Symphony: a Study in Musical Semiotics

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Shreffler, Anne C, 1994: '"Mein Weg geht jetzt voruber": the Vocal Origins of

Webern's Twelve-Note Composition', Journal of the American Musicological

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Straus, Joseph N., 1987: 'The Problem of Prolongation in Post-Tonal Music',

Journal of Music Theory, 31, pp. 1-21.

Weber, Samuel, 1998: 'Nomos in The Magic Flute\ Angelaki, 3, pp. 61-8.

Webern, Anton, 1963: The Path to the New Music, trans. Leo Black (Pennsylvania: Theodore Presser).

Whittall, Arnold, 1987: 'Webern and Multiple Meaning', Music Analysis, 6/iii,

pp. 333-53.

_, 1996: 'Music - Discourse - Dialogue: Webern's Variations Op. 30', in

Kathryn Bailey (ed.), Webern Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 264-97.





Wintle, Christopher, 1982: 'Analysis and Performance: Webern's Concerto

Op. 24/IT, Music Analysis, 1/i, pp. 73-99.

Zuber, Barbara, 1984: 'Reihe, Gesetz, Urpflanze, Nomos: Anton Weberns

musikalische-philosophisch-botanische Streifziige', Musik-Konzepte. Sonderband Anton Webern II (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik), pp. 304-36.




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