Hey, thanks for the prompt - I’ve come across Schoenberg’s name since exploring the further reaches of electronic music these past few years but not got round to listening to his music yet. Maybe that’s tantamount to heresy or something in circles like these?
Anyway I watched a performance of “Pierrot Lunaire” (this one: https://youtu.be/bd2cBUJmDr8) whilst stuffing pasta into my face this lunchtime (just to hammer home what a philistine I am). It took approximately 2 minutes and 30 seconds for me to shed my first tear. Compelling indeed.
Having done some cursory research I believe the term you refer to is “sprechstimme” (literally “speech-singing” apparently). In his foreword to the score Shoenberg talks about it a little, saying about how the performer should have the melodic precision of singing married to the sort of natural rise & fall of speech - i.e. not sustaining notes like in singing. It sort of reminded me, in theory, of how it feels when I try to speak a poem I’ve been singing a while - though Schoenberg’s admonition that the performer should do anything but lapse into a singsong speech pattern is bracing. I’m not at all skilled in any classical way like these people, but am certainly able to relate on a kind of intuitive/essential level, and do find it edifying.
The deepest part of why or how this kind of thing works for me personally, is in reinforcing the whole constellation of meaning and making it exponentially more powerful/impacting. This is how it started for me this year, already being into Blake (like any good hippy), but then starting to take a closer look - seeing how the decoration of the poems, the forms & the colours around them, basically gave them more life - made them more vivid & energetic - & then learning that he used to sing them too… & all this being a response to my own disillusion at the way that sometimes precious words or special feelings, put down in words - well sometimes they just seem empty & ridiculous… I’m not sure any art is immune to this kind of nihilistic crisis, and I guess such is part of the motivation of enough of it - but certainly great art resists or rises above it more resolutely.
So it would be easy to scoff at, what was it, something about “the scent of ancient fairy-tales”, or the black butterflies of night having eaten the sun, but when it’s really delivered like that there’s just nothing you can do but feel it, and it’s marvellous.
Also I’m not sure I really got atonality before, but something in that piece really got to me, and I love that I can’t remember a single melody from it, some 2 hours later… maybe if I spoke German that’d be different tho.
Some time back I had a fun morning fake dialoguing with my computer, making hir respond to my daily existential crisis in Amiga voice, but the tune I did to accompany it was a bit too messy and I gave up, but I might try and salvage it one of these days soon, made me chuckle at least.
