A Composer's Influences

Author(s): Ernst Krenek

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn - Winter, 1964), pp. 36-41
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/832235
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 A COMPOSER'S INFLUENCES
ERNST KRENEK

To ASCE R T AIN and evaluate the influences that might have caused
a creative artist to orient himself in certain directions and to make
decisions that would determine his own course as well as that of his art
(provided he is himself in a position to emanate influence) is a difficult
task, because the presence or absence of influence is, like all matters of
history, not verifiable through experiment. Faced with the evidence of
what has happened, we will never know what might have happened if
some elements contributing to the actual result of the process had been
different. Although it may appear obvious that certain phases in a
composer's growth were caused by influences to which he was exposed,
we can never be sure whether he would not have turned in the same
direction without those circumstances.
Within the narrower realm of the metier,of technical procedure, it is,
on the whole, possible to trace influence with a far greater degree of cer-
tainty than it can be when dealing with matters of style and general
orientation. All of these aspects will most frequently coincide in the case
of the apprentice who is obviously influenced by the master from whom
he not only learns his craft, but who also is the most vividly present model
of achievement asserting itself with authority. One usually recognizes as
a good teacher one who does not try to impress his own image upon the
receptive minds of his students; I, for one, have always tried to maintain
this goal in my own teaching, although I could not always prevent my
students from imitating some of my idiosyncracies. But influence is not
only passively received, it is also, consciously or not, sought after. The
beginner, however, will sooner or later try to branch out in a direction
different from that prevailing in his teacher's studio.
In my own case, I remember that during my third year at the State
Academy of Music in Vienna (1918) I came upon the LineareKontrapunkt
by Ernst Kurth. It had probably been received by the school library as
a reference copy and passed on to my teacher, Franz Schreker, as con-
cerning his department. He admitted having never looked at it and, at
my request, let me borrow i . I read the disquisition of the Austrian-Swiss
musicologist with rapt attention, and it turned my entire musical orien-
tation inside out. I was fascinated by the notion that music was not just
a vague symbolization of Gefuehlinstinctively conjured up into pleasant
sounding matter, but a precisely planned reflection of an autonomous
36
 A COMPOSER S INFLUENCES

system of streams of energy materialized in carefully controlled tonal

patterns. Thus, when I moved to Berlin two years later, I was ready to
be further "influenced" by the "radical" tenets of Busoni, Schnabel,
Erdmann, Scherchen, and others whose orientation was related to
Kurth's basic philosophy; and the concatenation of influences ultimately
led me to the "progressive" movement of atonality. I reported this to
Dr. Kurth when I was introduced to him in Berne another two years
later and was surprised to find that he was shocked by such an interpre-
tation of his trend of thought. Kurth, it seems, had had nothing more in
mind than a novel exegesis of the Bach style and had very little esteem
for our "new" music-which may serve as an anecdotal footnote on how
the concept of influence is seen from the angle of its generator malgrelui,
who may be totally unaware of and even unsympathetic to what he
happens to be generating.
Within these same limits of technical manipulation separated from its
external meaning, influence may also be the fruit of challenge. More
frequently than he might care to admit, a composer is tempted to try
his hand at a new technical procedure, not because he has noticed that
it was particularly productive of material success, but rather the oppo-
site: he is attracted by its esoteric traits, whose mystery he craves to
share with the initiated. Here it might be useful to distinguish between
influence and motivation, which may interchangeably act as cause or
effect. When a composer is motivated to turn to an advanced technique
by the challenge confronting him, he will expose himself to the influence
of the originators and practitioners of that technique. On the other
hand, the influence emanating from a strong personality may motivate
a composer to direct his creative efforts into similar channels.
In reality, it is hardly possible to maintain such neat distinctions.
When I decided, in the late Twenties, to make use of the twelve-tone
technique, the factor of challenge as described here was certainly a very
important motivating element. But there were others. Few transforma-
tions of compositional style and technique can be fully explained with-
out considering influences from far outside the field of music. Thus,
when in 1924 or so I turned from the atonal style I had adopted so eagerly
a few years before, first to the neoclassical posturing of the Baroque con-
certo, and shortly afterwards to the neoromantic attitudes displayed in
Jonny spielt auf and the song cycle of the Reisebuch,the first move was
touched off by the exhilarating experience of Stravinsky's Pulcinellaand
by my contacts with the seemingly carefree, unspeculative, straightfor-
ward music of my French contemporaries. Needless to say, I was moved
to take note of these characteristics in the first place because I was
inwardly ready to be swayed in a similar direction and only waited to
find a proper influence. The second step was more gradually prepared
37
 PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC

by my discovery, through my great friend, Eduard Erdmann, of the

marvels of Franz Schubert.
In neither case was a purely technical challenge decisively significant.
These moves were retrospective and led to a revival of traditional pro-
cedure. The motivating influence came from the outside world; the
increasing awareness of the problematical position of modern music in
contemporary society generated a desire to reassess the social function of
music. A preoccupation with sociological matters dominated the Twen-
ties and produced a neoclassicism based on the illusion that a return to
the stylistic characteristics of Baroque music would somehow restore the
happy rapport between music and its recipients that had supposedly
existed in earlier times. Undoubtedly, the contemporary attempts to
integrate jazz elements into "art" music were prompted by the same
desire to establish music as a vehicle of widely intelligible communication.
The diligent exploitation of folkloric materials that was pursued among
all tribes civilized enough to notate a five-eighths bar was dedicated to
the same purpose, as were the numerous species of Gebrauchsmusik, from
the melancholy recorder exercises for Boy Scout bands to the heroic
marching songs of socialist realism, and, on a much more sophisticated
level, the dramatic essays of Brecht and Weill, in which communication
was meant to induce action.
This raises the question of the influence of politics on music. Since music
as such does not denote concrete objects or concepts, as pictorial or
literary representation does, but attaches itself to extra-musical content
only through verbalized marginalia such as titles, mottos, programs, or
sung texts, music free of such connotation is on the whole left alone by
politicians who eagerly scrutinize literature, painting, and sculpture for
tokens of subversion. This does not mean that the composer remains, or
wishes to remain, unaffected by political developments. Direct influence
from that quarter may be relatively trivial, perhaps driving a composer
into exile when he becomes aware that the bloodhounds are closing in
on him, not because of a few dissonances too many in his latest opus, but
because he has expressed himself in words against the master of the
hunt. The indirect influence may be more considerable.
To return to my personal experience: the awakening of my interest in
the twelve-tone technique, which was internally plausible as a result of
both my exhaustion of the resources available from manipulating neo-
classical and neoromantic cliches, and my discovery of the challenge
offered by the new technical procedure, coincided with my increasing
disgust over the rise of totalitarianism. Seen in this light, my adoption of
the musical technique that the tyrants hated most of all may be inter-
preted as an expression of protest and thus a result of their influence.
The case was slightly more complicated, since I linked my bid for artistic
38 -
 A COMPOSER S INFLUENCES
freedom with a reassertion of my faith in the dogmatic systematism
of the Roman Catholic Church, in which I grew up. I spent much
intellectual effort on constructing a sort of mystical affinity between the
philosophiaperennisof the Aquinate and the universalism of dodecaphonic
organization. Thus my first work in the newly acquired technique was
the opera CharlesV, explicitly anti-Nazi, pro-Austrian and Catholic. My
most uncompromising twelve-tone works of that period, the Sixth String
Quartet and the Piano Variations, were written in 1936 and 1937.
Personal influences, perhaps of particularly high significance, are even
less susceptible of precise definition than other impulses, because they
result from contingencies that vary unpredictably from one individual to
the next. Analysis will bring them into line with the over-all image of a
personality. But this is a kind of historical interpretation whose validity
is debatable. If accepted, it will be called "objective."
If this passage has a relativistic appearance, this probably reflects a
basic trait of my mental make-up. In my formative years at the end of
World War I and through most of the Twenties, I shared the skeptical
attitudes that prevailed after the collapse of the old order, and to which
I have returned to some extent, but on a different level, in recent years.
The most durable influence on my thinking at that time came from Karl
Kraus, the Viennese poet and satirist, whose one-man magazine, Die
Fackel, I began to read in 1917. A true satirist, he was never committed
to any established philosophy, political or otherwise. He attacked right
and left with beautiful impartiality and equal vehemence, not, however,
out of blase, aimless spite, but because anything entangled with the
contaminating realities of modern civilization was found wanting when
measured by his very simple, but exceedingly demanding ethical stand-
ards. At that time I was mainly impressed by the splendid isolation of a
great mind dwelling in aggressive disdain above the jungle of controversy
and dealing out brilliant invective as he went. While Kraus's unsurpassed
dialectical prose has strongly influenced my German writings, his rela-
tion to music was limited to boundless enthusiasm for Offenbach, so that
no direct influence could transpire in that field. But his philosophy of
language and poetry was close to my thinking about the autonomy of
music, which remained intact even during the period of heteronomous
Gebrauchsmusik. In maintaining both, apparently contradictory, tenden-
cies, I found support in the German philosopher and musician, T. W.
Adorno, who stressed the relevance of social criticism as much as he
promoted independent, advanced musical thinking. Musical autonomy,
though not in a progressive sense, was also emphasized by the little
known, but very original Swiss theorist and philosopher, E. G. Wolff,
with whom I had been associated for many years.
The question of the extent to which external circumstances and
39-
 PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC

environment influence creative activity has special relevance, since so

many noteworthy composers of our time have had to live through pro-
tracted periods of formidable social upheaval, or to emigrate to foreign
countries. At face value, traces of such influence are surprisingly faint,
especially when such crises and transplantations occurred during a
composer's maturity. Without external evidence, it would be just as diffi-
cult to determine whether Schoenberg had composed his Fourth String
Quartet in Europe or in America, or Webern his Second Cantata before
Hitler or during the war, as it would be to infer whether a work by
Beethoven was written before or after Napoleon's downfall.
On the other hand, whenever we observe nuances in a composer's style
that might be ascribed to his changed circumstances-such as various
gestures of compromise in works by composers who settled in America
-we are again confronted with the unanswerable question of whether
these might not have occurred anyway as a result of intrinsic develop-
ment. At any rate, instances of changes so drastic that they clearly
indicate extraneous influence are very rare.
The intransigency characteristic of my own management of the
twelve-tone technique during my preoccupation with religious absolutes
culminated in my LamentatioJeremiaeProphetae,which I composed four
years after coming to America. This work was influenced by the war
situation insofar as it was written with utter disregard of practicality of
execution, since performances then appeared to be even less likely than
usual. (After fifteen years, the work was found still very difficult, but
feasible.) Whether the subsequent relaxation of my compositional tech-
nique and of my general frame of mind was prompted by inhaling the
American intellectual climate, or a natural reaction against former
attitudes (a backswing such as I had experienced before) is really not
determinable.
Since before my immigration to America I had not been active as a
teacher, it might be wondered whether ten years of intense academic
work here have influenced my creative work. Undoubtedly, the study
of music history has left visible traces in some of my works, since I
derived various ideas for novel treatment of the tone row and for basic
serial manipulation from insights gathered in historical research.
Perhaps a more subtle connection between contemporary music and
the academic life is the obvious influence of scientific attitudes on com-
posers. In some circles the attachment to science has become a sort of
status symbol, and strenuous efforts are made to demonstrate its existence;
but the evidence produced is frequently dubious and sometimes even
faked. We are reminded of Oswald Spengler's prediction forty years ago
that the true representative of our age will be the engineer and that the
artist will become obsolete. Perhaps some artists fear that he was right
*40
 A COMPOSER S INFLUENCES
and attempt to demonstrate that they really are engineers, in order to be
assured of a raisond'etre.
At any rate, the very nature of the twelve-tone technique and its
further development into serialism inevitably leads to a mathematical
style of reasoning, and the operation of electronic sound apparatus
induces scientific and technical interest. Whatever the inspiration derived
from such studies, it is different from the romantic adulation of the
grandeur of machinery that the futurists inaugurated. The fact that we
are able to fill the heavens with containers of complicated gadgetry is
impressive, but far less fascinating than the mysterious theory that made
it possible. The composer dreams that the image of the universe as out-
lined in the concepts of Einstein's relativity, Heisenberg's principle of
indeterminacy, Planck's quantum theory or Schroedinger's wave equa-
tions is somehow reflected and sublimated in his complex serial manipu-
lations of musical atoms, although they do not require much beyond
junior-college mathematics.
If the composer's inclination to depend on precise computation and
strict over-all control is the tribute for protection exacted by Science, his
attitude may be interpreted as a desperate surrender of his prerogative
as a sovereign creator relying on the powers of imagination, a reduction
of its infinite possibilities to the trivia of verifiable fact. But just as
modern science seems to approach areas where the hard and fast rela-
tionships of old are transfigured into referential patterns having unfore-
seen properties, music organized under the influence of such thought
processes moves on to new imaginative potentialities which might not
have been visualized without experience of the scientific influence.

* 41 ?