Seismographic Screams: Erwartung's Reverberations Through Twentieth-Century Culture

This study investigates the inception and historicization of musical Expressionism through the lens of the canonic exemplar of that style, Arnold Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung (1909). The dissertation is divided into two parts. The first suggests that the genre and affect of Erwartung was likely modeled on performances of spoken-word monodramas and the emotionally vexing routines of female entertainers in cabarets and less closely related to the longstanding genre of musical melodrama. It illuminates how Schoenberg developed new temporal designs, in addition to the prized harmonic ones, for Erwartung and its companion piece, Die gluckliche Hand, in order to directly link the listener to the protagonist's consciousness. The first part concludes with an examination of Erwartung's early performance history and illustrates that in the 1920s critics began to coherently articulate the tenets of musical Expressionism. These accounts speak of Erwartung's orchestral writing in physiological terms and focus on Schoenberg's invention of a "new sound," in which pervasive atonality was only one of many components. The second part of the dissertation traces the renewed interest of the cinematic and performing arts in the stylistic attributes and themes of Expressionism after the Second World War, as the migration of artists and intellectuals driven by the Nazi regime to countries outside of Austria and Germany fostered increased circulation of groundbreaking European musical and literary techniques and Freud's ideas among cultured circles. The path of this development is especially intriguing because it extends outside of the enclaves of art music as the erratic and frequently strained sonorities of Erwartung evolve into a type of sophisticated "topic," in the Ratnerian sense of the term. In the postwar era the use of this visceral style of music is increasingly concretized to convey to audiences that the depiction of violence, psychological imprisonment, or trauma should be interpreted from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Many mainstream accounts of twentieth-century music point out that Schoenberg's atonal vocabulary and pioneering extended vocal techniques have been assimilated into popular culture. For example, in The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007), New Yorker critic Alex Ross cites composers who refer to Schoenberg's Expressionistic style in movie soundtracks and other artistic practices that dip into the reserves of avant-garde art music, such as bebop jazz and performance art. Yet music historians have shied away from diligently tracing this development. The academy's preoccupation with the "Idea" segment of Schoenberg's well-known "Style and Idea" dichotomy has resulted in critical literature on pitch organization and the intricacies of the twelve-tone technique being esteemed to such a degree that the role of style in Schoenberg's compositional output is just beginning to gain acceptance as an avenue for serious research.