5 - Tippett, sequence and metaphor

Summary

Arguments about the exact time and location of the birth of musical modernism will probably never be resolved. It seems generally agreed, however, that one of the most significant contributions to its development was the fourth movement of Arnold Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2 (1907–8), where tonality is held in abeyance to a greater extent than in any previous work, albeit temporarily in terms of the quartet as a whole. But if the net effect of the music tellingly evokes Stefan George's ‘air from another planet’, some of the techniques employed, and much of the material, are not altogether alien, however transformed: the initial ‘flickering figure’ is transposed around a segment of the circle of fifths, one of the staple processes of common-practice tonality; and the interval of the fifth itself, perhaps the quintessential tonal interval, becomes increasingly prominent melodically and harmonically. There is even a mock perfect cadence in C in the cello (bar 9), sardonic in its forceful fortissimo pizzicato and its conflict with the chord of harmonics in the upper instruments.

This kind of rejigging of common-practice materials and processes – whether, as here, from within the tradition that gave birth to them, or essentially from without, as in neoclassical Stravinsky – is as much a manifestation of the radical spirit of the early twentieth century as the invention of new materials and processes.