Arnold Schoenberg's Wrong Notes

I just gave my first ever graduate level music theory presentation. They subject was the Piano Piece Op.33a, by Arnold Schoenberg. This piece is in the "expressionist" musical style known as twelve tone. That is to say, all twelve pitches are arranged into a row; this row can be played forwards, backwards, upside down, or backwards and upside down (not to be confused with upside down and backwards, that was Stravinsky when he discovered twelve tone, and is not the same thing at all!). The end result sounds like ... well .... um ... find a piano, take your hand, and bang randomly. But on paper, it looks pretty and is great fun for theorists to analyze.

It's kind of like musical Sudoku with a 12 x 12 matrix instead of 9x9. You can never repeat a note in a row or column, and you can make other partitions where notes aren't repeated if you want to; the parts of the puzzle that make up those other partitions need not be adjacent. Like sudoku, that's where each three by three box can't have repeats. In twelve tone music, we call it hexachordal combinatoriality - boxes of six notes that go together with other boxes of six notes to make up all twelve.

The thing is, I'm not a theorist, I'm a composer. And a tonal composer to boot. Which means I go to great lengths to sound exactly like not-Schoenberg, and yet still be somewhat modern sounding.

Which brings me to my presentation, and why I was giving it at all, since it is not even something that was assigned for a grade. Our prof is writing a book on Schoenberg which includes an analysis of this piece, which he presented in class. You see, this particular piece has what have been called the 'famous wrong notes.' That is to say, if you make the sudoku matrix for this piece, following the standard rules and operations, and align all the notes in the score with the top row form from the matrix, you get two 'wrong' notes. Apparently they have for the most part been analyzed as such. However, I was thinking like a composer - we care about things like counterpoint - and blurted out that it looked like if you circled all of the notes in the adjacent measures that repeat, you get the melody, but up a tritone, and that note is one of the repeated notes, so it can't be wrong. It's one of those basic rules of counterpoint - the long/held repeated note is alway right, unless the composer is a complete idiot, in which case we wouldn't be studying him anyway, and Schoenberg wrote several books on counterpoint. (Crap, now I have to go look at my own music to find where I have been an idiot by that definition.) Furthermore, those repeated notes are going forwards slowly while the other notes are going backwards fast, so there's some complex counterpoint involved.

This is the only time I can remember in my education where, sitting in class, I saw something that apparently nobody had considered before, at least that the prof knew of. That was pretty cool. (It does turn out that one theorist considered the theory behind my solution but didn't bother to address in his publication, or the 'wrong notes' in particular, because that was outside of the scope of his paper.)

So the professor told me to work it out, present it in class, and he's interested in helping me publish it. It went well, and I have a couple nice Powerpoint slides which I can drop into my paper later on.

Except that I have to change the color, because I found the exact shade of blue that doesn't photocopy. I forgot about that color, that photocopiers ignore, and I just picked a nice light blue.
I made copies for everyone and there was a gap in the middle of one of the pages.

Oh, since this is my Jewish blog, Schoenberg was Jewish. Then he wasn't. Then he was again. Then he wrote a setting of Kol Nidre. Then he got so scared of the number 13 that he dropped dead of a heart attack on Friday the 13th.