Clasificación: Grupos del TWINSPAN y su relación con los

course, the more clearly its sad or happy feature can be displayed, Thus it always is with Zeiter, but never when Schubert sets his bitter "Heiden­ roslein" in a major key. For what kinds of feelings are these that can so readily be identified as displeasure in the darker minor mode and as plea­ sure in the brighter major, or, as Schubert asks: can there even be "happy" music? And what terrible superficiality does this monochrome technique make of pain and pleasure and of the still deeper thing that is neither the one nor the other, but is just what Shakespeare praises so very ambiva­ lently in music, "moody food of us that trade in love"? Even before now the simple duality of major and minor, registering emotionally as softness or brilliance, and with its basis in the lesser or greater blending of the har­ monics, perhaps also in the minor, triad's characteristic of developing downward, as the drop from a higher root note into the depth-already before now, in other words, this classification by mood had lost its mean­ ing in numerous works. Perhaps no one would even guess that the Ger­ man "Moll" and "Our" meant sorrow and joy respectively if their ono­ matopoeic names did not derive from the rounded or angular shapes of their customary symbols (the German "b" and "h") as the

B-molle

and

B

­

durum

of medieval musical notation. Thus Bach is already very often completely indifferent to the mood supposedly expressed by a mode; in­ deed in his music one now and then finds minor used for determination, and major, particularly when the third predominates, for kindness or melancholy. What is more, just as the seven former Church modes have dissolved, so will the two remaining scales, major and minor, someday perhaps find their dissolution in the chromatic scale's affinity for leading tones. Already the augmented triad beginning on the third degree of the minor scale cannot still be perpetuated as emotionally a minor chord. Not only may it arbitrarily be carried through in either major or minor, but also possesses, like those chords Schonberg called "vagrant" -that is, para­ tonal, roaming at the borders of the key-a not at all unequivocal alloca­ tion to an emotional character incarnated in major or minor. One does find the augmented triad in Hugo Wolf, as well as in Puccini, as the chord

of brooding, but Wagner's completely contrasting applications of this

chord in the

Schlaf

motif and then as an arpeggio in the cry of the Val­

kyri�s or chordally in the Nothung motif make one take notice. It appears _'\

that an extensive arbitrariness attaches to the character-structure of just

this important and for a more modern, expressive harmony so very typi- cal chord, and with respect to major and minor a certain hermaphro- '

j

1

ditism. It is therefore entirely correct when Schonberg, there where a chord sounds very expressive, also wants to see the cause of this expressiv­ ity only in the novelty. That is why for example the brilliant and harsh di­ minished seventh chord, which was once new, provided the effect of nov­ elty, and so in the Classical period could stand for agony, anger, excite­ ment, and every other strong feeling, has, now that its radicality has vanished, sunk irretrievably into mere light music as the sentimental ex­ pression of sentimental matters. Therefore the new chord is only then written when what matters to the composer is to express something new and incredible, which moves him. This can be a new chord, too, but Schonberg as well believes that the unaccustomed chord is only assigned to a hazardous post in order to accomplish the extraordinary, in order to say, in a new way, what is new, namely a new human being, in other words in order that the new sonority can help a new emotional world achieve symbolic expression. It is just as impossible to comprehend the novelty in the effect, in a chord's receptive allocation, but in the fact that it is unusual, and for that reason already, or rather only, qualified to ex­ press even the most excited and powerful feeling, as it is unthinkable to deduce, as functionally ulterior or constitutive, the necessity of the choice, the formal-causal allocation, that is, the harmonic-expressive equivalence of such a chord, outside of this usage, its merely symbolic usage. What could it be, then, this strange identity between the inner and the tonal to­ tality of pulsions, this coincidence of expressive truth and structural truth, this "natural" system of chordal physics moderated or permitted by psy­ chology, if not the unwavering continuation of a "tonal" instinct, that is, an instinct borrowed from us, a borrowed sonic vitality that can simply be no further conventionally marked out by a harmonic

logic of expression?

The selection is certainly trained by the discipline and order of tradi­ tional procedures. But all that remains afterward as the source of order are the expressive imperatives of genius, its strength, its flowering and truth­ fulness, in both the compositional and the object-theoretical sense. Then every harmonic system becomes ultimately irrelevant; what seemed at first like nothing but proscriptions and laws becomes merely an obstacle to the untalented and a training for the talented, who soon enough will have to decide for themselves how far they may go and what the nature of the subjectively irrational element shall be that may set itself above and be­ yond bar lines, dissonance, harmony and tonality. That someone is some­ thing, might truly need this or that form, have this unmistakable primor-

In document UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS INSTITUTO DE CIENCIAS AMBIENTALES Y ECOLOGICAS (ICAE) POSTGRADO EN ECOLOGIA TROPICAL (página 95-125)